The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Reviving it was made easier with the help of Paulhan, whom Gaston Gallimard employed as director of the Pléiade collection. The editor who had slighted Drieu became his indispensable adviser at the NRF (apparently eschewing politics after several weeks in a Gestapo prison while clandestinely working for the Resistance). But Drieu could not deny the fact that he held sway over a diminished realm. Once his writing was slighted by an editor of note; now his ersatz NRF endured slights from notable writers. Malraux, who remained his friend, had advised him against accepting the position. Gide, who had helped launch the NRF before World War I, dissociated himself from it after résistants taunted him for contributing a piece to the first issue published under Drieu’s directorship, in December 1940.3 Attempts to herd Gide, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel onto an editorial board failed. “Gide, Valéry, Claudel backed out in the weasel ways of the old generation, more despicable than ever,” Drieu fumed. “Claudel, the enemy of Voltaire, served the Masonic government and the Jews. Valéry thrived, and Gide was entirely at his ease under a regime that venerated his pederasty, his asocial strutting.”

  Power and virtue were not easily reconciled at the NRF. Having helped to free Paulhan from a German prison, Drieu found himself overshadowed by the éminence grise, whom authors held in high esteem. The arrangement made Drieu acutely uncomfortable. By October 1942, when he traveled to Weimar for the Nazi-sponsored Congress of European Writers, depression was written all over his face. Photographs show it and his journal voices it.4 “I can no longer get interested in anything. I’ve retreated to my lair and feel that I’ve never left it. Why did I subject myself to this penitence for a year and a half? All the mediocrities I’ve read and seen. Why this habit of always altering and upsetting the blessed wholeness of my solitude, of my divine sloth?” Gilles was not recognized as the masterpiece he hoped it would be, and the NRF did not vindicate him.

  Drieu La Rochelle had compromised himself fatally, but fraternizing with evil enabled him on at least one occasion to redeem himself. Early in May 1943, his first wife, Colette Jéramec—now remarried, the mother of two young boys, and a research physician at the Pasteur Institute—was denounced by her concierge for holding suspicious meetings in her flat and arrested by French agents of the Gestapo. Because she had loudly resisted, they arrested her sons as well and transported all three to Drancy, outside Paris, an internment camp from which prisoners, mostly Jews, were sent to Auschwitz.5 Upon learning of their predicament, Drieu rushed home from the Midi and promised to help. She smuggled this letter to him, dated May 2, 1943:

  D. I don’t doubt that you spend most of your time working on my behalf. But L. [Dr. Legroux, a friend] led me to hope that the little meeting you had on Wednesday was to be followed by another and hearing nothing further about it upsets me. To tell the truth, I don’t place much faith in the effectiveness of other approaches; what little hope I have I place only in you, knowing how tenacious you can be in certain circumstances. But what can you do? … I’m not suffering too much materially, and am above all happy that the two men [her children] haven’t suffered at all. Emotionally, despite appearances which certainly didn’t deceive you, you can imagine my thoughts.6 Try to meet again, alone or in company.… Above all, I know that you will … not delude either yourself or me with vain hopes.… If you can’t speak to me one day put a word in your own writing on the next card, I would prefer it. Or if not, have me informed of your thoughts as minutely as possible. Knowing for sure that the two others can look forward to getting out, even without me, would set my mind at rest.

  Drieu spent more time working on her behalf than would have been necessary if his friend Otto Abetz were still the German ambassador. Abetz had fallen out of favor and been replaced by Rudolf Schleier. But the real obstacle was the German security service, the Sicherheitsdienst, whose director distrusted the embassy. Drieu enlisted the help of people he generally avoided, volunteered to lecture at the German Institute, and threatened to stop writing for the Paris press if his petition was denied. As a result of his exertions, Colette and her children were released after two months at Drancy, unlike sixty-five thousand other internees, who were deported to the east; sixty-three thousand of them died.

  Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, director of the Nouvelle Revue Française during the occupation.

  Far from taking pride in the rescue, Drieu taxed himself with being soft and blamed the beneficiary of his good deed for subjecting him to the judgment of his conscience. “The Jews tricked me,” he groused that summer. “My first wife deliberately got herself imprisoned, it seems, to put me under the obligation of freeing her. I was cowardly enough to whine over her fate and have her chains removed.… She has absolutely no idea that I find her insufferable.” For the superior man of Zarathustra, mercy is a cardinal vice.

  In 1943 he turned fifty, reimmersed himself in Nietzsche, left the NRF to Paulhan’s management, and questioned his reasons for living any longer as the world order in which he had tried to make his home began to crumble. The Russians had triumphed at Stalingrad and were advancing on Kursk. The Allied forces had landed on Sicily. In July the Fascist Grand Council dismissed Mussolini, who was arrested and imprisoned. “Mussolini has resigned like some vulgar democratic minister,” Drieu noted. “It’s ludicrous. So Fascism turns out to have been nothing more than that. Fascism was no stronger than I, an armchair philosopher of violence. He will be more grotesque than Napoleon on the Bellerophon. By its weakness Fascism demonstrates the weakness of Europe, the decadence of Europe. Will Hitler do any better?” He worshipped la force no less than before, but he saw decadence everywhere, and took to quoting Isaiah’s images of messianic wrath.

  In November, Drieu spent several weeks in Switzerland with his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, who assured him that cantonal authorities would be disposed to grant him a long-term visa if he chose to remain. He chose instead to return, with the intention, as he later explained, of dying by his own hand “in due course.” Living almost reclusively, he studied the great texts of Eastern religion, completed another novel, and reckoned with himself as best he could in a diary. “I would have liked to be just a man, not a writer: talent doesn’t excuse the lack of genius. But here I am writing. This journal is graffiti on the wall of a urinal or of a prison cell—even the graffiti writer believes that he will be read. The eternal Crusoe.” He was unremitting in his anti-Semitism but occasionally lucid enough to recognize its ignominious source. “I’ve always been scared to death of Jews, and terribly ashamed of my fear. Not hatred, but repugnance. Horror of Jewesses: almost not slept with them. They’ve approached, then fled. The Jew succeeding as he has in France has branded me, even more than the Anglo-Saxon, with an impression of French inferiority.”

  After the Normandy invasion, collaborators went into hiding or fled the country, some to the Swabian town of Sigmaringen, where the Vichy government, rescued and sequestered by Germany, occupied an enormous castle. Drieu could have fled to Spain—he obtained papers —but once again the prospect of living in exile repelled him. He wrote that if any army could have accepted him with his multitude of physical ailments, he would have volunteered to die at the front, on either side, in the uniform of a Scottish Highland regiment or the Waffen SS. To be avoided above all was a trial and judgment. “Should I soon commit suicide?” he asked himself. “I want to avoid being stupidly disemboweled by a mob of concierges or humiliated by Jews.”

  He wrote a will, letters of farewell (to Malraux, Victoria Ocampo, and Christiane Renault, among others), and on August 12, 1944, swallowed what would have been a fatal dose of phenobarbital if his maid had not found him in time. Three days later, at the American Hospital in Neuilly, he slit his wrists, but was saved again. “Where am I, in any sense?” he wrote to Paulhan. “I don’t know and am in no hurry to find out. I eat, I would like to chat with you slowly, after a long, silent walk.” With the battle for Paris impending, Drieu’s women friends took him under their collective wing. Colette Jéramec hid him on the Rue de
Grenelle in the apartment of a physician, who ministered to him for a month. He then lodged at Orgeval, outside Paris, in the country house of an old American friend, Noëlle Murphy, whose release from an internment camp for foreigners he had helped arrange in 1942. At Orgeval he regained his health and enough inner strength to embark upon a novel about a painter of genius, based on Van Gogh’s life but drawing heavily on his own, Mémoires de Dirk Raspe. He read as much philosophy as friends made available to him. By January 1945, the discomfort of winter in an unheated country house had put an end to his convalescence. He fell ill, and doubts almost as old as consciousness itself assailed him like reawakened Furies. “I wanted to be a complete man, not only a bookworm but a swordsman, who assumes responsibilities, who absorbs blows and returns them.… I shall regret not having filled during these past few years the role that remained available to me, that of dandy—of the unflinching nonconformist who rejects fatuities of every persuasion, who discreetly but firmly displays his impious indifference.”

  There were also Furies in the shape of informants. Drieu was a wanted man, with his name on a list of collaborationist writers drawn up by the Comité National des Écrivains. Suspecting that locals had rumored his presence at Orgeval, Colette moved him to her own country house, and from there to an apartment in Paris near the Place de l’Étoile. Another collaborator, Robert Brasillach, was executed in February. The trial frightened Drieu—the trial more than the sentence.

  On March 16, leaving nothing to chance, he detached a gas pipe and swallowed three vials of phenobarbital. A note insisted that the burial be nonreligious. His brief list of official mourners did not include Colette Jéramec or Christiane Renault. He requested the presence of only two men, one being André Malraux, whom he named his literary executor.

  1The reference to Aragon being a Communist concerns the Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact of August 1939. In fact, Aragon was drafted early in the war, won the Croix de Guerre for acts of bravery, and, after demobilization, played a significant role in the Resistance.

  2The Wehrmacht governed the northern zone, but Vichy, or “L’État Français,” was allowed to wear a wispy beard of authority, enough to justify the presence of a German “ambassador.”

  3Gide had ignored the pleas of the book publisher Gaston Gallimard, whose firm was the review’s sponsor. Books bore the imprint “NRF” as well as well as “Gallimard.” Roger Martin du Gard, an old associate and friend of both, sent Gide a letter containing the kind of retort he might have made to his critics: “I know what I’m doing. Laid out for me at length are the reasons why the NRF (both the review and book publisher) must be resuscitated if we hope to ‘save the furniture’ and prevent this double enterprise, which has been more or less our child for thirty years, from falling under foreign direction.… The fate of the book publisher … is inextricably bound up with that of the review: it will be impossible to save one and sacrifice the other. Now, the review is regarded by readers as mine.… The absence of my name from the table of contents, especially under present circumstances, would be tantamount to a public disavowal. I would be knifing it in the back by refusing my collaboration.”

  4Other delegates included Abel Bonnard and Robert Brasillach. Bonnard—a follower of Maurras who converted to Fascism, a prolific novelist and journalist, a member of the Académie Française, a minister of education in the Vichy government—fled to Spain after the war and was sentenced to death in absentia. Brasillach, also a protégé of Maurras’s and a convert to Fascism, who edited the collaborationist daily Je Suis Partout, was tried shortly before the end of the war and executed.

  5In another version, Colette was asked for identity papers by a German soldier stopping automobiles at a checkpoint in Paris. She complied indignantly, and was later arrested in her apartment by the Gestapo.

  6Drieu must have obtained permission to visit her at Drancy.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Donna Sammis of the Frank Melville Library of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I would also like to thank the staffs of the Butler Library of Columbia University and the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris.

  My thanks go to Paula Deitz for publishing a version of chapter 4 in the Autumn 2012 issue of The Hudson Review.

  Among the many friends whose conversation and encouragement buoyed me, I must make special mention of Ruth Kozodoy, who perused the manuscript with pencil in hand at various stages of the writing.

  My thanks go as well to Georges Borchardt, the kindest and most helpful of agents.

  I am indebted above all to Victoria Wilson of Knopf, whose devotion and care made this work possible.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  “the tree of liberty grows only when watered”: quoted in Wikipédia (the French version of Wikipedia). The statement by Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac was a close variation of one made five years earlier by Thomas Jefferson.

  “The plantings had multiplied”: Maurice Agulhon, Les Quarante-huitards (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 52. Unless noted otherwise, all translations from French are mine.

  “Alas, Lorraine undertook”: Maurice Barrès, Les Déracinés (Paris: Plon, 1922), vol. 2, p. 238.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1 The Coming of War

  “Nothing collapses more quickly”: George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (London: BiblioBazaar, 2006), p. 85.

  “the Servian [sic] is both by principle”: Edmund Spencer, Travels in European Turkey: 1850 (London: Colburn & Co., 1851), vol. 1, p. 34.

  “moments of excitement”: New York Times, June 24, 1903.

  “The assassination of King Alexander”: Le Petit Parisien, June 12, 1903.

  “in a Christian country”: Le Gaulois, June 12, 1903.

  “The Serbs change government”: Le Figaro, June 12, 1903.

  “There had been a score of opportunities”: Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. 87.

  “Never has the season”: Le Figaro, July 29, 1914.

  “a shade of anxiety”: Raymond Poincaré, The Origins of the War (London: Cassell, 1922), p. 182.

  “a blaze of fire and flame”: Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs (New York: George Doran, 1923), p. 14.

  “commonplace assurances”: Poincaré, Origins of War, p. 190.

  “the same ideal of peace”: Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 24.

  “had decided in principle”: Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), vol. 2, p. 591.

  “unanimity of patriotic resolution”: Poincaré, Origins of War, p. 206.

  “Never have I felt so overwhelmed”: quoted in Albertini, Origins of the War, vol. 2, p. 596.

  “no disorder, no panic”: Le Temps, July 30, 1914.

  “there is no longer any justice”: Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 2.

  “proceed united as one”: ibid., p. 241.

  “The Serbs are Orientals”: Albertini, Origins of the War, vol. 2, p. 468.

  “generous Slav heart”: ibid., p. 350.

  “My thoughts were utterly pessimistic”: Paléologue, Ambassador’s Memoirs, p. 37.

  “This is the way things”: Albertini, Origins of the War, vol. 2, p. 489.

  “Today you are told”: Harvey Goldberg, The Life of Jean Jaurès (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 444.

  “If all of Europe”: L’Humanité, June 30, 1914.

  “Think of what it would mean”: Goldberg, Life of Jean Jaurès, p. 446.

  “The ultimatum sent to Servia”: New York Times Current History (New York: The New York Times Co., 1915–16), vol. 1, p. 401.

  “Care must be taken to avoid”: Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les Français Sont Entrés dans la Guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), p. 142.

  “All civilized people”: Becker, 1914, p
. 141.

  “the conflict became inevitable”: ibid.

  “Your sentence will have no political”: Le Figaro, March 30, 1914.

  “Perhaps it meant to affirm”: L’Humanité, March 30, 1914.

  “the criminal maneuvers”: ibid.

  “This Wilhelm”: ibid., p. 334.

  “Germany has long been spoiling”: ibid.

  “War had to erupt”: ibid., p. 335.

  “ancestral,” “hereditary,” “eternal”: ibid.

  “If France is invaded”: ibid., p. 410.

  “The truth of the matter is”: ibid., p. 412.

  “At this tomb, on which”: Le Figaro, August 5, 1914.

  “What he would say”: L’Humanité, August 5, 1914.

  “What was the psychological phenomenon”: Becker, 1914, p. 407.

  “legitimate reparations”: Le Temps, August 5, 1914.

  “Under siege”: ibid.

  “one of the grandest”: Le Figaro, August 5, 1914.

  “Henceforth I know no parties”: C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1991), p. 125.

  “Even if it involves” Maurice Barrès, Chroniques de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Plon, 1968), pp. 123–24.

  “The task of Christians”: Becker, 1914, p. 471.

  “We know full well”: Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), p. 196

  CHAPTER 2 The Making of a Xenophobe

  “Maurice Barrès”: The quote is from Michel Winock, Le Siècle des Intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 149.