Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

I was thinking about people in extraordinary situations. The subjects here are Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, and Ezra Pound. The three of them were ex-pats, Stein and Toklas in France and Ez in Italy. Then the war came. Stein and Toklas moved from Paris. First to their country house. When the bombing came close, they moved to another village, a few miles away where they stayed for the rest of the war, in occupied France. And what of the other American lesbians in Paris at that time? Natalie Barney? Sylvia Beach? Did they ankle Paris for safer climes? Janet Flanner went to New York and returned in 1944 as a correspondent to cover the liberation of France. But I have always wondered about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Both were Americans. Both were Jewish. Both were famous lesbians. (Virgil Thomson, when once asked he if thought Stein had sex with Toklas, observed: "She ate her out with a spoon!") Stein was famous as a modernist writer. Why didn't they get out? The American consul in Vichy offered to make all the arrangements. In occupied France, and even in Vichy, a phony-baloney Republic, both would have been regarded as "enemy aliens."

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One school of thought has it that the Nazis treated those in France differently than they did those in Poland, Ukraine, Russia and other territories they occupied. This may be true; I do not know. But the agents of the Third Reich pulled a lot of the French out of their homeland and did away with them. They had a shopping list.

It turns out when the Nazi occupiers wanted a list of names of everyone in the town wherein Gertrude and Alice then resided, the Mayor told Stein he had left her name and Alice's off the list because he thought they were too old to survive life in a concentration camp.

I have read several biographies about Gertrude Stein. The best is the late John Malcolm Brinnan's The Third Rose. Not one of them, as I recall, addresses exactly what it was that she and Alice went through in that fearful climate. What, or who, kept them safe? Even Brinnan is vague: "How serious the plight of the two American ladies was cannot be certainly known." Stein was an odd bird. Her politics, to the extent she had them, were reactionary. She supported Franco and Petain. (Makes you wonder how right-wing "modernism" was-- think Eliot and Pound.) This would change under the occupation, and Stein was ecstatic when the US troops marched into town (having, just weeks before, had the grotesque situation of a dozen German soldiers camping out in her living room for a night-- for Gertrude the ultimate anti-salon). It is an era now so far away that it is hard to imagine. Except for this: I think anyone reading this column will understand Stein's situation. Living in a country once thought to be hospitable and welcoming, now occupied by forces unleashed by a horrible time, when, at any moment, the knock comes on the door. We'll get back to this later.

Then there is Ezra Pound. I have never made a final judgment on Pound-- or maybe I have and am in denial. Friends who care about these things laud his role in promoting new writers and a new sensibility. All that's fine. Few care about the arts in AmeriKa, and so Ezra got to be top banana in avant-garde circles for awhile. But when the crunch came, there was Pound, living in Italy, not just an "enemy alien," but one who embraced the regime. He gave radio broadcasts denouncing the US President, spewed forth his anti-Semitism, calling FDR "that Jew Franklin Rosenfeld," and did it all with great verve and enthusiasm. After the Allied victory, Pound paid with his piece of flesh, thus the Pisan Cantos. Regarded by the government as an active traitor, he was slated to be tried. Judged to be insane, he was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, where he remained until 1958-- publishing and winning prizes through it all. At the time he was released, he promptly returned to Italy. There is a famous photo of Ez, on his return to Italy, giving the fascist salute, the old piece of shit.

What's the point? Why is Stein an icon in our community? Can't we find better Sacred Monsters? She strikes me as a selfish, self-promoting woman, a bad writer and, in the most important matters, foolish. Her meditation on the war, a novel called Mrs. Reynolds, reads as though the Nazi onslaught were just an inconvenience for a quiet couple-- a pose is a pose is a pose. Pound's case is a blatant measure of inequity. I know people who have wound up on lists of targeted groups, men who have done more time for what I regard as inconsequential acts than did Pound. Both Stein and Pound left the US in large part because they thought the country was crazy. The country is probably crazier now than then, but I would suggest that, in large measure, the two of them were products of the craziness not just exiles from it. And I am Marie of Roumania!

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com