Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.
“CHAOS AND NIGHT” (“Le Chaos et la Nuit”) by Henry de
Montherlant (first published 1963; Terence Kilmartin’s English translation
first published 1964)
One day,
when I have the time and patience, I will set out on this blog my reactions to
one of the greatest, and at the same time one of the most repellent, sequences
of novels in modern literature. I refer to Henry de Montherlant’s tetralogy
usually known as Les Jeunes Filles
(“The Girls” or “The Young Girls”) after the first novel in the sequence; but
just as widely remembered as Pitie Pour
Les Femmes (“Pity for Women”) after the second novel in the sequence.
As de Montherlant’s critics never
tired of pointing out, it is a sequence of novels about the battle of the sexes
as seen by a bitter, misogynistic, phallocentric, egotistical, heterosexual
man, for whom women are at one and the same time necessities and complete
nuisances. Much here to arouse the wrath not only of doctrinaire feminist
critics, but also of anyone with a more balanced view of the sexes. And yet, as
the merest dabbler in literature should know, it is not necessarily admirable
or sympathetic viewpoints which make great literature. In fact lack of balance,
maybe even mild craziness, seems almost a necessary part of literary greatness.
And Les Jeunes Filles is still
essential reading.
Henry de
Montherlant (1895-1972) certainly was an odd human being, and not solely for
the fact that his first name was spelt English-style (“Henry”) rather than
French-style (Henri”). In spite of the heterosexual persona adopted in many of
his novels – including his great tetralogy – he was homosexual by inclination
and, as was gleefully made public after his death, he appears also to have been
a paedophile. His views were right wing and reactionary. His ancestors were
minor French aristocracy and he carried a heavy baggage of inherited prejudice.
He has been accused of being a collaborator at the time of the German
occupation during the Second World War, but in this particular he appears to
have been no more guilty than three-quarters of French intellectuals.
Sometimes, too, the term “Catholic” has been attached to him; but despite his
Catholic family background, and the Catholic institutional settings of some of
his novels based on his childhood, it is hard to find anything specifically
Catholic in his outlook. Indeed the way his characters live their lives, and the
way de Montherlant depicts them, is quite contrary to any church teaching. My
own suggestion is that the term “Catholic” is often applied rather lazily to
any French writers of his generation who were not specifically socialist or
otherwise left wing.
In spite of
all this, de Montherlant had admirers in France (where he was as well known for
his plays as his novels) from all quarters of the political compass. He was
elected to the Academie Francaise in 1960. By fellow writers like the communist
Louis Aragon, the existentialist Albert Camus or the conservative Catholic
Georges Bernanos, he was recognised as a master, whatever they might have
thought of his views. He may have been perverse, but he could write and was a
brilliant stylist in the classic French tradition.
Which, after all this
throat-clearing, brings me at last to the novel I’ve chosen as this week’s
“Something Old”. Chaos and Night came
late in de Montherlant’s career and shows the writer at his most merciless. Its
chief issues are not sexual but political, and it has at least something in it
to offend just about every political ideology.
The story is set specifically in
1959, exactly twenty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Celestino
Marcilla is an old Spanish anarchist, living in exile in Paris with his
daughter Pasqualita. He despises the French and their bourgeois democracy. He
despises his fellow Spanish exiles, who seem to him a futile bunch. He
deliberately breaks off contact with his best friends Marcial Pineda and Ruiz. Their talk has become the tiresome
self-justifications of the defeated, as when:
“Ruiz used to claim that a moment always came when wars and revolutions
turned into sombre farces, and that he was glad that the Left had been defeated
in Spain, because it would have been corrupted by victory, whereas now it was a
potentiality and therefore something pure and good.” (Chapter 2)
Being an anarchist, Celestino
hates equally the church and all forms of Marxism. He regards himself as a
complete individualist, musing that “Nobody
really understands the human condition unless he realizes that apart from one
or two persons, there is not one soul who is interested in whether he lives or
dies.” (Chapter 2)
Constantly he thinks of Spain and
of the bullfights, sometimes playing at being matador to the passing Parisian
traffic.
The first part of the novel is as
comic as it is serious: the portrait of an uncompromisingly cranky old man who
repeatedly bites the hand that feeds him and clearly has an inflated idea of
what his importance was in the civil war. This is reflected in the political
articles he keeps writing, which nobody ever publishes.
Then the story becomes much
darker in tone. From Madrid he receives news from his (middle-class and
Francoist) brother-in-law Vicente, telling him that he has come into an
inheritance, which he can collect if he goes to Madrid. His daughter
Pasqualita, quite clearly indifferent to politics, wants to go back to the
homeland.
So they go to Franco’s Spain.
At first, some of the tone of
cranky comedy persists amidst the growing darkness. Celestino constantly
imagines that Fascists are about to pounce on him and arrest him. In fact,
somewhat offending his amour propre,
what he discovers in Spain is complete indifference to him. Nobody cares. The
country under Franco is not depicted in glowing terms, but it is presented as a
place of relative material prosperity, where life goes on with no consciousness
of the slogans and ideals Celestino held so dear in the civil war twenty years
previously.
Celestino realizes he is now an
old man, an anomaly and an anachronism. His epiphany comes when he goes to a
bullfight (described graphically in Chapter 7) and at last realizes that it is
the bull which is his representative – not the nimble matador he imagined
himself to be in Paris. The bull is a beast worn down by the spikes of the
picadors and the deceits of the matadors and fated to die. Mortality is our
common destiny, not the flashy tricks of the matador. Life is chaos – a series
of delusive shows – followed by night – complete oblivion.
Celestino goes back to his hotel
room and dies in the realization that death is stronger than all slogans and
all political creeds. Before his death, his rambling and often nihilistic
thoughts set the final power of death against the ultimate triviality of
politics:
“… it was he who had so often repeated Trotsky’s words: ‘If human life is
sacred, we must abandon the revolution.’ The fall of Franco, the conquest of
the world by Communism, the outbreak of world war, the blowing up of the planet
by the hydrogen bomb – all these were as nothing compared to this single fact;
that he was going to die, that there was no hope and that it was immanent….
Then he saw that Franco was Stalin. Contrary to what he had always imagined,
there was no ‘yes’ and ‘no’; everything was ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time….
In discovering that Franco was Stalin he had discovered the promised land, he
had discovered everything. A hallowed but godless atmosphere now surrounded him.”
(Chapter 8)
This is a novel that transcends
politics. Whatever de Montherlant’s politics may have been at the time of the
Spanish Civil War (as a right-wing reactionary he favoured the Franco side),
the novel promotes no political ideology. The left-wing Spanish exiles are
shown as an ineffectual bunch, living off obsolete slogans, their brains
fixated on a conflict that is long over. (In this particular, some of the novel
anticipates the mood of Alain Resnais’s famous film about Spanish exiles, La Guerre est Finie, which appeared
four years after this novel was published.) On the other hand, though it seems
to be materially thriving, Franco’s Spain is clearly a police state. There is
an odd little sting in the tail to the novel where, after Celestino’s death, the
Civil Guard really do crash into his hotel room with the intention of arresting
him as a political troublemaker.
I admit at once that the ultimate
political outlook of Chaos and Night
is despairing. There is no programme to cling to. There is no character who
neatly articulates a means of bettering the world. This could outrage many
readers, just as de Montherlant’s sexual politics in his other novels outrage
many readers. Again, I find myself circling about the term “nihilistic”. Please
note, too, that there is no religious salvation – death, in an atmosphere that
is “hallowed but godless”, promises
only oblivion. So much for the notion that de Montherlant was a Catholic.
In part, this is a brutal novel.
Chapter 6 gives us the following happy anecdote: “Narvaez, a Spanish general of the nineteenth century, asked on his
death bed if he forgave his enemies, replied ‘I have no enemies. I’ve had them
all shot.’ ” Like much in the novel, this is indicative of the extremes of
the Spanish character as interpreted by de Montherlant – leading to the civil
war’s mutual destructiveness of anarchism/communism on the one hand and fascism
on the other. It is reflected, too, in the central image of bullfighting.
In an article, which I have not
been able to trace, Malcolm Muggeridge once interpreted de Montherlant (who
wrote other works, like Les Bestiaires,
centring on bullfighting) as one of those weak men – like Ernest Hemingway –
who were obsessed with their own virility and found vicarious compensation in
the extreme macho image that bullfighting provided. There may be some truth to
this. And there is certainly throughout Chaos
and Night the sense of dying male potency. In effect, chaos is what
descends as the old man’s penis fails to function and he ceases to have a
purpose in life. Like Hemingway, de Montherlant eventually took his own life,
both impotent matadors falling on their own swords.
But once we have taken all the
nihilism, all the political quietism and all the rancid machismo on board, this
is still a novel that conveys powerfully the finality of death. It is raw,
shocking, despairing and real. As I said, great literature rarely emerges from
a neat and rational philosophical balance; and de Montherlant’s horrible novel
is a memorable one.
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