Gertrude Stein, Hitler and Vichy-France: Process Notes
Renate Stendhal
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Contemporary Jewish Museum
May 12, 2011 - September 6, 2011
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde
SFMOMA
May 21 - September 06, 2011
Barbara Will
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma
Columbia University Press, 2011. 320 pp.
Janet Malcolm
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Yale University Press, 2008. 240 pp.
Charles Glass
Americans in Paris: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation
Penguin HC, 2010. 544 pp.
W.G. Rogers
When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person
Rinehart, 1949; Avon 1973.
Gertrude Stein
Wars I Have Seen
Reprint, 288 pp.
2011 was the “Summer of Stein” in San Francisco. Two epochal exhibitions ran at the same time: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (which moved on to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.) and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at SFMOMA (now at the New York Metropolitan Museum).
After publishing the photobiography Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures (Algonquin, 1994, republished in 2010), it was once again “all about Stein” for me. I gave talks about the art collector, the avant-gardist, her experimental writing related to Picasso and Matisse’s painting; and the detective work of reading Gertrude Stein. I blogged throughout the summer to share impressions about the first-ever “portrait“ of Stein in the form of a museum show, and the shock of modernity at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, in gallery rooms that reconstructed the famous Paris salons of the Stein siblings. It was thrilling to come again face to face with the portrait of Stein by Picasso, from 1906, and behold the androgyny and intelligence of this Jewish Mona Lisa of the 20th century.
Among the many events surrounding the parallel exhibitions, there were public readings of The Making of Americans, performances, even a new staging of Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. There was the local lesbian scandal: two hand-holding women chased from Seeing Gertrude Stein by a zealous museum guard, followed by a protest and public hand-holding action—by women and men—at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Then the global scandal hit. The sudden accusations of Stein’s alleged “politically incorrect” actions during WWII sent one shock wave after another through the media and across the blogosphere.
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Contemporary Jewish Museum
May 12, 2011 - September 6, 2011
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde
SFMOMA
May 21 - September 06, 2011
Barbara Will
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma
Columbia University Press, 2011. 320 pp.
Janet Malcolm
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Yale University Press, 2008. 240 pp.
Charles Glass
Americans in Paris: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation
Penguin HC, 2010. 544 pp.
W.G. Rogers
When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person
Rinehart, 1949; Avon 1973.
Gertrude Stein
Wars I Have Seen
Reprint, 288 pp.
2011 was the “Summer of Stein” in San Francisco. Two epochal exhibitions ran at the same time: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (which moved on to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.) and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde at SFMOMA (now at the New York Metropolitan Museum).
After publishing the photobiography Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures (Algonquin, 1994, republished in 2010), it was once again “all about Stein” for me. I gave talks about the art collector, the avant-gardist, her experimental writing related to Picasso and Matisse’s painting; and the detective work of reading Gertrude Stein. I blogged throughout the summer to share impressions about the first-ever “portrait“ of Stein in the form of a museum show, and the shock of modernity at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, in gallery rooms that reconstructed the famous Paris salons of the Stein siblings. It was thrilling to come again face to face with the portrait of Stein by Picasso, from 1906, and behold the androgyny and intelligence of this Jewish Mona Lisa of the 20th century.
Among the many events surrounding the parallel exhibitions, there were public readings of The Making of Americans, performances, even a new staging of Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. There was the local lesbian scandal: two hand-holding women chased from Seeing Gertrude Stein by a zealous museum guard, followed by a protest and public hand-holding action—by women and men—at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Then the global scandal hit. The sudden accusations of Stein’s alleged “politically incorrect” actions during WWII sent one shock wave after another through the media and across the blogosphere.
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In this essay I would like to recap the notes I took, the blog observations and articles I wrote as the controversy unfolded. My position in the debate shifted from disbelief to outrage, from doubt to concern—my main concern being the vitriolic fervor and indignation about Gertrude Stein that arrived right on the heels of her latest renaissance. Was there more to it than the usual scorn and ridicule the lesbian “genius” of Jewish origins had triggered all her life and ever since?
While I felt the urgency to study the situation, read and research anything I could put my hands on, I instinctively went on the defense of Stein – not, however, of Stein’s political virtue or innocence. That remained to be seen. Rather, my urgency was to address and possibly redress some of the glaring simplifications and the poisonous tone of the accusations—everything that seemed wildly out of proportion with what I knew about Stein’s life, personality, art, and yes, politics. |
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I expressed my dismay over the first attacks early on, even before the accusatory book by Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy Dilemma (Columbia University Press, 2011) was out in print. But Will’s main argument was already known and gleefully repeated: according to the author, Stein was a reactionary, had the same political beliefs as her influential fascist friend Bernard Faÿ, and was a relentless Vichy “propagandist.”
I summed up in my blog what had happened within the first few weeks:
In the aftermath of the seminal exhibitions in San Francisco, everyone seems to be curious, worried or upset over Gertrude Stein’s whereabouts during World War II. Gertrude and Alice stayed in the French countryside when France was Nazi-occupied. Why didn’t they leave when they were repeatedly warned and urged to flee? Why didn’t Gertrude and Alice get the treatment of enemy aliens (i.e. Americans) or get deported like other Jews, other lesbians, other unwanted people? Was Stein protected somehow and for some reason? Was her collection of “degenerate” art—all those pictures by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne—protected too?
The same questions about Stein’s survival during the war were raised many times before in Stein biographies—sympathetically, for example, in the well-researched account by James Mellow, Charmed Circle, in 1979. A few years ago they were raised again, this time aggressively, by Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007). The answers given have always been the same: Stein’s close friend and frequent visitor, Bernard Faÿ, who turned into a fascist collaborator during the war, allegedly protected them. When Malcolm’s book came out four years ago, nobody cared.
Suddenly this is not good enough. An urgent, belligerent need to question Stein started with accusations against the Contemporary Jewish Museum for hiding facts and protecting Stein’s image by not properly addressing her war survival. At a museum panel during the exhibition, local historian Fred Rosenbaum got “extremely worried” about Stein’s “Nazi collaboration.” In an article for the Bay Area Jewish Weekly, Sonia Melnikova-Raich called the omission historical “cleansing,” reminding her of the similar idealizing treatment of Soviet “heroes.” Commentator Mark Karlin eagerly picked up on Stein’s “fascist leanings” in his post “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Missing’ Vichy Years” and agreed with the charge that “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” “noticeably lacks a sixth story.” Dartmouth Professor Barbara Will’s new book tried to show the “real” Stein by painting her in a single color: black. Visitors and bloggers (like BuzzFlash writer Bill Berkowitz) who have never before read or studied Stein, got enraged by certain details they snapped up from the agitation around them: What? Stein had a Nazi friend? Stein said Hitler ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize? How scandalous! Stein a collaborator! Stein, a Nazi! The scandal even got to the Washington Post, prompting critic Phil Kennicott to review Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and openly declare his “hatred” for her.
Biased Interpretations
“Stein’s detractors have been able to combine the standard attacks with a denunciation of her support of Vichy and Pétain,” Stein expert Catharine R. Stimpson stated at the Second Annual Feminist Art History Conference (Nov. 2011, at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., in connection with Seeing Gertrude Stein). Until then my attempt to reason with the attackers had only received private support from Stein experts like Marjorie Perloff, Gloria Orenstein, Claudia Franken, artist/filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard. I was relieved to find an academic ally speaking up in public. Stimpson pointed out that intellectuals like Cynthia Ozick and even feminists like Elaine Showalter (A Jury of Her Peers) were among Stein’s detractors. She had not yet realized though that the most extreme academic attack came from Barbara Will.
In my next blog I took a look at the Hitler quote that proved to be among the most inflammatory, picked up by Will and circulating in the media:
What is this Hitler story that now goes around the blogosphere? Stein, freshly famous after the bestselling success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), was interviewed by Lansing Warren for the New York Times Magazine, in 1934. In the article titled ‘Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics’ Lansing quotes, “‘I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize,’ she says, ‘because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.’”
If you know Stein at all you instantly catch the joke. Anybody really looking at the interview might note that the interviewer points to the laugh and “impish” look on Stein’s face as she brings out such outrageous pronouncements. Isn’t this the way Jewish humor works? Stein recommends Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize just as Freud “recommended” the Gestapo—with the same perfect irony. When Sigmund Freud’s supporters tried to pay his way out of Vienna in the last minute, in 1938, the Germans made a condition for his release. They demanded a declaration that he had been well treated by them. Freud declared: “Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen.” “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.” Freud a collaborator, Freud a Nazi, like Stein?
If you read on in the interview, and if you are still in doubt, you will come across the following passage: “Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood.” Stein hands Hitler the price for paternalism, suppression, dullness and stagnation, in short, a mockery of “peace.”
Paradox, provocative use of language in order to break conventions of reading and understanding, irony and self-irony are the essence of the modernist Stein. Commentators who haven’t read Stein or don’t know enough about her will most likely misread and misinterpret whatever they do read. The more objective commentators in the course of Stein research and biographical writing have all recognized the irony in this famous comment – an irony that is reinforced by many other anti-German and anti-Nazi comments one could quote from Stein’s work. For example, one could quote Stein’s equation of Hitler’s “peace” with death for the arts as well as for the country: “The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany’s music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true” (Paris France, 1939).
Will, however, doesn’t put the Hitler quote to rest. She admits the irony but muses: “Stein probably wanted her audience to respond in both ways…” She sees “a strong element of conviction and intentionality in such pronouncements, as though she requires—indeed demands—that her words be taken literally.” Will denies Stein’s paradoxical humor by arguing, “her political ‘pontifications’ are not clearlyironic but apparently deeply felt” (all quotes pages 71-72). Is this choice of language – “probably wanted,” “as though she requires, indeed demands,” “apparently deeply felt” supposed to be clean, academic scholarship?
To my surprise, many academics I talked to didn’t notice this kind of biased intimation that threads throughout the book. In her keynote address, Stimpson still called Unlikely Collaboration a “useful, balanced account.” I found it a disturbingly unbalanced account. Will’s earlier book, Gertrude Stein: Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (2000) provided valid, even enthusiastic Stein research. I wonder if the author “probably, as though, apparently” suffered a conversion experience? (It is of interest to add here that, according to the converted Will, Stein’s brilliant tour de force, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “capitulate(s) to public tastes.”)
While Will has filled the book with detailed research on Bernard Faÿ, she has hardly found anything new or conclusive about Gertrude Stein. Hearsay often serves to make her “case” against Stein. For example, she quotes the well-worn Hitler story by editor/publisher Jay Lansing. In 1934, Lansing allegedly heard Stein say that Hitler and Napoleon were both “great men.” For Will, this unquestioningly gives the other Hitler comment a sinister “deeper meaning.” But here again, one would have to ask about the context, the tone of voice, the “impish look,” or else one risks another case of missed irony or mis-hearing. Stein never liked Hitler any more than she liked Germans on the whole. Napoleon was the Hitler of his time (his reign that lasted one year longer than the Third Reich). Did Stein perhaps refer to the fact that most of the so-called “great men” of history (from Alexander the Great onward), shared the megalomania that led to mass murder in their conquerors’ wars? (In my questioning I went back to the revelatory study A Brotherhood of Tyrants: Manic Depression and Absolute Power by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian LIeb [1994] to take in the extent of similarity in these “great men.”) I would argue that here again, Stein deserves at the very least the benefit of doubt—in spite of the fact that she did admire one “great man,” old Marshal Pétain, who at the end of his military career became the head of the Vichy Régime.
This is my point: there are paradoxes and contradictions in Stein’s life and work that make any picture in pure black and white questionable. An objective portrait of Stein would have to take into account her life-long ambivalence about great men (beginning with her tyrannical father and later her overbearing brother Leo), as well as her keen awareness that as a writer she was competing with all the “great men” of patriarchal literature—in particular her modernist rivals Joyce, Pound, Proust et al. In 1926, Stein wrote a long text, “Patriarchal Poetry” (Bee Time Vine, 1953), from which feminists in the seventies produced a postcard repeating in many variations “Patriarchal poetry is patriotic poetry is patriarchal poetry is the same.”
Missing from Will’s book are crucial quotes like this one: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing” (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936). Three years before the War, Stein commented in a letter to her friend from WWI, W.G. Rogers: “…disguise it to yourself as you will the majority does want a dictator, it is natural that a majority if it has come to be made up of enormous numbers do, a big mass likes to be shoved as a whole because it feels it moves and they cannot possibly feel that they move themselves as little masses can, there you are, like it or not there we are” (W.G. Rogers, When This you See Remember Me, 1949, p. 217). This undoubtedly realistic assessment is seen by Barbara Will as “chilling,” a proof that Stein “firmly distances herself “ from democracy: “Stein argues for the power, and, arguably, the rightness of authoritarian leadership.” (Will, p. 97.)
The Modernist Paradox
At the center of the attacks against Stein is her attempt to translate Pétain’s speeches in 1941. There is good reason to be mystified and dismayed by this strange undertaking, but this, too, deserves an historical perspective. Maréchal Pétain had been every French person’s hero after his victory in the Battle of Verdun, in 1916, and he was once again most French people’s hero—and Stein’s hero –when he saved Paris and most of France from the total destruction that had just been witnessed wherever the Nazi war machine had crossed a border. French people had seen the refugees running from Belgium: “…grandmothers holding dead babies in their arms, women with parts of their faces shot away, and insane women who had lost their children, their husbands, and all reasons for living” (Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation, 2010). They had seen the beginning of the end when Orléans was almost destroyed by the Germans. “Even though Pétain did not actually say ‘armistice’ this was the word that set off immediate rejoicing across the country. To this day, older French people can remember where they were—and how they felt—when they learned of Pétain’s decision” (Glass).
Yes, in Stein’s eyes, the old Marshal was the savior of France and that seemed to be all that mattered. She did not object to his election as Prime Minister and then Chief of State of the Vichy Government, establishing his increasingly authoritarian regime in collaboration with the German occupiers. If she was at all aware of Pétain’s evolving politics, did she approve of them or blindly give him carte blanche for his past merits? Nobody knows.
There is no denial that Stein was a staunch conservative. Her friend W.G. Rogers called her “a Republican all her life.” She came from an assimilated, proudly bourgeois Jewish family that admired Washington and Grant. She had been raised at the Californian frontier with the pioneer spirit of individualism and patriotism, but, as W.G. Rogers writes, she was “unfamiliar in the fields of economics and politics.” She said it herself: “Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics” (Answers to the Partisan Review, 1938). She said it repeatedly in her 1939 portrait of the French, Paris France: “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. And so France is and was.” Stein wrote a lot about her “hometown” Paris and the French culture and tradition that gave her the freedom to write: “After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves it is not real but it is really there.” (Paris France). This “romantic” passion for French culture and tradition echoes Flaubert, whose Trois Contes were the inspiration for Stein’s first story collection, Three Lives: “Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work” (Flaubert, 1876).
Still, I can’t deny that I had a hard time looking more closely at the translation project Stein undertook in 1941. How could a radical avant-gardist at the same time be a traditionalist, a conservative, even at times reactionary, I wondered? In an article for the LA Book Review I expressed the sadness it causes when a great woman is taken down a notch in our esteem: it brings us down as well. At the same time, it struck me that nobody asked the question how a radical avant-gardist like Picasso could join the communist party in 1944, after Stalin’s show trials, gulags, and mass murders were public knowledge? How Breton, Eluard, or Frida Kahlo could serve Stalin’s agenda by being active communists? In Stein’s own words: “Supposing nobody asked the Question, what would be the answer.” (Useful Knowledge, 1928).
I wrestled with these questions in my blog:
A partial answer is found in the movement of modernism which, on the whole, dreamed of extreme political renewal, of rebirth for their respective nations, connected to the “great men” of their time. Stein was part of the modernist paradox, about which we do not yet know enough. (An entire issue of the academic magazine Modernism/Modernity, # 15, is devoted to this exploration.) Few modernists, however, could claim the ironic self-knowledge that Stein professed: “It could be a puzzle why the intellectuals in every country are always wanting a form of government which would inevitably treat them badly, purge them so to speak before anybody else is purged. It has always happened from the French revolution to today. It would be a puzzle this if it were not that it is true that the world is round and that space is illimitable unlimited. I suppose it is that that makes the intellectual so anxious for a regimenting government which they could so ill endure.”(Paris France, 1939)
When the Vichy Régime chose Pétain as prime minister, Stein hoped – naively, blindly -- that he would guarantee France’s protection from Nazi Germany and recognition from America. This view was shared by the American Department of State. At the time of Stein’s translation project, Vichy France was not (yet) at war with America; in Pétain’s Unoccupied Zone, the Zone Libre, where Gertrude and Alice’s country house was located, American Jews lived freely, especially if—like Gertrude and eventually Alice—they were over 65 years old. Charles Glass points out that no Americans were interned in the Unoccupied Zone: “Despite Allied attacks on French soil, Washington and Vichy preserved their diplomatic relations in 1942.” Stein’s hope in Pétain’s France was encouraged when, according to Rogers, “the Franco-American Committee … asked her to translate for her compatriots Marshal Pétain’s messages.” If Stein acted out of her concern for France, it is still a puzzle how she felt about the repressive content of these speeches, the fascist and even anti-semitic pronouncements in some of Pétain’s “messages”?
Even Barbara Will is baffled. She doesn’t know what to make of the translation, because Stein didn’t really do it. She hand-wrote a draft of some thirty speeches from 1939 to 1940 in a language that renders them unreadable. As we know from computer gobbledygook, word-by-word translations don’t make sense; they are a joke. But that is exactly what Stein did. Here are some examples Will gives:
“’Telle est aujourd’hui, Français, la tâche à laquelle je vous convie’’ becomes ‘This is today french people the task to which I urge you.’ An idiomatic phrase such as ‘Le 17 juin 1940, il y a aujourd’hui une année’ becomes ‘On the seventeenth of June 1940 it is a year today.’ ‘Ils se méprendront les uns et les autres’ — a speech denouncing Pétains’ critics—is translated ‘But they are mistaken the ones and the others.’ Syntax is distorted: a speech describing the refugees from Lorraine notes the abandonment of ‘le cimetière où dorment leurs ancêtres’; Stein translates this as ‘their cemeteries where sleep their ancestors.’ Even the term ’speech’ is avoided: ‘Discours du 8 juillet’ becomes ‘Discourse of the 8 July.’’’
Will ponders that perhaps Stein had such an admiration for the old man that his every word had to be honored in and of itself. Maybe Stein wasn’t fluent in French, some commentators have proposed. She had spent almost four decades in France and had written and published in French. But what about her English?, others have wondered. Stein, the recent bestselling author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, certainly was able to write straightforward English. One is tempted to speculate in the same manner Will does, but in the opposite direction. What if Stein was just pretending, using a fool’s cap the way she loved to do? What if she didn’t care a fig about the messages but liked the language, some archaic French tonality of the old soldier that could only be rendered as some hermetic prose-poetry? The mystery remains, and even Barbara Will can’t will the answer.
The Paradox of Friendship
It’s possible that Stein’s long-time intellectual friend Bernard Faÿ urged her to do the translation, perhaps as a favor that could promote his own standing with the Maréchal whose personal advisor he had just become. Will is convinced Stein did it for Faÿ, because of his urging, and he in turn arranged for her wartime protection. But the facts have never been established. Even the most thorough French investigations in situ—gathered in Dominique Saint Pierre’s study Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre (2009) –ultimately rest on speculations, on one French collaborator’s questionable assertions about another. (The study is not mentioned in Will’s book.)
Faÿ came from an arch-catholic royalist family, was gay, Harvard-educated and highly respected, both in France as in the States, as an academic, the author of books on Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. In the twenties and thirties he had in many ways helped Stein’s career. Even if Stein wanted to do her friend a favor, there is no evidence that she knew what exactly Faÿ did in the Vichy government—that he became a Nazi collaborator and a secret Gestapo agent, a vicious persecutor of the Freemasons in France. Stein’s letters reveal nothing of the sort, even if Barbara Will tries to hang Stein by a single mention (in their entire letter exchange) of an agreement with Faÿ: “and of course I see politics but from one angle which is yours” (p. 69). Politics? What politics? As far as anybody knows they might have been talking about their shared conviction that Roosevelt was bad for America or that “labor unions deprive the worker of independence” (Rogers). By attempting this project, in Janet Malcolm’s judgment in Two Lives, Stein “behaved badly”; Barbara Will asserts she was “a willing propagandist” for Vichy and claims," even after Vichy ceased to be a viable political entity, Stein remained its unlikely collaborator” (p.138).
Roosevelt used a saying based (perhaps) on a Balkan proverb: “It is permitted you in times of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge” (“Getting Real” by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, Nov. 14, 2011). If indeed Gertrude Stein walked with the devil across the bridge, she did not get Malcolm’s or Will’s permission.
It is well known, however, that in war time, friendship trumps politics the minute anyone is in danger. When Germany occupied all of France, in November 1942, Sylvia Beach, the founder of the famous American bookstore Shakespeare & Company and publisher of James Joyce, was rounded up in Paris and deported to the Vittel detention camp. “Various friends at home who were on sufficiently good terms with the Enemy were continually working on our problem,” she wrote (quoted by Glass). In the end, her lover Adrienne Monnier appealed to Jacques Benoist-Mechin, minister of police in the Vichy government, who had helped the Germans round up Jews, Freemasons and resistants. “Adrienne’s beliefs were in direct opposition to everything Benoist-Mechin represented, but under the occupation friends made compromises to help friends” (Glass, p. 301). When Beach was set free in 1943, she personally thanked the collaborator—the same man who had sent her beloved assistant Françoise Bernheim to Auschwitz to die.
Another point of contention in today’s “politically correct” atmosphere is that Stein does not mention the death camps in her wartime writing. But Sylvia Beach, who was at the hub of international connections in Paris, did not hear about the death camps until a Polish woman from Auschwitz informed her at the Vittel camp, in 1943. Stein, by contrast, lived isolated in the deep countryside from 1939 to the end of the War, refused to listen to the French radio, while the American broadcasts made no mention of concentration camps. In an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, in 1940 (“The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France”), Stein expresses the same feelings toward the Nazis that her French neighbors felt—deep fear and loathing and a profound sadness about France.
In my blog, I noted:
The suspicious questioning of how Stein and Toklas were able to survive the war as Jews reveals a considerable ignorance of the conditions in Occupied France and a troubled confusion of France with Germany. In Germany, half of the German Jews were trapped after 1938, and almost every one of them was murdered. In France, three quarters of the Jewish population survived in the same way Stein and Toklas did, with the help of friends and neighbors, and often with the help of local French officials who quietly resisted German orders.
Stein’s brother Leo and his wife survived in Italy in the same way. It was how Chagall survived in France. Matisse, although not a Jew but a “degenerate” modernist painter, refused a visa from the States and stayed. Stein never mentions any wartime protection by Faÿ (a claim he made at his post-war trial for collaboration) or having been given privileges for her survival. On the contrary, she talks about being deprived and anxious. Should they flee to nearby Switzerland, with false papers, as was suggested to them by French officials? But how could they leave without being able to take their dog? How would they fare as an aging couple in a new place, among strangers?
“And then Italy came into the war and then I was scared, completely scared, and my stomach felt very weak, because – well, here we were right in everybody’s path any enemy that wanted to go anywhere might easily come here. I was frightened; I woke up completely upset. And I said to Alice Toklas, ‘Let’s go away.’”
They asked all their friends and neighbors: “’Well,’ said Doctor Chabout, reflecting. ‘I can’t guarantee you anything, but my advice is stay.”’…He went on, ‘Everybody knows you here; everybody likes you; we all would help you in every way. Why risk yourself among strangers?”
“’Thank you,’ we said, ‘that is all we need. We stay.’’’ (“The Winner Loses”)
Even with protection and help, anything and everything could have gone wrong. At any moment, neighbors could have denounced them. They never did. The Gestapo came twice to look at the “degenerate art” in their Paris home. Again it was friends, this time apparently indeed Faÿ, but also Picasso and Katherine Dudley, their painter friend and neighbor, who helped to save their collection. Germans were milling about in Bellay, their next-door garrison town, roaring on their motor-bikes through the village of Bilignin. In their second country house, in the village Culoz, Italian soldiers were billeted under their roof. At some point even German officers moved in with Stein and Toklas. If any one of them recognized the two elderly women as either American Jews or lesbians, they apparently didn’t care. The Germans admired Basket, the couple’s proud poodle—the only one of their two dogs who survived the deprivations of the cold winters. Reading again Wars I Have Seen, Stein’s diary-like memoir of those years, I found a very different Stein from the author of her earlier memoirs. She does not seem to have any sense of being protected; she has a sense of pervasive unreality and tension; like her neighbors she consults ancient prophecies for comfort. The photographs I collected for my book speak the same language: Stein is thin and haggard. She writes about having to walk for miles for an egg or a little bit of flour.
Blog notes:
As the war turns, after Stalingrad, she declares herself increasingly enamored with the resistance and keeps excitedly reporting about local successes of the Maquis. She has abandoned her translation project. She is now clearly anti-Vichy. She passionately writes, “The one thing that everybody wants is to be free… not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death… The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.” She did not write this book in hindsight. It got smuggled out of France before the war was over, and Stein didn’t add or change a word of it when it was published — to great success — in 1945. (The quote does not appear in Will’s book.)
It is true that Stein never directly addressed her Jewishness in her wartime writing. According to the American press, Stein and Toklas were “liberated” by the American army as Americans; there was no mention of their survival as Jews. (Jewish references are often oblique and coded in Stein’s experimental texts). This absence serves as another reason for today’s criticism. But once again, we have to look at the context. We have to remember that there were no “identity politics” back then. Intellectuals and artists considered themselves as defined by their country of origin; they were assimilated Jews like Stein and Toklas. Stein as a writer competing in the literary battlefield kept (perhaps wisely) her identity as a Jew quiet. Proust did the same. So did almost all the other important writers and artists of the period. When you read names like Nathalie Sarraute, Derrida, Bergson, Maurois, Milhaud, Max Jabob, Soutine, Modigliani, Tristan Bernard, Wanda Landowska—do you know which ones of them were Jewish? All of them, as it turns out. Heine and Kafka, by the way, also didn’t declare their Jewishness in their work. They are not put on trial the way Stein is nowadays.
I certainly wish Stein had been less politically conservative and short-sighted. That she hadn’t attempted to translate Pétain’s speeches and hadn’t chosen a friend who turned fascist. But none of it makes her a likely or unlikely collaborator. By contrast to many other writers and intellectuals of her time, who had propagated extremist doctrines, she thoroughly changed her mind and said so.
I summed up in my blog what had happened within the first few weeks:
In the aftermath of the seminal exhibitions in San Francisco, everyone seems to be curious, worried or upset over Gertrude Stein’s whereabouts during World War II. Gertrude and Alice stayed in the French countryside when France was Nazi-occupied. Why didn’t they leave when they were repeatedly warned and urged to flee? Why didn’t Gertrude and Alice get the treatment of enemy aliens (i.e. Americans) or get deported like other Jews, other lesbians, other unwanted people? Was Stein protected somehow and for some reason? Was her collection of “degenerate” art—all those pictures by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne—protected too?
The same questions about Stein’s survival during the war were raised many times before in Stein biographies—sympathetically, for example, in the well-researched account by James Mellow, Charmed Circle, in 1979. A few years ago they were raised again, this time aggressively, by Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007). The answers given have always been the same: Stein’s close friend and frequent visitor, Bernard Faÿ, who turned into a fascist collaborator during the war, allegedly protected them. When Malcolm’s book came out four years ago, nobody cared.
Suddenly this is not good enough. An urgent, belligerent need to question Stein started with accusations against the Contemporary Jewish Museum for hiding facts and protecting Stein’s image by not properly addressing her war survival. At a museum panel during the exhibition, local historian Fred Rosenbaum got “extremely worried” about Stein’s “Nazi collaboration.” In an article for the Bay Area Jewish Weekly, Sonia Melnikova-Raich called the omission historical “cleansing,” reminding her of the similar idealizing treatment of Soviet “heroes.” Commentator Mark Karlin eagerly picked up on Stein’s “fascist leanings” in his post “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Missing’ Vichy Years” and agreed with the charge that “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” “noticeably lacks a sixth story.” Dartmouth Professor Barbara Will’s new book tried to show the “real” Stein by painting her in a single color: black. Visitors and bloggers (like BuzzFlash writer Bill Berkowitz) who have never before read or studied Stein, got enraged by certain details they snapped up from the agitation around them: What? Stein had a Nazi friend? Stein said Hitler ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize? How scandalous! Stein a collaborator! Stein, a Nazi! The scandal even got to the Washington Post, prompting critic Phil Kennicott to review Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories and openly declare his “hatred” for her.
Biased Interpretations
“Stein’s detractors have been able to combine the standard attacks with a denunciation of her support of Vichy and Pétain,” Stein expert Catharine R. Stimpson stated at the Second Annual Feminist Art History Conference (Nov. 2011, at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., in connection with Seeing Gertrude Stein). Until then my attempt to reason with the attackers had only received private support from Stein experts like Marjorie Perloff, Gloria Orenstein, Claudia Franken, artist/filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard. I was relieved to find an academic ally speaking up in public. Stimpson pointed out that intellectuals like Cynthia Ozick and even feminists like Elaine Showalter (A Jury of Her Peers) were among Stein’s detractors. She had not yet realized though that the most extreme academic attack came from Barbara Will.
In my next blog I took a look at the Hitler quote that proved to be among the most inflammatory, picked up by Will and circulating in the media:
What is this Hitler story that now goes around the blogosphere? Stein, freshly famous after the bestselling success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), was interviewed by Lansing Warren for the New York Times Magazine, in 1934. In the article titled ‘Gertrude Stein Views Life and Politics’ Lansing quotes, “‘I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize,’ she says, ‘because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.’”
If you know Stein at all you instantly catch the joke. Anybody really looking at the interview might note that the interviewer points to the laugh and “impish” look on Stein’s face as she brings out such outrageous pronouncements. Isn’t this the way Jewish humor works? Stein recommends Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize just as Freud “recommended” the Gestapo—with the same perfect irony. When Sigmund Freud’s supporters tried to pay his way out of Vienna in the last minute, in 1938, the Germans made a condition for his release. They demanded a declaration that he had been well treated by them. Freud declared: “Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen.” “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.” Freud a collaborator, Freud a Nazi, like Stein?
If you read on in the interview, and if you are still in doubt, you will come across the following passage: “Building a Chinese wall is always bad. Protection, paternalism and suppression of natural activity and competition lead to dullness and stagnation. It is true in politics, in literature, in art. Everything in life needs constant stimulation. It needs activity, new blood.” Stein hands Hitler the price for paternalism, suppression, dullness and stagnation, in short, a mockery of “peace.”
Paradox, provocative use of language in order to break conventions of reading and understanding, irony and self-irony are the essence of the modernist Stein. Commentators who haven’t read Stein or don’t know enough about her will most likely misread and misinterpret whatever they do read. The more objective commentators in the course of Stein research and biographical writing have all recognized the irony in this famous comment – an irony that is reinforced by many other anti-German and anti-Nazi comments one could quote from Stein’s work. For example, one could quote Stein’s equation of Hitler’s “peace” with death for the arts as well as for the country: “The characteristic art product of a country is the pulse of the country, France did produce better hats and fashions than ever these last two years and is therefore very alive and Germany’s music and musicians have been dead and gone these last two years and so Germany is dead well we will see, it is so, of course as all these things are necessarily true” (Paris France, 1939).
Will, however, doesn’t put the Hitler quote to rest. She admits the irony but muses: “Stein probably wanted her audience to respond in both ways…” She sees “a strong element of conviction and intentionality in such pronouncements, as though she requires—indeed demands—that her words be taken literally.” Will denies Stein’s paradoxical humor by arguing, “her political ‘pontifications’ are not clearlyironic but apparently deeply felt” (all quotes pages 71-72). Is this choice of language – “probably wanted,” “as though she requires, indeed demands,” “apparently deeply felt” supposed to be clean, academic scholarship?
To my surprise, many academics I talked to didn’t notice this kind of biased intimation that threads throughout the book. In her keynote address, Stimpson still called Unlikely Collaboration a “useful, balanced account.” I found it a disturbingly unbalanced account. Will’s earlier book, Gertrude Stein: Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (2000) provided valid, even enthusiastic Stein research. I wonder if the author “probably, as though, apparently” suffered a conversion experience? (It is of interest to add here that, according to the converted Will, Stein’s brilliant tour de force, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “capitulate(s) to public tastes.”)
While Will has filled the book with detailed research on Bernard Faÿ, she has hardly found anything new or conclusive about Gertrude Stein. Hearsay often serves to make her “case” against Stein. For example, she quotes the well-worn Hitler story by editor/publisher Jay Lansing. In 1934, Lansing allegedly heard Stein say that Hitler and Napoleon were both “great men.” For Will, this unquestioningly gives the other Hitler comment a sinister “deeper meaning.” But here again, one would have to ask about the context, the tone of voice, the “impish look,” or else one risks another case of missed irony or mis-hearing. Stein never liked Hitler any more than she liked Germans on the whole. Napoleon was the Hitler of his time (his reign that lasted one year longer than the Third Reich). Did Stein perhaps refer to the fact that most of the so-called “great men” of history (from Alexander the Great onward), shared the megalomania that led to mass murder in their conquerors’ wars? (In my questioning I went back to the revelatory study A Brotherhood of Tyrants: Manic Depression and Absolute Power by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian LIeb [1994] to take in the extent of similarity in these “great men.”) I would argue that here again, Stein deserves at the very least the benefit of doubt—in spite of the fact that she did admire one “great man,” old Marshal Pétain, who at the end of his military career became the head of the Vichy Régime.
This is my point: there are paradoxes and contradictions in Stein’s life and work that make any picture in pure black and white questionable. An objective portrait of Stein would have to take into account her life-long ambivalence about great men (beginning with her tyrannical father and later her overbearing brother Leo), as well as her keen awareness that as a writer she was competing with all the “great men” of patriarchal literature—in particular her modernist rivals Joyce, Pound, Proust et al. In 1926, Stein wrote a long text, “Patriarchal Poetry” (Bee Time Vine, 1953), from which feminists in the seventies produced a postcard repeating in many variations “Patriarchal poetry is patriotic poetry is patriarchal poetry is the same.”
Missing from Will’s book are crucial quotes like this one: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing” (Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936). Three years before the War, Stein commented in a letter to her friend from WWI, W.G. Rogers: “…disguise it to yourself as you will the majority does want a dictator, it is natural that a majority if it has come to be made up of enormous numbers do, a big mass likes to be shoved as a whole because it feels it moves and they cannot possibly feel that they move themselves as little masses can, there you are, like it or not there we are” (W.G. Rogers, When This you See Remember Me, 1949, p. 217). This undoubtedly realistic assessment is seen by Barbara Will as “chilling,” a proof that Stein “firmly distances herself “ from democracy: “Stein argues for the power, and, arguably, the rightness of authoritarian leadership.” (Will, p. 97.)
The Modernist Paradox
At the center of the attacks against Stein is her attempt to translate Pétain’s speeches in 1941. There is good reason to be mystified and dismayed by this strange undertaking, but this, too, deserves an historical perspective. Maréchal Pétain had been every French person’s hero after his victory in the Battle of Verdun, in 1916, and he was once again most French people’s hero—and Stein’s hero –when he saved Paris and most of France from the total destruction that had just been witnessed wherever the Nazi war machine had crossed a border. French people had seen the refugees running from Belgium: “…grandmothers holding dead babies in their arms, women with parts of their faces shot away, and insane women who had lost their children, their husbands, and all reasons for living” (Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under the Nazi Occupation, 2010). They had seen the beginning of the end when Orléans was almost destroyed by the Germans. “Even though Pétain did not actually say ‘armistice’ this was the word that set off immediate rejoicing across the country. To this day, older French people can remember where they were—and how they felt—when they learned of Pétain’s decision” (Glass).
Yes, in Stein’s eyes, the old Marshal was the savior of France and that seemed to be all that mattered. She did not object to his election as Prime Minister and then Chief of State of the Vichy Government, establishing his increasingly authoritarian regime in collaboration with the German occupiers. If she was at all aware of Pétain’s evolving politics, did she approve of them or blindly give him carte blanche for his past merits? Nobody knows.
There is no denial that Stein was a staunch conservative. Her friend W.G. Rogers called her “a Republican all her life.” She came from an assimilated, proudly bourgeois Jewish family that admired Washington and Grant. She had been raised at the Californian frontier with the pioneer spirit of individualism and patriotism, but, as W.G. Rogers writes, she was “unfamiliar in the fields of economics and politics.” She said it herself: “Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics” (Answers to the Partisan Review, 1938). She said it repeatedly in her 1939 portrait of the French, Paris France: “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. And so France is and was.” Stein wrote a lot about her “hometown” Paris and the French culture and tradition that gave her the freedom to write: “After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves it is not real but it is really there.” (Paris France). This “romantic” passion for French culture and tradition echoes Flaubert, whose Trois Contes were the inspiration for Stein’s first story collection, Three Lives: “Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work” (Flaubert, 1876).
Still, I can’t deny that I had a hard time looking more closely at the translation project Stein undertook in 1941. How could a radical avant-gardist at the same time be a traditionalist, a conservative, even at times reactionary, I wondered? In an article for the LA Book Review I expressed the sadness it causes when a great woman is taken down a notch in our esteem: it brings us down as well. At the same time, it struck me that nobody asked the question how a radical avant-gardist like Picasso could join the communist party in 1944, after Stalin’s show trials, gulags, and mass murders were public knowledge? How Breton, Eluard, or Frida Kahlo could serve Stalin’s agenda by being active communists? In Stein’s own words: “Supposing nobody asked the Question, what would be the answer.” (Useful Knowledge, 1928).
I wrestled with these questions in my blog:
A partial answer is found in the movement of modernism which, on the whole, dreamed of extreme political renewal, of rebirth for their respective nations, connected to the “great men” of their time. Stein was part of the modernist paradox, about which we do not yet know enough. (An entire issue of the academic magazine Modernism/Modernity, # 15, is devoted to this exploration.) Few modernists, however, could claim the ironic self-knowledge that Stein professed: “It could be a puzzle why the intellectuals in every country are always wanting a form of government which would inevitably treat them badly, purge them so to speak before anybody else is purged. It has always happened from the French revolution to today. It would be a puzzle this if it were not that it is true that the world is round and that space is illimitable unlimited. I suppose it is that that makes the intellectual so anxious for a regimenting government which they could so ill endure.”(Paris France, 1939)
When the Vichy Régime chose Pétain as prime minister, Stein hoped – naively, blindly -- that he would guarantee France’s protection from Nazi Germany and recognition from America. This view was shared by the American Department of State. At the time of Stein’s translation project, Vichy France was not (yet) at war with America; in Pétain’s Unoccupied Zone, the Zone Libre, where Gertrude and Alice’s country house was located, American Jews lived freely, especially if—like Gertrude and eventually Alice—they were over 65 years old. Charles Glass points out that no Americans were interned in the Unoccupied Zone: “Despite Allied attacks on French soil, Washington and Vichy preserved their diplomatic relations in 1942.” Stein’s hope in Pétain’s France was encouraged when, according to Rogers, “the Franco-American Committee … asked her to translate for her compatriots Marshal Pétain’s messages.” If Stein acted out of her concern for France, it is still a puzzle how she felt about the repressive content of these speeches, the fascist and even anti-semitic pronouncements in some of Pétain’s “messages”?
Even Barbara Will is baffled. She doesn’t know what to make of the translation, because Stein didn’t really do it. She hand-wrote a draft of some thirty speeches from 1939 to 1940 in a language that renders them unreadable. As we know from computer gobbledygook, word-by-word translations don’t make sense; they are a joke. But that is exactly what Stein did. Here are some examples Will gives:
“’Telle est aujourd’hui, Français, la tâche à laquelle je vous convie’’ becomes ‘This is today french people the task to which I urge you.’ An idiomatic phrase such as ‘Le 17 juin 1940, il y a aujourd’hui une année’ becomes ‘On the seventeenth of June 1940 it is a year today.’ ‘Ils se méprendront les uns et les autres’ — a speech denouncing Pétains’ critics—is translated ‘But they are mistaken the ones and the others.’ Syntax is distorted: a speech describing the refugees from Lorraine notes the abandonment of ‘le cimetière où dorment leurs ancêtres’; Stein translates this as ‘their cemeteries where sleep their ancestors.’ Even the term ’speech’ is avoided: ‘Discours du 8 juillet’ becomes ‘Discourse of the 8 July.’’’
Will ponders that perhaps Stein had such an admiration for the old man that his every word had to be honored in and of itself. Maybe Stein wasn’t fluent in French, some commentators have proposed. She had spent almost four decades in France and had written and published in French. But what about her English?, others have wondered. Stein, the recent bestselling author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, certainly was able to write straightforward English. One is tempted to speculate in the same manner Will does, but in the opposite direction. What if Stein was just pretending, using a fool’s cap the way she loved to do? What if she didn’t care a fig about the messages but liked the language, some archaic French tonality of the old soldier that could only be rendered as some hermetic prose-poetry? The mystery remains, and even Barbara Will can’t will the answer.
The Paradox of Friendship
It’s possible that Stein’s long-time intellectual friend Bernard Faÿ urged her to do the translation, perhaps as a favor that could promote his own standing with the Maréchal whose personal advisor he had just become. Will is convinced Stein did it for Faÿ, because of his urging, and he in turn arranged for her wartime protection. But the facts have never been established. Even the most thorough French investigations in situ—gathered in Dominique Saint Pierre’s study Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre (2009) –ultimately rest on speculations, on one French collaborator’s questionable assertions about another. (The study is not mentioned in Will’s book.)
Faÿ came from an arch-catholic royalist family, was gay, Harvard-educated and highly respected, both in France as in the States, as an academic, the author of books on Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. In the twenties and thirties he had in many ways helped Stein’s career. Even if Stein wanted to do her friend a favor, there is no evidence that she knew what exactly Faÿ did in the Vichy government—that he became a Nazi collaborator and a secret Gestapo agent, a vicious persecutor of the Freemasons in France. Stein’s letters reveal nothing of the sort, even if Barbara Will tries to hang Stein by a single mention (in their entire letter exchange) of an agreement with Faÿ: “and of course I see politics but from one angle which is yours” (p. 69). Politics? What politics? As far as anybody knows they might have been talking about their shared conviction that Roosevelt was bad for America or that “labor unions deprive the worker of independence” (Rogers). By attempting this project, in Janet Malcolm’s judgment in Two Lives, Stein “behaved badly”; Barbara Will asserts she was “a willing propagandist” for Vichy and claims," even after Vichy ceased to be a viable political entity, Stein remained its unlikely collaborator” (p.138).
Roosevelt used a saying based (perhaps) on a Balkan proverb: “It is permitted you in times of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge” (“Getting Real” by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, Nov. 14, 2011). If indeed Gertrude Stein walked with the devil across the bridge, she did not get Malcolm’s or Will’s permission.
It is well known, however, that in war time, friendship trumps politics the minute anyone is in danger. When Germany occupied all of France, in November 1942, Sylvia Beach, the founder of the famous American bookstore Shakespeare & Company and publisher of James Joyce, was rounded up in Paris and deported to the Vittel detention camp. “Various friends at home who were on sufficiently good terms with the Enemy were continually working on our problem,” she wrote (quoted by Glass). In the end, her lover Adrienne Monnier appealed to Jacques Benoist-Mechin, minister of police in the Vichy government, who had helped the Germans round up Jews, Freemasons and resistants. “Adrienne’s beliefs were in direct opposition to everything Benoist-Mechin represented, but under the occupation friends made compromises to help friends” (Glass, p. 301). When Beach was set free in 1943, she personally thanked the collaborator—the same man who had sent her beloved assistant Françoise Bernheim to Auschwitz to die.
Another point of contention in today’s “politically correct” atmosphere is that Stein does not mention the death camps in her wartime writing. But Sylvia Beach, who was at the hub of international connections in Paris, did not hear about the death camps until a Polish woman from Auschwitz informed her at the Vittel camp, in 1943. Stein, by contrast, lived isolated in the deep countryside from 1939 to the end of the War, refused to listen to the French radio, while the American broadcasts made no mention of concentration camps. In an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, in 1940 (“The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France”), Stein expresses the same feelings toward the Nazis that her French neighbors felt—deep fear and loathing and a profound sadness about France.
In my blog, I noted:
The suspicious questioning of how Stein and Toklas were able to survive the war as Jews reveals a considerable ignorance of the conditions in Occupied France and a troubled confusion of France with Germany. In Germany, half of the German Jews were trapped after 1938, and almost every one of them was murdered. In France, three quarters of the Jewish population survived in the same way Stein and Toklas did, with the help of friends and neighbors, and often with the help of local French officials who quietly resisted German orders.
Stein’s brother Leo and his wife survived in Italy in the same way. It was how Chagall survived in France. Matisse, although not a Jew but a “degenerate” modernist painter, refused a visa from the States and stayed. Stein never mentions any wartime protection by Faÿ (a claim he made at his post-war trial for collaboration) or having been given privileges for her survival. On the contrary, she talks about being deprived and anxious. Should they flee to nearby Switzerland, with false papers, as was suggested to them by French officials? But how could they leave without being able to take their dog? How would they fare as an aging couple in a new place, among strangers?
“And then Italy came into the war and then I was scared, completely scared, and my stomach felt very weak, because – well, here we were right in everybody’s path any enemy that wanted to go anywhere might easily come here. I was frightened; I woke up completely upset. And I said to Alice Toklas, ‘Let’s go away.’”
They asked all their friends and neighbors: “’Well,’ said Doctor Chabout, reflecting. ‘I can’t guarantee you anything, but my advice is stay.”’…He went on, ‘Everybody knows you here; everybody likes you; we all would help you in every way. Why risk yourself among strangers?”
“’Thank you,’ we said, ‘that is all we need. We stay.’’’ (“The Winner Loses”)
Even with protection and help, anything and everything could have gone wrong. At any moment, neighbors could have denounced them. They never did. The Gestapo came twice to look at the “degenerate art” in their Paris home. Again it was friends, this time apparently indeed Faÿ, but also Picasso and Katherine Dudley, their painter friend and neighbor, who helped to save their collection. Germans were milling about in Bellay, their next-door garrison town, roaring on their motor-bikes through the village of Bilignin. In their second country house, in the village Culoz, Italian soldiers were billeted under their roof. At some point even German officers moved in with Stein and Toklas. If any one of them recognized the two elderly women as either American Jews or lesbians, they apparently didn’t care. The Germans admired Basket, the couple’s proud poodle—the only one of their two dogs who survived the deprivations of the cold winters. Reading again Wars I Have Seen, Stein’s diary-like memoir of those years, I found a very different Stein from the author of her earlier memoirs. She does not seem to have any sense of being protected; she has a sense of pervasive unreality and tension; like her neighbors she consults ancient prophecies for comfort. The photographs I collected for my book speak the same language: Stein is thin and haggard. She writes about having to walk for miles for an egg or a little bit of flour.
Blog notes:
As the war turns, after Stalingrad, she declares herself increasingly enamored with the resistance and keeps excitedly reporting about local successes of the Maquis. She has abandoned her translation project. She is now clearly anti-Vichy. She passionately writes, “The one thing that everybody wants is to be free… not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death… The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.” She did not write this book in hindsight. It got smuggled out of France before the war was over, and Stein didn’t add or change a word of it when it was published — to great success — in 1945. (The quote does not appear in Will’s book.)
It is true that Stein never directly addressed her Jewishness in her wartime writing. According to the American press, Stein and Toklas were “liberated” by the American army as Americans; there was no mention of their survival as Jews. (Jewish references are often oblique and coded in Stein’s experimental texts). This absence serves as another reason for today’s criticism. But once again, we have to look at the context. We have to remember that there were no “identity politics” back then. Intellectuals and artists considered themselves as defined by their country of origin; they were assimilated Jews like Stein and Toklas. Stein as a writer competing in the literary battlefield kept (perhaps wisely) her identity as a Jew quiet. Proust did the same. So did almost all the other important writers and artists of the period. When you read names like Nathalie Sarraute, Derrida, Bergson, Maurois, Milhaud, Max Jabob, Soutine, Modigliani, Tristan Bernard, Wanda Landowska—do you know which ones of them were Jewish? All of them, as it turns out. Heine and Kafka, by the way, also didn’t declare their Jewishness in their work. They are not put on trial the way Stein is nowadays.
I certainly wish Stein had been less politically conservative and short-sighted. That she hadn’t attempted to translate Pétain’s speeches and hadn’t chosen a friend who turned fascist. But none of it makes her a likely or unlikely collaborator. By contrast to many other writers and intellectuals of her time, who had propagated extremist doctrines, she thoroughly changed her mind and said so.
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Working notes
I always considered Gertrude Stein my Muse, a difficult, challenging Muse who didn’t easily bestow a kiss. When I translated her “detective novel” Blood on the Dining-Room Floor into German, I felt a bit closer to her. And again when I composed a “photobiography” of Stein with images and texts that are meant to “read” each other. The feminist movement had created a phenomenal renaissance for Stein, and it was a thrill to witness a new wave of recognition in the recent “Summer of Stein” in San Francisco, next door to where I live. In the last fifteen years, thirty books and seventy dissertations have been focused on Stein’s contemporary relevance. But it also didn’t hurt to have Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” as a charming parallel to the two traveling exhibitions. It all seemed to prove that our post-post-modern era had come to embrace one of the great writers of modernism who also happens to be post-modern par excellence.
That Stein’s new triumph would be foiled by attacks against her and against the museums came to me as a shock. I know a number of people working on the exhibitions, working on Stein, who reeled from the shock as I did. A good part of the controversy seemed to originate in the classic refusal to admit a woman, a fat, Jewish, lesbian woman, to the top of the imaginary literary pyramid and public fame. What I perceived as a jealous “war against Stein” this time was aimed at her “politically incorrect” survival of WW II in Nazi-occupied France, with the most damaging ammunition coming from academe: Prof. Barbara Will’s book Unlikely Collaboration appeared half-way through the San Francisco exhibition schedules, darkening the atmosphere.
In order to do some damage control, I set to work. I studied and researched every failure, every “crime” Stein was accused of in the media, the blogosphere, Will’s book. I discovered distortions, hype, historical and personal misunderstandings, manipulations, and outright lies. But I also had to admit (not for the first time) that my Muse was not exactly perfect, even if she deserved to be defended.
I shared my observations and findings in my blog “Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein” (http://quotinggertrudestein.com.) Thankfully, I found a few strong allies here and abroad, experts who came up with information I urgently needed; but there were also times when I felt quite alone, the only voice speaking up in public in Stein’s defense. I was lucky to get my voice heard not just in talks and panel discussions at the museums: two articles were published by Ms. Magazine and by the LA Review of Books, while some major Jewish magazines flatly refused to touch the hot button.
The rebirth of Trivia inspired me to gather these different bits and pieces of writing -- my “process notes” during the “Summer of Stein” -- as an attempt to create a semblance of justice for my fallible, inspiring Muse.
That Stein’s new triumph would be foiled by attacks against her and against the museums came to me as a shock. I know a number of people working on the exhibitions, working on Stein, who reeled from the shock as I did. A good part of the controversy seemed to originate in the classic refusal to admit a woman, a fat, Jewish, lesbian woman, to the top of the imaginary literary pyramid and public fame. What I perceived as a jealous “war against Stein” this time was aimed at her “politically incorrect” survival of WW II in Nazi-occupied France, with the most damaging ammunition coming from academe: Prof. Barbara Will’s book Unlikely Collaboration appeared half-way through the San Francisco exhibition schedules, darkening the atmosphere.
In order to do some damage control, I set to work. I studied and researched every failure, every “crime” Stein was accused of in the media, the blogosphere, Will’s book. I discovered distortions, hype, historical and personal misunderstandings, manipulations, and outright lies. But I also had to admit (not for the first time) that my Muse was not exactly perfect, even if she deserved to be defended.
I shared my observations and findings in my blog “Why Do Something If It Can Be Done: Quoting Gertrude Stein” (http://quotinggertrudestein.com.) Thankfully, I found a few strong allies here and abroad, experts who came up with information I urgently needed; but there were also times when I felt quite alone, the only voice speaking up in public in Stein’s defense. I was lucky to get my voice heard not just in talks and panel discussions at the museums: two articles were published by Ms. Magazine and by the LA Review of Books, while some major Jewish magazines flatly refused to touch the hot button.
The rebirth of Trivia inspired me to gather these different bits and pieces of writing -- my “process notes” during the “Summer of Stein” -- as an attempt to create a semblance of justice for my fallible, inspiring Muse.
About the author
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. (http://renatestendhal.com/) is a German born, Paris educated writer and writing coach. She has published several books in Germany and the United States, among them the award-winning photo-biography Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures (Algonquin 1994). She reviews cultural events for the international magazine of arts and media, Scene4 (http://www.scene4.com) and has previously contributed to Trivia: Voices of Feminism. Her ongoing blog http://quotinggertrudestein.com has a fan page of the same name on Facebook. She is working toward a documentary film about Gertrude Stein with award-winning filmmaker Rosemarie Reed.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.