ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS (1918–1930)
THERE WERE two things that Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ had in common when they met in 1926: both had received Medals of Honor for their participation in World War I, and both were admirers of Philippe Pétain, the French general who had cut short the German offensive at Verdun in 1916 and had come to represent, for Stein, Faÿ, and many others, the triumph of French fortitude and resilience over German aggression.
Forty years old at the start of the war, Gertrude Stein had at first been slow to express interest in aiding the Allied effort. When war broke out in the summer of 1914, she and her companion, Alice Toklas, were in England visiting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and his wife. Shocked and frightened by the sudden—and to them, incomprehensible—onset of hostilities, the two women returned briefly to Paris to pack up their belongings before leaving again for a year’s sojourn in peaceful, remote Mallorca. There Stein attempted to recapture the stability of what she called “daily living,” but news from the front continued to reach her—and worry her. In a poem from 1915, Stein reflects on a general feeling: “it is terrible the way the war does not finish.”1 And in a number of other works from this period, Stein weaves the theme of war into her experimental texts, suggesting a growing concern with the continuing conflict abroad that even the pleasures of writing could not allay.
In 1916, as the battle raged fiercely at Verdun, Stein and Toklas decided to make their way back to Paris and “to get into the war.”2 Joining the American Fund for the French Wounded, a volunteer organization devoted to emergency hospital service, they spent the next two years delivering supplies, relaying messages, and distributing comfort bags to French soldiers. In a Ford truck named Auntie they ministered to suffering troops in Perpignan, Nîmes, and war-ravaged Alsace. As the war dragged on and France became a “restless and disturbed world” (ABT 179), the two American women gamely volunteered their service to anyone they encountered: refugees, AWOL American soldiers, the homeless and destitute. Helping those wounded, displaced, or traumatized by the war stimulated and energized Stein and Toklas, but it was the particular mixture of support for their beleaguered France and American nationalist pride that propelled them tirelessly onward. With the armistice signaling the end of the war, both were rewarded for their efforts with the French Medaille de la Reconnaisance for outstanding service to the country, Toklas receiving a particular commendation. But their ultimate reward, according to Stein, was watching “everybody except the germans” march underneath the Arc de Triomphe in December 1918 and then suddenly realizing that “peace was upon us” (ABT 236).3
FIGURE 1.1 Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, with “Auntie,” during World War I.
SOURCE: BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY.
Bernard Faÿ was part of the crowd in Paris that day, although it is likely that he did not march in the victory procession. Stricken with severe polio as a young child, he walked slowly and with difficulty as an adult and tended to avoid situations that emphasized his disability. Nevertheless, he had been active in the Red Cross and ambulance corps of the recent war and was a decorated veteran of both the Belgian campaign and of the battle of Verdun. Watching the march of the Allied troops, he would have felt pride not only for his fellow Frenchmen but also for the American regiment whose place at the head of the procession was indicative of their newly important global status.4 Faÿ, who had dreamed of attending Harvard College since he was seven years old, had always been fascinated by America and Americans. But it was while fighting in the presence of American volunteers at Verdun that his dream of a people “made of joys, of confidence, and of universal ambition” became “incurable.”5 From that moment until late in his life, America would retain a special status in Faÿ’s imagination, guiding and transforming his thoughts, ambitions, and desires. France remained always for Faÿ the source of both culture and civilization, but America would become his “passion”: an idea, and a world, saturated with emotional, intellectual, and erotic feeling. The “warm embrace” of Franco-American conciliation would be welcomed by Faÿ in 1918, but like Stein he would also contrast this friendship with the feeling toward the defeated Germans, “blamed and mistrusted by everyone.”6
FIGURE 1.2 Bernard Faÿ, in uniform, at Verdun during World War I.
SOURCE: COPYRIGHT VINCENT FAŸ.
Faÿ had lost two brothers and many friends to the war and had almost been killed by the Germans on the battlefield of Verdun. He was saved in part by the military strategy of the Verdun generals, including Philippe Pétain, who would subsequently become a warm personal friend.7 Some thirty-seven years his junior, Faÿ admired Pétain not only for his military success but also for his conservatism and traditionalism. Honored for his defensive stance at Verdun, Pétain throughout his life understood his role as one of protecting, shielding, defending; his conservatism was bred in the bone.8 Like Faÿ, Pétain came from a family that aligned itself clearly with one side of the “two Frances”: Catholic and royalist rather than secular and Republican, opposed, above all, to the French Revolution and its liberal democratic legacy. For both men, the French Revolution represented what Faÿ called an “engine of destruction,” laying waste to the values, habits, principles, and “human types” of the ancien régime.9 Far from ameliorating the excesses of prerevolutionary France, the French Revolution had in fact robbed France of its spirit: a complex term signifying a range of moral, juridical, religious, and even racial characteristics. It was this spirit of France that seemed to be at stake in Verdun, itself the site of a ninth-century treaty that gave to France its modern geographical borders. In his guise as the Victor of Verdun, Pétain became not only a war hero for France as a whole but also a potent symbol of the past for individuals, like Bernard Faÿ, who were deeply suspicious of modern, post-Enlightenment notions of “progress.”
For Gertrude Stein as well, Philippe Pétain embodied resiliency and courage, honor and sobriety. In his defense of Verdun, Pétain represented above all the will to “peace”—a term, like “daily living,” that resonated for Stein with an entire worldview. “Peace” implied balance, equilibrium, and stasis; a sense of order; a commitment to tradition and habit, to what needed to be defended and preserved in the face of change, upheaval and revolution. “Peace,” “daily living,” “habit,” and “tradition” were terms that Stein would begin to use with increasing frequency after World War I and in contexts that often illuminated her reactionary political views. In Paris France, a book she published the day France fell to the Germans in 1940, Stein argued that peace, habit, and tradition were the requisite conditions for creative freedom, the backdrop, support, and foil against which “the art and literature of the twentieth century” could emerge.10 A few pages after, Stein makes her point more generally: “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free” (PF 38). Freedom and excitement in the artistic realm can easily coexist with conservatism in the political realm. Several months later, Stein would unreservedly praise Philippe Pétain for allowing the French “to make France itself again.”11 When in June 1940 Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler that for the next four years turned France into a virtual puppet government of the Nazi regime, Stein noted briskly that Pétain had “achieved a miracle.”12 The Victor of Verdun had once again brought peace to her beloved France.
In the way they lived through, responded to, and attempted to understand the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ are fascinating witnesses to their era. Through their involvement with the literary and artistic avant-garde, they participated in one of the most creative and dynamic moments in recent cultural history. But Faÿ and Stein were also actively, intellectually engaged with the political and social upheavals of the interwar period. In the wake of World War I, both sought to come to grips in their writing with the enormous cultural, geopolitical, and transnational changes around them; both were committed observers of the moment. And in the anxious period building up to World War II, both forged connections between the aesthetic and the political, seeking a similar course in navigating these uncertain times.
Looking back at their world, we can see it as a time of endings: of death (more than eight million killed; an entire generation of young men wiped out), of world-shattering destruction (Europe permanently altered, the “civilized” West imploded), and of the final toppling of the ancien régime (“sultans, pashas, emperors, and dukes reduced to impotence”).13 The winners of World War I understood that their victory was a relative phenomenon and that the ground they stood on would never be as firm or stable as it had been; the losers simply hoped to avoid social anarchy. In the two decades that followed the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, up to the commencement of the German offensive in September of 1939, the shell-shocked peoples of Europe put a further nail in the coffin of the old world by turning against the liberal democratic institutions and universalist values that were presumed to have contributed directly to war and social decay. Over the course of this epoch, a series of competing political ideologies—fascism, communism, and various communitarian third ways—emerged as possible successors to the dying system of liberalism. Each of these ideologies, as Mark Mazower writes, “saw itself destined to remake society, the continent and the world in a New Order for mankind.”14 None would firmly supersede its rivals until fascism finally asserted its dark force over the continent.
But the interwar period was also a time of beginnings, especially on the other side of the Atlantic, and especially for “the only victor of the war,” the United States.15 American militarism had been on display during World War I, and its Wilsonian vision dominated the subsequent peace process. But as America consolidated its control over much of Europe’s war debt, its power, its ideologies, and its values became inescapable. This was a technological and economic superpower that threatened to transform European culture through the soft seductions of “modernization” rather than through brute intervention. For Stein, this new American presence was, at least during the 1920s, the source of reassurance in an otherwise “restless and disturbed world” (ABT 234). Yet for most Europeans, the spectacle of American mass modernization during the 1920s and of American mass economic depression during the 1930s remained striking and worrisome during the interwar period. “The masses” became synonymous in European intellectual circles with what the French historian Georges Duhamel called the “American menace.”16 Only a few European commentators, Bernard Faÿ among them, were able to see the United States as a site of positive potential during the 1930s, and by the end of this decade, Faÿ, too, feared that America was sinking into materialism, cultural brutishness, and, worst of all, communism.17
Torn between endings and beginnings, between a sense that something foundational to the old world had been lost and a feeling that something uncertain or menacing was to come, many in the interwar period—including Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ—found hope in a set of fairly standard romantic myths or ideals. These included the myth of the Hero (Philippe Pétain) and the visionary ideal of the Nation (America or France). What made these romantic tropes contemporary was the fact that they arose from one of the most devastating experiences in world history—total war—and that, as a result of this war, they lived on in a form that was inextricable from exclusion, segregation, and violence. Indeed, despite the profound desire during the interwar period for a lasting international peace, most people affected by the war were haunted by the idea of violence. William Pfaff writes that people in the interwar period “thought chiefly in terms of catastrophe—of the violent breakdown of the civilization they had known, but also of a violent historical renewal.”18 Out of this space of violent instability, nationalism quickly took root. Gertrude Stein, often flamboyant in her expressions of patriotism during the 1930s and 1940s, was not immune from nationalist tendencies. At her most extreme, as we shall see, she legitimated violence as a necessary means to a nationalist end.19 In less inflamed moments during the 1930s, she would express a basic nationalist credo: “every nation has a way of being of being that nation that makes it that nation,” she writes in 1935. Or again in 1945: “Germans are as they are and French and Greeks and Chinamen and Japs.”20 A nation’s “being,” its essence—its “bottom nature,” to use another Steinian term—must be respected and defended, else it leads to “real catastrophe. That is what happened in France first with Napoleon and then with Louis Napoleon. That is what happened in America first with Theodore Roosevelt then with Franklin Roosevelt.”21
By 1935, Gertrude Stein was convinced that the Roosevelts, and especially FDR, had led the United States into a “real catastrophe,” transforming America’s past strengths into a present crisis similar to that of modern-day France. Roosevelt and his French counterpart Léon Blum were both pushing their countries along a slippery slope toward a soulless and debased form of social organization that hewed dangerously to the political Left. What was needed to arrest this decline, to avoid more “real catastrophe,” was a new form of national awakening: “We are there where we have to fight a spiritual pioneer fight,” Stein wrote in a 1945 address to Americans, “and dont [sic] think that communism or socialism will save you, you just have to find a new way.”22 Ten years earlier, in 1936, Stein had pointed the finger more directly at FDR and his policies in a series of articles she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, describing the New Deal as profligate and paternalistic.23 Her readers, evidently, were not pleased. But Stein still sensed that hers was the way forward: “the young ones said I was reactionary and they said how could I be who had always been so well ahead of every one and I myself was not and am not certain that I am not again well ahead as ahead as I ever have been.”24
However elliptical and eccentric, Stein’s political rhetoric during the 1930s and 1940s was inseparable from the feeling—shared with Faÿ and many of their contemporaries—that the societies they lived in, knew of, and wrote about were limping along in an advanced state of political and social decay. In France, home to both Stein and Faÿ during the interwar period, decadence had long been a defining catchphrase for the modern era; during the 1930s, it became a cultural fixation. Agreement about decadence was widespread, if not a sense of where the blame for decadence lay. According to Charles Maurras, founder of the Action Française and the spiritual leader of the French Right, modern decadence sprang from the so-called ideals enshrined by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—liberalism, egalitarianism, secularism—and by the democratic and parliamentary institutions to which these ideals had given rise. The glorious France of the ancien régime seemed to have devolved into a fractious and complex modern present; in the wake of the French Revolution, Maurras wrote, “everything has grown weak.”25 Four linked forces in particular defined what Maurras would call “anti-France”: “les juifs, les franc-maçons, les Protestants, et les métèques” (Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, and foreigners).26 Maurras’s views on culture and politics would have an enormous influence on the generation of French writers with which Bernard Faÿ and other of Stein’s French friends identified themselves. Faÿ, a personal friend of Maurras, would attempt to disseminate Maurrassian ideas during his many visits to the United States over the course of the interwar period.27 And even Stein seemed to be parroting Maurras when she decried the laziness of the unemployed (“you can never get anyone to do any work”) and railed against American “organization” (the antithesis of “individual liberty”) in the Saturday Evening Post articles.28
But the critique leveled against modern decadence in the interwar period was by no means limited to thinkers, like the French Maurrassians, on the political Right. While France remained a liberal democracy during the interwar period, its administration changed thirty-five times in the years between 1924 and the installation of Pétain’s Vichy regime in 1940. In the midst of this rampant political instability, both the Right—Maurrassians, monarchists, Catholics, conservatives, traditionalists—and the Left—socialists and communists—as well as the radicals and nonconformists in between—found common ground in the general sense that modern political and economic institutions were heading toward disaster. During these “hollow years,” to borrow Eugen Weber’s phrase, odd alliances were formed. Catholic traditionalists joined with Left activists to form “nonconformist” movements. Former socialists, fearing the doctrinal rigidity of the communist party, aligned themselves with the nascent movement of fascism. And iconoclastic members of the Parisian avant-garde—many of them expatriates, like Stein herself—found themselves seduced by, and in some cases enthusiastically supportive of, authoritarian political regimes. These unlikely collaborations can tell us much about the turmoil and confusion of political and social life during the interwar period.
This book emerged out of a sense of uncertainty as to how to understand the years that Gertrude Stein spent in Vichy, France, from 1940 through 1944. My previous book on Stein and modernism had ended with the period of the 1930s, at the moment when Stein achieved public success as a result of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This achievement seemed to be the defining feature of Stein’s late life and work; at the time, little was known of her experience in Europe during World War II outside of Stein’s own retrospective account in a book published in 1945, Wars I Have Seen. There, Stein can be seen saying complimentary things about Philippe Pétain, the Vichy head of state, and referring to a web of protection surrounding her during the war. But for most of her critics, these elliptical comments in Wars were ignored in favor of a more general reading that focused on the heroic personal qualities that enabled Stein to survive the period unscathed.29
Then, in 1996, an American graduate student named Wanda Van Dusen began raising uncomfortable questions about an unfinished manuscript that few knew about and no one had really confronted: a project started by Stein during the war to translate into English the speeches of Philippe Pétain. The same year, a more scholarly account of the Pétain translation project also appeared, buried in the back of Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo’s book The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Both accounts acknowledged that Gertrude Stein was indeed a Pétainiste: a supporter of Philippe Pétain’s National Revolution, which promoted a politics of French collaboration with the Nazis. But Burns and Dydo also tied Stein’s translation project to the mediating influence of Bernard Faÿ, a French scholar and close friend of both Stein and Pétain. Faÿ, it turns out, spent the war years working in the service of the Nazis: identifying, exposing, and persecuting hundreds of French Freemasons.30
Since my own previous work on Stein had focused almost exclusively on her aesthetics, I found my interest suddenly piqued—and troubled—by these revelations about her politics. First, I felt I needed to know more about the mysterious Bernard Faÿ. Described by Alice Toklas as Stein’s “dearest friend during her life,” Faÿ until recently rarely figured even in biographies of Stein.31 In France, his name has largely been forgotten—or repressed. A 2009 biography in French by the scholar Antoine Compagnon, Le cas Bernard Faÿ: du Collège de France à l’indignité nationale, has paved the way toward resituating this complex man within French intellectual life during the interwar period. Still, much remains unclear about his relationship to Stein before and during the war. Yet according to Burns and Dydo, Stein could not have undertaken the translation project and would not have survived the war without his intervention. Who was Bernard Faÿ, and how could he have performed such widely divergent roles: scholar, academic, Americanophile, high modernist aesthete, Gestapo agent?32
Reflecting on the complexities of Faÿ’s world brought me back to the question of Gertrude Stein’s own Pétainism: her support for, indeed collusion with, an authoritarian regime. Was Stein indeed a “conservative fascist,” as sources on the Internet claim, or were her allegiances less clear-cut, perhaps more conflicted and ambiguous? Given the generally positive reputation Stein currently enjoys, it was simply hard to believe the accusations that now circulate widely. We want our good writers to have good politics.33 For most contemporary readers, in fact, Gertrude Stein is an unquestionably progressive writer: the originator, in works such as Three Lives (1904–1906), Tender Buttons (1913), and The Making of Americans (1903–1912), of a radically antiauthoritarian, antipatriarchal poetics and a key precursor to both deconstructionist theory and postmodernist writing. Currently undergoing a critical renaissance, Stein’s work has recently been the source of great scholarly interest: thirty books and almost seventy dissertations in the last fifteen years alone. In film, contemporary music, and digital media, Stein’s work has been celebrated for its decentering, destabilizing use of language, its attention to everyday life, and its dialogic appeal to the audience.34 Stein has also been embraced by the field of queer studies and by the homosexual community in general, which see in her experimental writing an expressive poetics of lesbian-feminist identity.35 In light of her elevated status both in the university and in the public at large, those who learn of Stein’s Pétain translation project find it not only disturbing but also unfathomable. Some who have addressed its place in Stein’s oeuvre have tended to see it as an act of survival on the part of a sixty-six-year-old Jewish American woman unwilling to leave the country she had lived in for over forty years.36 Others—for example Janet Malcolm, in her recent book about Stein’s war years, Two Lives—simply cannot make sense of Stein’s “perverse” translation project. Malcolm cedes all interpretation of the issue to Burns and Dydo, who themselves admit that “what [Stein] understood about Faÿ and how she saw the situation remains a troublesome puzzle.”37
In my own early work on Gertrude Stein, I had been similarly taken with what I perceived as the deeply radical nature of her writing, its ability to elicit an absolutely unprecedented reading experience that in its open-endedness could never be fully contained or completed.38 While acknowledging the hermetic and even narcissistic aspects of her work, I paid little attention to how this hermeticism might be entwined with a particular or specific political vision. What, I might have asked, could Stein’s political views of the 1930s and 1940s possibly have to do with her earlier radical experiments in writing?
Indeed, the very work for which Stein is best known—her uniformly experimental writing from Three Lives (1906) to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)—is significant precisely because it appears so profoundly dissociated from time and place, from an author and her “views.” To this extent, Stein’s experimental writing also seems open to the reader in the radically democratic way that Roland Barthes discusses in his famous essay “The Death of the Author.”39 Almost more than any other writer in the English language, the Steinian experimental text seems to exemplify Barthes’s description of modern writing: “No one, no ‘person,’ says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading.”40 For those willing to read such a text—a text notably free of any guiding authorial presence—the experience can be both disconcerting and liberating. Yet it is precisely this freedom that makes it difficult to grasp how such a text could ever be seen as inscribing a particular political position beyond a progressive one of exposing the reader to new modes of reading.41 It is even harder to see how such a text might be seen to be anticipating, precisely in its literary experimentation, the reactionary political views that Stein overtly expresses in her later writings of the 1930s and 1940s.
Still, if Stein’s great accomplishment has been to teach us to read in a new way, the premises and principles that inform this teaching are not necessarily unassailable. Indeed, questioning the premises and principles of modernism, or at least producing a revisionary account of their value, has become an important recent critical trend. This has occurred in the wake of empirical evidence showing that many of the most creative, original, and experimental male writers of the modernist period—including Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Wyndham Lewis, Ernst Jünger, Filippo Marinetti, Gottfried Benn, and T. S. Eliot, alongside important twentieth-century philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, Carl Schmitt, and Maurice Blanchot—were all supporters of fascist, profascist, or authoritarian regimes during the 1930s and 1940s. More recent criticism has also shown the points of convergence between fascist ideologies and regimes and female modernists.42 Ever since the late 1980s, when it was revealed that the deconstructionist critic Paul de Man had written more than two hundred articles for a pro-Nazi publication during World War II, much attention has been paid to this alliance between modernist art and philosophy in its most seemingly progressive or avant-garde form and the eventual support for a politics of illiberal reaction.43 Why, asks one critic, would modernists “make a home or niche for themselves within fascism”?44
Given the complexity and variety of both artistic modernism and political fascism, as well as the rich and continuous debate that has swirled around their relation since the 1930s, it is impossible here to do full justice to this question.45 Moreover, the case of Gertrude Stein is quite particular. Stein could not be further in artistic temperament or political enthusiasms from a Futurist fascist like Marinetti, nor was she driven by the racist fervor of other fascist modernists like Pound or Céline. Her case seems to fall under the rubric of “reactionary modernism”—an affiliation that Stein herself captures when she states that being “well ahead of every one” may not be antithetical to being “reactionary.”
“Reactionary modernism” is a concept that seems to hold in suspension contradictory tendencies: a “paradox,” according to Jeffrey Herf in his book of the same name. Herf, who limits himself to the German context, argues that Nazism was at once a primitivist and irrationalist movement directed toward the recovery of some primordial past and a movement of technological modernization with an affirmative attitude toward the future.46 The Nazis envisioned a future in which technological progress could be harnessed to an authoritarian cultural revolution that would offer a third way “beyond” capitalism and communism. They were reactionaries in that “they were cultural revolutionaries seeking to restore instinct and to reverse degeneration due to an excess of civilization.” Yet they were modernists both in their embrace of technology and in their affinities with artistic and cultural modernism, particularly the idea “of the free creative spirit at war with the bourgeoisie”—a spirit “who refuses to accept any limits.”47
Roger Griffin’s recent monumental study, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler, goes further than Herf in underscoring how deep this reactionary strain ran through certain artistic and intellectual modernisms, which in their rejection of modernity for an alternative social and political future found ready agreement with fascist regimes. “The condition of modernity generated myriad countervailing bids by artists and non-artists not just to find ways of expressing the decadence of modernity, but to assert a higher vision of reality, to make contact with deeper, eternal ‘truths’—or even to inaugurate an entirely new epoch.”48 What Griffin terms “the sense of a new beginning under Mussolini and Hitler”—and I might add, under Philippe Pétain—was precisely this anticipation of a future that was also a return to something lost or hidden under what he calls “the decadence of modernity.” The “reactionary” aspect in this idea of modernism was thus always in tension with its “progressive” anticipations: the urge “to make contact with deeper, eternal ‘truths’” had to be balanced with “the pursuit of the regeneration of history and the inauguration of a new era.”49
Such a double-edged vision parallels Stein’s own ideas, expressed in the 1930s and 1940s, of a “new era” in both France and America that would arrest the soul-sucking march of modern life and return its citizens to a lost, vital, eighteenth-century pioneering spirit. This was an era, again, that Stein readily associated with Philippe Pétain and his National Revolution, with his calls for a return to a “spirit of sacrifice” in the place of a “spirit of jouissance.”50 Unlike Herf’s Nazis, technological progress did not seem to play a role in Stein’s Pétainism or in Pétain’s own political platform. If anything, Stein idealized the life of farmers and the rural working class, and this, too, drew her to Pétain’s static agrarianism. Yet like the reactionary modernists of Herf’s study, Stein also felt the strong pull of a future-oriented movement that promised “a radical reversal of the process of degeneration … threatening the nation’s body and soul.”51 Having spent years coming to terms with the idea that she was a “genius,” Stein also believed deeply in the value of the “free creative spirit … without limits” who might lead his or her nation into this brave new era.
This book is an attempt to chart the course of Stein’s views over the interwar period as they dovetailed with those of her friend and collaborator, Bernard Faÿ. The unlikelihood of these shared views has to do in part with the assumption that reactionary thinking would hold little attraction for progressive modernist intellectuals and artists. But this in turn leads us back the question raised above, a question that continues to trouble many of Stein’s most ardent and enthusiastic readers. Even if we acknowledge Stein’s politically reactionary leanings of the 1930s and 1940s, in what sense were these views related to her highly experimental writing of the 1910s and 1920s? To what extent were these leanings nurtured by her early modernist premises and principles? Simply put, was Stein a reactionary modernist from the outset, or did she only become one later in her life?
We can answer this question not by searching for political ideas in Stein’s experimental writing—writing, again, that abstains from “ideas” and “views”—but rather by looking at the principles that guided her through her creative development, especially during the first and most radically heterogeneous decade of her writing: from The Making of Americans to Tender Buttons (1902 to 1912). Some of these principles are to be found in the text that accompanied Stein on her creative journey during this period: a book called Sex and Character, by the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger. A strange blend of philosophy and hack science, Sex and Character presents itself as a typology of humanity based on racial, gendered, and sexual categories of identity, the varieties of which are seen to lie on a spectrum defined by two polar opposites or ideal forms: the Woman/Jew and the Man/Genius. Described by Gerald Steig as “the psychological-metaphysical prelude for National Socialism, including its variants,”52 Sex and Character was widely read from the moment of its publication in 1903 up to and through World War II; the Nazis found it a “racist classic.”53 Infusing its treatise on type and transcendence with large doses of anti-Semitism and misogyny, the text was even cited by Hitler for the self-overcoming of the author himself, a Jew who converted to Protestantism before killing himself and who thus became, in the words of Hitler’s mentor Dietrich Eckart, “the only decent Jew.”54
Gertrude Stein, who read Weininger during the critical period of 1907 and 1908, produced a capacious human typology of her own in the wake of her reading, an effort that would be sketched out in her most important early text, The Making of Americans. As Alice Toklas notes, Stein expressed a “mad enthusiasm” for Weininger, whom she thought “the only modern whose theory stood up and was really consistent.”55 Stein also, as we shall see, used Weininger to justify her own sense of herself as a creative genius, and this self-typing would, in turn, have multiple radiating effects on the complex changes and developments of her writing style. I have argued elsewhere that the implications of this apparently enthusiastic reading of Weininger on the new experimental direction in Stein’s writing, as well as on the determination of her own “type,” were enormous.56 The question confronting us here is what role, if any, Stein’s reading of Weininger had on her later attraction to the figure of Philippe Pétain and to the authoritarian ideology of the Vichy regime.
In Griffin’s terms, it would be specious to argue for any “direct lineage” between the Stein who read Weininger and the Stein who supported Pétain.57 Nevertheless, we could posit a connection between the definition of genius that Weininger offered Stein as the type that transcends all types—a definition, again, that had a significant effect on the development of Stein’s experimental aesthetic—and her attraction to an authoritarian dictator like Pétain.58 Weininger didn’t turn Stein into a Pétainist, but he gave her the terms and the framework for her discovery of genius and her sense of the importance of subjective transcendence: two realizations that lie behind both her formalist experiments in writing and her support for Pétain. In Philippe Pétain, Gertrude Stein saw someone who seemed to embody the imaginative and subjective reach of the high modernist writer or artist, but with real-world, transformative power. In his words and in his symbolic presence, Pétain reminded Stein of her own efforts in language to transcend and transform the public sphere. As Pétain called upon his countrymen to return to the earth (“la terre”), Stein saw herself returning Americans to the “earthy” value of words.59 What she saw in the emerging regime of Philippe Pétain was reform, heroism, national redemption, religious piety, traditionalism, and—perhaps above all—an aesthetic sensibility not entirely alien to her own.60
A similar connection between Stein’s early experiments in writing and her later political views can be traced through another central principle behind her creative development: the idea of the aesthetic breakthrough. Stein wrote famously in 1933 that her short story “Melanctha” (1905–1906) was “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature” (ABT 66). We will see later how important this calculus of century identity was to Stein’s Pétainism in the late 1930s and 1940s. But equally important here is Stein’s reference to her writing as “the first definite step away” from something obsolete and toward something aesthetically unprecedented, an idea that courses through her popular autobiographies of the 1930s but that is also evident during the period from 1906 to 1912 as she was making this step.
The example here is what Stein called “the beginning, really the beginning of modern writing”: The Making of Americans, her 925-page “record” of this early period’s changes.61 Feeling herself on the verge of something that had never before been attempted, of a radically new form of writing, Stein begins the book first as a fairly conventional story of an immigrant American family, and then, after reading Weininger, as an attempted typology of “everyone who ever is or was or will be living.”62 This second, gargantuan task becomes the catalyst for deep creative questioning, “a melancholy feeling in some that there is not a complete history of every one in some one” (MOA 330). The notes she kept during this attenuated compositional process are full of worry (“Trouble with writing book… . When sufficiently comprehensive lacks imaginative content”).63 Nevertheless, by the end of the ten-year process of struggling and writing, Stein had achieved her breakthrough. “I … am the original wise one,” she writes triumphantly, while also lamenting the fact that “perhaps sometime I will be sad again about not any one ever having the understanding of being in men and women that I am having” (MOA 708).
What Herf calls “the free creative spirit at war with the bourgeoisie who refuses to accept any limits” is powerfully captured in Stein’s sense of her unprecedented (and lonely) endeavor in The Making of Americans. Unlike the “pack of stupid fools” Stein excoriates in her notes to the project, her effort to “go on writing, and not for myself and not for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing” is not only unique but unreproducible.64 Soon, through this process, Stein would begin to realize that she was a genius: “Slowly and in a way it was not astonishing but slowly I was knowing that I was a genius,” she writes in an account of this period (EA 76). While recognizing that the new aesthetic standard she has set for herself demands ever-new breakthroughs—“beginning again and again” becomes her modernist mantra—she nevertheless embraces this standard as the necessary work of the truly original genius.
To be sure, the idea of the breakthrough—of “the first definite step away” from something older or outmoded or artistically stale—was not just Gertrude Stein’s own aesthetic concern, the driving force behind her writing. It defines the self-identity of the avant-garde; it is the raison d’être for artistic and literary modernism.65 As Herf and Griffin argue, it also defines how various fascist or profascist movements perceived and justified their political agendas: the “sense of a new beginning,” the break with modernity, with decadence, with the outmoded, stale, and corrupt system of liberal democracy as well as with the perceived alternative to liberalism, communism. Like the avant-garde, who imagined their work to be inherently revolutionary,66 fascist movements saw themselves in the vanguard of a future-oriented world-political organization; like the avant-garde, fascists saw themselves as “the beginning, really the beginning” of something new after almost two centuries of decadence that had followed the French and the American Revolutions. The fascists thus shared a core vocabulary with avant-garde artists and writers of the early twentieth century that allowed for certain affinities to be claimed, at certain moments and by certain individuals.67 While it is surely possible to overstate this commonality of views, words, and impulses, the harder question is to ask precisely how, in the case of particular modernists, this commonality turns into a convergence.68
In the case of Stein, it is important to underscore that her politics of the 1930s and 1940s were not the express outgrowth of the thinking that inspired her early experiments in literature: her “mad enthusiasm” for Weininger and her commitment to breakthroughs and “new beginnings.” Both of these commitments, we might say, form part of the background that she brought with her into the turbulent decades between the First and Second World Wars. Nor did her extraliterary views remain static and unchanging over the course of her life. Again, one of the points of this study is to argue that Stein’s political views became ever more reactionary during the period of her collaboration with Bernard Faÿ. At the same time, it would be a mistake to simply dissociate Stein’s early “progressive” experimental writing from her later “reactionary” politics, in the desire to excuse or compartmentalize. The tendencies that drew Gertrude Stein toward both Bernard Faÿ and Philippe Pétain, we could say, were always there.
Unlike some of her modernist contemporaries, Gertrude Stein never attended a fascist rally, was never an official functionary of any fascist organization, and was almost never celebrated in the fascist or profascist press.69 Of course, not many Jews were. And this, above all else, seems to make Stein’s Pétainism even more troubling than the more rabid support for fascist regimes of her contemporaries such as Pound, Céline, and Heidegger. For it is not the outspokenness of Stein’s commitment to Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime that matters but the very fact that she willingly sought to produce any propaganda in support of this regime that shocks us to this day. One can hear this shock in Picasso’s voice in a conversation reported by James Lord: “Gertrude was a real fascist. She always had a weakness for Franco. Imagine! For Pétain, too. You know she wrote speeches for Pétain. Can you imagine it? An American, a Jewess, what’s more.”70
I have laid out some of the sources of Stein’s commitment to Pétain: in a world where so much had been lost and where so much seemed uncertain, in a world deemed simply “decadent,” almost any action could be justified in the name of an ideal, however violent and exclusionary. Time and again, however, the scapegoating for the problems of the day turned upon a single presumed source: the Jews. In Europe, and to a certain extent in America, doing something about “the Jewish question” in the interwar period became synonymous with positive, progressive national change. In 1900, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the Action Française endorsed the idea that “anti-Semitism is essential to any truly French action”; after World War I, this view would move from the fringe to the center.71 As Zeev Sternhell has proven, modern French nationalism became inextricable from anti-Semitism: “The nationalists saw anti-Semitism as a common denominator that could serve as a platform for a mass movement against liberal democracy and bourgeois society. The further step of concluding that anti-Semitism permitted nationalism to appear as the doctrine of national consensus was easy to take, and taken soon enough.”72 As the interwar period progressed, the romantic ideal of a renewed nationalism became increasingly tied to a violent anti-Semitism.
In 1925, the first fascist movement in France was formed, the Faisceau. Although this movement was to founder three years later in the face of temporary improvement in French social and economic conditions, it laid the groundwork for what Sternhell calls “a revolution of the spirit and the will, of manners and morals.”73 Unlike their anti-Dreyfusard predecessors, the Faisceau did not have an explicitly anti-Semitic agenda: for much of the 1920s, overt anti-Semitism remained unfashionable. Yet the Faisceau “constituted an ideological and organizational link” between prewar anti-Dreyfusism and the more virulent anti-Semitism of the Right in the 1930s.74 The main journal of the Faisceau, Le Nouveau Siècle, was careful to recycle the stereotypes of an earlier era through an appeal to French national pride, making invidious distinctions between bad “foreign” and good “French” Jews. Yet while “foreign” Jews were explicitly marked out as disruptive to national unity, the Faisceau often insinuated that decadence in fact lay with assimilated Jews, whose ability to blend into their environments threatened any easy demarcations between natives and foreigners. According to Georges Valois, the leader of the Faisceau, the Jews had “used the powers of Gold to dissolve their host nations” and “sought to destroy that concrete and territorial French patriotism that would exclude them.”75 In the space of several years, Valois’s cautious ideas about the Jews as anathema to “French patriotism” would become more crudely repeated: the Jews as a whole were eternal outsiders and degenerate foreign bodies in the midst of the national community.
One of the most difficult questions of this book is whether the Jewish Gertrude Stein could have herself contributed to this scapegoating of the Jews. Several issues are troubling, not the least her various comments, both public and private, that seem to justify authoritarianism in the 1930s, including—as we will see—the actions of Hitler. There is her friendship with figures on the French Right and with radical Catholic reformers calling for a new French “order,” perhaps most importantly Bernard Faÿ. And then of course there is her support of Pétain and the propaganda she wrote for the Vichy regime. On the other hand, being Jewish was never a public affiliation that Gertrude Stein made much of, especially after she moved to Paris in 1903 and took up the mantle of modernist innovator and artistic genius. In fact, Stein’s embrace of modernism seemed to require the suppression of her ethnic origins, much as the characters in the first sections of The Making of Americans “wash away” their immigrant characteristics and patterns of speech in order to become Americans.76 That Stein connected modernism with Americanism made imperative her assimilationist position. Even in her earliest writings, in the college essays she wrote at Radcliffe, Stein had already understood Jewishness as something encompassed by and necessarily subordinate to a larger sense of belonging—for example, with the nation.
“The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation,” an essay Stein wrote for a college composition class in 1896, argues that Jewish “race-feeling” must not get in the way of being a “true and loyal American.” Jewishness, she suggests, should be a “private concern” dissociated from the public sphere of “modern national identity.” It is a “feeling of kinsfolk and does not in any sense clash with the loyalty of a man to his nation.”77 Several years later, in 1903, Stein began her “breakthrough” novel, The Making of Americans, with the premise that American identity requires the removal of ethnic or other differentiating traits. In the early sections of the novel that deal with successive generations of Jewish immigrants, the process of assimilation—the process by which Jewishness is erased from her characters—is also the process that nationalizes them, “making” them into Americans. Stein herself seemed to take this process to heart while she was writing and revising the novel: in each successive draft Jewish names are cut out, substituted by nonethnic descriptors. By the time she finished the work in 1912, the immigrant story had morphed into a present-tense exploration of the author’s “being” as she struggles to create a capacious typology of humanity. For many years thereafter, as her biographer Richard Bridgman notes, “her references to Judaism were infrequent.”78
Telling the story of her family’s assimilation into American society gave Stein her voice as a modernist writer. By writing through and beyond this story, by taking “the first definite step away” from previous generations, Stein discovered a voice that could lay claim to being absolutely new, unmarked by the past and its determinants. Stein’s critics have long been intrigued by the meaning of this discovery. Linda Wagner-Martin argues that “The modernist writer aimed to be universal, above political alliances, washed clean in the purity of serious and innovative aesthetics, and Gertrude certainly wanted to play that game well.”79 Yet playing that game well was not without its costs, as another critic, Priscilla Wald, has suggested. Wald refers to Stein’s “fear of self-loss” that attends cultural and narrative assimilation.80 As Stein writes the story of Jewish assimilation, she begins to question the norms that this story relies upon: the “middle-class” habits toward which Jewish and other immigrants strive, as well as the grammatical norms of English that represent successful linguistic assimilation. The text’s development from a “realist” to a “modernist” narrative, marked by the breakdown of plot, the uncertainty of the narrative voice, and the repetition of whole sections of text, “shows what has been suppressed and repressed” by the process of assimilation: the “untold stories” of immigrants who have been unable or unwilling to fully adapt to their new environment.81 Americans may be “made,” but the process of making requires a “self-loss” and “self-fragmentation” embedded in the new modernist form of the text.
In the end, however, it would be misleading to claim that Stein’s erasure of her Jewishness and emergence as a modernist writer were not liberating for her. For it was through the “breakthrough” of The Making of Americans, as we have seen, that Stein discovered that she was a genius. This, in turn, would have lasting implications for her writing and for her sense of self as exceptional, as existing beyond conventional expectations and assumptions. For Stein, being a genius justified her aesthetic drive, her physical and social displacement and eccentricity, and her homosexuality. And as her notebooks to The Making of Americans make clear, it also served to trump any identification with Jewishness. Despite a long tradition linking Jews with genius, Stein remained remarkably wary of this connection. Again, her “mad enthusiasm” for Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character may have had something to do with this wariness. Weininger, who argued against the premise of “Jewish genius” as a contradiction in terms, claimed that Jewishness was antithetical to transcendence and that it tended inevitably toward a “constant close relation with the lower life.”82 Importantly for Stein, Weininger also uncoupled Jewishness as a “tendency of mind” from individual character, suggesting that one could be a Jew but not be “Jewish.” Hence Weininger proved crucial for Stein not just in giving her the terms to lay claim to her own genius but also in helping her sever her outward ties to Jewishness, femininity, and the norms of heterosexuality.83
The Making of Americans was not the only modernist text to emerge out of Stein’s displacement of the Jewish theme. Another breakthrough text, the short story “Melanctha,” had its first incarnation as an autobiographical novella with a Jewish protagonist, entitled Q.E.D. When Stein undertook to write “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature,” she transformed her autobiographical Jewish lesbian story Q.E.D. into the narrative of an African American woman named Melanctha. While the black and heterosexual Melanctha retains certain identifiably “Jewish” traits—most notably, she is described throughout as a “wanderer”—her racial and cultural difference obscures the ethnic origins of the story. As with The Making of Americans, Jewishness, here, becomes one of the key points of origin for modernism and what needs to be abandoned or obscured in order for the modernist text to be written.84
Yet Stein’s lifelong refusal of outward identification with Jewishness had an interesting twist. In 1907, just after the stylistic breakthroughs of “Melanctha” and as Stein was beginning to use a Weininger-esque vocabulary in new drafts of The Making of Americans, she met her future companion, Alice Babette Toklas. A San Francisco native from a middle-class Jewish background, Toklas, like Stein, preferred to identify with an assimilationist American narrative: she once responded tersely to a question about her Jewishness by saying that she and Stein “represented America.”85 Yet personal notes shared between Stein and Toklas throughout the 1910s and 1920s tell a story of intimacy experienced in part through Jewish identification. Stein refers to Toklas affectionately as “my little Jew” and “my little Hebrew” and to herself and Toklas as “baby and its Jew.” Given the importance of Toklas to Stein’s life and writing, including her role in supporting the experimental direction of this writing, it is significant that Jewishness became part of the currency through which the two women related. The repression of Jewishness at the source of Stein’s modernism seems to return in intimate moments with Toklas as a form of transgressive identification. This return enables an erotic role playing that courses through Stein’s creative life, however much her sense of herself as a writer may have prohibited this identification.86
Yet this “return” of Jewish identification can be glimpsed almost exclusively in the private notes shared by Stein and Toklas during their daily life. In the work that Stein meant to present to the public, she returned explicitly to the issue of Jewishness only rarely after 1910. In the wake of World War I, during the nationalist fervor of the Versailles negotiations, Stein made passing references to Jews and Jewishness, often in terms of the efforts on behalf of the Zionist delegation to Versailles to carve out a Jewish homeland in Palestine. She directly comments on this movement in a 1920 text, “The Reverie of the Zionist.” Here, Stein rejects the idea that Zionism can speak in the name of all Jews, suggesting in fact that Jews are “anywhere … and everywhere,” their presence producing a “wealth of imagery.” She implies that Zionism obscures the more authentic emotional relationship of a person to his or her country: “Judaism should be a question of religion.… Race is disgusting if you don’t love your country,” she writes. Recalling her argument in “The Modern Jew,” Stein here compartmentalizes Jewishness, limiting it to a religious practice (“Judaism”) and arguing against essentializing claims to racial unity as the ground for national identification. She also proposes “love,” not race or religion, as the truest measure of national belonging. While “Reverie” does not deny the existence or the creative power of Jewish figures or traditions—Jews are indeed “anywhere and everywhere,” like the Old Testament figure of Shem who appears at the end—the text rests on the point that one “belongs” only to the place where one feels a deep-seated collective love.87
Ten years later, this kind of rhetoric would begin to have troubling resonances. While Stein in a text like “The Reverie of the Zionist” points toward a compromise between national solidarity and Jewish particularity, other writers and politicians at the time were beginning to use similar terms to stress the dissociation between Jewish and national identity. For the French Faisceau, Jews were the “symbol and cause” of decadence; many of their followers in the 1930s “insisted that Jews, by their very nature, could not be assimilated.”88 While Stein was talking about the primary importance of “lov[ing] your country,” right-wing nationalists were using the same terms to stress the difference between natives and “foreigners.” Stein’s point that “Race is disgusting if you don’t love your country” would seem to open the door for the argument that racialist or racist thinking is acceptable if you do love your country. And as the more optimistic decade of the 1920s turned into the hollow years of the 1930s, Stein’s own rhetoric, informed by her personal sense of distance from Jewish concerns, would begin to harden. She began to refer to “the Jews” as a discrete and disruptive social entity, often seeming to exclude herself from the category. And she began to essentialize her ideas both of the nation, as having a specific and unchanging “way of being,” and of national belonging as a prerogative of natives—not something to which immigrants or foreigners could easily aspire.
Furthermore, it was during this period that Gertrude Stein became close friends with Bernard Faÿ.
Although Stein and Faÿ shared much in common, their first encounter was not particularly auspicious. According to an outside observer, Stein “was only mildly interested” in Bernard Faÿ, and Faÿ “was frightened of her.”89 In 1924, Stein had already consolidated her reputation as an avant-garde celebrity and was somewhat jaded by the stream of deferential young men who appeared at her salon. Faÿ, just back from teaching stints at Columbia, Kenyon College, and the University of Iowa, with a master’s degree in modern languages from Harvard and a tenured professorship at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, was more of a scholar than many of Stein’s admirers. But he had moved in avant-garde circles while in America, and on his return to Paris in the early 1920s he was drawn to the American expatriate community that flourished there. He soon made friends with many of Stein’s followers: writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Scott Fitzgerald, musicians such as Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, painters such as Picasso and Jo Davidson. Still, with his combination of bourgeois manners, self-control, and evident ambition, Faÿ initially failed to impress in the uninhibited and experimental scene around Stein. It didn’t help that Ernest Hemingway, jealous and possessive of Stein’s attention, referred dismissively to Faÿ as “Bernard Fairy.”90
It would take another few years before Faÿ would be able to move into the inner circle of Stein’s group of friends. Hemingway, perceived by Toklas as a threat to her union with Stein, was banished from the ménage in 1924.91 Anderson retreated to America, where, like Fitzgerald, he began a long descent into alcoholism. In their place, a different set of artists, writers, and assorted hangers-on began to converge on Stein’s salon: women such as Janet Flanner, Bryher, and Natalie Barney; men such as Faÿ, Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Hart Crane, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copeland, Georges Hugnet, Francis Rose, the artist Pavel Tchelitchew and his partner Charles Henri Ford, and the surrealist writer René Crevel, who “talked with a pronounced lisp.”92 Almost all of these “disciples”—Carl Van Vechten’s word93—were homosexual or bisexual, and the electric atmosphere of the salon reflected this new orientation. At its core was a deep affection and indeed reverence for Gertrude Stein, a respect for her domestic partnership with Toklas, and an eagerness to partake in the substitute family that this partnership represented. But Stein’s disciples were also invested in the queer kind of “aura” she generated. By the late 1920s, according to one biographer, Stein’s “feeling in the salon … was that people came to hear her and so she needed to perform.”94 Whereas for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Stein had primarily played the role of mentor and career facilitator, for Faÿ and his gay cohorts, Stein was a combination of mother, saint, star, and diva: an icon of triumphant self-sufficiency, a survivor of ridicule and disdain, and a consummate, electric performer. Her estranged brother Leo recalls the glamour enveloping Stein during this period: the frisson of her persona, her nicknames like “The Presence” or “Le Stein.”95 Many compared her to Saint Theresa, the protagonist of Stein’s most famous opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, who joyously and unapologetically proclaims her eccentricity and exceptionality. Within the context of this late 1920s salon, gayness—or what Bernard Faÿ called “joy”—was a mantle to be worn without shame. Faÿ referred to Stein as Saint Gertrude and to her salon as “the chapel of Our Lady.” He wrote: “Only the joy of existing and acting possessed her, guided her, and led her to dominate her entourage.” She was “molded out of gaiety.” She taught of “la joie de vivre.”96
Yet for Bernard Faÿ, Gertrude Stein’s allure was a complicated thing. When Faÿ recalls being “frightened” of Stein at their first meeting, it was not just her reputation and domineering personality that struck him. It was also what she represented to his own self-identity, as well as the tensions and desires that her presence evoked.
Bernard Marie Louis Emmanuel Faÿ was a curious individual of complex personal and political sympathies. Born on April 3, 1893, to a family of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie, the son of a lawyer father and of an “ultra-Catholic” mother,97 Bernard Faÿ had every privilege of his class: education, culture, money—if not the aristocratic lineage he so deeply admired throughout his life. By his own admission he was a dreamy child and a loner, made more so by a debilitating bout with childhood polio that left him with a pronounced limp.98 Confined to his bed from the ages of five to thirteen, Faÿ passed the time being read to and reading widely in French literature, an activity that would shape his scholarly tendencies and have a lasting effect on his aesthetic sensibility. Returning to school with a disability, he developed a defensive verbal wit that served him well in the classroom and earned him the respect of his peers. Childhood trauma was soon followed by academic and personal success: an “Agrégé” in letters at the unusually young age of twenty-one; a Croix de Guerre for his work with the French Red Cross in Verdun in 1917; a Victor Chapman scholarship to Harvard in 1919; a master of arts in modern languages from Harvard in 1920. After Faÿ received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1925, his thesis was honored with the inaugural bestowal of the Jusserand Medal from the American Historical Association for the best work on intellectual relations between the United States and Europe. It was also the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in history. A transatlantic network of colleagues and friends helped certify his early reputation as one of the foremost writers on American culture in France; soon, he was being asked to teach and to give honorary lectures at elite institutions throughout the United States.99 His connections with the avant-garde Parisian musical group known as Les Six and, through his artist brother Emmanuel, to the New York visual arts scene endeared him to cosmopolites on both sides of the Atlantic, as did his friendship with both Proust and Gide.100 By the time he met Gertrude Stein, at the age of thirty-one, Bernard Faÿ was not only a rising academic star but well positioned to impress her with his sophistication, learning, taste, and ambition.
Yet Faÿ also had other affinities that Stein may have found innately appealing. Raised in a conservative Catholic and Royalist family, Faÿ had continued to align himself with dominant currents in the French Catholic Right during his adulthood. While his aesthete friends were Proustians, his political acquaintances during the interwar period included Charles Maurras, Philippe Pétain, Maurice Barrès, Robert Brasillach, Abel Bonnard, and a host of others who would eventually become Vichy insiders. Over the course of the 1930s, Faÿ would become identified both with Maurras and his Action Française and with more militant or extreme right-wing organizations such as the Croix de Feu and the Rassemblement National Pour la Reconstruction de la France. He would eventually become one of the few establishment intellectuals during the war to actively collaborate with the Nazi occupiers.
Faÿ’s intellectual ties to the French Right had been fostered by his scholarly work, first at Harvard and then in a quick succession of published volumes, on the topic of Freemasonry: a particularly charged issue in France. In the popular imagination, Freemasonry was associated with secularism, democracy, and revolutionary ideals; in the 1930s, these characteristics were inextricably linked to decadence and to the Jews. Faÿ described Freemasonry as “the most efficient social power of the civilized world” and as the central force that had given rise to the French Revolution. But Faÿ also warned against the “hidden” dangers of this power. For Faÿ, French Freemasonry—with its secret rituals involving death and resurrection, its mysticism, and its “indigestible phraseology”—represented a kind of shadow version of Catholicism, albeit one without any redeeming “refinement.”101 “A monstrous parasite, Freemasonry has grown larger out of our debasement,” Faÿ writes.102 As his scholarly criticism became sharper over the course of the 1930s, Faÿ began to align his critique of Freemasonry with more general critiques of French social decline and with militant forces calling for a violent overthrow of the Third Republic. With the installation of the Vichy regime in 1940, Faÿ finally was allowed to put his ideas into action as director of the covert Vichy agency involved in the pursuit and exposure of French Freemasons. There, as we shall see in chapter 5, Faÿ’s obsessions turned toxic.
But the vehemence and sordid outcome of Faÿ’s anti-Masonic crusade is only part of his—and our—story. Like Gertrude Stein, Faÿ led a double life, one framed by his sense of connection to two cultures: France and America. As the first professor of American civilization in France and the first to hold the chair in that field at the prestigious Collège de France, Faÿ began his career less as a scholar of Freemasonry itself than as a comparative historian of the French and American revolutions, within which Freemasonry had played an important role. In his Harvard thesis on the subject, Faÿ had in fact emphasized the salutary aspects of the American branch of Freemasonry, describing the lodges as “cradles of the spirit of independence” and showing in his analysis of Benjamin Franklin how much “Freemasonry envisaged the reform of society by means of enlightenment and philosophic benevolence.”103 In America, it seemed, Freemasonry could flourish without having the deleterious effects that it had on French culture, because America valued intrinsically the “didactic and utilitarian” qualities of Masonic thought. Simply put, Freemasonry “worked” in America because of the nation’s essential character—something about which Faÿ, like Stein, considered himself to be an excellent judge. Americans were ambitious and passionate, optimistic and impulsive. They “adored” ideas but did not take them too seriously; their dearest values were freedom and materialism; they were profoundly conformist (JP 156–157). Unlike the French, with their clericalism and traditionalism, Americans fully and unproblematically embraced any “fever of newness” (RSFA 3). America, being a young country, always looked to the future, and appreciated Freemasonry’s investment in progress. Within the context of American culture Freemasonry was clearly not a threat, since this culture was itself unanchored to any spiritual force or dogma, such as the Catholic Church, which might resist secular Masonic “enlightenment.” America, Faÿ writes in his Harvard thesis, represented to Europeans like himself “a benign, chimeric and innocuous dream” (RSFA 474).104
For most of his own life, in fact, Faÿ idealized America as a place of unorthodox desires and enlightened if secular politics, an anti-France that held all the attractions and dangers of the mythic Other. “Joy” was the word Faÿ consistently used to describe America: its optimism, its idealism, its futurity. And until he began to sour on America and its politics in the late 1930s, Faÿ also consistently—even obsessively—linked American “joy” to erotic vitality. In a 1925 essay, “La joie et les plaisirs aux Etats-Unis,” Faÿ notes how “the joy of the body, the most honorable and fecund joy of all, reign[s] in America” (JP 154). Elsewhere he writes that Americans’ bodies, “developed without brutality, have taught them only joy” (H 590). It was to America where Faÿ first went in pursuit of his dream, nurtured in youthful fantasies, of attending Harvard College. His earliest and most revealing essay, “Harvard 1920,” written during his graduate years, locates the origin of his interest in American joy in a personal awakening. On first hearing of America at the age of seven, Faÿ asked himself: “Shall I ever be a man in body, or will my life remain forever shut up in my thought?” This cryptic question seemed to be answered for Faÿ by his experience in World War I. As Stein herself would write about him in 1937, “Bernard Faÿ was a French college professor only like so many Frenchmen the contact with Americans during the war made the romance for them” (EA 103). Faÿ’s romance began when he caught sight of an American soldier in 1917 during the war. “His supple body, his unskillful and graceful movements, then his glance and his slow words mingled with smiles and pride attracted me. I saw him in the midst of dangers. I saw him in the midst of pleasures. I saw him abandoned and sought for. I studied him with passion” (H 588).105 After the war, enrolling as a graduate student at Harvard, Faÿ was able to pursue ever more passionate “studying” of American men, and to refine his original assessment of their type as “beautiful. These young men have ordinarily great supple bodies, without faults and without vices, qualified to give them all the pleasures which the air, the water, the land and movement can offer, and to serve their race” (H 590). Later, in “Protestant America” (1928), Faÿ writes of America that one “cannot conceive of what physical and sexual excitement is caused by the close proximity of white, yellow, and black races.” In general, for Americans, “it seems that everything is done to encourage them to enjoy their bodies as much and as freely as possible.”106
In its charged blend of sexual, national, and racial desire, Faÿ’s rhetoric about Americans in these passages and in many others is both excessive and veiled. The American bodies that he studies are “beautiful,” “great,” “without faults and without vices.” Their presence produces inconceivable “excitement.” At the same time, Faÿ remains vague about what he means by becoming “a man in body” simply by finding himself in the presence of Americans. We are reminded of the mute yearnings of Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby as he watches the “gorgeous” Gatsby from afar, or of Gatsby himself, gazing out across Long Island Sound at the mythic green light on Daisy’s dock. The parallels between Faÿ’s Harvard essay (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1924) are in fact remarkably suggestive. In discussing his time at Harvard, Faÿ writes that it “made my dream incurable,” as though the American Dream were a sickness or a terminal, “incurable” disease—an awareness that strikes the Yale-educated Nick Carraway as well after Gatsby’s death. The precise subtext of this “sickness” would only be revealed in Faÿ’s case some twenty-five years later, in a deposition written by the French authorities for Faÿ’s 1946 trial for collaboration with the Nazis. Among the items seized in his home, the authorities write, was a document describing his “intimate relations with a certain number of [male] American students while he was a lecturer in the United States” and including prayers to God to excuse “ces amours impures.” Like Nick Carraway, like Gatsby, Faÿ’s American dream was inseparable from forbidden and impure love.
And when Faÿ’s dream slipped away, as it did over the course of the 1930s, it would be replaced by a new fanaticism about the need for social and political “purification” in the face of modern “decadence.” The words of Nick Carraway perfectly capture this moment, when idealism turns into militaristic moralism. After abandoning his dream—the dream represented by Gatsby, by New York, and by the frenetic world of the 1920s—Nick writes prophetically, “I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”107
Within Faÿ’s rich fantasy about Americans, Gertrude Stein was a cipher for conflicting desires and prohibitions. Associated in his mind with joy, Stein manifested the best traits of the Americans whom Faÿ “studied” while at Harvard. Yet as an American woman, Stein could seemingly never be the true object of Faÿ’s desire. In fact, writing about Stein’s “joie de vivre” many years after her death, Faÿ remarks that it was never “skewed by sensuality.” Rather, Stein taught of joy “straightforwardly, in a direct manner.” In this essay, as elsewhere, Faÿ takes pains to emphasize that Stein’s joy is inseparable from her relationship to language: a means of confronting the world through words that was refreshingly affirmative: “it was stylish to balk at the real, to find it so full of defects, of disadvantages, of stench that one couldn’t resign oneself to love it. Gertrude rejoiced in living, in seeing life and in feeling that one was living.” Contrasting Stein to the “sensual” homosexual writer André Gide, Faÿ remarks on the “purity” of Stein’s language, which allowed her to approach reality in a way uncorrupted by “la volupté” (LP 139–140).
Yet at other moments, Faÿ’s description of Stein’s “joy” seems charged with an erotic feeling similar to that found in his other writings on American men. In his essay on Harvard, Faÿ had emphasized how much the attractiveness of the male Harvard student depended upon “honesty, patience, and tolerance” that produced a “noble and masterful air” (H 589–590). He echoes this description in his discussions of Gertrude Stein’s “directness” and frankness, her ability to allow “the pleasure of affirming oneself in front of someone who appreciated one’s affirmations” (LP 139). Another gay disciple, Virgil Thomson, would make a similar point when discussing how he and Stein got along “like Harvard men.”108 In both Faÿ’s and Thomson’s accounts, Stein’s joie de vivre is alluring precisely because it reminds them of the collegial and homoerotic bonhomie of the Ivy League campus. It is significant that Faÿ often referred to Stein’s voice when discussing her use of language, noting how it spoke “of joy, of health, of voluntary and spontaneous gaiety” (LP 138). As the physical vehicle for Stein’s words, her voice seemed to embody her “gaiety” and “joy.” Talking with Stein provided a way of rediscovering, through transgression and displacement, the excitement of forbidden desire. Faÿ even claims that it was an eagerness to speak with Stein that led him to master the English language. Far from avoiding the erotic, spoken exchanges with Stein were exciting precisely because they mimicked the “joy” of pivotal male homosexual experiences.
The erotic currents that flowed between Stein and Faÿ were subtle, fluid, and complex. Limited to the realm of language or conversation, these currents remained subterranean and largely unconscious. And for Faÿ, at least, any desire toward Stein was framed by the effort to negate what he took to be his own sexual impurity. As a figure for gaiety and joy, Stein represented homosexuality in its most positive, affirmative mode—a trait that made her a magnet for gay men and women. But as someone who, for Faÿ at least, seemed to avoid being “skewed by sensuality,” Stein also represented a wholesome, desexualized alternative to “impure” homosexuality (as the comparison to Gide makes clear). “You are the only poet alive,” he writes to her in 1930, “who makes me feel a healthy pleasure and a joyous excitement.”109 In a review of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Faÿ again characterizes her as a “healthy woman of genius.”110 Seeing Stein as “healthy” rather than decadent seems to have enabled Faÿ to project a powerful new kind of fantasy onto her: “Saint Gertrude.” Transforming Stein into a Christian saint, Faÿ made her into a source of forgiveness and absolution, a desexualized force of spiritual health and healing. Stein was both the diva-saint who drew gay men into her orbit and the mother-confessor who allowed her disciples to wash away their own “disgusts and angers” (LP 169). “I allowed myself to be swept up into her whirlpool,” Faÿ writes, “as one allows oneself to be carried away by the waters of a bubbling fountain of youth” (LP 139).
Of course, Faÿ’s fantasy of Saint Gertrude served another function: it allowed him to reconcile any concerns he might have had about Stein’s Jewish origins. Faÿ was careful never to articulate these concerns to Stein directly, and their correspondence from the 1920s and 1930s makes no mention of the Jewish question. But in other contexts, as we shall see, Faÿ parroted the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the French Right, particularly where it could be expediently linked to a “Masonic conspiracy” that was leading France to ruin. In writing of Stein after her death, Faÿ makes it clear that her Jewishness was never a neutral issue for him. Although he refers positively to Stein’s “Jewish blood,” linking it to the glories of Rome and to Old Testament prophets, his comments objectify in the guise of praise; there is nothing of Stein that is unmarked by her Jewishness (LP 147). Eventually, Faÿ would resolve the “problem” of Stein’s Jewishness with a remarkable postmortem coup: converting Alice B. Toklas to Christianity, on the grounds that as a Christian Toklas was more likely to meet Stein in heaven than as a Jew. In the 1920s, however, Faÿ dealt with Stein’s Jewishness through another kind of coup, imaginatively transforming her into a Christian saint.
Curiously, Faÿ appears to have been aided in this effort by Stein herself. In 1926—the year she met Faÿ—Stein was deeply engrossed in her own imaginative exploration of saints and sainthood. She had recently written a number of texts dealing either directly or obliquely with the theme (“Saints and Singing,” “A Saint in Seven,” “Talks to Saints or Stories of Saint Remy”). Richard Bridgman suggests that this new interest was stimulated by Stein’s experience around nuns during a hospital stay in 1921; Ulla Dydo links it to Stein’s sojourn in Saint-Rémy and to her romantic memories of Spain during her Mallorca period.111 Whatever the cause, saints began appearing regularly in Stein’s writing during the 1920s, and they would eventually form the basis for one of her best-known works, Four Saints in Three Acts (1927). Stein would continue writing and thinking about saints for the rest of her life. She would ultimately rely on the prophecies of the seventh-century Saint Odile and the nineteenth-century Cure d’Ars to make sense of the defeat of France by the Germans and the subsequent installation of the Vichy regime in 1940.
Stein’s saints are always iconic figures, eternally present and invested with deep creative and generative powers. They are associated in her mind with singing, with performance, and more generally with artistry and the artist: in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she links saints to the “individual force” of “actual creation” (ABT 280).112 Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, saints would join a list of other iconic figures in Stein’s imaginative pantheon—geniuses, generals, celebrities, prophets, heroes, and dictators—all synonymous with the figure of the artist and thus with Stein herself. But saints in particular fascinated Stein and seemed to mirror her own sense of self. As she writes in “Talks to Saints”: “I am said to resemble them and they are said to resemble them and they are said to resemble me.”113
There is nothing overtly ecclesiastical about Stein’s saints, and, indeed, their religious aspect might seem almost beside the point. Stein uses the term “saint” in a loose way to refer equally to canonized figures (St. Teresa of Avila, St. Michael the Archangel, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Paul), to fictional beings (St. Settlement, St. Plan), to friends and family (St. Sarah, St. Michael), as well as to herself. What these figures share in Stein’s writing is a dimension of difference from others, of separateness and distinction, “beyond the functions of history, memory, and identity.”114 As such, saints appear in Stein’s work like static figures in a tableau, or like the elements of a still-life painting, or like actors on a stage, for it was also her interest in plays, opera, and performance that initially led Stein to saints. As she writes in Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), “A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing,” a statement she would also make about her own genius: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing” (EA 109, 70). As Melissa R. Jones writes: “Saints personify that deceptive stillness of internal action in which ‘nothing really moves but things are there.’”115 Since they live in a continuous present and embody the fullness of being, saints, like geniuses, are not exactly performers, but they are often featured in a performative context with its own rituals, practices, and beliefs. It is worth remembering that Stein’s interest in saints coincided with her own emergence as gay salon hostess, where she presided over an ongoing spectacle of drama and gossip, all the while enjoying a campy kind of deification of her own. Welcoming her gay male disciples by posing herself performatively underneath the famous portrait of her by Picasso, Stein seemed to mimic Saint Theresa in Four Saints in Three Acts: “All to come and go to stand up to kneel and to be around.”116
But if Stein’s interest in saints and sainthood was less religious than it was aesthetic or performative, the Catholic faith was also not irrelevant to Stein—especially during a period when she was disavowing, in “The Reverie of the Zionist,” the claims of a politicized world Jewry. While Stein’s opinions on the topic of religion during the 1920s were clear—“I am really not all that concerned about it,” she told her friend Samuel Steward—her growing fascination with Catholicism suggests a more ambivalent, complex attitude toward matters of faith.117 One could even argue that Stein appears publicly to have embraced Catholicism, its rituals, and its icons in place of embracing Judaism—as a way of displacing her anxieties over her own Jewishness. We have already seen how Stein displaced the Jewish theme in her early works such as The Making of Americans and “Melanctha.” In 1927, Stein surely had “Melanctha” in mind when she wrote the libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts and when she agreed with Virgil Thomson to cast African Americans in the roles of the saints for the American performance of the opera. Stein explicitly refers to the Catholic saints she writes about as wanderers, invested with deep creative and generative powers, unfixed by semantic or narrative structures; they are, as Melanctha’s lover Jeff said about her, “too many” for the form that would attempt to portray, represent, or embody them.118 Yet at no point in her career does Stein ever acknowledge the Jewish Ur-text, or the figure of the wandering Jew, that lies behind the “Melanctha”-Four Saints lineage. The obscuring of the Jewish theme also works to Stein’s benefit in her effort in Four Saints and elsewhere to imagine her own creative genius as saintly. Perhaps most importantly, identifying herself with Catholic sainthood at a moment in which Jews, as one of the forefathers of French anti-Semitism wrote, represented a “slide toward decadence” was not without its importance for Stein.119 At the end of the 1920s, and as her friendship with Bernard Faÿ deepened, Stein seemed to grasp the expediency of a positive attitude toward Catholicism.120
In his retrospective account of their relationship, Faÿ states that Stein’s “curiosity” about Catholicism was sparked by their mutual conversations during long walks through the French countryside. “She loved to speak with me about God,” Faÿ writes, and while Stein always prefaced their discussions by remarks about her Jewish background, she also to Faÿ manifested a clear “taste” (goût) for Catholic culture and the various forms of Christian devotion (LP 141). What Faÿ fails to mention is that Stein’s interest in Catholicism was not simply intellectual. As the 1920s turned into the 1930s, whatever distance Stein may have felt from organized religion generally was gradually replaced by an appreciation for the political critique of the French Third Republic emerging from Catholic intellectuals on the Right. Faÿ was one of these figures, but there were others among Stein’s friends who would become key players in the Catholic movements calling for French national renewal: men such as Henri Daniel-Rops and Anatole de Monzie, both of whom would support the National Revolution of Philippe Pétain. These “political Catholics,” many of them, like Faÿ, former followers of Charles Maurras, were drawn to authoritarianism and its fascist permutations as the only alternative to the decadent Third Republic and as the only counterweight to the perceived threat of international communism. Their influence lies behind Stein’s remarkable claim from 1937, reported by Steward, that “Catholicism” represented the only possible future for France.121 By the late 1930s, Stein, like many others, would begin to voice support for what she called the “Catholic solution” to France’s social and political woes. What remains at issue is whether she understood, and even embraced, the connection between this solution and the eventual regime of Philippe Pétain.
There was one final characteristic that Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ had in common, and that made them, for a time, true equals: both were expert at controlling and manipulating the people around them. Both “collected” friends and disciples like fine paintings or objets d’art, cultivating and discarding acquaintances throughout their respective lives with alacrity and sometimes cruelty. Both were savvy critics of interpersonal relationships, and both enjoyed and encouraged social intrigue. By the time they met in the mid-1920s, both had also developed a sophisticated way of protecting themselves from the needs and demands of others.
As a “disciple,” Faÿ was at first clearly the less dominant figure in the relationship with Stein, but this too gave him a certain amount of latitude to charm, flatter, and manipulate. While he initially claimed to be “frightened” of Stein, he was also calculating about winning her favor. In fact, by the mid-1920s, Faÿ was in the process of developing a social modus vivandi that would serve him well in his career up to World War II. As his contemporary Bravig Imbs writes, Faÿ was “coldly analytical and calculating in his friendships.” Imbs recounts a telling conversation he once had with Faÿ about friendship: “‘It’s simple,’ [Faÿ] said, ‘first you choose the people you want ultimately for your friends, then you choose those who are the friends of theirs. You begin with the latter, of course, and as soon as they have introduced you to their friends, you drop them. Just make a new list every year and drop people as fast as you acquire more important friends.”122 Although Faÿ never wholly dropped Virgil Thomson, the “less important” friend who may have originally introduced him to Stein, he did manage to arrange a tighter and more lasting collaboration with Stein than Thomson ever did.123 In his memoirs, Faÿ claimed that Stein quickly became for him “a need,” leaving unstated the degree to which his “necessity” for her had to do with her greater authority at a moment when Faÿ was cultivating his career (LP 140).
Like Faÿ, Stein too saw friendship as a process of selection and rejection inextricable from an arc of power. In her first literary works, “Fernhurst,” Q.E.D. and Three Lives, Stein had explored her particular sense of human relationships as sites of struggle, competition, and hierarchy. Writing about friendship in Three Lives, Stein described its blossoming, its fading, its shifts, and its lulls as degrees on a subtle spectrum of mutual influence and manipulation, more complex than familial relationships and certainly less predictable, supportive, or lasting. While families required accommodation, friendship for Stein was in the end about what she called “winning”—or losing. Much of Stein’s understanding in this matter had to do with her own formative experiences at college when, as an “obstreperous and bossy” undergraduate,124 Stein took it upon herself to understand and describe the essential character—or what she called “bottom nature”—of those around her, her close associates as well as Harvard students as a whole. One college acquaintance recalls that “friendship” with Stein seemed to take the form of a psychology experiment: Stein would listen intently during a conversation until she had figured out the “bottom nature” of her companion. “I’ve got you!” she would then triumphantly announce. Needless to say, Stein’s will to power and dominance required that her acquaintances remain submissive “losers” in the game of friendship.
From the outset, Stein would use her discoveries about her friends’ bottom natures as fodder for her writing. She would easily dash off a literary portrait of an acquaintance with little apparent preparation. Her “research” appears in Q.E.D., in The Making of Americans, and in the portraits that she began doing of friends and family around 1908. In later years, Stein would confess that her study of bottom natures offered her the ability to know, control, and hence rid herself of any dependence upon those whom she was portraying:
there has to come a moment when I know all I can know about anyone and I know it all at once and then I try to put it down to put down on paper all that I know of anyone their ways the sound of their voice the accent of their voice their other movements their character all what they do … because after anybody has become very well known to me I have tried to make a portrait of them well I might almost say in order to get rid of them inside in me. Otherwise I would have got too full up inside me with what I had inside me of anyone.125
Stein describes the buildup to the writing of portraiture as a process of being engorged by the presence of another; the act of writing then becomes a way of ejecting this presence from her system. This is a strikingly abject image and one that speaks to Stein’s lifelong attraction to the dynamic of sadomasochism. Doing portraits becomes a way of asserting dominance over others, of “winning”—although submitting or “losing,” as Alice Toklas and eventually Bernard Faÿ recognized, could also develop into a form of power over Stein.
Several years after they met, in 1929, Stein sent Faÿ a note together with a literary portrait she had just written entitled “Bernard Faÿ.” The note reads: “My dear Faÿ, Here is a portrait of you that I have just done, I do hope you will like it, do write and tell me that you do, I made it out of grammar and I am very pleased with it.”126 Stein’s “pleasure” seems related to her ability to achieve what she calls “a very detailed action upon the parts of a sentence”: nouns, prepositions, adverbs, and, in particular, the articles “a” and “the.”127 Stein was intrigued by the unusual pronunciation of Faÿ’s name (Fae-ï), and she uses this pronunciation to explore differing permutations of “a” and “the” as well as to create a sort of alphabet of parts of speech (“A is an article. / The is an article. / A and the. Thank you.”).128 The text also apparently refers to a debate that Stein had with Faÿ in the late 1920s over the relative merit of nouns, with Faÿ “for” nouns and Stein “against” (“What is a noun. Favored. A noun can be best. Why does he like it as he does.”).129 But Stein may also have been pleased with “Bernard Faÿ” because the portrait seemed to capture the essence of Faÿ’s nature and in so doing seemed able to “get rid of [him] inside in me.”
“Bernard Faÿ” reveals what Stein thought of Faÿ at the beginning of their friendship. The image on the cover of the “Bernard Faÿ” draft notebook—a picture of a Spanish bullfighter who looks remarkably like Faÿ and a printed description of the “Toréador Espagnol”—is clearly meant to be representative and associates Faÿ with vigor, courage, and a “quickness to anger and to joy [gaité].” The portrait itself reiterates these qualities, referring to patience, amiability, deliberation, prudence, to “zeal,” to “delight,” and to the “relief” of “sense.” Faÿ is “careful” and “sure.” According to her own theory of portraiture, these qualities represent “all [Stein] can know” about Faÿ: her best efforts at grasping him, dominating him, pinning down his bottom nature. She ends with a penultimate sentence that cryptically affirms her control: “The own owned own owner.”130
But there was much more to Faÿ’s character that this portrait does not acknowledge, including Faÿ’s ongoing and subtle manipulation of Stein herself. As Stein would discover over the course of the next fifteen years, it was not so easy either to own Bernard Faÿ or to rid herself of her dependency on him. Although she didn’t realize it when they first met, Stein’s friendship with Faÿ would soon become a determining factor in her life