Free Writing on the Wall by Mary McCarthy

Israeli official in New York who kept calling her “Hannah Eichmann”—by a slip of the tongue, of course. More moderate parlor critics talk of “arrogance” or “lack of proportion” in her treatment of the Jewish Councils while conceding that Miss Arendt is of course not an anti-Semite or an admirer of Eichmann’s. But this is said in the tone of a concession; these Jews, many of whom call themselves friends of the author, are more interested in enumerating the shortcomings of her book than in repelling the slanders that are circulating about her in and out of print. These slanders, which they hear all the time and which are intended to destroy the reputation of a living woman, excite them far less than Miss Arendt’s “slander” of the Jewish leadership, who are dead and beyond being hurt by it, if it is a slander. I am told that at a meeting held under the auspices of Dissent to discuss Miss Arendt’s book only one voice from the audience was raised in her defense and that voice was shouted down; some others present including Jews disagreed with what was being said but they remained silent. **
    In such an atmosphere, so remote from that of free speech, Partisan Review published Lionel Abel’s “The Aesthetics of Evil,” with the announcement that it was opening a discussion. In other words, Miss Arendt’s defenders would be given an opportunity to reply. Daniel Bell’s very good piece in the last issue was not so much a defense as a plea for an armistice, so I am going to speak up, but it is with a heavy heart. First because I am Miss Arendt’s friend, and friends are regarded as prejudiced. Second because I am a Gentile, and I fear that this fact will only rejoice her enemies, since are not all Gentiles anti-Semitic? Third because I do not feel that Abel’s piece deserves a reply on its own merits. I can only see it as a document in a hate campaign against Miss Arendt and one of the worst. The two serious points Abel raises—a) how does Miss Arendt account for the mass slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine when no Jewish organizations existed there? b) how does she reconcile her criticism of the Jewish leadership with the picture of totalitarian terror she gave in The Origins of Totalitarianism? —are so entwined with insinuations, innuendoes, charges of bad faith that it is hard to free the trunk of his argument from this mass of creepers and look at it squarely. He accuses Miss Arendt throughout of deliberately suppressing evidence (“She must know very well,” etc.) that does not suit her hand, and he nudges the reader to guess what that “hand” may be: infatuation with her own ideas, a love-hate affair with totalitarianism, a preference for butchers over their victims, for the strong over the weak, for—why not say it?—the Nazis over the Jews. As a reader, Abel claims to feel that Eichmann “comes off so much better in the book than his victims.” This is given a priori, though it is also his conclusion, which is arrived at by a vicious circle—the term never sounded more apt. “Eichmann is aesthetically palatable, and his victims are aesthetically repulsive,” he finishes, as he began. He offers no evidence on behalf of this idea. He can defend it, if he wishes, as his personal impression. But this is more of a judgment of Abel than of Miss Arendt: reading her book, he liked Eichmann better than the Jews who died in the crematoriums. Each to his own taste. It was not my impression.
    But since Abel is not the only one to insist that Eichmann somehow got preferential treatment, he must be answered, if only as a spokesman for those less well read and less intellectually gifted than he. It is hardly credible to me that any reader, no matter how stupid, could really imagine that Miss Arendt divides the guilt equally between Eichmann and the Jews, let alone that she regards Eichmann as a lovely object in contrast to the Jewish dead. And yet this has happened, and it must be understood.
    Before