Stein After Will: A Review

Barbara Will's Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011; paperback 2013) is a book driven by archival evidence but wanting in close reading. Will proposes but does not elucidate a link between Stein's aesthetic radicalism and her political conservatism—the latter, Will claims, Stein adopted via her friendship or "collaboration" with Faÿ, a convicted Nazi collaborator. After Will, readers of Stein must ask: should one take Faÿ's ideas as a lens to re-read, or rather to recover Stein's political convictions, otherwise assumed to be ironic, insincere, naïve, or absent altogether?