McCarthy and Arendt

Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt were close friends for twenty-five years, each a formidable presence in postwar American politics and culture. Despite what might have been seen as the handicap of their gender in the public sphere, each could claim, like Chaucer’s Criseyde, ‘I am myn owene woman, wel at ese’ – a line McCarthy put in the mouth of her once-notorious character, Meg Sargent. If not always ‘wel at ese’, each was certainly her ‘owene woman’.

This friendship proved formative for Mary McCarthy, for whom maintaining relationships was a tricky business, and certainly supportive for Hannah Arendt, who had lost her lifelong confidante, Anne Mendelssohn Weil (‘Ännchen’), in 1950. Elizabeth Hardwick suggested, in the foreword to McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs, ‘Mary was, quite literally, enchanted by Hannah’s mind, her scholarship, her industry, and the complexity of her views. As for Hannah, I think perhaps she saw Mary as a golden American friend.’ The two women offered each other constant encouragement and vital support. Their friendship was even admired among members of an intellectual circle not known for its fidelity.

Since both these writers were independent, difficult and fearless, the mutual attraction had to be a case of like-spirits. In the ‘Editor’s Postface’ to Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, McCarthy would write, ‘Strange as it may seem, our minds were in some respects very close’. She attributed this partly to her own Catholic theology which gave her, Arendt believed, ‘an aptitude for philosophy’. She also recognised a similarity in their educational backgrounds while acknowledging Arendt’s influence ...