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THE VISITABLE PAST: A WARTIME MEMOIR Leon Edel, Honolulu, 1978, standing beside a portrait drawn by Canadian artist Louis Muhlstock in Paris in 1931 (photo by Barbara Hall). THE VISITABLE PAST A WARTIME MEMOIR LEON EDEL A BIOGRAPHY MONOGRAPH PUBLISHED FOR THE BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH CENTER BY THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS 2001 CONTENTS vii © 2001 Biographical Research Center FOREWORD ix All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Printed in the United States of America INTRODUCTION xi ONE: TRANSFORMATIONS 01 02 03 04 05 5 4 3 2 PART 3 I Am Drafted Fort Eustis: Soldiering 11 Camp Ritchie: Military Intelligence 14 Camp Sharpe: Psychological Warfare 22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data PART TWO: NORMANDY Convoy and Landfall 29 Edel, Leon, 1907—1997 Omaha Beach and an Orchard 34 a wartime memoir / Leon Edel. 38 The visitable past : A Month in the Country — monograph) 50 p. cm. (A Biography Liberating Brittany — (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 0—8248—2430—X (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0—8248—2431—8 PART THREE: ENTERING PARIS 1. Edel, Leon, 1907— 2. World War, 1939—1945—Personal narratives, American. 3. A Hermitage at Montigny 61 States. Army—Biography. 4. WorLd War, 1939—1945—Psychological aspects. 5. United A Pause at Rambouillet 70 945—Campaigns—france. I. University of Hawaii at Manoa. World War, 1939—1 A Night in the Prefecture 75 Biographical Research Center. II. Title. III. Series. The Hotel Scribe 81 Gaulle Triumphant 86 D811.E29A3 2000 Dc Musings and Memories 94 940.54’2 14’092—dc2 1 Carnival Without Masks 98 [B] Miller and the Place de la Bourse 101 00-069068 Captain Liane and Her Companions 108 PART FOUR: BOULEVARD WINTER 123 p In the rue d’Aguesseau Behind the Lines 126 Searching for Sylvia Beach 129 Edith’s Lover in Old Age: 138 University of Hawai’i Press books are printed on acid-free paper Encounters with W. Morton Fullerton and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability Interiors 146 Council on Library Resources. of the From My Notebook 154 158 A Parachutist’s Story The Performing Arts 160 Hospitals 163 Romances and Show Biz 165 Réveillon 1944 169 CONTENTS FOREWORD vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION xi PART ONE: TRANSFORMATIONS I Am Drafted 3 Fort Eustis: Soldiering 11 Camp Ritchie: Military Intelligence 14 Camp Sharpe: Psychological Warfare 22 PART TWO: NORMANDY Convoy and Landfall 29 Omaha Beach and an Orchard 34 A Month in the Country 38 Liberating Brittany 50 PART THREE: ENTERING PARIS A Hermitage at Montigny 61 A Pause at Rambouillet 70 A Night in the Préfecture 75 The Hôtel Scribe 81 De Gaulle Triumphant 86 Musings and Memories 94 Carnival Without Masks 98 Captain Miller and the Place de la Bourse 101 Liane and Her Companions 108 PART FOUR: BOULEVARD WINTER In the rue d’Aguesseau 123 Behind the Lines 126 Searching for Sylvia Beach 129 Edith’s Lover in Old Age: 138 Encounters with W. Morton Fullerton Interiors 146 From My Notebook 154 A Parachutist’s Story 158 The Performing Arts 160 Hospitals 163 Romances and Show Biz 165 Réveillon 1944 169 PART FIVE: STRASBOURG A Sudden Panic 177 Farewells 181 A Winter Journey 185 Strasbourg Besieged 188 Street of the Blue Sky 190 Briefings 192 Story of Claude 196 Siege Notes 200 Cannonade 207 A Didactic Moment 211 PART SIX: INFORMAL FURLOUGH Return from the Front 215 The Avenue Rapp 218 Plans and Proposals 220 An Informal Furlough 223 A Soldier’s Tale 229 Miss Nausicaa 231 Reverie in the Avenue Montaigne 237 Terminations 240 FOREWORD LOUIS S. AUCHINCLOSS In the fifty years that I knew and corresponded with Leon our concern was almost exclusively with Henry James and his world. This was because our meetings, particularly after his move to Hawai‘i, were infre- quent, and I rather greedily took advantage of them to avail myself of any precious items that I might till from his encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. There was always a new book or article or even a new dis- covery dealing with the life of the Master on which I would want the opinion that he always cheerfully offered. To have wasted a meeting on other subjects would have been like gossiping with Isaiah Berlin. So, odd as it now seems, it was not until after Leon’s death, at a tributary session at New York University, that I learned that he had served in the army in France in 1944 and 1945, in just the same period that I was serving on a U.S. amphibious vessel in the English Channel. With the result that his vivid memoirs of his wartime years have introduced me to a new and even more intensely interesting Leon. The memoirs create a wonderful symphony of motifs, some blaring and triumphant, some soft and sad, some with terrible discords, as he relates his meetings and adventures in a France slowly and agonizingly regrasping her liberty as the Nazi boot is painfully extricated from her soil. Leon’s role as a technical sergeant in psychological warfare—largely as a reporter of the real war news to people long battered with German propaganda—brought him into contact with every sort of person in the streets of Paris and Strasbourg: resistance fighters, both true and phony, American GIs, bored, homesick and sex hungry, collaborationists and anti-Semites, heroic victims of Nazi brutality, prostitutes yearning for a better life, old friends from peacetime sometimes looking a bit odd in uniform, reporters from Leon’s newspaper days, and former professors viii The Visitable Past parched for intellectual diversion. Leon lets them tell their stories: some gruesome, some pathetic, some shameful, some inspiring—all interest- ing. Peace and victory loom ahead, but in the stormy interval one may always be shot by a sniper. France is like a house that has been partially wrecked by a tornado; the foundations may be intact, but the roof is off and a wall is down and a good many seamy closets have been exposed. War is notoriously made up of even more boredom than terror, caused by the endless waiting between assignments. Leon, like many intellectuals in uniform, did not always delight in the constant compa- ny of men to whom his fields of interest were at best boring and at worst anathema. I myself, after four years in the navy amid the endless chatter of obscenity and sex, developed a distinct aversion to four-letter words. But Leon used his gobs of spare time to make careful note of his com- panions, and his book is the richer for it. One of the compensations for exposure to philistia is the greater appreciation it gives one of the advan- tages that in peacetime one tended to take for granted. I and another officer of our LST spent the long hours at anchor waiting for orders to sail reading aloud (taking the speeches in turn) all of Shakespeare’s thirty- seven plays, all of Webster and Marlowe, and a sizable chunk of Beau- mont and Fletcher. Would we have done that before Pearl Harbor? Leon had already started before the war on his lifelong study of James and James’s world, and the project of the great five-volume biography was forming in his mind. The memoirs are studded with significant glimpses of the Master on his visits to Paris, brought to mind when the author finds himself in one of the areas of his stay. The idea of James and his fiction permeates the memoirs as a kind of beguiling leit-motif to remind the reader that there may still be beautiful things to come after Armageddon, however unlikely it may seem and however unlike any possible post-war world the world of James might be. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MARJORIE EDEL In August of 1944, as he prepared to enter Paris with de Gaulle, Leon Edel jotted down in his diary a chapter outline for his wartime experi- ences that matches closely the sequence found in this book. He returned to that outline frequently during the following half-century, although it was not until the mid-70s, when his biography of Henry James was fin- ished, that he began working on these memoirs in earnest. He clearly wanted to write a wartime narrative. Receiving his draft notice would begin the story, and VE Day would close it. But as he explains in his introduction, his reflections on key moments during the war often led him back to the days of his Paris youth, and to other times scattered through his life as well. His wishes for both the content and the structure of his manuscript have guided its preparation for publication. Many friends and well-wishers have made this book possible. Frank Karpiel gathered together and typed out the entire manuscript. John Rieder carefully read through the page proofs, as did Peter Nicholson, who also carefully checked the French, including names and geographi- cal locations. And Stanley Schab’s editorial and design skills moved the manuscript smoothly through every stage of production. Special thanks to Dr. Richard Virr, Curator of Manuscripts, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill University Libraries, for retrieving from the Edel Archive many of the photographs appearing in this volume. I want to thank Craig Howes especially for his expert and continual help and his unfailing enthusiasm in the preparation of this manuscript. During the last year before Leon Edel’s death, he taped Leon’s thoughts on his method and materials. These tapes gave Craig a very special know- ledge for his work as an editor. I also want to thank Ileene Smith who contributed her expert skills in the final editing of this manuscript.