Henry de Montherlant

• Born: April 21, 1896
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: September 21, 1972
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Although he is best known as a playwright, Henry de Montherlant also had an extensive career as a novelist and essayist. He excelled more in the genre of the former than in that of the latter, for his essays, though often brilliant, never arrive at objective conclusions.

Achievements

Robert B. Johnson, the American scholar who knew Henry de Montherlant best, remarked that the author’s plays are poetic statements on the human condition, transcending time, and therefore likely to endure. This view is shared by the French critic Michel Mohrt, who also pointed out the quality of Montherlant’s pessimism that led him to the notion of people’s total freedom: from God, from their fellow human beings, even from their own makeup. Hope, the invention of the coward, makes one walk on crutches and live in the future, instead of stepping serenely on one’s own feet and existing in the present. If God is posited as absent; if dependence on others is viewed as useless; and if one refuses to excuse anything by invoking one’s physical and intellectual limitations, freedom is immediate and complete. Montherlant’s plays, then, focus on his characters’ struggle to come to terms with the awesome liberty of humankind.

The dramatist was not popular at first because the majority of his spectators questioned the value of freedom at the cost of retreat from God, from others, and from oneself. Montherlant’s answer, that the ensuing lucidity was worth any price, no matter how high, pleased the elite theatergoers, but not the rest. His plays were and are considered too cerebral. In the post-World War II era, however, when existentialism burst on the literary scene and attracted a popular following, Montherlant’s plays benefited from the similarity between his ideas and those of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and other exponents of the new school. A wave of intellectualism swept across the French stage, and Montherlant’s dramas began to be produced frequently and successfully. Readers and spectators were then faced with the reality of a war just ended and with the specter of another looming on the horizon. Scarred by the concentration camps and already threatened by the restrictions and constrictions of new ghettos and gulags, they found it easy to conceive of the absence of God and the basic loneliness of humanity. The lucidity announced by Montherlant seemed, then, a plausible alternative.

Since the 1970’s, however, as the vogue for existentialism has steadily declined, Montherlant’s theater has been less well received. To be sure, his plays are still presented and are well attended, but one can no longer speak of mass receptivity. The anti-theater of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and others has replaced the logically composed and intellectual dramas of Montherlant. That is not to say that he does not have a chance to survive in the twenty-first century. Once the anti-theater gives way to a new dramatic school, the well-written plays penned by Montherlant may well become popular again on French and other stages.

Biography

Henry-Marie-Joseph-Millon de Montherlant did not hide the details of his life. He spoke to interviewers, wrote numerous self-revealing articles, and published a diary entitled Carnets (1957) covering the years 1930-1944, as well as a second volume entitled Va jouer avec cette poussière (1966), detailing his life through 1964. From various essays published subsequently in magazines and newspapers, much is known about the years between this cutoff date and his death by suicide in 1972.

Montherlant’s upbringing was decidedly Catholic, first at the École Saint-Pierre and, as a teenager, at the École Sainte-Croix, from which he managed to get himself expelled because of a variety of small infractions. By the time he reached the age of twenty, both of his parents had died. It was then, in 1916, that he volunteered for front-line combat in World War I and was gravely wounded. Although he recovered, the experience left an indelible mark on him and pushed him toward cynicism. He began to practice all sorts of sports, as if to prove to himself that his physical abilities were still intact, and he enjoyed especially bullfighting, which he went on to pursue on numerous occasions, even though he was injured more than once. He wrote intermittently all this time, novels and essays, but it was at the request of a friend, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, director of the Comédie-Française, that he embarked seriously on a dramatic career. Between 1942 and 1965, he was to write a dozen plays, three of which, Port-Royal, The Cardinal of Spain, and Brocéliande, were staged directly at the French national theater, a feat of considerable rarity.

In the late 1960’s, Montherlant began to watch his body decay more and more, a calamity which, as he stated often, he was neither able nor willing to endure. The proud physical being he had been all along refused to put up with slow movement, with blindness, with the humility of dependence on a part-time, and then full-time nurse. In the course of the morning of September 21, 1972, though he could no longer see at all, he put the finishing touches to his will and wrote a letter to the chief of his police precinct in order that his action not be doubted in any way; whereupon, he put a bullet in his head, opting to remain the master of his destiny, in full compliance with the tenets that he had always held.

Analysis

Reflecting their creator’s belief in the self-sufficiency and freedom of the individual, most of the characters of Henry de Montherlant fight to maintain or to acquire liberty. Given this premise, threats to freedom come mostly from the outside, although sometimes from within an individual who is attracted by an easy way out. Such challenges must be met head on, according to Montherlant, for there is no compromise possible. The opposition between the spiritual race of the pure and the intransigent, which he claims as his own, and the ersatz race of compromisers is at the core of his best plays. Those characters with whom he sympathizes are clearly the ones who say no to modest, moderate, middle-of-the-road positions. If, in the process of saying no, they lose a privileged status, or even their life, they will have had a chance to breathe the rarefied, precious air of the Parnassian heights where heroes and heroines dwell in singular splendor.

Queen After Death

It is in Queen After Death that these ideas first crystalize. Montherlant transforms the legend of Inés de Castro into a play of grandeur. Passion and duty clash in strong and weak characters, and one or the other wins according to the virility or femininity of the persons involved. If events have an almost hormonal explanation, it is because once all sentimentality has been purged, the physical reigns paramount. Ferrante, the King of Portugal, according to custom but also in the interest of political expediency, has arranged for his son, Pedro, to marry the Infanta of Navarre. Pedro, however, has already been married in secret to Inés de Castro, who is now pregnant. Faced with his father’s authority, Pedro hesitates enough to give the king the courage to order the death of Inés. The son’s feminine makeup, even more accentuated than that of the two rival women, suggests neither flight, nor any other solution. Ferrante, on the other hand, is not being a bad father. He is fully aware of duty to family and to state, but between the two there is no compromise, and he is willing to sacrifice the first to the second even at the expense of changing from a moral being into a hateful, amoral subperson. Like Ferrante, the infanta accepts her defeat and returns to Navarre in dignity, if in sadness. Inés, on the other hand, like Pedro feminine and sentimental, appears to be a likely victim of Ferrante’s decisiveness, for, after all, in the real world only the fit have the upper hand and deserve to survive.

Malatesta

Even more than Ferrante, Sigismond Malatesta of Rimini, the hero of Malatesta, displays the qualities of the pure and the intransigent. Not merely taking on a son and his wife, as did Ferrante, Malatesta is pitted against Pope Paul II himself, who wishes to remove the hero from his post. None of Malatesta’s friends, least of all Porcellio, his best friend, is willing to help, and so Malatesta, unperturbed, arranges the pope’s assassination without assistance. A poetic duel of words takes place between hero and pope in act 2, and Montherlant is to be given credit for putting valid, human, and humane arguments in the mouths of both, even though the author clearly sympathizes with Malatesta. In the following act, Porcellio betrays his master and poisons him. In the final act, one learns the reason for Porcellio’s betrayal: Once Malatesta had saved his life, and Porcellio, for as long as Malatesta is alive, will owe his life to him. Yet, a free individual cannot owe anything to anyone, for dependence, no matter what its origin, belittles, humiliates, and erases the humanity of people. Porcellio has no choice but to kill his benefactor in order to regain his freedom. The giver must never be forgiven the sin of giving.

Notwithstanding the events, all the main characters admire one another: Malatesta reveres the pope and understands very clearly his political motivation; the pope appreciates Malatesta’s qualities of leadership, which, in fact, are so good that in the long run they might prove dangerous; Malatesta loves Porcellio’s mind, and in his company reveals in discussions of philosophy and metaphysics; and Porcellio, grateful to Malatesta, shares the latter’s delight in the virtuosity of their debates. Were it not that the self-sufficiency of each is endangered by the others, there would be no tragedy. Yet tragedy there must be, for without it there is no purity. It is interesting to note that the minor characters in the play (as in many other plays of Montherlant) are not driven to a tragic ending, for theirs is a stability that does not reach beyond, a complacence based on mediocrity. Isotta, Malatesta’s wife; Vannella, Malatesta’s mistress; and the other minor figures were born to serve, are content in so doing, and wish no more, for anything else would detract from their comatose existence. Malatesta may be temporarily lured, especially by the thirteen-year-old beauty Vannella, but having used his mistress, as is his right, he reasserts his independence.

The Master of Santiago

In The Master of Santiago, Montherlant’s most Christian and most Jansenist play, the dichotomy between contemplation and action is fully explored. All religions, but especially Christianity, must somehow reach a compromise between their sociopolitical functions and the duty of each individual to save his own soul. Don Alvaro, Knight of the Order of Santiago, whose mission is to convert the Indians of the New World, scorns the efforts he directs. He is aware of the compromises involved, of their ultimate futility, and he chooses to isolate himself from the concerns inherent in his post. On a domestic level, he would like to see his daughter, Mariana, give up her love for, and impending marriage with, Jacinto, so that she, too, may be freed from the degradation of living with another human being. In the beginning, she resists, but in the end she is persuaded that the institution of the family is an obstacle to grandeur and to salvation: Is this not the very reason why Catholic priests are not permitted to marry and why members of contemplative orders are closest to God?

Mariana’s conversion to Montherlantean ideals recalls the final attitude of the infanta in Queen After Death, just as the makeup of Don Alvaro presents similarities with that of Ferrante. To be sure, such extreme asocial attitudes as depicted constantly by the playwright may, for many, damage the verisimilitude of the characters; yet, these remain believable within the context of the severity of their psychology, which transcends the customary norms of society. Life is a social contract by which much is gained and something is lost. For those who refuse compromise, however, no loss, no matter how small, is worth any gain, no matter how large. Montherlant and his protagonists, it seems, look back nostalgically at the asceticism of the primitive Church. They see it threatened by modern Christian morality, which glorifies marriage, family, children, and other societal concerns that blur and blunt the primacy of the individual.

Celles qu’on prend dans ses bras

The dramatist’s scorn for women has already been noted. His almost legendary misogyny comes through in no uncertain terms in Celles qu’on prend dans ses bras. The title of the play is in fact the playwright’s definition of women: They are the ones destined to fall, and in so doing to cause the fall of man. Man’s arms must not surrender and catch those luring creatures whom Saint Francis himself feared. Montherlant is known to have often recalled the saint’s conviction that nuns were the invention of the devil, for they are a constant source of temptation. Lay women are even more so—witness Ravier’s reaction when faced with Christine. He is fifty-eight, rich, powerful, and independent. She is barely twenty, poor, beautiful, and she needs Ravier’s help on behalf of her father. In a moment of weakness, he provides the help requested. She is grateful, and a liaison ensues. Ravier knows, then, that he has lost, that he is lost, that nothing good can come out of a situation in which a woman is linked to a man through gratitude, and a man is linked to her through biological attraction. Ravier aspires to purity and intransigence but is unable to pay the price for their attainment.

Port-Royal

If in Celles qu’on prend dans ses bras both man and woman are weak, Port-Royal presents a group of women whose determination to say no is as unswerving as that of Montherlant’s most aggressive male characters. It should be noted at the outset, however, that these are no ordinary women: They are Jansenist nuns, belonging to a sect known for its austerity and for which Montherlant had a special penchant. The sisters of Port-Royal were indeed of a singular breed. For the playwright, they exemplified the highest level of asceticism, a level at which only exiles exist. They exhibited the frustration, the desperation, and the isolation of the potent and the principled, of the genuinely devout who rejected the mixture of politics and religion of the Vatican, of the Jesuits, in a word, of the compromisers. Not even the threat of excommunication, not even the menace of physical extinction, could make them retreat, let alone capitulate. Theirs was thirst for freedom, like Antigone’s, quenchable only in death.

Montherlant was attracted by their story when he read Blaise Pascal’s Les Lettres provinciales (1656-1657; The Provincial Letters, 1657) and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s Port-Royal (1840-1859). The Archbishop de Péréfixe, representing the Vatican, is the advocate of law and order, the enemy of any kind of particularism. The Church of Rome has ordered him to have the Jansenist sisters sign a document recanting their heresy. He is very persuasive in his speeches to the straying nuns. He pleads from the heart and from the mind. He enumerates the privileges that would be restored to them; he exalts the value of regimen over rebellion; he cautions that the admission of one divisive belief would inevitably bring forth others, endangering the very singularity of the Jansenist credo as well as that of the Church. It is so easy to say yes, he points out, using all the familiar arguments that Creon had uttered to the anarchic Antigone. Temporarily, some of the sisters hesitate. They fear, not so much the loss of their lives, but their doubts. In all human thinking there is a chance of error, and, besides, their resistance might irreparably harm all of Christendom.

Sister Angélique de Saint-Jean gives courage to the other sisters. She possesses a nobility and a dignity reminiscent of those of Ferrante, of Alvaro, and a strong constitution not unlike that of the archbishop. The debates between the two well-matched antagonists are devoid of maudlin sentimentality, each being unwilling and unable to capitulate. They both understand that the power to refuse to sign is greater than the power asking for signature. The ensuing destruction of Port-Royal by the Jesuits in 1710 is viewed by Montherlant as a gesture of frustration on the part of an immense authority that lost a struggle against a handful of women. What emerges also from the play is the dramatist’s belief that often people are punished not because they are heretics, but because any departure from the fold is considered dangerous to the majority. The sisters of Port-Royal are clearly Christian and clearly Catholic. The rigidity of their practice, however—their orthodoxy—may make new conversions difficult, may inspire others to stray; from the perspective of the pragmatic Church hierarchy, such threats cannot be tolerated. Quantity must win over quality, Montherlant concedes, but the victory can only be temporary. Port-Royal aroused a strong response in its first audiences and was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece; it remains perhaps Montherlant’s finest work.

The Cardinal of Spain

Almost equally successful was the author’s next great play, The Cardinal of Spain. The work of a playwright whose mastery of dramatic technique was at its height, The Cardinal of Spain concerns two figures of sixteenth century Spain, Cardinal Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros and Juana la Loca. Cisneros’s predecessors on the Montherlantean stage are Ferrante, Don Alvaro, and Malatesta. Like them, the cardinal walks a tightrope, attempting to strike a balance between spiritual duty to others and duty to himself. As a cardinal, he is aware that he cannot scorn others, that he must love them and administer to their needs; as an intelligent individual, he is equally aware of the humiliation of serving others, of the others’ frequent unworthiness, of the fact that nothing really changes no matter how valiant the effort because of people’s stubbornness and imbecility and natural petrification. Cardona, the cardinal’s nephew (whose predecessor is Pedro of Queen After Death), weak, jealous of his uncle’s power, will betray him and cause his death. Instead of being freed from his uncle’s authority, as he had hoped, he is imprisoned by guilt. It is the cardinal who, through death, is provided with an escape from the irreconcilable conflict between fulfilling his office and retaining his dignity.

The heroine, Juana la Loca, has the physical and mental stamina of the Infanta of Navarre, with whom she shares a masculinized temperament. There is no madness about her; there is only the stark reality of her sanity. The dialogues between her and the cardinal are models of the dramatist’s elegant and noble language. The two understand each other perfectly, and their enmity is only one of circumstance. They both find commerce with men demeaning, and they both long for the repose of indifference, of renunciation. That these can only be reached through feigned madness and real death is no fault of their own. From the gravitational pull of social existence there are no other means of escape—a recurring Montherlantean view, which helps to explain his own loneliness and ultimate suicide.

Civil War

Men who view death as being more meaningful than life appear in the dramatist’s last great play, Civil War. This time it is in the pagan ambience of the Rome of Cesar and Pompei that the action takes place. Having now reached old age, and having to bear all the frailties involved, Montherlant’s cynicism goes a step further: Not only is one’s own death often desirable, but also the annihilation of many is frequently needed for the purification of a race or of a society. Civil wars are especially helpful and necessary in this respect. He points out, for example, that when the Greeks had stopped killing one another, they became the slaves of foreigners. Besides, the horror of war disappears when fighting is viewed as a sacrificial rite.

The ambition of the leaders, Cesar and Pompei, of the traitor, Laetorius, of Cato, Pompei’s general, is used by the protagonists less for the attainment of an immediate and temporal victory than for the purpose of courting danger so that death might ultimately result. There is an ecstasy in war that allows people to escape the drabness and dreariness of routine existence, as revealed in the play by the voice of the chorus. Much as Jean Giraudoux does in La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (pr., pb. 1935; Tiger at the Gates, 1955), Montherlant suggests that national and international strife belongs to the natural state of things, and leads to the realization of the self, as does procreation for primitive societies, and as cloning might for more advanced ones. A state of peace, devoid of violent action and brutality, would soften people’s minds and bodies, would atrophy whatever meager capacities they possess. Amoral or offensive as such a thought may be, it is expected of the pure and the intransigent as fashioned by Montherlant’s personal view and dramatic conception.

Bibliography

Becker, Lucille Frackman. Henry de Monttherlant: A Critical Biography. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. A biography of Montherlant that covers his life and works. Bibliography.

Gerrard, Charlotte Frankel. Montherlant and Suicide. Madrid, Spain: J. Porúa Turanzas, 1977. A critical analysis of the works of Montherlant, with emphasis on his attitude toward suicide. Bibliography and index.

Golsan, Richard Joseph. Service Inutile: A Study of the Tragic in the Theatre of Henry de Montherlant. University, Miss.: Romance Monographs, 1988. This study examines the tragic elements in the dramatic works of Montherlant. Bibliography.

Johnson, Robert Borwn. Henry de Montherlant. New York: Twayne, 1968. A basic biography of Montherlant that covers both his life and works. Bibliography.