Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T04:45:41.024Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Let Us Save China”: Gertrude Stein and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Gertrude Stein  and
Birgit Van Puymbroeck
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Much has been written about Stein's politics ever since it was revealed, in 1996, that Stein had translated many of Philippe Pétain's speeches (Burns and Dydo, “Gertrude Stein”; Van Dusen). If some critics accuse Stein of collaboration with Vichy France, others defend her by pointing out contradictory evidence regarding her behavior during the war years. Barbara Will, in Unlikely Collaboration; Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011), casts Stein in the role of pro-Vichy thinker whose support of Pétain was “heartfelt and dogged” (118). In addition to translating Pétain's speeches, Stein was a close friend of Bernard Fay, who, as head of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, was an official high up in the administration of Vichy France. Charles Bernstein, Edward Burns, and Joan Retallack take up Stein's defense in jacket2's online dossier Gertrude Stein's War Years; Setting the Record Straight (2012). They argue that no conclusive evidence ties Stein explicitly to Vichy France (Burns) and highlight the irony in some of her statements—for instance, that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize (Bernstein, “Gertrude Stein”; Retallack). Furthermore, Stein published her writing in both the Vichy-sponsored magazine Patrie (“Fatherland”) and the anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy journals Confluences, Fontaine (“Fountain”), and L'arbalète (“The Cross-Bow”) during the war years (Burns and Dydo, “Three Lives”; Burns). She sympathizes with the French maquis in her postwar memoir Wars I Have Seen and writes about the inner workings of the Resistance in her play In Savoy; or, Yes Is for a Very Young Man (Wagner-Martin).

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 198 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alfrey, Shawn H. “‘Oriental Peaceful Penetration’: Gertrude Stein and the End of Europe.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, pp. 405–16.Google Scholar
Ashton, Jennifer. “Gertrude Stein for Anyone.” ELH, vol. 64, no. 1, 1997, pp. 289–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Charles, editor. Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight. Jacket2, jacket2.org/feature/gertrude-steins-war-years-setting-record-straight.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Charles. “Gertrude Stein Taunts Hitler in 1934 and 1945.” Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight, edited by Bernstein. Jacket2, jacket2.org/article/gertrude-stein-taunts-hitler-1934-and-1945.Google Scholar
Burns, Edward. “Gertrude Stein: A Complex Itinerary, 1940–1944.” Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight, edited by Charles Bernstein. Jacket2, jacket2.org/article/gertrude-stein-complex-itinerary-1940–1944.Google Scholar
Burns, Edward, and Dydo, Ulla E. “Gertrude Stein: September 1942 to September 1944.” Stein and Wilder, pp. 401–21.Google Scholar
Burns, Edward. “Three Lives.” The Nation, 5 Dec. 1987, p. 666.Google Scholar
DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Language. U of Wisconsin P, 1983.Google Scholar
Gallup, Donald. “Gertrude Stein and The Atlantic.” The Yale University Library Gazette, vol. 28, no. 3, 1954, pp. 109–28.Google Scholar
Haas, Robert Bartlett, and Gallup, Donald. A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein, Exhibited in the Yale University Library, 22 February to 29 March 1941. Yale UP, 1941.Google Scholar
Hastedt, Glenn. “Open Door Policy.” Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, Facts on File, 2004.Google Scholar
Lorange, Astrid. How Reading Is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein. Wesleyan UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Matsusaka, Yoshihisa Tak. The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932. Harvard UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Paris, Václav. “‘Gertrude Stein's Translations of Speeches’ by Philippe Pétain.” Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight, edited by Charles Bernstein. Jacket2, jacket2.org/article/gertrude-steins-translations -speeches-philippe-petain.Google Scholar
Pope, Stephen, and Wheal, Elizabeth-Anne. “Peaceful Penetration.” Dictionary of the First World War, Pen and Sword Military Classics, 2007.Google Scholar
Retallack, Joan. “Joan Retallack on Stein's War Years: From Her Introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections.” Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight, edited by Charles Bernstein. Jacket2, jacket2.org/article/joan-retallack-steins-war-years.Google Scholar
Spahr, Juliana. Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. U of Alabama P, 2001.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 1933. Penguin, 2001.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody's Autobiography. 1937. Exact Change, 1993.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. The Geographical History of America; or, The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. 1935. Stein, Lectures, pp. 367–488.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. How Writing Is Written. edited by Haas, Robert Bartlett, Black Sparrow Press, 1974. Vol. 2 of The Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. In Savoy; or, Yes Is for a Very Young Man: A Play of the Resistance in France. Pushkin Press, 1946.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. “An Instant Answer; or, A Hundred Prominent Men.” Useful Knowledge. 1928. Station Hill Press, 1988, pp. 144–61.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America: Writings, 1932–1946. Library of America, 1998.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. “Let Us Save China.” Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, YCAL MSS 76, box 32, folder 668.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. “Poetry and Grammar.” 1935. Stein, Lectures, pp. 313–36.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition.” 1935. Stein, Lectures, pp. 287–312.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. Yale UP, 1951–58. 8.vols.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. Wars I Have Seen. B. T. Batsford, 1945.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude, and Wilder, Thornton. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. edited by Burns, Edward M. and Dydo, Ulla E. with Rice, William, Yale UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Tilles, Nurit. “Unpublished Article Gertrude Stein: ‘Let Us Save China.‘” Received by Birgit Van Puymbroeck, 28 June 2015.Google Scholar
Van Dusen, Wanda. “Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein's ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain’ (1942).” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 3, no. 3, 1996, pp. 69–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Puymbroeck, Birgit. “Triangular Politics: Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and Elisabeth de Gramont.” Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations across Media, Disciplines and Traditions, edited by Posman, Sarah and Schultz, Laura Luise, Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 85–103.Google Scholar
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family. Rutgers UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Whittier-Ferguson, John. “Stein in Time: History, Manuscripts, and Memory.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 6, no. 1, 1999, pp. 115–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Will, Barbara. Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma. Columbia UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zox-Weaver, Annalisa. Women Modernists and Fascism. Cambridge UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar