Volume 47, Number 16 · October 19, 2000
It Was Mephistopheles
By Jay Neugeboren
In response to A Finished Woman
(September 21, 2000)
To the Editors:
The quotation from Mary McCarthy with which A.O. Scott ends his review of Frances Kiernan's Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy [NYR, September 21]—"The tree of life, said Hegel, is greener than the tree of thought…"—is not Hegel, but Mephistopheles, to a student, from Goethe, Faust, Part I:
Grau, teurer Freud, ist alle Theorie
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
(Gray, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.)
Jay Neugeboren
Northampton, Massachusetts
