8
PARTISAN REVIEW
victory. She even revealed at one point that one of the North Vietnam
leaders said to her that he was disappointed in the lack of large anti–
Vietnam demonstrations in America, because the Communists counted
on them to help their cause. On the other hand, both Hannah and Mary
were definitely anti-Soviet, yet they apparently saw no connection
between Russian and North Vietnamese Communism. As
r
read Hannah
and Mary's passionate letters favoring the Vietnamese, I could not help
thinking what a remarkably free country America is. Many other
countries would have regarded support of the enemy as acts of treason .
Even Ezra Pound escaped the charge of treason in America by being
judged
to
be insane .
There are other bits of political folly. Both women exaggerated the
meaning and consequences of Watergate. They thought that we were on
the verge of a dictatorship, either led by Nixon or as a result of
Watergate. They also went overboard for McGovern, who, after all, was
little more than a preview of Dukakis. And they thought some kind of
fascism would emerge from the pursuit of the war in Vietnam. They
wrote constantly about how awful America had become. And Arendt
even entertained the idea of moving to Switzerland.
But Arendt's and McCarthy's naive support of extremist views and
causes should not obscure the vivid picture in these letters of literary and
intellectual life in a good part of this century, as seen through the eyes of
two highly talented figures at the heights of their professions. And one
must admire the energy, the exuberance, the range of these two veterans
of the literary world: Mary's letters, sometimes hasty, are always in im–
peccable prose, and Hannah 's are powerfully written.
In them, we get glimpses of R.obert Lowell in some of his mad mo–
ments, of Edmund Wilson, Clement Greenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick,
Saul Bellow, Stephen Spender, Natasha Spender, Isaiah Berlin , Hans
Morgenthau, Karl Jaspers, Nathalie Sarraute, Diana Trilling, Vladimir
Nabokov, Robert Oppenheimer, Sonia Orwell, R.oger Straus, Robert
Silvers, William Jovanovich, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, Lionel Abel,
Philip Rahv, and a number of less well-known people. Hannah
comments on Harold Rosenberg's ego and arthritis. There is a sad
picture of Heidegger, Hannah's former teacher and lover, as an old, deaf,
feeble man. She saw him briefly in Freiburg towards the end of his life.
And Arendt paints a touching picture of Auden, broken-down and
drunk, when, not long before he died, he asked her to marry him. There
are fuller portraits of Dwight Macdonald and Nicola Chiaromonte.
There are a number of angry and indignant letters by both women
about the widespread criticism of Arendt's book on the Eichmann trial,
Th e Banality of Evil.
Most of the criticism centered on Arendt's critical
