November
14 , 2003
Pontigny
Symposium Reprises Historic MHC Encounters
Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Students in a
staged reading of Brecht’s
Conversations in Exile, directed by Holger Teschke |
When, as a college student in the
late 1960s, biographer and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
and other activists against the Vietnam War were debating whether
they should join forces with a labor union also opposed to
the war, they sought the advice of one of their professors,
the political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
The students believed that Arendt, an authority on the relationship between violence
and power and herself an opponent of the Vietnam War, would certainly be able
to help them assess the ramifications of aligning with another group. But Arendt’s
response was not what the students had expected. After listening to lengthy arguments
pro and con, she simply responded, “‘Well, you could use their mimeograph
machine,’” Young-Bruehl related, mimicking Arendt’s German
accent. The episode, typical of Arendt, showed “a wonderful combination
of sheer pragmatism and the very complex notion of action,” Young-Bruehl
said.
Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Soprano Nancy
Gustafson ’78 |
The ideas of Arendt and a number of other prominent writers and artists were
in the air this past weekend, as the College celebrated the sixtieth anniversary
of Pontigny-en-Amerique, when leading European figures in the arts and sciences
gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American counterparts for conversations
about the future of civilization in the midst of World War II. Artists,
Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College,
1942–1944,
organized by the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, drew
students, faculty members, writers, artists, and alumnae to
its three days of conversations and performances.
Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Laurent Jeanpierre |
“We invited our speakers to draw ‘inspiration and provocation’ from
the original Pontigny at Mount Holyoke 60 years ago, and that invitation was
richly fulfilled,” said Christopher Benfey, professor of English, codirector
of the Weissman Center, and coorganizer of the event. “What was most moving
for me was the way in which certain words and ideas left dangling in 1943 or
1944 were picked up again over the weekend. In 1943, Wallace Stevens asked for
an answer to his poetry from American philosophers and didn’t get it.
Sixty years later he got it, in a wonderfully eloquent response from the
Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell.”
“Hannah Arendt warned her Mount Holyoke audience in 1944 that a new form
of government she called ‘bureaucracy’ was reducing human freedom
to nothing,” Benfey added. “And Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome
Kohn, two of Arendt’s students, warned us in 2003 that that form of
government is now rampant, and we had better push back hard if we want to
have any effect at all on what our government does in our name. And Rachel
Bespaloff, that brilliant philosopher and writer who taught for six years
at Mount Holyoke until her suicide in 1949, received an indescribably moving
response from former students, from her daughter, and from others who have
been touched by her life and work.”
Photo: Ben Barnhart
Panel in tribute
to former MHC professor Rachel Bespaloff |
Weissman Center codirector
and Pontigny coorganizer Karen Remmler, associate professor of German studies,
agreed. “Like Chris, I was thrilled to discover the intricate constellations
that emerged during the weekend—affinities among the speakers via the work
of the original participants or new insights about how the talks given at the
Pontigny meetings in 1942–1944 resonate with current debates about the
use of violence or the status of creativity in times of war,” she
said.
“Looking back, I am struck by the desire among alumnae and current students
to know more about the details of the Pontigny gatherings in the 1940s at Mount
Holyoke College and to converse with one another and speakers about the big questions
that we are still asking: What is the function of art in times of war? What is
the role of the intellectual in the public realm? How have the encounters among
artists, composers, scientists, writers, poets, and scholars here on campus shaped
institutional memory? What can we learn from the experiences of refugee faculty
and students during World War II in creating spaces for such encounters today?” Remmler
said. “I wished that the whole community could have been present to hear
the brilliant contributions from our colleagues, Elissa Gelfand, Donal O’Shea,
and Andy Lass.”
Photo: Ben Barnhart
Naomi
Bespaloff Levinson ’48 |
Gelfand, Dorothy Rooke McCulloch
Professor and chair of the French department, opened the conference
with a tribute to Helen Patch, the MHC professor of French
who created the connections that brought Pontigny—and a number of French
Jewish intellectuals and artists—to campus as Europe was falling to the
forces of Nazi Germany. “What moved her to create a haven—albeit
temporary—to Jewish intellectuals when other (American) campuses capped
Jewish enrollment?” Gelfand wondered, suggesting that Patch is part of
the College’s tradition of “active, purposeful engagement with the
world.” She also complimented Benfey and Remmler for their “tireless
sleuthing,” which, she said, “has rescued the Mount Holyoke
Pontigny encounters from oblivion.”
Key figures in the original Pontigny encounters—Patch’s former teacher
Gustave Cohen and prominent French philosopher Jean Wahl—were considered
by Laurent Jeanpierre of the University of Paris, Jeffrey Mehlman of Boston University,
and Helen Solterer of Duke University. Solterer noted, with amusement, that participants
60 years ago affectionately referred to the South Hadley encounters as “Pont’ Holyoke.”
Artists Robert Motherwell, Marc Chagall, and André
Masson and art critic Lionello Venturi were invoked during a panel discussion
on the transition from surrealism to abstraction, one of the themes of the
original Pontigny. Venturi, who was one of the first to unite the fields of
art history and art criticism, arrived at Mount Holyoke as one of just 12 Italian
university professors who refused to swear allegiance to Mussolini, noted Romy
Golan of the art department of the City University of New York. Joining Golan
on the panel, moderated by professor emeritus of art Robert Herbert, were Jed
Perl of the New Republic and Mary Ann Caws of CUNY’s comparative
literature department.
MHC’s O’Shea, dean of faculty and Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor
of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, and Lass, professor of anthropology,
considered the work of mathematician Jacques Hadamard, anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss, and linguist Roman Jakobson. “Donal combined a memorable
math lesson from Euclid to Hadamard with highlights from Hadamard’s life
and his family ties to Alfred Dreyfus [Jewish officer in the French army falsely
accused of treason],” Remmler said. “Andy Lass talked about the extraordinary ‘elective
affinities’ between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson and their
work. Andy’s moving tribute to their influence on his own thinking
ended with his reminder that the displaced have no home to return to;
exile itself becomes destination.”
Onstage, Pontigny was celebrated in a performance by internationally
acclaimed operatic soprano Nancy Gustafson ’78 and a staged reading of Bertolt Brecht’s Conversations in Exile directed
by Holger Teschke, MHC’s visiting professor
of theatre arts.
“Rachel Bespaloff’s books were the only ones I ever considered stealing
in my life,” confessed Alyssa Danigelis ’01, who has studied Bespaloff’s
papers in the Mount Holyoke archives. During a roundtable discussion of Bespaloff’s
legacy that closed the Pontigny conference, Danigelis paid tribute
to the brilliant writer and exile.
Three former students of Bespaloff’s—Renee Cary ’48, Barbara
Levin Amster ’50, and Bespaloff’s daughter, Naomi Bespaloff Levinson ’48,
spoke of being challenged and inspired in her classes. “She stretched our
minds and lifted our perceptions way above the material we were reading,” Cary
recalled. “She believed that her students were more than students.
She believed that we could be scholars.”
Yet scholarship had its limits. Amster recalled being called to Bespaloff’s
apartment to discuss a disappointing paper she had turned in. “One would
think that you’re in love,” Bespaloff chided. “She said, ‘Are
you in love?’ I said yes. She crumpled my paper and said, ‘Now Barbara’—calling
me ‘Barbara’ for the first and only time—‘Barbara, you
must learn there are some things in life that are much more important than writing
papers.’”
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