Caught in the sweep of history

HISTORY : Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940-44By Charles Glass Harper Press, 524pp. £20

CHARLES GLASS has written one of those rare books that makes you laugh and cry, that catches you up in the sweep of history.

The narrative power of Americans in Paris; Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940-44lies in the way it slowly builds characters, returning repeatedly to individual stories as the Nazis arrive, enforce their cruel rule and eventually leave Paris.

We meet Sylvia Beach, daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman from Baltimore, owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and first publisher of James Joyce. Beach made her bookshop the centre of American literary life in Paris. Ernest Hemingway was 22 years old when he walked into it. He “fell in love, however platonically, with 34-year-old Sylvia the moment they met in 1921”, Glass writes. He quotes Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast: “She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

Later, brave Sylvia hides all her books on the fourth floor and shutters the shop, after a German officer threatens to confiscate its contents because Beach refuses to give him her last copy of Finnegans Wake. Shakespeare and Company would never reopen. (In 1964, the American expatriate George Whitman renamed his bookshop across the Seine from Notre Dame Shakespeare and Company, in homage to the original shop in the rue de l'Odéon. Whitman named his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman. She has run the shop since 2005.)

In September 1942, Beach wears the red ribbon of the Légion d'Honneurwhen she is arrested and interned, along with hundreds of American and British women. Because the reader has lived vicariously with Beach and others through freezing, fuelless winters, hunger, fear and the loss of loved ones to suicide and Nazi death camps, we share her joy on August 26th, 1944, the day Paris was liberated, when she hears a friend shouting, "Sylvia! Hemingway is here!"

Beach wrote later: “I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered . . .”. Adrienne Monnier, Beach’s longtime companion, described “little Sylvia down below, leaping into and lifted up by two Michelangelesque arms, her legs beating the air . . . yes, it was Hemingway, more a giant than ever . . .”.

The American population of Paris dwindled from 30,000 before the war to scarcely 2,000 by the spring of 1941. Being rooted in culture was no guarantee of morality. The mining heiress Peggy Guggenheim, for example, was unmoved by the refugees fleeing the German advance in June 1940. “She was buying paintings from artists desperate to leave Paris before the Nazis reached it – acquiring for $250,000 a collection that would be worth over $40 million,” Glass notes.

IT IS A STAIN on America’s record that the African-Americans who fought in both World Wars were treated better by the French than by their own compatriots. In 1918, Gen Pershing banned black servicemen from victory celebrations in Paris, a shameful decision that was repeated by Gen Eisenhower’s command in 1944.

Eugene Bullard joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914 and three years later became the first black combat pilot and the only African-American to fly in the Great War. In the 1920s and 1930s he owned Le Grand Duc jazz club in Montmartre. But when, after 27 years in France, he finally returned to the US in 1940, Bullard was ostracised because of his race.

Charles Bedaux, the French-born emigrant to the US who accumulated a fortune as an “efficiency engineer” for, among others, Campbell’s Soup, Gillette, Eastman Kodak, DuPont and Goodrich, is a repulsive and intriguing character. The American journalist Janet Flanner quoted a friend of Bedaux’s wife, the willowy socialite Fern Lombard: “She was so much finer than he, and so perfectly trained, that when you saw the Bedauxs together, it was like watching a thoroughbred paraded on a lead by her squat groom”.

The Bedauxs entertained lavishly at their Château de Candé, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor married in 1937. Bedaux feted US diplomats, then German officers, then sometimes both together. “The Germans were the only ones left in Paris to do business with,” he said in what Flanner called “the best and briefest definition of collaborationism yet put on record”. Bedaux travelled to Berlin to give strategic advice to Albert Speer, the Nazi minister of armaments and munitions. But he also provided snippets of intelligence to US officials.

During the war, Bedaux hatched two grandiose schemes, for a monetary system based on units of human work and a trans-Sahara pipeline to transport water and peanut oil. He was imprisoned by the Germans, French and Americans and committed suicide when the US indicted him for treason. Sixty-five years later, the FBI has not declassified his file.

The story of Count Aldebert and Countess Clara de Chambrun takes us to the heart of the grey zone of collaboration. A veteran of the first World War, the count enjoyed US citizenship as a direct descendent of the Marquis de Lafayette. His American-born wife, Clara Longworth, was the sister of a former speaker of the US House of Representatives,Nicholas Longworth III, who was married to Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice.

GLASS DOES NOT judge the ageing Chambruns, who bravely kept the two leading US institutions in France – the American Hospital in Neuilly and the American Library in the 8th arrondissement – open throughout the occupation. But their close friendship to Maréchal Pétain and his prime minister, Pierre Laval – whose daughter Josée was married to their son René – blinded them to the evils of the Vichy régime. Clara considered Gen Charles de Gaulle an upstart, and members of the Resistance “terrorists”.

Two women merit special mention: Drue Leyton, the former Hollywood actress who hid her grief over the death of her French husband, a Resistance hero, so she could continue her own work against the Nazis, and Alice-Leone Moats, the intrepid newspaper correspondent who was the only US journalist to sneak into occupied France after 1941.

The most tragic story in this wonderful book is that of Dr Sumner Jackson, the surgeon who in pre-war days cared for Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the poet ee cummings. Jackson fell in love with and married a French Red Cross nurse, Charlotte “Toquette” Sylvie Barrelet de Ricout.

The much-loved “Dr Jack” hid downed pilots in the American hospital and transferred locations of V-1 rocket factories and launching sites to London. Sumner and Toquette used their apartment in the Avenue Foch as a way-station for the Resistance, and enrolled their teenage son Phillip in the cause.

The Jackson family were arrested three months before the liberation of Paris. Toquette was taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was broken by starvation and exhaustion. Sumner and Phillip became slave labourers in the Neuengamme concentration camp. In the final days of the war, the Germans put the prisoners of Neuengamme on ships in the harbour at Lübeck, which the RAF bombed. Phillip escaped, and was later reunited with his mother. “Dr Jack” was never seen again, and his body was never found.

Sylvia, Eugene, Bedaux, Aldebert and Clara, Drue, Alice-Leone, Sumner and Toquette . . . Charles Glass enables us to live the lives of these extraordinary characters. Our small trials and triumphs pale by comparison with their exploits. Inevitably, they lead us to ask: what would I have done in their place?

Lara Marlowe is The Irish TimesFrance correspondent