The Integrity of Poets [by Jim Cummins]

In the Times a few weeks back (April 25) an article by Edward Rothstein, "The Sorrow, the Pity, the Celebration: France Under the Nazis," reviewed an exhibition at the New York Public Library (the exhibition runs through July 25), "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation," organized by Robert Paxton.  It was originally shown in Caen, France, in 1980 "as a display of a growing archive of war material," presented by Olivier Corpet and Claire Paulhan, and has been "reshaped" by Paxton, "whose 1972 book, Vichy France, outlined how avidly collaborationist that regime really was."

The show sounds terrific, brimming with material, much or most of it unfamiliar.  Rothstein says, "A sense of disorder is partly the welcome price of seeing so much." He tries to give some sense of the enormous amount of information in the exhibit, such as the fact that the avant-garde writer Jacques Audiberti, because of paper rationing that benefited collaborationist French writers, "wrote his novel, Monorail, on wallpaper supplied by his father, a builder." He also shows how muddled and/or self-serving the majority of French writers were in the face of German oppression. Some, like Sartre and Cocteau, "went along with the dominant power for the ride," whereas others, like Irene Nemirovsky (Suite Francaise), remained ignorant until it was too late. (Nemirovsky, a Jew, converted to Catholicism, or tried to, but was sold out by the French police.) All in all, a pretty sad tale of authorial cowardice -- no wonder we teach our students that the author does not exist anymore -- with few exceptions. Rothstein says, "... very few [writers]... like Andre Malraux joined the underground armed forces to fight the Germans."

Here is the last paragraph of Rothstein's article. "This is not ... a tale of heroism or far-ranging insight.  Though Mr. Paxton shows that poets were, as a group, particularly resistant to the collaborationist lure [italics mine], for the most part, the touted visionary powers of writers left all too much in the darkness."

So my question is, how come the poets were so much less willing to go down the road that led, eventually, to Derrida and Paul de Man, and beyond?

-- Jim Cummins

Comments

[Laura Orem]

I don't think it's because poets are better or more noble than anyone else. Maybe it's because a)they tended to be more obscure, so they were perhaps more able to fly under the Nazi radar than novelists and journalists, and b)they tend to be more solitary, less trustful of authority in general, so they weren't likely to collaborate with anyone. Just a guess...

[DL]

This, like LO's heartfelt post earlier this week, is a solid contribution to our never-ending discussion of these vexing questions: Should we expect more from our artists and writers? Does their bad behavior, whether in their private or political lives, bear on how we view their works? It would be comforting to draw a clear distinction -- as between church and state -- between the work and the life, but that's too neat, a debater's trick, and there seems little choice but to take each case on its own merits.

The mind, capable of proceeding despite the contradictions in its path, can enjoy Eliot's poems and essays despite the anti-Semitism that surfaces in them. But what Pound did and said was much worse, and you can reasonably argue that the crazy thinking that led Pound to propagandize for Mussolini is also what doomed his life-work to incoherence and failure.

On the other hand, I do not understand academics who say that Heidegger's Nazi allegiances are irrelevant to his philosophy of life.

Sidebar: do you think we would like Hemingway's stories more, less, or equally, if we had met the man in Paris in the 1920s or in braggadocio mode in New York twenty years later? Maybe it's wisest not to meet the artists we most admire.

[Jim Cummins]

DL, as usual, you open a number of possibilities for reply. I've been mulling over Laura's post the past few days. I'm nervous about any proclamations about "The Law," even when (frankly, especially) the proclaimer is on my "side" politically; there's a possible absolutism about that which never bodes well. "Either-or" doesn't get it, in this sense; Pound died a broken man, saying he "botched it." Not saying he shouldn't have, only that he did. Walcott's transgressions were 25 years ago; maybe he's an arrogant man who's never faced up to his folly, but I don't want to be on that jury. Whereas, slimy back-stabbing campaigns to get yourself what you want seem more creepy to me--and frightening, in the sense that, okay, the guy you hate and whom you've made an absolutist judgment on is the victim this time; but what about next time?

[Laura Orem]

My point in my post was not an evaluation of the relative "badness" of the examples, rather that poetry, art, whatever, is not an excuse for any of it.

However, I'll jump into the middle of things here and say I think that there are times when absolutism is called for. Call me old fashioned; call me a self-righteous old harridan; but at some point, wrong is wrong. Where that point it, well, that's up to each person's judgment and, as DL says, a question of taking each case on its own merits (or lack thereof). But in my view, Pound and Heidegger are both cases for this. It's good that Pound "repented," but the damage was done, and he did nothing to undo it. I mean, with Pound we aren't talking about stealing a job away from someone; we're talking about aiding and abetting, willingly and with relish, people who were perpetrating genocide. Again, that doesn't take away Pound's contributions to poetry and poetics, but I wonder if people would be less likely to overlook or excuse his actions if he had been an inarticulate boob. Would he be a more reprehensible character if he had never written a line of poetry?

That's the kind of relativism that bothers me, because in a sense it's elitism - intellectual elitism, not socio-economic elitism - but it sets up a double-standard for the artist and the "ordinary" person. And that was what infuriated me about the whole discussion of Walcott and Padel. Whether I think either of them is an appropriate choice for the post is a different question, and one I'm not prepared to answer here. (Buy me a drink in September, and I'll answer it then.)One other thing I will point out is the question of appropriateness involved teaching, not writing poems, and those are two very different things.

I also think it's interesting that we seem to have this discussion only about poets - not sculptors; not musicians; not novelists; not painters. No one seems to have trouble acknowledging both Richard Wagner's Nazism and his music; Picasso's cruelty and his art; Henry Miller's misogyny and his novels. It's all part of the story. There seems to be a resistance to this with poets, and I think it may be connected to that romanticizing of poets and poetry that we have talked about here in another context. We've never gotten over Shelley and his silly (and self-serving) pronouncements.