"A Style of Living Through Disorder:" Sport in the Fiction and Philosophy of Henry De Montherlant (Critical Essay‪)‬

Heralded as one of the three or four great moralistes of French literature (de Laprade 107), and even at one time as "France's greatest writer," the French writer of to-day who "will be the most read in the year 2000," (2) Henry de Montherlant has also been called a "non-creative" and "banal artist" (Cruickshank 1). Perhaps his most insightful critic, Jean-Louis Curtis (1950) captures Montherlant's cryptic status best when on the one hand he emphasizes Montherlant's egotism, high-flying desinvolture, and inconsistency of thought, and, on the other hand, describes him as a poet "of the highest order. Also a great stylist. And a great dramatist. And a great humorist. And a great novelist" (74). The conflicted reactions, even antagonism, towards Montherlant stem from a variety of sources, including a seeming indifference towards his public, a skeptical attitude towards the whole concept of truth, an epigrammatic skill that engendered a number of mocking boutades, an overt misogyny, a cult of superiority and a disdain of mediocrity (Almeras). There is a resolute non-sectarianism in Montherlant that has invariably opened him up to the criticism of intellectual indecisiveness. Or perhaps it is simply, as Hobson puts it, that Montherlant "tries too hard to make the welkin ring" (171). Despite Montherlant's lofty, even if enigmatic, reputation as a writer, (3) he remains a largely unrecognized and unacknowledged figure in the history and literature of sport, a fact rendered even more surprising given Segel's recent claim that Montherlant ranks as "one of the most exquisite writers on sports of the twentieth century" (7). Against the late 19th and early 20th century backdrop of philosophical anti-rationalism, the primitivism of avant-guardist language experimentation, the modernist critique of tradition and convention, and the emergent primacy of spontaneity and intuition, Montherlant embraced a celebration of the physical and delighted in the world of sports and physical culture. Like many of his contemporaries, including D'Annunzio, Marinetti, Gumilyov, Junger, Saint-Exupery, and Hemingway, in both deed and word, Montherlant personified the man of letters as the man of action. (4) His fictional world was to a great extent the world of men, of martial camaraderie, and the solitary, angst-ridden challenge of decisive action, the world of war and bullfighting, an anti-Christian Nietzschean world in which the values of power, conflict and violence were enacted and confronted. It was his glorification of both war and sport and his admiration for the German values of courage, hard work, discipline and militarism, as well as his renunciation of the French antipathy towards physical culture, that caused Montherlant's athletic philosophy to be informed by what Frese Witt calls an "aesthetic fascism" (17) and Montherlant himself to be condemned for his political sympathies with Nazism (Golsan). But his view of sport also went well beyond the purely militaristic, well beyond a celebratory cult of virile masculinity or fascist ethics of force and virility; Montherlant embraced a distinctly humanistic conception of sport that paid allegiance to the educational model of the ancient Greeks, that embraced an aesthetic of sport, and that--rare among his contemporaries, and despite his own chauvinistic reputation--saw in women's sport the realization of the exquisite perfection of form.