Jeffrey H. Jackson’s Paper Bullets

A Rhodes College professor tells the story of “two artists who risked their lives to defy the Nazis.”

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Nazi soldiers stop a bus on the small English Channel island of Jersey to inspect its passengers. Two of those passengers, French women Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, are more than what they appear — two middle-aged women, perhaps neighbors, out to do their weekly shopping. Lucy and Suzanne are partners — romantic partners, artistic partners, and partners in a covert psyops campaign intended to demoralize the occupying German army.

Lucy and Suzanne, perhaps now better known by their noms de plume, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, were artists. Their photography is still discussed in academic circles, though they also worked in sculpture, collage, and were published authors. They put all their considerable talents to use in their fight against the Nazis, risking their lives to craft and distribute poems, letters, and collages to undermine the morale of German soldiers. Paper Bullets (Algonquin Books), a new book by Memphian Jeffrey H. Jackson, tells their story.

Meet the Author

Jeffrey H. Jackson is a history professor at Rhodes College, where he has taught since he moved to Memphis in 2000. Though his field of study is most often focused on twentieth-century France, Jackson is a Nashville-born Tennessee native with Memphis roots. “I used to visit Memphis a lot when I was a kid,” he says. “My dad grew up partly here in Memphis, and also a little bit in Mississippi.”

In addition to his most recent work — the just-published Paper Bullets — Jackson is the author of Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 and Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. As French artists who worked in the interwar period, Lucy and Suzanne seem perfect subjects for the author and professor. But Jackson says it was his wife who suggested them.

“They had been resistors all their lives, in one form or another,” Jackson explains. “They found themselves in a place and a time where all of those things sort of came together, and also came together with their particular skill sets as artists.”

“My wife is an art historian, and she taught for many years over at the Memphis College of Art, which of course is no longer [operating],” he explains. “She was the one who said to me, ‘You know, you should look at these two artists.’”

Poised for Protest

They wouldn’t have called themselves lesbians — the term was hardly in common usage at the time — but Lucy and Suzanne were lovers. Before their resistance during the German occupation of Jersey, their relationship made Lucy and Suzanne outlaws, of a sort. “Their relationship was not their only secret,” Jackson writes in Paper Bullets. “According to Jewish tradition, Lucy would not have been considered Jewish because her mother was not a Jew. However, Nazi racial law made no such distinction.”

In Paris, before the war, the two women befriended Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, a literary power couple and the owners, respectively, of the Shakespeare and Company and La Maison des Amis des Livres bookstores. There, they met artists like Tristan Tzara, who has been described as a “tirelessly energetic propagandist for Dada.” Surrounded by artists and entrepreneurs who were anything but stereotypical, enmeshed in radical politics, Lucy and Suzanne were at the cutting edge of a convention-defying moment in art history, in a Paris still reeling from the heavy losses sustained in the first World War.

As Jackson writes, “In the years before Lucy and Suzanne moved to Jersey — and especially during the 1920s and 1930s, when they lived in Paris — Lucy and Suzanne began to see themselves as outsiders, bound to each other and fighting the world around them. Unknowingly, they were cultivating a set of behaviors and attitudes that would help them confront the Nazi occupation.”

As women working in a male-driven field, as women who loved each other, Lucy and Suzanne had practice viewing the world from a different perspective — and often having to fight for their right to participate. Lucy, too, suffered from chronic illnesses that set her apart from many of her fellows. Their status as unconventional artists working with Dadaists and Surrealists taught them the power of art as a way to subvert expectations. “A lot of things came together,” Jackson tells me. “By the time they get to Jersey, they’ve been involved in artistic movements that were pushing against the norm, pushing against the mainstream. They had also been a part of that Paris scene, the lesbian scene in particular, and others who were pushing against those norms and values.

“They had been resistors all their lives, in one form or another,” Jackson explains. “They found themselves in a place and a time where all of those things sort of came together, and also came together with their particular skill sets as artists.”

The Soldier With No Name

Eventually, Suzanne and Lucy left an increasingly divided Paris, one marred by political strife, right-wing riots, and anti-Semitic protests, for their sometimes vacation home on Jersey. That island, though, would not escape the war any more than Paris did. It became, along with the other channel islands, part of Hitler’s “Atlantic wall,” defenses between England and occupied territory on the Continent. There was no safe place to flee to, Suzanne reasoned, so she and Lucy remained on Jersey. But if they were going to stay, that did not mean they had to surrender unconditionally. They would fight back and do so as artists attacking the Germans’ psyche.

As Jackson writes, “During the winter of 1941, Lucy and Suzanne began discussing how to escalate their actions. Lucy told Suzanne that she would like to do something serious, regular, and systematic. She wanted their actions to have a bigger impact.”

Lucy and Suzanne’s work confronting gender norms was put to good use in their fight. Lucy’s Claude Cahun persona often toed the line between typical expressions of masculinity and femininity.

One thing contemporary readers can take from Lucy and Suzanne’s story is the way they utilized their already-honed skill sets as artists as a means of resistance. “Not everybody goes out in the streets to protest,” Jackson says, admitting that the work of resistance is hard work indeed. “They were in a very difficult situation in occupied territory with hundreds and hundreds of German troops around them, but they still found a way to resist and to keep going in that resistance in what were quieter ways — writing notes, passing messages. But it really had a big cumulative effect. Even though it wasn’t as public, it still ended up having that kind of power to speak to people.”

Not surprisingly, the artists who had taken on new names to promote their art created a new persona, the Soldier With No Name, and attributed many of their notes to him — or them, as perhaps the notes seemed to be written by a collection of anonymous Germans dissatisfied with the cost of the war.

Lucy and Suzanne’s work confronting gender norms was put to good use in their fight. Lucy’s Claude Cahun persona often toed the line between typical expressions of masculinity and femininity. That same mode was utilized when Lucy and Suzanne pitted the German archetype of dependable father, husband, and family man against the Third Reich’s propaganda suggesting war made the German people stronger. While you’re at war in a foreign land, Lucy and Suzanne’s notes prompted, who protects your family at home?

They also spoofed the famous German poem “Dei Lorelei,” emasculating Hitler by casting him as the seductive river goddess — but instead of Hitler’s beautiful song distracting the poem’s sailors, it’s his “screaming” that leads a nation off course, destroyed by war as the poem’s ship is dashed on the rocks.

Of course, the Soldier With No Name was just one weapon in Lucy and Suzanne’s impressive arsenal. “The notes that they wrote took several different forms,” Jackson says. Lucy and Suzanne wrote poems, song lyrics, bits of imagined dialogue between fictional soldiers; they utilized bawdy humor, photo montages, BBC news summaries, and illustrations in their fight against the Nazis.

“At least one time, probably other times, they put some sort of note in a bottle and threw it into the bay for it to wash up somewhere else,” Jackson says. “Sometimes they would slip them into pockets of soldiers.” Suzanne often did the dangerous work of depositing the messages. It was her knowledge of the German language, too, that enabled Lucy and Suzanne to, in their notes, pass as a German soldier.

“Many scholars who write about Lucy and Suzanne’s photographs still usually attribute them to Claude Cahun alone, erasing Suzanne’s contribution despite the fact that she was nearly always the one behind the camera,” Jackson writes. “But their work clearly was, and always would be, a partnership.”

The Greatest WWII Story Never Told

Paper Bullets is an espionage story, a romance, a snippet of art history, and a story of World War II unlike any other. The absolute brutality of some WWII narratives is seen at something of a remove — it’s not absent, and the horrors of Nazism are never downplayed. Still, it’s clear that, far removed from the racist rhetoric and grand schemes for world domination, the German soldiers had far more in common with the people of Jersey than with their leaders, cocooned safely miles away from the front.

It’s that sliver of shared experience that Lucy and Suzanne sought to reach. “It’s designed to reframe how you see the world,” Jackson says of their campaign. “What they really wanted the Germans to think about is, ‘Why are we here? Why are we here on this island instead of home with our families?’”

Jackson deftly juggles the threads of a narrative that demands at least occasional explanations of art history or WWII strategy, that is both a tale of resistance and a love story. It’s a credit to the author that the plot is never lost — and that the book is an indisputable page-turner.

A scene early in Paper Bullets seems to give, in its few pages, a glimpse of the whole. “All cameras were supposed to have been surrendered, but they had refused to give theirs up. It had been such an important part of their lives for so long,” Jackson writes, before describing a Kodak photo surreptitiously taken. In it, Kid, the couple’s cat, sits perched on the windowsill while German soldiers trudge along the beach in the distance, visible through the open window. The juxtaposition of the mundane with the martial is evocative and direct. “This,” the photo seems to say, “is what we all stand to lose. And for what? Boys playing dress up, trudging endlessly through mud.”

There exists simple beauty in a home filled with love, as represented by a domestic cat basking in the sun. It’s beautiful and, oh, so fragile.