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

Pontigny and Cerisy-la-Salle evoke a particular tradition of intellectual debate highlighted by Jacques Derrida in a text translated for this volume. What is less familiar is the interlude during the Occupation when many of the leading lights of French cultural life found themselves in exile in the United States. Gustave Cohen and Jean Wahl were chiefly responsible for following up the suggestion from Helen Patch, an enterprising professor of French at Mount Holyoke, that the College offered an appropriate venue and atmosphere in which to create a 'Pontigny en Amérique', to maintain continuity with the pre-war gatherings at the abbey in Burgundy. The décades held at Mount Holyoke between 1942 and 1944 were important intellectual and artistic encounters reflecting not just 'la France éternelle' as Cohen had it, but also the interdisciplinary interaction between French and American cultures. This volume, dedicated to the memory of Rachel Bespaloff, who taught at Mount Holyoke from 1942 until her suicide in 1949, presents the proceedings of a symposium held at the College in November 2003 to revive memories of the wartime gatherings. It is something of a mixed bag, mingling personal reminiscences of former students, historical accounts of the sessions, sketches of the key contributors such as Cohen himself (plus poignant tributes to Bespaloff), and reflections on some of the debates that took place during the three gatherings. Out of some 400 contributors only a few are represented here, and in his introduction, Christopher Benfey draws attention to key sessions such as that on the nature of poetry in 1943 —which brought together Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore before an audience that counted Rachel Bespaloff, Ruben Brower and John Peale Bishop —and the exchange in 1944 between artists and art critics including André Masson and Louise Bourgeois, joined by the Italian art historian Lionello Venturi. Laurent Jeanpierre provides a splendid history of the way the torch was passed from Burgundy to Massachusetts, where the flame was tended among many others by Hannah Arendt and the exiled mathematician Jacques Hadamard (on whom Donal O'Shea gives an illuminating paper). Stanley Cavell and Jeffrey Mehlman debate the contribution of Wallace Stevens; Romy Golan discusses Lionello Ventura's time in America; Mary Ann Caws takes Robert Motherwell's contribution as a starting-point for a fascinating discussion of the painter's art and writings. The passion for France is the focus of Helen Solterer's evocation of Gustave Cohen's activities; the politics of resistance and terror inform Jeffrey Mehlman's comparison of the medievalism of Cohen with that of Aragon. Andrew Lass considers the confluence of linguistics and anthropology which was fostered by the presence at Mount Holyoke of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. The coincidence of studies on the Iliad by both Bespaloff and Simone Weil is highlighted by Christopher Benfey and debated by Jerome Kohn and Elizabeth Young Bruehl in the light of Arendt's work. The volume contains rewarding nuggets of intellectual history and scholarly reflection.