American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman (review)

American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman. Thomas Carl Austenfeld. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. 189. $34.50.

According to conventional wisdom, Paris during the 1920s and Spain in 1936-39 were for American expatriate writers the main sources of cultural capital and political experience, respectively. Of course some Americans made London their residence, others Rapallo, still others, however briefly, Moscow. As Thomas Carl Austenfeld reminds us, most canons draw our attention not only towards Paris and Spain but towards men rather than women, a generation born before the turn of the century rather than those who were to reach adulthood after World War I, and a handful of "major" writers at the expense of what he calls "major minor" writers. Austenfeld's valuable and provocative study of Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, and Lillian Hellman not only shifts the emphasis towards Austria and Germany rather than France and Spain but attempts, by grouping these writers together for the first time, to discover a new lost generation.

Yet despite his scrupulous attention to historical detail, or perhaps precisely because of it, Austenfeld tends to undermine his own argument. As he points out, for example, Hellman's visits to Germany were "brief." Of these the most significant was her trip to Berlin in 1937—a rather cloak and dagger affair according to her account in Pentimento (1973)—to deliver $50,000 to the antifascist cause. Although this experience would be used four years later in her play Watch on the Rhine (1941) it is worth remembering that it lasted—literally—only a few hours and that Watch on the Rhine, which was first performed eight months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, is far less about German fascism than the need for Americans to awaken from their isolationist complacencies. Austenfeld refers to what he calls the "Berlin-Moscow-Spain kernel of her prewar experiences" but concedes that Hellman's "political apprenticeship" was in Spain and her lamentably long sympathies were for Moscow (88, 87). And despite the influence of her experiences in Spain and the Soviet Union on her relationship with the House of Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, Hellman had tackled the witch-hunting propensities of American Puritanism in her brilliant play about two women schoolteachers accused of "sinful sexual knowledge of one another," The Children's Hour (1934), before she visited either of those countries.

Similarly, Stafford lived and studied in Heidelberg for only the winter of 1936-37, although she did return in 1949 to write some articles and stories for the New Yorker. According to some reminiscences published in Mademoiselle in 1960 and quoted by Austenfeld, Stafford "made the full Nazi salute and solemnly roared 'Heil Hitler!'" with her fellow students before her lectures because she was politically "as green as grass" (81). In part because they were somewhat older, Porter and Boyle were less politically naïve when they visited Germany during the 1930s. Nevertheless, as Austenfeld points out neither knew the German language very well. Porter's formative political experiences had occurred much earlier in Mexico and Boyle's "deep expatriatism," to use Austenfeld's felicitous phrase, was spent in France, not Germany (45).

Given the brief or even superficial nature of their German and Austrian experiences, it is hard to see how these writers could have responded to the Nazis with the kind of "ethic of care" Austenfeld attributes to them. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Annette Baier and others, Austenfeld contrasts the main characteristics of this "ethic"—its subjects' "refusal to choose between two starkly opposed options" and its "privileging of the immediate over the remote"—to "the submission of even personal relationships to rules" that characterizes totalitarian ideologies (154). However, the two works by these writers that deal with Nazi ideology or...