Barbara Will: Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011)

“A study of the friendship between Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the collaborationist Vichy government and chief protector of Stein’s interests in France during World War II. From the late 1920s-40s Stein and Faÿ shared a worldview marked by aesthetic radicalism and political conservatism, culminating in Stein’s agreement in 1941, at the suggestion of Faÿ, to translate the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain into English. This book reads the Stein-Faÿ relationship as a case study through which to raise larger theoretical questions: about the role of prominent intellectuals in wartime France; about the place of America in the Vichy imagination; about the libidinal promise or threat of fascist ideology for sexual identity; and most importantly, about the intersection of modernism and fascism.”

Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
Gender and Culture series
ISBN 0231152620, 9780231152624
xviii+274 pages

Reviews: Renate Stendhal (LA Review of Books 2011), Sarah Posman (Modernism/modernity 2012), Richard M. Berrong (Gay and Lesbian Review 2012), Christopher Benfey (New Republic 2012), Michael Kimmelman (NY Review of Books 2012), Angela Kershaw (French Studies 2012), Birgitvan Puymbroeck (Modern Fiction Studies 2013), Karen Leick (H-France 2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

EPUB

See also Gertrude Stein’s war years: Setting the record straight, a dossier edited by Charles Bernstein in May 2012. (added 10 Apr)