a time gone mad
by Douglas Messerli
Gertrude Stein Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House, 1945)
After finishing her “fiction” Mrs. Reynolds in 1942, at the house in
which she was living in Biliginin—although it is also evident that she later
revised that fiction to include the end of the war in 1945—Stein, having moved
to Culoz, turned, in 1943, to writing a book that at first seems to be a kind
of continuation of her earlier, Paris
France—the latter seemingly a larger discussion of not just the current
war, but about all the other wars she had experienced, Wars I Have Seen.
At times it seems that these maxims, pronouncements, and musings will,
in fact, overwhelm any coherent narrative about her World War II experiences.
One almost cringes, at moments, for example, when Stein attempts to
differentiate the current War from World War I, which she declares was a
nineteenth century war which its veterans remember as something they “liked”:
“it was a nice war, a real war a regular war, a commenced war. It was a war,
and veterans like a war to be a war.” Tell that to the over nine million
soldiers and seven million civilians who died during World War I. Had Stein
even seen a trench? I am tempted to try to ameliorate such ridiculous
statements by simply describing them as the blind spots of an old woman—until I
remind myself that at 69 in 1943, Stein was only a couple of years older than I
am today.
But what we must also recognize is that not everything Stein writes in
this book, as in Paris France,
represents her own point of view. As in that earlier book, what Stein often
creates is not a work which, instead of personally commenting on history,
serves as a kind of expression of the
panoply of voices and their accompanying points of view that living in a small
French village during 1943 and 1944 would naturally produce. And, in that
sense, her Wars I Have Seen is less a
personal memoir about war than, like Mrs.
Reynolds, an attempt to demonstrate “the way anybody could feel these
years.” Perhaps we cannot go so far as to say that, as she does in the Epilogue
of her “fiction,” “There is nothing historical about this book except the state
of mind,” but we can argue that the history she tells is not merely a personal
one. And if, at times, it appears that Stein is somewhat impervious to the
feelings anyone might have during this tense period in French history, it is
because it is not a history about any one person—even though those events are
represented through her point of view and she very much stands out as the
central figure within the book.
One need only to observe the basic structure of most of this work to
realize that it is unlike nearly any other Stein creation. Although a great
many of Stein works are conversational in tone, here the very patterns of the
book suggest a kind of narrative structure that is not only oral but is based
on way human beings converse with one another.
Consider, for example, the quote I so objected to above: “It was a nice
war.” That statement appears on page 75 in the 1984 British edition of the
original 1945 Random House publication. Given Stein’s usual predilection for
outright pronouncements and generalizations, we may not, at first, even
question her description of a war—any war—as being “nice.” But Stein quite
clearly knows in saying this that she has made a rather strange comment. And
two pages later, after ambulating through a great many other issues, including
the appearance in 1918 of a vision to two children of the Virgin who predicts
“a much worse war,” Stein returns to her comment to explain:
The 1914-1918 war was must
like our civil war, it was that kind of a
war and that made it
possible for Elmer Harden to make Pierre Caous
admit that it was a nice
war. A nice war is a war where everybody who
is heroic is a hero, and
everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war.
This quite clearly alters what at first seems to be a personal
observation. Elmer Harden is a figure, also appearing in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
who Stein and Toklas met and shared with them his experiences in World War I. I
quote below the entire passage from the 1933 work:
Before the war we had known a
young fellow, not known him much
but a little; Elmer Harden,
who was in Paris studying music. During
the war we heard that Elmer
Harden had joined the french army and
had been badly wounded. It
was rather an amazing story. Elmer
Harden had been nursing
french wounded in the american hospital
and one of his patients, a
captain with an arm fairly disabled, was
going back to the front.
Elmer Harden could not content himself any
longer nursing. He said to
Captain Peter, I am going with you. But
it is impossible, said
Captain Peter. But I am, said Elmer stubbornly.
So they took a taxi and they
went to the war office and to a dentist
and I don’t know where else,
but by the end of the week Captain Peter
had rejoined and Elmer Harden
was in his regiment as a soldier. He
fought well and was wounded.
After the war we met him again
and then we met often. He and
the lovely flowers he used to send
us were a great comfort in
those days just after the peace. He and I
always say that he and I will
be the last people of our generation
to remember the war. I am
afraid we both of us have already
forgotten it a little. Only
the other day though Elmer announced
that he had had a great
triumph, he had made Captain Peter and
Captain Peter is a breton
admit that it was a nice war. Up to this
time when he had said to
Captain Peter, it was a nice war, Captain
Peter had not answered, but
this time when Elmer said, it was a
nice war, Captain Peter said,
yes Elmer, it was a nice war.
Obviously Captain Peter is Pierre Caous, the man he convinced to allow
him to nurse the French wounded in the American hospital. And his seemingly
outrageous comments are not meant as a commentary on the horrors of the war,
issues which he brilliantly explored in his own writing,* but are merely a
generality on the values of those who fought in the war, the individuals who
saw themselves and others as heroes. For Stein, World II was much more of a
medieval experience, a far more brutal world, which, she argued, made it a 20th century war instead of a 19th century one, a war in which the people
no longer believed in progress or that personal invention might still somehow
save them. In short, Stein’s casual way of approaching her subjects should not
obscure her more serious consideration of the issues she brings up, which
reveal not always her own points of view, but those of the past and those
around her.
Stein brings these issues up, one might also say, as tantalizing
questions which she later answers in various ways that are not always personal.
As Stein puts it another way, “Anybody can ask a question and anybody can
answer a question, and during war-time they ask questions more than ever
particularly in war-time like this one of 1943.” The seeming triviality of some
of these questions is humorously revealed in her next comments:
Who said Christine aged six of
her mother who is the Italians, Italians
being in occupation it was a
natural question, why the Germans said her
mother, and who are friends of
the Germans, why the Italians said her
mother, and who are friends of
the English said Christine, why the
Americans said her mother, and
is Stalin friends with the Germans said
Christine, no with the English
said her mother, and who are the French
friends of, said Christine, why
no one said the mother.
The incessant child-like questions,
many of which Stein posits, creates a kind of chatter than reveals more than
its speakers sometimes perceive. “So if you ask questions and there is an
answer it is not nevertheless any less illuminating,” Stein concludes, arguing
for her approach.
Not all of these questions are as significant as her discussions of the
differences between wars or even the issue of which country sides with which.
As the reader of Mrs. Reynolds will
remember, Saint Odilie’s predictions were of enormous importance to the
character in that book, and in this work that obscure saint remains of interest
to Stein, if for no other reason than because she made predictions whose
coincidence with current events help her (as it did for Mrs. Reynolds) to have
faith in the future.** Similar to the pattern I describe above, Stein begins
with a simple, strange outcry: “Saint Odile, oh yes Saint Odile. (p. 57)” The
following paragraph on the farmers of Bilignin has nothing to do with her
saint. But a paragraph later, she mentions the subject once more, “And now
about Saint Odilie,” without really picking up the strand again until page 59,
while still refusing to finish her story. Once again on page 69, she brings up
the theme, “So Saint Odile did prophesy.” But she does not pick up the subject
again until page 192, in talking about the liberation of Rome, and Stein
withholds her major statement on Odile’s predictions until page 239.
Similarly (as early as page 31) Stein applies her reading of
Shakespeare’s plays to the war: “There are so many enemies in Shakespeare,”
which unleashes a somewhat long discussion of enemies. But it is not until page
37 that she again brings up Shakespeare as a subject in relationship to his
play, Henry VI. On page 59
Shakespeare returns and reappears from time to time throughout the rest of the
book. In short, Stein uses such subjects sometimes almost as leitmotivs, mentioning them and then
withholding the information before furthering the discussion at later points
along the way when it becomes appropriate, often in different contexts. She
does the same in her several mentions, throughout the text, of James Fennimore
Cooper’s novel, The Spy.
One might perceive this structural device, in fact, as a purposeful clue
to the reader that what Stein has to say on the aforementioned subject will be
returned to from various perspectives, from the viewpoints of many in the
context of sometimes conflicting ideas. Certainly, she applies this approach to
the most sensitive issues that she brings up, including her often clashing
viewpoints that she and her neighbors have about the Vichy government and its
nefarious leader, Philippe Petain. On page 83 she writes: “But to tell about
Petain and all the things one could I could think about him.” Immediately
after, however, she jumps to a long passage about eating honey in the war, a
replacement for sugar that one at first misses, but gradually realizes is every
bit as good as sugar. Clearly one might read this as a kind of metaphor for her
relationship to Petain and the Vichy government, particularly since it was her
acquaintance Bernard Faÿ’s interference that allowed her and Alice to remain in
France during the war. In 1941 she was even asked to translate some of Petain’s
writings. But when she does finally proceed into her discussion of what we now
recognize as a villainous figure who sent thousands of French Jews to their
deaths, it is with the removed restraint of a biographical story about his life
(p. 86), explaining how this retired World War I figure was brought back to
head the French German-sponsored government. Even in that discussion, Stein
expresses a great many doubts about Petain’s positions, particularly with
regard to the French consensus that they as a people “getting slack.” Stein
even appears to mock Faÿ and others in describing what Petain and many of the
French sought, “a sort of heroic rotarianism in every walk of life. I used to
hear Bernard Faÿ talk about this and mixed up with it all was a desire to have
back a king, they thought that kings suit France, most Frenchman prefer a
republic but everybody has to think as they like about that.” Stein clearly
questions Petain’s position while he served as ambassador to Spain:
…he hoped Franco would
do what he thought should done but
did he does he….
Even when she finally sums up his
achievements, it is clear that Stein, like many in the French population is
quite conflicted in her feelings about Petain:
Well anyway there was
the armistice Petain made it and we were
all very glad in a way
and completely sad in a way and we had so
many opinions. I did
not like his way of saying I Philippe Petain,
that bothered me and we
were in the unoccupied area and that was
a comfort.
Despite the fact that others had
suggested to her that there was no difference between the occupied and
unoccupied zones, Stein argues convincingly that “there was a difference all
right. One might not be very free in the unoccupied but we were pretty free and
in the occupied they were not free, the difference between being pretty free
and not free at all is considerable.” Her mixed views, moreover, were similar
to a great many French Jews, as Caroline Moorehad has made clear in her Village of Secrets. In the beginning a
large portion of the population supported Petain, changing their viewpoints as
they grew more and more aware of his roundup of the Jews and his other
capitulations to the Germans.
Several pages later, after some stories that help to prove her point, Stein humorously summarizes her and her neighbors’ attitudes, “And all the time there is Petain, an old man a very old man and mostly nowadays everyone has forgotten all about him” (p. 92).
One has to be careful, accordingly, in how one reads the viewpoints
Stein expresses. For in her conversational, answer-and-question like
structures, she often put statements in contradiction with others, or delays
information that amends and even changes the initial statement. Despite Stein’s
lifetime conviction, for example, that people do not basically change but
continue to repeat each themselves—a view reconfirmed by her constant
repetition of her memory of the young doughboys she has seen in San Francisco
as being representative of the American forces—by work’s end Stein arrives at a
complete about face, recognizing that just like differences between World War I
and World War II, the new American soldiers she encounters in 1944 are very
different in their ability to speak and in their thinking processes than were
the soldiers of World War I.
In other words, Stein uses the tactics of communal thinking to proffer
and explore unanswerable questions with which she is faced by having, as she
and her neighbors were, “an enemy in the house” (p. 67), an enemy, one must
always remember, that would have surely arrested her had they been able to read
her impossible-to-interpret handwriting. It almost a shock when late in the
book (page 229) that Stein writes:
Alice Toklas has just
commenced typewriting this book, as long as
there were Germans
around we left it in manuscript as my hand-
writing is so bad it was
not likely that any German would be able
to read it, but now ell
if they are not gone they area so to speak not
here, we can leave our
windows open and the light burning, dear
me such little things
but they do amount to a lot, and it is.
For suddenly we realize just how
precarious Stein’s and her neighbor’s situations have been all along. And
because of these purposeful expressions of communal sufferings I would argue
strongly against Djuna Barnes caustic dismissal of the book, “You do not feel
that she [Stein] is ever really worried about the sorrows of the people. Her
concerns, at its highest pitch is a well-fed apprehension.”
In fact, despite Stein’s attempts to situate her commentary within the
voice of the community as a whole, which successfully cloaks her writing within
a public commentary that suggests a kind of guarded neutrality about many of
the issues facing her and her neighbors, Stein’s personal feelings and
emotions, nonetheless, quite often come to the surface in a manner similar to
what I just observed about her relief that Toklas had now been able to commence
typing up her manuscript. If these emotional responses, like the questions and
answers she expresses of those around her, remain rather muted, that has as
much to do with the wartime situation—the natural fears of drawing attention to
oneself or each other simply out of a sense of self-protection. As historian
Moorehead makes clear in Village of
Secrets, after the German entry into Vichy France, “orders went out to
mayors and police to report every incident,…even those taking place at night
and on holidays. Posters, propaganda, suspicious people, sounds of aeroplanes,
suggestions of discontents: all and everything was to be noted and reported.
…Under a new edict, law number 979, Jews were no longer allowed to leave their
residences without special papers” (VoS, p. 155).
True, Stein is not an idealist hero like the Protestant and Catholic
church figures and community leaders in the Vivarais-Lignon region. Like even
these remarkable figures, her behavior was sometimes filled with
contradictions. While there may have have been dashing purists living in enemy
territory like Casablanca’s Victor
Laszlo, their exploits were certainly better suited to the cinema fiction.
Despite the German edicts and restrictions, however, Stein remained an
active member of Culoz, beloved clearly by many, sharing her townspeople
worries, fears, and hate of the Nazis, desperately awaiting the arrival of the
Americans. Young men forced to travel to Germany to work in factories—a
euphemism for what Stein well realized meant that they were being sent North
“as hostages, to be put in a pen” (pp. 85-86), stopped by to see her before
they left for advice and encouragement, leaving her, at least in Stein’s
perception, “cheered,” she kissing each of them. Her reaction is one of her
many gems of intense understatement: “Oh, dear me one cannot sleep very
well.” In her nightly and daily walks
through the countryside, Stein often came upon young soldiers, who she very
clearly recognized as maquis, part of the guerilla bands of the French
Resistance. Even while still in Bilignin, Stein makes clear she recognized what
was going on around her:
I go out in the
village of Bilignin there I see all your young
men whatever is
happening they are still there and that is
everything that they
are not gone. But now they are gone and
going. Some of them
betake themselves to the mountains others
are conspiring, the
son of our dentist a boy of eighteen has just
been taken because he
was helping and will he be shot or not.
Oh dear. We all cry.
The connection between the visitation of the young men about to travel
to Germany and her statement that “some of them betake themselves to the
mountains” are meaningful. If a few youths had previously escaped from the
often German-filled villages, such as Culoz, after the Vichy government issued,
in February 1943, the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO)—requiring all men
born in the years 1920-1922 be obliged to serve as workers in Germany—the
Maquis groups grew commensurably. As Moorhead summarizes: “With the STO came
the beginnings of a Marquis.”
As a Jewish homosexual American, Stein had three identities which might
and should have doomed her, and she was, one must always remember, equally
responsible for her companion, Alice.***** Yet nonetheless, she moved about on
long walks throughout the region, joined Alice on train journeys to other
cities, including Belley, Aix-les-Bains, Lyons, and Chambery, cities and
villages in which she would (and in some instances did) certainly face possibly hostile Nazi troops. Stein makes it
clear that she and Alice always updated their papers, obtaining the proper
passes before starting out on such journeys.
Despite whatever agreements she had made with Faÿ and others to ensure
the protection of her Paris apartment with its art noted collection of art, the
Gestapo reportedly did break into Stein’s apartment on Rue Christine,
threatening to cut up and burn the Picassos. As Janet Malcolm reported (in one
of her few truly informing moments among her numerous open attacks on Stein):
A resourceful neighbor
called the French police, who were able
to dispatch the Gestapo men by
asking them for requisition
orders that they did not have.
(When the police arrived, the
Gestapo men were in Stein’s
bedroom trying on her Chinese
coats.) A longer-term reprieve
for the paintings was achieved
by Bernard Faÿ, the
collaborationist who protected Stein and
Toklas during the war, and now
used his influence to protect
the art.******
Numerous other, “minor” “bibelots,
linens, and utensils,” however, were looted.
Stein, probably, had no idea about these dangers while living in Vichy
France (although Faÿ or others may have written her about them), but she most
certainly knew of the dangers of her situation, particularly after the couple
were forced to move from Bilingnin to Culoz. Even that incident reveals both
Stein’s and Toklas’ peril and bravery. When her lease on the Bilingnin house
expired, the owners, despite the fact that, as Stein asserts, they did not need
“it just then” (p. 49), insisted she and Toklas vacate. Stein sued, losing the
case in court. Surely bringing up a court suit during that period was a fairly
rash act. I do not know what lay behind Stein’s thinking; it may be that the
owners had wanted her and Alice out of the house because of their fears of
having Jewish-homosexual-American tenants, but obviously it might have, and may have called attention to Stein’s and
Toklas’ presence. When Toklas visited her lawyer to close the deal on the Culoz
house, which they had found after their legal defeat, she was told what her
lawyer describes as something “rather serious”:
…and now I have something rather
serious to tell you. I was in Vichy
yesterday, and I saw Maurice
Sivain, Sivain had been sous-prefet at
Belley and had been most kind
and helpful in extending our privileges
and our occupation of our house,
and Maurice Sivain said to me, tell
those ladies that they must
leave at once for Switzerland, to-morrow
if possible otherwise they will
be put into a concentration camp. (pp.
49-50)
Clearly shocked by his comments,
Stein queries him about the difficulties of traveling into Switzerland, which
the lawyer assures her “could be arranged.”
You mean pass by fraud I said.
Yes he said, it could be arranged. I felt
very funny.
Some critics, such as Malcolm, have criticized that seemingly
inappropriate word, “funny,” as demonstrating an insignificant response to the
situation. But it is a word that Stein uses time and again throughout Wars I Have Seen, representing, it seems
to me, not what my dictionary describes as the “simple, general term” meaning
something that creates laughter or a sense of mirth, but as what is described
as the “quaint” meaning, as something that “because of its strangeness” amuses
one in a more thoughtful manner. In my larger Random House Unabridged Dictionary, the word “funny” also suggests
something that “arouses suspicion,” a feeling of deceitfulness. For Stein it
hints also of a sickening feeling that hits one in the pit of one’s stomach.
Feeling “funny,” Stein rushes home to tell Alice what she has heard that they
must now do, Stein repeating the phrase, as she arrives home, “I felt a little
less funny but I still did feel funny, and Alice Toklas and Madame d’Aiguy were
there, and I said we are not moving to-morrow we are going to Switzerland.” The
women suffer they meal together, until Stein comes to a decision:
We both felt funny and then
I said. No, I am not going we are
not going, it is better to
go regularly wherever we are sent than
to go irregularly where
nobody can help us if we are in trouble,
no I said, they are always
trying to get us to leave France but
here we are and here we
stay.
If, within the context, this appears like a dangerously sudden decision,
a Steinian-like bluff against what she describes as “realism,” by work’s end we
see the wisdom of her determinedness to stay. But we also must somewhat qualify
our feelings, with the suspicion that Stein, like most of those in France
during this period, did not truly know what might have been her and Alice’s
fates if they had been interred in a concentration camp; even as late as 1943
many French Jews still perceived themselves as protected by their citizenship.
While a few had seen, first hand, the Vichy brutality expressed against the
Jews in Vénissieux detention center in nearby Lyons, Stein and most of the
region’s residents could have had no idea that conditions would have been so
awful, and even fewer could have imagined what lay ahead in the Poland camps
where by 1943 most of the Jews who had not changed their identities and were
not in hiding had been sent. As Moorehead writes of the remaining French Jews
in 1942: “What exactly awaited them in
Poland was still a matter of conjecture; many found it impossible to believe
that it was mass murder. But what was clear was that with the German occupation
of the whole of France, another step had been taken in the delivery of Jews for
deportation. The little optimism that had remained among Vichy’s Jews now died”
(VoS, p. 155).
What is quite apparent is that Stein simply did not comprehend the
dimensions and enormity of German and French anti-Semitism. A few pages later,
when she lashes out against the French and German hatred of the Jews, she
expresses it only in terms of a misunderstanding of Jewish wealth, suggesting
that for her the issue appeared to be centered in the mistaken idea that the
Jews represented an economic power that somehow threatened the lower and middle
classes. If once international bankers such as the Rothchilds had gained
financial wealth, she argues, by the time of industrialism, “the Jewish money
in the world is only a drop in the bucket and all of it together could never
buy anybody to make war or make peace, not a bit.”
…of course everybody must
know it, the big names in industrial-
ism and in the financing
of industrialism are not in any modern
country Jewish and
everybody must know it but nobody wants
to know it, because
everybody likes it to be as it was supposed to
be as for so many
hundreds of years it was so course religion
does get mixed up with
it…and so anti-semitism which has been
with us quite a few
centuries is still something to cling to (p. 56).
Stein was attempting to be logical
in a time that had gone mad.
If nothing else, however, Stein again demonstrates her own views in a
way that shows her to be not only outspoken but brave in a way that goes far
beyond mere “apprehension,” and certainly demonstrates admirable convictions.
Toklas and Stein, moreover, not only faced possible arrest and
imprisonment, but even if left alone, were in some financial peril,
particularly when monies from Paris no longer arrived. Throughout Wars I Have Seen Stein strongly attempts
to cover up any shortages of food she and Alice were suffering, recognizing
that in the Rhone farmland she was so much better off that those who had
remained in the cities. The most significant difficulties regarding foodstuffs
and other ingestibles are represented as minor issues of missing sugar
(replaced by honey), cow milk (replaced by goat’s milk), and Toklas’ craving
for cigarettes (purchased from the Italian soldiers and others). Stein’s
biggest complaints have to do with their limited diet as opposed to any days of
empty stomachs. She does, however, describe the effects of food shortages, as
she does also Mrs. Reynolds, on men.
Even in the camps, Moorehead suggests in Village
of Secrets, the men wasted and died at a faster rate than the women.
The reason for Stein’s continued peregrinations throughout the territory
are casually attributed to their need to obtain food. Throughout Wars I Have Seen Stein depicts a
population forced to be on the move in order to trade dairy goods for meat,
meat for fruit, etc. As she describes the situation: “You have to buy what you
do not want to buy in order to buy what you do want to buy” (p. 115). Many
grocers and other individuals, Stein makes clear, illegally sold goods. Grocers
and farmers had been ordered to deliver a certain amount of their food to the
German occupiers. And Stein admits how difficult it is to live on the rations
one is allotted:
…a good many people had for a
year consciously tried to live on their
rations, but now everybody
finds that there is no use in doing it, no
use at all and so nobody
does, nobody does except funnily enough some
timid grocery storekeepers,
who are afraid. I know one family of them
and they are the only ones
around her who continue to be thin and to
get thinner. Nobody else is,
nobody else is thin and nobody else con-
tinues to get thinner, nobody
not unless they are awfully poor and
because of their situation in
life unable to work. Nobody. (p. 106)
Rather than seeing this as an
example of Stein’s dismissal of those going without, I perceive it simply as
another instance of Stein’s understatement, a purposeful playing-down of the
horrific elements of war- time living.
Stein also downplays any true financial difficulties, only at one point
admitting that she and Toklas were truly facing destitution. Without even
hinting that she and Alice might have been in need of help, she suddenly (p.
111) begins a new story with the words “You never can tell who is going to help
you….” Citing the French people’s thrifty ways, she nonetheless praises their
willingness to “most unexpectedly” be helpful. “After we came into the war it
began to get very difficult extremely difficult, and nobody among my old
friends nobody asked me if we were in any trouble and it was getting a bit of a
trouble….” Almost out of nowhere comes an offer from Paul Genin, a former Lyons
silk manufacturer, who asked if she was having difficulty with money. Admitting
that it had begun to “run pretty low,” Stein is amazed by his generosity of
setting up an account for her and serving as her banker. Six months later,
Stein was able to sell one of her Cezanne paintings, and to pay him back.
In the latter half of Wars I Have Seen, we find more and more
statements that reveal her opinions and attitudes. At several points she
refers, dismissingly, to what describes as “callabo”: “that is one who wanted
to collaborate with the Germans, there were quite a few of them and they are getting
less and less but there still are some and he [the owner of the local
drugstore] is one.” She quotes a German to underline her own hatred for
collaborators: “They [the French] are either honest and intelligent, they are
either collabo and intelligent or they are collabo and honest but I have never
met one who was collabo honest and intelligent.” She even seems to share the excitement of the
villagers who in 1944, began to shave the heads of the girls who kept company
with the Germans (p. 248). And as her narrative progresses she increasingly
comes to describe the mountain Maquis as Robin Hoods, despite the various
opinions and fears of those around her. Later in the book, when finding herself
and Alice sharing a taxi with a Maquis, Stein is absolutely delighted:
To-day we were for the first time
in company with a real live maquis, we
were in a taxi and he came along
to go to Culoz, and we were delighted, he
had the tricolor on his shoulder
rand looked bronzed and capable….(p. 233)
In the next paragraph, she expresses
herself even more clearly: “The maquis were pretty wonderful of course now they
are armed and more or less superior in numbers to the Germans….”
But her naiveté and lack of inside knowledge continues to be apparent,
even when, after the Germans have abandoned the railway center, and she and
Alice share in the village celebrations. Told that a resistance fighter (the
French Forces of the Interior, F. F. I) had been hiding in Culoz, she seems
quite amazed. “Well honneur aux maquis, one cannot say it too often…,” she
concludes (p. 243).
What is most touching about Stein’s work, however, is her increasing
impatience with the war and her growing desire to witness the American
liberators. She even determines that she will end her work when she encounters
her first American. When Stein does hear word of Americans in Belley, where she
immediately rushes to a nearby hotel in which she is told they are gathered,
her reaction so silly that she sounds almost like a schoolgirl writing in her
diary “Oh happy day, that is all that I can say oh happy day” (p. 244). Such an
utter expression of excitement hardly squares with Stein’s noted inability to
care for those whom she encounters.
Fortunately, she does not end her book with her first meeting, but
continues in an epilogue to describe her pleasure of talking to the soldiers,
asking them from what state they hail, and discussing with them the many ideas
they so readily and openly—as opposed to the soldiers of World War
I—express.*******
It is also fascinating that a great many
of the soldiers she meets not only know who Stein is but claim to have read her
poems in school. Given the quality of education these days, and the complete
lack of any contemporary figures in most secondary educational programs, it
seems almost miraculous that the military men of World War II would not only be
so excited to be in her company and but would ask her to sign her name on the
American dollars they handed her. Stein, herself, attempts to explore the
reasons just why these soldiers are so different from the others she has
previously met. Perhaps Stein had helped to bring about some of those changes
by working so emphatically against the tropes of 19th century to
create a 20th sensibility—despite some of horrors that came with
that transformation. Even if Stein might be guilty of a bit of fictitious
reporting here, it is so endearing that we desire to believe the fact that
Stein once represented a figure that is now, in so many ways, maligned. Given
Stein’s reconnoiter with the Americans in this volume, it is almost inevitable
that her next war-time book, her final contribution to literature would be a
dialogue between American soldiers, the intellectually challenging, while
utterly patriotic Brewsie and Willie.
*Stein’s Elmer Harden, presumably,
was the same author of one of the most acclaimed works on World War I. His An American Poilu (published by Little,
Brown in 1919) attempted to describe the horrors of the war in terms of sound:
“If the city of New York should topple in the sky and fall to the ground, the
crash would be like a whisper to the racket of that dawn [June 10 or June 13,
1918]. I wonder that the entire regiment didn’t perish from the mere sound
alone. Its fury turned Jehovah’s wrath into a shepherd’s piping and ten
thousand Wagners, ‘ragging’ ten thousand orchestras, into the murmur of a
parlor seashell. But what’s the use—I only amuse myself—you can’t hear it. I’ve
already forgotten myself how monstrous it was. Memory cannot hold so much
noise.” Clearly this young man, serving in the French army, did not see World
War I as a trivial event or a “nice” war in the sense of its personal
consequences. His observation, rather, had to do with the sense of heroism that
its survivors brought home with them.
**Stein relates coincidences with
superstition and faith (see page 18), which are particularly appealing to those
“between babyhood and fourteen.” Yet coincidences and predictions obviously
fascinate Stein throughout her writing and, in particular, in these war-time
writings.
***Stein rightfully connects these
issues with the struggles in North Africa, which some argue should have been at
the center of the defeated French forces instead of the country’s agreement to
an Armistice. In fact, the success of Free French, De Gaulle-led forces in
areas of Africa, is part of the reason that German forces were introduced, in
revenge, into Vichy France. The response to the November 8, 1942 attack by
British and American forces in North Africa, three days the Germans entered
Vichy France. The free garrison at Brazzaville, to where Louis Renault and Rick
Blaine head at the end of 1942’s Casablanca,
accordingly, is directly connected to the reasons why Stein and Toklas had to
bear with Germans sleeping in the Culoz living room.
****Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in
Vichy France (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). See my essay on this book
below.
*****Marjorie Perloff has argued
that, in Stein’s case, her lesbianism had nothing to do with the dangers her
faced her. Simply being elderly Jewish women was “quite enough.” Perhaps this
is true in Vichy, France, but once the Germans had entered into the form Vichy
territory, Stein and Toklas would have been equally arrested for being
homosexuals. I think it is important to remember, if nothing else, that gays
were also arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis.
******Janet Malcolm, “Strangers in
Paradise,” The New Yorker, November
13, 2006. Always on the lookout for another criticism or scandal she might hurl
at Stein, Malcolm, in response to a letter mentioning a Gestapo raid and
arrestment of 40 children in an orphanage near Culoz, in the village of
Izieu—an incident in which there is no evidence at all that Stein knew anything
about—wrote to Genin’s stepdaughter, Joan Chapman (on the suggestion of Stein
critics Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns), in an attempt to discern whether or not
Stein might have known of this event. Chapman wrote back, dismissing Stein’s
knowledge about the Izieu raid:
No, we had no idea that a group
of Jewish children were hidden in a boarding school
at Izieu, they were indeed
deported, we only found out months later. I’m sure Gertrude
and Alice had no idea of the
incident at the time. Izieu is about 20 K from Belley
and 30 K from Culoz. In those
days the only way of getting to and fro was walking
or on a bike, people were pretty
isolated from each other. Anything confidential
was never mentioned by phone.
Indeed, Stein describes herself was
only walking or occasionally taking a train and never mentions Izieu in Wars I Have Seen. Chapman, however, also
wrote Malcolm of another event, the arrival of two young boys, one, a five-year
old Jewish-German orphan named Manfred Iudas. Caring for the children, Chapman
and her mother evidently grew quite fond of the boy and had decided to adopt
him. Consulting their friend Stein, the Chapmans apparently were warned against
adopting him, with Stein insisting that he “must be adopted by a Jewish
family.” Malcolm immediately jumps on this statement, which she presents almost
as an “edict,” suggesting that, once again, “Stein did not behave well in the
Second World War.” Malcolm melodramatically writes: “The story chills the
blood….. To propose that a Jewish child be sent to a Jewish family at a time
when everywhere in France Jews were being rounded up was an act of almost
inconceivable callousness. Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns agreed that Stein’s
advice was inexplicable and terrible.”
In reality, it is soon revealed, when Malcolm later meets with Chapman,
that when Stein had argued for Jewish adoption, had not at all put the child’s
life at risk, and the child was, in fact, adopted by a Jewish family only after
liberation, “when Jews were no longer in danger.” The Izieu raid did not take
place in 1943, as reported by the letter writer, but on April 6, 1944, four
months before France was liberated. In short Stein had done absolutely nothing
to suggest she was callous or thoughtless regarding the Jewish children.
Moorehead, in her Village of Secrets,
also describes this event, a shocking one since it came so close to liberation,
and the school was located in an isolated region, set atop a hill. The school
was also said to be protected by “sympathetic Vichy officials.” The attack was
directed by the notorious Klaus Barbie.
That does not stop Malcolm, however, as she madly trudges forward trying
to dredge a story out of her non-event. Why, she queries, would Stein, a
non-practicing Jew, have argued for a Jewish position of “isolationism,” the
idea that a Jew should marry only a Jew? Her argument is a nearly pointless one
as she searches the records vainly, quoting Toklas, who converted to
Catholicism after Stein’s death, as saying that she and Stein ever thought of
themselves as being among a religious minority.
Forget the fact that Stein, as she demonstrates in Wars I Have Seen very much understood herself, practicing or
non-practicing, as a homosexual Jew in danger of imprisonment, it seems
absolutely ludicrous to try to explore an issue that seems to have very little
to do with the theory of Jewish isolationism. Even I might have argued, had I
been there, that a child—one of thousands, who had been suddenly torn from his
Jewish family, beliefs, and roots—might benefit from being raised by a Jewish
family, particularly after the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews had lost
their lives. Given the intense values of family and tradition in Jewish
culture, I would think that anybody who hadn’t suggested what Stein did, would
have been the most insensitive of human beings. And clearly the Genins agreed,
for they found a Jewish couple to adopt Manfred. Stein’s religious practices,
or lack of them, I would argue, have absolutely nothing to do with her
intelligent and sensitive suggestion—particularly given the fact that she might
easily have been among the dead simply for being who she was.
Finally, as Moorehead makes clear, “…There was a strong feeling in the
French Jewish community that these children [those temporarily protected by
Protestant and Catholic families] needed to rediscover their Jewishness,
receive a Jewish upbringing, become, as they saw it, “un home Juif nouveau,” a new Jewish man.”
*******Some of her soldier friends,
recognizing that they are different from their father’s generation, attribute
it to the Depression, during which they or their parents were forced into
fields of labor in which they did not take pleasure ; the new generation, they
argue, are determined to find most satisfaction in their lives. Others argue
that the rise of radio and its broadcasts made them a more intelligent and
knowledgeable audience that their more isolated ancestors.
Los Angeles, September 4-5, 2014
Reprinted from EXPLORINGFictions (September 2014) and PiPPoetry Blog (January 2015).
