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

Part I: A Hundred Years of Pontigny

I A HundredYears of Pontigny The conferences were made possible by the support of Miss Helen Patch, chairman of the FrenchDepartmentatMountHolyokeCollege,whosawthatonecouldnotdobetterintimeof war than to provide a place where ideas could be exchanged on the immediate issues of the war, in so far as they are things of the mind, as well as on those permanent concerns of men, who,thoughdrivenoutoftheircountriesbyanenemywhoseweaknessandstrengthisthathe has always wanted to be either more or less than mankind, are determined to remain within thehumandomain.Massachusettshasalongrecollectionoffreedom,anditwasbefittingthat these Europeans, despoiled of all else, but still maintaining a free conscience, should be received in the little village of South Hadley....In the late morning, there was the noise of army planes passing overhead, while the nearer calm of the summer air was disturbed by the trucks that came to remove the garbage from Porter Hall. All was, no doubt, as it should be; for in these days discussions of poetry must hold their own against irrelevant sounds.What matter if the speakers were interrupted?They waited until they could be heard again.Young men must be prepared for war; garbage collectors must go their rounds and bang their cans if they are to carry away the day’s refuse; and poets must hold discourse on poetry whenever they are minded to make explicit in speech what remains implicit in their art. John Peale Bishop,“Entretiens de Pontigny: 1943” There was, however, a dominant concern with deeper things, with manifestations of great human crises in the culture of nations, with the social and moral crisis of the day. Unquestionably , the spirit of Pontigny was one of anxious hope that the cultural individuality of nations wouldbepreservedwhilethenationalselfishnesstowarsandthedestructionofculturewould be somehow put down....The cosmic exchanges of Pontigny in America, its unforced internationalism , will be missed. Mary Goodwin in Hartford Courant Magazine (August 27, 1944) 17 For the intellectuals and artists in exile, and also for their American counterparts , Pontigny-en-Amérique—or the “Yankee Pontigny,” as Wallace Stevens called it—was a radical departure from institutional business as usual. This primarily historical section addresses three related questions concerning the “fit” of Pontignyen -Amérique within different institutional narratives. The sociologist and intellectual historian Laurent Jeanpierre gauges the significance of this American detour within the ongoing and primarily French history of Pontigny, and conceives of Pontigny-enAm érique as an illuminating test case of what one might call the portability of institutions . Elissa Gelfand, a scholar of French cultural life in the shadow of WorldWar II, asks what Pontigny-en-Amérique signified in the life of its host, Mount Holyoke College, during a period of institutional challenge and redefinition. And Leah Hewitt offers reflections on the visit of an agent of the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) to the Mount Holyoke sessions during the war. Jacques Derrida was the foremost French philosopher of our time, and his death in 2004 marked the end of an epoch in French intellectual life. Among Derrida’s final works was an eloquent meditation on the meaning of Pontigny and its later permutations for the life of the mind during the twentieth century . Derrida observed that all the Pontigny-inspired entretiens in which he participated , even those in which philosophy was not the explicit subject, were “intensely philosophical adventures.” In the closing essay of this section, Derrida takes us inside that conversational history—international, unpredictable, improvisatory, transdisciplinary —discerning in the vivid history of Pontigny through the decades the emergence of a “counter-institution” that challenges the traditional forms of the academy. For the writers in this section, Pontigny in its various guises was a kind of volcanic eruption, a departure from habitual institutional practices and rituals, opening up new intellectual and creative possibilities. This page intentionally left blank ...