Henry de Montherlant

Henry de Montherlant
File:Henry de Montherlant.jpg
Period	early-mid 20th century
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Henry de Montherlant or Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (20 April 1895 – September 21, 1972) was a French essayist, novelist 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 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, Italy, and Algeria.

From 1929 he began to write 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 solstice de Juin (1941) 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.

Montherlant is remembered for his aphorism "Happiness writes white. It does not show up on the page."

Biography

Born in Paris France, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) 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 (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house). After the death 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.

Montherlant concealed his homosexual tendencies from the public during his lifetime. In 1912, he had been expelled from the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly academy for a relationship with a fellow student. His play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and novel Les garçons (The Boys, published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier) and his correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte, (author of Les amitiés particulières (Special Friendships, 1943), also about sexual relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school), are the main testaments to this side of his character.

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, 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.

After becoming almost blind in his last years, Montherlant died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide 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, taking the seat which had belonged to André Siegfried, a political writer. His presentation speech dwelt mercilessly on the geography of New Zealand. 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 (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, 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.

Christophe Malavoy directed and starred in a 1997 television movie adaption of La Ville dont le prince est un enfant.

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, "Les Jeunes Filles", illustrated by Mariette Lydis, and others illustrated by Cami, Édouard Georges Mac-Avoy and Pierre-Yves Tremois.