The Monster, Marriage

Costals and the Hippogriff by Henry De Montherlani. Knopf. $2.75

Henry De Montherlants’s early writings—La Relève du Matin (1920), Le Songe (1922), Les Olympiques (1924), etc.—are intensely personal and reveal an ardent temperament, a will to dominate experience. He aspired then to a kind of spiritual leadership akin to Bartès’s. These lyrical novels, which show strongly the influence of Epictetus and Claudel, exploit certain post-war themes in a peculiarly exalted vein-adolescence as “the zenith of life,” sport, that develops comradeship, and war with its violent revelation of man’s capacity for devotion and strength. (“The most hideous dead man will seem beautiful to you if it is you who have killed him.”) They are in a sense pedagogical novels, in which the aristocratic young hero, “egoistic and hard,” evolves a code of behavior and an ideal of society through his experiences and contacts in school, the army and the gymnasium. They espouse, in a somewhat dithyrambic vein, the regressive ideal of a hierarchical society, with the Catholic church as a successor to the Caesarian tradition sharing the ministry of souls with a paganism compounded of the worship of the mystic bull and the cult of the body and the Spartan virtues. Montherlant next went through a phase recorded in his two novels written on the theme of the “voyageur traque” (the tired traveler), in which nostalgia for old Castilian and North African cultural traditions and settings led to a very modern world-weariness not unlike that of Paul Morand. Having attained “the flaming ramparts of the world,” Montherlant withdrew into a seminal seclusion from which he emerged, five years ago, with a completely new repertory of works, several of which he has thus far withheld from publication, and of which the present four-volume novel, Les Jeunes Filles, written in 1931-32, is the most recently published.