Gertrude Stein

In 1941, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein embarked on one of the strangest intellectual projects of her life: translating for an American audience the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government. From 1941 to 1943, Stein translated thirty-two of Pétain's speeches, in which he outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements" from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with Nazi occupiers. Unlikely Collaboration pursues troubling questions: Why and under what circumstances would Stein undertake this project? The answers lie in Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Faÿ, Stein's apparent Vichy protector. Faÿ was director of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the Vichy regime and overseer of the repression of French freemasons. He convinced Pétain to keep Stein undisturbed during the war and, in turn, encouraged her to translate Pétain for American audiences. Yet Faÿ's protection was not coercive. Stein described the thinker as her chief intellectual companion during her final years. Barbara Will outlines the formative powers of this relationship, noting possible affinities between Stein and Faÿ's political and aesthetic ideals, especially their reflection in Stein's writing from the late 1920s to the 1940s. Will treats their interaction as a case study of intellectual life during wartime France and an indication of America's place in the Vichy imagination. Her book forces a reconsideration of modernism and fascism, asking what led so many within the avant-garde toward fascist and collaborationist thought. Touching off a potential powder keg of critical dispute, Will replays a collaboration that proves essential to understanding fascism and the remaking of modern Europe . Barbara Will's study of Gertrude Stein's actions during World War II reveals a woman whose support for the Nazis went far beyond opportunism. Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma, by Barbara Will. Columbia University Press, 274 pages, $35 Gertrude Stein, as Barbara Will confirms for us in "Unlikely Collaboration," was a complex, experimental writer, a collector of modern art, a salon hostess to modern artists and writers, a feminist, and a lesbian. It is understandable, then, that through much of the 20th century and into the 21st, she has been seen by many as a radical progressive. But as the writer Janet Malcolm earlier demonstrated in her book "Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice" (2007 ), Stein, who was Jewish, had a very close relationship with the prominent French academic Bernard Fay, a Nazi agent imprisoned after the war as a collaborator. Gertrude, Malcolm writes, "did not behave well in World War II." This was not entirely unknown during Stein's lifetime. Pablo Picasso, for example, recognized that she "was a real fascist." She had always had "a weakness for Franco," the artist said, but he still found it hard even to imagine that Stein also translated and helped write speeches for Marshall Phillipe Petain, the chief of state of Vichy France. After all, Picasso said, she was an "American, a Jewess what's more." Yes, it was that Gertrude Stein, the same one you may have thought you knew, the iconic woman and modernist writer who was celebrated for her "genius" and her having survived the European conflagration of the 1930s and 1940s. But what you may not have known is that Stein - along with her partner, Alice B. Toklas - not only emerged unscathed, but lived willingly and comfortably in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Barbara Will, a professor of English at Dartmouth, is entirely persuasive on this point. Stein's fascism, which apparently emerged in the early '30s, and her cooperation with the Vichy regime in the 1940s were bolstered by her intimate intellectual connection with Bernard Fay. Stein's political views, wherever they came from originally, were informed by