Henry de Montherlant
Encyclopedia
Henry de Montherlant or Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (20 April 1895 – September 21, 1972) was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 essayist, novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

ist and one of the leading French dramatists of the twentieth century.

Works

His early successes were works such as Les Célibataires (The Bachelors) in 1934, and the tetralogy
Tetralogy
A tetralogy is a compound work that is made up of four distinct works, just as a trilogy is made up of three works....

 Les Jeunes Filles (The Young Girls) (1936–1939), which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages. At this time, Montherlant traveled regularly, mainly to Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, and Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

.

He wrote 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 Songe he described the courage and camaraderie of soldiers, based on his experiences in World War I. In the 1930s, he wrote numerous articles and books advocating intervention against Nazi Germany. During the German Occupation, his book L'Équinoxe de Septembre was banned by the German authorities. However, in Le Solstice de Juin, a book about the defeat of France in May and June 1940 (which he had covered as a reporter), he expressed his admiration for Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht
The Wehrmacht – from , to defend and , the might/power) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe .-Origin and use of the term:...

 and claimed that France had been justly defeated. This earned him the reputation of a collaborator, and got him in trouble after the Liberation. Like many scions of the old aristocracy, he had hated the Third Republic
French Third Republic
The French Third Republic was the republican government of France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed due to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to 1940, when France was overrun by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the German and Italian occupations of France...

, especially as it had become in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair
Dreyfus Affair
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...

.

Although not openly gay, Montherlant treated homosexual themes in his work, including his play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant
La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (play)
La Ville dont le prince est un enfant is a 1955 play by French dramatist Henry de Montherlant. The title, literally translated, The City Whose Prince is a Child, is taken from Ecclesiastes 10:16: "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!"-Progress of the...

(1952) and novel Les Garçons (The Boys), published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier. He maintained a private correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte
Roger Peyrefitte
Roger Peyrefitte was a French diplomat, writer of bestseller novels and gossipy non-fiction, and a defender of gay rights.-Life and work:...

—author of Les Amitiés particulières
Les amitiés particulières
Les amitiés particulières is a 1943 novel by French writer Roger Peyrefitte, probably his best known work today, which won the coveted prix Renaudot...

(Special Friendships, 1943), also about sexual relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school.

Montherlant is remembered for his aphorism "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page," often misquoted in the shorter form "Happiness writes white."

Biography

Born in Paris France, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard
Picardy
This article is about the historical French province. For other uses, see Picardy .Picardy is a historical province of France, in the north of France...

 family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly
Lycée Janson de Sailly
Lycée Janson de Sailly is a lycée located in the XVIe arrondissement of Paris, France. It is generally considered as one of the most prestigious lycées in Paris...

 and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.Although Neuilly is technically a suburb of Paris, it is immediately adjacent to the city and directly extends it. The area is composed of mostly wealthy, select residential...

. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair
Dreyfus Affair
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...

 army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity
Electricity
Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...

 or the telephone
Telephone
The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

 installed in his house).

In 1912, he was expelled from the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly academy for a homosexual relationship with a fellow student. 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 ('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
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

.

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
Peter Quennell
Sir Peter Courtney Quennell CBE was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic....

, 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
Vertigo (medical)
Vertigo is a type of dizziness, where there is a feeling of motion when one is stationary. The symptoms are due to a dysfunction of the vestibular system in the inner ear...

.

After becoming almost blind in his last years, Montherlant died from a self-inflicted
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...

 gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide
Cyanide
A cyanide is a chemical compound that contains the cyano group, -C≡N, which consists of a carbon atom triple-bonded to a nitrogen atom. Cyanides most commonly refer to salts of the anion CN−. Most cyanides are highly toxic....

 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
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

, taking the seat which had belonged to André Siegfried
André Siegfried
André Siegfried was a French academic, geographer and political writer best known for his commentaries on American, Canadian, and British politics....

, a political writer. His presentation speech dwelt mercilessly on the geography of New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

. He was an Officer of the French Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur
Légion d'honneur
The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...

.

Reference is made to "Les Jeunes Filles" in two films by West German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Das kleine Chaos (1967) and Satansbraten (1977). 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

Terence Kilmartin
Terence Kilmartin
Terence Kilmartin CBE was an Irish translator who served as the literary editor of The Observer between 1952 and 1986. The most well-known and popular of his translations is his 1981 revision of C. K...

, best known for revising the Moncrieff translation of Proust, translated some of Montherlant's novels to English, including a 1968 edition of the five volumes of Les Jeunes Filles.

In 2009, the New York Review of Books returned Montherlant to print in English by issuing Kilmartin's translation of Chaos and Night (1963) with a new introduction by Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana is an American writer, filmmaker, and visual artist. He teaches philosophy and literature at the New School in New York City. He divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.- Fiction :...

.

Christophe Malavoy
Christophe Malavoy
-Selected filmography:* Madame Bovary* Le Cri du hibou* La Balance* A Captain's Honor* Le Voyage en douce* Death in a French Garden-External links:...

 directed and starred in a 1997 television movie adaption of La Ville dont le prince est un enfant
La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (film)
La Ville dont le prince est un enfant is a 1997 made for television film adapted from 1955 play by French dramatist Henry de Montherlant of the same title....

.

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
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...

, "Les Jeunes Filles", illustrated by Mariette Lydis, and others illustrated by Cami
CAMI
CAMI can refer to:*CAMI Automotive, a Canadian automobile manufacturing company.*Columbia Artists Management, a talent management agency*Camisole...

, Édouard Georges Mac-Avoy and Pierre-Yves Tremois.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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