Occasional Prose (5 page)

Brecht’s theatre, in appearance, aims at establishing a clear demarcation line, something like the old classic distance, between audience and spectacle. The audience, alerted by the “alienation effect” to the fact that this is theatre, is meant to assume an objective stance. Chiaromonte’s quarrel with Brecht was based on the conviction that this whole procedure was self-deceiving. Brecht’s scenic images, seemingly objectified and held at a distance, were in fact “plastic symbols of predetermined ideas.” The epic theatre, as is plain from its self-chosen name, is not even dramatic; it is staged narrative of a spectacular kind, dependent on scenic effects and living pictures. Closer, in a curious way, to realistic representation, which also cannot do without decor, than to drama, which depends only on speech.

Chiaromonte’s ideas about Brecht and his forerunner Piscator are more various and subtle than I can indicate here; in effect, he respected Brecht’s talent but denied his claim to be anything more than a prodigious impresario of the stage. But it should be plain from what has preceded that an avowed materialist with commitments to social agitation and historical progress could never see human action dramatically—
sub specie aeternitatis
. For a Brechtian, the very conception of reality as the ineluctable, that which is and cannot be altered, would be bound to be either repellent or of marginal concern. The individual fate, in the epic theatre, has scarcely any meaning in comparison to the happiness of the species. The spectator’s emotions and power of empathy are transferred from the unheroic heroes of the spectacle to a large opaque social unit, represented in the most famous instance by Mother Courage’s speechless wooden cart.

In this essay the initial paradox of Chiaromonte—a man who hated artifice and loved the art of the buskined performer—has not been altogether resolved into a non-contradiction. Yet at least we can now see, I hope, that the paradox is not just a quirk or quiddity of his character but corresponds with the fundamental reality-unreality synergism at work in the drama itself. Chiaromonte was not the first stubborn truth-lover to be drawn as if by tropism to a world of mountebanks (see, again, Shakespeare, and Shaw and Ibsen) and he accepted it as his personal fate, to be borne with philosophy.

To write about him and his ideas, now that he is dead, has been a hard undertaking. I should have liked him to be able to listen, approve, dissent, modify. Above all,
help
. Yet in reality, as I suddenly recognize, he
has
—on the principle of God-helps-those-who-help-themselves—by being absent, beyond recall or consultation. Having been myself a theatre reviewer, off and on, for nearly forty years, shared a lot of Chiaromonte’s judgments, followed his column during periods when I lived in Italy, I have now been made to ponder for the first time on the deeper motives of the dramatic art. Rereading the essays about to be republished and the earlier collection,
The Dramatic Situation
, rushing back to have a look at Chekhov, Pirandello, Ibsen, dipping into Shakespeare and the dictionary has been an experience like those rare ones of student days when all at once everything thought and studied hangs together. In other words, one has learned something. It is too much to hope for anything like Elijah’s mantle—even a little piece of it—to fall on me as a reward for industry. But, as you remember from your student days, those moments when everything fitted (even though there was much more to learn and never enough time) left you feeling very happy.

February 20, 1975

*
In the medieval theatre the “place” was the central stationary acting area, or
platea
, usually free of scenery, around which were grouped the various “pageants” and “mansions” representing Herod’s palace, Pilate’s hall, and so on.

Saying Good-bye to Hannah (1907–1975)

H
ER LAST BOOK WAS
to be called
The Life of the Mind
and was intended to be a pendant to
The Human Condition
(first called
The Vita Activa
), where she had scrutinized the triad of labor, work, and action: man as
animal laborans
,
homo faber
, and doer of public deeds. She saw the mind’s life, or
vita contemplativa
, as divided into three parts also: thinking, willing, and judging. The first section, on thinking, was finished some time ago. The second, on willing, she finished just before she died, with what must have been relief, for she had found the will the most elusive of the three faculties to grapple with. The third, on judging, she had already sketched out in her mind and somewhat explored in lectures; though the literature on the subject was sparse (mainly Kant), she did not expect it to give her much difficulty.

I say “her last book,” and that is how she thought of it, as a final task or crowning achievement, if she could only bring it off—not only filling in the other side of the tablet of human capacities but a labor of love in itself for the highest and least visible of them: the activity of the mind. If she had lived to see the book (two volumes, actually) through the press, no doubt she would have gone on writing, since her nature was expressive as well as thoughtful, but she would have felt that her true work was done.

Being Hannah Arendt, she would have executed a service or mission she had been put into the world to perform. In this sense, I believe she was religious. Hannah had heard a voice such as spoke to the prophets, the call that came to the child Samuel, girded with a linen ephod in the house of Eli, the high priest. One can look on this more secularly and think that she felt herself indentured, bound as though under contract by her particular endowments, given her by Nature, developed in her by her teachers—Jaspers and Heidegger—and tragically enriched by History. It was not a matter of self-fulfillment (the idea would have been laughable or else detestable to Hannah) but of an injunction laid on all of us, not just the talented, to follow the trajectory chance and fate have launched us on, like a poet keeping faith with his muse. Hannah was not a believer in slavish notions of one’s “duty” (which may be why she had so much trouble with the section on the will) but she was responsive to a sense of calling, vocation, including that of the citizen to serve the common life. She was also a very private person, and I think (though we never spoke of it) that
The Life of the Mind
was a task she dedicated to the memory of Heinrich, a kind of completion and rounding out of
their
common life.

Heinrich Bluecher, her husband and friend, was the last of her teachers. Though he was only ten years older than she, in their intellectual relationship there was something fatherly, indulgent, on his side, and pupil-like, eager, approval-seeking, on hers; as she spoke, he would look on her fondly, nodding to himself, as though luck had sent him an unimaginably bright girl student and tremendous “achiever,” which he himself, a philosopher in every sense, was content, with his pipes and cigars, not to be. He was proud of her and knew she would go far, to peaks and ranges he could discern in the distance, while he calmly sat back, waiting for her to find them.

For her, Heinrich was like a pair of corrective lenses; she did not wholly trust her vision until it had been confirmed by his. While they thought alike on most questions, he was more a “pure” philosophic spirit, and she was more concerned with the
vita activa
of politics and fabrication—the fashioning of durable objects in the form of books and articles. Neither was much interested in the biological sphere of the
animal laborans
—household drudgery, consumption of goods; though both were fond of young people, they never had any children. When he died, late in 1970, quite suddenly, though not as suddenly as she, she was alone. Surrounded by friends, she rode like a solitary passenger on her train of thought. So
The Life of the Mind
, begun in those bleak years, was conceived and pondered for (and she must have hoped
with
) Heinrich Bluecher, not exactly a monument but something like a triptych or folding panel with the mysterious will at the center. Anyway, that is what I guess, and she is not here to ask.

I spoke of a crowning achievement, but Hannah was not in the least ambitious (absurd to connect her with a “career”); if there was some striving for a crown, it was in the sense of a summit toward which she had labored in order to be able to look around, like an explorer, finishing the last stages of an ascent alone. What would be spread out before her were the dark times she had borne witness to, as a Jewess and a displaced person, the long-drawn-out miscarriage of a socialist revolution, the present perils of the American Republic, where she had found a new home in which to hang, with increasing despondency, the ideas of freedom she had carried with her. From her summit she would also look out at the vast surveyor’s map of concepts and insights, some inherited from a long philosophical tradition and some her own discoveries, which, regarded from a high point, could at least show us where we were.

In the realm of ideas, Hannah was a conservationist; she did not believe in throwing anything away that had once been thought. A use might be found for it; in her own way, she was an enthusiastic recycler. To put it differently, thought, for her, was a kind of husbandry, a humanizing of the wilderness of experience—building houses, running paths and roads through, damming streams, planting windbreaks. The task that had fallen to her, as an exceptionally gifted intellect and a representative of the generations she had lived among, was to apply thought systematically to each and every characteristic experience of her time—
anomie
, terror, advanced warfare, concentration camps, Auschwitz, inflation, revolution, school integration, the Pentagon Papers, space, Watergate, Pope John, violence, civil disobedience—and, having finally achieved this, to direct thought inward, upon itself, and its own characteristic processes.

The word “systematically” may be misleading. Despite her German habits, Hannah was not a system-builder. Rather, she sought to descry systems that were already
there
, inherent in the body of man’s interaction with the world and with himself as subject. The distinctions made by language, from very ancient times, indeed from the birth of speech, between
this
and
that
(e.g., work and labor, public and private, force, power, and violence), reveal man as categorizer, a “born” philosopher, if you will, with the faculty of separating, of finely discriminating, more natural to his species than that of constructing wholes. If I understood her, Hannah was always more for the Many than for the One (which may help explain her horrified recognition of totalitarianism as a new phenomenon in the world). She did not want to find a master key or universal solvent, and if she had a religion, it was certainly not monotheistical. The proliferation of distinctions in her work, branching out in every direction like tender shoots, no doubt owes something to her affection for the scholastics but it also testifies to a sort of typical awe-struck modesty before the world’s abundance and intense particularity.

But I do not want to discuss Hannah’s ideas here but to try to bring her back as a person, a physical being, showing herself radiantly in what she called the world of appearance, a stage from which she has now withdrawn. She was a beautiful woman, alluring, seductive, feminine, which is why I said “Jewess”—the old-fashioned term, evoking the daughters of Sion, suits her, like a fringed Spanish shawl. Above all, her eyes, so brilliant and sparkling, starry when she was happy or excited, but also deep, dark, remote, pools of inwardness. There was something unfathomable in Hannah that seemed to lie in the reflective depths of those eyes.

She had small, fine hands, charming ankles, elegant feet. She liked shoes; in all the years I knew her, I think she only once had a corn. Her legs, feet, and ankles expressed quickness, decision. You had only to see her on a lecture stage to be struck by those feet, calves, and ankles that seemed to keep pace with her thought. As she talked, she moved about, sometimes with her hands plunged in her pockets like somebody all alone on a walk, meditating. When the fire laws permitted, she would smoke, pacing the stage with a cigarette in a short holder, inhaling from time to time, reflectively, her head back, as if arrested by a new, unexpected idea. Watching her talk to an audience was like seeing the motions of the mind made visible in action and gesture. Peripatetic, she would come abruptly to a halt at the lectern, frown, consult the ceiling, bite her lip. If she was reading a speech, there were always interjections, asides, like the footnotes that peppered her texts with qualifications.

There was more than a touch of the great actress in Hannah. The first time I heard her speak in public—nearly thirty years ago, during a debate—I was reminded of what Bernhardt must have been or Proust’s Berma, a magnificent stage diva, which implies a goddess. Perhaps a chthonic goddess, or a fiery one, rather than the airy kind. Unlike other good speakers, she was not at all an orator. She appeared, rather, as a mime, a thespian, enacting a drama of mind, that dialogue of me-and-myself she so often summons up in her writings. Watching her framed in the proscenium arch, we were not far from the sacred origins of the theatre. What she projected was the human figure as actor and sufferer in the agon of consciousness and reflection, where there are always two, the one who says and the one who replies or questions.

Yet nobody could have been farther from an exhibitionist. Calculation of the impression she was making never entered her head. Whenever she spoke in public, she had terrible stage fright, and afterward she would ask only “Was it all right?” (This cannot have been true of the classroom, where she felt herself at ease and among friends.) And naturally she did not play roles in private or public, even less than the normal amount required in social relations. She was incapable of feigning. Though she prided herself as a European on being able to tell a lie, where we awkward Americans blurted out the truth, in fact there was a little hubris there. Hannah’s small points of vanity never had any relation to her real accomplishments. For example, she thought she knew a good deal about cooking and didn’t. It was the same with her supposed ability to lie. Throughout our friendship, I don’t think I ever heard her tell even one of those white lies, such as pleading illness or a previous engagement, to get herself out of a social quandary. If you wrote something she found bad, her policy was not to allude to it—an unvarying strategy that told you louder than words what she thought.