Immediately Stein captures the paradox of reproduction and progress embedded in the generational drama: for the son to drag the father is both a transgression that dishonors the father and a repetition that emulates him. Meanwhile this narrative of progress--this dragging "beyond" a certain point marked as the arrival point by previous generations--is also a narrative of a family's failure, its violence: bodily as well as psychological "dragging" is the action at the heart of the story. The story hints that even if the son (not the daughter, I presume) were to obey and drag no further, his obedience has already visited the patriarch's force upon the patriarch: this reversal of power is the price the patriarch must pay to insure reproduction of his power.
In short, narratives of tradition that purport to conserve the past entail a moment of "progress" or change when the son turns the tables on the father; and likewise narratives of progress that purport to supercede the past entail a "repetition" in which the son becomes the father. There is no pure progress narrative and no true traditional narrative. It is in the nature of narrative to repeat with a difference. It is in the nature of culture--at least modern culture--to "make" its "being" again and again, with something new--someone other--added by historical time.
In fact Stein herself borrows and repeats this very tale, perhaps playing off the eugenical spirit in which it was published. 21 And so we enter Stein's repetitive revision of the novel--of that tradition of "histories" of a family's "progress" which she understands as an assimilation narrative whose claim to inclusion depends on exclusion of less-sensitive others.
Priscilla Wald has fully explored the ways Stein creates her book as a revisionary version of the contemporary American immigrant tale, beginning with her title echoing that of the popular immigrant-story novel by Jacob Riis, The Making of an American. 22 After the opening anecdote, the narrator turns to the grandfathers who "came across the water" and the grandmothers who "carried these our fathers and mothers into the new world inside them" (Making, 3). At the same time, I am emphasizing, this ethnically-shaped immigrant narrative gets framed within the eighteenth-century English trope of a "family's progress," which Stein highlights by referring to "this history for us of a family and its progress" three times within the first two pages of the novel. In bringing together the founding tropes of the immigrant American and the classic English novel, Stein foregrounds and engages the ethnic substructure of the progress narrative they have in common--a structure she challenges in more direct and concentrated, as well as more offensive, form in Three Lives. In this first novel, as in the stories of Pamela or Pride and Prejudice, "a family's progress" has everything to with its reclamation of the "noble" via the Saxon virtues of humility, honesty, liberty, and sensibility.
Throughout Making, Stein invokes and repeats the same Saxon virtues that we find in the eighteenth-century historical accounts of the Saxon's native character as well as in popular eighteenth-century novels of sentiment from Henry Fielding's Tom Jones to Henry MacKenzie's The Man of Feeling. She makes them the core of her characters' feelings in this history of "feeling" and "being," this "history of every man and every woman," and in effect identifies them as criteria for assimilation into white Protestant culture (Making, 175). Grandfather Dehning, the first-generation immigrant, is introduced as "just a decent honest good-enough man to do ordinary work," "a decent well-meaning faithful good-enough ordinary man" (Making, 6). The repetition of phrases (which continue in this vein) and the omission of commas (especially in the early twentieth century) tend to expose these traits as an ideological seme, or a common unit of meaning in the social mythos. Because the men in the Dehning family were "generous decent considerate fellows, frank and honest," the daughter Julia Dehning assumes that all men are "good strong gentle creatures, honest and honorable and honoring" (Making, 19, 29). These qualities must be highlighted within the immigrant narrative, as they are again and again, exactly against accusations that immigrants did not fit the profile of a straightforward, upright, simple yet decent Anglo-Saxon Americans--of good "fellows." The narrator hints at the hidden racial-national valuation at stake in these "simple" values when she turns in this context to the "great question . . . of washing" (a motif that also signifies racial identity in Three Lives): "The French tell me it's the Italians who never do any washing, the French and the Italian both find the Spanish a little short in their washing, and the East finds all the West a pig . . . . And so it goes"(Making, 16). But she assures us, repeatedly, that the eldest Dehning son "was not at all foreign in his washing" but on the contrary was a "sporty cheery well washed" young man (Making, 17).
"You see," the humble narrator explains helpfully, "it is just an ordinary middle class tradition we must use to understand this family's progress. There must be no aspiring thoughts inside us, there must be a feeling always in us of being in a kind of way in business always honest, there must be in a kind of ordinary way always there inside us the sense of decent enough ways of living for us" (Making, 34). Though introducing an immigrant cast of characters at a time of growing fears about the new and large waves of immigration of "lower stocks" (including lower stock Germans, as made clear in "The Good Anna"), the narrator, by her use of an unspecified "us," slyly fails to distinguish German immigrant from "regular" American values. This sleight of hand meanwhile allows her to include herself in both of these groups. "Us" is made quite porous. And the ironies thus proliferate insofar as, on the one hand, these late-arriving Germans are supposedly the root race for the Anglo-Saxons who now hold precedence in the U.S. and, on the other hand, the untouched question of whether these Germans are Jews or Christians leaves the reader unable to identify comfortably in either direction. Given the centrality of "business" to this difference, the mention of "a feeling always in us of being in a kind of way in business always honest" further strains the question of identification--all in a seemingly happy and innocent account of the feel-ings of the Dehnings. Indeed the narrator works hard to disallow any distance or dis-identification here even as she coyly raises all of these questions. True to sentimental practice, she implicitly insists on the identity of all of "us" while covertly referencing divisions within this "us."
The narrator even boldly eschews the educated middle class habit of dissociating themselves from the middle class economy (exactly the phenomenon that Jane Garrity put her finger on in the Bloomsbury group in a recent issue of this journal). 22 First, she declares: "I believe in simple middle class monotonous tradition, in a way in honest enough business methods" . Though it is risky to equate Stein with her narrator or assume her audience did, it is reasonable to claim that in the heightened racial/ethnic atmosphere of the early twentieth-century both Stein and many of her readers entered this book with an awareness of Stein's Jewishness and her identity with the tale of German immigrants. This awareness, lurking just under the level of consciousness perhaps, would raise a question for the reader about how to respond: is this a Jewish narrator slapping the wrist of her Protestant middle class compatriots who consider it bad manners to talk in public of money and trade, or is this a good solid American expressing pure American feeling, as implied in the manipulative use of "us"? Ambiguously referring to her "friends," she suggests that, by owning up to her investment in these "business" virtues, she is more honest--more American--than her Protestant Anglo-Saxon reader-friends:
Middle-class, middle-class, I know no one of my friends who will admit it, one can find no one among you all to belong to it, I know that here we are to be democratic and aristocratic and not have it, for middle class is sordid material unillusioned unaspiring and always monotonous for it is always there and to be always repeated, and yet I am strong, and I am right, and I know it, and I say it to you . . . that a material middle class who know they are it, with their straightened bond of family to control it, is the one thing always human, vital, and worthy it--worthy that all monotonously shall repeat it,--and from which has always sprung . . . the very best the world can ever know, and everywhere we always need it. (Making, 34)
"We are to be democratic and aristocratic": while teasing the literate reader, Stein pierces to the heart of Saxonism, touching directly, even if unconsciously, on its historically conditioned yet contradictory claim to both democratic humbleness (as the hearty people of English soil) and aristocratic sovereignty (as the wronged nobles of England and the true Whigs in America).
Next she makes one of her characteristic twists, first of all turning the righteous innocent voice on the complacent, superior reader ("yet I am strong, and I am right, and I know it, and I say it to you") and then identifying herself with the very assumption of superiority over the rest of the world that these literate, perhaps non-Jewish middle-class readers quietly cherish for themselves (the middle class "from which has sprung . . . the very best the world can ever know, and everywhere we always need it"). Listen to the echo between this last passage and the 1920's President of the U.S. National Institute of Immigration, whose words simply repeat a cliché of the first decades of the twentieth century: "We have bred more than sixty millions of the finest people the world has ever seen. Today there is to surpass us, none." He goes on to conclude that "Therefore any race we admit to our social body is certain to be more or less inferior." 23 I suggest that Stein understood perfectly that her narrator is strutting through a social minefield, a racial minefield, but her narrator can survive this dance because Stein has her mimic the moves of the elite; the apparently "forthright" narrative's turns and tropes conform to the "native" Anglo-American idea of innocence, honesty, sensibility, and liberty. While at first her relation to sentimental tradition remains implicit and sly, eventually, though still slyly, the narrator "openly" confesses her preoccupation with the nature of sensibility and the workings of sentiment.
Sometime I want to understand every kind of way any one can have the feeling of being distinguished by the virtue they have in them. . . and all the details of their coming to have in them their kind of feeling, imagination, thinking, knowing certainty inside them, virtuous feeling in them . . . I want to know sometime all about sentimental feeling. I want to know sometime all the different kinds of ways people have it in them to be certain of anything. These and virtuous feelings in each one, of themselves to themselves having virtue inside them, is to me very interesting . . . . Certainty is certainly very interesting. (Making, 450-52)
Sentimental feeling preoccupies the narrator but also seems to elude her. Apparently she manifests sentimental feeling in her intense interest in understanding others, yet the more she repeats her desire to understand sentimental feeling, the more the possibility seems to recede and the less she seems to be one of "they" who feel it. She divides most sharply from this sentimental group on the "feeling" of "certainty"--"knowing certainty inside them"--which she stipulates as an element of sentimentality along with "feeling, imagination, thinking, . . . and virtuous feeling in them." She repeatedly includes certainty among other, more commonly recognized, uplifting traits of the sentimental: "some have a sentimental sense of the beauty and the loveliness and the truth of certain feeling and it is so lovely and so noble and everybody is so good and so beautiful . . .These are many ways of being sentimental" (Making, 450).
In fact her particular fascination with "certainty," and (as we learn later) her failure to achieve it, gets dramatized in the prose's repetitiveness. Here as in much of her writing, Stein institutes the principles of repetition and reproduction yet meanwhile enacts their implosion via the inevitable temporal principle of difference--thus, through, repetition, unfolding the contradictions of sentimental narration of an organic self. Like the deconstructive theorists who would later philosophize (perhaps partly under Stein's belated influence) about the decentering effects of this apparently stabilizing principle of repetition, Stein shows that repetition always manifests a difference from one instance to the next, despite its driving desire for a sameness organized around an anchoring original. Say a word twice and the second time around it expresses a difference if only because it now echoes the first saying. "Yes" is different from "yes, yes." The second yes, while reinforcing the first, at the same time turns against it, or puts it in question by displaying the felt need to insist on it. Cultural or narrative repetition likewise enacts "stress" in both senses of the word.
Stein's narrator pushes further yet, however, to give just a hint of a "gay" feeling under--and under cover of--this righteous, virtuous feeling. Philip Redfern epitomizes one typical kind of "virtuous being," who "was to himself a man simple, sensuous, and passionate. . . from whom chivalry demanded he should be always yielding when he himself was not active in feeling." And after all, he is like those others who "make a principle to free them, from the weakness in them" (Making, 446). Yet key allusions suggest that his principle is a decoy for his gay "sexual emotion," for "he was of the kind of them and perhaps Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde were this kind of them, he was of them who become romantic, heroic, beautiful, saintly by the weakness in them that is there always acting" (Making, 445). While Stein covertly tells us Philip could have loved men, Philip simply feels that "every one could hold him by suggesting to him by the sensitive suggestibility in him and this was his great weakness in him and he made of it the principle of his living to himself in his talking, thinking, feeling" (Making, 445).
What Stein scrutinizes here is the way the insistence on a structure of self-truth, of identity with oneself that allows for certainty in virtuousness, aims exactly to contain a volatile difference within oneself. She further explains that within this dynamic "Sensitivity turns into suspicion, cleverness, self-protection. . . . These then all of them have it inside them that everything turns inside them to suspicion, to cleverness, to self-protection, to sexual emotion, to sensibility of a kind that is a thing that is called sentimental" (Making, 566). If "sexual emotion" in particular compels this posture that is called sentimental then the following joke takes on a double valence--one that both incriminates and explains the middle class obsession with honest decency: "There are some who have not any feeling of virtue in them. There are not very many of them" (Making, 444).
Yet again, although Stein thus seems to critique the sentimental novelistic tradition, we should recall that it has been our narrator's ambition exactly to come clean in a sentimental way and get to the bottom of "every kind of men and every kind of women and every way any one can think about them" (Making, 175). Her very pulling back of the layers of sentimentality to expose a gay feeling is a sentimental project: it wants a self, a self with a history that has "everything included" (Making, 335). Importantly, however, and perhaps intentionally, her project fails; she cannot keep each one separate from her self and whole unto himself or herself. Instead it "gets all mixed up to me all mixed up in each one . . . and then sometimes all of a sudden I lose the meaning out of all of them I lose all of them" (Making, 335). About halfway through the novel she laments, "Perhaps no one ever will know the complete history of every one. This is a sad thing" (Making, 453). It seems that perhaps "bottom" nature is after all bottomless--just as repetition would seem to anchor but in practice unhinges truth and narrative. The narrator's sentimental dilemma reaches a climax as she approaches the last sections of her book and broods over the complicated blending and mixtures and slippery repetitions of each one. She confesses finally that:
I am in desolation and my eyes are large with needing weeping and I have a flush from feverish feeling and I am not knowing what way each one is experiencing in being living . . . . I tell you I cannot bear it this thing that I cannot be realizing experiencing in each one being living, I say it again and again. . . it is in me now when I am realizing being dead one, a one being dying . . . . and I I am very certain that I will not ever be completely with each one doing such a thing. (Making, 729)
Stein's narrator once more exposes herself as certain only of uncertainty--a failed sentimental subject. And yet she weeps; she puts herself at her reader's mercy; and so her reader is forced to make the very move Stein has exposed as duplicitous and self-serving and, most importantly, catalyzed by the questions of inclusion and ostracism, a move prompted by a sentimental longing to reach across to the other for recognition ("I tell you I cannot bear it this thing that I cannot be realizing experiencing in each one being living") exactly in order to have some sense of control in the world of others. Sensibility is an ambition, in other words. It is omnivorous. And the reader is included in its feast.
The Making of Americans, Being the History of a Family's Progress repeats the contradictory modern narrative of being and making, or inheritance and innovation, that had shaped all such histories of a family's progress. It meanwhile names the uncertainty principle underlying progress's drive to know; and it links these to the veiling of a non-reproductive yet compelling "sexual emotion." Through repetition, Stein thus narrates the paradox Said had identified in the modern novel in the West: of a progress that must reproduce itself, that must repeat itself, that must obsessively begin again and again to narrate itself in relation to the other, which in the end exposes its precarious madeness, its will to a world-making self, which I am arguing rests on a racial self-making and which, Stein reveals, entails a smothering of gay feeling insofar as racial making requires heterosexual reproduction. Stein repeats this exposure more searingly in Three Lives, that triptych of failed assimilations and in particular of the lesbian desire that disrupts the drive to progress, reproduction, and assimilation. She strips narrative down to its racial-patriarchal bones, with a vengeance.
If the narrator in Making simulates sentimentality and expands it to the point of imploding it, the narrators of Three Lives are aggressively anti-sentimental as they distill and parody the policing of eroticism through codes of race and ethnicity. The narrators in Three Lives insult their characters with racial and ethnic slurs. We learn in "Gentle Lena" about one of the characters, who is explictly tagged as German, that she was "an overgrown, slow, flabby, blonde, stupid, fat girl" while the German family Lena (of the title) marries into is "dirty and stingy" and "theirs was the german dirt of saving, of being dowdy and loose and foul in your clothes so as to save them and yourself in washing, having your hair greasy to save it in the soap and the drying, having your clothes dirty, not in freedom, but because it was cheaper, keeping the house close and smelly because so it cost less to get it heated" (Three Lives, 248, 268).
"Melanctha" goes further. In this story, Rose Johnson is introduced as the "real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress" (Three Lives, 85). We are told she does not have "the wide abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine," and yet she does have the "simple promiscuous unmorality of the black people" (Three Lives, 86). When her baby dies, perhaps because she "just forgot it for awhile," Rose doesn't give her loss much thought because "these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint"(Three Lives, 85).
These lines are calculated to offend. They are indistinguishable from contemporary racist assumptions among many educated, established whites about blacks and new immigrants but are pushed a step further than "polite" white society (which Stein knew well enough) would like to read in print or hear out loud. This polite society of established whites is, I suggest, Stein's imagined audience. Indeed, one important aspect of the insidious racism of the phrases in "Melanctha" is that they are most likely written for white ears not black. It is a kind of audience-response Africanism, wherein, as Toni Morrison clarifies in Playing in the Dark, blacks serve a function rather than entering as full human presences. 24 Disconcertingly, though, as I will argue, their function is to echo the audience's racism in a way that makes readers squirm--all the while creating the author as author through the power of racism.
Stein's subjection of both Germans and blacks to this treatment further suggests that her audience here is similar to that which she addresses in Making in her apostrophe, "Middle class, middle class, I know no one of my friends who will admit it." That is, these readers admit neither, as said there, that they belong to a "sordid material" economy nor, as implied in Three Lives, that they implicitly espouse a dehumanizing racism. She's calling her audience out of its ideological closets. As we have seen, Stein had an ear for cliché, for cultural trope, for what Roland Barthes called the semes of social mythologies. She regularly picked up on such overdetermined phrases and imitated the culture's repetition of them so as to pound the meaning out of them and alert us to their inculcative power.
So Stein simultaneously echoes these phrases in order to expose her audience's investment in them and yet reveals her own attachment to them. She is empowered by her appropriations of them--she becomes an author exactly by this means. This is why, in at least one way, they deserve the name of racism.
And yet, uncomfortably, to stop here is to turn away from a problem that is ours as well as hers no matter who we are, and it is also to refuse the insight Stein has to offer us in her grappling with this problem. For in these stories Stein identifies a deep link between the economies of racism and sexism, one that depends on the interlocking structures of repetition and heterosexual reproduction; and she repeats these connections in part to reveal them. She is in the business, as I will later argue the novel is in the business, of recreating and reconring the cultural fault lines that alienate her from her readers. Yet, more than some other novelists, she disruptively troubles the link between narrative repetition and racialized heterosexual reproduction, exactly by working through and exposing the racial logic and the insistent rhythm of reproduction that together drive the master plot of Anglo-American virtue and sensibility, a fact that becomes especially clear when we read Lives in the light of The Making of Americans. That is, not only does Stein repeat a phrase like "the broad sunshine of Negro laughter" enough times to throw its cliché character and racist function into relief, to defamiliarize it, but she does so within an enforced plot of heterosexual repetition, into which she inserts a lesbian "deviance" that disrupts it. It is here that I believe there is an incisive critique of racialism implicit in her modernist narrative practice--even though at the same time she can safely reiterate racist phrasing because her position as an educated middle class "white" gives her the luxury to "play" with racism while her Jewish-German heritage compels her to undertake this "play."
The opening story of Three Lives begins simply: "Anna led an arduous and troubled life." Most of the next several pages describe the small mishaps and frustrations of her dogs, closing with the narrator's reiteration, "You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life" (Three Lives, 13). Given the triviality of the incidents with Anna's dogs, we are immediately invited to read these repeated phrases ironically, or in Bakhtinian terms dialogically, rather than in the monological way that repetition seems at first to demand. This emerges as especially so when we realize that the key to these incidents is sexuality--and the policing of it: despite Anna's earnest and close supervision, one of her dogs mischievously manages to get another dog pregnant.  Stein thus forces the narrative mode of repetition to fail in its function of regularizing reproduction and sexuality, even while at the same time maintaining the appearance of regularization through repetition. In effect she narrates what Foucault would later theorize: the irony of the way in which policing discourses draw attention to and embellish the acts they purport to prohibit. After all, Anna is fixated on the sex life of her dogs.
At the same time in this first story, repetition functions laboriously to reproduce and contain ethnic identity as well as sexual regularity. Anna is described as "a small spare german woman" who speaks a "queer piercing german english" and who takes in young german girls as servants and acts the part of "a good incessant german mother who watched and scolded" (Three Lives, 19). Anna's German-ness is repeatedly stressed, and with all this stress it begins to feel like an identity under stress. Again repetition works not to fix but to create a sense of the need to fix what might otherwise slip away or be misread or, from Anna's point of view, lead to behavior that would break the rules of German womanhood. For a key aspect of Anna's Germanness is her "firm old world sense of what was the right way for a girl to do . . . A girl was a girl and should act like a girl, both as to giving all respect and as to what she had to eat" (Three Lives, 24). But many of her troubles are with girls or women who, like her dogs, do not do "the right way for a girl to do" (including as to what they eat!). In a way that becomes even more marked in "Gentle Lena," it is not just that girls are girls and boys boys but that German girls are German girls and German boys German boys.
Proper gender identities must be properly ethnicized or racialized--and it is these racialized gender features that get stressed in all of the three stories. They are, in significant part, the form repetition takes in the book. Narrative repetition is yoked to ethnic or racialized repetition. The repetition is usually taken far enough, and juxtaposed with enough dialogic effect, not only to defamiliarize their racialized gender categories but also to make narrative itself feel like willed repetition, determined recuperation of a past self into a future self that will hold, an incessant naming and naming again so as to make identities self-identical.
Meanwhile within this insistently narrated tale of German womanhood there erupts a lesbian romance: "The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna's life" . The point is repeated at intervals throughout, in a way that acknowledges that this is a plot that might get overlooked or repressed: "Remember, Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna's life" (Three Lives, 34, 54). Gradually, however, it becomes clear that this story of the "good" Anna's life is the story of the failure of that romance, which ends, crucially, over a disagreement about reproduction and mothering: this reiterative and racially circumscribed cultural plot reasserts itself over the pressure of that "sexual emotion" that might have derailed it. As in Making, Stein narrates narrative's "coverage" of sexuality, its will to contain, to have and to hold, sexuality by the clenched hand of racialized community and its "progress."
For it is the demand for the reproductive, insistent, "scolding" work of mothering that comes between Anna and Mrs Lehntman. In Anna's eyes Mrs. Lehntman is a neglectful mother, who is failing to reproduce the ideal German girl which, as Anna sees it, burdens her with the task of showing Mrs. Lehntman's daughter "the right way for a girl to do." Stein's narrator follows Anna's own maddening allegiance to this ethnicized reproductive logic by maintaining repetition as her narrative principle and, despite the insertion of an alternative plot of homoeroticism, destroying the romance between the two women according to that logic. Here as in both of the other stories in Three Lives, the narrator follows this racialized and heterosexual narrative logic until it kills off all of her deviant female protagonists. A careful reading of "Melanctha" in this light establishes that it indeed repeats this narrative logic by which Stein critiques the tradition of sentimental fiction in English; and that, furthermore, the story of Melanctha's "deviant" gay sexuality is of a piece with Stein's larger critical project, perhaps her most overt expression of it, even as it also makes use of whites' racialized sexual stereotypes of blacks and mulattas to realize that project.
In an ironic echo of the good Anna's phrase, the female protagonist of "Melanctha," wonders if suicide would "be really the best way for her to do" (Three Lives, 89). Melanctha is acute about the logic that Stein has just displayed for us in the preceding story. For Melanctha, too, has a romance with another woman, Jane Harden, and for her, too, that romance brings death. It's as if she looked sideways at the two stories hers is sandwiched between and reads the writing on the textual wall.
 Although as a young woman Melanctha is at first timid about sexuality, she wanders the streets in search of something. Yet "with all her courage," the narrator tells us, "Melanctha was here a coward, and so she could not learn to understand"-- until she meets Jane Harden who "had had much experience [and] was not afraid to understand" (Three Lives, 100, 103). Jane was "very much attracted by Melanctha" and they begin "more to be together than to see men" during which time Melanctha "dimly . . . began to see what it was that she should understand" (Three Lives, 105, 104). With a smirk referring not only to the way Jane upsets Melanctha because she "would be with other people and with men and with Melanctha," the narrator tells us "in every way she got it from Jane Harden" (Three Lives, 106). Although Melanctha ends this affair and takes up with a man, the sexual desires and the heterosocial consequences created by it stay with her.
Like Anna, Melanctha befriends and is mothered by a heterosexual woman, Rose Johnson, who very insistently knows what is "right for a decent colored girl always to be doing" (Three Lives, 208). Some version of this phrase is repeated by Rose ten or fifteen times. "Decent conduct," as Rose sometimes calls it, is repeatedly yoked not only to gender but also to racial identity. This racially and sexually defined code of the right way for a girl to do is once more the principle of repetition in the story. The code is what the story reproduces--echoing the means by which "colored" culture reproduces itself through its "decent" reproducing women.
Yet unlike Anna or Lena, in Melanctha Stein creates a character who understands the way the repetitions of speech serve not to represent patterns in life but rather to create, to force, and to reproduce those patterns in the face of "other" impulses. In effect, Melanctha herself voices Stein's critique of Western traditions of representation, especially its narratives of moral sensitivity and sexual goodness. This becomes most clear in her conversations with the doctor Jefferson Campbell, the man with whom she has a romance and who also stands for the insistent principle of "the right way to do."
Jeff understands "just two kinds of ways of loving, one the way it is to be good in families and the other kind of way, like animals are all time . . I didn't ever like that last kind of way much for any of the colored people" (Three Lives, 158).  He also advocates the apparently simple honesty cherished by the characters in Making. He believes that you should (and that it is possible to) "always tell everything just as you meant it. That's the only kind of life he knew or believed in, Jeff Campbell repeated." So again we have a racialized code of family reproduction naturalized as "regular," a code which Jeff reproduces and repeats.
That Jeff repeats these notions is important and Melanctha shrewdly exposes this mode of self-reproduction, and its covert self-protection. Melanctha responds to Jeff not just by rejecting this "regular living" code for colored people but also by pointing to its status as rhetoric, as prescriptive ideology rather than ingenuous description of feelings. She highlights the gap between his repetitive speech and his desire: "about what you was just saying, Dr. Campbell about living regular and all that, I certainly don't understand what you meant by what you was just saying.  You don't care about going to church much yourself, and yet you always are saying you believe so much in things like that, for people" (Three Lives, 120, 118). Finally she asks him "what about Jane Harden?"  (Three Lives, 118, 120)
Melanctha points to the nonrepresentational nature of Jeff Campbell's repetitive "saying." She highlights the way it functions as a code which he constructs coercively for others while using it as a decoy for his impulses to avoid church and good girls and instead visit with queer folks who like excitements. Jeff Campbell laughs out loud in recognition of her insight; he listens too when she tells him he doesn't yet know how to love--not regular-living love but "real, strong, hot love" for "you certainly are just too scared Dr. Campbell to really feel things way down in you." He responds that "perhaps I could learn a whole lot about women the right way, if I had a real good teacher" (Three Lives, 125). And so their romance begins.
But the code returns to haunt him and their sexual relationship. As their relationship progresses, Jeff worries her with his feelings that she is a bad hard girl and a good kind girl in one and he has trouble trusting her. Their first crisis develops when he learns of her past affair with Jane Harden which he at first feels is "ugly" (Three Lives, 144). They talk their way through this crisis and their relationship eventually reaches a point where "with her pure, strong ways of reaching, Melanctha would give him all the love she knew" and "Jeff took it straight now . . . and he felt, strong, the joy of all this being, and it swelled out full inside him, he poured it all back to her in freedom, in tender kindness, and in joy, and in gentle brother fondling" (Three Lives, 154). But, apparently at the moment they start to move beyond "brother fondling," Jeff's desire recoils. The passage is worth quoting at length:
. . . they were lying there and resting, with a green, bright, light-flecked world all around them What was it that now really happened to them? What was it that Melanctha did, that made everything get all ugly for them? What was it that Melanctha felt then, that made Jeff remember all the feeling he had had in him when Jane Harden told him how Melanctha had learned to be so very understanding? . . . It was all green and warm and lovely, and now Melanctha had made it all so ugly for him. What was it Melanctha was now doing with him? What was it he used to be thinking was the right way for him and all the colored people to be always trying to make it right, the way they should always be living? . . . All the old thinking came up very strong in him. He sort of turned away then, and threw Melanctha from him. He never, even now, was ever sure, he really knew what
Melanctha was, when she was real herself, and honest. . . . Then he really knew he could know nothing. He knew then, he never could know what it was she really wanted with him. He knew then, he never could know really what it was he felt inside him. (Three Lives, 155)
At these most unstable, uncertain moments in the relationship the words "really" and "certainly" make an insistent, repetitive appearance, revealing their function as a response to the stress of potential deviation and heterosexual disorder: Jeff Campbell thinks "I certainly did think now I really was knowing alright, what I wanted. I certainly did really think now I was know to be trusting . . . I certainly did think it was like that with me sure . . . And now I certainly do know I don't know anything that's very real about her" (Three Lives, 157). If it's certain that Jeff didn't really know Melanctha until now, it is just as uncertain that he really knows her now. In this kind of prose, in other words, the stability of words like really and certainly certainly dissolves.
Moreover, as in Making, that principle of certainty at the heart of sentimental culture is linked to anxiety about racial identity and sexuality. Jeff is most concerned with Melanctha's "honesty," but it is his own honesty that he is trying so hard to secure by his repetitive invocation of "decent" Anglo-Saxon sexual codes. Especially in this light, the "really"s of this passage should condition the way we read the racist phrases that are also laced with real's and really's--such as the description of Rose as "a real black negress" or Rose's description of Melanctha's father as "certainly a black brute." Certainly this must be true. And yet it is just as uncertain as all the certainly's in Stein's stories. Stein leaves us uncertainly with the certain violence of her racist clichés, just as certainly as she leaves those clichés deformed.
Stein's method is to constrain her characters' lives within an insistent reproductive narrative even while she uses its repetitions to expose its violence to her characters' desires.  There is catharsis in her method, and there is clearly more going on than using black characters to signify transgressive sexuality, but both readers and characters become instruments and victims of her parodic narrative method. She spares no one--and this attitude, while impelled by a will to resistance, also mirrors the master's violence. The racist resonance in these repeated phrases cannot be controlled in the text.  There is a kind of pleasure in their power to shock and wound--when the character is German the pleasure is in part masochistic, but the meaning necessarily shifts when she as a "white" person uses racist phrases about "black" characters. Thus it becomes clear that, like other modernists, Stein both critiques and colludes in the racial order of things; she too is seduced by its epic sweep, its narrative possibilities, and especially perhaps its lacunae into which she, like Philip Redfern, can load her secrets.
Barbara Johnson once said that if there were not "men" and "women" there would probably be no written literature--implying that such is the co-formation of "text" and "sexuality" via the shared principle of difference. 25 I am increasingly convinced the same can be said of "text" and "race," or at least in the English and American tradition, of the novel and race. This joining operates, I have argued, via the tropes of sentimentality, which also unfolds through dynamics of sameness and difference, universality and hierarchy. Pointing in this direction, Hegel claims in The History of Philosophy that what most distinguishes the Germanic races as superior, what most suits Germans to the "Idea of Freedom" and the "principle of Subjectivity" (introduced, he says, by Protestantism and extending to England), is their dialectical consciousness of "History" (Hegel's emphasis). 26 Hegel's formulation is paradigmatic of the ways that our fashioning of subjectivity takes its principle of narrativity from race. A freedom-seeking, modern race is, paradoxically, a race with a history, with a dialectical story to tell: a race with a novel tradition. Further, the novel finesses its paradoxical, dialectical claim on the new and the old, tradition and novelty, by way of women, whose fictionalized sensitivity and potentially transgressive sexuality motor the very narratives that enclose them and in the process reproduce epics of race (a feminist paradox that Myra Jehlen noted long ago and which I am now linking to the paradox of race). 27 Thus is modernity's attachment to race transgressively reproduced, by women and by novels.
Modernism apprehends this telos and troubles it in such texts as Loy's "The Anglo-Mongrel and the Rose," Woolf's The Waves, Toomer's Cane, Joyce's Ulysses, and in Faulkner's oeuvre as a whole. Yet modernism desires the subjectivity that the West's modern racial narratology has yielded. It seeks epic scope and ancient depth. In Three Lives, Stein's flattening repetitions tamper with these desires, but in the process repeat the violence of the history they expose. Meanwhile modernism as a whole seeks repeatedly, and perhaps admirably, for a history outside of race that will sustain a history-transforming, dialectical subjectivity.
And generations later, we are still seeking, yet race still narrates us. We repeat again and again the story of racial boundaries transgressed yet recuperated. In cross-racial buddy shows and movies from The Lone Ranger and The Mod Squad to Fried Green Tomatoes and Nothing to Lose, in twentieth-century novels from To Kill a Mockingbird to Midnight's Children to The Color Purple, our narratives at once racialize history and promise to elude that racialization, pivoting around plots of sexual identity. They equivocate with great success. Only when they do otherwise, when race and modernity uncouple, shall we be so transformed that Stein reflects nothing about ourselves. Only then will race be history--someone else's history and not ours.
Laura Doyle is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture . This essay is part of her current project, Race and Modernity.
1. See William Wordsworth, "Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal to Each Other, and to the Common Enemy, at this Crisis and Specifically as Affected by The Convention at Cintra," excerpted in William Wordsworth: Selected Prose, ed. John O Hayden (New York: Penguin, 1988), 225-226. Also see my discussion of this metaphor and race in Wordsworth in Chapter Two of Bordering on the Body: the Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1994).
2. John Whittier-Fergusen, "Stein in Time: History, Manuscripts, and Mempory," 6.1 (January 1999): 115-151.
3. See Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975); and "On Repetition," The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
4. For these related discussions, see Trevor H. Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), especially 3-56 and 185-198; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 11-55 and 155-93; Christopher Hill, "The Norman Yoke," Puritanism and Revolution. (New York: Schocken Books, 1964); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Chatto Heinemann, 1974). See also Laura Doyle, "The Folk, the Nobles, and the Novel: The Racial Subtext of Sentimentality," Narrative 3.2 (May 1995): 161-186; and "The Racial Sublime," Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. Sonia Hofkosh and Alan Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
5. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) and discussion in Michael Murphy, "Antiquary to Academic," Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries, ed. Carlt T. Berkhout and Milton Gatch (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982), 1-17.
6. Gerard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, ed. Max Radin (Sutro, California: State, 1939).
7. Procupius, History of the Warres of the Emperour Justinian, trans. Humphrey Holcroft (London: H. Moseley, 1653).
8. See Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience.
9. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Lanuage (New York: AMS Press, 1967), Preface, no page number.
10. For a full discussion of the late eighteenth-century blossoming of the idea of a native "Gothic" literary tradition, especially via such texts as Bishop Percy's Ancient Reliques of English Poetry, see Doyle, "The Racial Sublime."
11. For an exploration of this incipient racism, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 1-24. For a discussion of the paradigmatic quality of this double turn, see Doyle, "The Racial Sublime."
12. See discussion of Cheyne's reiteration of Newton in the introduction and first chapter of G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 4-9.
13. This confluence of race and sensibility is increasingly supported by recent scholarship on the American novel, such as that of Kenneth Warren and also of a number of feminist critics writing on the way domestic ideals operated in nineteenth-century American sentimental literature both to transcend and reinforce racial identities. See Kenneth Warren, Black and White Starngers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Also see essays in Shirley Samuels, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimental Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Dersire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Also suggestive along these lines in the European and British contexts is John Murray Cuddihy's analysis of "manners" as the key to Jewish assimilation in the West in the introduction of The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
14. See Cecil Degrotte Elby, The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987).
15. See my discussion of this aspect of Joyce in Bordering, 112.
16. Shawn Alfrey, "Oriental Peaceful Penetration: Gertrude Stein and the End of Europe," Massachusetts Review 38.3 : 405-16.
17. See Maria Damon, "Gertrude Stein's Jewishness, Jewish Social Scientists, and the 'Jewish Question'." Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (Fall 1996: 489-506; and Charles Bernstein, "Stein's Identity," Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (Fall 1996): 485-88.
18. This reading of race and sexuality in the stories is articulated by Saldivar-Hull but was also made earlier by Milton Cohen and more recently by Debra B. Silverman. See Sonia Saldivar-Hull, "Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice," Women's Writing in Exile. Eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Milton Cohen, "Black Brutes and Mulatto Saints: The Racial Hierarchy of Stein's 'Melanctha,'" Black American Literature Forum 18.3 (Fall 1984): 119-21. For an account of Stein's racial appropriations in this story, see Carla Petson, "The Remaking of Americans: Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha' and African-American Musical Traditions, Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies. Ed. Henry B Wonham (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
19. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995) and Three Lives (New York: Vintage Press, 1936 [1909]), hereafter referred to as Making and Three Lives, respectively.
20. Though I have not been able to determine if this is the source for Stein's text, a very similar version of this tale appears in Oliver Wendell Holmes' Preface to The Guardian Angel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892 [1867], in which he tells it as an example of the unfortunate inheritance of "characteristic qualities." Apparently this story was circulating in eugenical discussions at the end of the nineteenth century and Stein, as usual, made roguish use of it in her novel.
21. See Priscilla Walk, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 243, 250-51. See also Jacob A Riis, Making of an American (New York: Macmillan, 1940).
22. Jane Garrity, "Selling Culture to the 'Civilized': Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity," 6.2 (April 1999): 29-58.
23. Quoted in Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarion Attitudes in American Thought, [1963] rprt, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984) 146-7.
24. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1993).
25. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 13.
26. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosphy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956) 438-457.
27. Myra Jehlen, "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism," Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, eds. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi. See especially 210-214.
In memory of Jean Arthus, former pupil of the École bilingue de Neuilly, executed by the Nazis on February 8, 1943.
On the evidence of the number of entries in the Bibliothèque nationale catalogue, Georges Belmont must rank among the most prolific writers of the post-war period: 156 to date (September 1998) in Opale, the online catalogue, to which one must add 13 in the 1960-1969 Catalogue des imprimés and ten more in the old pre-1960 card catalogue. This impressive output includes five novels, a collection of poems, and above all a large number of translations from English. 1 Belmont's work as translator over more than four decades ranges from Henry James (The Ambassadors), Malcolm Lowry (Hear us, O Lord, from Heaven, Thy Dwelling-Place), Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited), and James Hardley Chase, to autobiographies of political and artistic res such as Golda Meier and Arthur Rubinstein. Four authors with whom Belmont's name is more closely associated are Graham Greene (four titles: A Sort of Life, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor), Peter Townsend (five titles), Erica Jong (Fear of Flying and eight other titles), and Anthony Burgess (13 titles, including A Clockwork Orange). But there is one author who is inseparable from Belmont in his role as translator: Henry Miller. In addition to the 13 titles Belmont translated (including Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Max and the White Phagocytes, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder), he has published prefaces to Miller translations by others and a volume of interviews he conducted with Miller in 1970 for the French national radio and television, known as the "Entretiens de Paris," and has contributed an introduction and thirty-eight dense pages of personal notes to the French translation of Mary Dearborn's 1991 biography of Miller. 2 These notes document a friendship which went back to the late 1930s and they represent, together with the Entretiens, a valuable biographical source for Miller scholarship. If, however, one had to select one single book linked with Belmont's name, it would have to be not a translation but Monsieur Proust, the memoir of Céleste Albaret, Proust's housekeeper for the last nine years of his life, recorded and prefaced by Belmont. This famous literary "scoop" (seventy hours of conversations over five months according to the introduction) caused a sensation at its publication in 1973 and its prodigious success can be measured by the simple fact that, twenty-five years later, it remains in print. 3 The critical reception of the book was mostly enthusiastic but the praise was not altogether unqualified. In spite of the ghostwriter's protestations of absolute objectivity in his introduction, doubts were raised about certain aspects of Céleste's monologue, which veers from a self-effacing to a vehemently assertive tone, denouncing what she views as the "lies" (mensonges is used frequently) that have been spread about her master, suggesting for instance that if Proust had been homosexual she would have been aware of it, and, while she repeatedly denies having any literary competence, often sounds as if she were paraphasing or parodying well-known passages from the Recherche. 4 Is Belmont's Céleste quite the same person as the one interviewed for French television by Roger Stéphane?
All the above should make us legitimately curious to know who was, or is, the prolific Belmont. The Bibliothèque nationale catalogue does not show anything published in book form under his name before 1950. The first occurrence of his work I have been able to locate is the French translation of John Hersey's Hiroshima which came out in 1947; there is evidence, however, that it was first published with no mention of a translator. 5 There is a biographical note in Belmont's first novel, La vache et la tour Eiffel, published in 1953, but one would be tempted to say that it withdraws as much information as it yields: apart from the author's age, forty-three, he is introduced as an alumnus of "one" Grande École, has not travelled much, "except in France," has "subjected himself to a variety of jobs and (reluctantly) put up with [supporté] several positions--neither the ones nor the others highly interesting, ultimately, in his view." Then, we are told, he became a translator and lived in the suburbs before moving back to Paris with his wife and daughter. The note (presumably penned by Belmont himself) continues with a statement both bland and cryptic, and defies interpretation: "He believes that life is what it is, that is to say what you make of it. But if you make nothing of it, it will make itself and it will be even less fun." 6 The short biographical note on the back cover of Belmont's last novel, Ex, published in 1969, tells us a little more. It specifies that "he was a journalist before and after the war" and later "abandoned the press to become an editor." Indeed, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Belmont worked as editor of popular glossy magazines such as Paris-Match, Jours de France, and Marie-Claire (for which he interviewed Marilyn Monroe in April 1960), and as an occasional contributor to periodicals like Arts and Candide. 7 In the late 1960s and 1970s, his name appears as director of collections for Robert Laffont, the publisher of two of his novels. If one turns to the bibliographies of two other novels, Chris and Un homme au crépuscule, published by Julliard in 1965 and 1966, they list work in preparation which does not appear to have been published as well as a previously published poem, play, and essay--works which a curious reader would be at a loss to locate in any library catalogue under the name Belmont.
In the post-war era, Maria Jolas reportedly said that Georges Belmont did not exist. She mentioned him infrequently and with evident distaste. It was a painful subject, recalling a betrayal she no doubt viewed in both personal and civic terms. Nonetheless in February 1982 she did so with her usual firmness. When she saw under Belmont's signature an article in Le Monde in connection with the James Joyce centenary, she wrote to its editor Jacques Fauvet (she was then 89):
I must inform you that Joyce, who died in January 1941, knew no Georges Belmont. This surname was adopted at the Liberation, perhaps to cast oblivion on collaborationist activities, by Georges Pelorson; the French had the recent opportunity to see this character on their television screen, shouting slogans in favor of the "Révolution nationale" . . . This ceremony . . . was part of the film The Sorrow and the Pity. . . . I am offering these clarifications, Monsieur, because it seems to me important, with a view to any future use of your archives, to fill the lacunae and point out the dishonesty of the article signed Georges Belmont." 8
I will now try in my turn to fill the lacunae by retelling the story of the man I will henceforth call by his real name.
Georges Pelorson was born on July 19, 1909 in Belley, capital of the small province of Bugey on the southeastern edge of Burgundy. After taking his Baccalauréat, he was enrolled in 1926 or 1927 at the Khâgne of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand which res so prominently in Jean-François Sirinelli's Génération intellectuelle. Indeed, even if he does not receive much attention from Sirinelli, Pelorson is a perfect representative of that "generation of 1905" which, too young to have fought in the First World War, found itself so diversely involved during the second, especially under the Nazi Occupation. 9 His contemporaries at Louis-le-Grand included Robert Brasillach, Maurice Bardèche, and Roger Vailland and his teachers the pro-Action française French literature professor André Bellessort, who was Louis-le-Grand's answer to the radical-socialiste Alain in the other leading Khâgne at the lycée Henri IV. 10 In 1928, Pelorson entered the École normale supérieure. Among the 29 members of his class (besides the aforementioned Bardèche and Brasillach) were Jean Beaufret, the future philosophy teacher and Heidegger disciple who was also from the Khâgne at Louis-le-Grand, as was Jacques Talagrand, a.k.a. Thierry Maulnier, future contributor to L'Action française and Je suis partout. Last but not least, the 1928 class included a woman, Simone Weil. At rue d'Ulm, Pelorson's room was next to the one shared by Bardèche and Brasillach but he does not seem to have been particularly close to either. 11 Politically, he would appear to have leaned towards the left, if one can thus interpret his presence among the 83 signers of the petition against the special military preparation Normaliens were subjected to: it was published in Le populaire of 26 November 1928 and provoked the ire of the nationalist press. 12
If not much is known about Pelorson's political views during his Khâgne and École normale years, much, on the other hand, is known about his relations with the new English lecteur at the ENS, fresh from Trinity College Dublin. His name was Samuel Beckett and he was to become one of Pelorson's closest friends. 13 As the only English major in his class, the instruction Pelorson received from Beckett seems to have consisted mostly in two-voice readings of The Tempest and long conversations in the bars of Montparnasse. "The real lectures were in Montparnasse," reminisced Pelorson sixty years later, "the lectures of life. There were two things that changed my life, Montparnasse and then Ireland afterwards." 14
Pelorson went to Ireland in the fall of 1929 as the French lecteur at Trinity College, Dublin, a position he held until the summer of 1931. Beckett himself returned to Ireland in 1930 and it was then that he and Pelorson became particularly close. A well-known episode, which took place in February 1931, was their staging of Le Kid, a parody of Corneille's Le Cid, as the annual presentation of the French group of the Modern Languages Society. Beckett played Don Diègue and Pelorson the Count. The event provoked the expected scandal and has gone down in history as the first direct involvement of Beckett with the theater and his first and only stage appearance. 15 Pelorson is also linked with Beckett's debut as a novelist, since, according to James Knowlson, the episodic character named Liebert in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, his first novel (which remained unpublished until 1993), is at least in part based on Pelorson. 16 Pelorson also claims to have introduced Beckett to that remarkably pre-Beckettian text that is the diary of Jules Renard. 17 During his second year in Ireland, Pelorson met a young woman named Marcelle Graham, whom he married shortly afterwards. On his return to France, he decided to abandon the traditional academic career usually expected of a Normalien to become a writer instead. He left the École normale with only a licence (B.A.) in English instead of the agrégation which would have made him a member of the French national school system. He and his wife together produced a French translation of Emily Brontë's poems, which was published in 1933. 18
Beckett's work had begun to appear in transition in June 1929, when his first published story, "Assumption," as well as his essay on Joyce's "Work in Progress," had appeared in transition 16/17. Thanks to his connection with Beckett, Pelorson soon got to know Eugene and Maria Jolas and it was in transition that he too made his literary debut: his work, mostly in its original French, appeared in every issue but one of the "new transition" from 1932 to 1938. Two poems, "Isocèle" and "Plans," re in the "Poetry is Vertical" section of transition 21 (March 1932). Pelorson's name appears several times in transition 22 (February 1933), with a letter-poem "A Eugene Jolas" (dated October 1932), followed by three poems, a multilingual short story, "Hysteriette of La Cosmosa," signed jointly by Jolas and Pelorson. A Vertigralist fantasy, "Le moment de Parsifal" is to be found in the "Paramyths" section of transition 23 (July 1935) and the same issues contains two poems in the "Hypnologues" section, a reply to the "Mutation in Language" questionnaire, and three short poems in the section "Experiences in Language Mutation." There are a lengthy poetic fragment ("Le nombre") in the "Vertigral" section and a prose text ("Le Roi dans la Vallée") in the "Paramyths" section of transition 24 (June 1936). Finally, the prose poem "Le vrai visage" appeared in two parts in the journal, part I in the "Workshop" section of transition 26 (Winter 1937), part II in transition 27 (April-May 1938), which also contains his prose poem "Perpétuel Mobile."
Pelorson's contributions to transition fall into two distinct groups. One group is the work of a dutiful--if not highly original--disciple of Eugene Jolas and the Revolution of the Word and "Verticalist" or "Vertigralist" tenets. It is therefore not a surprise to find Pelorson's name among the eight signers of the "Poetry is Vertical" manifesto in transition 21. 19 Particularly characteristic of his production is "A Eugene Jolas," a prose poem in celebration of American Spirituals: ostensibly in reaction to "Black Rhythms" in transition 21, it can be seen as an homage to Eugene Jolas the author of the anthology Le nègre qui chante. 20 It combines neologisms (allégoreuse), spelling fantasies ("jeste" for geste), unorthodox punctuation, an emphatically stated preoccupation with the status of language and the possibilities of multilingualism, references to Joyce as well as to Benjamin Péret, and a tone bordering on that of a manifesto: "Then instead of striving for the creation of new ideas with new words/We can create new words and ideas will follow if we truly cannot do without them." 21 The three poems that follow present the same characteristics; they are in fact not called poems but "ontogrammes," Pelorson's coinage, which res in transition's "Revolution-of-the-Word Dictionary" in the same issue with the definition "neo-mythical composition with a-logical words." 22 Three short poems in transition 23 are called "rythmèses" and can be described as nursery rhymes based purely on neologisms and nonsense words. 23 "Perpétuel Mobile," Pelorson's last contribution to transition, is very much along the same lines. All the aforementioned texts suggest--as seems to have been the case--a master-disciple relationship between Pelorson and Jolas. The short story they wrote in collaboration, "Hysteriette of La Cosmosa" (transition 22) is a Rabelaisian romp with passages in English and in French, often combined in the same sentence, peppered with Wakean coinages. It makes no greater impression than a curious and amusing experiment but its very effervescence is indicative of a happy congeniality between its two authors.
The other group of Pelorson's contributions to transition belongs to a strikingly different vein. "Connaissance" and "Semence" in transition 23 are called "ontogrammes" but it is difficult to see what is "ontogrammatic" about them. Neologisms are absent. The form, free verse in appearance, is in fact a series of hexasyllabic lines which to the ear sound no different from conventional, if unrhymed alexandrines ("L'homme alors s'avança/dans la force de l'ombre/Et l'on n'entendit plus/que le dur de la mer"). 24 The poems deal with broad entities ("les Dieux," "la terre," "l'homme," "la femme") in a mode of incantation and with a use of repetition strangely reminiscent of the poetry of Charles Péguy. 25 The first poem, "Connaissance," much revised, forms part of a much longer poem Pelorson published under that same title in 1937. 26 "Le nombre--Prologue-- fragment" (transition 24) presents exactly the same characteristics. "Le Roi dans la Vallée" (transition 24), a tale in the surrealist mode with a strong oneiric flavor, and "Le vrai visage" (published in two parts in transition 26 and 27), also in prose, retain some modernist traits: the latter, however, deals like Connaissance with broad, abstract entities and displays the same grandiloquence of tone and a similar reliance on effects of repetition.
Pelorson's response to the "Inquiry on the Malady of Language" in transition 23 appeared in English and was one of the two longest. It unsurprisingly endorses Jolas's "vertical" and "vertigral" aspirations. But it is also an intemperate anti-intellectual outburst which has (with hindsight) a quasi-fascist ring to it: "Intelligence be damned! . . . To the deuce with the fruits ripened in the brain! To the deuce even with the brain! We shall create with the incantation of our bodies." 27
Transition was the main, but not the only literary anchor of Pelorson in the mid-1930s. His name crops up at least three times in the Nouvelle revue française between 1932 and 1935. 28 Another, longer fragment of the poem Connaissance, "Le soir," was published in Jean Paulhan's handsome review Mesures in 1935 and we know that in July 1936 Pelorson participated in a reading organized around Mesures at Adrienne Monnier's Maison des Amis des livres. 29 Was Pelorson the epic poet Paulhan eagerly wished for, as one of his editors has suggested? 30 In any event "Le soir" was Pelorson's only contribution to Mesures. According to Pelorson's own testimony recorded by Richard Ellmann, Paulhan asked him to undertake a translation of Joyce's Pomes Penyeach for Mesures and Pelorson worked on the project during the spring of 1937 in consultation with Joyce, who tried to convince him "to retain the identical rhythms in French as in English" (a common failing among poets who get involved in the translation of their own work). Ellmann does not indicate whether the undertaking was abandoned at Pelorson's or Joyce's initiative. 31
The question of Pelorson's relations with Joyce has been described in diverse ways. Pelorson himself, both in his testimonies to Ellmann and in the Le Monde article mentioned above, suggests that he and Joyce enjoyed a sort of literary or at least intellectual friendship, including discussions of Pelorson's own work. 32 Maria Jolas, in her rebuttal of the Le Monde article, takes a firm exception to that view. "Around 1932, Joyce asked my husband, Eugene Jolas, to recommend to him a man who could help him in his work; Pelorson, who knew Ireland well, was approached because he was bilingual and competent in literary matters. He thus enjoyed the privilege of having professional relations with Joyce at that time. Joyce, to be sure, was affable and friendly towards the young man, but he kept his distance." 33 It must also be noted that Paul Léon, in a March 1933 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, lists Pelorson among the people who "constantly pester" Joyce, "asking for his help and aid which having not the strength to refuse he is trying to do in the best possible manner and which is not at all warranted either by his occupation or by his present state of health and nerves." 34 On the other hand, it was Pelorson who published in the Revue de Paris dated 1 September 1939 (the very day Hitler's troops invaded Poland) one of the first reviews--the first in French--of Finnegans Wake. According to his 1982 article in Le Monde, it was Joyce who commissioned him to write the review and guided him through its writing. Joyce was sufficiently pleased with it to recommend it to both Valery Larbaud and Frank Bugden two weeks later. 35
Pelorson's activities in the 1930s were by no means limited to his literary career. At least until the war he was a freelance reporter for the daily Paris-Midi. 36 And in 1936, Maria Jolas recruited him as headmaster ("directeur des études") of the École bilingue de Neuilly which she had opened in 1932 and which grew from the original handful of pupils (which included her two daughters) to 150 in 1939. In addition to these administrative responsibilities, Pelorson taught literature courses at the school, where his wife Marcelle was a teacher as well. There is every indication from the surviving correspondence from that period that Maria Jolas had the greatest professional and personal confidence in both Pelorsons and the tone of the letters is, on both sides, that of mutual esteem and indeed affection--feelings that make her subsequent unforgiving resentment even more understandable. 37
At the end of 1937, as transition was about to stop publication, Pelorson was ready to launch his own journal, the monthly Volontés. According to Maurice Girodias, whom he met at that time and whose memoirs contain a perspicacious and generally sympathetic portrait of Pelorson, Volontés was financed by Pelorson's journalistic work for Paris-Midi. Pelorson's own version is that it was supported by a pool to which he and his co-founders had agreed to contribute in equal parts, but that he found himself increasingly responsible for its maintenance, all the others but two (Miller being one of them) having stopped contributing. 38
Volontés published 20 issues between December 1937 and August 1939 and an additional one in the spring of 1940. Its official editorial board, as it appears on the cover of the first issue, comprised, besides Pelorson himself, Pierre Guéguen, Eugene Jolas, Frédéric Joliot, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau, and Camille Schuwer. Jolas's own presence is hardly a surprise: Jolas was, as we have seen, Pelorson's literary godfather and it is only natural that the disciple would have recruited his master. Guéguen, described by Girodias as a "little, round-bellied poet of gardens," was one of the poets praised by Pelorson in his review of L'année poétique for 1935; one poem by him had appeared in transition 25. 39 The name of Frédéric Joliot, known as Joliot-Curie following his marriage to Eve, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, is an unexpected re to encounter in the context of Volontés. Pierre and Marie Curie had shared the 1935 Nobel Prize for chemistry and their son-in-law may have simply lent his prestigious name out of friendship for Pelorson, since he does not appear to have made any substantive contribution to the review. A socialist and member of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, he was then close to the Communist Party, which he officially joined only in 1942. As of No. 12 (December 1938), his name is no longer featured on the cover. Pelorson met Miller through Queneau in 1937 and they were to remain lifelong friends. 40 Queneau himself had met Pelorson in 1935 through Paulhan and they became close friends. 41 In July 1939, he was recruited by Maria Jolas, presumably on Pelorson's recommendation, to teach at the École bilingue de Neuilly: his mobilization in September 1939 prevented him from taking up the position. 42 Schuwer taught philosophy and had been, like Pelorson, a regular contributor to the "New transition." 43 A new name was added to the list as of the second issue, that of the modernist émigré Hungarian sculptor Joseph Csaky (1888-1971), who became Volontés's chief art critic. 44
Pelorson's later testimony on his intentions as founder of Volontés are not altogether consistent. On the one hand, he claims that when he first approached Miller, what won the latter over "was that there was no question of either a movement or group gathered on a 'programme,' that there would be no common 'line' other than through the natural conjunctions of opinions and ideas, each participant remaining entirely free to express what he meant, no matter whether the review offered in its pages the paradox of contradictions." 45 On the other hand, he himself implies, in a rather self-serving statement that therefore needs to be somewhat qualified, that there was something of a political program behind the founding of the journal: "The journal Volontés was born in my mind in order to awaken the energies to denounce and t the passivity of public opinion and the incompetence of rulers, on the side of democracies facing the hegemonic onslaught of a fanaticized Germany." 46
The contradictions and paradoxes announced above are indeed plentiful in Volontés. To be sure, there is much in the journal that can be described as non-political. This applies to Jolas's own contributions: poems mostly, one Vertigralist essay ("Vertigral ou la volonté cosmique") in No. 5, and one translation (a fragment of "The Roan Stallion" by Robinson Jeffers, in No. 2). Jolas was, in fact, one of the most frequent contributors to Volontés, present in every issue but one. Later, he evidently wished to distance himself from it, since he mentions the journal only once in his autobiography in connection with Miller, without referring to his own involvement. 47 As for Miller, his work appeared 18 times in Volontés, usually in translations by Pelorson (except for an extract from Tropic of Cancer in the French version by Henri Fluchère). Queneau res in 17 of the 20 issues of Volontés (as well as in the April 1940 number) and was its chief cultural critic, contributing articles on aesthetics, poetry, humor, Proust, and Joyce. Those include some of his wittiest and most esteemed early work as an essayist and he later collected nearly all of them in Le Voyage en Grèce. 48 He also published poems in No. 5 ("Paysan qui va-t-en ville") and No. 20 (an extract from "Gueule de Pierre"). Besides Guéguen and Schuwer, the poetry published in Volontés featured work by Jacques Audiberti, Armand Robin (poems later reprinted in Ma vie sans moi), and Léopold Sedar Senghor ("In Memoriam" in No. 17, "Héritage" and "Aux tirailleurs sénégalais morts pour la France" in No. 20).
Pelorson himself published little poetry in Volontés. One poem, "Titan," in No. 15 (March 1939), was written very much in the mode of Connaissance. Volontés 4 and 7 contained parts III and IV of "Le vrai visage," the "prose poétique" written in the prophetic mode (the first two parts of which had appeared in transition). His literary interests seem to have shifted towards the theater, both as a playwright and as a critic. The first issue of Volontés contains a fragment ("Prologue") of a tragedy, "Caligula"; two more fragments appeared in Volontés 3 (from Act III) and 8 (Act IV, death of Caligula). 49 Nos. 17 and 19 included two fragments from another Roman play, "Jules César." 50 The fifth issue opens with an essay on "Le Théâtre et les Moeurs," which denounces the decadence of the stage--from which only Giraudoux and Artaud (not the worst choices) are excepted. Four issues later, Pelorson published a "Lettre à M. Jean Dasté sur la tragédie," in which he gives his own conception: "The theatrical action seems to me to be the truest, most complete form of eloquence" (not a very avant-gardist statement). 51 As of No. 14 (February 1939), Pelorson kept a "chronique dramatique" of which three more installments appeared between March and August 1939.
Art criticism, we have seen, was mostly the province of Csaky, who contributed a series of thought-provoking, at times frankly polemical articles. The second, "Abstraction et Humanité ou le Sens de la Grèce Antique," published in Volontés No. 3, prompted a response from Léonce Rosenberg, the noted art dealer, who had represented Csaky in the early 1920s. From No. 8 on, Rosenberg became a second art critic for Volontés and his contributions included aphorisms on art, "Parlons Peinture," in Nos. 8, 9, 11, and 14 and a series on Italian art, "L'Italie sans Baedeker," in Nos. 15, 17, and 19. Along with Queneau's articles, these contributions are some of the more refreshing to read in this often relentlessly strident publication.
Why does a perusal of Volontés inevitably produce a more than occasional feeling of malaise? It is due to part to some individual contributions--and contributors--such as Lucien Combelle's "Discours sur un Tombeau" in Volontés 17 (May 1939), a virulent attack on the Third Republic in which he advocates a "moral revolution" in a particularly premonitory language: "When we face those monsters, let us then be monstrous. . . . Threats if necessary.  Physical forces are at play. To resist them victoriously, the fist must be ready to support the mind. Let us find wits with firm fists." 52 Combelle, who was only 27 in 1939, had been André Gide's secretary and was then, among other things, managing editor of the magazine Arts et Idées (published by José Corti). During the war, Combelle became involved with, then responsible for the collaborationist weekly Révolution Nationale, to which Pelorson contributed as theater critic. 53 At the Liberation, he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor but was freed in 1951. 54
Another cause for malaise is the recurrence throughout the issues of Volontés of a number of themes and vocabulary which, admittedly, were found in many publications of various political tendencies at the time, but are no less troubling for that. A good example, taken from the opening number, is the first of Le Corbusier's two contributions to the journal, in which he urges reforms in urban planning policies in the context of "creating a solid, beautiful, healthy race." 55 Simply entitled "Volonté," and signed "Acte de volonté" like a proclamation at the end, the piece reads as if it had been ghostwritten by Pelorson: "Will to get out of it! Will of happiness. Definite happiness. Will of greatness. Greatness is to put one's heart before one and to respond to its simple, timeless demands." 56 Along the same lines, an article by Pelorson entitled "Recherche d'un statut économique de la jeunesse" in Volontés 3 advocates "policies of racial 'maintenance' (sports and leisure)." 57
Other passages, also much in the spirit of the times, sound themes soon to be taken up in some of Marshal Pétain's best-known speeches. Under the signature of Dr Henri Arthus, in Volontés 13: "The soil, our land, therein lies the truth, therein lies what represents, among us, the center, the soul of the nation." 58 In the next issue, Pelorson himself takes up the theme: "But the soil is stubborn. The soil has ideas of its own, which 'ideology' cannot comprehend. The soil has ideas on man, which man cannot control." This textbook example of the confusion denounced by Pascal when he warned against speaking of spiritual things in corporeal terms is followed by a not completely reassuring disclaimer: "And I see that I have to pause once again. For 'they' will misinterpret: 'they' will interpret this as racism, as 'they' put it these days." 59 Further on, Pelorson praises nationalism as the expression of the soil and finds reasons to exculpate Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin: "I also note that their mistake is in line with destinies, that they were able to correct their 'ideology' and that . . .they certainly reawakened an idea, gave rebirth to a soil, brought the minds back to their measure of soil. . ." Pelorson goes on to express qualified, but clear support for the Munich accords. 60 The language is not much different in Pelorson's response to the enquiry on directors of conscience, the results of which occupy the entirety of Volontés 18 (June 1939):
The person, in truth, matters so little, whereas the idea, sister of the flesh, the geographical space where the mind incarnates itself, matters so strongly that I see no other model for France, no other institution, than the French nation. I insist on the word geographic, since that seems to me the single universal on which the moral revolt can be founded upon. . . . History finds its own words, invents them if need be. But it has no use for professors. . . . No matter what its words are, the fact Hitler exists in itself. No matter what words are applied to it and the definitions given of it, Hitler is nothing but the embodiment of German mores,--of the German moral revolt. Hitler embodies the German geography. 61
Launched in its February 1939 issue, Volontés's investigation on the nature and the role of "directors of conscience" in the West was commissioned from the young sociologist Jules Monnerot and it raises the question of the links between Volontés and the Collège de Sociologie, since Monnerot was a participant in its activities, as were a number of personalities who received Monnerot's questionnaire and responded to it. 62 In its November 1938 issue, Volontés had published the "Déclaration du Collège de Sociologie sur la crise internationale" which first appeared in the Nouvelle revue française for November 1, with a note endorsing the declaration which may be interpreted as an indication that Pelorson had not yet come around to a pro-Munich attitude). 63 In their variety, the responses to Monnerot's questionnaire are the best illustration of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize Volontés--or indeed characterize that particular moment of French intellectual history. They range from Georges Duthuit's denunciation of "the sordid mysticism of race and the State" to Combelle's transparent apology for dictatorships and Pierre Libra's overt racism; from Eugene Jolas's hopes in "the new being," with "a new language, the inter-continental inter-language" to the astrological rantings of the charlatan Conrad Moricand, Henry Miller's friend. 64 The most lucid is probably that of Jean Wahl, who begins by questioning the questionnaire ("What an odd questionnaire. How badly framed the question is") and goes on to sum up in the clearest terms the crucial problem of the hour: "Today the question is to know whether the collapse of the national-socialist regimes will take place soon enough for democracies not to be completely destroyed beforehand." 65
The presence of such statements in Volontés--and there are, fortunately, more--corrects to some extent the impression of malaise made by other statements like the ones quoted above. 66 So does the publication, in the August 1939 issue, of Aimé Césaire's "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" and of poems by Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, and Octavio Paz. 67 Above all, the review appears to mirror the ambiguities and ambitions of its creator, leader, and chief contributor. Though Pelorson is actually absent from No. 13, every issue of Volontés bears his mark. We have already noted in his poetry his penchant for blank verse combined with Péguy-like repetition. In Volontés, these tendencies, especially the latter, are inflated to the point of caricature. 68 The word "volonté" is constantly hammered in like a mantra, either alone or in phrases like "volonté de grandeur" or "volonté de vivre" (a section heading in each issue), often printed in capitals for greater effect. 69 "Actif France," the title of the two-part article quoted above, is particularly representative of Pelorson's growing tendency to think--or at least write--in slogans, a tendency that was to bear poisonous fruits in 1941-1943. 70
There is indeed much in Volontés that could be interpreted as evidence that Pelorson was harboring political ambitions. We have quoted his article "Recherche d'un statut économique de la jeunesse" in Volontés 3. The very first issue contains a "Plan Directeur d'une réforme de l'enseignement en France," identified in a footnote as an "excerpt from a book, Éducation et enseignement, to be published by Éditions Denoël next January." The publication of the book continued to be announced in subsequent issues but the book came out, as we will see, only in late 1940, under a different title, and under a different imprint.
Volontés did not survive the Declaration of War, which led to the mobilization of most of its editors. An attempt was made to resurrect it in the spring of 1940, with Pierre Prévost as its chief editor and as its new publisher the very young Maurice J. Kahane, soon to become Girodias, whose father, Jack Kahane, founder of the Obelisk Press, had just died. Volontés 21 came out in April 1940 and was distributed free. The cover page had a new design and bore the address, though not the name, of the Éditions du Chêne (16, place Vendôme), which Girodias had just created. It consists simply of four articles and a "letters from the front" section. The contribution by Pelorson, "La guerre et la paix," and that by Prévost, "La guerre sans bataille," are relatively sober assessments of the situation, whereas the piece by Combelle that follows, by contrast, opens with a candid defense of eugenics as practiced in Germany. The fourth article is a review by Queneau of M.B. Fondane's Faux traité d'esthétique. Volontés 22 was printed but the Nazi offensive on May 10 and the ensuing debacle prevented its publication. 71
Pelorson's editorship of Volontés brought him wide recognition in pre-war intellectual circles. In the fall of 1939 and the early months of 1940, he participated in the meetings that took place in the apartment by Marcel Moré to resume the activities of the Collège de Sociologie. Besides Moré and Pelorson, the meetings gathered, among others, Georges Bataille, Julien Benda, Pierre Klossowski, Alexandre Koyré, Paul-Louis Landsberg, René Leibovitz, Queneau, Wahl, and, it seems, Gide. By May 1940, the group had disbanded, apparently after bitter altercations ensued, and in which Pelorson was directly involved. 72 According to both Paulhan's and Queneau's testimonies, Pelorson was also cultivating ties at the time ("a reprehensible flirt in my view," in Paulhan's words) with Jean Coutrot, a Polytechnicien and the founder of AFNOR (Association française de normalisation). Coutrot was the leader of Travail et Nation, a group which had ties with the fascist-leaning Parti populaire français (P.P.F.) of Jacques Doriot. Members of this group included Henry de Jouvenel and Pierre Pucheu. 73 Pucheu's and Pelorson's paths were to cross again in Vichy three years later.
In the meantime, Maria Jolas had moved her school to Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, the tiny village near Vichy where she was joined by the Joyce family. Pelorson remained officially the headmaster and his wife a teacher: he was able to visit twice a month, at least in the fall of 1939. 74 In her 1950 article "Joyce en 1939-1940," published in the Mercure de France, she prompted Pelorson's last visit to Saint-Gérand in February 1940 and threw a dinner party with James and Nora Joyce, the Pelorsons and herself, but concluding tersely: "As we wished him 'godspeed,' far were we from suspecting the collaborationist career that awaited him following the armistice." 75
Marcelle Pelorson was Irish, and Maria Jolas's War Diary records her virulent anti-English feelings as the hostilities erupted. 76 As for Pelorson himself, he continued to be in touch with Maria Jolas. There is certainly nothing pro-Hitler in the feelings he conveyed to her from "somewhere in the Yonne [département]" on May 29, 1940: "Here we wept with rage before the radio yesterday. But we have never been so certain that Hitler will be swept away, or better: that Europe and the world will be swept clean of him." 77 At the armistice, Pelorson was briefly a prisoner of war but was, it seems, freed on parole, and was able to walk all the way back to Paris. 78 Girodias mentions a meeting which then took place to discuss a possible resurrection of Volontés. These plans failed, however, owing to irreconcilable differences between the extreme right (Combelle) and the extreme left (André Viollis, who was close to the Communist Party). 79 In the fall of 1940, as Maria Jolas and her daughters were leaving France for the United States, Pelorson and his wife reopened the school in Neuilly (reverting, according to a prospectus preserved in the Jolas Papers, to the school's original name, "École nouvelle de Neuilly"). They had sixteen pupils and the teachers included Queneau and Paul Guth, the future popular writer, who had contributed to Volontés. 80 However, by the end of the year, faced with high utility bills and unable to pay them (in that very cold winter of 1940), the school closed its doors for good.
By then, Pelorson's book De l'enfant à la nation had appeared, one of the first if not the first book published by Girodias under his new imprint, the Éditions du Chêne. 81 The first sentence of the introduction reminds the reader that the book was ready two years previously, which is another way of stating--and the author does state it--that its contents are unrelated to the context created by the defeat and subsequent Occupation. Indeed, it can be described as technical rather than a political work, going into such details as teachers' salaries and pupils' daily schedules. The two references to educational practices in Third Reich Germany can be considered fairly innocuous, even supposing that they were added as a topical afterthought: there are others to England, the United States, and the Montessori methods. 82 More significantly, in view of the functions the writer was soon to occupy, are the references to propaganda and even slogans as tools for a reform of education. 83 Even more interesting and revealing are the introduction and the book's "packaging." The introduction refers to the child as the prime goal of a "révolution nationale" (without capitals), and goes on to claim that the book "was rejected by a publisher not long ago on the grounds that it did not conform to the fantasies which the Abraham-Zay had made into law." The sentence targets the reforms introduced by the Popular Front under its minister of Education, Jean Zay, and generally known under his name (Abraham was his chief of staff). Pelorson's appellation ("la réforme Abraham-Zay"), in the fall of 1940, was anything but innocent at a time when Zay had been imprisoned and had become the object of anti-Semitic attacks in the collaborationist press which did not cease until his assassination by the Milice in 1944. 84 There is a laudatory reference to Vichy's pro-family policies, immediately followed by a derogatory reference to the previous regime as serving the interests of "certain people." 85 As for the book's advertising matter, it is interesting in two respects. First, the biography on the flap of the front cover, which, after mentioning Pelorson's role as director of the "École Nouvelle Bilingue de Neuilly," refers to his growing "interest in the political and moral problems caused by the disorder of our country" and goes on: "But Georges Pelorson, a born animator, could not be content with an activity limited to the intellectual 'elites'. He is aware that a racial and moral renaissance is called for. . ." 86 The anonymous author of the biographical note, in all probability Pelorson himself, writes in conclusion that the book should be considered not as a technical study intended for pedagogues, but rather the work of a "moral and political reformer" and it quotes the "révolution nationale" passage from the introduction. On the other flap, two more publications by Pelorson on related issues are announced, "Le testament de notre temps" and "La révolution de la jeunesse," neither of which was published. Under the heading "Collection 'Volontés,'" forthcoming publications, presumably under the Éditions du Chêne imprint are announced: the authors listed include Jacques Copeau on the theater, Georges Bataille (La mort et le sacrifice. Premier essai de sociologie sacrée), Pierre Prévost (Le gouvernement des hommes), Lucien Combelle (Responsabilité des écrivains) and Jean Jardin (Les transports). Even though the "Collection 'Volontés'" never materialized, this is an interesting assemblage which gathers briefly under the dual patronage of a half-Jewish publisher (Girodias) and soon-to-be Vichy official (Pelorson) two of the future founders of Critique (Bataille and Prévost), a Pétain-appointed theater administrator (Copeau), an ultra collaborationist (Combelle), and Pierre Laval's chief of staff (Jardin). 87
As we have seen, the paths of Bataille and Pelorson had crossed previously in the context of attempts to revive the Collège de Sociologie. There is no evidence that they crossed again after the abortive project of a "Collection 'Volontés.'" Their names, however, are linked in a most intriguing way in the context of one of the many movements that sprouted in the first year of the Vichy period, called "Jeune France." First established in the free zone at the end of November 1940, then in the occupied zone in January 1941, "Jeune France" was created with the purpose of promoting the artistic and cultural education of young people and, because of its educational aims, received the patronage of and financial backing from Vichy's Secrétariat général à la jeunesse. Its founder was a young Polytechnicien, Pierre Schaeffer, later one of the heads of the national French radio and a pioneer of musique concrète. Other participants were former members of the movement Ordre Nouveau, such as Paul Flamand, future head of the Éditions du Seuil, Xavier de Lignac, and Pierre Prévost, and also a prestigious array of literary and artistic personalities: the poet Patrice de la tour du Pin, the painter Alfred Manessier, the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, and men of the theater such as Jean Vilar and Raymond Rouleau. Actors included Pierre Fresnay, and Pierre Renoir, and contributing composers and musicians included Henri Baraud, Daniel-Lesur, and Maurice Martenot. In spite of the fact that it received official support from Vichy, "Jeune France" was a genuine educational movement and historians of the period stress its high quality and generally single it out as one of the most creative and high-minded of the era. 88 Pelorson was to be responsible for its literary section and preliminary discussions were held with Girodias about the publication of a journal. 89 In February 1941, when Pelorson abandoned the project to take up his new position, he recommended to succeed him a young writer of his acquaintance whom he considered equal to the greatest. His name was Maurice Blanchot. Pelorson introduced him to Prévost who in turn introduced him to Bataille. Pelorson was thus responsible for the meeting, which soon developed into a close friendship, between two of the greatest res of the French literary avant-garde of the next three decades. 90
The new position Pelorson took up in February 1941 was that of "Chef de la propagande des jeunes" for the occupied zone within the Secrétariat général à la jeunesse (SGJ). The SGJ was one of the creations of the Vichy régime that have survived, in various incarnations, throughout the Fourth and Fifth Republics. It first combined Family and Youth and was first entrusted to the right-wing Basque sportsman Jean Ybarnégaray. As of September 25, 1940, the new man in charge was Georges Lamirand, who was a director of the Renault factories at the eve of the war. A catholic and an admirer of Marshal Lyautey, who prefaced a book he published in 1925, Le rôle social de l'ingénieur (a direct homage to Lyautey's own Rôle social de l'officier), Lamirand had gained the personal confidence of Pétain. He has been described by one historian as "a sort of boyish itinerant national cheerleader for the National Revolution" who seemingly loved nothing more than the sound of his own voice. 91 He reported to the Minister of Education, except for a two-month period at the end of 1940 when the SGJ was controlled by Laval, who was then Vice-président du conseil. The role of the SGJ was to oversee training programs at all levels for young people after they had left school. The "Chantiers de jeunesse" and the 20 or so newly created leadership schools, of which the most famous was the École des cadres d'Uriage founded by Captain Dunoyer de Segonzac, were under the SGJ's tutelage. It was also supposed to liaise with youth movements and develop a network of regional delegates. Finally, it was able to subsidize youth movements once they had gone through a procedure of official recognition or "agrément" (a system which, as Pierre Giolitto points out, is more or less still in place today). 92
The Youth Propaganda services which Pelorson headed for the occupied zone had a program of publications, the collection "France nouvelle--à nous, jeunes," which published edifying 32-page brochures on themes such as Forces de la France: le maréchal, les jeunes, or Qu'est-ce que la révolution nationale? 93 Those brochures often reprint speeches given by Pelorson at meetings such as the Assises de la jeunesse de France organized at the Salle Wagram in Paris on June 15, 1941 for regional youth delegates from the occupied zone: in the presence of the notoriously pro-Nazi Abel Bonnard, Pelorson addressed the audience on "Destin de la jeunesse française," "L'Union et l'unité," "Discipline," "Hiérarchie," among others. Under "Nécessité de choisir," Pelorson opposes "the France of the Maréchal, which is France itself" and "that image of our country which has been appropriated by a mendacious foreign propaganda and which they are trying to promote from beyond our borders," between "the hero of Verdun" (Pétain) and "l'homme de Dakar et de Syrie" (De Gaulle). He urges the delegates to have "absolute faith . . . in the Leader the Maréchal gave us: Georges Lamirand." 94 At another such meeting ("Journées de solidarité nationale"), held at the Vél d'Hiv at the end of November 1941, the former editor of Volontés addressed the youth delegates in words and in a style that sound like a parody of his younger self; a less charitable interpretation would be to suggest that the "geographic" rhetoric of Volontés had finally found its real home: "We have a will,--it is to achieve, together with the Maréchal, for the greatness of our country, the National Revolution. This will is made of our blood, and our blood is made of our soil. This will is that of France. We are here by the will of France. And no force in the world could possibly distract us from this will." 95
On the evidence of their speeches, it would seem as if Lamirand and Pelorson were speaking as one voice. They were, in fact, bitterly opposed in their views, which represented two conflicting and contradictory sides of Vichy France. Lamirand, for all his fondness for public appearances and his addiction to applause, was a pragmatist rather than a doctrinaire. His Catholicism and social conservatism were in contrast with Pelorson's anti-clericalism and socialist views. Both Anglo-American and French historians of the Vichy regime, for once in agreement, have taken a severe view of Pelorson, whom one of them introduces as "one of the more curious characters that the regime threw up." 96 He was described as an ideologue bent on imposing a "jeunesse unique" on the model of the Hitlerjügend, a "brilliant representative of the collaborationist extreme-right within the SGJ," a partisan of "a kind of moral and spiritualist fascism," a "crypto-fascist." 97 He was held in suspicion in Vichy because of his extremist views, both by Pétain's staff and by the prudent Jérôme Carcopino, Minister of Education from February 1941 until the return of Laval to power in April 1942. In his post-war memoirs, Carcopino recalled with dismay the vast budget (10 millions francs) allocated by his predecessor to Youth Propaganda and harshly criticizes the SGJ as being infiltrated by a "handful of fanatics" and elsewhere mentions Pelorson among his most virulent opponents. 98
In early 1942, the relations between Lamirand and Pelorson had deteriorated to such a point that the former, according to Pelorson's own testimony, tried to force him to resign. 99 Pelorson, however, had the opportunity of furthering his political ambitions in mid-March 1942 at a meeting of the Conseil national, the advisory body created by Pétain to advise him on constitutional matters, which was convened behind Carcopino's back to review questions relating to youth. In his testimony before the Commission, Pelorson attacked the "clerico-reactionary" philosophy of the SGJ and denounced its tepid paternalism. His views were supported by the ultra-collaborationist wing on the Council: Pucheu, Minister of the Interior, Paul Marion, Minister of Information, and Bonnard. The Commission's final report recommended him among possible replacements for Lamirand. 100 In April 1942, Laval returned to power and named Bonnard Minister of Education. On June 6, Pelorson was appointed Deputy Secretary General for Youth with the specific mission of keeping Lamirand in line and with the determination to push for a more authoritarian control over youth movements. Pelorson's "reign" (since Lamirand was no more than a rehead at this point) began, to the alarm of Pétain's cabinet, with an administrative purge of the moderate elements in the SGJ staff. 101 It was marked by the granting of official recognition (and therefore subsidies) to overtly pro-fascist movements previously kept at bay by Lamirand, such as the Jeunesse de France et d'outremer, the Jeunesses paysannes of Dorgères, and the Jeunesses francistes. 102 Another opportunity Pelorson had to display his New Order zeal was the support he gave to the Jeunes de l'Europe nouvelle of Marc Augier, which he lobbied in vain to represent France at meetings of the Union of European Youth organized in Vienna by Baldur von Schirach, the notorious Jugendführer of the Third Reich. 103 He was, in fact, soon known among youth leaders wary of SGJ hegemony as "Baldur von Pelorson." 104
Pelorson's grand idea (in the context of his dreams of a "Jeunesse unique") was the "Équipes nationales," which he created in early August 1942 to "gather the young from 12 to 15 that do not belong to any movement, to make them participate in civic and social activities and give them a 'virile and strong' training." 105 The context of the speech is worth recalling: since May 29, Jews in the occupied zone had been forced to wear the yellow star and the Vél d'Hiv roundup had just happened on July 16. It goes without saying that those Équipes, in Pelorson's own words, echoed in the oath required of the "Équipiers," were reserved to the "sole Frenchmen worthy by the soil, the blood and the race to be admitted into the French community." 106 And if any doubts subsist on how Pelorson then stood on such issues, here is how he addressed the youth leaders on August 3, 1942: "We wish to launch in France the reign of a new, just, and strong State. . . . We want this force not to be used anymore for the benefit of velleities [volontés], parties and more or less anonymous and French private ventures: for the benefit of the Jews, the Freemasons, corporations, the financial world and international capitalism." 107
As we have suggested above, Pelorson's policies did not endear him to any but the most pro-Nazi activists among youth leaders. For example, at the Congress of the Jeunesses nationales populaires in 1943, he was singled out for praise by Marcel Déat's right-hand man, Georges Albertini. 108 He was particularly resented by the Catholic movements. 109 Relations were no better with the leadership schools, which Pelorson viewed (not incorrectly) as devoted to Uriage. In late August 1942, at a "Réunion des Chefs" held at the École des cadres du Mayet-de-Montagne, Pelorson blamed the Uriage representative for the school's failure to apply Vichy's anti-Semitic policies. 110 At a similar meeting with Pelorson at Écully, near Lyon, in October 1942, an uproar occurred as a result of the racism of some of the statements. 111
In spite of Pelorson's collaborationist zeal which earned him praise from the Nazi authorities, he did not succeed Lamirand, to the surprise of many, when the latter was finally dismissed on March 24, 1943. As we have seen, Pelorson was not popular with the entourage of Pétain (with whom he had a meeting the day before, on March 23). The pragmatist Laval (who also saw Pelorson in Vichy on March 18) may have grown wary of his extremism. Bonnard himself, even though Pelorson was perceived as one of his henchmen, may have come to the conclusion that his nomination would have incensed the youth movements. Instead of him, he chose as Lamirand's successor the conservative law professor Félix Olivier-Martin. 112 The position of deputy Secretary General was abolished and Pelorson's political career came to an end. He did, however, keep his office on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and was retained by Bonnard to head an obscure collaborationist organization called "Les amis du Maréchal," a position he retained until his arrest at the Liberation. 113
Vichy historians generally agree--not, of course, to deplore it--on the overall lack of success of the regime's propaganda machine. Indeed, Pelorson's tenure at the SGJ is symptomatic of the glaring contrast between Vichy's inflated rhetoric and the realities faced by the country, particularly the increasing weight put on its youth by the Service du travail obligatoire, which by the summer of 1943 claimed an ever-growing number of them. Pelorson himself almost seems to have sensed the ultimate futility of his efforts even as he was addressing the topic dearest to him, his "thing," the creation of the Équipes nationales: "Never mind even what those young people should build: roads leading nowhere, roads that would not make any sense . . ." 114 The irony is that despite this "Bridge on the River Kwai" insanity, the Équipes nationales actually accomplished some useful work, especially after Pelorson's departure, as the bombing of French cities intensified. They were not dissolved at the Liberation and, even more paradoxically, were subsequently incorporated into the Communist-led Union de la jeunesse républicaine. 115
One Frenchman who hardly met Pelorson's official criteria of blood, soil, and race had nonetheless kept in touch with him throughout the war. Girodias was indeed able to continue his activities as a publisher throughout the Occupation and regularly visited Pelorson at his office, conveniently located within walking distance of the Place Vendôme. 116 Pelorson was by then separated from his first wife and eventually married his secretary at the SGJ, named Josephine. 117 Girodias's Éditions du Chêne published two works by Pelorson during the war: the play Jules César in 1943, and the poem Carmen Seculare the following year. Carmen Seculare is a love poem and definitely not a modernist one, even if we allow that it was written at a time when even former Surrealists turned back to traditional forms ("je pourrai dans tes yeux/et dans l'ombre levée,/voir enfin devant Dieu/la beauté communier/avec l'éternité"). 118 Jules César is a more interesting work, not so much in its form which is the familiar split alexandrines of Pelorson's earlier poetry, but for the deliberately anachronistic treatment of the theme as a fascist tragedy--the dictator versus Roman senators who are made to sound like Third Republic senators. 119
It is no surprise to find Pelorson's name on the black list published at the Liberation by the Comité national des écrivains, whose members included Queneau. Pelorson appears both on the first list of 88 names, published in the Lettres françaises for September 16, 1944, and on the much enlarged list of 158 names published in the same journal on October 21. The presence of one's name on those lists was tantamount to a ban on publication, at least for the immediate future. 120 Pelorson, who had been arrested in his office at the Liberation, was then in one of the makeshift prisons established in the Montparnasse area to cope with the overcrowding of the official ones. Girodias tried in vain to plead with Queneau the cause of his old friend "Pelo" and claims to have even plotted an escape attempt, but Pelorson was unexpectedly released after five months. Having risen only to the level of Deputy Secretary of State, he was spared a trial by the High Court of Justice and was sentenced to a relatively lenient deprivation of civil rights for ten years. 121 He was also advised to spend a few years away from Paris. As he needed financial support, Girodias put him in charge of the translation of Tropic of Capricorn and other works by Miller: the career of Georges Belmont had begun. 122
Few of Pelorson's pre-war friends appear to have even attempted to resume relations with him. He does not come up in name in Jolas's autobiography, though one passage clearly alludes to him: "I met old friends who had spent the war in resistance to the enemy. I also heard of others who had been Pétainists or had even betrayed France and its Allies." 123 Henry Miller himself, who was being translated by Pelorson while the latter was in hiding, writes to Jolas in October 1950 that he has "never had a line from Pelorson since [he] left Paris" (though relations were resumed shortly afterwards). 124 The main exception was Samuel Beckett, which may be surprising in view of his involvement in the Resistance, but which can be explained both by the closeness of their early ties and by Beckett's profoundly forgiving nature. 125
There are few links between the literary output of Belmont and that of Pelorson. The 1953 novel, La vache et la tour Eiffel, is a mildly amusing satire reminiscent of the popular works of Pierre Daninos. His next work, Le grand pressoir was published four years later also by Robert Laffont. And though it is also rather conventional in form, it is, by contrast, a serious and even stark novel. Set in the future (the 1970s), it is the story of a civil war in France and an obvious allegory of the Occupation and its sequels. France has been caught in a war between the two superpowers. The hero, Jacques Legrand, was on the American side and served the government they backed. 126 The other side having won, he is taken prisoner and eventually murdered by one of his jailers after having seen his best friend savagely tortured. Flashback chapters describe the fallen regime, at the head of which were an old general ("L'Image") and his head of government, the "Vizir." These transparent portraits of Pétain and Laval contain cruel barbs towards the first, whereas the interview with the second in chapter 8 is a lively vignette, clearly based on personal reminiscences. Legrand himself is a leader of Brigades civiques de volontaires in which it is not too difficult to recognize Pelorson's Équipes nationales. Le Grand Pressoir is a striking novel, but, as an attempt on Pelorson's part to come to terms with his past, it is also a deeply dishonest one. By transposing the action into the future, Belmont can be conveniently selective in his allegorical treatment of Vichy. Racial persecutions are not even hinted at. Based on this account, it would seem that the gravest crime Pelorson would let himself be accountable for was political naivete.
The other three novels can be dealt with more briefly. Chris, published in 1965, is also allegorical, and is also set against a political background. Its theme is reminiscent of Sartre's Les mains sales, opposing a cynical hero and "Chris," his "pure" Doppelgänger. An epilogue suggests, a little heavy-handedly, that Chris never existed and they were the same person. Un homme au crépuscule, published the following year, is set in Ireland and on the Riviera and explores the sentimental interaction between the French narrator, his Irish friend John (a painter), and John's girlfriend Vicky. Vicky turns out to have had a previous affair with another woman, who committed suicide. The treatment of the sexual theme seems excessively melodramatic. We are certainly as far from transition as from the Révolution nationale. Ex, published by Denoël in 1969, has little in common with Belmont's preceding four novels. It is a "nouveau roman" of sorts, with some typographical and syntactic liberties such as interrupted sentences, unconventional punctuation, or the words "aimer" and "amour" replaced by dashes. The work has a certain confessional tone--a confession made at times to a doctor, at other times to a judge--and there are references to a plague-ridden city and an unspecified "thing" which haunts the narrator and follows him everywhere: it could be seen as his past, but the very opacity of the text defies interpretation.
Pelorson published one more book of poetry in 1973, L'honneur de vivre, with a vanity press known as Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One poem is dedicated to Maurice Nadeau and his wife, another to Beckett. The form is freer than Pelorson's earlier poetry, the inspiration elegiac or melancholy. But the most notable feature of the book is its colophon, where we catch the author fiddling with his past: it mentions a limited edition of 26 and a few Hors Commerce copies with a lithograph by Jean Hélion: "This illustration was made in 1937 by the painter for the poem 'Connaissance' by Georges Belmont." 127 As Maria Jolas might have said, Georges Belmont the author of 'Connaissance' does not exist.
There has been a growing tendency among historians of ideas in the past two decades to cast suspicion on the intellectual and artistic avant-garde as the pre-war or wartime political views of some of its representatives became better known. 128 The case of Georges Pelorson is of no such scope insofar as his literary significance is negligible and, his early contributions to transition notwithstanding, he was never more than a surface modernist. On the other hand, it is an extreme case in the sense that it would be hard to find anyone else in the pre-war avant-garde circles and connected with so many of their members, who compromised himself to such an extent as a government official--only just short of occupying a cabinet position in the Vichy regime during the period when it sided most clearly with the Nazis. 129 The post-war disappearance of Pelorson and his reappearance as Belmont make it also an interesting case as one of the most successful (and therefore little-known) illustrations of what Daniel Lindenberg amusingly calls "l'effet Monte Cristo." What Maria Jolas and many others who knew him as Edmond Dantès could not forgive him for was his attempts to have it both ways: he posed as Georges Belmont--the friend of Beckett, Miller, and Joyce--as if he and "Baldur von Pelorson" had not been one and the same person. 130
Vincent Giroud is curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. His publications include an edition of Paul Morand's Les extravagants, scènes de la vie de bohème cosmopolite, and exhibition catalogues on Robert Louis Stevenson, Maurice Sendak, and the books of Pierre Lecuire.
1. Even if we allow for reprints, books simply prefaced or edited by Belmont, and translations he did in cooperation (mostly with Hortense Chabrier), it can be compared, to limit ourselves to the online catalogue, with 45 entries for Nathalie Sarraute, 70 for Julien Gracq, 116 for Simone de Beauvoir or, to choose two more appropriate examples, 94 for fellow writer-translator Jean-Louis Curtis (born in 1917) and 123 for Pierre Leyris, Belmont's coeval and possibly the most esteemed translator of his generation.
2. Henry Miller, Entretiens de Paris avec Georges Belmont (Paris: Stock, 1970). (Texte remanié des entretiens diffusés par France-Culture et la télévision française). The English translation appeared two years later: Henry Miller in Conversation with Georges Belmont, Translated from the French by Antony Macnabb and Harry Scott (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972). Mary Dearborn, Henry Miller, Biographie, Introduction et Notes de Georges Belmont (Paris: Belfond, 1991). The 92 notes are to be found on pages 339-377. The English original, The Happiest Man Alive: a Biography of Henry Miller, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), contains a number of references to Belmont (though his name is given as Roger instead of Georges, both in the body of the text and in the index), but not in his notes.
3. Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, souvenirs recueillis par Georges Belmont (Paris: Laffont, 1973). The English translation came out three years later: see Albaret, Monsieur Proust, edited by Georges Belmont, translated from the French by Barbara Bray (New York at al.: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
4. See Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 1976, introduction, ix-x.; see also the discussion of Proust's "alleged homosexuality," 191-198. It must be said that Jean-Yves Tadié's masterly recent biography of Proust takes a balanced view of the book and treats it, at least as regards its factual aspects, as a reliable biographical source. See Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), in particular, 721-722.
5. John Hersey, Hiroshima, traduit de l'anglais par Georges Belmont (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947, [collection Pavillons]): so reads the title-page of the copy donated by John Hersey to the Yale Collection of American Literature (Za H441 Eh947B). Although it bears the mention "40e édition," the "achevé d'imprimer" is still dated January 1947. A copy of an earlier printing I came across by chance in Paris bore no translator's name, which may explain why the Bibliothèque nationale catalogue does not include an additional entry for Belmont.
6. Georges Belmont, La vache et la tour Eiffel: Roman (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1953). The biographical note is on the front cover fold.
7. The interview appeared in the October 1960 issue of Marie-Claire and was reprinted twice, in Cinéma d'aujourd'hui 1 and in Norman Rosten, Marilyn Monroe, trans. François Guérif, preceded by Marilyn Monroe par elle-même: entretien avec Georges Belmont (Paris: L'Herminier 1984 [collection "Le Cinéma en Mémoire"]).
8. All uncredited translations are mine. The original reads: "Je dois vous faire savoir que Joyce, qui est mort en janvier 1941, n'a pas connu Georges Belmont. Ce patronyme a été emprunté à la Libération, peut-être pour faire oublier des faits de collaboration, par Georges Pelorson; les Français ont pu voir ce personnage dernièrement sur leur petit écran, lançant des slogans en faveur de la 'Révolution nationale' . . . Cette cérémonie . . . fait partie du film: 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié'. . . . Si je vous donne ces précisions, Monsieur, c'est qu'il me paraît important en vue de toutes futures utilisations de vos archives, de combler les lacunes et de signaler la malhonnêteté de l'article signé Georges Belmont." Maria Jolas to Jacques Fauvet, Eugene and Maria Jolas Papers, GEN MSS 108, box 30, folder 592. Both a corrected draft and a copy are preserved in the archive; the index to Le Monde provides no evidence that the letter was published. It is quoted with the kind permission of Betsy Jolas. See also Belmont, "Virgule pour 'Finnegans Wake,'" Le Monde (5 February 1982).
9. Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle: Khâgneux et normaliens dans l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988). On the concept of "génération de 1905," see in particular the introduction, 14. Belmont himself evokes his generation in similar terms in the article he contributed to the Cahier de l'Herne on Queneau: see Georges Belmont, "Queneau," in Raymond Queneau (Paris: L'Herne, 1975), 233-234.
10. On Bellessort, see Sirinelli, especially 74-81.
11. His name does not appear in Brasillach's autobiography, Notre avant-guerre, written in 1939-1940 and published in 1941. Pelorson briefly evokes Brasillach and Bardèche in the interview he gave to François Dufay and Pierre-Bertrand Dufort, Les normaliens: de Charles Péguy à Bernard-Henri Lévy, un siècle d'histoire, Preface by Régis Debray (Paris: Lattès, 1993), 111. There is a veiled reference to Maulnier at the start of Belmont's article on Queneau mentioned in n. 9 above, 233.
12. On the petition against the Préparation militaire spéciale and its repercussions, see Sirinelli, 501. It must be added that Brasillach was among the signers, a temporary aberration according to Sirinelli; neither Bardèche nor Talagrand were.
13. On the friendship between Pelorson and Beckett, see above all Pelorson's own testimony, "Remembering Sam" [by] Georges Belmont and John Calder, in Beckett in Dublin, edited and introduced by S.E. Wilmer (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992), 111-128. Both Beckett biographers, Deirdre Bair and James Knowlson, interviewed Pelorson and their accounts are essentially derived from his testimony: see Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York et al.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), and Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Bair fails to explain the connection between the Georges Pelorson mentioned in her narrative and the Georges Belmont referred to in her notes; Pelorson himself later had harsh words to say about her biography (see Beckett in Dublin, 120). Knowlson (722, note 8) mentions the change of name after the war. Both he and Bair are silent on Pelorson's wartime activities, as is the short biographical note in Beckett in Dublin ("Notes on Contributors," 147). On Pelorson and Beckett, See also Dufay and Dufort (111-118).
14. Beckett in Dublin, 113.
15. See Bair, 127-128; Knolwson, 123-124; Beckett in Dublin, 125-126.
16. Knowlson, 153-154. Liebert is also based on Alfred Péron, Beckett's other close friend from the École normale, whose later itinerary differs remarkably from that of Pelorson: a member of the Resistance network to which Beckett also belonged, he was arrested by the Nazis in 1942 and died in May 1945 in Switzerland on his way home from captivity (see Knowlson, 305-306).
17. Bair, 118; Beckett in Dublin, 114.
18. Émily [sic] Brontë, Poèmes; traduits de l'anglais par Marcelle Graham et Georges Pelorson; avec une préface de Edmond Jaloux (Paris: Éditions de la Revue française, Alexis Rodier, éditeur, 1933 [B.N.F. In-16 8vo Z26068]). See Denis Saurat's review (in which the translators are not mentioned), N.R.F. 243 (1 December 1933): 925-927.
19. transition 21 (March 1932): 148-149. There are actually nine names, but one, Theo Rutra, is a pseudonym of Jolas, who thus gets to sign the manifesto twice.
20. "Black Rhythms," transcribed by Reuben T. Taylor, in transition 21: 312-317; Le nègre qui chante: chansons traduites et introduction par Eugène Jolas (Paris: Éditions des Cahiers libres, 1928).
21. "Alors au lieu de s'ingénier à créer de nouvelles idées avec de nouveaux mots / On peut créer de nouveaux mots et les idées suivront si vraiment on ne peut se passer d'elles." transition 22 (February 1933): 29.
22. "Composition neo-mythique avec des mots a-logiques." transition 22: 122.
23. transition 23 (July 1935): 182-183.
24. "Connaissance," transition 23: 76.
25. Maurice Girodias describes Pelorson in his memoirs as "situated somewhere between Joyce and Péguy" ("se situant quelque part entre Joyce et Péguy"). Maurice Girodias, Une journée sur la terre, I: L'arrivée (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1990), 314. I will usually quote from the original French, as most of the passages I refer to are omitted from the English version, The Frog Prince (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980). This English version also contains many inaccuracies that were corrected in the revised and expanded 1990 French edition.
26. See Georges Pelorson, Connaissance (Paris: Éditions Fustier, 1937). The Yale copy, presented by Henri Peyre, is misbound, with the sixth signature present twice and the seventh missing.
27. transition 23: 155-158.
28. See "Image de Goethe" in the Goethe special issue, N.R.F. 222 (1 March 1932): 516-523 and his reviews of Les romantiques allemands by Ricarda Huch, N.R.F. 242 (1 November 1933): 762-763, and of L'année poétique in N.R.F. 264 (1 September 1935): 459-460.
29. See Mesures 4 (15 October 1935): 85-100. Mesures was published between January 1935 until January 1940. The other members of its editorial board were Henry Church, Bernard Groethuysen, Henri Michaux, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. See the invitation to the "Séance consacrée à Mesures" in Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge, Correspondance 1923-1966, ed. Claire Baoretto (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), letter 208, 207.
30. See Paulhan and Ponge, Correspondance, 208, note 3. Baoretto, who does not mention the other fragment of Connaissance published in transition, notes, and one has to agree with her, that the poem is more bombastic (enflé) than épique.
31. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 700-701 and 809 note 39, citing a 1953 interview with Pelorson; the only translations from "Poèmes d'Api" listed by Slocum and Cahoon are the ones of four of the poems by Max-Pol Fouchet and an unidentified J.M.R., published in 1944 in a special issue of the journal Fontaine (John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, 1882-1941 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953], D 35).
32. See Ellmann, James Joyce, 731: "Joyce was interested in the Gracchi, about whom Pelorson had written a long poem . . ." This testimony is based on a 1954 interview: see 811, note 30. I have not been able to locate that poem in any published form.
33. "Vers 1932, Joyce ayant demandé à mon mari, Eugène Jolas, de lui recommander un homme susceptible de lui apporter une aide pratique dans son travail, Pelorson, qui connaissait bien l'Irlande, fut pressenti parce qu'il était bilingue, et pour ses compétences littéraires. Il a ainsi eu le privilège d'avoir des rapports professionnels avec Joyce à cette époque. Joyce, sans doute, fut aimable et amical à l'égard de ce jeune homme, tout en gardant ses distances." See above, note 8.
34. Letters of James Joyce, ed. by Richard Ellmann, vol. III (New York: Viking, 1966), 270. The other names listed by Léon are Frank Bugden, Yvan Goll, John Sullivan, and Édouard Dujardin.