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By Root 2355 0

Colère’ was in reality Louis Aragon, the poet who had fallen in love with Cyprian Beach twenty years earlier. ‘Forez’ was François Mauriac. ‘Mortagne’ was Claude Morgan, editor of the underground newspaper, Libération; ‘Jean Noir’ was the poet Jean Cassou. Bruller also published John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down in French. Sylvia’s friend, the poet Paul Eluard, was, she wrote, ‘active in bringing out and hawking about in the bookshops the Midnight Editions and other clandestine publications and dodging the Gestapo. He was obliged to sleep in a different place every night.’ Copies were sent through the post and passed from reader to reader. Every hand-bound copy was inscribed, ‘Ce volume, publié aux dépens de quelques lettrés patriotes, a été achevé d’imprimer sous l’oppression à Paris.’ (‘This book, published with the aid of certain literary patriots, has been printed under the oppression in Paris.’) One of the writers working on Midnight Editions, the poet Jean Paulhan, was arrested and spent months in solitary confinement. He later told Sylvia he kept his sanity by reciting to himself every poem he could remember. Adrienne took a risk merely reading the volumes, but she went further and hid copies in La Maison des Amis des Livres.

If the literary résistants were winning a battle to keep the culture of free France alive, other battles were being lost. Sylvia learned after her return from Vittel that her close friend and former assistant, Françoise Bernheim, had been arrested in one of the rafles, round-ups, of Jewish people in Paris. The Germans took her to Drancy and put her on the train for Oswiecim. By then, having heard from the Polish Jewish women at Vittel, Sylvia knew what happened to prisoners at Auschwitz. Another love of her life had been taken from her.

To complicate matters, she had to thank one of those responsible for turning women like Françoise Bernheim over to the Germans, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, for her own liberty. Adrienne confided in a letter to her assistant, Maurice Saillet, on 30 March, ‘Sylvia has been to see Benoist-Méchin (it seems that it’s really him who set her free, through an SS general). He was very kind, very affectionate and [he] promised to release her again if she is taken.’ Nowhere in Sylvia’s letters or memoirs did she refer to a courtesy call that she must have found distasteful.

When Drue Tartière asked Sylvia to visit some of the American flyers she was hiding at friends’ apartments in Paris, Sylvia seized the chance. She and sculptress Elsa Blanchard went with Drue to see ‘the boys’ and ‘to keep them from getting too bored’. The young Americans would have been delighted to hear her stories about Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and the other ‘lost generation’ writers Sylvia had known in the 1920s. She gave them some of the clothes that Jim Briggs, Carlotta’s husband, had left in their Paris flat with instructions for her to use them as she thought best. Sylvia’s friend, Sarah Watson, brought the aviators meat from the refrigerator at her students’ hostel. These American women welcomed the chance to do something for the young men whose bravery was bringing their own liberation closer.

THIRTY-THREE

German Agents?

THE WALT WHITMAN SOCIETY of Long Island called on Congress in March 1943 to revoke René de Chambrun’s American citizenship. The New York Times reported on 7 March, ‘The society charged that Count de Chambrun was “the chief instrument of the pending movement to expel a percentage of the Jews in France and responsible for the establishment, now under way, of Nazi-ized ghettos”.’ Although the accusation was far-fetched, it related to another instance of de Chambrun attempting to use his influence at Vichy. A former Jesuit priest, Abbé Joseph de Catry, had asked René for an introduction to Maréchal Pétain. Chambrun arranged for de Catry to meet Pétain’s secretary, André Lavagne. The ex-priest was promoting what he called ‘Christian anti-Judaism’ to ‘restore the dignity of Judaism and to effect its concentration in a Jewish state’. For a time, Vichy considered