Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944

Part VI: Remembering Rachel Bespaloff

VI Remembering Rachel Bespaloff There follows a scene of starry serenity in which the human accent, however, is still audible. Priam asks Helen to tell him the names of the most famous of the Achaian warriors that he can see in the enemy camp. The battlefield is quiet; a few steps away from each other, the two armies stand face-to-face awaiting the single combat that will decide the outcome of the war. Here, at the very peak of the Iliad, is one of those pauses, those moments of contemplation, whenthespellofBecomingisbroken,andtheworldofaction,withallitsfury,dipsintopeace. TheplainwherethewarriorherdwasragingisnomorethanatranquilmiragetoHelenandthe old king. Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad (1947) 249 Rachel Bespaloff had an affinity for despair, and she may well have found kinship in Hannah Arendt’s talk on Kafka at Pontigny-en-Amérique in 1944. We have no record of her response to Arendt’s talk. We may never know the extent of the friendship between these two extraordinary thinkers, but it seems fitting to begin our remembrance of Bespaloff by recalling the constellation that includes Arendt, Kafka, and Benjamin, and, by extension, Bespaloff herself. In her collection of essays MeninDarkTimes, Arendt reprinted some of her previous writings on the illuminations of men and women whose “uncertain, flickering, and often weak light”would kindle hope even to those whose eyes were used to darkness. Arendt’s collection, which includes essays on Benjamin and Brecht, echoes the conversations in exile between those two thinkers, who talked, among other things, about Kafka’s stance toward modernity and the uncanny portrayal of alienation and powerlessness in his writing. Both refugees may have been on Arendt’s mind when, in her essay on Benjamin, she quoted Kafka’s entry in his diary of October 19, 1921: “Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”Directly following this quote, Arendt inserts an excerpt from a letter Benjamin wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem on April 17, 1931: “Like one who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling. But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue.” At the Pontigny-en-Amérique gathering at Mount Holyoke, Arendt introduced her listeners to Kafka in an essay later published in PartisanReview in the fall of 1944. Again, she echoed Brecht’s and Benjamin’s conversation about Kafka’s understanding of modernity . Kafka, she suggested,“wanted to build up a world in accordance with human needs and human dignities, a world where man’s actions are determined by himself and which is ruled by his laws and not by mysterious forces emanating from above or from below.” At the time Arendt wrote these words, Bespaloff considered the attachment to the world in Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague in light of the “naked death, in a storm of cold violence” that had become the norm. We conclude this volume with a tribute to Rachel Bespaloff, whose life embodies not just the physical and mental experience of exile“in the storm of cold violence,”but also that desire for opening a space for those conversations and encounters that make hope possible in times of war and its aftermath. Bespaloff was not reconciled to the world in which she lived. This inability to reconcile the terror with the vision for a better world manifested itself in Bespaloff ’s thinking and writing about transcendence as a possible potential for mending the rupture caused as much by historical circumstances as by existential angst. The relation between terror and a vision for a better world, which is at the heart of Arendt’s reading of Kafka, surfaced again during a roundtable on November 9, 2003, at the Pontigny symposium at Mount Holyoke College. Different generations of students and scholars spoke of Bespaloff’s intellectually sharp and elegant prose and her demanding demeanor as a teacher and as a mother. We present here a collection of texts and reminiscences that rekindle not just the memories of Bespaloff as an enduring thinker, but also the relevance of her writing for present and future generations...