Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
DELUSION
OF “TEAMS”
I have just been
considering Gertrude Stein’s The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and there was one element of the popular
reaction to it that made me think of a particularly delusional way of looking
at the past.
I mean the way
many people are inclined the remake the past in the image of the present,
assuming that all people with admirable or sympathetic qualities in the past
must have shared all the values that are now generally applauded. I have touched
on this phenomenon before (see the post LikeUnto DNA for Dinosaurs) in the context of historical novels, but Stein’s
book brings up another aspect of the delusion.
Gertrude Stein was
a lesbian, and is applauded as such on many Gay and Lesbian websites. She is
seen as a pioneer of gay liberation who would therefore presumably have approved
of gay marriage etc.etc. Gay-and-Lesbian readers are left to assume, from such
websites, that she would have seen the world as homosexuals in the early 21st
Century do. Open, inclusive, rainbow LGBTQ coalition and so forth.
But there is a
big problem with this. If one reads The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, one soon discovers that Stein was in many
respects a conservative, indeed reactionary, person. She may well have been an avant garde writer of her time in terms
of style, but she was more on the Right than on the Left of the political
spectrum.
It’s no secret
that this was true of many of the Modernists, from T.S.Eliot (“Anglican, royalist,
classicist”) to W.B.Yeats (aristocratic elitism and a taste for Fascism) to
D.H.Lawrence (basically Blut-und-Boden-mit-Sex) to Ezra Pound (broadcasts from
Fascist Rome etc.). In fact, this sort of conjunction was more-or-less
inevitable when the Modernists were reacting against mass-produced and
mass-appeal literature and consciously creating something for the educated few.
Assumptions of an elite and exclusivist sort were behind much of their thought.
I say none of
this to belittle what they wrote. All the names I’ve mentioned here (except
possibly the tiresome, phallus-obsessed Lawrence) were important figures in
literature. All of them wrote significant and important things. And a part of
me thinks that the social and political opinions they expressed were no more
off-the-mark than those of writers on the Left at the time, who wobbled
foolishly into the orbit of Stalin.
Nevertheless, it
remains true that Gertrude Stein was no advocate of gay liberation and indeed
sometimes spoke scornfully even of the women of “first-wave” feminism who had
struggled for the vote. She thought of herself as “masculine” (her term),
admired soldiers, and thought of Alice B. Toklas as her “wife”. Heterosexual
women – especially married ones – she regarded as less than herself, and tended
to dismiss or patronise when they came visiting with their husbands. Not much
sisterly solidarity there. And on the political front, she greatly admired the
soldier General Franco, whose side she supported (with words) when the Spanish
Civil War was in progress. Ironical when you consider that she was an on-again,
off-again friend of Picasso, whom she claimed to have “discovered”, but there
you are.
And then we come
to the very messy part of the story. Though they were both ethnically Jewish
(though non-religious), Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas stayed in France
throughout the Nazi occupation, 1940-44. They did have to leave Paris and move
to a remote country area, but they were not molested and the art collection
they had amassed in Paris was never plundered or destroyed, as other
collections of “decadent” art were in Nazi-occupied countries.
Why was this?
Partly because,
though they were known to be Jewish, the couple were protected by a high Vichy official,
Professor Bernard Fay, who had been – and remained – one of Stein’s closest
friends since the late 1920s. Fay was an early acolyte proclaiming Stein’s
genius. Fay translated some of her works into French. Fay was also an extreme
right-winger, on the fringe of Catholicism and having an obsession with
Freemasons. During the Second World War, Fay helped compile lists of known
Freemasons to help Petain’s government round them up for imprisonment or worse.
(Additional note – Fay managed to survive the war and by the 1960s was
denouncing the post-Vatican II Catholic Church for being too liberal. He wrote
a book entitled L’Eglise Judas [The Judas Church] and was one of those
who helped Archbishop Marcel Lefebrve set up his breakaway “traditionalist”
church.]
Now one
obviously sympathises with Stein and Toklas in this situation. As they were
Jews in Nazi-occupied territory, we would have to be tone-deaf not to agree
that they had a right to preserve their lives by any means at hand. But I note
that Bernard Fay was no mere convenience for Stein. He had been her close
friend for well over a decade before the war and she shared many of his views.
Early in the war, Stein agreed to translate and produce an English-language
version of the speeches of Petain. She proceeded to do so, though she did not find
a publisher in the Anglophone world. Some have argued that she agreed to do
this simply as an act of self-preservation; but this is not the case. Even after the Liberation of France (in 1944) when the
Nazis were gone, and in the last two years of her life (she died in 1946),
Stein continued to profess her admiration for Petain’s paternalist and
nationalist ideas and was still trying to find an English-language publisher
for her translations, which were accompanied by her admiring introduction.
I am aware that
this case has been argued back and forth by admirers and detractors of Stein,
and you will note that I have not mentioned the silly idea (which turns out to
be based on an ironical wisecrack Stein once made) that Stein once lobbied for
Hitler to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. You can easily read about the case in
many on-line articles. But I am still making it clear that the avant garde, lesbian writer was no
liberal in her ideas, and would most likely have rejected much that is held
dear by those who produce admiring portraits of her on Gay and Lesbian
websites. (And for the record, would I disillusion you too much to point out
that, in the 1920s and 1930s, left-wing writers were more likely than
right-wing ones to denounce homosexuality as a sign of bourgeois decadence?)
What conclusion do I draw from all this?
The conclusion
that it is all too easy to misconstrue real history as consisting of “teams” –
the goodies with whom we agree and the baddies who represent everything we
detest. But real history isn’t like that. People in the past have mixed ideals
and mixed ideologies (just like you and me). The same person can espouse ideas
that we now embrace and ideas that we now emphatically reject. The “teams”
mentality is for those who do not know what history really is.
Thank you for this, Nicholas. Their collaboration has always intrigued me.
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