WHAT HAS BECOME OF THEM?
61
.
Gertrude Stein
recently sent her publisher, from somewhere in unoc–
cupied France, the manuscript of her new novel. Called
Ida,
it is modeled
on the life of the Duchess of Windsor, though the Random House reader
was not able to guess it from the manuscript itself. It is reported that she
has since come to the United States, where she arrived incognito and lives
unrecognized. According to other, more reliable, sources, she is still in the
south of France or in Belgium.
Kay Boyle
wrote a letter to the October
View
from Megeve, a town in Italian-occupied France, in which she said
she might come to the United States.
Julian Green,
an expatriate longer
than she, is now in Virginia writing a new novel.
Ezra Pound,
after spend·
ing a year in this country, has returned to Rapallo, Italy, where he is still
at the last report writing cantos.
T. S. Eliot
is an air-raid warden in Surrey;
John Strachey
is one in
London.
Stephen Spender
is in England, where, with Cyril Connolly, he
continues to edit
Horizon. Louis MacNeice,
who had been in this country
for some time, was recently called back to England for military service.
Dylan
Thomas
is in an anti-aircraft unit on the Channel coast.
Christopher
Isherwood
is working with Metro·Goldwyn-Mayer in California.
W. H.
Auden
has been in this country since before the war.
The Germans had already moved once and had only shallow roots in
French soil; they are scattered all over the earth. In London, among
others, are
Alfred Kerr,
critic;
Max Hermann-Neisse,
poet;
Karl Otten,
novelist.
Arnold Zweig
is in Palestine.
Friedrich Wolf,
author of
Profes–
sor Mamlock,
was in a camp at Vernet d'Ariege. Through the intercession
of the Soviet ambassador, he was released and sent to Russia.
Bertolt
Brecht
escaped from Denmark to one of the Baltic states, also with the
help of Russian officials.
Alfred Neumann
is in Lisbon, on his way here.
Gustav Regier,
who was also in a French camp, is in Mexico City.
Franz
Borkenau,
who had lived in England for six years, was for some months
in a British camp. He has now been deported to Australia; his address is
"Prisoners of War Information Bureau, Melbourne."
Hellmuth Wetzel,
a
poet living in Paris, is in a German prison.
Julius Meier-Graefe
died
recently at Vichy. A few months earlier,
Rene Schickele
had died in Paris.
Walter Hasenclever,
leftwing playwright. killed himself at the Les Milles
camp.
Franz Pfemfert,
onetime editor of
Aktion,
is now with his wife in
New York, Another suicide was
Carol Einstein.
Still a young man, he had
helped to establish in
Bebuquin
and other works a new naturalist trend in
German novels. Released from a camp near Bordeaux, he traveled with
his friends, the Pfemferts, towards the Pyrenees, bJ.lt at Pau threw himself
into the river. The list of German writers in the United States is long:
Stefan Zweig,
now in South .America on a lecture tour;
Heinrich Mann,
who arrived with
Gottfried Mann,
his nephew (Thomas' son), editor of a
Zurich review;
Konrad Heiden,
author of a biography of Hitler;
Leonhard
Frank; Hermann Kesten,
who is now helping at the American Rescue
Committee to bring others over;
Lion Feuchtwanger; Emil Ludwig,
now
in California working on a biography of Trotsky; the novelist
Anna
