MONTHERLANT, HENRY DE O

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Philippe Jullian,Prince to the movies, and then home to bed. of Aesthetes, New York: Viking, 1968. Montherlant soon fell in with one particu- Stephen Wayne Foster lar youth, who was fourteen, with the knowledge of the boy's mother. Although MONTHERLANT,HENRY not a novice in these matters, the older novelist came to rely on Peyrefitte's ad- DE (1875-1770) French novelist, dramatist and vice as to how to conduct the affair. After essayist. A Parisian by birth, Montherlant Montherlant settledin thesouth of France, was educated in an elite Catholic board- their friendship continued on a weekly, ing school, whose atmosphere of particu- sometimes daily postal basis, thoughwith lar friendships and ambivalent student- verbal dodges to fool the censor. Through teacher relations left an abiding impres- the tragic events of the declaration of war, sion. At the age of sixteen he fell passion- the defeat of France, and the beginning of ately in love with a younger boy-an inter- the Occupation, the two remained obses- est evoked in La Ville dont leprince est un sively preoccupied with their affairs with boys. Both men got into scrapes with the enfant (1952) and Les Garcons (written in 1929 but published posthumously). authorities, but while Montherlant was In World War I he used family able to use influence to smooth things connections to make sure that he had a over, Peyrefitte lost his job with the Quai taste of combat without really being en- d1Orsay. dangered by it. His first novel, Le songe Although a first version of the (1922),is an account of the war initiating novel Les Gargons was written in 1929, the full text, which shows the pupils of a lifelong personal cult of virility and courage that many have subsequently Sainte-Croix in an almost frantic ballet of found spurious. In ensuing novels, as well love affairs with each other (though not as in his plays (1942-65], Montherlant with the teachers], did not appear until presents resolute heroes and heroines who after the writer's death. The book captures are steadfast in their confrontation of God the sultry mixture of passion, religion, and and nothingness, embodying audacity, (a very definite third) study in an elite patriotism, purity, and self-sacrifice as French school as well, if not better than opposed to cowardice, hypocrisy, compro- any other in this well populated genre. mise, and self-indulgence.Throughout his Before his death Montherlant seems to life, Montherlant labored to polish an image have foreseen that the truth about himself of a manly stoic, and it was in this key that would come out, and even to have given he took his own life in 1972, as blindness this process some anticipatory encourage- set in. ment. The postumous publication of his In their lives Montherlant and correspondence with the openly gay nov- Peyrefitte offer a vivid contrast: the one elist Roger Peyrefitte threw anew light on striving to retain and even polish the mask Montherlant, one that could only prove of heterosexuality, the other frank about disconcerting to many of his erstwhile his from his first novel, Les admirers. In April 1938 the thirty-one- amitibs particulibres (1945). Yet after year old Peyrefitte met Montherlant, then Montherlant's death a truer picture has forty three, at an amusement arcade in emerged, and the divergent perspectives of Place Clichy in . Both had discovered work and life have become visible without independently that, in aParis that had still growing together. In fact his work abounds in divided characters: a colonial officer not entirely recovered from the Depres- who does not believe in imperialism, an sion, these commercial undertakings pro- vided good opportunities for picking up artist who does not care for painting, a priest for whom God is an illusion, and an impoverished teenaged boys, taking them 9 MONTHERLANT, HENRY DE anarchist who has never believed in anar- ment thinkers as and Diderot had chism. ambivalent attitudes toward sexual non- conformity. While opposing barbaric op- BIBLIOGRAPHY. pression, they clung to the notion that the and Roger Peyrefitte, Correspondence, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1983; Pierre church remained the arbiter of "moral- Sipriot, Montherlant sans masque, I: ity," which in practice meant sexual L'Enfant prodigue, 1895-1 932, Paris: morality, and that same-sexrelations, being Robert Laffont, 1982. "unnatural," were destined to disappear in Wayne R. Dynes a truly enlightened polity. During the French Revolution two pamphlets MOTIONPICTURES appeared, Les enfans de Sodome and Les See Film. petits bougres au man8ge, purporting to give information on adherents to a proto- MOVEMENT, liberation movement for homosexuals, but HOMOSEXUAL this anticipation remains shadowy. Modernlife has seen many move- A lonely precursor was Heinrich ments for social change, including those Hoessli (1784-1864), a Swiss milliner from intended to secure the rights of disenfran- the canton of Glarus, who in 183648 chisedgroups. Thehomosexualmovement published in two volumes Eros: Die is a general designation for organized po- Miinnerliebe der Griechen: ihre litical striving to end the legal and social Beziehungen zur Geschichte, Erziehung, intolerance of homosexuality in countries Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten where it had been stigmatized as both a (Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks: Its vice and a crime, and where the revelation Relationship to the History, Education, of an individual's homosexuality almost Literature and Legislation of All Ages). inevitably led to social ostracism and Amateur that he was, Hoessli collected economic ruin. Only at the end of the the literary and other material-mainly nineteenth century did such organized from ancient Greeceand medieval Islam- movement endeavors become possible in that illustrated male homosexuality. His continental Europe, in no small measure writings, issued in very small editions, had because of the impact of scientific think- no immediate effect on public opinion or ing on the political discourse of that ep- the law. och. Characteristic of such movements is Second in the prehistory of the their capacity to give the homosexual movement, the German jurist and poly- individual not just a sexual but a political math Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (182.5-1895) identity-as a niember of a minority with began in January 1864to publish a series of agrievance against thelargersociety. These pamphlets under the title Forschungen movements varied in the size of their zur mannmannlichen Liebe. The first of membership and the scope of their activ- these was entitled Vindex, a name meant ity, as well as in the specific goals which to vindicate the homosexual in the eyes of they pursued and the arguments by which public opinion. The second had the name they sought to persuade the decision- Inclusa, taken from Ulrichs' formula an- making elites and the general public of the ima muliebris corpore virili inclusa, "a justice of their cause. female soul trapped in a male body." The Origins. The Enlightenment of pamphlets rambled over the entire field of the eighteenth century, which took up ancient and modern history and sociology, arms against every form of arbitrary op- with comments on contemporary scan- pression, may be regarded as the spiritual dals. Although he even conceived the idea parent of all later homosexual liberation of an organization that would fight for the movements. Yet such leading Enlighten- human rights of Umings, as he called them,