Barbara Will - Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma

UNLIKELY COLLABORATION

GENDER AND CULTURE SERIES

GENDER AND CULTURE

A SERIES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner, Series Editors

Carolyn G. Heilbrun (19262003) and

Nancy K. Miller, Founding Editors

UNLIKELY COLLABORATION

GERTRUDE STEIN,

BERNARD FA, AND

THE VICHY DILEMMA

BARBARA WILL

Columbia University Press New York

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2011 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52641-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Will, Barbara

Unlikely collaboration : Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fa, and

the Vichy dilemma / Barbara Will.

p. cm.(Gender and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15262-4 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-52641-8 (e-book)

1. Stein, Gertrude, 18741946Friends and associates. 2. Fa,

Bernard, 1893Friends and associates. 3. Politics and

literatureFranceHistory20th century. 4. France

Intellectual life20th century. I. Title. II. Series.

PS3537.T323Z927 2011

818.5209dc22

[B] 2011013191

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FOR MICHAEL

Verweile doch

CONTENTS

Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, with Auntie, during World War I

Bernard Fa, in uniform, at Verdun during World War I

Gertrude Stein and Bernard Fa at Bilignin, France (1937)

Gertrude Stein on the cover of Time magazine (1933)

Courtyard and main building of the Collge de France, Paris

Advertisement for Fas lecture at the Collge de France

Stein, Toklas, and Fa at Bilignin (1930s)

Philippe Ptain propaganda poster

The 1940 Statut des Juifs (from Journal Officiel de la Rpublique franaise)

The 1941 Statut des Juifs, announcing census of Jews in unoccupied zone (from Journal Officiel de lEtat franais)

Steins home at Culoz, France

Gnral Benot Fornel de La Laurencie (19391940)

Portrait of Bernard Fa (early 1940s)

Bernard Fa at his desk (early 1940s)

Grand Orient de France during German Occupation

Advertisement for Vichy propaganda film Les Forces Occultes(1943)

Bernard Fa giving an anti-Masonic lecture at the Salle Wagram in Paris (1941)

Gertrude Stein and American GIs at Berchtesgaden (1945)

New York Times announcement of Fas escape from prison (1951)

Gonzague de Reynold, in eighteenth-century breeches

Bernard Fa in Fribourg, Switzerland (1960s)

T HE GENESIS of this book lies in a few yellowing manuscript notebooks tucked away in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Their pages are filled with Gertrude Steins slanted, notoriously bad handwriting and with manifold corrections in the tiny, precise script of Alice Toklas. Deciphering the writing is hard enough: no one who has ever read a Stein manuscript has found it an enjoyable task. But reading these notebooks is nothing compared with trying to comprehend them. For what they contain are 180 translated pages of the speeches of Philippe Ptain, the head of the Nazi-occupied Vichy regime in France during World War II. They are evidence of a propaganda project in support of Vichy France that Stein began in 1941, one she hoped somehow to sell to a skeptical American public.

What was Gertrude Stein doing translating the speeches of Ptain into English? The unlikelihood of this project was clear to me from the start. Stein, a Jewish American experimental writer and famous patron of modernist art, seemed the least likely person to write propaganda in support of an authoritarian regime. The considerable reputation she currently enjoys as an intellectual and artistic iconoclast was almost impossible to reconcile with the image of Stein as a Vichy-regime propagandist. This project began, then, with a central mystery. And the mystery only deepened when, following the lead of others, I found myself looking more closely at Steins friendship with the man who may have drawn her into the orbit of Vichy, a Frenchman named Bernard Fa. Described by Alice Toklas as Steins dearest friend during her life, Fa was a striking figure. A writer, translator, historian, and art patron, Fa was also the first professor of American studies in France as well as the youngest person ever elected to the elite Collge de France. He would also become one of the central figures in Ptains Vichy regime, a role that would eventually land him in prison. If Gertrude Stein was an unlikely propagandist for this regime, so, it appears, was the scholar and aesthete Bernard Fa.