Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma
by Barbara Will
Columbia University Press
274 pages, $35.
DURING WORLD WAR TWO, Gertrude Stein translated a collection of speeches by Marshall Pétain, the head of the Vichy government in France. Among them were diatribes that, as Barbara Will shows in Unlikely Collaboration, “announced Vichy policy barring Jews and other ‘foreign elements’ from positions of power in the public sphere and those that called for a ‘hopeful’ reconciliation with Nazi forces.”
Will, the author of previous works on Stein, was astonished to discover that the Jewish-American writer who presented herself as one of the great figures in experimental Modernist literature could be attracted to the Vichy puppet government’s right-wing programs. As she notes in her 
preface, however, “the recent controversies surrounding the wartime writings of Paul de Man [and others]… have forced us to rethink the intersection between modernist writings and intellectuals and fascist ideology.”
And so Will undertook a very thorough investigation of Stein’s political thought in the 1930’s and 40’s. This revealed that the Pétain translation was not just an aberration undertaken to allow its author to remain in Vichy France, but rather very much in line with the political views the writer had developed in those decades. Stein had a very elitist view of how the world should be run. The “masses,” which did not of course include a genius such as herself, could not be trusted to rule themselves, so modern democracy was unacceptable. Western society was in decline and needed the sort of “return to the traditional” preached by Pétain, which is why Stein wanted to make his speeches available to the American public. Contrary to what we were told about Modernism and its descendants in graduate seminars and books by professors who chose to believe what they wanted to be true, Stein’s forward-looking radicalism in the arts did not prevent her from embracing such traditional, hegemonic ways of thinking about politics and society.
Never does she seem to have considered how she, a Jewish lesbian, would fare under the rule of the “traditional values” that she praised. In this and other respects, Stein was a mass of contradictions who saw no need to be consistent, or even particularly logical. Her prose style, it would seem, was less a creation ab nihilo than an outgrowth of her personality.
Half of Unlikely Collaboration is devoted to the equally inconsistent life of her close friend and eventual political mentor, Bernard Faÿ. A brilliant Frenchman who was for many years pro-American, Faÿ ended up collaborating, first with Pétain, and then with the Nazis in order to uncover and denounce the Freemasons, a secretive society that he blamed for France’s decline in the 20th century. When Hitler invaded France in 1940, Faÿ was willing to collaborate with the Third Reich in order to achieve his dream of driving the Freemasons from power. This, despite that fact that, as a gay man, Faÿ was part of another group that the Nazis were persecuting.
A prominent intellectual figure in the France of his day, Faÿ is now largely forgotten, which would have infuriated him. Stein, on the other hand, probably enjoys greater standing now than ever before. Will never seeks to diminish her achievements as an author—or as a lesbian who carved out a place for lesbians and same-sex couples, a topic covered most recently in Seeing Gertrude Stein, edited by Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer (reviewed in the Nov.-Dec. 2011 issue of these pages). She does, however, force us to reconsider Stein as a private individual, just as devotees of Pound, de Man, and other collaborators have had to do. Perhaps more importantly, Will also forces us to put another large nail in the coffin of the notion that innovative art necessarily has an effect on political thought.
Unlikely Collaboration is a fascinating book that explores a sensitive topic with solid documentation to support its often disagreeable findings. It is also, despite being a university press publication dealing with literature, written with clarity and a complete absence of jargon. In short, it is a well-researched book on an intriguing topic written to be accessible to a potentially wide readership.
Richard M. Berrong is the author of In Love with a Handsome Sailor
