on reading julie orringer's flight portfolio

Julie Orringer with Katherine Noel - taken at last nights event

In the middle of Julie Orringer's ambitious new novel The Flight Portfolio one of the characters recounts a German proverb. "It goes like this. Who's most important, the farmer who feeds the cow, the cow who makes the milk, or the girl who milks the cow? None of them.  The most important is the boy who carries the milk to the market.  One wrong step and the work of all the others is lost in an instant."

The proverb demonstrates the crucial role that Varian Fry played during Nazi occupied France. Fry is the protagonist of this historical novel, and in 1940 he spearheaded a rescue operation to get imperiled artists and writers out of France.  It involved first verifying who the importance artists were; then obtaining passports and visas, be they forged or legitimate.  In some cases the artists had to be hidden before they found safe passage to the United States.  The work was done without much cooperation from the United States government, with the exception of some heroic efforts on the part of Hiram Bingham, a vice consul who against State Department guidelines issued hundreds of visas.

You can imagine too, the moral questions besetting such a program. With a limited number of visas on hand, who was deemed worth the opportunity of escape?  In fact, who was worthy of survival?  And what about the question of potential?  There are so many difficult questions.

The novel runs about 550 pages. When you have other reading projects and obligations (which I do) there has to be something great about a book of this complexity and scope that keeps you coming back.  I was immediately drawn into the narrative with the opening sequence where Varian Fry visits the Chagalls.  He must impress upon Chagall the crucial importance of leaving France.  His life is at stake.  But Chagall believes his reputation will protect him. The scene plunges you immediately into the difficulty of Fry's mission.

Over the next several hundred pages we meet many artists and writers of the time, including a lot of surrealists.  There are wonderful scenes where surrealist games are played - all based on fact.  They took up residence at a gorgeous Marseille villa called Air Bel - where they were able briefly to live a different life and escape the horrors of war.  We meet such people as  Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Andre Breton and Andre Gide.  Other important figures of the time, like Peggy Guggenheim and Eleanor Roosevelt also make appearances in the book.

But this is historical fiction, and as such it imagines fictional characters too.  Among those is Elliott Grant, an imagined Harvard classmate of Varian Fry who shows up in Marseille with a special request:  to enable the passage out of France of a brilliant young physicist who is the son of a very close friend.  The inclusion of this fictional character lets Orringer open up further provocative questions about race, sexual preference and artistic accomplishment.  How have they influenced our assessments of who and what is deemed worth opportunity and survival.  And yes, as well as being the story of Varian Fry’s courageous rescue operation, this novel is also a love story.

Some critics have taken issue with this.  Writing in the New York Times Cynthia Ostik questions what she refers to as "a knot of intertwined characters, who together come to dominate, even to override, and finally to invade the historical Fry."  But last night at Politics and Prose where I was honored to introduce Julie Orringer's book talk, she explained her reasoning.  After poring over twenty something boxes of memos, letters, memoir drafts and diaries in the Varian Fry archive for ten years, she made sure all historical facts were accurately portrayed.  But at the same time, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind, after reading between the lines, that Varian Fry was gay.  

By the way, the flight portfolio which gives the novel its title, was a portfolio of donated lithographs by artists of the day,  collected with the intention of exhibiting them in the United States, in order to gain support for the cause and demonstrate what was at risk.

This novel is long, there's no question about it. Cynthia Ostik called it "movie tone make-believe" And to be honest in the middle you do get the sense that one more revision would have made the book that much better.  Perhaps it was a revision too far for an author who had been immersed in the complexities of this story for a decade.  So yes, some of the dialog begins to read like a film script, with a lot of exposition, and not so much inner life. Some scenes beg for actors to breathe life and heart into them.

Having said this, the final chapters brought it all together again.  Oh, the love lost.  And the lost lives - lives forfeited for no better reason than that others were spared instead. Also, the dreadful sense that in spite of the countless heroic rescue efforts accomplished, there might always be more that didn't happen.  Underlying this, is Varian's personal heartache from which you sense he may never recover. For me, this made Fry's nobility, Fry's actual person more vivid, rather than less so.  Very personal emotional struggles certainly lie behind great heroic public deeds. 

By the way, during the q&a portion of last night's event one audience member stood up to say that as a girl in Connecticut she was a play mate of Varian Fry's daughter.  When he died suddenly at 59, and everyone read his obituary, they were astonished at the life this man had led during the war.

Some of the things Julie Orringer revealed in her talk last night added still new dimensions to this already complex tour de force of a book. A recording of the talk will be available on the Politics and Prose youtube channel in a few weeks time. I encourage you to listen - and of course to read this incredible book.

#julieorringer #flightportfolio #varianfry