“We Think So Much Alike”

For Arendt and McCarthy, their alignment, and their shared position as outsiders, became clear in 1963, when “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (Arendt’s report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, which appeared as a five-part series in this magazine) and “The Group” (McCarthy’s novel about eight Vassar graduates making mistakes in New York) were published. The two very different books caused very similar levels of fuss in the literary and intellectual worlds. Both women felt betrayed by hostile reviews in publications run by people they considered friends — Arendt was mauled by Lionel Abel in the Partisan Review, and McCarthy was parodied by Elizabeth Hardwick (using the pen name Xaiver Prynne) in the New York Review of Books, then pilloried again in that publication, by Norman Mailer.

[…]

The two women were certainly not the first to enjoy this kind of close intellectual bond. But the particular shape theirs took, that of a bulwark against their naysayers, is worth considering, particularly when so many women still struggle to assert critical authority, to make men listen to their claims about the workplace, art, literature, and politics.

Michelle Dean wrote about the friendship between Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt over at The New Yorker’s books blog yesterday. (The biopic Hannah Arendt is in theaters now).