Cynthia Ozick Reviews Julie Orringer’s ‘The Flight Portfolio’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/books/review/flight-portfolio-julie-orringer.html

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THE FLIGHT PORTFOLIO By Julie Orringer

Henry James in his tales liked to send his much-advantaged yet inexperienced young Americans abroad, to be steeped in the superior civilization of Europe: its grand boulevards and ancient seats, its paintings, its music, its unsurpassed literary heritage. At 28, on his way to Germany in 1935, Varian Fry of New York, born to affluence and Protestant probity, was just such an impressionable young man. His Harvard degree was in classics. His father was a Wall Street eminence. His bent was intellectual and writerly. And ultimately he did in fact encounter at close quarters European civilization at its 20th-century zenith.

But in 1935, in the streets of Berlin, it was not high culture that he witnessed. It was barbarism: SS thugs savagely beating and bloodying Jews. What he saw then led to his extraordinary entanglement with the most significant thinkers and artists of the time. Five years later, when the Germans had overrun France and the collaborationist Vichy regime took control of what was no longer a refuge for Nazi prey in the south, Fry went to Marseille as a volunteer for a privately organized mission, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Initially encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, its mandate was to facilitate escape for prominent dissidents and luminaries of the arts, many of them Jews: the makers of masterworks, the crème de la crème of European genius. This had a double intent: saving the refugees, and raising the money their fame would elicit to save them.

[ In 1935, The Times published Varian Fry’s account of anti-Jewish rioting in Berlin. ]

By the close of his stubbornly daring sojourn in Marseille, bristling with peril, subterfuge, forgery, bribery and unrelenting hostility, Fry had delivered from the freight cars the lives of more than 2,000 desperate souls, both the renowned and the less so. (Among the renowned: Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Jacques Lifschitz, Golo Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Arthur Koestler, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Alma Mahler, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Max Ophüls and countless others.) And if the young Varian Fry once resembled a type of dramatically evolving character in fiction, he has now become, in Julie Orringer’s sympathetic and prodigiously ambitious novel, a fictional character himself.

Orringer’s scrupulous research into this turbulent period goes far beyond bookishness. Her landscapes regularly rise to a Keatsian sensuousness. Her Marseille breathes as a city breathes: architecture, gardens, streets, hotels, cafes, skies, smells, weather, food, cigarettes, the interiors of suites, offices, prisons, internment camps, the moods of authority and tyranny and spite, the cunning of confederates and criminals, the fury of betrayal by seeming allies. She evokes the crooked geography of flight — Spain, Portugal, Martinique, the trek on foot over the Pyrenees, the ships that disappoint. Many of her pivotal figures are familiar to history: Hiram Bingham, the heroic American vice consul who lavishly issued salvational visas to despairing Jews; Hugh Fullerton, the consul general who thwarted Bingham on the advice of Cordell Hull, the Roosevelt administration’s compliant secretary of state; and the idiosyncratic panoply of Fry’s assistants. All these, and the hapless refugees themselves, Orringer revivifies with cinematic verisimilitude. Yet it is the beating heart of Varian Fry that is the means and purpose of “The Flight Portfolio.”

A biography can read like a novel. Ought a novel to pose as a biography? Like an egg with two yolks, Orringer’s novel has two centers: the trustworthy chronicle of the Emergency Rescue Committee, and the mind of Varian Fry. The first is at hand. The second is a door with no key. But must the verifiable past surrender to the sovereignty of imagination? Confident that it must, Orringer goes where no exacting biographer will go, and where the novelist is hotly obliged to go — into the veiled precincts of Fry’s psyche: “He had always thought, given enough time, that he could crack any code, unravel any knot, unmaze any maze, master any beast, however venomous or wily. Since childhood he’d lived in an adversarial dance with his own mind, filling it with whatever seemed impossible, daring it to prove him wrong.”

The novelist is obliged also to the commands of plot — plot seething in contrivance, stratagem, revelation. In service to these, “The Flight Portfolio” invents a knot of intertwined characters, who together come to dominate, even to override, and finally to invade the historical Fry. In Orringer’s scheme, we learn that her fictive Varian and her fictive Elliott Grant had once been lovers; at Harvard they quarreled and parted. Now, after 12 years, Grant turns up in Marseille, hoping to find and rescue Tobias Katznelson, an Einstein-like young prodigy whom the Germans mean to seize for his value to weaponry development. Grant’s interest in the boy is motivated by his sexual intimacy with Tobias’s father, already safe in New York. But here in tumultuous Marseille Varian and Grant renew their old passion; plot begins to outstrip all else. Soon Varian’s lover’s obsession will overtake and outweigh — and then devour — whatever remains of biographical verity. And Tobias is not what he seems to be: the ruse leads to the endangerment of a celebrated (fictive) painter.

The novel of chase-and-elude differs from the so-called literary novel not so much in its frantic excitements as in its influence on character. In one, story grows organically out of the elastic complexity of individuated traits. In the other, character is conditioned and flattened by contrivance. Even the glamour of the homoerotic, which fuels Orringer’s engine of suspense, turns threadbare through overexposure. In scene after scene, Varian’s leg slides seductively (and also schematically) along Grant’s; or vice versa. For the historical Fry, beyond hunches and hints, there is no evidence of homosexuality. Yet Orringer makes it a part of his character, expanding on speculations by Fry’s biographer, Andy Marino. “The skills Fry had developed to cope with and express his ‘deviance’ from the norm over the years,” Marino writes, “may have stood him in good stead for the illicit and secret activities he took to so naturally and performed so extraordinarily well in France.” Might this be a Freudian leap too far? A leap that lands Orringer’s Varian in another man’s bed.

The mind of the Varian Fry of “The Flight Portfolio” is Orringer’s mind, and how, in the war between history and imagination, can we deny her that? Literature is everywhere rife with parallel precedents. Shakespeare’s Henry V is Shakespeare’s mind. Tolstoy’s Napoleon is Tolstoy’s mind. Then why should it matter that Orringer’s vertiginous unscrollings of event and intent, unfolding in the south of France in the very pit of Vichy brutality, are chiefly her own? But it does matter. Today we have no stake in the Battle of Agincourt. We have no stake in the Napoleonic wars. But we do have a stake in whatever touches on the historical integrity of the Holocaust, now increasingly denied, diminished, demoted, misapplied, perverted, derided; or else utterly erased. And what of the re-creation of a historical figure crucial to the necessary truth of a half-forgotten reality?

Yet “The Flight Portfolio” will, to a degree, educate. It exposes America’s dogged reluctance, at the very summit of its political will, to take in refugee Jews. It uncovers a moral flaw inherent in the primary aim of the Emergency Rescue Committee, premised on the principle of Orwell’s Animal Farm. World-famous Chagall — yes. A pious 15-year-old in an obscure town in the remote Carpathians, who will one day be known as Elie Wiesel — no. Still, it was the real-life Varian Fry, writing in The New Republic in 1942, who recorded not the fate of Europe’s superstars, but as his title had it, “The Massacre of the Jews.”

A thriller is above all meant to excite and enthrall. “The Flight Portfolio” is more Hitchcock than history. Then know, as you read on, excited and enthralled, that Orringer’s Varian is movie-tone make-believe. Do not mistake him for Varian Fry.