Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Ruthless Flowers of Friendship Barbara Will (bio) "In friendship, power always has its downward curve," Gertrude Stein writes in Three Lives, underscoring her particular sense of human relationships as sites of struggle, competition, and hierarchy.1 In the wake of a now-dominant tradition of feminist scholarship on Stein, which has tended to emphasize her texts' "dialogic form, in which difference may enter without being relegated to a secondary position or subsumed under an authoritarian identity,"2 we have lost sight of the degree to which Stein in her texts and in her life understood relationships as difficult at best, deadly at worst. Although Stein's work has often been associated with a form of idealized engagement called "talking and listening," she herself was an expert observer (and practitioner) of hierarchical power relations. And of all relationships, friendship was the most fraught for Stein, the dynamic most likely to result in the suppression rather than celebration of difference: the dynamic most drenched in power. Writing about friendship in Three Lives, Stein described its erotic blossoming, its fading, its shifts, and its lulls as degrees on a subtle spectrum of mutual influence and manipulation, more complex than familial relationships and certainly less predictable, supportive, or lasting. While families required accommodation, friendship for Stein was in the end about what she called "winning"—or losing. In her own life, not surprisingly, Stein's friendships were often experienced as struggles for domination and control, as competitions between victor and loser in a game of power. This essay will focus on one such friendship, with the person described by Alice Toklas as Stein's "dearest friend during her life"3: the writer, scholar, and leading French expert on American culture, [End Page 647] Bernard Faÿ. Faÿ is best known as the person who protected Stein from persecution during World War II, and is credited with saving her art collection from seizure by the Nazis. In most accounts of Stein's life, he is a benevolent if compromised friend, a Vichyite who collaborated with the Nazis but whom Stein supported publicly to the end, even working to secure his release from prison.4 Yet the story of Faÿ's "protection" of Stein and Stein's "support" of Faÿ during the Vichy years is more complex than it at first appears, occurring as it did within a context of desperation and uncertainty, marked by the needs and pressures of an extraordinary situation. If life under Vichy's profascist regime strained human relationships to their breaking point, it was especially destructive to the casually selfless and altruistic dimensions of friendship in normal times. Under Vichy, Stein's idea of a friendship defined through power and "winning" or "losing" seemed suddenly to describe the norm. Yet in fact Vichy represents for Stein and Faÿ only the final manifestation of a long and involved relationship characterized by desire, greed, ambition, egoism, mutual flattery, as well as genuine affection and shared vulnerability. Tracing the arc of this friendship over the course of some twenty years reveals the dynamic of relational power at the heart of Stein's aesthetic and social imagination. Completing the arc in the aftermath of World War II throws into relief the complex and violent end of both this friendship and the larger unsettled world out of which it emerged. I. 1924–1930 Faÿ and Stein were first introduced in 1924, in what Faÿ described as "the small, queer, and cosmopolitan, literary Paris where she [Stein] has her home."5 Although Stein claimed that initially she and Faÿ "had nothing in particular to say to each other,"6 Faÿ soon became a member of Stein's postwar queer entourage, composed of fellow writers, painters and musicians, students, sycophants, and hangers-on, most if not all of them bisexual or homosexual men. By 1926, the frequent, sometimes daily visitors to Stein's apartment included Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, Virgil Thomson, René Crevel, Hart Crane, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copeland, Georges Hugnet, Francis Rose, the artist Pavel Tchelitchew and his partner Charles Henri Ford. And of course, Bernard Faÿ: notable for his erudition, his ambition, and his love of all things American, particularly...
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Dec 12, 2019
Mateusz Stróżyński 
