Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Henry De Montherlant - Chaos and Night
A 1949 Carrefour poll asked "Which of the contemporary French writers will be the most read in the year 2000?" Henry de Montherlant (1896-1972) came in first. The were wrong: in 2000, I think the answer was Simone de Beauvoir or Colette and now, Irène Némirovsky. Montherlant does not seem to me ever to have been much read in the US (more in the UK).
I gleaned the information about the poll from the introduction to Montherlant's 1947 play "The Master of Santiago." Set in a castle in Avila in 1519, "The Master of Santiago" shows Don Alvaro bemoaning the downfall of chivalry and resisting being sent to the New World to accumulate a fortune to provide a dowry for Mariana. Mariana is appalled at the idea of disturbing her father, especially for money-grubbing. Mariana is clear-eyed. She says, "My father is a man of exceptional uprightness. That is his only luxury, but it is a luxury for which one [she] pays a high price."
Montherlant's 1963 novel Chaos and the Night (Le chaos et la nuit), translated by Terrence Kilmartin, just brought back into print in America in the New York Review series (that has selected some of the best romans durs of Georges Simenon) seems to me to have a self-absorbed father, Celestino Marcilla, and a self-sacrificing daughter, Pascualita, who are variants on the same pair, even still Spanish.
Both Don Alvaro and Don Celestino, both of whom are widowers, are mired in idealizing a past: respectively the age of chivalry before gold from the New World began pouring into Spain and the Spanish Civil War in which Celestino fought on the side of the Republic. Celestino does not remember the Republic before Franco's rebellion with any particular fondness. Rather it was the time when bullets were flying, Celestino was killing people and in danger of being killed.
Twenty years of exile in Paris (after some unpleasant time in a refugee camp) with money still flowing from Madrid have been a long anticlimax. Celestino writes fiery anarchist essays (he is more anti-American than anti-Soviet but quite aware that the communists in the Spanish Civil War were at least as intent on wiping out anarchists and fascists) that Pascualita translates into French. 99 % are rejected by publishers, though occasionally part of a letter to an editor is printed.
The author makes an observation echoing the one I quoted above from Mariana: "Somebody always has to pay the cost of noble sentiments." As in "The Master of Santiago," it is the doweryless daughter who must devote her youth to caring for a heedless, attitudinizing father.
In the first half of the novel, Celestino is having intimations of mortality. He breaks with his only two friends and is even more than usually selfish about keeping his daughter in servitude to him.
What reinvigorates him is the news that his sister has died in Madrid. He wants his inheritance to get furniture for his death chamber. Though concerned that his visa is a trap, Celestino is cheered by the prospects of seeing a real (that is, Spanish) bullfight.
The Madrid part of the novel is more interesting than the (larger) Paris part. I don't find either of the main characters (or the subsidiary ones) interesting. Celestino is, I think, supposed to be a satire of a propertied man with a confused sentimental feeling of being on the left (not really caring in the least for the proletariat or individual proletarians). Montherlant was ultraconservative (like many other closeted pederasts).
Very little happens in the book, though there is a suitably ironic ending following three bullfights in which Celestino is progressively more irritated by the matadors. Montherlant makes Celestino pathetic in his delusions and mental fogginess, but not interesting. No other character is developed.
Don Alvaro was only interested in his own salvation, though he eventually recognizes that Mariana has a greater, nobler soul than his. Celestino is an atheist and does not think in such terms, but never appreciates Pasculita's sacrifices for his whims within his unconvincing leftist worldview. (Don Alvaro cared not at all about those who benefited from his charity, just as Celestino cared not at all about the workers whose cause he believed he was advancing.)
So, for someone interested in the dynamics of self-sacrificing daughter and heedlessly willing to sacrifice any life (and love) for his daughter, I'd recommend reading "The Master of Santiago" instead of Chaos and Night. (Oh yes, the title: chaos is life, night is death.) And for insights into increasing decerpitude, Chaos (published when the author was 68) adds nothing to The Bachelors (published when he was 40).
The NYR edition has a foreword by Gary Indiana, an openly gay novelist of (bad) manners. For more on Montherlant, see Louis Begley's essay at http://www.nysun.com/arts/pitiless-universe-of-montherlant/58590/.
I have written about Montherlant's plays "The Master of Santiago" at www.associatedcontent.com/article/791299 /henry_de_montherlants_1947_play_the.html?singlepage=true&cat=38
"La ville dont le prince est un enfant" (which means "the city ruled by a child, though the English title is "The Fire that Burns") at www.associatedcontent.com/article/755435 /henry_de_montherlants_play_la_ville.html,
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