Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop analyses truth and fiction in TRANSATLANTIC (Anna Winger, Daniel Hendler, Germany/France, 2023)

 

 

 

Despairing of his country’s muted indifference to the war in Europe, 32-year-old Varian Fry left the USA in 1940 for Marseille with $3000 strapped to his leg. There, he led a volunteer team to assist more than 2000 refugees escape from Vichy France. 

The refugees included artists and intellectuals many of whom walked across the Pyrenees to Spain, or left by boat with forged documents to safe ports, en route the USA.

The refugees included film director Max Ophüls; writers Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler and Walter Benjamin; artists Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba Breton; musicians Pablo Casals and Wanda Landowska; Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof; and the philosopher and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. 

Known as “the American Schindler”, Varian Fry received the only official recognition of his work in 1967, five months before his death. André Malraux, then Minister of Cultural Affairs awarded Fry the croix de Chevalier of the French Legion d’Honneur. Malraux had visited Fry in Marseille in 1941, but had refused his offer to escape from France, instead entrusting Fry with the reels of his Spanish Civil War film L’espoir (1940). 

Varian Fry, Marseilles, 1941

The television series Transatlantic was ‘inspired’ by Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, a weighty novel that ‘fictionalizes’ the work of Varian Fry and his collaborators. In its closing titles, Transatlantic claims to be a “a work of fiction inspired by real people and real events”.

Factual history and historical fiction are really at issue here.

A lot happened during Fry’s fourteen months in Marseille and both Orringer and the television series creators Anna Winger and Daniel Hendler have a lot to choose from. Or maybe…just make-it-up…sorry, I mean create ‘historical fiction’.

Orringer, for instance, creates a major and entirely fictional character for her novel – Elliot Shiffman Grant. He is the second most important character after Fry, and also Fry’s past lover. Grant joins him in Marseille to renew their closeted relationship and provide the novel with its central emotional arc, even if none of it is actually true. 

Varian Fry, 1967

Winger and Hendler dispense with Grant entirely in their television series and, instead, use a Thomas Lovegrove as Fry’s gay lover. But he, too, is entirely invented for romantic interest. 

Fry’s son has confirmed to The New York Times that his father was gay, but the Orringer and the television series creators have gifted Fry lovers who never existed. 

In the novel, Orringer gives Hannah Arendt only a few pages. She comes to see Fry looking for help to escape Vichy France. He immediately tells her he will try to obtain visas to the US for her and her husband. In the television series, Arendt is a slightly more substantial character, but is forcefully told by Fry on several occasions he cannot provide her with a visa. Quite confusing.

In Transatlantic, the escape route over the Pyrenees is compromised by British Intelligence who want British POWs taken to Spain. Fry’s lover, the fictional Thomas Lovegrove, turns out to be working for the British. In the novel, the route is never compromised, nor are there any British POWs, nor British Intelligence operatives and certainly no Thomas Lovegrove. 

Alexander Fehling as Max Ernst, Johdi May as Peggy Guggenheim

Other sources do claim Fry worked for British Intelligence and did help British pilots escape, suggesting it was a source of income to keep his refugee operation afloat.  It was, after all, a murky war, where casualties include the truth.

The novel also details the Flight Portfolio project - drawings from the surrealist artists seeking Fry’s help to escape. The drawings were to be smuggled to New York for a sale designed to raise funds for more escapees. But the Vichy police confiscated the drawings in a raid. 

In fact, there was no such Flight Portfolio project until 30 years later. In 1971, four years after Fry’s death, the International Rescue Committee published a portfolio of lithographs, limited to 250, under the title FLIGHT. Fry, who started the project in New York in 1964, found it difficult to assemble the work. In The Rescuer (2012), Dara Horn notes that a reluctant Marc Chagall finally contributed, but refused to sign his work. Max Ernst refused numerous requests from Fry, only ‘capitulating’ when Fry travelled to France to beg him. André Breton just flatly refused. 

If these claims from Dara Horn are true, this reluctance to engage years later with the refugee cause and with the man who could legitimately claim to have saved their lives is very puzzling. Something is missing here.

Fictionalization, however, allows Orringer to take the idea of a ‘Flight Portfolio’ from 1971 and re-plant it to Marseille in 1941. It’s such a good idea for a book title, after all.

Historical fiction is still fiction.

One real character from the time, who didn’t make it into either the novel or the television series, was a volunteer Varian Fry called a ‘moral adventurer’ – the ex-pat American Charles Fernley Fawcett: a wrestler, Foreign Legionnaire, social butterfly, trumpet player, songwriter, composer, artist, B-film actor (more than 50 credits), and for Varian Fry in Marseille, a doorman-receptionist. Fawcett wore his ambulance corps uniform as he managed the queues of refugees lining up for interviews with Fry. 

Cory Michael Smith as Varian Fry

Fawcett engaged in six bigamous marriages in a three-month period during the war, marrying Jewish women from Nazi internment camps so they could leave on American visas. At one point, two “Mrs. Fawcetts” turned up in Lisbon at the same time. 

His exclusion from the novel and from Transatlantic only testifies to the wealth of real - and imaginary - characters available. 

Leaving aside the surrealist artists’ party (nude in the novel, clothed in the television series), ‘fictionalization’ can produce some imaginative moments.

In the television series, surrealist artists André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba Breton and Max Ernst loiter around a swimming pool improvising poetry:

“Hug the dull. Prickly thorns are below.

In his slippers, a snail has lost his armor,

But he has found a mailbox.

The rain falls upside down.

It is blown by the currents, like ribbons.

The gray-black clouds are reflected on the skin of the sardines.

Swindled under the influence of their lumber pains!”

 

In Orringer’s book, when André Breton is escaping Marseille by boat, Breton says to Fry:

“There is no purer embodiment of surrealism than the departure from land onto a borderless plane of water. One sails over the bodies of millions of creatures, many of them unknown to man – even over mountains uncharted, mountains higher than the highest peaks in Tibet – entirely without consciousness, without the slightest knowledge of their existence. One might, for example, while sitting in the ship’s dining room and eating iced pineapple, sail over a great underwater current propelling a fleet of leviathans and their children, thousands of tons of oily flesh moving invisibly and inaudibly along that unbound underwater river like giant corpuscles through the bloodstream of the world.”