GOSSIPING ON MOUNT OLYMPUS

By R.Z. Sheppard

MARY MCCARTHY MET HANNAH Arendt at a Manhattan bar in 1944. Wartime New York was jumping, especially for jazz musicians, black marketeers and left-wing intellectuals. McCarthy, then a 32-year-old short-story writer, reviewer and wife of critic Edmund Wilson, was making the most of it. She had come to the red-hot center by way of Seattle and Vassar, class of '33. Arendt, a German Jew, had been an outstanding student at Marburg University, where she was the lover of her mentor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. She arrived in the U.S. in 1941, escaping probable death in the Holocaust.

McCarthy started the relationship off badly by making a lighthearted remark about Hitler. Apologies were useless. But Arendt warmed up three years later, after both women took the same unpopular position at a political meeting. "Let's end this nonsense," she told McCarthy. "We think so much alike."

Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 (Harcourt Brace; 412 pages; $34.95) reveals just how much these two passionate minds had in common. To begin with, both thought the literary world a circus. The pages glitter with mad poets, deceitful lovers, long-suffering wives and natural-born snobs. The widow of George Orwell is quoted as having said, "Auschwitz, oh, dear no! That person was never in Auschwitz. Only in some very minor death camp."

As the friendship grows, compliments and commiserations, family news and professional gossip flow steadily between the two. McCarthy helps Arendt with her prose; Arendt dispenses wisdom ("Thinking does not lead to truth. Truth is the beginning of thought.") and advises McCarthy about her love life: "Nobody ever was cured of anything, trait or habit, by a mere woman ... Either you are willing to take him 'as is' or you better leave well enough alone."

The attraction went deeper than mutual admiration and concern. It was as if each woman saw in the other an uncompleted part of herself. The staid Old World thinker, comfortably married to a college professor, undoubtedly took vicarious enjoyment in McCarthy's romantic affairs. Arendt, six years younger than her friend, personified a high culture unattainable in America. McCarthy died in 1989, having spent nearly the last third of her life in Europe with her fourth and final husband.

Both women were fairly daring for their day. McCarthy's autobiographical fiction (The Company She Keeps, The Group) was sexually brisk and unromantic. It is where many readers first encountered a young woman seduced by an attractive stranger without suffering any ill effect. At a time when the heavy moral lifting was thought best left to men, Arendt bench-pressed the weight of the world in books with such grave titles as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) gave the world a deeply disturbing concept, "the banality of evil." "Who does she think she is, Aristotle?" cracked an editor at Partisan Review.

When it comes to backbiting and ridicule, the pair easily keep pace with their literary friends. McCarthy finds Charles Reich (The Greening of America) "smarmily loving" and feminist Germaine Greer "an absurd Australian giantess." Not to be outdone, Arendt declares Margaret Mead "a monster" and Vladimir Nabokov "an intelligent show-off." Her 1957 take on Norman Podhoretz, critic, editor and later author of the confessional memoir Making It: "one of these bright youngsters with bright hopes for a nice career." Only three years later, it is "little Podhoretz, already soooo 'tired' like the proverbial Jewish waiter."

But Arendt is most at home above it all. "Dearest Mary," she writes in 1964, "the chief vice of every egalitarian society is Envy ... This constant comparing is really the quintessence of vulgarity." This fact does not stop the two pen pals from making comparisons. Yet the assessments share an ideal of high-mindedness, of scaling some moral peak that towers over fallible theories and suspect ideologies. Parts of letters read like encounters in The Magic Mountain and offer clues to the thematic overload in McCarthy's last novels. Happily, most of the exchanges have the vitality and cutting edge of her earlier fiction.

Living on different continents, Arendt and McCarthy missed each other's company. Their loss is our gain. Had McCarthy stayed in New York, where Arendt remained until her death in 1975, the irreplaceable contents of this book would probably have vanished into the telephonic ether or gone up in the cigarette smoke of long lunches.