Mary McCarthy

And the way the world is, the way the media works, you just feel so dumb saying this sometimes.

But for the record, virtually everything reminds me of what Lillian Hellman once said about Mary McCarthy.

Everything she says is a lie.

Every paragraph, every sentence, every word she says is a lie, including and and the.

whose genius for putting extremely canny judgments in the mouth of her seeming simpleton Lorelei Lee is exactly what we mean by a sophisticated joke.

The novelist and journalist Mary McCarthy, by contrast, is discussed at length, though her inclusion even in the second sense seems unconvincing.

What gives her work its bite is not so much assured knowingness as a persistently disingenuous sense of surprise.

Florence, sex on trains, the Vietnam War, Lillian Hellman's dishonesty.

She used to walk around Germany and say, "Hello, my name's Hannah.

I'm Jewish," 'cause she was sort of fed up with people saying, "Well, where have you been?" And she said, [laughs] "I, I've been in exile, in a camp." [laughs] Um, and she goes to Freiburg, and she, she writes to Mary McCarthy.

Now it's-- I think there's a kind of weird version of this story where lots of people in their 40s want to contact their lovers from when they were in late teens and early 20s, and it is never a good idea.

Don't do it.

[laughs] Hannah writes to Mary McCarthy, "So if you are thinking of doing it, and you're asking your best friend's advice, it's a very good idea if that friend isn't a novelist." [laughs] Ask the sensible friend, 'cause Mary McCarthy says, "Well, it's obvious you're still in love with him.

Course you must write." And then he immediately turns up, and she does get swept back into this relationship.

I think later in life, she had quite complicated versions about forgiveness as the promise of politics, that you have to be able to forgive, otherwise nothing can move on.

She started ahead of it, which is why with time it's less shocking than it was then.

She noted, quote, "Accommodation was free, as were all travel expenses, meals, and the use of the tennis court and swimming pool.

Writing on the villa's elegant stationery, Hannah Arendt told Mary McCarthy, quote, 'You feel as though you are suddenly lodged in a kind of Versailles.

The place has fifty-three servants.'" End quote.

So while Hannah Arendt was writing her books about how evil the Soviet Union was and demonizing the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, Vietnamese people who were sacrificing their life to free themselves from Western colonialism, she was demonizing them as Stalinists and authoritarians and totalitarians.