Alone on the Same Side

 

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 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.”1 Each then apologized and so began one of the most vital intellectual friendships of the last century. Brock Brower 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.’”2 Carol Brightman, McCarthy’s biographer and the editor of their letters, suggests that they formed a “party of two,”3 but it is more accurate to make use of Brower’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.

Their preference for going it alone has made them difficult to categorize politically. McCarthy could have been referring to herself or Arendt when she described her other close friend, the Italian drama critic and political anarchist Nicola Chiaromonte: “His ideas did not fit into any established category; he was neither on the left nor on the right. Nor did it follow that he was in the middle— he was alone.”4 (...)

Arendt’s and McCarthy’s detachment, their preference for solitude over solidarity, sets them apart from the type of political affilation later favored by the progressive social movements that emerged in the Cold War era, all of which advocated bonds of intimacy and group identification, and during which their reputations were forged. Indeed, their repudiation of both in theory, to say nothing of their refusal in practice, marked these women as pariahs within groups that expected to win their support. When the social movements of the late twentieth century recommended the healing power of empathy as the glue of solidarity and the fuel of progressive politics, Arendt and McCarthy recoiled, not from the goal of social justice, but from the path to it. It was not always easy for their readers to make this distinction. Because it is difficult to imagine ethics without empathy, Arendt and McCarthy have been perceived as psychologically cold rather than engaged in an ethical project with different assumptions. The ethical models of relation ascendant since the eighteenth century’s advancement of moral sentiment and thrust forward by the tragedies of the midcentury have tried to bring the self face-to-face with the Other. If we return to the image of two women standing side by side, facing the subway, we might imagine a countertradition of ethical relation, one that seeks not to come face-to-face with the Other but to come face-to-face with reality in the presence of others. Since reality and the Other cannot be faced at the same time, McCarthy and Arendt chose to face reality, however psychically wounding.

from the book Tough enough Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil
Deborah Nelson