Review Essay: A Montherlant Renaissance

Abstract

In the fall of 1982, Pierre Sipriot published the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Henry de Montherlant, Montherlant sans masque, Tome I, L'enfant prodigue (1895-1932). The biography, an immediate succks de scandale, was followed in short order by several other important books on or by Montherlant. In the same year, Gallimard published the Romans II in the Pliade series, and the editor of the volume, Michel Raimond, published a general reassessment of all of Montherlant's fiction entitled Les Romans de Montherlant. In 1983, Sipriot and Roger Peyrefitte joined forces to edit and annotate the latter's correspondence with Montherlant during the years 1938-41. Finally in 1984, Montherlant's first novel, Thrasylle, appeared posthumously.1 Clearly, one of the monstres sacr~s of twentieth-century French letters, in eclipse since his suicide in 1972, was enjoying a comeback. The recent Montherlant is welcome, first of all, because it rehabilitates a writer whose work had been unjustifiably neglected for nearly a decade. More significantly, the books comprising this renaissance have provided valuable new insights into the personal life of the artist and the genesis and evolution of his writings. Sipriot's biography and the MontherlantPeyrefitte correspondence successfully deconstruct the Montherlant legend. Raimond's study and Thrasylle argue convincingly in favor of a closer scrutiny of the novels as the most effective means of tracing the development of Montherlant's thought and his progress in the art of writing. Pierre Sipriot could not have chosen a more appropriate general title for a biography of his friend of 25 years, since the primary ambition of Montherlant sans masque is to demystify the writer and lay bare the realities of his personal life. For most of his adult life and especially during the twenties and thirties, Montherlant enjoyed a reputation as a war hero, a sportsman, and a Don Juan. He did a great deal to foster this image, publishing novels like Le Songe (1922), Les Bestiaires (1926), and La Petite Infante de Castille (1929), whose virile, Nietzschean heroes were equally adept at fighting for their country, killing bulls, and seducing women. In point of fact, Montherlant was in many ways quite the opposite of his heroes. Sipriot reveals that, unlike his protagonists, he was not the picture of health, and suffered all of his life from a congenital heart defect. Moreover, he was not a heroic combat soldier during World War I, nor was he patriotic in the least. His letters to his grandmother, Marguerite de Riancey, quoted from at length by Sipriot, confirm that he cynically sought to use his limited military service as a springboard to launch a literary career. A selfdescribed social eunuch (99), Montherlant cared nothing for the values and traditions he was supposedly defending at the front.