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A Political Education
By Andre Schiffrin Melville House
Copyright © 2007 Andre Schiffrin
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-933633-15-2
Chapter One
Family albums are treacherous things. They lie there quietly, over the years, waiting to be shown to bored grandchildren and other relatives. But like Poe's purloined letter, they contain unexpected truths, unbeknownst to the innocent owner, that can be discerned by the knowledgeable detective.
For years I had worked with a young American photo-historian named Michael Lesy, who became well-known in the early 1970s when I published his PhD thesis as a book we called Wisconsin Death Trip. Lesy had found a stash of glass plates taken by a small-town photographer at the end of the nineteenth century and had fashioned a brilliant psycho-history of the period from this forgotten trove. The book became a bestseller and established Lesy's reputation, but he found it a hard act to follow. When he decided that family albums might contain the same kind of neglected material, I mentioned that I had one. Lesy was interested.
He sat next to me on our living-room couch and closely examined the bedraggled red cover, stained with cigarette burns, over some of which my mother had pasted photos of Charlie Chaplin as Hitler (in The Great Dictator). The album, which I'd looked at unthinkingly dozens of times, was divided into two sections. The first, which covered my first sixyears, were all set in France and seemed to depict an incredibly idyllic time: Our large sunny Paris apartment with my toy-filled room; holiday photos in Belgium with Aldous Huxley and his family; a day at the beach in Royan with my mother Simone and her friends next to me as an infant. That last was a glamorous series of images that my mother loved, and that I remember being told had been taken by a fashion photographer. They looked it.
In short, the first section of the album showed the carefree life that I dimly remembered-the reflections of a happy, comfortable, and well-off childhood, a classic Parisian boyhood. Frequent trips to the Normandy beaches, merry-go-rounds in the Tuileries, the little sailboat basin in the Luxembourg Gardens....
It was a time that must have appeared in retrospect no less idyllic to my parents: My father, recently freed of the financial worries of running his own publishing company and instead now working at Gallimard, the biggest publisher in France, directing the prestigious classic series he'd begun, called the Pléiade, for what he assumed would be the rest of his life; my mother occupied with her only son and her extended family. I can think of no unhappy event they ever mentioned about those prewar years. The album seemed an accurate reflection of all our lives.
The next section of the album consisted of photographs taken in New York City in the fall of 1941. The first few show the small apartment on Riverside Drive where we lived upon our arrival. The rest were taken in the surprisingly inexpensive and rent-controlled flat that my parents subsequently found on the corner of Park Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street. It was one of the few low-rise, tenement-like apartments that could be found on the Avenue, and it still is. Whenever I pass the building now, its fire escape stands out as an anachronistic reminder to me of another era.
As I looked back over the photos with Michael Lesy, I realized how bare both of these places looked, except for my mother's large jewelry worktable, at which she worked day and night. This was the background for my own first American portraits, playing in a military uniform or with my toy soldiers. Clearly I had decided that I would no longer face an enemy unarmed. But the very familiarity of the pictures had kept me from noticing how poor and sad the apartments looked, how very different from the images of our prewar life in Paris. Lesy seemed fascinated by it all, though I was happy when he later decided not to include any of the photos in his book. (I was relieved lest our destitution become part of the public domain, making us successors to the photos of dead babies that had made his first book so notorious.)
* * *
What strikes me in retrospect is how unaware of the album's message I had been, how little I had noted the contrast in our lives, how oblivious I had been to the spare décor of our New York existence. In looking through these pages hundreds of times, neither I nor my parents nor my children nor other family and friends had ever commented on any of this.
Something else about the album that now seems obvious struck me as well: It contained very few photographs of my parents' lives before their marriage. They had both apparently left behind their previous lives when they came together. My father, Jacques, had been born in Russia in l892, beside the Caspian Sea in Baku, the oil-rich capital of Azerbaijan. His father had gone there to work as a longshoreman. Eventually, my grandfather had been struck by the fact that the Caspian surrounding the city was always aflame. Surely something could be done with the oil waste that was being dumped daily into the water? He met a young Swedish chemist, Alfred Nobel, who had been lured to Baku by the oil rush, and set about learning from him the basics of chemistry. He found that the waste could be turned into usable petrochemicals, so my grandfather began approaching the oil producers with offers to buy it. They were amazed at his stupidity but agreed readily. Thus guaranteed a steady supply of inexpensive raw materials, the Schiffrin petrochemical works was soon flourishing, supplying tar and other products to much of Russia. My uncle Simon Schiffrin reported going back to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and finding barrels in the Leningrad harbor that still bore the family name.
In sum, my father grew up in very comfortable surroundings. The few family photos we have of that time show a prosperous group leading the life of the very rich. Each summer they would take the train to Switzerland for their vacation. Their servants filled their train compartments with the pillows and linen that were required for the three-day journey. On shorter holidays, they would repair to the family dacha, or country house, in Russian Finland.
In 2003, my older daughter, Anya, who is fascinated by her roots, persuaded me to return to Baku. We found the former Nobel and Rockefeller mansions, which date back to the oil rush at the end of the nineteenth century. We also discovered the old Schiffrin family house in the center of town. It surrounded a spacious courtyard, and one could still see the large, sun-filled rooms that had once included a ballroom and other grand gathering spaces. The beautiful building Anya and I found ourselves examining was now a very busy and welcoming abortion clinic.
The family later moved to St. Petersburg and, as the First World War approached, my father decided to go to Geneva to study law and, I assume, to escape the Czarist draft. Those Swiss years seem to have been very happy ones. He had more than enough money to live very comfortably and made many close friends, among them the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, as well as, I gather, a great many women. He cut a dashing figure, was a skilled skater, and led what seems to have been a carefree student's life. I know little more about this period, however, and am puzzled by some of its mementos. For example, a Bible presented to my father by Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian philosopher; it has a long, very high-minded dedication by Tagore dated 1918. They must have been good friends, but I don't know how this came about.
Things changed for my father when the war ended. Russia's revolutionary government nationalized the family holdings, leaving him nearly penniless in Europe. Ironically, the only money the family still had came from their shares of Nobel's dynamite works, which they had obtained in an exchange for shares from the now-nationalized Schiffrin oil company. (Poor Nobel got the worse of the bargain, but he seems to have survived nonetheless.) My father went from Geneva to Monte Carlo and decided to try his luck at the casino. Acting like a character out of Dostoevsky (whom he would later translate), he left a large part of his limited funds on a single number on the roulette board and, amazingly, won. Rather than go home happily, he decided to leave the money on the same number one more time-a reckless move that I would never have been capable of. But against all odds the number came up again, and my father found himself with enough money to last for a couple of years.
He decided to move from Geneva to Florence and somehow got a job there as the secretary to Bernard Berenson. They worked together for several years, and as a result of this collaboration my father would later publish Berenson's Italian Portraits of the Renaissance. While in Florence he also was hired by Peggy Guggenheim to teach her Russian. However, when it became clear that he would do no more than that, Guggenheim fired him. (Her memoirs describe this without rancor, though later they reveal a less attractive aspect of her personality when she describes her wartime glee at being able to buy so many paintings cheaply from Jewish artists desperate to flee Hitler's Europe.)
Having rejected Guggenheim's advances, my father fell in love with, and married, a Russian pianist, Yura Guller, whom he had met while playing the cello in chamber-music groups. Guller had won the first prize of the Conservatoire de Paris in 1909 and had a promising future ahead of her. During their early years together, she enchanted my father's friend André Gide with her mastery of Chopin and taught him how to play and understand Chopin's compositions, for which Gide was endlessly grateful, according to his biographers.
My father was also accomplished enough to be considering a career as a cellist, but Guller was understandably obsessed with her own possibilities, and one such professional turned out to be more than enough in a marriage: They agreed to divorce after a few years. By the oddest of coincidences, I was to meet her once, many, many years later. My family and I were spending the summer in Dartington in Southern England, where my wife had grown up. Dartington was famous for its summer music school, and there on its program of visiting artists was Guller's name. I went to see her after her performance and introduced myself. I think she was amused to meet me but far from deeply moved; our links were too distant and tenuous. All I now have of her is a compact disc of her Chopin recordings, its cover photo showing a striking, dark-haired woman.
From Italy, my father moved to Paris in the early twenties, where he decided to try his hand at publishing. He began by serving a kind of apprenticeship with the art publisher Henri Piazza. After a short time, however, he felt ready to strike out on his own and in 1922 formed a new publishing house, which he called Éditions de la Pléiade. The name came not from mythology or French literary history, as has often been assumed, but from a group of classic Russian poets. With no authors at his disposal, he began with a series of Russian titles translated into French by himself and friends. It was at the very beginning of the Éditions de la Pléiade that my father got in touch with André Gide, whose help he sought in translating what would be his first book, Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. The books were lavishly illustrated, some by Russian artists living in Paris, and they had stunning typography, which my father himself designed. (In the fifties, I happened to visit the Soviet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and saw an exhibit of these books-surprisingly, displayed as examples of Russian art in the postwar period.)
After the success of his early, deluxe editions, my father had the idea of publishing a series of books, leather-bound and on Bible paper, consisting primarily of French classics. The series became known as the Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, and it remains to this day one of the mainstays of French publishing. The idea was to collect in each volume the basic works of one great author in a carefully established and annotated text, yet at the same time the books were to be relatively inexpensive-to buy the Pléiade Proust would be less expensive than to buy all the volumes in the regular editions, for example-and more portable. Gide often spoke of carrying them around in his pocket. Beginning with a volume of Baudelaire, my father gradually went on to publish all of the major works of French literature. He then expanded the series to include translated works; at present the Pléiade includes nearly all of the world's classic literature (though the new editions are far more scholarly and much more expensive than my father had originally intended).
The Pléiade was an instant and enormous success, such a success that Jacques soon ran through the small capital he'd raised from investors (primarily family and friends) and didn't have the up-front funds necessary to print sufficient quantities of books fast enough. He was still on good terms with Peggy Guggenheim, and she invested as well. To pay her back in part, he gave her six hundred copies of The Queen of Spades-which she tried unsuccessfully to sell to Parisian bookstores. Happily, the book later became a great success, and Jacques bought back and resold her copies.
But in spite of such maneuvers, my father ultimately had to look for more financing, and he approached several of Paris' larger, more established publishing houses. In 1933, my father joined Gallimard, perhaps the most prestigious firm in Paris, through the intervention of Gide, who had been closely involved with the firm since its origins. He stayed there until the German occupation in l940, when the German "ambassador," Otto Abetz, issued orders for the takeover of key French institutions, Gallimard among them. The firm was to be "Aryanized." On August 20, l940, barely two months into the German occupation of Paris, my father was dismissed in a two-line letter from the owner, Gaston Gallimard. Jacques was one of the two Jews in the firm and their departure led to the increasing role of French fascists in running Gallimard. It also led to the changes chronicled in our family album.
* * *
My mother's life had been much less eventful. Her father, Oscar Heymann, had come to Paris from Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine as a penniless pedlar, ordered by his father to somehow earn enough money for his sister's dowries. Gradually, he built a successful business dealing in lace and trimmings, which allowed him to raise my mother, who was born in l906, and her two sisters and younger brother in the comfortable suburb of Neuilly in a vast, luxurious apartment that included a billiards room, proof of their bourgeois achievements. Like most French girls of the post-First World War period, my mother never went to college, though she certainly partook of the intellectual fervor of the period; one of my favorite of her stories was of lining up at the local bookstore as each new volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past appeared.
But my maternal grandfather was a very strict father of the old school. If he ever caught my mother leaving the house wearing even a soupçon of makeup, he would wet his handkerchief and erase all the offending traces. My mother, however, was determined to break away and, hearing from friends that there was an opening for a secretary in a new publishing house, she climbed the stairs to the sixth-floor, one-room office housing the fledgling Editions de la Pléiade and applied for the job. She would later remember that each landing on the long staircase had a sign saying that the offices were just above. My father was immediately struck by her beauty and, recently divorced from his first wife, Yura, he promptly offered her the job, even though she confessed that she had no previous work experience and didn't even know how to type. My parents were married soon thereafter, in l929, and they embarked on what was by all accounts a joyful first few years.
(Continues...)
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