The Writers' Castle, page 17
Flanner didn’t usually pass on such anecdotal, entertaining details about Germany. Like many of her colleagues, she didn’t believe Germans were learning anything from their recent past. “The Nuremberg Trials put the spotlight on the brilliant foul complexities of the big Nazis’ master plans, but the average German can truthfully state that such remarkable ideas never occurred to him,” she wrote in 1947. “The significant Berlin catch-all phrase is ‘That was the war, but this is the peace.’ The cryptic remark means, in free translation, that the people felt no responsibility for the war, which they regard as an act of history, and that they consider the troubles and confusions of the peace the Allies’ fault.”24 But despite Germans’ repression and lack of guilty conscience, Flanner never doubted that they were collectively to blame. She always described Allied troops as battling Germany and the Germans, not Hitler or the Nazis, and she made no distinctions between the county and its people.25
What separated Flanner from many fellow correspondents in Nuremberg, many of whom also believed in the notion of collective German guilt, was her analysis of the problems of masculinity. A staunch feminist, Flanner believed that the male-dominated world with its attendant militarism—whether in Germany, the Soviet Union or the USA—made it impossible to maintain human rights and legal guarantees for all. In her eyes, Nuremberg was a failure because of the fallacy that the principles of democracy and basic human responsibility upon which the trial was based could be brought about by exclusively male personnel. As a result of this failing, there could be no moral and political new beginning after the Second World War.
But there was no way Flanner could submit such sentiments to Harold Ross. In her private correspondence she complained to Murray about “the slow spread of stupidity, of mass confusion and an instinct only to choose to do the wrong thing, never the right, to complicate all issues under red tape, masculine vanities, jealousies, so that what was meant to be done is lost, stifled, under men’s army uniforms, their moustaches, their ridiculous arm patches, like football teams, their drinks, their mistresses, their ambitions, their misconceptions of Europe”. Such masculine obstacles gave Flanner a dim view of Europe’s future, and she exclaimed in frustration: “I am tired of talking on the male level. I am tired of their levels, which are indeed all flat, some being higher than others, but all platitudinous.”26
Notes
1 Z.P. Lesinska, Perspectives of Four Women Writers on the Second World War, p. 55.
2 B. Wineapple, Genêt, p. 77.
3 Ibid., p. 127.
4 J. Flanner, “Uber alles”, The New Yorker, 9th January 1932, p. 48.
5 J. Flanner, “Fuhrer II”, The New Yorker, 7th March 1936, p. 27.
6 A. Weiss, Paris war eine Frau, p. 200.
7 J. Flanner, “Letter from Cologne”, The New Yorker, 31st March 1945, p. 58.
8 J. Flanner, “Letter from Nuremberg”, The New Yorker, 5th January 1946, p. 46.
9 J. Flanner, Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend, pp. 50, 64.
10 Ibid., p. 73.
11 B. Wineapple, Genêt, p. 197 f.
12 D.M. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg.
13 G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary.
14 A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 604–5.
15 J. Flanner, “Letter from Nuremberg”, The New Yorker, 23rd March 1946, p. 81.
16 J. Flanner, “Letter from Nuremberg, March 22”, The New Yorker, 30th March 1946, p. 76.
17 Ibid, p. 77.
18 J. Flanner, Darlinghissima, p. 17 (fn), p. 106.
19 See C. Rollyson, “Reporting Nuremberg”.
20 R. West, “Extraordinary Exile”, The New Yorker, 7th September 1946.
21 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/09/07/extraordinary-exile. West’s New Yorker articles were later published in a slightly modified form in her 1955 book A Train Full of Powder.
22 B. Wineapple, Genêt, p. 200.
23 J. Flanner, “Letter from Königstein”, The New Yorker, 18th September 1948, p. 96.
24 “Letter from Berlin, July 12”, The New Yorker, 2nd August 1947, p. 42.
25 B. Wolbring, “Nationales Stigma und persönliche Schuld”, p. 346.
26 J. Flanner, Darlinghissima, p. 54. After the main Nuremberg Trial Flanner lived primarily in her adopted home, Paris, continuing to write for The New Yorker until the ripe old age of eighty-three. In 1975, three years before her death, she returned to New York a much-revered and multiple-award-winning writer.
IX
The French Stalinism of Elsa Triolet
“I am Scheherazade, the great teller of stories. I am the muse and curse of the poet. I am beautiful and I am repulsive.”
ELSA TRIOLET
When Elsa Triolet (1896–1970) began reporting on the Nuremberg Trial in May of 1946, she didn’t suspect that the fame she enjoyed at the time would fade in the not too distant future. In 1945 she had become the first woman ever to win France’s highest literary honour, the Prix Goncourt—an astonishing achievement for someone born in Moscow in 1896 as Ella Yuryevna Kagan, who had mastered French as a foreign language. “Only a short time later, I had enough money to buy a country house,” she would recall. “People began to like my books. Indeed, they were wild for them. Theatre, cinema, newspapers and magazines were open to me.” But despite her literary reputation and moral credibility as a French Resistance fighter, Triolet would become an outcast and the target of personal and political attacks.
Whenever scholars and critics write about Triolet, they always mention her partner, Louis Aragon (1897–1982). This is not just down to the male domination of literary history or Triolet being degraded to an appendage of a famous male author. Aragon was a true living legend. And he and Triolet portrayed their relationship as the latest in a long tradition of symbiotic French literary partnerships: from the patron saints Abelard and Heloise to George Sand and Alfred de Musset to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The former mill near Paris where they made their home, retreated from the world and chose to be buried bears the words: “And if we rest side by side next to one another, the connectedness of our works will unite us for better and worse in the future that we dreamed and worried so much about. Thus, our united books, black on white, hand in hand, will defy that which would tear us asunder.”1
Starting in 1964, their works would be published alternatingly over forty-two volumes in the Oeuvres romanesques croisées. It was a literary dialogue of monumental size. Aragon’s Trioletinspired love poetry, set to music by famous chansonniers like George Brassens and Leo Ferré, became staples of French national culture. The defiant tone of their epitaph at the mill reflected their life philosophy. When Triolet and Aragon met in 1928, it was a union of two social outsiders. They wed in 1939 and remained inseparable for forty-two years until Aragon’s death in 1982. The “lovers of the century”, as they were later idealistically known, were soulmates joined by the activity of writing and their love of Russian literature, as well as by their political views and above all by their strength of purpose.
Triolet lifted the sensitive Aragon, a bisexual, out of a deep emotional hole when they met. A few months previously he had tried to commit suicide after unhappily falling in love in Venice. He was part of the literary avant-garde, initially a Dadaist, who later became known with his friend André Breton as a leading surrealist. On the evening of 6th November 1928, he was sitting in the Café La Coupole on Boulevard Montparnasse. “Suddenly, someone called my name,” he later recalled. “‘The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky asks you to join him’… The next day, at a somewhat later hour, when the café was almost empty, I met Elsa Triolet again. We’ve never been apart since.”2 Triolet had read Aragon’s montage-technique novel Paris Peasant, one of the landmarks of French surrealism and a hymn to sensuality and fantasy, and wanted to meet the author. So she seized the chance to make contact with Aragon when her friend Mayakovsky asked her for an introduction.
At this point in her life, Triolet already had one unsuccessful marriage behind her. In 1919 she had wed the French cavalry officer André Triolet, living with him in Tahiti until 1921. But Elsa had intense literary and intellectual interests. Before studying architecture in Moscow, she had been part of a group of formalists around Roman Jakobson and for a time Mayakovsky’s lover, and she soon tired of her decidedly unintellectual husband. “You have to be connected to a man by more than just love,” she once remarked. After the Triolets separated, Elsa led an unsettled existence between Moscow, where she was a member of the intelligensiya, and various European capitals she repeatedly visited to escape the hardships of Soviet life. By that time, her older sister Lilya had replaced her as Mayakovsky’s lover and muse, but Elsa remained loyal to the dissolute man she so greatly admired, translating his poems into French and writing a biography of him after his suicide in 1930.
After stays in Berlin, the centre of the Russian diaspora, and London in 1921 and 1922, Triolet settled in Paris, where she became part of the French capital’s art scene. Her literary career began with an indiscretion. In Berlin, literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, who had fallen in love with her, began writing her daily letters, a practice she accepted on the condition that he avoid the topic of love. He later included some of her replies, without her knowledge, in his book Zoo, or Letters Not About Love. When Maxim Gorky read that work, he considered Triolet’s unwitting contributions the most literary thing about it and encouraged her to start writing. In 1926, after composing an account of Tahiti, she published the autobiographical novel Wild Strawberry, both in Russian. She was already an established author when she switched to the French language in 1938 with the novel Bonsoir Thérèse, though she never considered herself a French author, but rather a Russian who wrote in French.
As had been the case with Mayakovsky, Triolet was fascinated not only by Aragon’s literary talent but also by his nonconformism. Both men were theatrical dandies who talked as if their lives depended on it. Both had a dual passion for literature and politics, cultivated an image as scourges of conventional morality and courted notoriety with targeted acts of provocation. Aragon, for example, filled his 1928 book Traité du style (Essays on Style) with the rudest of insults. Aragon knew that Triolet saw him as an extraordinary master of language, a kindred spirit and, in a sense, an intellectual and artistic heir to Mayakovsky after the latter’s death. “Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Else met at the age of fifteen when he was more or less unknown, not only made a deep impression on her life,” Aragon wrote. “He remained for her an image that tortured her for years, an image that inspired the subject matter which became her obsession and which you repeatedly encounter from book to book.”3
Stalinism
Stalin liked Mayakovsky as a poet despite his eccentricity and his dissipated lifestyle; although his relationship to the Communist Party was not entirely unproblematic, Mayakovsky was altogether willing to serve as a propagandistic agitator. In his memoirs, Dmitri Shostakovich was very critical: “I can readily say that Mayakovsky epitomized all the traits of character I detest: phoniness, love of self-advertisement, lust for the good life, and most important, contempt for the weak and servility before the strong.” The composer added: “It was Mayakovsky who first said that he wanted Comrade Stalin to give speeches on poetry at Party Congresses.” Such fawning allowed Mayakovsky to become something of a court poet in Stalin’s cult of personality.4 He was well acquainted with Yakov Agranov, a ranking officer in the Soviet secret police, the GPU, a forerunner of the KGB, which was responsible for keeping tabs on the cultural scene. One of Agranov’s informants was Mayakovsky’s lover and Triolet’s sister Lilya. Elsa was also a Stalinist, and she too was closely connected with the GPU.5 On Mayakovsky’s visit to France, during which he asked Triolet to arrange a meeting with Aragon, she was the one tasked by the secret police with ensuring that the capricious poet would eventually return to the Soviet Union.6
When Triolet arrived in Nuremberg in 1946, her advocacy of Communism was still mostly viewed as something positive. The French Resistance to Nazism, of which Triolet and Aragon were literary figureheads, mirrored the organizational structure of the Communist Party, and many French people equated Communism with the successful campaign against Hitler and Germany. Triolet was a heroine and an icon. She was also Jewish, and Aragon was classified as half-Jewish; in 1940, after France’s defeat by Germany, they fled to the non-occupied south of the country. In Nice they served as couriers for the Resistance, a function that required them to cover long distances on foot. For a time Aragon even led a Resistance group consisting of writers. After the Italians occupied Nice, the couple went underground and published works under pseudonyms.
Aragon worked intensely during these years on the literary journal Les Lettres françaises, originally established as an underground Resistance magazine. The period of French occupation was a productive one for both him and Triolet. They wrote conspiratorial pamphlets and tried to use words to combat the occupiers. Aragon’s poem cycle Les Yeux d’Elsa (Elsa’s Eyes) contains several more or less direct calls for resistance and revolt, referring, for instance, to “Paris, which is only a Paris in a hail of cobblestones”. Triolet’s short story “Les Amants d’Avignon” (The Lovers of Avignon), published under the pseudonym Laurent Daniel, described the hardships of living underground. And the title of the collection of short stories, Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs (A Fine of 200 Francs), for which she won the Prix Goncourt, cited the code name by which the Allies’ landing in Normandy was announced in Provence. Meanwhile, after the war, Aragon’s verses—particularly “Il n’y a pas d’amour hereux” and the poem “Les Yeux d’Elsa”, in which he compares his wife’s eyes to his battered homeland—were considered classics of the Resistance.
Nonetheless, as sacrosanct as Triolet had become as a writer and moral authority, despite the Prix Goncourt she was also criticized for her political views. The criticism came, ironically, from French surrealists, who blamed her for alienating Aragon from them and for convincing him to toe the Soviet Communist Party line. To understand why, we must look back briefly.
Starting in 1927, some of the French surrealists had joined the French Communist Party, the only anti-war party in the country, but conflicts soon arose between the artists and party functionaries. Prompted by Triolet, Aragon accompanied her to the Second International Conference of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov in 1930. He returned from the conference a different person politically and artistically, breaking with Breton and his ideas of surrealism. In a programmatic essay, Aragon demanded that surrealists “recognize, understand and unconditionally adopt dialectic materialism as the only true revolutionary philosophy”.7 He himself had signed a declaration in support of putting art fully under the control of the party in future. That was anathema to Breton, who considered Communist Party bureaucracy the natural enemy of his radical concept of freedom and rejected the sort of obedience and conformity demanded by the Stalin regime as incompatible with surrealism.
Breton blamed Triolet for making his former friend into an apostate, complaining in a 1952 radio interview: “Remember that this trip [to Kharkov], which was full of surprises and consequences, did not take place by any means on Aragon’s initiative. Rather it was on the initiative of Triolet, whom he had just met and who demanded that he go along with her. From a distance, and based on how she later behaved, there is every reason to assume that she insisted on this and got what she wanted… If the circumstances had been different… the Aragon I knew would have never done anything that would risk a split with us.”8
Be that as it may, after his trip to Kharkov Aragon hewed to Stalin’s party line while Breton remained a Trotskyite, co-authoring a manifesto, “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art”, which called for artistic autonomy vis-à-vis the state, even in revolutionary circumstances. Aragon’s literary style also changed. Whereas Breton stuck with the ideals of literary surrealism and its renunciation of logic, syntax and aesthetic forms, in a 1935 article Aragon called upon French authors to follow the lead of Socialist Realism, which the previous year had been made the only legal style in the Soviet Union—although Aragon did allow himself some linguistic leeway on the margins of this doctrine.
Triolet, too, stressed the importance of linguistic “artisanship” while remaining faithful to the principles of the Russian avant-garde, particularly Mayakovsky.9 And both Aragon and Triolet’s Resistance activity would show that language offered plenty of space for political activism. Their easily understood texts had moved the French masses; their literary endeavours had real social effects. That no doubt further convinced them that surrealism was an ivory tower of social and aesthetic exclusivity.
There has been much emotionally charged discussion in recent years about whether Triolet steered or even manipulated Aragon, and there is no dismissing the fact that her influence was one reason why he became a Stalinist. In 1931, Aragon went so far as to write a poem, “Vive le Guépéou” (Long Live the GPU), originally known as “Prélude au temps des cerises” (Prelude to the Cherry Season), that called for a French version of the Soviet intelligence service and justified the persecution of enemies as a necessary evil.
“The Judges’ Waltz”
Over time, the journal Les Lettres françaises, which Aragon edited after the liberation of France, became his and Triolet’s main literary and political organ. Like many respected journals, it sent a correspondent to the Nuremberg Trial. The task fell to Triolet, who accepted the assignment, among other reasons because she wanted to see the criminals who had subjected her family and many friends to such indescribable suffering. She attended the trial in late May 1946, and on 7th June and 14th June 1946 she published “La Valse des juges” (The Judges’ Waltz), a two-part field report illustrated with caricatures.10
