Francesca Wade’s elegant new biography, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, is composed in two parts: the first, a relatively conventional biography in which the events of Stein’s life are interwoven with her sometimes fraught, and often ruthless, relationships and, of course, the writing of her books; the second, the story of the “afterlife,” comprising a fascinating account of the Stein archive, held by Yale University, together with stories of her partner Alice Toklas’s anguished conflicts over which documents should be accessible to the public and under what conditions.
Much of the second part is devoted to Toklas, who outlived Stein by close to three decades, and much of it recounts the use made by previous scholars of the materials held in the archive. Here, Wade takes the opportunity to reflect on the ethical dilemmas facing the biographer when she encounters unpublished papers that contain private, sometimes intimate, information.
This book tells its stories simply and engagingly, bearing the weight of its considerable scholarship lightly, without undue polemical material. In one episode, however, Wade debates with Barbara Will’s 2011 book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (reviewed by Sarah Dowse for Inside Story in 2011). Will sought to explain why Gertrude Stein undertook translations of the speeches of Philippe Pétain, chief of the collaborationist Vichy state during Germany’s occupation of France. Wade takes issue with her assessment.
Where Wade’s story of Stein’s life includes stories about the full range of her acquaintances — friends and professional associates — Will’s is a forensic investigation of her relationship with a single person: Bernard Faÿ, whom Toklas described as Stein’s dearest friend from the mid-1920s onwards. Faÿ was professor of American history at the Collège de France, a senior official in the Vichy administration, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale following the dismissal and internment of his Jewish predecessor Julien Cain, and thereafter charged with heading the Vichy anti-Masonic operations.
Will’s book is composed in alternating chapters focused on these two friends. It is a compositional strategy that lends itself to the implication of guilt by association: as Wade writes, this implication was taken as fact in the reception for Will’s argument, with the result that “articles in the mainstream press” began to refer to Stein’s “collaborationist activities” and place her alongside notorious collaborators such as L.-F. Céline.
In rebutting these conclusions Wade addresses her objections not to Will but to Will’s readers. Yet it needs to be said that Will leaves herself open to this representation by referring to Stein’s “vocal Pétainism”: Stein “chose,” she writes, “to commit her writing and her name to the service of the Vichy regime. She chose it out of conviction and out of hope.” And again, citing examples, “Stein referred to herself as a propagandist for France.” In two long chapters Stein’s political leanings are represented as “converging” with Faÿ’s increasingly hardline arguments against the policies of Léon Blum’s Popular Front and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, both of which he considered to be comparable (confusingly, as Will writes) to both fascism and communism.
Wade, by contrast, represents Stein’s political ideas as consistently inconsistent, and stresses that it is “difficult to assess [them] coherently.” We are told that “throughout the war, Stein’s work was sought out by some of the leaders of the intellectual resistance,” that in the early parts of the German occupation she was published by some anti-fascist outlets, and that she privately admired the young men of the maquis — the rural Resistance fighters — in her region. Wade finds further evidence for her views in Stein’s wartime books Paris France and Wars I have Seen. To read Wade and Will together, therefore, is to read something like a prosecution of the charge of Vichy sympathies and a defence of a “radical” author potentially victim of the regime she purportedly supported.
I don’t intend to arbitrate between Will and Wade, but instead to tease out what is at stake in their disagreement. The fact of Stein’s Vichy translations is not in contention: it is what they actually mean that is at issue. Wade is inclined to excuse them because, “apart from his decision to sign the Armistice, Stein never praised Pétain’s actions or policies” and because “her attachment to Pétain was primarily iconographic.” For Will, by contrast, Stein’s support for the Vichy regime was unambiguous, and her title (Unlikely Collaboration) suggests that Stein was not only “nostalgic,” as Wade puts it, for a “return” to a traditional France following the Armistice but also, more damningly, that she was that most reviled of wartime figures, a “collaborator.”
The dispute between Wade and Will carries echoes of the far more ruthless dispute that took place in France in the immediate postwar period. At that time, people thought to have been collaborators were subject to summary punishment if not execution at the hands of the Resistance. De Gaulle put a stop to these purges by instituting official trials in which the question was clear: did the accused commit treason by collaboration?
In both the extra-legal and the legal prosecutions there lies a tacit assumption that the Resistance represented loyalty to France, that the majority of the population was loyal in this sense — loyal, presumably, to a “certain idea of France” — and that the betrayals were committed by a few bad apples. This assumption was propounded by De Gaulle in his negotiations with the Allies to ensure that France was counted among them. It was thereafter adopted as the official history. France’s civil war took the form of a dispute over control of the narrative. And that is what we have between Wade and Will.
Was Gertrude Stein loyal to her adopted country? She would have thought of herself as loyal to an ideal of France grounded in nostalgia for an agrarian, pre-revolutionary past, and she thought of Pétain as incarnating this ideal. In this respect, Will makes her case persuasively. She is also persuasive in her account of the sway exerted on Stein by Bernard Faÿ’s politics, which took this ideal in the direction of his own Catholic, royalist views. These views explain his rabid anti-Masonic activities. There is no indication that Stein took any interest in his opinions on this matter, and she appears to have been very careful to avoid the issue of anti-Semitism, this being what made her vulnerable to Pétainist persecution.
But the question of loyalty does arise in relation to an astonishing postscript to the story of her translations of Pétain’s speeches. It is thought likely that Faÿ encouraged this project; he certainly spoke directly to Pétain about it, as he did to Ménétrel, Pétain’s personal physician and confidant, and appears to have obtained official approval for it. The project remained incomplete and unpublished.
Faÿ, meanwhile, lost some of his influence when Pierre Laval took over decision-making powers from Pétain, but was still in a position where — alerted to the impending danger by Stein’s friend Picasso — he could intervene to save the Stein art collection from requisition by the Gestapo.
Nevertheless, after the war, he was tried, convicted, imprisoned and stripped of his citizenship, along with Pétain and other senior officials. Stein wrote to the court in his defence, claiming that he was “a consummate patriot,” but with no effect, and she died shortly after. So there is no sense in which she was an active participant in what happened next. In order to help Faÿ escape from prison, his friends asked Alice Toklas for funds. Unbeknownst to the other executors or legatees of Stein’s will, she sold two paintings, using the proceeds to enable Faÿ’s cause. The escape was successful, and Faÿ lived out the rest of his life in Switzerland. Toklas believed that she had fulfilled “a sacred trust,” that was “entwined” with the publication of the manuscripts” as “Gertrude’s last wishes.”
Of what was Gertrude Stein guilty? Will condemns her for her close friendship with Faÿ and for what she calls a “propaganda project in support of Vichy France,” referencing as evidence of that project her translations of Pétain’s speeches. In order to understand that project, we need to bear in mind that her intended audience was American. It was not an intervention in the internal politics of a divided France, despite Will’s claim that she “willingly [participated] in the Vichy propaganda machine.” Its aim most certainly was to persuade the Americans that the France of Vichy should be supported when America was quietly having a bet each way. She hoped to present Pétain’s “national revolution” “as a cause worthy of both support and emulation” — this on behalf not of France’s present so much as of America’s future.
Yet it is clear that Stein was “out of her depth” in matters political and ideological, and ignorant of the consequences of adopting a Fascist programme for reform. In view of this, Jean Wahl’s assessment of Stein’s views as unbelievably naive seems both pointed and understated.
Speaking as a communist — though no doubt fondly, since their friendship remained undiminished — Picasso relied on a familiar ideologically driven binary opposition between two sharply delineated “sides”: “Gertrude was a real fascist. She always had a weakness for Franco. Imagine! For Pétain, too. You know she wrote speeches for Pétain. Can you imagine it? An American, a Jewess, what’s more.” This is hardly accurate, but it shows how support for the right in the Nazi era could lead seamlessly to the angry response to Will’s book reported by Wade. There too we read that Stein was accused of “pro-Fascist ideology.” Stein became in this reception a “collaborationist” monster. Perhaps a more accurate answer to our question, of what was she guilty, is simply that she has disappointed her readers. From a queer hero, a feminist icon, or a triumphantly experimental writer, Stein is discovered to be flawed.
This disappointment is evident in both books: in Will’s initial motivation for investigating Stein’s politics — “[Stein] seemed the least likely person to write propaganda in support of an authoritarian regime” — as well as in Wade’s claims of Stein’s Resistance sympathies. It is also evident in Wade’s equivocation concerning the fact that the translations were not completed or published: did she “actively decide” not to publish them (this would indicate her late change of heart) or did the project “falter” because of Pétain’s fall (indicating that she might otherwise have pursued the project)?
I too was shocked when I first read Will’s book, but it made me reflect on the many instances of reactionary modernism we know of. This category includes a broad spectrum, from outright support of Nazi policies and actions (Céline, Ezra Pound) to moderate views opposing progressive politics. The story of that range of modernist art practice is not adequately told through recourse to an individual’s psychology or her friendships. In Wade’s intelligent and more nuanced reading, Gertrude Stein takes her (shifting) place somewhere on this spectrum, certainly not at either of the extremes.
Affective attachment or abreaction: these may be the risks of biography, for both writer and reader. I came to dislike Gertrude Stein in the course of reading Francesca Wade’s book: it is, I am sure, the very precision, the thoroughness of her research and the readability of her stories that allow the personality to emerge. It is certainly better to read a good book about her than to have tangled with her vanity and self-absorption, and certainly better to engage intellectually with the challenges of her writing. But this kind of personal dislike is rather different from the condemnation of her politics that Simone Weil would have characterised as self-righteous.
A telling contrast between the epilogues to the two books clarifies the source of these responses. In her epilogue, Francesca Wade adopts the biographer’s trope of following in the footsteps of her subject; she “marvel[s] at the reach of Stein’s legacy and the passion she inspired in her admirers,” and reports bringing Stein to life again in her pilgrimage. It is sentimental writing, testament to the bond that so often arises from the commitment of a biographer to her subject. Barbara Will had written a previous book on Stein’s aesthetics, and I surmise that Unlikely Collaboration comes from the place of love betrayed. Her epilogue is devoted to Bernard Faÿ’s life in exile: her book performs the act of rejecting Stein. •
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
By Francesca Wade | Faber | $39.99 | 480 pages
