I have already said that Montherlant has chosen a freedom without object; that is, he prefers an illusion of autonomy to an authentic freedom engaged in the world; it is this availability that he means to use against woman; she is heavy, she is a burden. “It was a harsh symbol that a man could not walk straight because the woman he loved was on his arm.”5
“I was burning, she puts out the fire. I was walking on water, she takes my arm, I sink.”6
How does she have so much power since she is only lack, poverty, and negativity and her magic is illusory? Montherlant does not explain it. He simply and proudly says that “the lion rightly fears the mosquito.”7
But the answer is obvious: it is easy to believe one is sovereign when alone, to believe oneself strong when carefully refusing to bear any burden. Montherlant has chosen ease; he claims to worship difficult values: but he seeks to attain them easily. “The crowns we give ourselves are the only ones worth being worn,” says the king in Pasiphaé. How easy. Montherlant overloaded his brow, draping it with purple, but an outsider’s look was enough to show that his diadems were papier-mâché and that, like Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, he was naked. Walking on water in a dream was far less tiring than moving forward on earthly land in reality. And this is why Montherlant the lion avoided the feminine mosquito with terror: he is afraid to be tested by the real.8
If Montherlant had really deflated the Eternal Feminine myth, he would have to be congratulated: women can be helped to assume themselves as human beings by denying the Woman. But he did not smash the idol, as has been shown: he converted it into a monster. He too believed in this obscure and irreducible essence: femininity; like Aristotle and Saint Thomas, he believed it was defined negatively; woman was woman through a lack of virility; that is the destiny any female individual has to undergo without being able to modify it. Whoever claims to escape it places herself on the lowest rung of the human ladder: she does not manage to become man, she gives up being woman; she is merely a pathetic caricature, a sham; that she might be a body and a consciousness does not provide her with any reality: Platonist when it suited him, Montherlant seems to believe that only the Ideas of femininity and virility possessed being; the individual who partakes of neither has only an appearance of existence. He irrevocably condemns these “vampires” who dare to posit themselves as autonomous subjects, dare to think and act. And he intends to prove through his depiction of Andrée Hacquebaut that any woman endeavoring to make herself a person would be changed into a grimacing marionette. Andrée is, of course, ugly, ungainly, badly dressed, and even dirty, with dubious nails and forearms: the little culture she is granted is enough to kill all her femininity; Costals assures us she is intelligent, but with every page devoted to her, Montherlant convinces us of her stupidity; Costals claims he feels sympathy for her; Montherlant renders her obnoxious. Through this clever equivocation, the idiocy of feminine intelligence is proven, and an original fall perverting all the virile qualities to which women aspire is established.
Montherlant is willing to make an exception for sportswomen; they can acquire a spirit, a soul, thanks to the autonomous exercise of their body; yet it was easy to bring them down from these heights; he delicately moves away from the thousand-meter winner to whom he devoted an enthusiastic hymn; knowing he could easily seduce her, he wanted to spare her this disgrace. Alban calls her to the top, but Dominique does not remain there; she falls in love with him: “She who had been all spirit and all soul sweated, gave off body odours, and out of breath, she cleared her throat.”9 Alban chases her away, indignant. If a woman kills the flesh in her through the discipline of sports, she can still be esteemed; but an autonomous existence molded in a woman’s flesh is a repulsive scandal; feminine flesh is abhorrent the moment a consciousness inhabits it. What is suitable for woman is to be purely flesh. Montherlant approves the Oriental attitude: as an object of pleasure, the weak sex has a place—modest, of course, but worthwhile—on earth; the pleasure it gives man justifies it, and that pleasure alone. The ideal woman is totally stupid and totally subjugated; she is always willing to welcome the man and never ask anything of him. Such was Douce, and Alban likes her when it is convenient: “Douce, admirably silly and always lusted after the sillier she is … useless outside of love and thus firmly but sweetly avoided.”10
Such is Rhadidja, the little Arab woman, a quiet beast of love who docilely accepts pleasure and money. This “feminine beast” met on a Spanish train can thus be imagined: “She looked so idiotic that I began to desire her.”11
The author explains: “What is irritating in women is their claim to reason; if they exaggerate their animality, they border on the superhuman.”12
However, Montherlant is in no way an Oriental sultan; in the first place, he does not have the sensuality. He is far from delighting in “feminine beasts” without ulterior motives; they are “sick, nasty, never really clean”;13
Costals admits that young boys’ hair smelled stronger and better than women’s; Solange sometimes makes him feel sick, her “cloying, almost disgusting, smell, and this body without muscles, without nerves, like a white slug.”14
He dreams of more worthy embraces, between equals, where gentleness was born of vanquished strength … The Oriental relishes woman voluptuously, thereby bringing about carnal reciprocity between lovers: the ardent invocations of the Song of Songs, the tales of The Thousand and One Nights, and so much other Arab poetry attest to the glory of the beloved; naturally, there are bad women; but there are also delicious ones, and sensual man lets himself go into their arms confidently, without feeling humiliated. But Montherlant’s hero is always on the defensive: “Take without being taken, the only acceptable formula between superior man and woman.”15 He speaks readily about the moment of desire, an aggressive moment, a virile one; he avoids the moment of pleasure; he might find that he risks discovering he also sweated, panted, “gave off body odours”; but no, who would dare breathe in his odor, feel his dampness? His defenseless flesh exists for no one, because there is no one opposite him: his is the only consciousness, a pure transparent and sovereign presence; and if pleasure exists for his own consciousness, he does not take it into account: it would have power over him. He speaks complacently of the pleasure he gave, never what he receives: receiving means dependence. “What I want from a woman is to give her pleasure”;16 the living warmth of voluptuousness would imply complicity: he accepts none whatsoever; he prefers the haughty solitude of domination. He seeks cerebral, not sensual, satisfactions in women.
And the first of these is an arrogance that aspires to express itself, but without running any risks. Facing the woman, “we have the same feeling as facing the horse or the bull: the same uncertainty and the same taste for testing one’s strength.”17 Testing it against other men would be risky; they would be involved in the test; they would impose unpredictable rankings, they would return an outside verdict; with a bull or a horse, one remains one’s own judge, which is infinitely safer. A woman also, if she is well chosen, remains alone opposite the man. “I don’t love in equality, because I seek the child in the woman.” This truism does not explain anything: Why does he seek the child and not the equal? Montherlant would be more sincere if he declared that he, Montherlant, does not have any equal; and more precisely that he does not want to have one: his fellow man frightens him. He admires the rigors of the Olympic Games that create hierarchies in which cheating is not possible; but he has not himself learned the lesson; in the rest of his work and life, his heroes, like him, steer clear of all confrontation: they deal with animals, landscapes, children, women-children, and never with equals. In love with the hard clarity of sports, Montherlant accepts as mistresses only those women from whom his fearful pride risks no judgment. He chooses them “passive and vegetal,” infantile, stupid, and venal. He systematically avoids granting them a consciousness: if he finds traces of one, he balks, he leaves; there is never a question of setting up any intersubjective relationship with woman: she
has to be a simple animated object in man’s kingdom; she can never be envisaged as subject; her point of view can never be taken into account. Montherlant’s hero has a supposedly arrogant morality, but it is merely convenient: he is only concerned with his relations with himself. He is attached to woman—or rather he attaches woman—not to take pleasure in her but to take pleasure in himself: as she is absolutely inferior, woman’s existence shows up the substantial, the essential, and the indestructible superiority of the male; risk-free.
So Douce’s foolishness enables Alban to “reconstruct in some way the sensations of the ancient demigod marrying a fabulous Goose.”18
At Solange’s first touch, Costals changes into a mighty lion: “They had barely sat down next to each other when he put his hand on the girl’s thigh (on top of her dress), then placed it in the middle of her body as a lion holds his paw spread out on the piece of meat he has won.”19
This gesture made daily by so many men in the darkness of cinemas is for Costals the “primitive gesture of the Lord.”20
If, like him, they had the sense of grandeur, lovers and husbands who kiss their mistresses before taking them would experience these powerful metamorphoses at low cost. “He vaguely sniffed this woman’s face, like a lion who, tearing at the meat he held between his paws, stops to lick it.”21
This carnivorous arrogance is not the only pleasure the male gets out of his female; she is his pretext for him to experience his heart freely, spuriously, and always without risk. One night, Costals takes such pleasure in suffering that, sated with the taste of his own pain, he joyfully attacks a chicken leg. Rarely can one indulge in such a whim. But there are other powerful or subtle joys. For example, condescension; Costals condescends to answer some women’s letters, and he even sometimes does it with care; to an unimportant, enthusiastic peasant, he writes at the end of a pedantic dissertation, “I doubt that you can understand me, but that is better than if I abase myself to you.”22
He likes sometimes to shape a woman to his image: “I want you to be like an Arab scarf for me … I did not raise you up to me for you to be anything else but me.”23 It amuses him to manufacture some happy memories for Solange. But it is above all when he sleeps with a woman that he drunkenly feels his prodigality. Giver of joy, peace, heat, strength, and pleasure: these riches he doles out fill him with satisfaction. He owes nothing to his mistresses; to be absolutely sure of that, he often pays them; but even when intercourse is an equal exchange, the woman is obliged to him without reciprocity: she gives nothing, he takes. He thinks nothing of sending Solange to the bathroom the day he deflowers her; even if a woman is dearly cherished, it would be out of the question for a man to go out of his way for her; he is male by divine right, she by divine right is doomed to the douche and bidet. Costals’s pride is such a faithful copy of caddishness that it is hard to tell him apart from a boorish traveling salesman.
Woman’s first duty is to yield to his generosity’s demands; when he imagines Solange does not appreciate his caresses, Costals turns white with rage. He cherishes Rhadidja because her face lights up with joy when he enters her. So he takes pleasure in feeling like both a beast of prey and a magnificent prince. One may be perplexed, however, by where this fever to take and to satisfy comes from if the woman taken and satisfied is just a poor thing, some tasteless flesh faintly palpitating with an ersatz consciousness. How can Costals waste so much time with these futile creatures?
These contradictions show the scope of a pride that is nothing but vanity.
A more subtle delectation belonging to the strong, the generous, the master, is pity for the unfortunate race. Costals from time to time is moved to feel such fraternal gravity, so much sympathy in his heart for the humble, so much “pity for women.” What can be more touching than the unexpected gentleness of tough beings? He brings back to life this noble postcard image when deigning to consider these sick animals that are women. He even likes to see sportswomen beaten, wounded, exhausted, and bruised; as for the others, he wants them as helpless as possible. Their monthly misery disgusts him, and yet Costals confides that “he had always preferred women on those days when he knew them to be affected.”24
He even yields to this pity sometimes; he goes so far as to make promises, if not to keep them: he promises to help Andrée, to marry Solange. When pity retreats from his soul, these promises die: Doesn’t he have the right to change his mind? He makes the rules of the game that he plays with himself as the only partner.
Inferior and pitiful, that is not enough. Montherlant wants woman to be despicable. He sometimes claims that the conflict of desire and scorn is a pathetic tragedy: “Oh! To desire what one disdains: what a tragedy!… To have to attract and repel in virtually the same gesture, to light and quickly put out as one does with a match, such is the tragedy of our relations with women!”25 In truth, the only tragedy is from the match’s point of view, that is, a negligible point of view. For the match lighter, careful not to burn his fingers, it is too obvious that this exercise delights him. If his pleasure were not to “desire what he disdains,” he would not systematically refuse to desire what he esteems: Alban would not repel Dominique; he would choose what he desires: after all, what is so despicable about a little Spanish dancer, young, pretty, passionate, and simple; is it that she is poor, from a low social class, and without culture? In Montherlant’s eyes, these would seem to be defects. But above all he scorns her as a woman, by decree; he says in fact that it is not the feminine mystery that arouses males’ dreams but these dreams that create mystery; but he also projects onto the object what his subjectivity demands: it is not because they are despicable that he disdains women but because he wants to disdain them that they seem abject to him. He feels that the lofty heights he is perched on are all the higher as the distance between them and her is great; that explains why his heroes choose such pathetic sweethearts: against Costals, the great writer, he pits an old provincial virgin tortured by sex and boredom, and a little far-right bourgeois, vacuous and calculating; this is measuring a superior individual with humble gauges: the result is that he comes across as very small to the reader through this awkward caution. But that does not matter as Costals thinks himself grand. The humblest weaknesses of woman are sufficient to feed his pride. A passage in The Girls is particularly telling. Before sleeping with Costals, Solange is preparing herself for the night. “She has to go to the toilet, and Costals remembers this mare he had, so proud, so delicate that she neither urinated nor defecated when he was riding her.” Here can be seen the hatred of the flesh (Swift comes to mind: Celia shits), the desire to see woman as a domestic animal, the refusal to grant her any autonomy, even that of urinating; but Costals’s annoyance shows above all that he has forgotten he too has a bladder and intestines; likewise, when he is disgusted by a woman bathed in sweat and body odor, he abolishes all his own secretions: he is a pure spirit served by muscles and a sex organ of steel. “Disdain is nobler than desire,” Montherlant declares in Aux fontaines du désir (At the Fountains of Desire), and Alvaro: “My bread is disgust.”26 What an alibi scorn is when it wallows in itself! Because one contemplates and judges, one feels totally other than the other that one condemns, and one dismisses the defects one is accused of free of charge. With what headiness has Montherlant exhaled his scorn for human beings throughout his whole life! It is sufficient for him to denounce their foolishness to believe he is intelligent, to denounce their cowardice to believe himself brave. At the beginning of the Occupation, he indulged in an orgy of scorn for his vanquished fellow countrymen: he who is neither French nor vanquished; he is above it all. Incidentally, all things considered, Montherlant, the accuser, did no more than the others to prevent the defeat; he did not even consent to being an officer; but he quickly and furiously resumed his accusations that take him well beyond himself.27
He affects to be distressed by his disgust so as to feel it is more sincere and to take more delight in it. The truth is that he finds so many advantages in it th
at he systematically seeks to drag the woman into abjection. He amuses himself by tempting poor girls with money and jewels: he exults when they accept his malicious gifts. He plays a sadistic game with Andrée, for the pleasure not of making her suffer but of seeing her debase herself. He encourages Solange in infanticide; she welcomes this possibility, and Costals’s senses are aroused: he takes this potential murderess in a ravishment of scorn.
The apologue of the caterpillars provides the key to this attitude: whatever his hidden intention, it is significant in itself.28 Pissing on caterpillars, Montherlant takes pleasure in sparing some and exterminating others; he takes a laughing pity on those that are determined to live and generally lets them off; he is delighted by this game. Without the caterpillars, the urinary stream would have been just an excretion; it becomes an instrument of life and death; in front of the crawling insect, man relieves himself and experiences God’s despotic solitude, without running the risk of reciprocity. Likewise, faced with female animals, the male, from the top of his pedestal, sometimes cruel, sometimes tender, sometimes fair, sometimes unpredictable, gives, takes back, satisfies, pities, or gets irritated; he defers to nothing but his own pleasure; he is sovereign, free, and unique. But these animals must not be anything but animals; they would be chosen on purpose, their weaknesses would be flattered; they would be treated as animals with such determination that they would end up accepting their condition. In similar fashion, the blacks’ petty robberies and lies charmed the whites of Louisiana and Georgia, confirming the superiority of their own skin color; and if one of these Negroes persists in being honest, he is treated even worse. In similar fashion, the debasement of man was systematically practiced in the concentration camps: the ruling race found proof in this abjection that it was of superhuman essence.
This was no chance meeting. Montherlant is known to have admired Nazi ideology. He loved seeing the swastika and the sun wheel triumph in a celebration of the sun. “The victory of the sun wheel is not just a victory of the Sun, of paganism. It is the victory of the sun principle, which is that everything changes … I see today the triumph of the principle I am imbued with, that I praised, that with a full consciousness I feel governs my life.”29