Americans in Paris battle over literary treasure

The American Library in Paris is one of the city's more obscure cultural jewels – undeservedly obscure.

Ernest Hemingway wrote there. The novelist Edith Wharton was a trustee. Gertrude Stein wrote for its monthly review in the 1920s. The epic poem of the American civil war, "John Brown's Body", by Stephen Vincent Benet, was composed there in 1928.

The library, almost in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, has the biggest collection of English-language books in Europe, outside Britain. For 80 years, the institution has been a guardian of the quieter, more reflective side of American – and English-language – culture in the heart of the French capital.

It is not so quiet any more. A heated dispute between the library's trustees and a group of its members has unsettled this island of literary calm. The members claim that there are stealthy plans to merge the library with the ambitious and expansive American University next door, swamping its triple identity as a repository of American culture, a tranquil haven for scholars and a family lending library, which encourages children to treasure books. The 22 trustees, almost all American expatriates, adamantly deny any such plans.

There was a stormy annual general meeting in March, which was followed by the resignation of the chairman of the library's board, Robert Gogel. A protest group of members has been formed – the International Friends and Defenders of the American Library in Paris. In the past couple of days, the library has banned the protesters from distributing their literature within its precincts. How ironic, the protesters say. The Paris library was one of the few American cultural institutions to resist the Communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Now it is censoring its own members.

One of the leading protesters is the Paris-based Australian writer, John Baxter, 60. He says that he has seen documents which suggest that the library and that of the American university next door, plan to have a single director and hire common members of staff. The documents also talk about "joint programmes" and blanket membership of the American Library for 1,200 students and teachers at the university.

"This is merger by stealth," Mr Baxter said. "Inevitably, the library would come to be dominated by the university and the needs of its faculty and students. The wonderful character and identity of this place, used by many of the leading literary figures of the last 80 years, would be lost.

The fears are based partly on geographical proximity: the seventh arrondissement university library and the American Library are separated only by a partition wall. There used to be a connecting door but this was blocked off a few years ago, when staff complained that they were being "swamped" by students who treated the two libraries as one.

But Charmaine Donnelly, the new chair of the Library's trustees, an American businesswoman, said, that the fears were "totally groundless". Asked if she would personally oppose a merger, she declined to respond directly but said: "Let me answer you this way... This is a little jewel. Its identity and survival is something precious to me. Anything that would threaten that identity would be totally anathema."

'I didn't want her in bed, only on film'

One of the delights of the American Library is an exhibition of books once owned by Marlene Dietrich (top). The books – complete with acerbic, not to say bitchy, annotations in her handwriting – were given to the library after she died in Paris 10 years ago, aged 91.

In an autobiography by Eddie Fisher (centre), who was Elizabeth Taylor's husband just before Richard Burton, Fisher wrote that he had an "unusual relationship" with Marlene Dietrich. The German-born actress scrawled on her copy of the book: "You said it, kid. We never met."

Dietrich also inserted a hand-written note on blue paper in a book about Roberto Rossellini, the Italian director who had a passionate affair with Ingrid Bergman (bottom) in the 1950s and later married her. The book suggests that Rossellini pursued Bergman. Dietrich begs to differ. Her note reads: "When I was living at the Plaza, Roberto Rossellini came and told me that he did not want her in bed, only on film, but she forced herself on him."