Gertrude Stein: The Vichy Collaborator as Liberal Cultural Icon

Among the more obvious signs supporting my contention that American liberalism took a serious U-turn as it went from the, frankly, religiously based agenda based on equality, inherent rights and the moral obligation to respect those to an allegedly "scientific" or, more honestly, anti-religious "liberalism" - is the real character of so many of its idols and heroes.  As with Darwin, their position in the pantheon in the original neo-liberalism, that abandonment of the values of real liberalism, depends on a superficial knowledge of what they said or did.  Or, more often, it depends on the selected, highly edited or, if you will, "quote mined" version that their fans and supporters promote.  The total destruction of that phony, papier-mâché figure head version of those heroes is as near as opening the lesser read items of their complete works.  The successful suppression of the real person is also an indictment of the superficiality of so much of today's intellectual discourse, in this case, the "liberal" branch of that dead bush.

One of the things I wrote which got the most extreme of outraged denials by the self-declared "reality community" was indisputably true and entirely documented.  Gertrude Stein, the emblematic "modernist" writer was an enthusiastic collaborator with the Nazi puppet, Vichy government of Philippe Pétain.  That Stein translated Pétain into English in a lame-brained attempt to influence American opinion in favor of his government, that she wrote an adoring essay about him, in hopes of making the Nazi collaborator popular with Americans AS THE UNITED STATES WAS AT WAR WITH IT AND ITS PUPPET MASTERS - the actual, constitutional definition of treason -  is absolute fact, she said so herself.  That she was a prominent American Jew living the good life in occupied France as she collaborated and as other Jews were being sent to their deaths by the Vichy government is as undeniable as any other fact about that period.

It shocked me to first read her most shameful and idiotic act but it wasn't really surprising.  I read a number of Stein's excerpts and would be bons mots and was somewhat aware of her substance before I attempted to choke down one of her books while I was in college,  I'm not sure if it was Tender Buttons or Three Lives, with Stein it doesn't much matter what it is, but about the first thirty pages convinced me she was a true bull shit artist whose fame and repute was based in her superficiality and frivolous emptiness, on the most ephemeral novelty and not on any artistic ability.  At no point did the genius she attributed to herself manifest.  Asserting her own genius was one of the few intellectual enthusiasms that she sustained for any length of time.  That is what the basis of the brain-dead admiration of Stein insists on.  Far from being someone who took any kind of risk, Stein was the very embodiment of the empty headed, self-satisfied Babbitt retired to France, collecting up-and-coming art from up-and-coming artists at a good price, in at the beginning of a rising market.

Well after that, I read Katherine Anne Porter's three occasional pieces about her, climaxing in the brilliant take down of Stein, The Wooden Umbrella.  I would recommend it to anyone as a decisive critique of Stein and her repulsive, superficial, self-centered and vulgarly irresponsible life and writing.  I would also recommend her published exchange with the literary figure, Donald Sutherland, Old Woman River, published with it in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter.  I completely agree with Porter's mature assessment of Gertrude Stein,

"I was getting her placed, her relation to the times and what her attitude really meant in political, human, all sorts of terms, I thought her a blight on everything she touched and I think so more than ever."*

Much of what fed my "more than ever" were the eventual revelations about her collaboration and far more than that.  The current defense of Stein that she was a Jew doing what she had to do to survive the Nazi occupation is a clear lie.  Stein was an American citizen, so was her companion, Alice Toklas. After even her absurd denial of the oncoming war couldn't resist reality, she opted to not leave France. She said in her repulsively would-be charming manner that, “it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.”  The problem to overcome in order to defend her crime is complex and not in her favor.  Stein's long friendship with the French fascist Bernard Faÿ, their deep and complex literary, academic, and ideologically intertwined friendship is one aspect of it.   Faÿ was a fixture in Pétain's government which allowed him to protect Stein and Toklas and, probably as important to her, her art collection.   But, as mentioned, Stein had considered leaving France, which she could certainly have done with relatively little trouble before the United States entered the war.  With her connections she probably could have managed to move her large collection of art as well.

It isn't possible to maintain that Stein was unaware of the Vichy policy on Jews, among the speeches of Pétain she translated were those banning Jews from holding positions of powers and those which called for a cooperation with the Nazis.  Despite all of that Stein compared Pétain with George Washington:

... we [Americans] did not understand defeat enough to sympathise with the French people and with their Marechal Petain, who like George Washington, and he is very like George Washington because he too is first in war first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen, who like George Washington has given them courage in their darkest moment held them together through their times of desperation and has always told them the truth and in telling them the truth has made them realise that the truth would set them free.

That was part of  Stein's proposed introduction to her translations, of which Stein's editor, Bennett Cerf, said, in a note attached to the letter.

"For the records. This disgusting piece was mailed from Belley on Jan. 19, 1942."

In preparing this post I read this piece by Janet Malcolm, which only added to her repulsiveness. She quotes Eric Severeid, who was obviously charmed by Stein but even he couldn't help note her

She could not think politically at all. Thus she assured me:
“Hitler will never really go to war. He is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist. He wants the illusion of victory and power, the glory and glamour of it, but he could not stand the blood and fighting involved in getting it. No, Mussolini—there’s the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won’t stop at anything.” She did not understand Fascism; she did not understand that the moods and imperatives of great mass movements are far stronger and more important than the individuals involved in them. She knew persons, but not people.

The reports of Stein nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize are convincing.  She was a right winger, a rich trust-fund baby, decadent, superficial fraud, promoting her "genius."  Her declaration of her genius is the only thing distinguishing about her and she stole even that act from Oscar Wilde who did so much more to earn the title, though I wouldn't hold him as having actually been one.   He was certainly deeper on those occasions he wasn't playing the fop.  Stein was only a fop and her act grows really tedious through the sameness of her production.

Her being a lesbian as well as Jewish are often used to shield her from the fact of her treason, her collaboration with the puppet regime that murdered millions of Jews and many gay GERMAN men. The fact that the elderly lesbian who was Jewish and who had so many friends in the Vichy puppet show AND WHO WAS MORE THAN EAGER TO PRODUCE PROPAGANDA FOR THE NAZI PUPPETS FOR THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE all rendered her a useful tool,  a one-woman Potemkin false front, a one-woman Theresienstadt posing no danger to Nazism but useful as a tool of deception. And unlike the ghetto full of young people able and willing to resist their murders, the murders of their children, Stein, the human black hole of ego, was guaranteed to never give them any problem before her imminent death in her permitted comfort by natural causes.  I doubt Toklas could have reliably escaped liquidation after she stopped being associated with the dead Stein.  The Nazis only cared about gay German men who wouldn't produce more members of the master race, they were quite prepared to overlook gay Nazis and gay men of nationalities and races who they meant to dominate or destroy.  They certainly wouldn't have cared about the sexual practices of Stein and Toklas.  If the Nazis hadn't been defeated Stein and Toklas probably would have featured in an exhibit in one of the museums of "entartete Kunst" only doing what the pseudo-liberals have done, suppressing her Nazi collaborations due to their inconvenience.

I'll probably expand on this theme in the future.

*  I would add, not just her but the corner of superficial, value free art that can't even be bothered to have content, values, moral positions or even more than an enervated and unchallenged novelty, concerned only with being sell-able and celebrity feeding.  This includes most of what gets included in pop-music, the movies, TV etc.

Update:  Here is more:

But the threat was palpable. Professor Will notes that in April of 1944 - just 30 miles from where Stein lived - 44 Jewish children were "seized and deported to Auschwitz." All of them were murdered.

New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, who disclosed Stein's relationship to Faÿ in her 2007 book "Two Lives," perhaps understated the case when she concluded that Stein "did not behave well in World War II."

"The full story of the relationship of modernist writers to fascist and pro-fascist regimes is just beginning to be told and Stein offers a fascinating case study of this relationship," Professor Will stated to BuzzFlash at Truthout. "It is hard to get at the complexities and dilemmas of this modernism/fascism nexus if we only see a sanitized 'Saint Gertrude' image of Stein. She was a complex, layered, in some ways heroic, but in some ways despicable individual. The fact that her writing is so obscure has allowed people to say almost anything about her and up to this point the discussion around her has been mostly hagiographic. Looking at the facts of her life, her politics, even her aesthetic principles (which are more conservative than you would think) allows for a much fuller and more realistic picture of Gertrude Stein to emerge."

Two recent exhibitions involving Stein in San Francisco raise the question that Professor Will asks about historic accountability when it comes to artists and revered literary figures. Should how one lives one's life as an artist or literary figure become a vital part of an art exhibit? Does the "industry" of promoting certain "hallowed" figures as branded artistic figures need to be balanced by vigilant historical accuracy and debate?

... The second question for the Contemporary Jewish Museum is how could it promote Stein as its featured exhibit at the same time that it was holding a showing of the art work of Charlotte Salomon? Salomon, according to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, was "a young Jewish artist from Berlin, [who] worked feverishly between 1940 and 1942 to produce approximately 1300 paintings before she was arrested by the Nazis in 1943, transported to Auschwitz and killed at the age of 26." She was five months pregnant when she was gassed, after being captured in, ironically, southern France.

Sonia Melnikova-Raich, who emigrated from the Soviet Union 25 years ago, felt that this type of historical "cleansing" of anything that would do damage to the favorable image of Gertrude Stein was similar to what she had seen done to some Soviet "heroes" and official cult figures. In an article for the Bay Area Jewish Weekly, Melnikova-Raich charges that "the current exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum 'Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories' noticeably lacks a sixth story."