April
11 , 2003 Mount
Holyoke to Re-create Historic Pontigny Symposia
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Pontigny
image courtesy of Mount Holyoke Archives and Special Collections
Professor
of English Christopher Benfey (in color) "poses"
with Pontigny colloquia participants (left to right) André
Masson, Lionello Venturi, and Marc Chagall. |
by Nancy Doherty FP
During these difficult days of war in Iraq, when anti-French sentiment
is so rampant that the United States Senate cafeteria has just
renamed French fries "freedom fries," the Mount Holyoke
community may appreciate learning of an extraordinary but obscure
part of its history, when our campus served as a haven to French
Jewish intellectuals and other prominent European thinkers fleeing
Hitler. Artists Marc Chagall and André Masson, philosopher
Hannah Arendt, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—these
are just a few of the dozens of eminent exiles who sat in the
shade of Mount Holyoke's huge maples during the World War
II summers of 1942 through 1944 to discuss the future of art and
humanism in a world gone mad. In this act of intellectual resistance
to Nazism, they were joined by a number of equally illustrious
Americans, including poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore,
artist Robert Motherwell, and composer Roger Sessions.
Next fall, to celebrate
the sixtieth anniversary of Pontigny-en-Amérique,
as these summer sessions were called, the Harriet L. and Paul
M. Weissman Center for Leadership plans to give this fascinating
piece of our history the attention it deserves, by hosting a special
weekend-long symposium November 6–8. Chris Benfey, codirector
of the Weissman Center, has invited scholars and visitors participating
in the symposium to focus on three major trends that emerged during
the original Pontigny sessions—the transition from surrealism
to abstraction in the arts; the emergence of structuralism in
the social sciences; and the search for a theory of creativity
in philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences—all amid
the strains of war. "The idea," says Benfey, "is
to get some of the best minds of today to revisit some of the
concerns of the original Pontigny and to gauge their contemporary
relevance."
The original Pontigny colloquia were the brainchild of a resourceful
Mount Holyoke French professor, Helen Patch. Aware that World
War II had ended the famous annual gatherings of intellectuals
at the Abbey of Pontigny in the Burgundy region of France (attended
by such luminaries as André Gide, Lytton Strachey, and
Edith Wharton), she proposed to her former Sorbonne professor,
eminent medievalist Gustave Cohen, that Mount Holyoke might offer
something similar to him and other refugees. Cohen had participated
in some of the original Pontigny sessions, as had prominent French
philosopher Jean Wahl, who had recently fled imprisonment and
torture in Nazi-occupied Paris to become a professor at Mount
Holyoke. First Cohen and then Wahl became the guiding forces behind
Pontigny-en-Amérique, the annual Mount Holyoke
event that caused such a stir it was covered by the New York
Times and Time magazine, and was praised in the
London Times Literary Supplement. It was even noticed
by the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), which
sent an agent in 1942 to sit in on all four weeks' sessions
and report back.
Cohen and Wahl organized
the Mount Holyoke conferences around general themes such as "Art
and Man" and "Permanence of Values, Renewal of Methods."
Students and local faculty were welcome, and many of the original
talks survive in written form. Some speeches are memorable, even
groundbreaking, including Hannah Arendt's new interpretation
of Kafka as critic of totalitarianism and Wallace Stevens's
idea of poetry as a form of resistance in "The Figure of
the Youth as Virile Poet." Robert Motherwell's talk
"The Place of the Spiritual in a World of Property"
suggested artists abandon surrealism as spiritually inadequate
and embrace abstraction.
Among the speakers
slated for the 2003 fall symposium are the Harvard philosopher
Stanley Cavell, art historians Romy Golan and Jed Perl, and Arendt
biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Opera singer Nancy Gustafson
'78, will perform a selection of French music. There will
be a special session for alumnae on the plight of Jewish refugees
at Mount Holyoke during World War II, with special attention to
MHC professors Rachel Bespaloff and Jean Wahl. Exhibitions at
the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the College archives
will focus on Pontigny, and students will be able to choose from
a cluster of Pontigny-related courses across the disciplines.
"What was being sought at Mount Holyoke College was a new
way of articulating culture and politics, creative work and criticism,"
observes Laurent Jeanpierre, an intellectual historian from the
University of Paris. Jeanpierre, who is writing a book on
Pontigny-en-Amérique, will speak at the symposium.
Though this unique and remarkable undertaking was Helen Patch's
inspiration, Jeanpierre suggests that, from its inception, the
College's tradition of internationalism made it the perfect
setting: "The intellectual culture of Mount Holyoke College,
though of a type very much in the minority in the American academic
world of that time, was nonetheless quite close to what the spirit
of Pontigny represented in French and European intellectual circles
during the period between the world wars." n
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