Deborah Nelson - Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

AI : Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

CSK : Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps

DAA : Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

EJ : Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

GG : Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

IAM : Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

JP : Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah

LOTM : Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

OP : Mary McCarthy, Occasional Prose

OPS : Susan Sontag, On Photography

OR : Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

OT : Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism

OTC : Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 19461961

OV : Hannah Arendt, On Violence

PHA : The Portable Hannah Arendt

R : Diane Arbus, Revelations

RJ : Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment

SOF : Mary McCarthy, Stones of Florence

SRW : Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will

STB : Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem

SWR : The Simone Weil Reader

WA : Joan Didion, The White Album

YMT : Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

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 eras 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 livesSontag and McCarthy notoriously sonone 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 Websters 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 (its 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 writers 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 unsentimentalitywriting that is