1. See Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), for a history of the movement of sentiment and sympathy into the home in the nineteenth century.
2. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 10.
3. Tania Modleski, “Clint Eastwood and Male Weepies,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 136.
4. See Adam Potkay’s “Contested Emotions: Pity and Gratitude from the Stoics to Swift and Wordsworth,” PMLA 130, no. 5 (October 2015): 1333.
5. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as quoted in Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 71.
6. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); James P. Chandler’s An Archaeology of Sympathy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Leonard Cassuto’s Hardboiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
7. Mary McCarthy, “The Hiroshima New Yorker,” politics, October 1946, 367; and John Hersey, “Hiroshima,” New Yorker, August 31, 1946.
8. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34.
9. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1.
10. Marianna Torgovnick’s book The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) offers the first thoroughgoing account of how the war haunted the postwar, which might indeed be the appropriate context for thinking about the emotional extremes that characterize the period. Torgovnick’s method—an ethics of identification—strikes me as useful for a great deal of material from the period, but it does not account for the bipolarity of response or the various ways writers attempted to deal directly with the fallout from the war.
11. See Lauren Berlant’s “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 49–84; and Wendy Brown’s “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (August 1999): 390–410.
12. Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1.
13. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
14. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 72.
15. Susan Sontag, “The Third World of Women,” Partisan Review 40, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 180–206.
16. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 10.
17. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–21.
18. Berlant, “Subject of True Feeling.”
1. Camus had published her collection of essays Oppression and Liberty in the midthirties, and Cahiers du Sud had published several of her articles in the early 1940s.
2. Simone Weil, “The Iliad: A Poem of Force,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 162–95.
3. See Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1992). For the quotation from McCarthy, see 626, and from MacDonald, 227.
4. Elizabeth Hardwick, Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1983).
5. See Gregory Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the “politics” Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 193.
6. Hardwick, Bartleby in Manhattan, 158.
7. See bibliography for full titles. Fanny Howe also had many poems and essays devoted to Weil.
8. Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu (Paris: La Colombe, 1950); and Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon, 1947).
9. Simone Weil, L’enracinement: Prélude a une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
10. Dwight Macdonald said the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was “like taking apart Westminster Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments.” See Dwight Macdonald, ed., Masscult and Midcult: Essays against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), 38.
11. There are a number of excellent biographies of Weil, and the outlines of her life story are nearly always rehearsed in articles on her work. Simone Pétrement, her friend, wrote the first authoritative biography: Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). David McLellan’s Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990) is perhaps now the definitive one. Francine du Plessix Gray’s short biography for the Penguin Lives Series, Simone Weil (New York: Penguin Group, 2001), has circulated widest. Robert Coles’s biographical/analytical book, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2001), also deserves mention. Sylvie Courtine-Denamy’s Three Women in Dark Times, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), treats her work and life in the context of two other figures, Edith Stein and Hannah Arendt. None disagree on the basic outlines of Weil’s career, but no one has looked at the posthumous reception history of her work. Sisela Bok has written an article on Weil’s legacy but treats only a small number of important readers of her work. See Sisela Bok, “No One to Receive It? Simone Weil’s Unforeseen Legacy,” Common Knowledge 12, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 252–60.
12. The split between radical and mystic is more an artifact of publishing history and academic taste than a fact of her work. Françoise Meltzer makes a strong case for the paradoxical continuity of her thought in “The Hands of Simone Weil,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 611–28.
13. David Castronovo’s book Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s That Made American Culture (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004) develops from this sort of account. In his summary, the protagonist of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is paradigmatic not as a man of emotional resilience in the face of war trauma but as a man who “wondered why he should get so scared in peacetime” (11, emphasis mine). Castronovo’s answer—that “the late 1940s and 1950s produced a remarkable number of new things to worry about” (11), most anxiously, Communist spies and atomic annihilation—places us back into familiar territory.
14. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
15. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
16. See Robert Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
17. See ibid., 11–13. But the Christian realists, however pessimistic, were not tragic thinkers, as I explain later in the chapter.
18. Leslie Fiedler, introduction to Waiting for God, by Simone Weil (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 2000), vii.
19. Leslie Fiedler, “Simone Weil: Prophet Out of Israel; A Saint of the Absurd,” Commentary 12 (January 1, 1951): 38–46.
20. Robert Barrat, “Simone Weil,” Commonweal 24 (March 1951): 585–87.
21. John Cogley, “Sister to All Sufferers,” review of Waiting for God, by Simone Weil, New York Times, September 16, 1951, Sunday Book Review. John Cogley was on the editorial staff of Commonweal.
22. Anne Fremantle, “Soul in Search of Salvation,” New York Times, December 16, 1956, Sunday Book Review.
23. The first comment was made by Robert Barrat (“Simone Weil”); the second, by John Cogley (“Sister to All Sufferers”). Fremantle (“Soul in Search of Salvation”) called her “ugly, unwell, alien.”
24. Cold War tensions appear in the occasional attempt to mock Weil’s dedication to suspiciously Communist causes like the labor movement. Weil engaged with Marxist theory and Communist political groups on many levels, but she could hardly be considered a Marxist, much less a Communist, so deep was her criticism and so violent her hatred of the Soviet experiment with it, which she considered totalitarian. This contributed to her heroism in the eyes of ex-Communists turned Cold War liberals like Fiedler. Later reviews in the 1950s were increasingly more sympathetic and admiring.
25. William Barret, “Mlle. Weil’s Question,” review of Letters to a Priest, by Simone Weil, New York Times, March 14, 1954, Sunday Book Review.
26. Isaac Rosenfeld, “Simone Weil as Saint,” review of Waiting for God, by Simone Weil, Partisan Review 18, no. 6 (November/December 1951): 712–15.
27. Fiedler, introduction to Weil, Waiting for God, xvii.
28. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 49–50.
29. Chiaromonte had a deep friendship with Albert Camus, one that blossomed as Chiaromonte awaited transport to the United States in Marseille. This was the height of Weil’s late production and when the Iliad essay was published in Cahiers du Sud. Chiaromonte and Camus shared a great deal philosophically and politically, not least their admiration for Weil. See Elizabeth Hawes, Camus, a Romance (New York: Grove Press, 2009).
30. Nicola Chiaromonte, The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 184–86.
31. Chiaromonte is quoting Weil, “The Iliad: A Poem of Force.”
32. Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Simon & Schuster / Fireside, 2003), 3, 121.
33. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 53; hereafter cited in text as GG followed by the page number.
34. In Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), I call this a “topological crisis”—a widespread anxiety about the boundaries of the human body, the nation, and the mind, which were figured everywhere in Cold War discourse as containers with leaky membranes. Timothy Melley has called this “agency panic” in Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Cold War America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
35. There are so many books and articles on the Cold War with the word “containment” in the title that they are impossible to list. I would note the early employment of this term in the cultural field in Alan Nadel’s Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
36. Amanda Anderson has aptly defined midcentury liberalism as “bleak,” identifying some of its key figures, Lionel Trilling most conspicuously, as “marked by a chastened rationalism and a caution against progressive optimism,” which she argues forms a central but unrecognized component of the liberal tradition. “Bleak” sits adjacent to Weil’s more tragic sensibility. See “Postwar Aesthetics: The Case of Trilling and Adorno,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 421.
37. There was also a surge in adaptations of Greek tragedy and perhaps something like new forms of tragedy—Arthur Miller would be doing one kind and Samuel Beckett another. Samuel Moyn points out the conversation among German classicists who looked to the Greeks and Greek tragedy as a way of imagining a tradition of human rights. See Moyn, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in the History of Cosmopolitanism” (lecture presented at the Sawyer Seminar “Around 1948,” University of Chicago, November 29, 2011). At the end of Raymond Williams’s reissued Modern Tragedy (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006), the Works Cited and Further Reading includes Camus and Steiner, as well as a number of classicists and Shakespearean scholars who wrote on tragedy in the 1950s and 1960s, such as H. D. F. Kitto and G. Wilson Knight.
38. Raymond Williams (Modern Tragedy) comes at this question a different way (and he was responding to Arendt in On Revolution as well as to Steiner): how do we distinguish what we experience as tragedy and what we know of the tradition of “tragedy,” in which only some events and responses to them are deemed tragic? He is referring to ordinary tragedy in ordinary life, and he is more interested than other critics in connections between the dramatic tradition and the vernacular uses of the term “tragedy.”
39. See McLellan, Utopian Pessimist.
40. J. P. Little, “Albert Camus, Simone Weil, and Modern Tragedy,” French Studies 31, no. 1 (January 1977): 48.
41. Rita Felski, introduction to Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
42. Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Scribner, 1937), 155.
43. See Kathleen Sands, “Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in the Time after Time,” in Felski, Rethinking Tragedy, 82–103.
44. In, for example, Werner Jaeger’s classic work Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), there is not one mention of tragedy as a constitutive component of either tradition. Weil was not a classicist, of course; her understanding of both traditions was both learned and typically idiosyncratic. Jaeger’s essays on this topic began to be published in the 1930s. My thanks to Sam Moyn, who alerted me to these dates at the Sawyer Seminar “Around 1948” in 2011.
45. Albert Camus, “On The Future of Tragedy,” lecture given in Athens in 1955 and published in Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy, ed. Phillip Thody (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 303. Weil’s influence can be seen in The Plague—the priest in the second half of the novel is a Weil-like figure, and the sermon he gives clearly draws on much of “The Love of God and Affliction.”
46. Citations to “The Love of God and Affliction” are taken from The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1977), hereafter cited in text as SWR followed by the page number. The Simone Weil Reader has the complete text, whereas Waiting for God has only the first half of the essay.
47. Weil wrote many essays, collected in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge, 1998), to show the presence of Christian theology centuries before Christ’s birth. She also wrote essays and parts of essays devoted to tracing the relationships between Christianity and non-Western religions.
48. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 4.
49. Miles, Simone Weil: An Anthology, 16.
50. The best account of Weil’s concept of decreation, which is enormously complex, is Sharon Cameron’s. Cameron states that decreation is “so alien to us that we barely have any concepts for it, so quick are we to find any attempt to eradicate egotism in terms this extreme repellent,” in her essay “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality,” in Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 110.
51. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 67.
52. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 4.
53. McCarthy, for example, typically uses an infinitive construction.
54. Miles, Simone Weil: An Anthology, 185.
55. Ibid., 221.
56. Ibid., 222.
57. Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 12.
58. Ibid., 11.
59. This appears in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, 18–19.
60. Joan Dargan, Simone Weil: Thinking Poetically (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
61. M. K. Ferber, “Simone Weil’s Iliad,” in Simone Weil—Interpretation of a Life, ed. George Abbot White (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 63–64.
62. Italics in quotations are always in the original unless otherwise noted.
63. For a full discussion of the relation of Weil to Marx on the subject of labor, see Robert Sparling’s “Theory and Praxis: Simone Weil and Marx on the Dignity of Labor,” Review of Politics 74, no. 1 (January 2012): 87–107.
64. Dargan, Simone Weil.
65. Weil, Waiting for God, in Simone Weil Reader, 64.
66. In closing the essay, Weil says, “Often, one could weep tears of blood to think how many unfortunates are crushed by affliction without knowing how to make use of it. But, coolly considered, this is not a more pitiful waste than the squandering of the world’s beauty. The brightness of the stars, the sound of sea-waves, the silence of the hour before dawn—how often do they not offer themselves in vain to men’s attention?” (SWR, 467, emphasis mine).
67. This is from Barret’s “Mlle. Weil’s Question.”
68. From The Notebooks of Simone Weil as quoted in McLellan, Utopian Pessimist, 187.
1. See Peter Novak, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), for the now standard account. For a dissenting opinion, see Laurence Baron, “The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 62–88.
2. Dan Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Banal and the Evil in Her Holocaust Narrative,” New German Critique 71 (Spring/Summer 1997): 178.
3. See Hans Mommsen’s “Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence: The Intellectual Background,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Ascheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 224–31.
4. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl traces out the debate over Eichmann in Jerusalem and comments frequently on Arendt’s style but does not speculate as to why Arendt employed the strategies she did. See Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
5. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s chapter on Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, “The Man in the Glass Booth: Hannah Arendt’s Irony,” provides an excellent alternative to my account of Arendt’s irony, arguing that after the Holocaust Arendt feared that “language had run away from historical meaning” (52). See Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremburg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 47–72.
6. All quotations from The Origins of Totalitarianism are taken from Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (New York: Harvest Books, 1968), here viii; hereafter cited in text as OT followed by the page number.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978).
8. See David Skinner, ed. and trans., Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 1914–1982 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), vi.
9. According to the New York Times Book Review editorial comment at the opening of these pages, they had received more than a hundred letters in the month after Musmanno’s review, mostly in support of Arendt and critical of the review. The pages themselves include a selection, roughly half in support of Eichmann in Jerusalem and half in support of Musmanno’s review.
10. Printing this volume of response was unprecedented in the New York Times Book Review. The Book Review had never (nor has to this date) devoted as much space to one controversy as it did with Eichmann in Jerusalem.
11. The response is in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town (July 20, 1963) and does not contain a byline for Shawn, though he did indeed write it.
12. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 241; hereafter cited in text as JP followed by the page number.
13. See the translation in Skinner, Gershom Scholem, 396.
14. Moreover, she claims that “I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person,” by which she implies a kind of narcissism in the love of a people (JP, 247).
15. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1978), 73.
16. Musmanno does note tone in reference to various other figures in the trial. For instance, Arendt “deals intemperately” with the lead prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, and “pours scorn” on Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Michael Musmanno, “Man with an Unspotted Conscience: Adolph Eichmann’s Role in the Nazi Mania Is Weighed in Hannah Arendt’s New Book,” New York Times, May 19, 1963, Sunday Book Review, 40–41.
17. Ibid.
18. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 90; hereafter cited in text as OR followed by the page number.
19. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 25; hereafter cited in text as EJ followed by the page number.
20. Grynszpan’s unstable son, Herschel, had assassinated a low-level German administrative functionary in Paris on November, 7, 1938, providing the pretext for unleashing the pogroms of Kristallnacht.
21. She recounts one additional story in detail, that of a German soldier, Anton Schmidt, known to many in the courtroom. Schmidt helped the Jewish underground by providing forged papers and military trucks before being executed for that work. Mention of this name produced two minutes of silence in the courtroom as though, she says, “in honor of a man named Anton Schmidt” whose memory produced a “single thought clearly, irrefutably, beyond question—how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe and perhaps all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told” (EJ, 231). It is not the failure of the court to provide such testimony but the rarity of such stories during the war that is her point.
22. In The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which Arendt wrote in the mid-1950s, she had already developed a theory of the public world that did not include pain and emotion. Her primary examples of things that should not be shared in public are physical pain and emotion, especially love. Because internal states are not subject to the verifications of plurality, pain and emotion should not be seen and heard, denying the fundamental conditions of publicity—appearance. Moreover, certain things, she claims, cannot bear the light of day, the exposure to many, and one of these is the intensity that comes with intimate feelings. This intensity, she argues, is always a threat to reality (50–51).
23. Margaret Canovan sees On Revolution as Arendt’s attempt to come to terms with totalitarianism on the left. See the chapter “Morals and Politics in a Post-totalitarian Age,” in Margaret Canovan’s Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 155–200.
24. New Yorker, Talk of the Town, July 20, 1963.
25. New York Times, May 19, 1963, sec. 7, 1.
26. See Moshe Zimmerman, “Hannah Arendt, the Early ‘Post-Zionist’” (181–93), and Richard Bernstein, “Hannah Arendt’s Zionism?” (194–202), in Ascheim, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem. As Bernstein says: “To ask, in an unqualified manner, ‘Was Hannah Arendt ever a Zionist and when?’ obscures basic issues. We need to make more discriminating judgments. We need to clarify what precisely attracted her to Zionism (especially which version of Zionism, and when this occurred), as well as what repelled her about Zionist ideology and became the target of her stinging criticism” (194–95).
27. Marie Syrkin, “Hannah Arendt: The Clothes of the Empress,” Dissent, Autumn 1963, 344–52, here 346.
28. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996), 190.
29. Ibid.
30. Note the current mass fascination with psychopathies like serial killing, where an affectless perpetrator motivated by obscure and highly particularized forms of hatred seems to combine the two.
31. Ernest S. Pisko, “Afterword on Eichmann,” Christian Science Monitor, May 23, 1963.
32. “‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’—Can One Know the ‘Whole’ Truth?,” Newsweek 61, no. 24, June 17, 1963, 94–95.
33. Note Arendt’s “cura posterior” in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 336. Arendt wrote to her close friend Mary McCarthy: “You are the only reader to understand that I wrote this book in a curious euphoria. And that ever since I did it I feel—after twenty years—light hearted about the whole matter. Don’t tell anybody: is it not proof positive that I have no ‘soul’?” (as quoted in ibid., 337).
34. Moreover, this lack of sympathy is also linked to the similarities between Arendt and her subject. As many critics do, Julia Kristeva reads Rahel Varnhagen autobiographically, noting Arendt’s especially harsh treatment of her: “Far from empathizing with her heroine, Arendt appears to be settling scores with Rahel, a being held dear, an alter ego that Hannah herself could never be although it threatened her, an alter ego that she dislodged of any compassionate depth with a relentless severity that was as ruthless as it was insightful.” Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 49.
35. For a more extended discussion of the thinker as conscious pariah, see “The Conscious Pariah as Rebel and Independent Thinker,” in Richard Bernstein’s Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 14–45.
36. See especially the epilogue to Sylvie Courtine-Denamy’s Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 202–22, for an extended discussion of this attempt to reconcile with reality.
37. Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 54; hereafter cited in text as PHA followed by the page number.
38. For Arendt, to believe seriously and even literally in ideology, which she calls “harmless” and “arbitrary” when merely opinion, represents contempt for reality. Once this ideology becomes a serious explanation of the world, it forms the “nuclei of logical systems” that reshape the world for the sake of consistency. It is the systematic nature of supersense that most worries her because what does not fit or threatens to unsettle it will eventually be destroyed for the sake of consistency. Supersense is both the initial premise and, more importantly, the logical system that derives consequences from that premise. Her example: “if the inmates are vermin, it is logical they should be killed with poison gas” (OT, 155–56).
40. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 11.
41. This lecture series and other unpublished writings appeared in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003); hereafter cited in text as RJ followed by the page number.
42. See Norman Podhoretz, “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” Commentary 36 (September 1, 1963): 201–8, for an example.
43. From American Power and the New Mandarin, as quoted in Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 64; hereafter cited in text as OV followed by the page number.
44. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1978), 70; hereafter cited in text as LOTM followed by the page number.
1. This account is taken from Carol Brightman’s biography of Mary McCarthy: Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1992), 299.
2. Brock Brower, “Mary McCarthyism,” in Conversations with Mary McCarthy, ed. Carol Gelderman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 43.
3. Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harvest Books, 1996), xxx.
4. Mary McCarthy, Occasional Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 10; hereafter cited in text as OP followed by the page number.
5. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45–56.
6. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 247.
7. For a good summary, see Carol Gelderman’s introduction to Conversations with Mary McCarthy, and Edwin Newman’s television interview, the transcript of which is collected in the same volume (Gelderman, Conversations, 69).
8. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 25, 24. This and later quotations from Men in Dark Times are taken from the address she delivered on acceptance of the Lessing Prize: “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times, 3–32.
9. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 88, 89.
10. Arendt, Jew as Pariah, 246–47.
11. Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 1946–1961 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961), 75–105; hereafter cited in text as OTC followed by the page number.
12. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 13–14.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. McCarthy, Between Friends, 23.
15. Ibid., 24.
16. McCarthy builds her indictment of American self-delusion in Vietnam by describing in painful detail the mirroring of homogeneous groups in Viet Nam (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967) and Hanoi (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). Arendt seems to have gotten many of her ideas on image-making and publicity in Vietnam from McCarthy’s reports. See Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 257–75.
17. Several things have contributed to overlooking McCarthy’s careful construction of a fact-based aesthetic. For one, her personal daring, both sexual and rhetorical, so troubled and mesmerized the circle of New York Intellectuals in which she traveled that it has become legend. When this often-caricatured version of McCarthy has not been the default explanation of her work, psychological analyses of McCarthy have offered alternative readings. In other words, her candor has been seen as her best and most attention-getting weapon. Or it has been explained as what Elizabeth Hardwick has called her “Jesuitical morality.” See Elizabeth Hardwick, foreword to Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938, by Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), vii–xxii.
18. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Fall 1992): 5.
19. Philip Roth published a now quite well-known essay in Commentary a year later lamenting that “the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary 31, no. 3 (March 1961): 224. He, like McCarthy, found the contemporary novelist retreating into something like a dream world. “What I have tried to point out is that the sheer fact of self, the vision of self as inviolable, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment, that that vision has given to some writers joy, solace, and muscle. . . . However, when survival itself becomes one’s raison d’etre, when one cannot choose but be ascetic, when the self can only be celebrated as it is excluded from society . . . we then, I think, do not have much reason to be cheery” (233).
20. Prospectus for Critic magazine (1952), p. 7, box 174, folder 5, Mary McCarthy Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Library (hereafter Mary McCarthy Papers).
21. Ibid., p. 6.
22. Henry Luce dominated the magazine market in the midcentury. By 1952 Luce published Time, Life, Fortune, and House and Home; two years later, he purchased Sports Illustrated. He also produced The March of Time weekly newsreel.
23. Prospectus for Critic magazine (1952), p. 8, box 174, folder 5, Mary McCarthy Papers.
24. Ibid., p. 10. In this comment, McCarthy prefigures Arendt’s dismissal of “the tact of the heart” in her exchange with Gershom Sholem over her Eichmann in Jerusalem.
25. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (New York: Harvest Books, 1970), 168; hereafter cited in text as CSK followed by the page number.
26. “I had to admit that if I was not fearful, I was at least uncomfortable in the supposition that anybody, anybody whatever, could think of me, precious me, as a Communist. A remoter possibility was, of course, that back there my departure was being ascribed to Jewishness, and this too annoyed me. I am in fact a quarter Jewish, and though I did not ‘hate’ the idea of being taken for a Jew, I did not precisely like it, particularly under these circumstances” (OTC, 61).
27. BBC broadcast on realist playwrights, p. 4, box 18, folder 8, Mary McCarthy Papers.
28. Mary McCarthy, Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 87.
29. Ibid., 93.
30. Ibid., 94.
31. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 7–8.
32. This first appeared in the New York Review of Books on May 12, 1983.
33. McCarthy’s sense that aesthetic education was a preparation for citizenship was widely held among the New York Intellectuals, though the art forms or aesthetic practice each found most salutary differed. Dwight Macdonald argued, for instance, specifically for the benefits of aesthetic difficulty like that of modernism to train the reader’s resistance to platitude, propaganda, and sentimentality. See Dwight Macdonald, ed., Masscult and Midcult: Essays against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962). Tobin Siebers makes this argument about the New Critics in Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
34. As McCarthy said of Stones of Florence, “The reason I enjoyed doing those books on Italy . . . was that I was writing in my own voice” (Gelderman, Conversations, 26, emphasis mine). The ease of writing she enjoyed with this book, writing in her own voice, was not only the difference from writing a novel (“the technical difficulties” of “feigning an alien consciousness” [Gelderman, Conversations, 26]). There’s much to be said about voice and point of view in McCarthy’s own work and in her sense of the possibilities or, more accurately, the narrowing of possibilities in the novel after Henry James and after modernism. Not just the problem of inhabiting another character’s voice in first-person narration but even limited omniscience or free indirect discourse required forms of ventriloquism that McCarthy did not like or feel completely competent to pull off. It’s partly a question of aesthetic taste, partly a question of talent, and, I think, partly a question of McCarthy’s own factualism, her need for a certain kind of frankness or honesty, that caused her to bemoan the rise of perspectivalism.
35. Gelderman, Conversations, 28. Brightman argues that Stones of Florence and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood mark a breakthrough in McCarthy’s writing. She found herself more confident and ready to take on more ambitious projects as she broke loose of the intellectual circle of her formative years (Brightman, Writing Dangerously, 411).
36. Mary McCarthy, The Stones of Florence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 74; hereafter cited in text as SOF followed by the page number.
37. Hardwick, foreword to McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs, xix.
38. Brightman, Writing Dangerously.
1. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 154.
2. I thank Nancy Miller for this reference. Carolyn Heilbrun, “Speaking of Susan Sontag,” New York Times, August 27, 1967, 2, 30.
3. Another slightly different and bitchier version of this story comes from Mary McCarthy. In an interview with Frances Kiernan for her book Seeing Mary Plain, Sontag says, “‘She’s the imitation me,’ or ‘she’s the ersatz me,’ Mary McCarthy is reported to have said, though no one has been able to pin down when she said it or to whom. Mary McCarthy was, with the exception of one waspish remark, unfailingly polite and friendly to me” (537). Sontag had taken over McCarthy’s theater column for the Partisan Review, which probably accounts for the supposed provenance of the remark. However, what’s interesting is less McCarthy’s saying it than the circulation of a remark as something McCarthy would say and the way that circulating it put the idea out of their own mouths and into McCarthy’s. Kiernan reports that Sontag saw this as “troublemaking by the boys,” and when she was asked to review McCarthy’s The Group, she declined (537).
4. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 14. Hereafter the book will be referenced as AI and the pages numbers for specific essays will be given in the text.
5. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Michael Featherstone (London: Sage, 1998), 174–85.
6. Raymond Williams introduced the concept of the “structure of feeling” in A Preface to Film (London: Film Drama, 1954) and elaborated it over the course of the next two decades, principally in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
7. From the online Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com. The Oxford English Dictionary cites only examples from the twentieth century after its first use in German.
8. Both quotations can be found in David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 35, 36.
9. I am really not certain in my own mind how to think about Sontag’s journals, the first of which was published in December 2008. Sontag was always reticent, to say the least, to write about her personal life and was never reticent about the scourge of biography in contemporary criticism. She once said in an essay collected in Where the Stress Falls, her last collection published, “My books aren’t me—all of me. And in some ways, I am less than them.” Susan Sontag, “Singleness,” in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 259.
10. Sontag argues that there is a taste in emotional styles as in anything else in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in AI, 275–92.
11. See Joyce Carol Oates, “Adventures in Abandonment,” review of Jean Stafford: A Biography, by David Roberts, New York Times, August 28, 1988, Sunday Book Review. James Atlas later that year reminded readers of Freud’s use of the term (“Freud’s Pathology,” New York Times Magazine, December 18, 1988). According to Atlas, in Freud’s use, “pathography” clearly has the same disparaging quality that Oates wants to convey, though Freud defended the genre. The term was first coined in 1848 in German, but it acquired its negative connotation as soon as it migrated from the scientific to the literary in the twentieth century.
12. In Sontag’s numerous interviews in the 1970s following the appearance of Illness as Metaphor and On Photography, she frequently comments on the urgency of her writing on cancer as a result of her own experience. She does not, however, talk about that experience.
13. Nixon’s ambitious domestic program of 1971 included universal health care as well.
14. Richard M. Nixon, “State of the Union Address,” American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
15. “Statement about Conversion of Facilities at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to a Center for Cancer Research,” October 18, 1971, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3194.
16. This would be a little over nine billion in 2015 dollars, according to http://www.usinflationcalculator.com.
17. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 23, 67; hereafter cited in text as IAM followed by the page number.
18. Constance Holden, “Cancer and the Mind: How Are They Connected?,” Science 200 (June 1978): 1363–69.
19. Sontag is evidently paraphrasing Reich because, though the terms she uses are all Reich’s, this actual (and more eloquent) phrasing does not appear in his work.
20. Time magazine has several articles referencing Reich and the orgone box. After his death in 1957, another article appeared, on January 24, 1964, “Morals: Second Sexual Revolution,” which begins with the orgone box. Next, his name is mentioned in a May 25, 1970, article on Masters and Johnson and sex therapy, “Repairing the Conjugal Bed.” A book review of Orson Bean’s account of his Reichian therapy, Me and the Orgone: The True Story of One Man’s Sexual Awakening (Robbinsdale, MN: Fawcett Crest, 1971), appeared in 1971. Also in 1971, a documentary—a biopic on Reich’s life by Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev—was reviewed; and in 1973 a book by the author’s son, Peter Reich, was reviewed.
21. Mildred Brady, “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” New Republic, May 26, 1947, 20–23.
22. Reich’s theory of cancer is essentially a theory of its sexual, not emotional, origin.
23. Susan Sontag, “Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death,” in AI, 259.
24. “The Pornographic Imagination” is also collected in an anthology along with essays by George Steiner, Paul Goodman, William Phillips, Anthony Burgess, and Kenneth Tynan, among others, all previously published between 1961 and 1969. See Douglas A. Hughes, ed., Perspectives on Pornography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970). The page numbers in my citations refer to Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), hereafter cited in text as SRW followed by the page number.
25. See Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 176.
26. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), 32; hereafter cited in text as OPS followed by the page number.
27. From the New York Review of Books article “Freak Show,” November 15, 1973: “Preceded (in most of the spectators’ awareness) by Warholiana, gay lib, drag rock, Tod Browning revivals, the freak parades of Fellini and Alejandro Jodorowsky, R. Crumb comics, and the grotesqueries of the neighborhood porn films, Arbus’s photographs are practically the art of everyday life.” Sontag calls this, in On Photography, the sensibility of the sixties: “More typically, it is the sensibility of someone educated and middle class who came of age between 1945 and 1955—a sensibility that was to flourish precisely in the 1960s” (43).
28. See Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photography Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville, 1991); Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Susan Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Lili Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal to the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Amy Schlegel, “My Lai: ‘We Lie, They Die’; or, A Small History of an Atrocious Photograph,” Third Text, no. 31 (Summer 1995): 47–65; and Fred Ritchin, “The Photography of Conflict,” Aperture 97 (Winter 1984): 22–27. Their accounts vary: Goldberg sees television’s competition with still photography as a reason for the photograph’s waning influence. Zelizer sees the Holocaust atrocity photograph as having over decades exhausted the capacity to influence. Moeller, in a complex assessment of the photographers’ varied political stances toward the war, the censorship of photographs by the military and the media outlets, and the contrasting political views of the editors who shaped and contextualized the photographs, concludes that war photojournalism “helped” turn the public against the war, but in the end “public discontent that the press fulminated did not extend to a meaningful discontent about anything other than issues that directly affected Americans in combat” (413). Bezner sees the personalizing of documentary photography during the early Cold War period as a retreat from its social purpose. Schlegel tracks the shifting frames of a photograph’s presentation to suggest how powerful the discursive context of viewing is, and Ritchin discusses the ambiguous role of the photojournalist who both glamorizes and indicts the war effort.
29. John Berger, “The Photographs of Agony,” in John Berger Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 279–81.
30. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 102.
31. “Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, March 20, 1975. This was a response to Rich’s critique of Sontag’s earlier review, “Fascinating Fascism,” published in the same venue on February 6, 1975.
32. Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, 35.
33. “A Special Supplement: The Meaning of Vietnam,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 1975.
34. This interview appeared in Leland Poague, ed., Conversations with Susan Sontag (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 186.
35. Ibid., 94.
36. Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 19; and Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 1979).
37. Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 259.
38. Ibid., 54, 85; and Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000).
1. Harold Hayes, the editor at Esquire who commissioned so many of New Journalism’s most famous articles, hired Arbus for one of his first efforts upon taking up leadership of the magazine.
2. Diane Arbus, Family Album, ed. Anthony W. Lee and John Putz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
3. Sean O’Hagan makes the case for his breadth of insight and influence in “Was John Szarkowski the Most Influential Person in Twentieth-Century Photography?,” Guardian, July 20, 2010.
4. “The Question of Belief,” in Diane Arbus, Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003), 150n; hereafter cited in text as R followed by the page number.
5. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), 40.
6. See photographer Joel Meyerowitz on this topic in Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander: A History of Street Photography (New York: Little, Brown, 1994).
7. Sontag, On Photography, 20; Stuart Hall, The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the News Media, ed. Stanley Cohen and Josh Young (London: Constable, 1973); and Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972).
8. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981).
9. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, ed. Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel (New York: Aperture, 1972), 1–2; hereafter cited in text as DAA followed by the page number.
10. Sontag, On Photography, 29.
11. See, e.g., Anne Tucker, The Woman’s Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). This story and its speculative conclusion are repeated often in the reviews, as is the quotation. This may have originated in the Ms. Magazine piece that Doon wrote in October 1972 after her mother’s death.
12. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80; and André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 237–44.
13. See also Diana Emery Hulick, “Diane Arbus’s Expressive Methods,” History of Photography 19 (Summer 1995): 107–16; and Diana Emery Hulick, “Diane Arbus’s Women and Transvestites: Separate Selves,” History of Photography 16 (Spring 1992): 34–39. See also Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, Bystander.
14. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation in the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
15. Diane Arbus, “The Full Circle,” Infinity, February 1962, 4–13, 19–21, reprinted from Harper’s Bazaar, November 1961.
16. Carol Armstrong, “Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference according to Diane Arbus,” October 66 (Autumn 1993): 45.
17. Sontag, On Photography, 191.
18. Faye Ginsburg has described how the appearance in public of persons with mental disabilities has changed in the past thirty years. Faye Ginsburg, “Enabling Disability: Renarrating Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship,” Public Culture 13, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 533–56.
19. In his November 27, 1995, review “Unmasked” in the New Yorker, Hilton Als says, “But several of these photographs also express great love for and trust in their photographer: not because they were particularly interested in being memorialized by the notorious Diane Arbus but because—for that moment—she was paying attention.”
1. Vintage Didion (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). This isn’t a completely representative reader because only the pieces for which Vintage owns copyright are included in the volume.
2. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 7–8; hereafter cited in text as YMT followed by the page number.
3. She later says: “You see how early the question of self-pity entered the picture” (YMT, 77).
4. Self-pity comes up a remarkable number of times in early uncollected essays.
5. This phrase comes from an omnibus review she did of contemporary fiction in the mid-1960s called “Questions about the New Fiction,” National Review, November 30, 1965, 1100–1102.
6. Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 15; hereafter cited in text as STB followed by the page number.
7. In an interview in Joan Didion Essays and Conversations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (New York: Persea Books, 1984), she talks about tone, the preface, and doing interviews. In writing the essays, she claims to find a tone that is not hers. The preface, on the other hand, is her, written very quickly (86–87). She also comments on perceptions of her emotional fragility to both own and discount them.
8. See Carol Hult, “Metonymy and Metaphor in Joan Didion: A Personal Grammar of Style,” in The Peirce Seminar Papers, vol. 3, ed. Michael Shapiro (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 59–73.
9. Joan Didion, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1968, as quoted in Mark Royden Winchell, Joan Didion (Boston: Twayne, 1980).
10. Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 31.
11. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 13; hereafter cited in text as WA followed by the page number.
12. For more about the contagion of feeling, see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
13. Joan Didion, “Just Folks at a School for Nonviolence,” New York Times Magazine, February 27, 1966. This later appears in Slouching toward Bethlehem as “Where the Kissing Never Stops.”
14. Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 272, 284, 291.
15. If this makes Didion sound like Wendy Brown or Lauren Berlant, it’s oddly true that she sees this use of sentiment to mask structural pain in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Obviously, her politics are considerably different from theirs, but there are unexpected overlaps.
16. Didion, After Henry, 284.
17. Whether little magazines, mass-market magazines, or literary small-market magazines, everyone who was anyone wrote for them in the sixties because magazines were home to a great deal of literary experimentation. Moreover, unlike today, writers wrote for a variety of magazines of different ideological and political perspectives—Garry Wills wrote for the square National Review and the hip Esquire, Didion for the middlebrow Saturday Evening Post as well as the highbrow American Scholar—and readers also consumed magazines across ideological borders.
18. Joan Didion, “Two Up for America,” National Review, April 9, 1960, 240–41.
19. Mary McCarthy, “The Fact in Fiction,” Partisan Review, Summer 1960, 438–58; and Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary 31, no. 3 (March 1961): 223–33.
20. Didion, “Questions about the New Fiction,” 1100.
21. Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” 224.
22. Didion, “Questions about the New Fiction,” 1101.
23. Digby Diehl, “Chilling Candor of Joan Didion at UCLA,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1971, Q39.
24. Joan Didion, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love,” Life, December 1969, 28.
25. For Digby Diehl, the “chilling” aspect of this candor is Didion’s affirmation of her own ambition, especially in the context of her roles as wife and mother. To her comment “I’m a wife and a mother but I’m a writer first,” he appended her married name “(Mrs. John Gregory Dunne)” and commented, “chilling.” Diehl, “Chilling Candor of Joan Didion at UCLA,” Q39.
26. See Chris Anderson, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 179.
27. Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976, 270, 271.
28. Didion, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” 12.
29. Joan Didion, Salvador (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 35–36.
30. Dennis Rygiel’s “Lexical Parallelism in the Nonfiction of Joan Didion,” in Repetition in Discourse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, vol. 1, ed. Barbara Johnstone (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1994), 113–27, is an empirical study of this feature of Didion’s work. It counts the uses and categorizes them in quite helpful ways.
31. Didion, Salvador, 26.
32. Ibid., 16–17.
33. All anti-utopian thinkers, like Arendt, who frequently uses this phrase, will protect the eggs. Being unable to predict the future, morality lies in the immediate. No decisions can be justified by their outcomes because outcomes cannot be known.
34. Joan Didion, “Sentimental Education,” New York Review of Books, March 18, 1982.
35. Joan Didion, “Girl of the Golden West,” in Vintage Didion, 10.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 11.
38. Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 199.
39. Didion looks to a couple of sources to explain and to date this phenomenon, oddly failing to note the most famous book on the subject, Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963).
40. This self-reassessment dovetails with that of Where I Was From, where Didion acknowledges her participation in a form of self-mythologizing, which was tied to her own family’s romantic self-portrait. In Where I Was From there is the absolutely brilliant reading of the journals (and other manifestations of the myths of origin) where Didion notes that the tellers cannot possibly have had the perspective that they take up, could not have seen what they testify to—that the myth at some very early point begins to write itself.
41. “I remember being dismissive of, even censorious about, her ‘self-pity,’ her ‘whining,’ her ‘dwelling on it.’ [Caitlin Thomas’s] Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn” (YMT, 199).
42. Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 154–55.
43. Ibid., 110–11.