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

Introduction: A Violence from Within

1 Introduction A Violence from Within Christopher Benfey If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one. Wallace Stevens,“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” (1936) Engagéesdansundevenircomplexe,réalitéetsensibilitésecréentetsedétruisentréciproquement ,sontl’unepourl’autrel’occasionetl’obstacle,leprétexteetlafin.Cetteluttenousépuise; nous cherchons le repos dans une vérité ultime. Nous cherchons...mais ici la recherche et le but se confondent. [Engaged in a complicated process of becoming, reality and sensibility are created and destroyed reciprocally, and are for one another both occasion and obstacle, pretext and purpose. This struggle exhausts us; we search for repose in an ultimate truth. We search...but in this case the search and the goal blur into one another.] Rachel Bespaloff (1938) Pontigny began for me with a faded snapshot, a freeze frame in time. I stumbled across it among the swatch of photographs in the center of Peter Brazeau’s Parts of a World, his fragmentary “oral history” of people who had known the poet Wallace Stevens. The black and white image, slightly blurred by bright sunlight, shows Stevens, in his habitual business suit—the uniform of an insurance executive from Hartford, Connecticut—seated on the lawn by a brick building beside a diminutive man with wavy hair and glasses. Brazeau’s caption reads: “Jean Wahl and Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke College in August 1943, when Stevens lectured on ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet.’”1 Now, I was familiar with the lecture—a difficult meditation on the task of poetry to lift the spirit “in a leaden time”—and I knew the location, since I have taught at Mount Holyoke for a dozen years. The Beaux Arts building in the background of the photograph is Porter Hall, where I happen to have my office. But who was Jean Wahl, and what were these men doing on the lawn at Mount Holyoke on a summer afternoon in the middle of World War II? To find answers to those questions, I went first to the Mount Holyoke Ar- 2 ChristopherBenfey chives, then to various books and articles, and finally to a seventeenth-century chateau in the heart of Normandy. Along the way, I came across more and more pieces of a puzzle, but its full dimensions and image long remained a mystery. I had a name, though:“Pontigny.”And this turned out to be the key. Pontigny, I learned, was a Cistercian abbey in the Burgundy region of France. Beginning in the summer of 1910, a full-bearded humanist with medievaltastesnamedPaulDesjardins —imagineaFrenchWilliamMorris—would convene an international group of writers, thinkers, and artists for ten-day informal conversations, or décades, on ambitious themes like “Man and Time” or “The Will to Evil” or “Is Civilization Mortal?” Oddly enough, as the British scholar David Steel has discovered, Desjardins had drawn his idea for these Jean Wahl and Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke College, August 1943. From Peter Brazeau, ed., Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 174. Reprinted with permission of Peter R. Hanchak. Introduction: AViolencefromWithin 3 summer gatherings from an American model,the famous Chautauqua assemblies , held in an old Indian settlement in southwestern New York since 1874.2 The Chautauqua model—combining adult education and recreation with visits from intellectual luminaries such as William James, at a rural site remote from formal academic institutions—appealed to Desjardins. Desjardins’s specific contribution to the model was his vision of the Latin Middle Ages as a time of international (and generally Christian) humanistic exchange. His décades were simultaneously nostalgic—for a time in the distant past more culturally unified—and visionary, proposing and enacting an international community of artists and thinkers. The mood established by Desjardins, as Jacques Derrida remarks in his essay on Pontigny as“counter-institution,”was both anti-academic and vigorously intellectual, with philosophy as the reigning discipline even when the subject was ostensibly artistic or scientific. Desjardins inspired great affection and allegiance from his invited guests. Marcel Proust in his childhood had known and admired Desjardins, and mentions him in his novel In Search of Lost Time.3 French writers dominated at the Pontigny sessions;André Gide and PaulValéry were regular...