Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (review)

This book is part of a growing body of scholarship that traces the itineraries of right-wing French intellectuals active in the interwar period and complicit in collaboration with the Vichy regime, in order to attempt better to understand their seemingly paradoxical choices and opinions under the Occupation. (Other recent examples include Antoine Compagnon's Le Cas de Bernard Faÿ, du Collège de France à l'indignité nationale (Paris: Gallimard, 2009) and Alice Kaplan's The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).) Barbara Will's book differs in so far as it brings two such figures, Bernard Faÿ and Gertrude Stein, into dialogue, interrogating not only their individual itineraries but also the role played by their relationship in the articulation of their opinions. The book is a development of Will's previous work on Stein, which includes a fascinating article on Stein's (unpublished) wartime translations of Pétain's speeches from Paroles aux français: messages et écrits 1934-1941 (Lyon: H. Lardanchet, 1941) (see B. Will, 'Lost in Translation: Stein's Vichy Collaboration', Modernism/Modernity, 11.4 (2004), 651-68). The motivation driving the present work is to address the problem of how we deal with modernist writers who were aesthetically forward-looking and innovative while holding and expressing regressive, objectionable, and ultimately dangerous political views. Compared with Stein, Faÿ was 'a very different kind of animal' (p. xv), and the sentence of national degradation and hard labour pronounced after his épuration trial reflected his systematic attempt to demolish French Freemasonry, in collusion with Vichy and the Nazi occupiers. Stein and her lover Alice B. Toklas — Jewish lesbians residing in the Vichy zone throughout the Occupation — famously, and still inexplicably, escaped unscathed from the war. It is clear from Will's account that, unlike those of Faÿ, Stein's opinions were often ill-informed, incoherent, and without direct consequences — although they were no less abhorrent for all that. Will's project is to go beyond the readings of Stein offered in some previous studies, which paint her positively as a 'survivor' and adopt unquestioningly Faÿ's post-war claim that it was he who had saved these two Jews from persecution. Will's review of the existing scholarship in the light of her extensive archival research suggests that there are no straightforward explanations. She rejects those of Stein's apologists who explain away her politics, concluding that 'on balance, Stein's Vichy activity was less about opportunism than about loyalty to a cause' (p. 143). As for Faÿ, she locates him in a 'gray zone' where Jews and Freemasons were 'casualties of the "cleaning-up operations" required to purge France of a century and a half of democratic decadence' (p. 174). Though not explicitly a psychoanalytic study, Will combines historico-political and psychoanalytic interpretations of, for example, Stein's obsessive attraction to authoritarian figures and Faÿ's neurotic pursuit of Freemasonry. Her study is a valuable and well-informed portrait of a troubled and troubling literary and political relationship.