Henry de Montherlant
Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant was a French essayist, novelist, and dramatist. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
Biography
Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic 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. His mother, a formerly lively socialite, became chronically ill due to the difficult childbirth, being bedridden most of the time, and dying at the young age of 43.From the age of seven or eight, Henry was enthusiastic about literature and began writing. In 1905 reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz caused him a lifelong fascination with Ancient Rome and a proficient interest in Latin. He also was enthusiastic about school comradeship, sports and bullfighting. When he was 15 his parents sent him alone to Spain where got initiated in the corrida, killing two young bulls. He was also a talented draughtsman and after 1913 resorted to hiring young people in the street for nude modelling.
On 5 April 1912, aged almost seventeen, Henry was expelled from the Catholic Sainte-Croix de Neuilly school for being a «corruptor of souls». Together with other five youngsters he had founded a group called 'La Famille', a kind of order of chivalry whose members were bonded by an oath of fidelity and mutual assistance. A member of that group was Philippe Jean Giquel, Montherlant's two year junior "special friend", with whom he was madly in love although it never became physical. According to Montherlant this "special friendship" had raised the fierce and jealous opposition of abbé de La Serre, who managed to get the older boy expelled. This incident became a lifelong obsession of Montherlant's that would depict it in the 1952 play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant and his 1969 novel Les Garçons. Later, in his adult years, he would resume his platonic friendship with Giquel, who would invite the writer to be the godfather of his daughter Marie-Christine.
After the deaths of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, he went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles. Mobilised in 1916, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe, an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun, both exaltations of heroism during the Great War. His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.
Montherlant first achieved critical success with the 1934 novel Les Célibataires, and sold millions of copies of his tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles, written from 1936 through 1939. In these years Montherlant, a well-to-do heir, traveled extensively, mainly to Spain, Italy, and Algeria, giving vent to his passion of street boys. During the Second World War after the fall of France in 1940 he remained in Paris and continued to write plays, poems, essays, and worked as a war correspondent.
Some time in 1968, according to Roger Peyrefitte, outside a movie theatre in Paris, 72 years old Montherlant was attacked and beaten up by a group of youths because he had groped the younger brother of one them. Montherlant was seriously injured and blinded in one eye as a result. The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of his works, recalled that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall" instead; and mentions in confirmation that Montherlant suffered from vertigo.
After going almost blind in his later years and becoming the target of scorners like Peyrefitte, Montherlant died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide capsule in 1972. His ashes were scattered in Rome, at the Forum, among the Temple of Portunus and into the Tiber, by Jean-Claude Barat and Gabriel Matzneff.
His standard biography was written by Pierre Sipriot, and published in two volumes, revealing the full extent of Montherlant's sexual habits.
Works
His early successes were works such as Les Célibataires in 1934, and the highly anti-feminist tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles , which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages. His late novel Chaos and Night was published in 1963. The novels were praised by writers as diverse as Aragon, Bernanos, and Malraux. Montherlant was well known for his anti-feminist and misogynistic views, as exemplified particularly in The Girls. Simone de Beauvoir considered his attitudes about women in detail in her The Second Sex.He wrote plays such as Pasiphaé, La Reine morte, Malatesta, Le Maître de Santiago, Port-Royal and Le Cardinal d'Espagne. 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, and explored the 'irrationality and unpredictability of human behaviour'.
He worked as an essayist also. In the collection L'Equinoxe de septembre he deplored the mediocrity of contemporary France and in Le solstice de Juin,, 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. He was in a "round-table" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris in the 1940s, including, the writers Ernst Junger, Paul Morand and Jean Cocteau, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Montherlant wrote articles for the Paris weekly, La Gerbe, directed by the pro-Nazi novelist and Catholic reactionary Alphonse de Châteaubriant. After the war, he was thus viewed as a collaborationist, and was punished by a one-year restriction on publishing.
A closeted pederast, Montherlant treated pederastic themes in his work, including his play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant and novel Les Garçons, published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier. He maintained a private and coded correspondence with fellow pederast Roger Peyrefitte — author of Les Amitiés particulières, also about relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school. Peyrefitte would later mercilessly mock and out Montherlant in his 1970 novel Des Français and in his memoirs Propos secrets.
Montherlant is remembered for his aphorism "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page", often quoted in the shorter form "Happiness writes white".
Honours and awards
Les célibataires was awarded the Grand prix de littérature de l'Académie française in 1934, 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. 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 and Satansbraten. 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.
Translations and adaptations
, best known for revising the Moncrieff translation of Proust, translated some of Montherlant's novels into English, including a 1968 edition of the four volumes of Les Jeunes Filles, in English called simply The Girls.In 2009, New York Review Books returned Montherlant to print in English by issuing Kilmartin's translation of Chaos and Night with a new introduction by Gary Indiana.
Christophe Malavoy directed and starred in a 1997 television movie adaption of La Ville dont le prince est un enfant.