Listening to Spirits

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Professor Chris Benfey Communes with Geniuses Past
For three summers during World War II, some of the leading European intellectuals of the twentieth century came to sit in the shade of Mount Holyoke's huge maples to discuss the future of art and humanism in a world gone stark raving mad.

Among these visitors were the artist Marc Chagall, philosopher Hannah Arendt, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and dozens of other eminent exiles from Nazi atrocity who had escaped to the U.S. with their lives, intellects, and little else.

What was it like to sit among them as they mapped out a future for a deranged world? We can't really know. But Mellon Professor of English Christopher Benfey has come as close as anyone to comprehending what these long dead figures said, thought, and felt.

To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Pontigny-en-Amérique, as these summer sessions were called, Benfey and a colleague pored over archives of the sessions and studied the writings and artistic production of attendees. Then they brought together contemporary thinkers for a three-day symposium examining major intellectual trends that emerged during the original sessions.
 
 "The idea," says Benfey, "was to get some of the best minds of today to revisit some of the concerns of the original Pontigny sessions and to gauge their contemporary relevance."

Getting into the minds and motivations of some of the most interesting people ever is Benfey's business. A prolific author, Benfey has tackled American literary luminaries Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, French painter Edgar Degas, and—most challenging of all—the cultural and social encounters between the U.S. and Japan in the nineteenth century.