LITERATURE: PHYLLIS GAFFNEYreviews Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ and the Vichy DilemmaBy Barbara Will Columbia University Press, 260pp. £24
HOW COULD a modernist, experimentalist writer such as Gertrude Stein, a cultural icon of interwar Paris – her friend Picasso had painted her portrait even earlier, in 1906 – get caught up in fascist politics, translate into English the speeches of Marshal Pétain and count as a close friend a powerful administrator of the Vichy regime? And this when she was not only an American and a lesbian but also a Jew? How did Stein survive the Nazi occupation of France? This book goes a long way to answering these questions, leaving others in their wake.
Barbara Will, a Stein specialist, concentrates on the last two decades of Stein’s life and her unlikely friendship with Bernard Faÿ, “scholar, academic, Americanophile, high-modernist aesthete, Gestapo agent”. A historian of American civilisation at the prestigious Collège de France, Faÿ was a prominent Pétainist intellectual who was appointed head of the Bibliothèque Nationale in August 1940 and became the linchpin of an obsessive and unremitting crusade against freemasons during the second World War.
A range of affinities – intellectual, emotional, political – help to explain the curious bond between the American expat experimentalist and the right-wing Frenchman. Like many French citizens, both had a quasireligious veneration for Pétain, seeing his pact with the Nazis in June 1940 as the path to salvation.
Both idealised an agrarian, prerevolutionary past, encapsulated by the 18th century, whether in Stein’s America or Faÿ’s France. Both found contemporary industrialised democracies distasteful and were attracted to fascism’s promise of a new beginning. Both had an instrumental approach to friendship, which, in Stein’s writings and Faÿ’s actions, was reduced to a matter of power relations, a dynamic of winners and losers. Friends were there to be exploited. Indeed, neither of the two comes across as admirable. At best a tiresome self-centredness runs through their quoted exchanges, at worst a moral offensiveness.
This story would not have been particularly interesting were it not for the way that war radically altered their respective situations. The book’s bipartite structure reflects this crucial watershed, part one dealing with their friendship up to 1940, part two and an epilogue relating how they fared afterwards.
Part one charts the evolving dynamic between them from their first encounter, in 1926. There were practical contacts: Faÿ translated Stein and also helped her and her partner, Alice Toklas, secure the lease of a chateau by organising the promotion and transfer of the previous tenant, an army officer. More pertinently, Will demonstrates their shared political concerns: an admiration for George Washington; a disillusionment with Roosevelt's New Deal; a strong attraction to Pétain, even to Nazism (in 1934 Stein told the New York Timesmagazine that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize). During the 1930s, as Faÿ's star ascended, Stein, some 20 years his senior, gradually came to need him more than he needed her. Will argues that his right-wing views strongly influenced hers. Most palpable of all is her political naivety.
Their paths crossed little during the war. Will highlights one salient fact: neither Stein nor Toklas, who was also Jewish, appeared on any official census of Jews. Did Stein’s interest in Christian saints, or her suppressed ethnicity, help her pass as a believing Christian? Did nobody suspect that she was Jewish, even in the notoriously Pétainist Bugey region where she lived, and even after the Nazi invasion of the free zone in November 1942? Surely her nationality would also have been a liability. Was she just lucky or was someone protecting her?
This last question is where the role of her unfinished translations of Pétain come in. Did her self-image as a Vichy propagandist, with the mission of wooing the US over to “the new France”, have some factual basis? Stein’s translations of Pétain’s speeches remain unpublished. Why is their quality so uniformly inept? Were they commissioned? And, if so, by whom? Did Faÿ play a part here? Stein’s Vichy period remains mysterious, not to say murky.
The final chapter tells the sordid story of Faÿ’s overt and assiduous collaboration with the Gestapo, his denunciation of colleagues at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his drive against freemasonry. His fate after the liberation was very different from Stein’s. While she was hailed as a miraculous survivor, he was tried for collaboration and sentenced to life imprisonment. An epilogue tells of Stein’s death from uterine cancer, in July 1946, and the postwar life of Bernard Faÿ: his escape from Angers and subsequent pardon, then his exile in Switzerland, where, unrepentant to the last, he moved in other far-right circles, including that of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
Barbara Will’s story is well told and its backdrop is clearly sketched: the mindset of fascist ideologies, the political divisions in 1930s France, the “strained diplomatic dance” of Franco-American relations during the war. Some 50 pages of notes show her meticulous use of primary and secondary sources. A brief exposition of Stein’s early history would have been useful. Any assumption that everyone knows about her privileged Californian childhood, or how she and Toklas had come to live in France, is unfounded.
Ultimately, the question of Stein’s latent fascism is of limited interest. The politics of writers are often distasteful to their readers, and many writers of greater talent than hers were drawn to fascism. Her decision to remain in France among friends in 1940, despite consular advice that she should leave, can also be explained, given the absence of hindsight and her trust in Pétain. The real mystery may be why her self-important ramblings are read today.
Phyllis Gaffney is senior lecturer in French in the school of languages and literatures at University College Dublin
