The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  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.”

  · · ·

  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.”

  André Malraux, 1920s.

  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 Dri
eu, 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.’ ”