Henry de Montherlant

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Montherlant, Henry de (1868-1971). Montherlant had two almost entirely separate careers, as a novelist (1922-39) and as a dramatist (1942-71). In both, he specialized in the close examination of the irrationality and unpredictability of human behaviour.

Born in Paris, into a family of the minor aristocracy, Montherlant attended a number of schools, ending with the Catholic Collège de Sainte-Croix in Neuilly, from which he was expelled in 1912 (in circumstances reflected in his La Ville dont le prince est un enfant). A rather aimless existence thereafter was transformed by the experience of the war, in which he served in the infantry and was severely wounded.

His early writing (1920-32) was heavily coloured by the experience of life in a Catholic college, of sporting activity, and of the exhilaration of war. The message tended to be one of male heroism, of the fraternity of war and action, and of the dangerous dilution of all this by sentimentality and the ‘feminine’ virtues. His first work, a collection of essays entitled La Relève du matin (1920), emphasized the ambiguous moral and spiritual effect of the college, and the moral impact of the trenches. In the novel Le Songe (1922), the hero Alban de Bricoule finds fulfilment in the ‘ordre mâle’ and the fraternity of war. Les Olympiques (1924) is a collection of essays, poems, and short stories in praise of sport and its physical effort, its sense of fraternity, its purity of spirit. The next novel, Les Bestiaires (1926), takes us back to the pre-war Alban, who finds heroism in the bullring. Mors et vita (1932) collects together various pieces, inspired by the war, that Montherlant had been writing since 1918.

It was when he turned to new themes and techniques, however, that Montherlant was to show his true capabilities. Les Célibataires (1934) was a successful new departure, consolidated by the sequence of four novels Les Jeunes Filles (1936-9), in which various experimental techniques help to underline that ‘syncrétisme et alternance’ in human psychology which Montherlant had defined in the essay of that name in Aux fontaines du désir (1927): the simultaneous, or alternating, presence of opposites within human motivation. These novels were to be praised by writers as diverse as Aragon, Bernanos, and Malraux.

He continued as an essayist, too, with the collections L'Équinoxe de septembre (1938), which railed at the mediocrity of contemporary France, and Le Solstice de juin (1941) which, in the aftermath of defeat, expressed similar anxieties and called for a new spirit within the country.

Up to 1942, then, Montherlant was known almost exclusively as a novelist and essayist. Nobody could have foreseen that from 1942 onwards he was to write above all for the theatre. La Reine morte (1942) was the result of a commission to translate for the Comédie-Française a play by Guevara; in the event, Montherlant wrote a play entirely his own, which set the pattern for his mature drama. A historical play with elevated tone, it dealt with the complexity and inconsistency of human motivation and behaviour. It was the first of a series of historical dramas: Malatesta (1946), Le Maître de Santiago (1947), Port-Royal (1954), Don Juan (1958), Le Cardinal d'Espagne (1960), La Guerre civile (1965). Alongside them were written a number of other plays in modern dress: Fils de personne (1943), Demain il fera jour (1949), Celles qu'on prend dans ses bras (1950), La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1951), Brocéliande (1956). These two strands, which have often been contrasted, have much in common. Montherlant's originality does not lie in his stage techniques, which are surprisingly traditional amid the experimentation of the post-war theatre, but in the introduction of a novelist's ambiguities into the theatre, and a rejection of shape, coherence, or synthesis, particularly in the field of psychological motivation. He rejects the ‘theatre of ideas’, and presents us with human situations of infinite complexity, to which there are no certain conclusions, and certainly no ‘authorial message’ (hard as many critics have tried to ascribe one to him). Certain themes, admittedly, fascinate him: heroism, stoicism, the clash of ideals—and, above all, religion. As an agnostic, Montherlant is nevertheless convincingly able to depict, from his detached standpoint, Christian problems of grace and the appeal of Christian renunciation. His powerful dramatic work has aroused much controversy in France; one thing that is sure is that it cannot be ignored.

In the 1950s and 1960s Montherlant published a number of volumes of diary-based writings containing his ideas and reactions, over the years, to a wide variety of subjects; these included Carnets (1930-1944) and Va jouer avec cette poussière (Carnets 1958-64), as well as similar volumes containing observations about his own plays. He also produced a remarkable last novel, Le Chaos et la nuit (1963), in which the theme of death and its effect on the human psyche is explored, with indifference finally being seen as the only defence against both the illusions of life and the certainty of death.

Montherlant died by his own hand on the day of the autumn equinox; his ashes were scattered on the Forum in Rome.

[Richard Griffiths]

Bibliography

• H. Perruchot, Montherlant (1959)
• J. Cruickshank, Montherlant (1964)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009)

Henry de Montherlant
Born	Henry Millon de Montherlant 26 April 1895(1895-04-26) Paris, France
Died	21 September 1972 (aged 77) Paris, France
Writing period	early-mid 20th century
Signature

Henry de Montherlant or Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (20 April 1895 – September 21, 1972) was a French essayist, novelist and one of the leading French dramatists of the twentieth century.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Career 1.3 Personal life 2 Honours and awards 3 Illustrated Works 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Early years

Born in Paris France, a descendant of a aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house). After the death of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, he went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles.^[2]

Mobilised in 1916, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe ('Dream'), an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (Funeral Chant for the Dead at Verdun), both exaltations of heroism during the Great War.

Career

His early successes were works such as Les célibataires (The Bachelors) in 1934, and the tetralogy Les jeunes filles (The Young Girls) (1936-1939), which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages.^[2] At this time, Montherlant traveled regularly, mainly to Spain, Italy, and Algeria.

From 1929 he began to write plays such as La reine morte (1934), Pasiphaé (1936), Le Maître de Santiago (1947), Port-Royal (1954) and Le Cardinal d'Espagne (1960). He is particularly remembered as a playwright. In his plays, as well as in his novels, he frequently portrayed heroic characters displaying the moral standards he professed.

In Le solstice de Juin (1941) he expressed his admiration for Wehrmacht and claimed that France had been justly defeated and conquered in 1940. Like many scions of the old aristocracy, he had hated the Third Republic, especially as it had become in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.

Christophe Malavoy directed and starred in a 1997 television movie adaption of La Ville dont le prince est un enfant.

Personal life

Montherlant concealed his homosexual tendencies from the public during his lifetime. In 1912, he had been expelled from the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly academy for a relationship with a fellow student. His play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and novel Les garçons (The Boys, published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier) and his correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte, (author of Les amitiés particulières (Special Friendships, 1943), also about sexual relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school), are the main testaments to this side of his character.

Montherlant was attacked and beaten in the streets of Paris in 1968. He was seriously injured and blinded in one eye. The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of Montherlant's works, recalls that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall"; he dates the incident to 1968, and mentions that Montherlant suffered from vertigo.^[3]

After becoming almost blind in his last years, Montherlant died from a self-inflicted^[4] gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide capsule in 1972.

Honours and awards

Les célibataires was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature de l'Académie Française and the English Northcliffe Prize. In 1960 Montherlant was elected a member of the Académie française, taking the seat which had belonged to André Siegfried, a political writer. His presentation speech dwelt mercilessly on the geography of New Zealand. He was an Officer of the French Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur.

Reference is made to "Les Jeunes Filles" in two films by West German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Das kleine Chaos (1967) and Satansbraten (1977)^[5]. In the short film Das kleine Chaos the character portrayed by Fassbinder himself reads aloud from a paperback German translation of "Les Jeunes Filles" which he claims to have stolen.

Illustrated Works

Some works of Henry de Montherlant were published in illustrated editions, today demanding large prices at book auctions and in book specialists. Examples include "Pasiphaé," illustrated by Henri Matisse, "Les Jeunes Filles", illustrated by Mariette Lydis, and others illustrated by Cami, Édouard Georges Mac-Avoy and Pierre-Yves Tremois.

References

1. ^ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/390970/Henry-Marie-Joseph-Millon-de-Montherlant
2. ^ ^{a b} Louis Begley (18 July 2007). "The Pitiless Universe of Montherlant". The New York Sun. http://www.nysun.com/arts/pitiless-universe-of-montherlant/58590/. Retrieved 2008-10-01. 
3. ^ Quennell, Peter (1980). The Wanton Chase (First edition ed.). Lonon: Collins. ISBN 0002165260. 
4. ^ "Henry de Montherlant". The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/authors/14576. Retrieved 1 June 2009. 
5. ^ Töteberg, Michael: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002. p.23

External links

• Henry de Montherlant at the Internet Movie Database

v • d • e Académie Française Seat 29 Pierre Bardin (1634) · Nicholas Bourbon (1637) · François-Henri Salomon de Virelade (1644) · Philippe Quinault (1670) · François de Callières (1688) · André-Hercule de Fleury (1717) · Paul d'Albert de Luynes (1743) · Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1788) · Jean-François Cailhava de L'Estandoux (1803) · Joseph François Michaud (1813) · Jean Pierre Flourens (1840) · Claude Bernard (1868) · Ernest Renan (1878) · Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour (1893) · Gabriel Hanotaux (1897) · André Siegfried (1944) · Henry de Montherlant (1960) · Claude Lévi-Strauss (1973)

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