Like the many other artistic projects he had started, the novel was abandoned fifty pages in, “because it was so bad,” in Lévi-Strauss own words.3 “I very quickly realized that I wasn’t able to do it, because I lacked imagination and didn’t have the patience to write the descriptive details needed to flesh out a character and create atmosphere.”4
Engrossed in his work at the museum and struggling with his novel, Lévi-Strauss seemed strangely disconnected from the events brewing across Europe. “Did you feel that the war was coming?” he was asked in the 1980s. “No,” he replied. “No more than I sensed the dangers of Hitler or the Fascist threat. I was like most people, totally blind.”5 Nor did the mounting threats to Europe’s Jewish population strike a personal chord. As German Jews continued to flee across the border into France, Lévi-Strauss explained away Nazi anti-Semitism as petit bourgeois jealousy against Jewish bankers who had profited from the era’s high inflation rates. The ongoing persecution he likened to a kind of natural disaster to be weathered—like a volcanic eruption—rather than some fundamental, catastrophic social change.6
Lévi-Strauss’s second exhibition never took place. As he finished documenting his collections, war broke out. The forlorn wail of sirens sounded across Paris skies as civilians went through the paces of air raid drills; barricades and checkpoints sprang up along the boulevards; soldiers piled sandbags high around the city’s famous monuments and carried artwork into storage. For Lévi-Strauss, the drift toward war was accompanied by personal upheaval. In the spring of 1939, he separated from Dina. An eleven-year marriage, a good proportion of it spent in Brazil, was over. The couple had worked closely together, enduring the hazards and pleasures of backland travel, the thrill and tedium of ethnographic fieldwork. Seventy years after they had split, I asked Lévi-Strauss what had happened. At the age of ninety-eight, he spoke in short sentences, with long pauses in between. “She lived in her head,” he told me. “I never knew what she was thinking.” He went on to hint at other problems. Sometime after they had divorced he had been told of the existence of “romantic letters” between Dina and Mário de Andrade.7
By September, British Expeditionary Forces began arriving in northern France, marching over fields still pitted with the divots left from the First World War. French conscripts dug trenches and constructed shelters from the Channel down to the Ardennes, trying to paper over defenses to the north of the Maginot Line. Lévi-Strauss was drafted. He has described his war experience as a kind of continuation of fieldwork. Just as he was settling back into Paris, to the museum, his writing desk and the prospect of the teaching job in the autumn, he was on the move again. Over the next months there would be more travel to uncertain destinations, more bivouacking and tinned food, boredom and discomfort.
He spent the first months of the drôle de guerre censoring telegrams for the postal ministry (“utter buffoonery”8) before he asked to be trained as a liaison officer for the incoming British Expeditionary Forces. His English was rudimentary, but he managed to pass the exams and was posted behind the tail of the Maginot Line on the Luxembourg border. In the months leading up to the German invasion, there was little to do. During the spring he whiled away his time on long hikes through the surrounding wooded fields. It was on one of these excursions, at the beginning of May, that he claims to have had his first, sketchy intimations of the philosophical basis of structuralism. Gazing at a bunch of dandelions, he fell into intense intellectual contemplation. He examined the gray halo of a seed head with its hundreds of thousands of filaments sculpted into a perfect sphere. How was it that this plant, along with all others, had come to such a regularized, geometric conclusion? “It was there that I found the organizing principle of my thought,” he later remembered.9 The dandelion was the result of the play of its own structural properties, calibrated into a unique and instantly recognizable form. Subtle variations, changes at a deep genetic level, could give rise to other forms, the different species that multiplied through nature. The idea that culture, like nature, could have its own structuring principles—hidden, yet ultimately determining, like the genetic codes that produced the geometry of nature—would inform much of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent work, as he began his analysis of sociological/cultural phenomena such as kinship, totemism and myth.
Lévi-Strauss was awoken from his intellectual reveries by the dramatic opening of Germany’s westward offensive. With news of strikes into Belgium and Holland on the airwaves, a little to the north of where Lévi-Strauss was stationed, columns of tanks sped down the narrow lanes of the Ardennes Forest. Crossing the Meuse at Sedan, German panzer divisions punched effortlessly through the French defenses, leaving a trail of dust and diesel fumes as they broke into open countryside.
The surprising ease of the German conquest traumatized the French. “It was horrible . . . ,” remembered Jean Rouch, who would go on to become a renowned ethnographic filmmaker. “We discovered that what we had learned at school—the invincibility of the French army—was false. The old officers were afraid and were escaping. There was not a real battle. In just one month the whole of France was occupied. We were ashamed to have lost the war.” Then a student of civil engineering, Rouch spent the first months of the occupation traveling around France by bicycle from the Marne River to the Massif Central, blowing up bridges to slow the German advance.10
With the German blitzkrieg penetrating deep into French territory, Lévi-Strauss was relieved by a Scots regiment, which arrived with its own set of liaison officers. Lévi-Strauss’s group set off in search of their corps, tracking them down to a village in the Sarthe. “It probably saved our lives,” he remembered, “for the [Scots] regiment was decimated a few days later.”11 In the confused weeks that followed, Lévi-Strauss found himself caught up in huge movements of people across France. Cars weaved cross-country through the trees to avoid the lengthening traffic jams. Streams of refugees choked all routes south, trying to outpace the Germans’ spectacular advances. Overnight, eight million were on the move. The historian Gaston Roupnel watched the catastrophe unfold:I started Histoire et destin [History and Destiny, his last book] at the very beginning of July 1940. In my little village of Gevrey Chambertin, I had just seen waves of refugees go past along the main road, the whole sorry exodus of unfortunates, in cars, in carts, on foot, a miserable muddle of people, all the wretchedness of the roads, and mixed up with all this were the troops, soldiers without their weapons . . . and this great panic, this was France!12
Lévi-Strauss’s corps traveled by rail and cattle truck, from the Sarthe through Corrèze and Aveyron as their officers bickered over whether to head for Bordeaux and surrender to the Germans or escape to the Mediterranean. Fortunately, they opted for the south and the trip ended in the relative safety of Béziers. They were quartered on the Larzac plateau. After a disorderly retreat, Lévi-Strauss had miraculously landed on his own doorstep, near the family home in the Cévennes, where his parents had already taken refuge.
He was moved with his corps on to Montpellier. There he left his barracks in search of work at the university, offering his services as an examiner in philosophy for the upcoming baccalaureate examinations. He was hired and, after being demobilized, divided his time between the university and his family home. In Montpellier he met up with René Courtin again, his traveling companion in Brazil. Courtin was in the process of setting up a Resistance network, and after the war would be one of the founders of Le Monde.
Lévi-Strauss had escaped unscathed, his only experience of the fighting being the splintering of tiles overhead when his position was strafed by German Stukas during the retreat. He was secure in Vichy France, with family nearby and a university job. Yet by the beginning of September he was courting danger once more. He traveled up to Vichy to ask to be reassigned to his old job at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Just as French Jews were escaping south, Lévi-Strauss requested to be sent back north, into Nazi-occupied territory. It was an extraordinary move, given the times. In France forty thousand
foreign Jews were already interned in camps—makeshift wooden huts in muddy fields, which froze during the winter.13 Although official persecution of French-born Jews had not yet begun, the screws were tightening under the Nazi occupation.
In the 1980s Lévi-Strauss claimed that it was his “lack of imagination” that led him on this potentially disastrous attempt to return to Paris. “That helped me during my fieldwork,” he told Didier Eribon. “I was unaware of the danger.”14 Scarcely believing such an offhand reply, I went back over this with him. “I did know that the Jews were threatened,” he told me, “but I thought you had to hide in the most direct, thorough way possible, by carrying on as normal.”15 Fortunately for Lévi-Strauss, the official dealing with the request, the director of secondary education, refused to send anyone with such an obviously Jewish name back into occupied France, suggesting a college in Perpignan instead. When Lévi-Strauss arrived in Perpignan, a new mood was in the air. Colleagues were wary, studiously avoiding the subject of the Jewish situation and the Nazi race laws. A gym teacher, who privately sympathized with Lévi-Strauss’s position, became his only confidant.
After only a few weeks in Perpignan, Lévi-Strauss returned to Montpellier, where he taught what would turn out to be the last philosophy classes of his career for a preparatory course at the École polytechnique. It turned into a purely ritualistic exchange between a set of students with no interest in philosophy and Lévi-Strauss, who had already mentally fled the discipline for anthropology. He read out his lecture notes against the hubbub of students chatting among themselves.
Outside classes he caught up on his reading. One book in particular, Catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité dans la Chine ancienne (Matrimonial Categories and Kin Relations in Ancient China), written by the doyen of francophone Far Eastern studies, Marcel Granet, struck a chord, setting in motion a train of thought that would follow him into exile. Granet was the leading sinologist of his day, studying Chinese classical texts, traditional numerology and feudalism. Catégories matrimoniales was one of the first attempts to rigorously map out classical Chinese kinship relations. Lévi-Strauss had already grappled with kinship in Brazil, observing the Bororo’s fine-tuned moiety system and the small, densely interrelated nomadic families of the Nambikwara. Unlike Lévi-Strauss’s fumbling efforts to pin down their significance, Granet had tried to move beyond description. His goal was to unveil the very mechanics of kin systems, to find a set of objective rules that underpinned what at first glance appeared to be merely the arbitrary outcome of tradition. His book drew together concepts that Lévi-Strauss would later revisit: the symmetry of kinship systems as a kind of mathematical inevitability; the incest taboo as a positive prohibition—a magnetic field of repulsion propelling a system of exchange. Granet also hinted at universality (albeit through an evolutionist paradigm), drawing parallels between ancient Chinese systems and present-day Australian Aboriginal arrangements. The arguments were dense. There were complex diagrams—spirals inside cones, stars embedded in circles, crisscrossing arrows. “I was spellbound,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled.16 Yet he was also frustrated. He found Granet’s solutions obscure and overly elaborate; complexity had generated yet more complexity; untidy data could be described only by invoking baroque rules. The goal, which would remain a lifelong quest for Lévi-Strauss, was to descend to the next level of abstraction, into a clarifying world beyond description, a purer universe of simple imperatives.
Three weeks later, Lévi-Strauss was fired under the first Jewish Statute introduced by the Vichy government on October 3, 1940. He returned to his parents’ house, this time with some sense of the very real danger that he and his family were in. “I already felt myself to be potential fodder for the concentration camp,” he later confessed.17 He entertained romantic notions of being able to survive on the run, scavenging in the countryside, sleeping rough, Nambikwara-style, roaming the Cévennes. But inevitably thoughts turned toward exile. After Georges Dumas intervened to secure him a new posting at the University of São Paulo, another spell in Brazil was an option.18 He might even have been able to resume fieldwork among the Nambikwara. The nomadic period had shown him only one aspect of Nambikwara life; intensive study of the sedentary camps during the wet season would fill out the picture.
Lévi-Strauss traveled back up to Vichy, where the Brazilian embassy had set up offices in a cramped ground-floor room. There, in an episode later recounted in Tristes Tropiques, he tried, but failed, to renew his visa. In an excruciating scene the ambassador held the stamp in midair, ready to hammer it onto Lévi-Strauss’s open passport, but—reminded by a zealous official of the new rules in place—could not follow through. Lévi-Strauss left empty-handed.
With his options dwindling, he received a letter that turned out to be as life-defining as Bouglé’s phone call had been six years earlier. It was an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. Founded after the First World War, the New School had been taking in European intellectuals under threat from the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it began receiving waves of intellectuals from across Europe fleeing war and persecution. Lévi-Strauss was fortunate to have the backing of both Alfred Métraux and Robert Lowie, who had been impressed by his work on the Bororo, as well as family connections in the States—his aunt Aline, widow of the painter Henry Caro-Delvaille, raised money through a wealthy friend to support the application. After the offer Lévi-Strauss wrote to Dina, who was also Jewish, saying that if she wanted to get out of France she could travel with him as his wife.19 She elected to stay on and ended up playing a role in the Resistance. Lévi-Strauss’s parents would remain in Vichy France, stranded in their holiday house in the Cévennes and unable to return to the rue Poussin apartment until after the war.
Lévi-Strauss could now enter the States; the problem lay on the French side. As the war progressed, leaving the country was becoming more and more difficult. After the occupation of the north, some Jews and perceived undesirables hiked over the Pyrenees, traveling across Spain and into Portugal to the neutral port of Lisbon, from where they packed onto Cunard liners or, money permitting, took the newly established twelve-hour Pan American Clipper air service. The other route, out through Marseille, was more direct, but still involved mountains of paperwork: affidavits of support, proof of job in the host country, visas, proof of passage and Vichy exit papers, with each document depending on the others in a dispiriting bureaucratic chain.
Artists Max Ernst and André Masson, writer Arthur Koestler and Nobel physicist Otto Meyerhof, among thousands of others, gathered in Marseille to get their papers in order and find a berth out of Europe. They were aided by the inspired work of the American Quaker Varian Fry and his Emergency Rescue Committee, another privately funded organization aimed at rescuing European intellectuals from the deteriorating situation in Europe. Vichy military police scoured the port with orders to arrest any “subversive” who could not produce proof of passage. People had begun disappearing. Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, who sailed with Lévi-Strauss, described lives “hanging by slender threads” in Marseille, where the “talent and expertise of Paris . . . in the days of her prime” were reduced to “hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources.”20 Despite the difficulties, the artistic communities that would soon set up in exile—in New York, Buenos Aires and Mexico City—were already forming before they set sail. André Breton and assorted surrealists along with Victor Serge and Varian Fry rented the eighteen-room Villa Air-Bel, where they hosted exhibitions, “auctions,” theater and comedy nights.
The unusually mild autumn of 1940 gave way to one of the coldest winters on record. A biting mistral blew off the Massif Central, streaming down the Rhône Valley. Snow dusted the Mediterranean. Shortages of food and heating oil signaled the beginning of the long, hard slog through the war years. His papers now in order, Lévi-Strauss came down from the Cévennes and did the r
ounds of Marseille’s drafty shipping offices. He heard rumors that a ship was about to leave for Martinique and tracked it down to the Compagnie des transports maritimes—the very same shipping company that he and his academic colleagues had used on half a dozen trips to and from Brazil. A company official who remembered Lévi-Strauss from the Brazil days confirmed that a ship was setting sail for the Caribbean the next month, but tried to dissuade him from taking it, being “unable to tolerate the idea that one of his former first-class passengers should be transported like livestock.”21
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Page 14