The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  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 s
ure, 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.”