To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
SUSAN SONTAG, “Notes on ‘Camp’”
This is a book on women writers, intellectuals, and artists who argued passionately for the aesthetic, political, and moral obligation to face painful reality unsentimentally. These may seem like a strange cast of characters to call to your aid during a crisis, but here they are: Simone Weil, while less well known than the others, achieved a cultlike status in the early postwar religious revival for her austere and unconventional mystic Christianity; Hannah Arendt was one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, and her star has risen only higher the further we get from her own moment; Mary McCarthy, well known in her own day as a novelist and a critic, remains a figure of note in American literary history primarily for her autobiographies and her best-selling novel The Group; Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual of the late twentieth century, an icon in popular culture, and a controversial but highly regarded critic of the arts and politics, although less well regarded for her own artistic practice; Diane Arbus was one of the postwar era’s most influential photographers and artists; and Joan Didion, after a long and successful career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, became a celebrity upon the publication of her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking and its Broadway adaptation with Vanessa Redgrave. Though these women are hardly unfamiliar to contemporary readers or scholars of the late twentieth century, they do not constitute a recognizable group, and it is likely that few readers will be familiar with all of them. Moreover, they would not have appreciated being classed by their gender, however much they might have found the adjective “tough” accurate.
For years I called this book “Tough Broads,” which conveyed something of the aggressiveness I will talk about in the following chapters. Unfortunately, “tough broads” suggested the self-possessed, witty, and flirtatious Mae West rather than the dour Simone Weil or the cool, remote Joan Didion. However sexually charismatic some of these women were in their personal lives—Sontag and McCarthy notoriously so—none of them wrote prose that could be considered flirtatious or seductive. They are grouped together here in this book for the similarities of style and outlook they shared on the questions of suffering and of emotional expressivity that preoccupied the late twentieth-century United States and, in many ways, continue to do so now. What makes them tough is their self-imposed task of looking at painful reality with directness and clarity and without consolation or compensation. All of them have been called “unsentimental” by some reviewer for their practice of “facing facts or difficulties realistically and with determination,” the definition of “unsentimental” according to Webster’s Online Dictionary (which also lists “tough” as a synonym). However, had I called this book “Unsentimental Women,” the term would automatically have conferred praise. This default admiration for unsentimentality (it’s always “clear-eyed!” and “refreshing!” or, more soberly, “unflinching”) derives from our failure, paradoxically, to take it very seriously. Unsentimentality has no critical history, certainly not the volumes that sentimentality does, even while it has been the default style of serious and important aesthetic work since the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century. Moreover, in the ways that “unsentimental” is reflexively applied in reviews or criticism, it appears to derive more from character than from philosophy, more from temperament than from strategy. After all, most writers would prefer their writing to be refreshing rather than stale, clear-eyed rather than myopic. But the connotations of “unsentimental” go further to suggest probity, bravery, even heroism, as if writing with an abundance of feeling displayed a writer’s moral laxity or psychological and intellectual weakness. Under the banner of a heroic engagement with painful reality, unsentimental writing would appear immune from failure.
Except when it fails. And it does fail, only rarely and in very particular circumstances. The scandals around unsentimentality—writing that is too unsentimental rather than not unsentimental enough—drew me to the women in this book. Most conspicuously, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem sparked a worldwide debate over both her judgment and her character—that is, her heartlessness—but all these women have been called to account for failures of feeling. Mary McCarthy was “pitiless”; Simone Weil, “icy”; Diane Arbus, “clinical”; Joan Didion, “cold”; Susan Sontag, “impersonal.” It is difficult to find—for me, impossible—a similar roster of male writers and intellectuals or artists who lived through and beyond their characterization as unfeeling. And while these six are not the only women to raise the issue of heartlessness (other figures from the period do as well—Flannery O’Connor, for instance), the six in this book made their approach to suffering a deep subject of their work. Their internal debates on representing painful reality and the function of pain more broadly provide an opportunity to follow their thought and their practice closely so that we can learn something about what unsentimentality is and what it can and cannot do. Because unsentimentality is a subject of their work, its aesthetic, moral, and political dimensions will become clearer to us, which will activate unsentimentality as a choice, not mystify it as a character trait.
These controversies arise not simply because the conventions of emotional expression differ between women and men or because the demands for female warmth and sympathy are more insistent. That we know from decades of feminist scholarship. More specifically, the sentimental tradition crafted the eighteenth-century “man of feeling” (who disappeared from public life when sympathy and sentiment were assigned to the domestic sphere in the nineteenth century) in a stoic mode.1 From Eve Sedgwick in the 1980s to Julie Ellison in the 1990s to Tania Modelski more recently, we have seen how emotional response is deflected onto the viewers of the male sufferer or sympathizer. Whether we are talking about a bewigged Adam Smith or a squint-eyed Clint Eastwood, the traditions of male reserve in the face of suffering—their own and others—go back to the Roman and the Greek Stoics. Julie Ellison describes Adam Smith as such: “For Smith, the ideal manifestation of moral sensibility involves a dignified upper-class sufferer whose very self-control provokes his friends to vicarious tears.”2 This tableau closely resembles Tania Modelski’s male weepie, or melodrama: “Real men do not cry, or at best they shed only a few hard-wrung tears; others do the crying for them—usually women or people of color.”3 If Adam Potkay is correct that stoicism is always being remodeled, emotional expression has been solidified at the bottom of the social hierarchy, which means that adopting a stoic mode might appear not just unnatural but presumptuous.4 In short, if sentimentality can contain stoicism, “too unsentimental” might register two things: the absence of admiring onlookers whose job it is to express intense emotion or the presence of the wrong protagonist whose stoicism is not admirable but alarming. The unsentimentality that is the subject of this book is not “silent and majestic sorrow,”5 however, but a concerted attempt to manage feelings so that no one tears up: not the writers, not their subjects, and not their readers.
One consequence of this gendering of emotional style is that these women had to be unusually thoughtful about the choice to be unsentimental, compelled to think it through, test it out, explain it as a choice with specific ends. Indeed, far from a mere absence of improperly calibrated or insincere emotional expression, unsentimentality for these writers and artists is a lifelong project, one that gets worked out with a great deal of self-consciousness. Certainly, temperament plays into this for all these women, as does their life experience. But biography is only the point of departure. What they wrote, how they wrote it, and how they imagined, defended, and advocated their practice make unsentimentality and its ethics available for use.
When Susan Sontag set out to define “camp” in her career-making essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” she began by defining “sensibility,” using the word no fewer than fifteen times in the first three paragraphs. If Raymond Williams is correct in Keywords that “sensibility” fell out of use in the early 1960s because a consensus about even having taste at all had dissipated, Sontag’s 1964 essay constitutes the term’s last hurrah and its bold reassertion as a marker of specialization, not generality. Having taste, her opening remarks suggest, whether camp taste or any other, required explanation and definition. What makes this essay so characteristic of Sontag’s own sensibility, which she claims it is, is the camp relationship to feeling. Exaggerated feeling is one of camp’s prized objects, and therefore, sentimentality is itself always available for camp appropriation. She quotes Oscar Wilde—“one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”—to note camp’s delighted, ironic consumption of sentimentality.
Unsentimentalism, too, is a sensibility, a particular taste in emotion with its own aesthetic practices, though the history of the term would not predict it. To summarize Williams, “sensibility” emerged in the eighteenth century as a term of approval for a person’s susceptibility to tender emotions. In the nineteenth century, “sensibility” and “sentimental” parted ways; approval shifted to an aesthetic notion of sensibility, the capacity for perception and judgment in matters of taste. “Sentimental” increasingly became the disapproving term for the indulgence in emotion or the clichéd rendering of feeling, though its valence was not yet securely negative. Importantly, in the nineteenth century, the word “unsentimental” still carried with it an idea of coarseness, which played off the earlier association of sensibility and refined capacity for tender feeling. That notion of coarseness disappeared in the twentieth century when “unsentimental” became exclusively a term of approval. By the modernist moment and running back through the Romantic, according to James Chandler’s Archaeology of Sympathy, “sentimental” had become permanently and irrevocably associated with bad taste and moral simplicity and “unsentimental” with good taste and moral acuity. I have not been able to determine a precise date when “unsentimental” began to stand as self-evidently approving in matters of style, and in fact, Keywords does not mention the term. By Sontag’s moment, the camp delight in exaggerated emotions shows how far the capacity for tender feeling and the aesthetic capacity for perception and judgment had diverged. It is precisely camp’s hardheartedness, its ironic consumption of painful feeling, that constitutes aesthetic refinement. The camp aesthete can determine under which circumstances excessive emotional sensitivity couples with aesthetic failure to turn the awful into the great.
But what does “unsentimental” actually denote? By way of contrast, a nonsentimental work will still treat feelings, but in a way judged fresh, properly scaled, and free of cliché. But “nonsentimental” is a term of exclusion that draws a boundary around that thing we call sentimentality, as does “antisentimental,” which identifies a criticism of sentimentality. Neither constitutes a style in itself. “Nonsentimental,” the most neutral term, is also the least used because it does not specify a set of properties, merely the absence of properties. “Antisentimental” is the most closely tied to “sentimental” because as several scholars have shown, it is difficult to engage sentimentality critically without reproducing some of its logic.6 “Unsentimental,” as opposed to “nonsentimental” or “antisentimental,” I want to argue, does define something specific. And while we might know it when we see it, it does not always look the same. For instance, no one would mistake the prose of Joan Didion for anyone else’s, much less that of Simone Weil or Susan Sontag.
What they share first is their attention to the same terrain as sentimental literature—painful reality, suffering, sufferers—but without emotional display. The novelist Thomas Pynchon, for instance, has been accused of being a cold writer because his novels do not offer rounded characters with whom readers might identify; he is not called an unsentimental writer, because while there might be painful reality, there is little that we can identify as suffering because there is little that we can identify as interiority, which is the place of suffering, however publicly displayed. Second, painful reality must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically. When unsentimentality succeeds, its descriptors are “lucid,” “clear-eyed,” “precise,” “restrained,” and “penetrating,” to name a few. When it fails, unsentimentality veers into coldness, tactlessness, aggression, and even cruelty. Painful reality, it seems, must not be treated too directly, concretely, and realistically without conveying some of the writer’s relationship to the suffering, or she—and it is always she—is perceived as cold, tactless, or heartless. Like sentimentality, unsentimentality is also, therefore, implicitly a matter of scale—that is, of the perceived balance between a cause and its emotional effect. To be affectless in the face of extreme suffering can be terrifying, as Arendt argued in On Violence.
Because unsentimental work prizes the object of reflection over feelings about that object, its syntax tends to be simpler, shorn of qualification and subordinating clauses, which often work to fold in the feeling perspectives of both subject and writer. Didion argues in her essay “Why I Write” that qualification and subordination were attempts to soften the blow, so to speak, and outlawed them for herself accordingly. It seems all these unsentimental writers did the same and for much the same reason. Causing pain to the reader was not only acceptable but, at times, necessary. Weil, Sontag, and Didion, for example, are wary of the satisfactions of sympathy, whether these satisfactions are narcissistic (the heightened self-regard of displaying how compassionate one’s feelings are), moral (the displacement of guilt in that if I feel bad, I must be good even if I’m not doing anything), or sensual (the pleasures of intensity, the excitement of sharing feelings). Arendt worries that feelings of horror aroused by the death camps obliterate thought. Sontag, McCarthy, and Didion suggest that feelings are anesthetic in that one form of more tolerable pain works to mask another, deeper injury. Arbus confesses that it hurts to be photographed but believes that empathy masks human reality.
One of the late twentieth century’s great dilemmas has been how to confront the scale of painful reality or “to regard the pain of too many others,” to paraphrase Sontag. World War II unleashed an enormity of suffering that defied anyone’s attempts, then or now, to describe or comprehend its totality. The few numbers that quantify it—six million murdered Jews, sixty million war dead, twelve million dead of starvation in the Pacific Rim, the quarter million Japanese incinerated in one day by two bombs, to name just some—can measure but not convey the horror, the loss, and the reach of destruction at midcentury. The United States, which was comparatively unscathed, still suffered over four hundred thousand military casualties. While this number is dwarfed by the USSR’s twenty-three million (almost 14 percent of its population), a rank order of suffering does nothing to console the statistically most bereaved, nor the statistically least. John Hersey, who meticulously measured the atom bomb’s impact in seconds and in distance from the center, scattering data throughout his account of the bombing of Hiroshima, ultimately reduced his story to that of six survivors to provide some human measure to the new atomic reality. Scale itself, the sheer imponderability of the size of the problem, became one of the psychic, social, aesthetic, and political challenges of the postwar era. “To do the atom bomb justice,” Mary McCarthy reckoned, “Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead.”7
In the face of the midcentury’s disasters, artists and writers of all kinds and from around the globe decried the inadequacy of the formal tools they had inherited. Theodor Adorno famously claimed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”8 However, as we well know, the perceived impossibility of the task did not render suffering and trauma invisible. On the contrary. Despite the anguish of many thoughtful commentators, there has been no shortage of attempts to depict suffering across every medium in all ranges of culture from the highbrow to the middlebrow to the mass market. Poets did not stop writing poetry “after Auschwitz,” nor did they shrink from attesting to horror; neither did novelists, painters, filmmakers, memoirists, comic-book writers, documentarians, journalists, television writers, dancers, choreographers, even musicians. If the twentieth century is a century of traumas and a century of theories of trauma, as Shoshana Felman puts it, it is also a century of traumatic representation, which encompasses the attempts to do justice to suffering as well as to capitalize on its eager consumption.9 An expression that leapt into the American public domain after the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus was “There’s no business like shoah business.”
By examining the work of Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, and Weil, this book’s broadest aim is to contribute a chapter to the story we have been telling ourselves about our relationship to suffering—our own and others—in the decades following World War II. We are told, for instance, that the late twentieth century was a period that prized, often demanded, emotional expressivity and that exhibited a drive toward authenticity and empathy that required the public sharing of feelings. We are also told that the late twentieth century was a period defined by its coolness, its irony, and its affectlessness. This bifurcated story directs us toward a broader question. Naturally, coolness and affectlessness can produce a longing for their opposites in warmth and emotional fullness, whereas authentic self-disclosure of intense personal emotion can result in an equally powerful desire for distance and detachment. Moreover, any cultural moment offers myriad tones and styles, but it is the habits of thought about this period that allow observers to claim both authenticity and irony as dominant or characteristic. We ought to ask what in the larger historical impulses, including the war but also beyond it, threw emotions to the extremes of the emotional scale, or why emotional display—full or empty—became so fraught that emotions would be constantly remarked on in various divisions of the public sphere (I’m thinking primarily of arts and politics) and subjected to constant debate, which itself is marked by emotional charge (elation or disgust, for instance).10
The women in this book constitute a countertradition to these two poles, not a happy medium—one in which the display of feeling is minimized if not outright excluded, but which also insists on an encounter with suffering that is serious, engaged, and often painful. It is on this narrow ground between saturation and denial that these women appear so out of step with their times. They neither sacralized pain nor remained indifferent to it, and in this way, they constitute a countertradition that has been mistaken for heartlessness and coldness. But it is, in fact, something else altogether, something I want to call toughness. They were drawn to suffering as a problem to be explored and yet remained deeply suspicious of its attractions. It is easy to confuse their toughness with indifference or callousness, but that would be to misconstrue their project. They sought not relief from pain but heightened sensitivity to what they called “reality.” Perversely or not, they imagined the consolations for pain in intimacy, empathy, and solidarity as anesthetic. Their toleration of pain, indeed their insistence on its ordinariness, is a part of their eccentricity. In discourses where pain is a serious ethical and political question, as it was for them, the explanatory authority of trauma has rendered unintelligible both ordinary suffering and the ordinariness of suffering.
Their refusal of empathy and solidarity was taken by many to be unpardonable. It was, furthermore, quite literally unthinkable because it landed squarely in the heart of postwar America’s incoherent relationship to psychic pain and its remedies. As Lauren Berlant and Wendy Brown have argued, intimacy, empathy, and solidarity derived their conceptual and social power from their imagined capacity to heal a deep and often traumatic psychic wound.11 This relief from pain through empathy resonated widely with other discourses of recovery in late twentieth-century America. It is essential, however, to cast the dilemma of pain more broadly still by remembering that it is not peculiar to areas that we identify with woundedness—identity politics, therapy and confessional culture, and trauma studies—to take pain as self-evident and, in a very complicated sense, satisfying. On the one hand, as Mark Seltzer has explained, late twentieth-century America is a “wound culture” marked by “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound.”12 On the other, postmodern culture has exhibited the well-known “waning of affect” described by Fredric Jameson. We are left, then, with two extremes, one where pain supplies an overabundance of meaning or stimulation and one where it fails to produce any affective response at all.
In an important way, their acceptance of and insistence on pain for themselves and their readers constitute a critique of Enlightenment secular modernity with its master narrative of human perfectibility. In the drama of human perfectibility, every source of pain is subject not merely to remediation; it is already located somewhere on the path to elimination. As modernity’s fantasy of itself as an increasingly pain-free world imploded in the first half of the twentieth century, these women were willing to admit pain into the sphere of aesthetics and politics. They demanded that feeling pain, a result of considering in detail and with accuracy the conditions of pain and suffering, was a legitimate, even necessary, enterprise. This pain was to be both the reader’s and the writer’s. Yet—and here is where they depart, or tried to, from the prevailing ethics of the period—they were not to share that pain. The pain should never be between the writer and the reader, though both may experience it.
As Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular explains, pain is a peculiarly modern problem and one conceived in terms of scale.13 Excess became the marker by which cruelty was identified, though where the baseline of acceptability lies is always historically contingent. As cruelty in punishment was outlawed, pain became incompatible with what it meant to be human. To inflict it and to experience it were both dehumanizing. Of course, that did not render cruelty obsolete, he argues; it merely made it secret and subject to denial. But the remaking of the penal code and the notion of rights changed the place of pain in modern societies and rendered it unitary—that is, one thing rather than many. By “many” Asad does not mean that pain varies by intensity (though it does in his account), but that the functions of pain—not its meaning—for the individual and for the community were made invisible and unthinkable. That pain was merely an ordinary part of human life, that it had spiritual and other uses, began to seem inhuman, uncivilized, barbaric. To consider its value or use seemed reactionary.
If we take heartlessness and coldness as mere quirks of personality, we deprive ourselves of alternatives to intimacy and empathy even as their limitations appear more striking and, at the same time, more fixed and naturalized. Because it is difficult to imagine ethics without empathy, however, these women have been perceived as psychologically cold rather than engaged in an ethical project with different assumptions. The ethical models of relation that have been ascendant since the eighteenth century’s invention of moral sentiment, and that have been rendered inadequate by the tragedies of the midcentury, tried to bring the self face-to-face with the Other. Because unsentimentality refuses to attend to the emotional suffering of the protagonists of whatever situation confronts the writer, the work of the authors and artists I discuss provides an alternative to an ethical system that rests on empathy, whether that is found in the philosophy of Levinas or the debates over sentimentality; the work of trauma studies or the efforts to understand emotional flow in affect studies; or the work on identity and identification across forms of subaltern studies. These systems fundamentally presuppose a face-to-face encounter with the Other. These women, however, dispute the efficacy of that ethical mode for a variety of reasons: its consolatory distraction, its moral vanity, its tendency to overwhelm and saturate both actors, its unreliability, its impossibility. More importantly, beyond criticizing or discarding empathy, they attempt to mount another ethical mode that requires, to borrow Arendt’s terms, sharing the world with others but without their face-to-face encounter. This is a painful mode, one that deprives the reader of consolation, certainty, predictability, gratitude, company. It is deliberately, sometimes vehemently, anti-utopian. If it promises nothing more than unpredictability, helplessness, sadness, and self-alteration, it also attempts nothing less than an active, expansive, and transformative relationship to reality.
Toughness means difficult, however, not insensate. It paradoxically demanded a heightened sensitivity to reality, just not to other people’s emotions. The women I write about here insisted on the duty to face reality; they advocated for the necessity to contain emotions, both those that prevented one from confronting painful reality and those that arose in the process of doing so. They argued for the psychological and political value of toughness. They formulated an aesthetic practice for facing painful reality, which they demonstrated in their own work. They insisted on facing suffering with clarity, alone but in the company of others. Finally, they believed this practice to be crucial to the fate of the postwar public sphere—particularly the US public sphere—and even human civilization itself. But however much they shared, they had different ways of formulating their projects: Simone Weil espoused a tragic formulation of justice in her embrace of a form of suffering so extreme its only analogy is the Crucifixion; Hannah Arendt described herself as heartless so as to elaborate an alternative to a politics of compassion; Mary McCarthy provided an aesthetic theory of facing facts across the many literary modes in which she wrote; Susan Sontag, in her anxiety about cultural anesthetics, explored the problems of emotional self-regulation under late capitalism; Diane Arbus viewed failure as an ordinary part of self-fashioning, providing a pedagogy of helplessness; Joan Didion pitched a battle with self-pity and self-delusion, which ground to a halt when she came to understand the grandiosity of hardness.
“Regarding the pain of others” has been a motivation for extended and brilliant reflection and a source of theoretical, historiographic, and methodological creativity for dealing with the ongoing witness of atrocity and oppression across the globe and even across historical periods. Several fields, often overlapping, have fashioned conceptual tools for thinking about and witnessing suffering in its various scales and registers. With its roots in psychoanalysis, trauma studies have produced ways of attending to the incommunicable, the stuttering, fugitive, oblique ways of speaking of or representing trauma. Feminist studies, race studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, disability studies, gay/lesbian/queer studies, studies of the working class, using methods from a variety of disciplines, all have made visible and intelligible the suffering and oppression of individuals and communities of people across cultures and across time. Affect studies, which has roots in (without superseding) these fields, is increasingly a nexus in which painful emotion is studied. It has the conceptual advantage of producing rich psychological and social accounts of suffering and responses to it because it takes affects to exist between mind and body, between people, between a person and an abstraction (like the nation or the good life), and between a body and its environment. This in-betweenness is where affect can be generative and motivate action; it is also where it can be unpredictable, which is where it becomes a source of anxiety. Affects are a source of optimism in a great deal of contemporary work on the subject, just as they were a source of dread in studies of crowds, masses, and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. This book, in making a space for coldness and heartlessness, reserve and containment, marks a border territory of affect studies.
The detachment of these women—their preference for solitude over solidarity—seeks to eliminate the in-betweenness of affect, or feelings and emotions (though these are technically different from affects), for a variety of reasons that will be spelled out in each chapter. This resistance to emotion while in the domain of painful reality also sets them apart from the type of political affiliation favored by the progressive social movements that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, all of which advocated bonds of feeling and group identification. 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. For instance, Hannah Arendt’s major work of the early 1960s, On Revolution, published at the height of the civil rights movement, carefully dissected the “devastating” effects of compassion in political life.14 Joan Didion’s breakout collection of essays, Slouching towards Bethlehem, satirized the feeling politics of the New Left and the feeling culture of the fringe Left as the antiwar movement and the hippies intermingled and often collided in Northern California in 1968. And when the social movements of the late twentieth century recommended the healing power of empathy as the glue of solidarity and the aim of progressive politics, they 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.
These women have many overlapping biographical, artistic, and philosophical connections, though this is not an argument for influence or a description of anything like an artistic or intellectual collective. As it turns out, collectivity is something none of the women could abide, for various and significant reasons. They were also, not coincidentally, ambivalent or outright hostile to the feminist movements of their days, principally second-wave feminism. I will explore the reasons for their hostility and ambivalence less as a product of internalized misogyny or even the practical realities of succeeding in an intellectual culture that was often explicitly misogynist than as a specific set of ideas about the foundations of feminist thought, not least its relationship to emotional expressivity, its foregrounding of psychic pain, its emphasis on collectivity, and its advocacy of utopian projects. Their unsentimentality in part lies in their willingness to endure or deflect certain kinds of psychic pain, indeed in their insistence on the morality of doing so. They might, in fact, recognize these claims of oppression, but they cannot philosophically tolerate a relationship to them that permits any shared feeling about them.
Most of these women were associated in some way with the New York Intellectuals, that group of mostly male writers and intellectuals who wrote and edited the influential little magazines of the midcentury such as Partisan Review, politics, Commentary, and Dissent. McCarthy, who worked to restart Partisan Review after its editors broke with the Communist Party USA, and Arendt, who quickly began to publish in these magazines when she arrived in New York from Paris during the war, were card-carrying members of the New York Intellectuals and among the very few women whose work consistently saw print. McCarthy and Arendt also enjoyed a great and productive friendship, which is why their chapters here overlap in ways the others do not. Simone Weil, who died before the end of the war, was first published in the United States in politics, having been translated by McCarthy. Weil was a “patron saint” for certain of the New York Intellectuals, in particular Dwight Macdonald, and she is in many ways a presiding spirit, and a limit case, in this book. Sontag was a second-generation New York Intellectual whose tastes and objects of study were so foreign to the older generation that her time there was limited, and she rarely socialized among them. Didion falls into the orbit of this group by way of her work for the New York Review of Books and the patronage of Elizabeth Hardwick, a friend of McCarthy’s and Arendt’s and a New York Intellectual herself. Hardwick edited the New York Review of Books, which absorbed and slowly took the place of the little magazines after the sixties. Diane Arbus, a much more solitary figure, came to renown posthumously and not least because of Sontag’s review of her one-woman show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the book that it inspired, On Photography.
Their paths cross, sometimes run parallel, and they are connected by degrees of personal relationship. For my purposes, they are affiliated more closely by style and shared sensibility than they are by biography, though biography is nonetheless part of it. This is not, however, a book about the New York Intellectuals. The New York Intellectuals produced the intellectual magazines of record, so to speak, of the US midcentury; these magazines, read across a spectrum of political belief and investment, provided a forum for serious cultural, aesthetic, and political work for the professional thinker, to use Arendt’s term, and the nonprofessional alike. There were few places an intellectual could find an audience and engage with other intellectuals and hope to have an influence outside this circle except in academia. Most of these women criticized, sometimes mocked, academic style and specialization even though several of them—McCarthy, Sontag, and Arendt—needed to teach to support themselves. The point is, for most intellectuals of the period, these magazines were the place to publish, even more so for women intellectuals if they did not want to or could not hold academic appointments, which were hardly plentiful for women before the 1980s. They also did not want to specialize. Scholars today do not generally prize the insight of the nonspecialists of their own era.
Of course, their style and sensibility also made them successful in this milieu. That they were not overtly feminist or distanced themselves from feminism certainly did not hurt their careers and probably helped them, though Sontag published “The Third World of Women,” her most polemical essay on the condition of women, in Partisan Review.15 McCarthy and Arendt fell afoul of their male colleagues for their toughness, not their sentimentality or softheartedness. McCarthy’s graphic (for the time) sexual farces offended her male friends and colleagues, and she wounded several of them seriously in her autobiographical fiction by drawing their all-too-recognizable and all-too-unpleasant caricatures. Arendt was roundly and sometimes viciously attacked by the New York Intellectual cohort for Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Their embrace of painful reality does not mean that these women were pessimists. Indeed, as bleak as their message often was, most of them were neither pessimists nor optimists. They fancied themselves realists of a certain kind. Moreover, their own experiences of utopian optimism had a profoundly chilling effect on them. If they were not pessimists, they were robustly anti-utopian. Utopianism, very simply, violated two rules of their creed: that reality must be faced in all its complexity and pain; and that the outcome of any action is unpredictable. One simply cannot know the results, especially of complex political and social actions, and so the moral judgment about that action has to stand on its own, not be wagered against an outcome. Nonetheless, with several of these women, there is a surprising amor mundi that subtends their ethics and discipline of accuracy, a love of the world in all its complications, ambiguities, ambivalences. This amor mundi helps explain why they were able to sustain their projects over long periods and in the face of dispiriting changes in public life.
With the exception of Sontag, none of these women are known as aesthetic theorists, but they all, under the pressure of circumstance, had to formulate an aesthetic theory that comes to grips with the ethical dilemmas of representing painful reality. This theory is often (but not always) explicit, and the demonstrations of it in action make up the work of the following chapters. The methodology of this book takes its cue from a small reference to Theodor Adorno in Michael Taussig’s book The Nervous System. Taussig calls for understanding “contiguous” with representation—that is, “giving oneself over to a phenomenon rather than thinking about it from above.”16 I’m trying to think about the literal meaning and the patterns across their work that help to excavate what is not always explicit but often embedded in their thought and practice. We might call this what Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best have termed “surface reading,” with all its commitment to the verbal structure of literary language; the embrace of surface as an affective (or, in this case, not very affective) and ethical posture; surface as a practical description; surface as patterns within and across texts; surface as literal meaning—what Marcus called simply “reading.”17 Surface alone, however, cannot bring us closer to the model of engagement the texts offer. Because I focus primarily on essays and, in one case, photographs and photographic essays, the contexts that spurred their reflection have to be taken into consideration.
The book doesn’t follow an overarching theory of unsentimentality. It instead attempts to inhabit the thought and practice of these expert practitioners of that sensibility in the hope that the intimate public sphere—or the compassionate public sphere, as Lauren Berlant names it—will have alternatives, since this public sphere (as she shows) seems to be neither genuinely intimate nor effectively compassionate.18 A corollary hope is that we will know the costs and benefits of these alternatives. For these women, unsentimentality is not a cure or even a palliative to the suffering that consumes our headlines and newsfeeds. Its offers a troubled and troubling encounter with the shared world that produces such suffering. Facing facts in the terms laid out here does not mean simply knowing them, which is why the aesthetic component of this project is so important. If facts alone could lead us to the promised land—facts about climate change, gun violence, terrorism, war, racial prejudice, economic inequality—then we already live in a paradise of facts. The problem is not that we do not know what is happening but that we cannot bear to be changed by that knowledge. The women I discuss in the following pages all insist that we should be changed, however much we give up in the process.