The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy

Abstract

To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires deep sympathy modified by revulsion. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” One evening in the late 1940s, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy found themselves standing together on a subway platform in uncomfortable silence. Though both were returning home from an editorial meeting for the magazine politics, on which they had both served for some time, neither had spoken to the other since their disastrous first encounter at a party six years earlier. Arendt approached McCarthy and said in her typically blunt manner, “Let’s end this nonsense. We think too much alike” (Brightman, Writing Dangerously 299). Each then apologized, and so began one of the most vital intellectual friendships of the last century. Brock Bower aptly surmises why they were able to make peace: over the years at politics, “they found that on any number of public questions they always ended up on the same side, and ‘usually alone’” (qtd. in Gelderman 43). Carol Brightman, McCarthy’s biographer and the editor of their letters, suggests that they formed a “party of two” (Between Friends xxx), but it is more accurate to make use of Bower’s felicitous turn of phrase: on the same side and alone. Being “alone” “on the same side” seems to me an unusually precise characterization of the detached quality of relation they sought in each other and in their political affiliations.