Usually when we like a book very much, we admire the main character. She is principled, brave, or kind. In Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Francine Prose gives us someone different. A young girl, Lou Villars, troubled throughout childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood becomes a Nazi spy and interrogator.
The setting is France before World War II. Lou was a fearless sports-oriented child who liked her brother’s clothes. She is sent to a convent where her athletic gifts are encouraged; the Olympics are mentioned. When trouble comes, she is given shelter in a transvestite nightclub in Paris where she thrives for a while, becomes part of a show, and falls in love. Because of her strength and competitive spirit, she is tapped by one of the customers to train as a race car driver. She is successful and briefly happy. But each success, both in love and work, ends in betrayal, leaving Lou depressed and embittered.
It is at this low time that she is invited to Germany where she is flattered and fawned over. There is a dinner where the Fuhrer (no less!) chooses to sit with her and admire her strength and accomplishments. She is totally seduced. With her many contacts in the sports world, wouldn’t she like to help Germany, which is doing so well and wants to help France become equally successful? Of course she would.
Lou’s choices – or is it fate – make this a meaty psychological book, but there is so much more. The supporting characters tell their stories in their own voices. There is the gifted photographer, Gabor, drawn to the steamy nightclubs of the Paris underworld who writes weekly to his parents. His friend the writer, is penniless at the time, but eventually becomes a cult figure. The Baroness, in a very French marriage, supports and loves Gabor.
Equaling the complex characters are the vivid descriptions of the prewar era. The portrait of how Paris waited, of how the French lived their daily lives as war with Germany loomed, is superb. At the same time, the Germans are crazy for their leader and idolize his views on strength and power. When war comes, we see the details of how spying for the Nazis worked and how easily information slipped out to waiting ears.
In addition to evocative descriptions of an era, insightful character studies, and explorations of moral questions, Prose does a great job with the symbol of the chameleon. On one hand, it is the obvious: the cross-dressing night club and the spies and resistance during the war. But it is also two themes of the book. Is there just one truth or does a story change according to how many are experiencing it? Is someone’s identity stable, or does it change according to circumstance and time? What is the chameleon’s true color?
The characters in the book are based on real people and events. Lou is based on Violette Morris, a French lesbian race car driver who collaborated with the Nazis; the writer is based on Henry Miller; and the Hungarian photographer, Brassai.
A nonfiction story about war time intelligence gathering is Book and Dagger by Elyse Graham. In it, she tells how the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was formed during WWII and in particular, how experts in the humanities came to play a crucial role. Their skills as scholars, researchers, and artists provided vital information and support to the US.
Part of the group was deployed to Europe, Africa, and Asia to find needed facts buried in old pamphlets, newspapers, dry technical books. They found, for example, information on railroad capacity enabling the US military to estimate how quickly supplies could be moved by rail in Germany. Old telephone books kept in obscure libraries listed companies, (with addresses), that made parts such as ball bearings used in tank or truck production. Bombing factories that made parts put many additional manufacturers out of business.
At home, another part of the group read the reams of information that was sent and organized it into usable reports that answered generals’ questions. This was an interesting story about the kind of details that were important in winning a war and the kind of people able to find them.
Graham is interested in the U.S. culture of the 40s that looked in unusual places for experts and found them among the people Hitler most loathed – intellectuals, racial minorities, Jews, immigrants. The diversity of the U.S., its melting-pot, was a great asset in collecting intelligence. She contrasts this openness with German authoritarianism which valued conformity, overestimated the abilities of insiders, stereotyped outsiders. Graham ends with a discussion of the continued need for a liberal arts education.
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