Rejected Books: The American Pimpernel

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The American Pimpernel
The Story of Varian Fry
The man who saved the artist's on Hitler's death list

I've been "reading" this book for about eight years now, maybe more maybe less, but I haven't read a word for probably six of those years. It's been sitting on my nightstand all those years, but I haven't even cracked it. I'm on page 128 of 352 and will be forever. I'm officially leaving this book closed. I'll be selling it to a used-book store in about 45 minutes.

The idea behind the book is thrilling. American guy sneaks into Hitler's Europe and through his intellectual swashbucklery rescues artists and academics targeted by the Nazi regime. Exciting!, right?

Yeah, I guess. I don't really remember if it was exciting or not.

The only sticking impression is of the author Andy Marino's attitude toward this adventure. Marino is chilling and he presents the "hero" Fry in his own image. Which is to say, in the laws of life presented by this book, as true as gravity-pulls-down or Nazism-is-bad, you as reader as expected to accept the fact that an artist's life is worth more than tens of thousands of other people's lives.

This is what I found so chilling, so unsettling, so wrong.

I can find noble reasons to save André Breton and Max Ernst, but to suggest they deserve to be saved because their lives are inherently more valuable than a peasant woman's are where I will have to disagree. As an artists who associates with artists, I will readily admit that we have high opinions of ourselves, but the second we start thinking our actual lives matter more than other lives is the second our megalomania becomes dangerous.

Art is for everyone who lives and all those lives are equally valuable and it is not for the artist or the connosier to decide who is worthy to live and who might as well die. Yet that's what this book suggests. Varian Fry was rich and appreciated good art and writing and so he could decide who should live and who should die. Perhaps he was a more complicated character than that, but to Marino, that's enough. He is incapable of questioning his premise that artists' lives are worth more and that's what makes it impossible for me to finish this book.