And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (15 page)

Jacques Schiffrin, the Russian-born Jewish publisher who accompanied Gide on his Soviet tour in 1936, was no less eager to escape the Nazis. As a man totally integrated into the Parisian literary scene, he also had good reason to expect support from his peers. In 1923, he founded the Éditions de la Pléiade to publish Russian classics in French; eight years later he added modern French classics to what was renamed La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. In 1933, with Schiffrin in financial difficulties, the Pléiade series was absorbed into Éditions Gallimard, but it remained a prestigious imprint. Schiffrin’s role in creating it, however, was soon forgotten.

In the summer of 1940, Schiffrin moved his family to Saint-Tropez after German officers occupied their Paris apartment. Then, in November, he received a curt letter from Gaston Gallimard informing him that he was being separated from his job as editor of the Pléiade series. Gallimard lacked the courage to give the real reason—that Schiffrin was Jewish—and instead said it was because of a reorganization “along new lines of our publishing house.”
¹⁰
But Schiffrin’s friends in New York had ensured that his name was on Fry’s list. Finally, on May 6, 1941, he learned that he and his family could travel on a ship from Marseille to Casablanca on May 15. In a letter to Gide five days later, he described the kind of uncertainty lived by most refugees: “Since arriving in Marseille, we have undergone a new kind of torture. Arrangements are made and then unmade in the same day. That is, once we have gotten all the necessary papers, visas, tickets, passports, etc., the next step fails and all is lost. To save what seems lost forever, I drag myself through the streets in the hope that I will meet someone who knows someone.”
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When the Schiffrins reached
Casablanca, they were interned by the Vichy government; they finally made it to New York more than three months after leaving Marseille.

The Surrealists were perhaps the most visible group of artists in Marseille, creating something of a world of their own in a crumbling mansion called Villa Air-Bel, outside the city. Bénédite had found it while looking for a place where Fry could escape the twenty-four-hour pressure of living in downtown Marseille. With its eighteen bedrooms, once-elegant salons and big kitchen, Villa Air-Bel proved ideal. In October 1940, Fry was joined there by some of his team—Bénédite and his wife, Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Davenport—as well as by Serge. The most prominent guest, though, was André Breton, who arrived with his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, and their daughter, Aube. As a result, in the months that followed, Villa Air-Bel was turned into something of a Surrealist commune, with Breton as the presiding guru. “They were having a good time,” according to Stéphane Hessel, who spent time in Air-Bel before joining the Free French Forces in London, “but at the same time they were frightened. Fright is an incentive to the good life: enjoy life while you can.”
¹²

Early in December 1940, their lives were disrupted when French police set about searching the house and triumphantly discovered an old pistol belonging to Breton. As it happens, Fry and the others had already heard that Pétain was planning an official visit to Marseille, and Hirschman had responded accordingly. “I always make it a practice to clear out when the head of a Fascist state comes to town,” he told Fry.
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But the rest of them, plus some visitors, were at Villa Air-Bel when the police arrived, and it was soon apparent that they would be detained. By nightfall, along with some 570 other
nondésirables
, they were placed in the hold of the S.S.
Sinaïa
, a cargo vessel docked in the port of Marseille. After two uncomfortable nights, Fry and Gold sent a letter to the captain reminding him that he was holding two Americans illegally. The captain promptly invited them to his cabin, apologized profusely and, blaming Vichy for turning his ship into a prison, offered them each a glass of cognac.

Finally, on the fourth day of their detention, Fry and his team were freed. One gauge of the number of refugees in Marseille in late 1940 is that it required four ships, four forts and three movie theaters, as well as regular jails and prisons, to accommodate them all. One of these briefly detained was a bookseller: in his display window, he had placed photographs of Pétain and Admiral François
Darlan on either side of a copy of Hugo’s
Les Misérables
. “In all, twenty thousand people had been arrested,” Fry noted dryly. “The Marshal’s visit had been a huge success.”
¹⁴

With the Surrealists still awaiting their visas, Villa Air-Bel kept drawing curious visitors, many of them from Breton’s own circle of artists and poets, among them Wilfredo Lam, André Masson, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Benjamin Péret, Remedios Varo, Roberto Matta, Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp, all of whom would eventually leave France. “Many Surrealists would come there every day and we cheated the anxieties of the hour as best we could,” Breton later wrote.
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For example, he organized debates and put the artists to work on collective drawings; one elaborate set of playing cards changed the traditional four suits to Love, Dream, Revolution and Knowledge. Many of the gatherings were photographed; one series of pictures shows an outdoor exhibition of Ernst’s recent work, which Saint-Exupéry’s wife, Consuelo, helped him hang on trees. “The entire Deux Magots crowd came, and they were mad as ever,”
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Fry later wrote, singling out with amusement Oscar Domínguez’s “fat and elderly, but rich, French girlfriend”; Péret’s poems, which resembled writings on the walls of public toilets; and the one-eyed Romanian painter Victor Brauner, whose women and cats also had only one eye. “André [Breton] would get out his collection of old magazines, colored papers, pastel chalks, scissors and pastepots and everybody would make montages,” Fry went on. “At the end of the evening, André would decide who had done the best work, crying
Formidable! Sensationnel!
or
Invraisemblable!
at each drawing, montage or cut.”
¹⁷

Another visitor to the villa was Peggy Guggenheim. After she fled Paris on June 11, she rented a house on Lac d’Annecy, east of Lyon, where she also sheltered the German-born artist Jean Arp and his Jewish wife, the painter Sophie Taeuber. While preparing to ship her newly acquired art collection from Grenoble to New York, she was asked to pay the ship fare to the United States for Breton’s family, Ernst and Pierre Mabille, the Surrealists’ doctor. She agreed to do so for the Bretons and Max Ernst, then typically requested a painting from Ernst in exchange. With her friend Victor Brauner also in need of help, Peggy decided to visit Villa Air-Bel. But she was so disturbed by the threatening mood of Marseille that, after giving Breton and Fry some money, she rushed back to Grenoble. By the time she returned to Villa Air-Bel many weeks later, the Bretons, Serge, Lam, Masson, the writer Anna Seghers and the anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss were safely on board a crowded ship en route to the Caribbean. But Peggy found one consolation: Ernst was still in residence and, in the course of trying to extract more paintings from him, she seduced him. As she recollected later, “Soon I discovered that I was in love with him.”
¹⁸

The weeks that followed brought danger and melodrama. Beginning to feel at risk as a Jew, Peggy started making plans to leave France, but she also wanted to take her new lover. On several occasions, she accompanied Ernst to the American consulate in Marseille in the hope that the Guggenheim name would impress. In the end, help came from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Ernst’s son was working. In an affidavit, Alfred Barr testified to Ernst’s “active dislike of all totalitarian forms of government,” and an emergency visa was finally issued. On May 1, 1941, twenty months after he was first interned in France as an
étranger nondésirable
, Ernst crossed into Spain with his canvases rolled up in a suitcase. Astonishingly, even the French border official who inspected his baggage proclaimed him a great artist and waved him through. Then, in Lisbon, another surprise awaited him in the fetching form of Leonora Carrington, whom he had not seen for a year and who had spent several months in a psychiatric hospital in northern Spain. This upsetting news also awaited Guggenheim when she reached Lisbon a few days later. Worse, Peggy quickly understood that Ernst was still in love with Leonora and concluded that she had lost him. But Leonora, having agreed to marry a Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc, kept her word, albeit puzzled by Max’s behavior. More than forty-five years later, she told an interviewer: “I felt there was something very wrong in Max’s being with Peggy. I knew he didn’t love Peggy.”
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On July 13, Peggy and her contingent of one ex-husband, his ex-wife, seven children and Ernst left Lisbon by plane for New York, where they joined Breton and other Surrealist exiles. Five months later, Peggy married Ernst. It was, she told him, his best insurance against being deported as an enemy alien. But the marriage did not last.

When Ernst left Marseille, several other artists on Fry’s list were still awaiting overseas visas. Marc Chagall, however, had been hesitating. Although a Russian-born Jew, he had acquired French nationality in 1937 and felt safe in his stone farmhouse at Gordes, east of Avignon. In a letter to a French official, he noted that he had chosen France as his adopted country in 1910, adding “Since that date, my
artistic career has unfolded entirely in France. I have always been very honored to be considered as a French painter.”
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On March 8, 1941, Fry and Bingham spent the weekend with Chagall and his wife, Bella, and delivered a formal invitation to the United States from Barr, but the painter again said he was happy where he was.

The following month, a roundup of Jews accused of black market activites in the unoccupied zone alarmed the Chagalls, and they rushed in alarm to find Fry in Marseille. During a police raid on the Hôtel Moderne on April 9, Chagall was among several Jews arrested and driven off in a police van. Quickly informed by Bella Chagall, Fry responded with typical panache, sternly warning the French police official responsible that “Vichy would be gravely embarrassed, and you would probably be severely reprimanded” for arresting “one of the world’s greatest painters.”
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Barely thirty minutes later, Chagall was released. Even then, though, he insisted on traveling with all of his paintings. On May 7, accompanied by 1.5 tons of baggage, the Chagalls left France on a train through Spain to Lisbon, where they boarded a ship for the United States.

The exodus continued. The Russian-born Jewish sculptor Lipchitz, who had to be warned repeatedly by Fry of the dangers he faced, left Marseille one week later; Péret and his artist lover, Remedios Varo, reached Mexico in late 1941; Duchamp made it to New York in June 1942; and Arp and Taeuber, who were refused American visas, fled to Switzerland in November 1942. Willy Maywald, a German fashion photographer who arrived in France in 1931, had to wait even longer. He was interned in several camps during the phony war before escaping in May 1940. While awaiting a visa from Fry, he stayed with friends in Cagnes-sur-Mer, between Nice and Cannes, where he opened a workshop making shoes and raffia objects to earn money for himself and other refugees. Only in December 1942 did he finally make it into Switzerland.

One loyal supporter of Fry’s was the Countess Lily Pastré, the wealthy heiress of the Noilly Prat fortune. She also opened her Château de Montredon, in a southern neighborhood of Marseille, to artists, actors and musicians, with Casals and the Romanian Jewish pianist Clara Haskil among those giving concerts. On July 27, 1942, Pastré hosted an unusual performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, directed by the actor Jean Wall and Boris Kochno, Diaghilev’s former assistant and librettist, with costumes made from Pastré’s curtains by a young Christian Dior. Accompanying music was
provided by the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, conducted by Manuel Rosenthal. Pastré also sheltered fugitives, helping both Haskil and the Arps to reach Switzerland. After the Germans took over southern France, they occupied part of her château, although the lively countess continued to support culture in Marseille.

Some refugee artists never left France. Sonia Delaunay, a Ukrainian-born Jewish painter whose French husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, died in October 1941, survived the war in hiding in Grasse, near Cannes. The French photographer Willy Ronis, who was also Jewish, left Paris during the exodus and found work with a theater troupe traveling around the unoccupied zone. When Germany occupied the south, he, too, went into hiding. The artists Bellmer and Wols, who had been in the Camp des Milles with Ernst, also survived the war, as did Brauner and Jacques Hérold, both Romanian Jews, who could find no country willing to receive them.

Others were unluckier. Chaïm Soutine, a Lithuanian-born Jew who was a leading painter of the interwar years, had been living in Paris since 1937 with a German Jew, Gerda Groth. She was interned in the women’s camp at Gurs in May 1940, and they never again saw each other. Instead, in March 1941 Soutine left Paris with Marie-Berthe Aurenche, Ernst’s former wife, for Champigny-sur-Veude, in central France. Forced to wear a yellow star after May 1942, he nonetheless continued painting. But in summer 1943, his health failed and he was rushed to Paris, where he died on August 9. (Picasso, Cocteau, the poet Max Jacob and Groth were among those attending his burial at the cemetery of Montparnasse.) Both Tristan Tzara, the founder of the Dada movement, and the actor Sylvain Itkine joined the resistance, although Itkine was murdered by the Gestapo days before the liberation of France in August 1944. Fry particularly mourned two prominent German socialists, Rudolf Hilferding and Rudolf Breitscheid, who were arrested by French police and who, despite Fry’s intense lobbying, were handed over to the Nazis. The official account was that Hilferding hanged himself in a Paris prison in 1941, while Breitscheid was killed by Allied bombing at Buchenwald in 1944. Fry believed that both men died at the hands of the Nazis.