On June 22, 1922, the Almanach des Lettres Françaises et Étrangères announced that Littérature, whose collaborators would thenceforth “devote themselves to Surrealism in poetry and life,” had had its day. Two weeks later, Breton declared that Symbolism, Dadaism, and Cubism were also spent enthusiasms. He envisaged art as life-changing. Salvation lay in the unconscious, from which Surrealists proposed to “take dictation,” like evangelical scribes at the mouth of an inner oracle.
Two years later, shortly before the publication of the movement’s new journal, La Révolution Surréaliste, Breton issued a long manifesto in which Surrealism was defined as “psychic automatism in its pure state,” or a method of freeing thought from the shackles of reason and letting it play innocently, without regard for morality and aesthetics. Its foundation, he wrote, is a belief in “the omnipotence of dream,” which, in turn, sustains a belief in “the superior reality of certain forms of hitherto neglected associations.”
Although Descartes was the last philosopher with whom Breton wished to be associated, his creed echoes the motto illustrated in Jan Weenix’s famous portrait of the philosopher, Mundus est fabula: the world is a fable. In Breton’s manifesto, the world is not so much a fable as it is our narration of it. Having declared in the manifesto that “man was given language to make Surrealist use of it,” he took that thought one step further in Point du Jour by contending that “the mediocrity of our world” derives essentially from the way we use our power of speech. “What prevents me,” he asked, “from muddling the order of words and thus dealing a blow to the wholly apparent existence of things?”
It was almost axiomatic among young poets of the postwar generation that Victor Hugo, who had made good his promise to put a red bonnet on the French dictionary, and Mallarmé, who proposed to give a “purer sense” to “the language of the tribe,” needed radical heirs. Language had become the instrument and warden of the ruling social order. “This hubbub of cars and lorries, these districts housing merchandise or files rather than people, … these governments of shopkeepers and money-grubbing politicians, I want out; but no, we are forced to play the game,” wrote Francis Ponge, a young poet who later signed Breton’s “Second Manifesto.” “Alas, this sordid regime speaks from within ourselves, for we have at our disposal no other words … than those prostituted from time immemorial by daily use in this squalid world.”
The cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, December 1924.
How to conjure a new world in speaking it? was the question. Their revolt against the commonly understood significance of words, or against the word as sign, led Breton and his confrères to insist on the word’s materiality, to view words as debris erupting from the unconscious and signifying nothing for being self-referential. Louis Aragon proclaimed that he sought the human equivalent of external things.
The paradox of hermetic transcendence was a collective quest. The new evangelists subscribed to Breton’s fantasy that the mind in some altered state would no longer be aware of words but, rather, would press them out of itself, like a thing extruding things. When words themselves became objects impervious to logic, the rift between subject and object would vanish. In Une Vague de Rêves, one of the first essays about Surrealism and its experiments, Aragon recounts a magical moment when the group discovered that a written image could affect their senses, “shed its verbal aspect” and call into being phenomena they did not think it possible to create. The concrete is the ultimate moment of thought, and the state of concrete thought is poetry, he concluded. Ponge said something of the same thing more engagingly in his celebration of the snail, whose utterance, as he describes it, takes the form of dribble clotting, drying, and leaving a silvery wake: “It does not have many friends. Nor does it need any to assure its happiness. It cleaves so well to nature, revels so perfectly in its clasp; it is a friend of the ground, and kisses it with its whole body.”1 In the organism absolutely adequate to the earth, “awareness of” or “consciousness of” is otiose.
Ultimately, Surrealism’s initiates might have chosen the snail as their emblem for its shell as well as its dribble—for its exquisite self-involvement as well as its organic trail. Breton wrote this about Picasso:
The plastic instinct, raised here by an individual to the apogee of its development, draws upon the refusal, the negation of everything that may distract it from a sense of itself. With Picasso it is the sum of all these needs, these essays in disintegration, rendered with implacable lucidity.… It [the plastic instinct] is, to suppose the impossible, the spider devoting its attention to the design and substance of its web’s polygon more than to the fly; it is the migrating bird peering over its wing in full flight to look at what it has left behind, or the bird seeking to recover itself in the labyrinth of its own song.
Surrealists, with Breton in the center and his wife, Simone, at the typewriter, taking dictation from Robert Desnos’s unconscious. Desnos was reputed to have a special talent for entering self-induced trances. In the upper right-hand corner, craning his neck, is Giorgio de Chirico.
The Surrealist poem was to answer the same ideal of a locked, reflexive universe in which language exists on its own terms (“words make love to one another,” wrote Breton), conveying no feeling, no experience, no image felt, experienced, or imagined outside itself. It no longer derived from an intention or preconceived idea but, rather, sprang from pure chance. As the product of unconscious mayhem, it was purely necessary in a way that only things can presume to be. Hence Breton’s doctrine of “objective chance”: the ellipses, the absence of rhetorical connectives, the dislocated clichés, the unforeseen meeting of rationally unjuxtaposable words, or sometimes the loneliness of a single word drumming through the poem, pivoting on itself in puns or disintegrating into its syllables, form a material cryptogram of one’s “mental matter”—not a transparent sign dissolving into significance but an irreducible thing. Surrealist gospel envisioned an objective order of concrete metaphors bearing an imprint of the poet’s “true life” on their inner face, like a fossilized secret. It remained for him to find his secret within the order he created by chance.
Aragon—Drieu’s close friend and Breton’s most eloquent apostle—once told an audience of students in Madrid: “I am stranded at your ear.” Stranded they all were, insofar as their ideal of creation had the poet looking out and seeing himself look in, or hearing his voice through his ears, like a listener. One is put in mind of André Malraux’s comment in The Voices of Silence on his novel La Condition Humaine. “We know the yearning every man has for omnipotence and immortality,” he wrote. “We know that his mind does not grasp itself the way it grasps the world, that each of us is, in his own eyes, a welter of monstrous dreams. I once told the story of a man who fails to recognize his own voice, freshly taped, because he is, for the first time, hearing it through his ears, no longer through his throat. And because our inner voice is conveyed to us through our throat alone, I called this book The Human Condition.” What the Surrealists abhorred in the end was less the subversive influence of the bourgeoisie than their own human condition. Or perhaps both inseparably. Emerging from the bloody havoc wreaked by men who honored “le clair esprit français,” in a country blooming with monuments to the dead, they could not settle for less than the absolutes of omnipotence and immortality. The Great War fostered literary terror.
Equating mind and word in a substantive sense, Breton wished to short-circuit the world. Nowhere is his intention more explicitly stated than in the “Second Manifesto”:
Everything leads one to believe that there exists a certain vantage point of the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived as opposites. One searches in vain for any other motive to Surrealist activity than the hope of determining this point.… It is clear … that Surrealism is not seriously interested in whatever is being produced next door under the pretext of art, or of anti-art, of philosophy, or of anti-philosophy, in a word, in anything whose end is not the annihilation of being in a flash, interior and blind.… What could those people who harbor some concern about the place they will occupy in the world expect to gain from the Surrealist experiment?
As in the text on Picasso, Breton draws an image of the self, divided in the phenomenal world but recoiling upon itself, thereby gaining the kind of absolute oneness inherent in matter, on the one hand, and divine vessels, on the other. At times the Surrealist would characterize words as matter materializing the self, like dreams of stone, at other times as a solvent dissolving the self (Breton’s image of “soluble fish”). Like Baudelaire’s private journal My Heart Laid Bare, which opens with the pronouncement “The evaporation and the condensation of the SELF: there you have it, in a nutshell,” the “Surrealist Manifesto” could have been published with two illustrations on facing pages: Magritte’s tableau of a petrified man seated at a petrified table within petrified walls, and a blank canvas on a blank page. Surrealist writings everywhere refer to an original unity of which man has been dispossessed but that he can regain in some new Creation, conceived alternately as a plenum and a void: the dreamer’s mind being occluded by the hallucinatory object or being absolved of everything that furnishes a personal history. In one of Aragon’s early works, a certain Baptiste Ajamais (who, according to the writer’s key, is Breton) says, “Above all there is that joy of finding nothing within myself once I’ve closed my eyes. Nothing. I am empty. Outside nothing fixes onto my sight any longer.”
Although Drieu spent much time with Louis Aragon—at music halls, in brothels, on long walks though the beautiful crescent of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, high above Paris, and, during summer holidays, at the Cyrano café near Breton’s flat in Montmartre—his name mingled with the Surrealists’ publicly only once, in a pamphlet they published, largely at his expense, after the death of Anatole France on October 12, 1924. It was entitled Un Cadavre.
Not since December 1923, when Maurice Barrès’s hearse, drawn by ten black horses and followed by an immense cortège, crossed Paris en route to Notre Dame Cathedral (halting at the Place des Pyramides to bid Jeanne d’Arc a posthumous farewell) had there been a state funeral of such proportions for a revered literary figure. Anatole France’s coffin, draped in black and silver, lay beneath a statue of Voltaire overlooking the square of the Institut de France on the Quai Malaquais. Crosses were banished. Musicians played the Andante from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the March from Gluck’s Alceste. Red flags honoring Anatole France’s conversion to Socialism outnumbered the tricolor, and a row of them followed his horse-drawn hearse past the Tuileries and the Arc de Triomphe to a small cemetery in Neuilly. Again, from windows and balconies many thousands witnessed the cortège, which reached Neuilly after dark. France was buried by torchlight.2
The funeral procession began so late because so many dignitaries delivered prolix eulogies: the president of the Republic, the premier, cabinet ministers, the president of the Société des Gens de Lettres. Notable was the fact that no one quoted the famous line from France’s own eulogy of Émile Zola at the Montmartre cemetery in 1902. Zola was, he had said, “un moment de la conscience humaine”—a moment in the history of human conscience. To do so would have revived memories of the Dreyfus Affair at the very portal of the Académie Française, to which France had belonged and whose meetings he had boycotted between 1902 and 1916 as a protest against his colleagues’ unanimous anti-Dreyfusism. There were oblique references to this, but what the speakers trumpeted were the author’s unobjectionable virtues—his taste, his style, his exemplification of “French genius.” Gabriel Hanotaux, who represented the Académie Française, annointed him “the great writer par excellence, the most French in his language, his ingenuity, his wisdom.” Having received “the admirable dialect of Paris” as a birthright, France defended it all his life, said Hanotaux, and thus “contributed to our conquests abroad.” His works were “pregnant with humanity,” declared Paul Painlevé, the minister of education. He was “the very model of the perfect writer,” according to Georges Lecomte, president of the Société des Gens de Lettres, “the writer whose language most exactly translated and fit his thought.” In Le Figaro, another member of the Académie Française claimed that Pierre Loti, France, and Barrès, all of whom died within fourteen months of one another, formed “a chain of peaks.”
André Breton in the 1950s in his Montmartre apartment, after World War II.
A few years later, Breton would be flirting with the French Communist Party, Aragon and other Surrealists would be seeking their salvation in Marxism-Leninism rather than in the id, and Drieu would be waffling between ideological extremes; but in 1924, none was yet sufficiently political to balance Anatole France’s civic heroism against the literary ideals they scorned.
Un Cadavre satisfied enemies who wanted only one more piece of evidence to convict its authors of being mad dogs. “Anatole France hasn’t died, he will never die,” wrote Soupault. “In a few years, a few worthy writers will have invented a new Anatole. There are people who can’t do without this comic character, ‘the greatest man of the century,’ or ‘a master.’ His every last word is anthologized, his most trivial sentences are studied under a magnifying glass. And then one obligatorily bellows: ‘How beautiful it is! How magnificent! How splendid!’ The eternal master.” Breton’s smear appeared under the title “Burial Refused.”
Let us commemorate the year that silenced three sinister men, Loti, Barrès, France: the idiot, the traitor, the cop. Gone with France’s departure is a bit of human servility. Let there be rejoicing on the day that ruse, traditionalism, patriotism, opportunism, skepticism, realism, and lack of heart are buried! Let us remember that the basest villains of this age had Anatole France as an accomplice and let us never pardon him for having colored his smiling inertia with the red, white, and blue of the Revolution. Let his corpse be put in a box, all those old books “that he loved so dearly” packed on top of it, and the whole kit and kaboodle thrown into the Seine. Once he’s dead, this man must no longer be able to make dust.
Drieu, who, three years earlier, had argued Maurice Barrès’s case at the mock trial, was characteristically ambivalent, chiding Anatole France for his ignorance of everything new in art while lauding his conservative virtues. One could not draw a “principle of life” from his works, but neither could the language have done without him. From the moribund body of France the nation, wrote Drieu, war had brought forth a new nation as alien to the old as the Wild West to Europe or Ottoman Constantinople to Byzantium. In an uncouth country swarming with Negroes and “disturbing” foreigners and automobiles and airplanes, Anatole France rescued the “old family” of words. “He exercised the vigilance and the prudence that enables words to live together like a strong, united nation: it is called syntax, which can be like love among citizens.” Readers might have mistaken this for a gross parody of eulogies in the provincial press or the Bulletin de l’Instruction Publique. It wasn’t intended to be.
Still, Drieu’s contrary argument did not prevent him from rushing to the defense of Louis Aragon when Aragon’s diatribe in Un Cadavre cost him the stipend he received from Jacques Doucet, a famous fashion designer who collected modern literary manuscripts. Unbeknownst to Aragon, Drieu pleaded with Doucet to restore his allowance. “You and I, sir, are of the century, while Louis Aragon is not,” he wrote. “He has taken vows that exclude him from it. I don’t know if they are permanent but for the moment they put him before us in a situation that demands our solicitude.” Aragon, he went on to say, was a seeker of the absolute among timeservers. He kept the torch lit for others improvising existence, and deserved to be treated accordingly. “Wise kings,” he concluded, “have always sheltered mad monks.”
A year later Drieu and Aragon were no longer on speaking terms. Friends surmised that Aragon’s love affair with a woman who had previously been Drieu’s mistress accounted for the break. It may well have played a part in it. But the professed cause was an open letter to the Catholic poet and playwright Paul Claudel, France’s ambassador to Japan, in which the Surrealists denounced him for carrying the cross to Asia. Their hope was that revolutions, wars, and colonial insurrections would exterminate Western civilization. “We seize this opportunity to dissociate ourselves publicly from everything French, in words and actions,” they wrote, adding that salvation for them lay nowhere. “We understand Rimbaud to have been a man who despaired of his salvation, whose work and life are pure testimonies of perdition.”
Despair was Drieu’s homeland. He could travel with his Surrealist friends to its far reaches, but not beyond. With the letter to Claudel seeming to imply that they saw a bright star in the east over Moscow and meant to follow it after abandoning their quest for that “absolute vantage point of the mind,” he took offense. And he did so flagrantly, in an open letter to Aragon. “I always believed that your movements, Aragon, had the virtue of expressing a despair that flows in my blood and in that of many around us,” he wrote. “After more than ten years in Paris—fitful discussions, anxious pacings, long flights toward love.… But suddenly I see you relaxing [your sense of the absolute] and at the first crossroad taking a shortcut to the beaten path before the crowd arrives en masse.… Suddenly one point on the horizon is more cardinal than another.… What are these superstitions? How can one prefer the east to the west?” He dismissed the image of “light coming from the east” as unpardonably trite and their apparent conversion to “neo-Orientalism” as an outright self-betrayal. “While some consider themselves obliged to murmur ‘Long live the King’ from time to time, or ‘Long live Millerand,’ which is more prudent, you fall into the trap and shout: ‘Long live Lenin!’ ”3
All he wished to remember of the Surrealists’ diatribe against Claudel was a phrase faithful to the conversations Aragon and he had had during the previous decade: “For us, salvation is nowhere.” It voiced the spirit of their bond, and it was, to all intents and purposes, his valediction.
In November 1944, Drieu noted that “the years 1924, 1925 were the first pivotal moment of my life.” He remembered spending the summer of 1924 at Guéthary, near Biarritz on the Basque coast, in the company of Aragon and in the thrall of an American woman named Constance Wash. Tall, blond, and shapely, she embodied his “Doric” ideal. They had a passionate affair, which continued until April 1925, when Constance, unhappily married but determined to stay that way for her child’s sake, sailed home with her husband, leaving Drieu stranded in the Midi, contemplating suicide.
In June his mother, Eugénie, the original lost love of his life, died at age fifty-four.
After putting the loaded pistol down, Drieu, never certain of his virility, challenged it by seducing women seriatim. André Malraux, whom Drieu befriended in the late 1920s, said of him that he played a relentless game of hide-and-seek with himself (which biographers have as truly said of Malraux). “He wasn’t alone. Take T. H. Lawrence. If one relied only upon his private writings, one would take him to have been impotent and full of complexes. Well, even with allowances made for the legendary and exaggerated, he, Drieu, was a man of uncommon energy.” But much of the uncommon energy was invested in the seeking and hiding—in fleeing the bondage of conquest or the humiliation of failure. Brothels were safest; he patronized them wherever his peripatetic life took him. In 1924 and 1925 he was known to be philandering in Florence; to be courting a beautiful Italian princess in Paris; to have followed her to Rome; to have impregnated, betrayed, and abandoned her; to have broached the subject of marriage with a young Jewish art student of good family and, when expectations were raised, left her for a tryst in Nice with the Italian princess, Cora Caetani (who had aborted their child).4 Having dissipated much of Colette’s endowment, he lived on a modest inheritance from his mother and a retainer from Gaston Gallimard. In 1925, Gallimard published Drieu’s novel aptly titled L’Homme Couvert de Femmes (The Man Beset with Women), which, like Drieu’s two books of war poetry and his brief memoir L’État Civil, received scant notice.
Drieu’s reputation as a notable young writer rested principally upon Mesure de la France, a small volume of geopolitical essays arguing, among much else, that institutions born of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were responsible for France’s decay, that a new Pan-European arrangement was needed to restore the nation’s vitality, and that party politics were anachronistic. The book was published in 1922, soon after Raymond Poincaré, bent upon invading the Ruhr, which he would do on January 11, 1923, replaced Premier Aristide Briand. Two years later he, in turn, fell from power as the ministerial roundabout of the Third Republic continued to turn.
Party politics thrived, at the expense of political reform, in a legislature scored with fault lines. Church and state had been separated for almost twenty years, but not in the National Assembly. Secular Republicans and the Catholic Right remained at daggers drawn over educational policy. Men who had held office before the war closed ranks against a postwar generation wanting to change the way government worked. The upper house tilted one way, the lower another. There were pacifists, the most notable being Aristide Briand, and sword rattlers who insisted that Germany fund France’s economic recovery, manu militari if need be.5
By 1924, economic realities had spoken loudly against France’s continued presence in the Rhineland, and Poincaré, whose campaign to seize German industry was responsible for the occupation, had squandered much of his credit with the public. A plan named after General Charles G. Dawes, the American who drew it up, promoted measures that led to France’s withdrawal from the Ruhr. When elections were held in 1924, voters sick of war, of maintaining an army of occupation, of talk about dismembering Germany and of the need for a buffer state, and most especially of higher taxes to cover the cost of reconstruction, empowered leftist parties allied under the title Cartel des Gauches. Their leader, Édouard Herriot, who became premier, accepted the Dawes plan, which also prescribed a rational schedule of German reparation payments. In L’Action Française, Léon Daudet cried treason: “The Herriot cabinet has played its cards: evacuation of the Ruhr; trust in democratic Germany; peace in Europe secured by the forfeiture of our rights.” It had played other cards of the same suit, he maintained, by inducting Jaurès into the Panthéon (to the sound of trumpets playing the Aïda theme) and allowing a Soviet embassy in Paris.6 If history should demonstrate that Herriot had facilitated a German war, he would have to be tried before a high court, Daudet blustered.
Herriot’s recognition of the Soviet Union in 1924 was in some sense a rejoinder to Poincaré’s reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1921, sixteen years after the breach.7 This and bills introduced during Poincaré’s second term, in 1923–24, had alarmed secularists, especially schoolmasters fearful that a permissive view of banned religious orders teaching in towns and rural regions would compromise their authority and diminish their enrollments.8 The kind of local feuds between Dreyfusard civil servants and anti-Dreyfusard clerics described by Émile Zola in his novel Vérité would be resumed as if time had stood still.
In the Cartel des Gauches, Socialists had consented to a most awkward marriage of convenience with the far more numerous Radicals, who were radical in name only. “Representative of the attitude of the party were the writings of its chief, almost its only eminent intellectual defender, Alain,” writes the Cambridge historian Denis Brogan.
“The Citizen against the Powers that Be”—that was political life as Alain saw it. The unending audacities of elected persons in betraying their electors moved him less to the indignation of Whitman than to an ironical resignation and to a resolve to reduce, as far as possible, their power for evil, as it was impossible to increase their power for good. But the deputies, bad as they were, easily seduced by flattery and by the social poison of Paris, were not as bad as the bureaucrats, the “Tite Barnacles” (for Alain had read Dickens).
Herriot’s Radical Party believed that checks were indispensable to hinder the machine of state from entering the twentieth century too precipitously. By and large, Radicals did not like change, notes Brogan. “The Radical was the man who wished to keep to the ideas and practices of 1789; to defend the Rights of Man as interpreted in the pre-machine age; and to ignore the fundamental difficulties of applying the methods of the age of diligences in the age of motor-cars.… For the Radical feared that, if the State were strengthened and modernized, the beneficiaries would not be the little men whose interests it was the business of the party to foster, but the powerful lords of business and finance.” It was with some contempt for a backward partner ignorant of economics and pledged to a costive ideology that the party joined the Cartel.9
Financial problems with which the Cartel des Gauches could not deal effectively proved its undoing and, in the two years of its administration, condemned cabinets and premiers to brief tenures.10 The prospect of measures that might have stabilized the economy—above all, a tax on wealth and the wealthy—caused a flight of capital. Herriot’s successor, Paul Painlevé, appointed Joseph Caillaux minister of finance in hopes that the ex-premier disgraced during the war but remembered for his economic sagacity would succeed where five predecessors had failed. He became the sixth failure. A Cartel whose members quarreled among themselves could not prevail against the so-called wall of money. Those powerful lords of finance, enriching themselves even as the debt-encumbered state limped toward bankruptcy, wanted conservatives restored to power, and in July 1926 they got their wish.
Drieu raised hopes of marriage with political factions as well as with women, and so it was that after reading his letter of divorce from the Surrealist group in the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), Charles Maurras, under the pen name “Orion,” publicly urged him to seek intellectual companionship at L’Action Française. In an open letter, Drieu replied that he could not rush headlong into a political trap when his recent denunciation of the Surrealists warned poets against that very danger. “The best way of devoting myself to ideas, to ideal institutions many of which we doubtless share in common, is to remain free of personal bonds. I shall cling to the advantages and disadvantages of a certain solitude, not out of pride or prudence, I assure you, but to husband the limited resources allotted me.” His salutations were affectionate.
While he sidestepped political traps, Drieu made an avocation of touring them with a friend and fellow writer named Emmanuel Berl, who was to play a conspicuous role in left-wing journalism during the 1930s. Like André Jéramec, Berl belonged to the well-off Jewish bourgeoisie residing near the Parc Monceau. He had survived the war decorated but in poor health, had married a young Catholic woman (for her property, he confessed), and settled on a remote estate in Béarn, near the Basque coast, where he met Drieu one summer. Their friendship blossomed even as his loveless marriage withered. Before long Berl had sprung back to life, mingling in Paris with Surrealists at the Cyrano café and receiving invitations to salons of hostesses who liked to sprinkle bright young men among the duller eminences of French politics and letters.
Another bright light was Berl’s former classmate at the Lycée Condorcet, Gaston Bergery, whom Drieu met here and there on his social perambulations. Bergery, a lawyer by training, had set his course for politics after recovering from an injury suffered at the Champagne front and by 1920, at age twenty-eight, was deputy general secretary of the Reparations Commission. When the latter dissolved, he became principal private secretary to the minister of foreign affairs in the Cartel des Gauches.11 Berl, Drieu, and Bergery spent much time together, talking politics. Having survived 1914–18 with emotional and physical wounds to show for it, all three agreed that the hands that had drafted the Treaty of Versailles were wooden spatulas, that Germany should not be ostracized, that the only guarantee against future wars would be a united Europe transcending national egos. “How would this Europe look? Oh, of course,” Berl recalled. “I was surrounded by Socialists.” In 1925, Drieu’s “pivotal” year, Bergery left government to become an appeals litigation attorney whose expertise in private international law took him to the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1928, residents of Mantes, roused by his call for the nationalization of monopolies, elected him mayor and a deputy in the National Assembly, where right-wingers, perceiving his political color to be more deeply dyed than that of his Radical colleagues, nicknamed him “the Radical Bolshevik.”
In 1927, at their own expense but hoping for subscribers, Berl and Drieu published a small pamphlet of literary and political commentary called Les Derniers Jours. It expired after seven issues. Berl described the project as “casse-cou”—reckless or daredevil. “We commented on everything and everyone: Lenin, Mussolini, Freud, Einstein, the Paris school of painting. After the first issue, Léon Blum, a cousin of [our friend] Colette Clément and Drieu’s bête noire, telephoned, wanting to make our acquaintance. Maurras also called attention to us in L’Action Française.” It is thought that Bergery had some hope of the magazine becoming an instrument of his political ambitions. Its apocalyptic title would have told him that the editors concerned themselves more with ends and beginnings than the calendar of political life.12 Pouring out of Berl were the ideas that inspired his mordant pamphlets, La Mort de la Morale Bourgeoise and La Mort de la Pensée Bourgeoise. And Drieu’s contributions include several articles about Surrealism that by their mere existence argued a stronger attachment to the movement than his public repudiation of it suggested. Politically he had worn as many hats as a well-furnished dandy, never sporting them long enough to wear them out and doffing them left and right to gain attention yet remain impenetrable. But in the deepest part of him, beneath his shifting political personae, was something that didn’t change: a yearning for certainty, for a new dispensation compatible with the messianism of Surrealist manifestos. In that deep place he was still the boy bedeviled by failure, marching off to war with Nietzsche in his knapsack. He was still the actor compelled to seduce audiences while dreaming of perfect self-possession in an earthly netherworld. “If one wants to hold a little of the earth in one’s arms, one must survive a shipwreck and resign oneself to being the Robinson of some lost island,” he wrote, but elsewhere he preached just the opposite, that salvation might lie beyond individuality, in collective existence. No matter. The insular “I” and the collective self were twins. One way or the other, to be was to be reborn in a new world liberated from the dichotomy between inside and outside.
His thinly veiled memoir Le Jeune Européen, dedicated to André Breton, enlarges on this theme in a chapter entitled “Ruins.” There he wrote that he believed in decadent man because he believed in primitive man. “If man is old, his senescence has lasted so long that it amounts to perdurable youth. Senescence capable of renewals and springtimes is no longer old age; it is life in its alternations.” Progress was dismissed as one of those secular myths that legitimized the bourgeoisie’s claim to power: “We cannot seek our reasons for existence in history: we must free our era from bonds that tie it to other eras.… Being souls outside of time, we must shut our minds to the idea of time. Enough of shop-worn comparisons and superstitious analogies.” Le Jeune Européen also echos the raptures of Barrès’s Le Culte du Moi: “Thus, I joyfully cried that I was the forest. The tree was rotting, but I partook of the inexhaustible sap of the forest.” The solipsist in Drieu abhorred division: the division of life into units of time, of the mind into consciousness of the “Self” and “non-Self,” of government into parties, of Europe into countries. Following Barrès’s lead but going well beyond Barresian nationalism, Drieu found shelter for his mind only in visions of a one-man island or an unbounded continent.
On April 12, 1926, he wrote in his diary, “I am thirty-three years old. I am still alone, as I was at twenty-three, as I was at thirteen, as I will be at forty-three. But forty-three is the end.”
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Like his twenties, Drieu’s thirties were a loneliness crowded with new acquaintances and ephemeral lovers. Notable among the former was André Malraux, whom Drieu met in 1927 at the apartment of Daniel Halévy.13 Malraux had just brought out La Tentation de l’Occident, an Asian-European correspondence that may have benefited from the stir he had made three years earlier, when French colonial authorities in Cambodia arrested him for attempting to smuggle Khmer temple reliefs out of the country. He would base his novel La Voie Royale on that escapade. In the meantime, he made the most of it at Parisian salons, keeping his audience spellbound with virtuosic recitals, all performed at breakneck speed and accompanied by facial twitches. Malraux, who had as much reason as Drieu to heed Pirandello’s warning “Woe to him who doesn’t know how to wear his mask,” found a nimble interlocutor in Drieu.14 And in Malraux, Drieu found a younger replacement for Aragon. They took long walks through the city, conversing hectically about their works, about ruins and rejuvenation, about East and West and the multitude of “isms” available to ideological shoppers, about the inevitability of war without the bulwark of a united Europe, about the threat of a Bolshevik hegemony or of conquest by American capitalism. That Malraux eluded definition when so many confrères were rooting themselves in movements, ideologies, schools, and parties made him all the more attractive to Drieu. “His likes are few and far between,” Drieu wrote. “He has traversed philosophical and historical speculation, Asia, the Revolution. He will always be adding to his booty in these various provinces, but he will settle in none of them. Politics? Archeology? Business? It’s too much or not enough for a man. Being a writer? Again, too much or too little.”
They honed each other’s intellects in public as well as in private—or, rather, public may have been all there was. The novelist Jean Giono describes meeting Drieu, Malraux, and André Gide in 1930 or 1931 at the Rôtisserie Périgourdine for a meal that soon became a staged debate between Malraux and Drieu, with André Gide and himself there as the audience. “The subject of the conversation,” he wrote, “was an extraordinarily intelligent one—so intelligent that Malraux and Drieu La Rochelle started talking promptly at half past twelve and continued until six in the evening.” Cigarettes were chain-smoked, drinks were served, and on they nattered.
I noticed that Gide was silent throughout. When the conversation ended and we went back outside, I bade farewell to Malraux and Drieu La Rochelle, who walked off in different directions. I accompanied Gide a way and apologized to him, saying: “I kept quiet because I must admit that I understood nothing, not a single word.” Gide touched my arm and kindly replied, “If it’s any consolation, Giono, I, too, understood nothing.”
After a few steps, Gide added a self-consoling postscript: “And I don’t think they did either.”
What struck Malraux’s wife, Clara, more than Drieu’s lengthy improvisations was his fin-de-siècle affectation of ennui, which proved irresistible to certain women, though not to her—and not immediately to the woman he married in 1927. It was in fact her resistance as well as her youth that attracted Drieu to Olesia Sienkiewicz, the vivacious twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Polish banker and a mother related to the Hetzels (famous and rich for publishing Jules Verne). Olesia looked nothing like the Junos Drieu generally preferred, but a fire was lit and a determined courtship followed. On August 19 he informed Gide, when they met on a Paris street, that he was soon to marry. “I offered him a glass of port in the nearest bar,” Gide noted in his journal. “ ‘Yes, it’s an experiment I want to perform,’ he told me. ‘I want to know whether I can stick it out. Up to now … I have never been able to maintain a love affair beyond six months.’ ”
Soon came the bondage of conquest. Olesia and Drieu exchanged vows in a Catholic ceremony on September 22, 1927. By March, Drieu had tired of Sundays en famille and fled to Athens. The couple’s brief life together became an epistolary marriage. And even after his return from Greece, there were more intermittences than intimacies. He dispatched Olesia to the Alps for skiing with friends or found asylum from their apartment in the upper recesses of the immense Hôtel d’Orsay. When a literary journalist interviewed him about his latest book, Genève ou Moscou (which moots the case for a Pan-European state), he confided, “I have always had other people’s wives. Now I have my own. She’s charming. I have somewhat the impression of being her father.” Drieu mentioned in passing a recent excursion to England with “a very pretty creature.”
The marriage lingered into the summer of 1929, through three unhappy months spent at Talloires in the French Alps, where Drieu read Nietzsche, Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf as he labored to complete his fourth novel, Une Femme à Sa Fenêtre.15 “I have to spend three months with a child who is feverish and supplicating, but also obstinate and sly,” he wrote to his new mistress, Victoria Ocampo. “Three months with the corpse of love. Three months of wary correspondence with you.”
Drieu had met Victoria Ocampo, along with Ortega y Gasset, at the Paris residence of Duchess Isabel Dato, daughter of the assassinated prime minister of Spain. A purposeful, elegant, dark-eyed Argentinian whom Ortega nicknamed “the Giocanda of the Pampas” but who looked more like the intellectual sister of Sargent’s Madame X, Victoria came from great wealth and spoke French as fluently as Spanish, having been tutored by a French governess. During a two-year sojourn in Paris, her very Catholic family allowed her to study philosophy with Bergson and literature at the Sorbonne. Their liberalism extended no further than that. When she announced her desire to become an actress, they drew the line: Argentinian aristocrats didn’t exhibit themselves onstage. Cheated of one theatrical career, Victoria embarked upon another as the wife of a diplomat, Bernando de Estrada, and played the part long after they had ceased to live connubially.16 She left Estrada in 1920, at age thirty. Until then, and ever afterward, literature sustained her. Her devotion to the cause of Latin American letters matched her will to flout social convention. She was herself a prolific writer, but the publication for which she was best known in her own day and is best remembered in ours had yet to appear when Drieu met her in 1929: the literary magazine Sur. She founded it two years later, flinging the continent open to the work of European writers and nurturing homebred talent, notably Jorge Luis Borges. “Victoria is something above and beyond: she is the founder of a spiritual space,” Octavio Paz declared. “Because Sur is not merely a publication or an institution. It is a tradition of the spirit.”
Months before Drieu wrote to Victoria from Talloires, he had pursued her to London and found her living in lavish quarters at the Savoy Hotel, with a view of Cleopatra’s Needle. They spent some weeks together, often in the company of her future contributors or Drieu’s friend Aldous Huxley and Huxley’s friend D. H. Lawrence. Much the stronger of the two, Victoria entered the relationship well guarded against fantasies of shaping a future around someone whose entire being, down to his fingertips, bespoke impermanence. “His long, slender hands,” she later wrote, “seemed made to let precious sand flow between the fingers.” It was an intense affair while it lasted, which was time enough for her to address his vulnerable core. He dissolved in tears when she told him one evening, upon returning from the theater, that one could not be jealous of a man like him. “That evening I saw … a very unhappy child always wanting a woman to offer him the moon. One always wanted to give it to him … as one does with children.”
After a dreary weekend on the Normandy coast, they went their separate ways, she to Spain and Argentina. They corresponded as former lovers, developing a transatlantic intimacy that allowed Victoria to upbraid him for his ill treatment of women and he to lay bare the doubts that belied his apparent indifference to the opinion of others or the importance of writing. He would have liked to please even journalists—even his in-laws—all of whom found him unintelligible, at best. Believable were the taunts of “cretins” and dubious the compliments of admirers. Inferiority shadowed him like a sleuth tailing an impostor.
The character Drieu could flesh out most convincingly was his shadow. This he accomplished in Le Feu Follet (Will o’ the Wisp), a short novel describing in painful detail the inner predicament and last hours of a man whose ties to the living have gone slack.17 Inspired by the suicide in 1929 of a former Surrealist, Jacques Rigaut, whom he had continued to befriend after 1925, it gave voice to Drieu’s obsession with decadence, with the unraveling of the will, with the faintness of vital signs in European civilization, with wear and tear and the depredations of intellect. Alain, the protagonist, is a moribund dandy. Ravaged by drugs, he hangs the remains of his wardrobe on the ghost of his body. Unable to write, he finds solace in the dicta of a literary movement that taught him contempt for literature. The women who supported him have departed. Their largesse is spent, and so are his days on earth. Empty forms people the world. Help is nowhere to be found, least of all from the physican treating him, who prescribes willpower. “How could he talk about willpower when the sickness lies at the very heart of the will? … The individual will is the myth of another age. A race worn out by civilization cannot believe in will. Perhaps it will take refuge in constraint: the rising tyrannies of Communism and Fascism promise to flagellate drug addicts.” Alain’s one commanding act is his suicide. He lies on his bed in the posture of a defiant soldier facing execution and presses a revolver to his heart. “A revolver, that’s solid, that’s steel. To come up at last against an object.” It’s as if he were returning to the trenches and that narrow border of primitive life where life hinged on a moment. That was real.
Gallimard published Le Feu Follet in 1931, the year Drieu’s marriage ended. M. Sienkewicz, the banker, had been ruined by the crash, and with Drieu himself begging, Olesia found herself in financial straits. Obviously related to these events was a play Drieu wrote about love, marriage, and money (all irreconcilable). Staged at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, L’Eau Fraîche had a respectable run for the wordy imbroglio it was, but did not enrich anyone or come near allowing Drieu to repay his debts. Still, his plight may not have been dire. Relying on gifts from his former wife, Colette Jéramec, a stipend from Victoria Ocampo, and a modest inheritance from his mother, he rented a flat on the Île Saint-Louis facing Notre Dame Cathedral, very near Olesia, who had meanwhile set up house with a young friend of Drieu’s, the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan.
And he traveled, thanks largely to Victoria Ocampo. In 1932, shortly after launching Sur, she asked him to lecture in Argentina. At first the idea of speaking in public unnerved him, but he warmed to it and proposed a series of four lectures on the crisis of European civilization. His intention, he explained, was to study “European anguish” in religion, in war, in love, in philosophy, in politics. It would be “an epic commentary on my generation,” a history of Europe since 1914 seen through the prism of his personal experience. Entitled “Is Europe Going to Die?,” it would be Le Feu Follet writ large.
As his confidence swelled, so did the series, from four lectures to eight. No record exists of what he told his audiences, except for a summary he wrote two years later:
Young Argentinians, like young Frenchmen, challenged me to declare myself Fascist or Communist, I insisted that as an intellectual I needed a vantage point on the margin of events, from which to survey the whole scene. I sympathetically analyzed the Italian phenomenon and the Russian phenomenon. The global importance of Fascism emerged more clearly when viewed from the perspective of the past fifteen years. Hitlerism was rumbling toward its goal. I predicted that without a doubt the movement, if not its leader, would one day triumph. The inanity of proletarian parties, which was already apparent to me, had been driven home in a surprising way. To be sure, I stated my broad allegiance to Socialism, but not Socialism as it is now. The Socialism I championed would transcend political parties.
The summary was written in 1934, with the benefit of hindsight. Drieu stayed in Argentina for almost five months, from June into October. Midway through his long sojourn, on July 31, 1932, news reached Buenos Aires that the Nazi Party had won 38 percent of the vote in the German federal elections and become the largest parliamentary bloc. Had Drieu truly predicted Nazism’s electoral triumph and Hitler’s uncertain future before July 31? Determined to become the ruling party, in order to abolish all but their own and with them the Weimar Republic, the Nazis did their utmost to make government unworkable under the chancellors of minority coalitions, while Hitler, rebuffed again and again by President von Hindenburg, wondered anxiously when or whether his turn would come. It came like doomsday on January 30, 1933, after Gemany had sunk deeper into an abyss of political intrigue and economic mayhem.
Drieu made an excursion to the Indian remoteness of Bolivia with a French ethnologist, but he found companionship of the sort he had enjoyed with Aragon and Malraux in Jorge Luis Borges. They were indefatigable walkers; talking all the while and always at night, they walked through Buenos Aires often to the edge of the pampa. “Everyone was asleep,” Drieu recalled. “The cinemas were closed, the cafés twinkled. Every two or three kilometers, the anguishing brightness of a little brothel beckoned. My poet walked and walked, striding like one possessed. He walked me through his despair and his love, for he loved this desolation.”
Before the Argentinian interlude, in January 1932, Drieu had written to a friend that “the man in him” who had borne arms in his early twenties and dispensed political advice (presumably to Gaston Bergery) in his early thirties could no longer settle for existence in the “fallen state that gives birth to novelists.” When he returned from Argentina, he was determined to retrieve what he had lost during fifteen years of postwar womanizing and intellectual vacillation—to be a warrior, un homme d’action, a man with fire in his belly—and he envisaged the transformation as another kind of fall. “The ghost of ambition has an enormous advantage over that of love: once you grab hold of it, it doesn’t let you slip free. You must find the stone heavy enough to attach to your neck and help you sink to the bottom. The fall is what gives meaning to a destiny.”
Had Drieu attended Charles Dullin’s production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches ten years later, during the German occupation, he might have seen himself in a protagonist tortured by the feeling that he does not weigh enough to leave tracks in life. Sartre’s Orestes acquires gravitas—a destiny, as Drieu liked to say—by murdering his father, Agamemnon. For Drieu, intellectual suicide would also do. Manhood demanded only a weight around one’s neck and the will to leap. In his preface to a translation of The Man Who Died, he claimed that D. H. Lawrence understood the great purpose served by Fascism and Communism in salvaging man’s “animality” and “primitiveness.”18 What made Rome and Moscow admirable, in his view, was “the great rhythmic dance of an entire people gradually reconstituting itself.”
In 1933 Drieu stood at the cliff’s edge, still unable to step back from it or leap. He wrote a play pitting a dictator, sympathically portrayed, who declares that freedom is no longer the supreme good it had been in other seasons and centuries against a libertarian intellectual who conspires to assassinate him. He wrote short stories about World War I, collected in La Comédie de Charleroi, denouncing modern, industrialized warfare but recalling the intoxication of an infantry charge at Charleroi in 1914. “There I was a leader. I wanted to mass the men around me, grow bigger through them, aggrandize them through me, and advance as one, with me in front pointing forward, across the universe.” Malraux sought his support when French intellectuals joined demonstrations protesting the arrest and trial of George Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Communist the Nazis accused of setting fire to the Reichstag. Drieu declined. Less important to him than Dimitrov’s fate at the hands of a tyrant was his own at the hands of a self-indulgent, angry, desultory child. He told himself that freedom had undermined him, just as it had made France sluggish. Both needed a master: he for direction and France to awaken from her torpor.
In January 1934, Drieu spent a week in Berlin, observing the Reich soon after the Reichstag fire and the “Strength Through Joy” campaign launched by Hitler to pacify German workers. On February 6, he was present at the Place de la Concorde when extreme right-wing groups demonstrating against government corruption confronted a cordon of police assigned to prevent them from crossing the bridge to Parliament. A riot ensued, leaving fifteen dead, six of them Camelots du Roi.
Drieu sided with the dead, with death.
1Ponge began writing the prose poems, collected under the title Le Parti Pris des Choses, in 1924.
2Both ceremonies were dwarfed by Hugo’s funeral in 1885. His coffin had lain on a catafalque one hundred feet tall under the Arc de Triomphe. Two million people watched the cortège wind its way to the Panthéon, in which he was interred.
3Alexandre Millerand belonged to the club of rotating ministers during the Third Republic. A Socialist turned conservative, he had been president of France between 1920 and 1924 and minister of war in 1914–15, when Colette Jéramec, whose father knew him as a friend, obtained special favors for Drieu.
4Of his tryst in Nice he wrote, “We took walks along a desolate beach, which was Sahara-like in January, when the accursed cold combined with the curse of sand whipped by a bitter wind, between the bubbling rot of marshland and a sea roaring destruction. Did she know what she was doing by leading me there?”
Born to a wealthy family of Tuscan vintners, the Antinoris, Cora married Prince Michelangelo Caetani and bore him a daughter. She cut a wide swath through European society. It would not have displeased Drieu to learn in the 1930s, long after their separation, that the Antinoris had become supporters of Mussolini.
5Briand’s name is linked with that of Frank Kellogg, American secretary of state, in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy except in matters of self-defense. It made no provision for sanctions. Winston Churchill said of Briand’s supporters that their heads were full of “benevolent wool.”
6Communists demonstrated against Jaurès’s interment in the Panthéon as an act of ideological embezzlement by the state.
7The breach took place under Émile Combes, a fiercely anticlerical premier. When France’s president paid a state visit to King Victor Emmanuel III, he was not received by Pope Pius X, who maintained a hostile view of the king for ruling territories confiscated from the Holy See.
8The ban, one of the consequences of the Dreyfus Affair, was suspended in 1914. Poincaré’s government maintained the suspension. Supporters of Herriot wanted the ban enforced.
9The Socialists called their strategy “support without participation,” although they participated to the extent of accepting five ministerial portfolios.
10Presidents of the Republic could dissolve the Assembly but never exercised the right after 1877. Legislators therefore had no threat of a call for new elections to fear by challenging the executive with confidence votes.
11Édouard Herriot served simultaneously as premier and minister of foreign affairs.
12Les Derniers Jours can be read as a double-entendre meaning “Recent Days” or “The Final Days,” but in an autobiographical novel, Gilles, Drieu revived it under the title Apocalypse.
Bergery was to have a tortuous political career. In 1933 he resigned from the Radical party and founded his own, “The Common Front Against Fascism, Against War, and for Social Justice,” on the basis of which he ran for office in 1936 and served as an independent deputy during the Popular Front. After France’s defeat in 1940, he became an ardent Pétainist, threw in his lot with the Vichy government, and became its ambassador to Turkey. On July 6, 1940, four days after the rump Parliament granted Pétain unrestricted power to change the Constitution, Bergery heralded “a new Order—authoritarian, national, social, anti-Communist, and anti-plutocratic.”
Berl’s ideological itinerary also led to Vichy, or at least to Pétain, for whom he wrote speeches during the marshal’s premiership. He didn’t travel as far in that direction as his cousin Lisette Ullmann, née Franck, who divorced her husband, a Jewish banker, to marry Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s ambassador to Paris. As an “honorary Aryan,” she hobnobbed with Joachim von Ribbentrop, among other prominent Nazis, during the Occupation. Brinon was executed in 1947. Lisette served a brief prison sentence.
13Daniel Halévy, the son of Ludovic, Offenbach’s and Bizet’s librettist, had been a schoolmate of Marcel Proust’s at Condorcet. They remained friends and active Dreyfusards in the 1890s. In 1927 Malraux was twenty-six, Drieu thirty-four.
14Reviewing La Voie Royale in the December 1930 issue of the NRF, Drieu wrote of Malraux: “His novels are fast moving, compelling, enthralling, but their scope is narrow and unilinear.… One has the impression that the author hardly ever departs from facts with which he is personally acquainted.… There is a single line of events, and treading this line is a single character, a hero, who is not Malraux but the mythical figuration of his Self. More sublime and concrete than himself.… Search your memory and you will find the greatest, flanked by their heroes: Byron and Manfred, Stendhal and Julien Sorel, Balzac and Rastignac, Dostoyevsky and Stavrogin, etc.”
15Benjamin Crémieux, an astute critic who wrote an early essay on Proust—perhaps the earliest—and played an important part in acquainting the French public with Pirandello, also praised young Drieu after the publication of his war poems. Having demonstrated his admiration for the verse, he savaged the novels, which combined—to ill effect, as he saw it—critical analyses of the world situation and the confessions of a “postwar neurotic” reminiscent of such Romantic melancholics as Chateaubriand’s René and Senancour’s Obermann. Drieu was clearly a master of French prose, but he had yet to prove himself a novelist. “There is nothing in him of the failure or the cripple. It’s just that he is incomplete and partial, like the rest of us. May he just accept himself as he is.”
16In 1934 she enjoyed a brief stage career, playing a part in Stravinsky’s Perséphone (with a libretto by André Gide) at the Teatro Colón and in Rio de Janeiro. Many years later she confessed that it was her most painful memory. “I say painful because I would have wished to continue doing these performances, which were the best thing I have done in my life.”
17Louis Malle’s film The Fire Within is based on Drieu’s novel.
18In the late 1930s, Granville Hicks, among other literary critics in England and America, accused Lawrence of Fascistic thinking. Christopher Caudwell, the author of a book entitled Studies in a Dying Culture, denounced him for turning backward “to old primitive values, to mythology, to racialism, nationalism, hero-worship, and participation mystique. This Fascist art is like the regression of the neurotic to a previous level of adaptation.”
