By Mel Freilicher
A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry by Andy Marino on St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999
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Varian Fry arrived in Marseille in August 1940, representing the Emergency Rescue Committee, with a list of 200 intellectuals, artists, labor activists, journalists, and scientists certain to be rounded up by the Gestapo. By the time he was expelled from Vichy, France a year later, Fry had, incredibly, arranged the escapes of nearly fifteen hundred people (estimates run as high as four thousand, including family members). And the organization he established there, continuing to function under increasingly difficult conditions, almost certainly smuggled several hundred more exiles out of the country.
Fry managed to rescue many of the most significant figures of the time, contributing enormously to America’s post-war ascent as the world’s cultural capital. To name a few: Andre Breton and his wife; visual artists Marc Chagall (who would only agree to leave France after Fry assured him there were, indeed, cows in the United States), Andre Masson, Sophie Tauber, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Matta, Jacques Lipschitz, Wilfredo Lam, Jean Arp; writers and intellectuals, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, Kurt and Helen Woolff, Leon Feuchtwanger, Victor Serge, Franz Werfel, Claude Levi-Strauss, Siegfried Kracauer; Dr. Otto Meyerhof, the Nobel prize winning biochemist; the harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska
At a banquet, quickly formulated in New York following France’s surrender to Germany--occupying the northern part of the country, including Paris, of course, they nominally established the Vichy government in the south, with WW1 hero Marshall Petain as its leader--Erika Mann (Thomas’ daughter) proposed creating a new organization. The overflowing crowd provided initial funding for the Emergency Rescue Committee. After two weeks of fruitless searching for a leader, Varian Fry, who’d volunteered to go to France, was asked to do so to represent the ERC.
Their original list was compiled in New York by an eminent group of experts and representatives of certain categories of refugees: Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art; the “Emperor of German Letters,” the already exiled Thomas Mann; the French theologian Jacques Maritain; novelist Jules Romain, and journalists and political refugees from Italy, Czechoslovakia, Spain and Austria.
Fry, as Andy Marino points out, “a neurasthenic intellectual and expert on the ancient Greeks,” hardly fit the tough, clear thinking prototype of a hero. But he was fluent in German and French, and as an American would be far more efficient than Europeans in liaisons with American consulates and embassies. Having been to England in the 1930s, Fry saw how unprepared the country was for war. Moreover, in Germany in 1935, he’d witnessed a vicious anti-Jewish riot which changed his life forever.
Rushing from his hotel to the street, Varian first encountered a mob beating an elderly victim to death; when his wife tried to intervene, a fist smashed her in the face, and she too was pulled into the blood orgy. Then Fry realized beatings were going on all around him while storm troopers loitered in the streets. The crowd was intoning the line, “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife…Then things will go even better.”
Fry believed he was witnessing “nothing less than an inversion of the Christian liturgy,” according to Marino. “For all its dancing insanity, for all its murderous frenzy, he was sensitive to a ritual aspect of the pogrom.” The thought flashing through his mind: this was the beginning of a religious crusade against the devil of “Jew-Bolshevism.” The next day, his Associated Press report on what he’d seen made front page of the New York Times, and America had its first glimpse of Nazism in action.
Fry arrived in Marseille with a six-month passport, and no governmental authority. He did have letters of introduction from the YMCA, and American Red Cross, and through Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence, an official State Dept. letter of introduction which gave him, in practical terms, very nearly but extremely temporary, diplomatic status.
Marseille is France’s oldest city, Roman in its roots, nautical since the 7th century B.C. when Phoenicians plied the waters of the Mediterranean and first showed up there. Arguably the toughest place in France, with its transient human traffic from Africa and the Orient, and its solidly established Corsican gangsterism—earning for itself the sobriquet, “the French Chicago.” One of Fry’s agents said of the inhabitants, “Half of them were gangsters and the other half wanted to be.”
In the ancient part of the city, police dared not enter a system of caverns, hollowed out within and beneath the medieval warren of streets and buildings. An entire invisible netherworld of secret warehouses, hideouts, gambling dens and killing floors nestled undisturbed; its denizens knew which sewers led into the waters of the harbor, where they would toss the severed heads of their enemies. The Nazis dynamited the whole area in 1942 as a “hygienic measure,” revealing for the first time in 1500 years the Roman docks buried below.
Installing himself in a small room in the Hotel Splendide, Fry began contacting others already working with refugees, starting with Dr. Frank Bohn—living in a room in the same hotel—sent there by the American Federation of Labor to extract various labor leaders, union officials, and democratic politicians: exiles who had “eventually slid into that bilge of hope, Marseille.”
Bohn connected Fry to the Red Cross, and the Quakers, and most importantly, to Dr. Donald Lowrie, representative of the international YMCA; a seasoned relief worker, he’d been in Prague when the Nazis invaded, and helped many escape. Lowrie provided connections to printers of fake passports. Soon Fry’s organization became adept at forging passports unlikely to be scrutinized, from countries like Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Poland, and China.
At first, some genuine American visas could still be obtained, where a refugee was famous in his field or of “outstanding quality,” besides satisfying a host of other requirements. But the U.S. government hadn’t entered the war yet and was wary of alienating the puppet Vichy government. Plus, many key Washington insiders, especially the moribund, 69-year-old Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, were extremely hostile to the idea of importing Jews and Bolsheviks. Any potential refugee could be rejected if Washington officials deemed them “liable to become a public charge.”
From the start, escape routes and guides had to be invented and reinvented. Initially, the most frequent route was to lead refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain. Then get them on trains to Lisbon; though some border guards were Fascist sympathizers, others not at all. But both Spanish and Portuguese borders kept opening and closing, often with no warning. And many individuals wouldn’t be safe in Spain because they had fought in the Spanish civil war.
Nightmarish, totally Kafkaesque rules about paperwork also meant Fry and compadres needed to constantly revise tactics. Usually, transit visas and booked passages on ships were both required for departure; sometimes exit visas from Spain and Portugal were also necessary—making it nearly impossible to get all the requisite travel documents together at the same time. Almost invariably, one set of papers would expire before others could be obtained.
Neglecting to contact the police since he arrived in town, two months later they contacted Fry—with a surprise inspection of his and Bohn’s hotel rooms. Managing to slide his map of escape routes behind a mirror, and to destroy incriminating papers, including lists of safe houses for refugees and sources of forged documents, Fry asked the American consulate and a young lawyer, Gaston Defferre, to accompany him to the police station. (In the postwar years, Deferre became the longtime mayor of Marseille, and Francois Mitterand’s Minister of the Interior in the 1980s.)
Fry quickly took on a staff of three. Miriam Davenport turned out to be a godsend. Graduating from Smith College in 1938 with high honors, continuing to study art history on a scholarship from the Sorbonne, she fell in love with a Yugoslavian art student, and decided to complete her education there, supporting herself by teaching English. When the Germans launched their spring offensive against Holland and Belgium, Miriam returned to Paris alone. Right before the German army’s march into the city, she caught the last train south to Toulouse (the line was bombed the next day) where she managed to sit for her exams.
Miriam became a reluctant judge of artistic merit. Many “ordinary” refugees petitioned the Emergency Rescue Committee for assistance, as artists or intellectuals. Some were genuinely talented but unknown (Miriam called them “the near misses”). If a potential client claimed to be a painter, she would send them down to make a sketch of the harbor. When they returned, she’d appraise the drawing and either place the artists on the list of Fry’s clientele, or express regrets.
A heartbreaking situation. “To turn away people on the basis of their talent (or lack of it) seemed to everybody a bloodless method of judging human worth,” Marino comments.
Corridors around Fry’s hotel room became increasingly crowded with refugees. Wary of the loose security which Bohn and others seemed to employ, with help Fry was able to incorporate his enterprise in its own offices, as the Centre Americain de Secours: believing undercover operations were safest when they looked completely, transparently innocent. Meanwhile, illegal escapes were proceeding at full speed.
Their offices were bombarded when word got around about the Centre being a “kind of deluxe relief bureau for a special type of client, the intellectual who has never before had to ask for help of this kind,” as Fry put it. He became rather desperate for both greater privacy and a more capacious space to house staff and associates.
Miriam Davenport brought in her friend, Mary Jayne Gold, an enormously wealthy American heiress whose affluent, leftist circles proved of great value to Fry’s continual need for funding. “A late version of what was called a ‘flapper’ in the twenties,” Mary Jayne lived in a large apartment in one of the better districts of Paris. Outgoing, blond and “beautiful in a chipmunkish way,” she had her own monoplane which she flew over Europe, following the snow in winter and the sun in summer. When war was declared, Ms. Gold donated her plane to the French air force; it was probably one of their fastest crafts.
One day, Miriam and Mary Jayne took a trolley from the central city to a semi-rural suburb. Walking through the ravishing autumn scenery, they came across a FOR RENT sign planted in the ground at the beginning of a long drive. At the far end, they could see an imposing three-story house surrounded by gardens, woodland and water with a fabulous view across the valley to the distant, shimmering sea. The sign said “Villa Air-Bel”: a big, bourgeois family residence on the 19th century model, with 18 rooms. The kitchen had a coal stove 20 feet long.
The many bedrooms were equipped with large mahogany beds, embellished marble fireplaces and marble-topped washstands. Like Miriam, Fry was overcome with a feeling of destiny at Villa Air-Bel. He inhabited the library, featuring monochrome wallpaper depicting scenes from Greco-Roman mythology. The first one he identified was Aeneas’ fight from Troy. Fry agreed with T.S. Eliot—Aeneas was the first refugee.
There followed “a term of halcyon days, time almost out of time, and more extraordinary than Fry expected.” Miriam and other staff members moved in along with a number of refugees waiting to leave France, like the shy, 18-year-old son of Nobel Prize winner, Otto Meyerhof (who’d already escaped to the U.S. with his wife). Temporary residents included the writer, Victor Serge, his wife and son, Vladi, “a red-hot young Marxist” who Fry liked to argue with: “How can an intelligent young man swallow all that garbage?” was a typical rejoinder.
Victor Sege had survived more than ten of his fifty-seven years in captivity. Five years in a French penitentiary (“anarchist bandit”); nearly two years in a WWI concentration camp (“Bolshevik suspect”); three months grueling interrogation in a notorious Moscow prison, then three years deportation to Central Asia for refusing to recant his oppositional views or confess to trumped up charges. (Serge had joined the Reds in the 1917 revolution, was a Leninist then a Trotskyist, always opposed to Stalin.)
Another client who moved in straightaway was Andre Breton, the poet commonly referred to as the Pope of Surrealism, with his daughter and “equally Surrealist wife, the stiletto-tongued and deadly sexy Jacqueline Harris.” (They’d met when she’d been an aquatic dancer in a giant fish tank in a Paris club.) In Assignment: Rescue, one of two books Fry wrote after the war, he described Jacqueline as “blonde and beautiful and savage…she work necklaces of tiger’s teeth and tiny bits of mirror glass in her hair.”
Breton’s presence served as a magnet for nearly all the Surrealists and Cubists congregated in or near Marseille. Frequent visitors included Max Ernst, Andre Masson, the poet Benjamin Peret, the black Cuban Cubist, Wilfredo Lam, one of Picasso’s very rare students, the novelist Kay Boyle, and the Comtesse de Saint-Exupery, wife of Antoine, the famous French novelist. Providing much needed funds, Peggy Guggenheim appeared after evacuating the paintings from her museum at Grenoble. (She and Max Ernst soon married, briefly.)
With Breton as Master of Ceremonies, the crowd delighted in playing the sort of games Surrealism was famous for, such as “Exquisite Corpses,” where each player added a section of a drawing to a folded over piece of paper as it was passed around, so nobody knew what had already been drawn: designed to reveal a kind of collective subconscious, to disrupt the flow of habitual perception and assumptions. There were art auctions, painting competitions, “and all manner of sophisticated rowdiness, laughter and argument.” One of the most beautiful creations was a collective effort, a pack of redesigned Tarot cards.
Despite increasing tensions in the world around them, the atmosphere at the Villa (renamed by Victor Serge, “Chateau Espere-Visa”) provided great relief for Fry, who was carried along by the mayhem of the whole “mad group” as he called it: enabling him to balance a natural reserve, and need for remoteness with a developing desire for play and companionship he’d never previously enjoyed. About a photograph of Fry fooling around up a tree, while the Comtesse bounces on an outlying limb, Marino comments, only a month earlier, “this would have been as unlikely as finding an elephant wedged in a submarine.”
The author’s admirably detailed account of Varian Fry’s complex, and confounding attempts to rescue refugees starts with finding, then helping to hide, them until they were ready to leave. Meeting with the British ambassador to Spain in Madrid, Fry was essentially recruited as a British agent to smuggle their soldiers out of France. In return, the ambassador paid $10,000 to the New York office of the Emergency Rescue Committee.
In October, Marshall Petain met with Hitler: his subsequent broadcast to the nation announced, “I enter into the way of collaboration.” “Until then,” Marino comments, “many French people desperately wanted to believe the fiction that their government was doing only what was essential to safeguard the honor of France.” Nonetheless, the French had already adopted a number of anti-Jewish laws, barring employment in the teaching, journalism, motion picture and radio professions. All foreign Jews could be arrested by the police.
Laws from the previous decade had set quotas for foreigners in certain occupations and made it much more difficult to become a naturalized French citizen. In July, 1940, the citizenship of people naturalized since 1927 was revoked. Immediately, 15,000 foreign born Frenchmen and women found themselves without passports or any of the rights they’d enjoyed the day before. In time, this would become one of Vichy government’s most powerful weapons in the battle to rid the country of “inferior breeds”—namely, Jews.
After Petain’s declaration, French police suddenly became more active: a series of raids picked up many refugees who were sent to concentration camps. Also, the Kundst Commission, a group of German Army officers and Gestapo agents, began more intensively searching French concentration camps for individuals the Gestapo wanted to deport to Germany.
Initially, Fry had mostly been concerned with hateful article 19 of the armistice with Germany which stated the French government “must surrender on demand” all refugees from the Greater German Reich—including Austrians, Czechs, and Poles. But now the rightward momentum made him realize he’d have to help French citizens as well, in danger from their government. Additionally, when Frank Bohn left Marseille, he asked Fry to take over his task of rescuing various European socialist and labor movement leaders.
In December, Marshall Petain visited Marseille, and Fry remarked, “The police action amounted literally to hysteria.” Four boats, four forts, and three movie houses in addition to the jails and prisons had been filled with the arrested. At the last minute, police locked people into cafes and restaurants until Petain passed. In all, twenty thousand people had been arrested. “The Marshall’s visit,” Fry wrote, “had been a huge success.”
Marino goes into some depth on a number of individual refugee’s stories. The author, Leon Feuchtwanger, for example, second man (after Heinrich Mann) who Hitler decreed to be no longer German, was rumored to be interned in a German concentration camp. But he was actually smuggled out of Marseille, over the Pyrenees to Barcelona where a large Red Cross symbol was emblazoned on his suitcase.
There, he was in the two-stall bathroom of the train station, when a Gestapo officer walking in, unbuttoned his fly. Seeing the suitcase, he began asking Feuchtwanger in Russian-accented English about America. Replying in Bavarian-accented English, he managed to bluff his way through a brief conversation. Later, at the customs queue at the Portuguese border, a cry of “Mr. Feuchtwanger!” went up from an American journalist. The agent accompanying the author quickly told her to shut up.
When Feuchtwanger’s boat docked in New Jersey, he was met with a battalion of pressmen. Unfortunately, he responded to their eager questions by revealing practically everything Fry had been so strenuously denying to the American embassy and French authorities. The reporters savored every detail, including how Leon has been dressed as a woman for part of the journey, and went so far as to expose the “vast rescue machine that has worked quietly and efficiently for Mr. Feuchtwanger and many others in his circumstances.”
Fry and his team were “stunned, speechless, livid.” There was no explanation for what Feuchtwanger had done, assesses Marino, “except perhaps an unplumbable naivete or an unforgivable opportunistic ego.” Having no qualms about reporting the details of the escape, the American press then “quickly discovered there was mileage in criticizing Feuchtwanger for his recklessness.” Time magazine reported, “Far from charmed was the Emergency Rescue Committee. They thought Anton [sic] Feuchtwanger might as well be talking to the Gestapo.”
Almost immediately afterwards, the Spanish border was closed. Sometimes Fry could still make contact with trusted underground cells working in Spain to conduct refugees all the way to Lisbon. Also these routes remained valuable for smuggling British soldiers. If caught on the Spanish side, they’d be interned as prisoners of war; if caught in France, they would be shipped off to German concentration camps.
An infamous, tragic situation occurred when Walter Benjamin, “one of the most insightful, original, and eccentric individuals of the 20th century” who’d already been incarcerated in a French concentration camp, crossed the mountains with other refugees. Reaching the customs house on the Spanish border, he was told the border was closed and he’d have to return to France.
Permitted to stay overnight in the town because of his weakened condition, Benjamin swallowed the fifteen morphine tablets he’d brought with him and was found dead the following morning. The next day, the border was opened again.
“The truth is,” Marino argues, “Benjamin probably killed himself to save the manuscript…he’d dragged all the way to the border in a heavy suitcase.” He “must have assumed that his death would be noted and that someone would come for his belongings, take away his briefcase, and see to it that his masterwork was published.” The manuscript has never been found.
After a number of failed or disastrous attempts—ravaged by storms, and human greed—Fry’s organization secured ships to carry refugees to northern Africa. British soldiers were transported all over the Mediterranean: to Syria, North Africa, Gibraltar, Rabat, Casablanca, and even to Dakar. A number of ships were then able to bring refugees to some of these ports and to Martinique, before Vichy cracked down, canceling all sailings from Marseille.
Having overstayed his visa by six months, Fry was facing increasing pressure to leave the country—both from the Vichy and American governments as well as from some vociferous, key elements within the Emergency Rescue Committee back in New York. Fry’s futile trip to Vichy headquarters to try to renew his passport came two weeks after Germany had broken the golden rule of warfare (“never attack Russia.”)
Almost as soon as he returned to Marseille, the Vichy government was convulsed by the attempted assassination at Versailles of Pierre Laval, Minister of Justice and Vice-Premier, by a man who was part of the circle of would-be resisters surrounding Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. The assassin failed, though the wound to Laval’s liver was grave. A week before that, a German was killed on the Paris Metro.
Something in France was awakening after the long shock of defeat,” Marino asserts, “and the collaborationist regime suddenly felt vulnerable, its mandate openly challenged for perhaps the first time.” Within four days of returning to Marseille, Fry was picked up and ordered to leave the country immediately—no recourse.
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Returning home, Fry was critical of the State Dept. Even before leaving LaGuardia airport, quoted as saying the Dept. had acted “stupidly”: describing one case where because of delays in granting a visa, a refugee was in the hands of the Gestapo. Soon afterwards, he wrote, “Any American official who collaborates with Vichy, and through Vichy with the Gestapo, against an American citizen, is guilty of something not wholly unlike treason.”
Applying to join the Army, Fry was classified as 4-F: a duodenal ulcer noted as “pathogenic.” His application to join the O.S.S. was rejected because of the rumor he was a communist—having helped so many left-leaning refugees escape. Actually, always anti-communist, by 1945 those feelings had hardened.
Fry quickly resigned as assistant editor of The New Republic following a disagreement over his editorial condemning Soviet judicial murders. A few years later, after a bitter quarrel in which he more or less accused magazine personnel of being “fellow travelers,” Varian asked for his name to be removed from the masthead. Also leaving his position as editor of the journal, Common Sense, and his post as executive director of the American Labor Conference on International Affairs.
Although Andy Marino describes Fry’s “middle years” as “settled and basically contented ones,” the transition was rough. He had married Eileen Avery Hughes soon after graduating from Harvard. Also working with the Emergency Rescue Committee while Varian was in France, their correspondence during the war, on both business and personal matters, was fraught with miscommunication compounded by long delays. When he returned home, it was clear the marriage, initially a close one, was at an end.
They remained good friends. In 1948, Eileen was dying of lung cancer, and Varian was at her bedside daily, reading to her. She had gone to work at the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and the last thing Fry read to her was a note, signed “A. Einstein”: “I feel very sorry that you have to suffer so badly. You are too unselfish for this world and should have somebody to protect you. I wish with all my heart that you may soon feel well.”
Seven years older than her husband, Eileen was from an old Boston family; like Varian’s, respectably middle class but not wealthy. When they met, she was working as an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, and possessed the glamour, assurance, and sophistication of an older woman. Intelligent and unconventional, Marino describes Eileen as a “gentle and tolerant woman who could also be as stubborn and bossy as Fry himself.” Probably, “Eileen was responsible for his political awakening.”
In the early days of their relationship, Fry tried to both impress and scandalize Eileen, succeeding in the first but failing in the latter. She “tolerated Fry’s showing off and the tantrums that went with it,” because she so very much respected his intelligence. Before they ever met, Eileen knew a lot about Varian: she was the best friend of his friend’s, Lincoln Kirstein’s, sister.
At Harvard, viewing themselves as “literary swashbucklers,” Varian and Lincoln, who later became known as a writer, impresario, philanthropist, and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, began their own literary journal lampooning the Harvard Advocate. The Hound and Horn became known colloquially as The Bitch and the Bugle. A sort of revenge on the establishment, this very successful enterprise had a wide reputation beyond their undergrad circles: from the start, “unlettered sports fanciers sent in unsolicited advertisements for geldings, dachshunds, Airedales.”
As an undergraduate, Fry cultivated an image of foppish aristocrat who would take “inordinate care over how he dressed, and demand a knife and fork to eat a hamburger.” Kirstein wasn’t Varian’s only gay friend. Attracted to those like himself, he seems to have been open and rather provocative about it. In 1926—the year he passed the Harvard entrance exam in the top 10% nationally—Varian became inseparable from his first real best friend, a Scandinavian visitor.
Johannes Martens wrote Fry about “my two visits to Harvard, and a weekend in Westport where your parents had rented a house and you had invited three boyfriends.” Bright and gregarious in his own way, inevitably narcissistic, “scandalous behavior was part and parcel of Fry’s persona at this time.” This carefully created image had emerged fully after he’d suffered intense hazing and ostracism at the exclusive prep school where his parents had sent him.
Growing up a “strategic hypochondriac,” chiefly to get out of school to go bird-watching, Varian’s parents decided Hotchkiss was the right academy to prepare their son for the Ivy Leagues. There for his academic abilities, Fry didn’t share his persecutors’ background of wealth and privilege. He was made to hang from a boiling hot water pipe running the length of the dormitory, and proceed to the far end, hand over hand: one of the ordeals, continuing well into his sophomore year, which Varian never forgot or forgave.
The summer after his second year in college, his parents sent him to Europe, Greece and Turkey, whetting his appetite for antiquity, and leading to a Classical studies major in Greek and Latin. Forced to repeat his senior year, after spotting a FOR SALE sign on a Chinese laundry and planting it on the dean’s front lawn, he graduated at the onset of the Depression. It would be Varian Fry, “the iconoclast, the aloof non-joiner, the snob, the school drudge, who organized and led the Harvard contingent in a march for jobs down Broadway.”
Prior to the Emergency Rescue Committee, Fry held a number of jobs: assistant editor at Consumer Research magazine, researcher at Time, then assistant editor at Scholastic magazine. In 1935, he heard through friends that Quincy Howe was leaving his job as editor of the prestigious review of international affairs, The Living Age. Given the responsibility of finding his replacement, Howe offered Fry the position on one condition: he visit Germany, because nobody in America seemed to know exactly what was going on there.
Following his AP coverage of Nazi bloodlust, Varian worked diligently for the Spanish Aid Committee, until the organization’s internal struggles began between Communists and anti-Communists, led by Norman Thomas, Socialist candidate in the past three presidential elections. Fry was supposed to be speaking for the moderates in the developing tug-of-war, but characteristically, expressed his anti-Communist views so strongly, he alienated the Socialists as well. He was sacrificed to expediency.
The “contented middle years” include Varian’s second marriage. He met Annette Riley a year after Eileen’s death. Almost twenty years his junior, Annette, the daughter of the head of the Philosophy Department at Vassar, was dazzled by Fry’s truly amazing accomplishments. Moving to suburban Connecticut, they settled down to raising their 3 children. By then, Fry was writing freelance reports, brochures, and documentary film scripts for Fortune 500 companies.
Making good money, “at the same time he enjoyed ridiculing the doltish mentality of his corporate clients.” As creative writing instructor in New York’s City College, Varian kept his hand in teaching. The two books Fry wrote soon after he returned from France were well received but made little impact: readers were more interested in praising the U.S. than blaming the State Department for its mistakes—basically, everyone wanted to move on.
Gradually becoming absorbed into more or less full-time work for one of his major employers, Coca Cola, the pull of Classics led him back into part-time teaching: in addition to Greek and Latin, Fry found himself filling in as a French tutor. He grew more discontent: his hypochondria “had kept pace with his grouchiness,” and now his health was starting to fail.
Irritable and depressed, after twelve years Fry was sacked by Coca Cola. His crime? A report he wrote at the request of the company, on the inferior illumination of its drink dispensaries compared to Pepsi’s, attributing this to management negligence over a period of decades. The next year, the director of the Episcopalian Day School where he was teaching Latin and history also fired him for, among other things, playing a recording of satirist Tom Lehrer’s Vatican Rag to the students. “Clearly, his old mischievousness had not entirely withered away,” Marino comments.
Depression increased, Fry began to suffer from headaches, attacks of dizziness, and tinnitus. Eventually he “could no longer abide his wife merely putting up with him,” and told her to “go get a divorce,” which she did in Mexico. Then Fry, “stricken with remorse,” pleaded for her to come home again. She did that too, writing at the time, her ex-husband was “totally changed from the manic, cold person he had been all summer.”
Before his death in 1967, Varian was awarded the Croix de Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur at the French consulate in New York City. Strictly speaking, the award was not for the work Fry had done in France, but for France, specifically for the Resistance. In 1940 and ’41, the writer Andre Malraux had been refused help by the American embassy to send intelligence to General de Gaulle in London. So Malraux had gone to Fry instead, who arranged to smuggle the information out of the country, through the network of escaping British airmen and soldiers.
At his death, Annette received words of praise for her husband. Jacqueline Lamba-Breton described Varian as “a magnificent man—he thought only of others, never of the danger he himself was in.” Jacques Lipschitz wrote to Annette: “In some way I owe him my life. I did not want to go away from France. It was his severe and clairvoyant letters which helped me finally to do so.”
In 1996, like Oskar Schindler before him, Varian was pronounced, “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel—then the only American to ever be so designated. U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, attended the ceremony and apologized on behalf of the State Department for the treatment Fry had received during his time in France.
Marino’s book concludes with, “’And about time, too,’ Fry would no doubt have replied.”
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.