"Bulls, Art, Mithras, and
Montherlant." Hemingway's Spain: Imagining the Spanish World.
Preface d'Henry de
Montherlant. Paris, Gallimard, collection 'Folio', no.
The tone was often polemical, railing against political literature and politically committed artists in general--but the weekly also displayed an elegant and erudite style, thanks to a long list of prestigious contributors, including Cocteau, Audiberti,
Montherlant, Giono, and Ayme.
This volume surveys the work of French writer [ETH]ric Jourdan from his first work, Les Mauvais anges from 1955, to recent works and in the context of gay literature and erotica and the works of writers like Peyrefitte,
Montherlant, Guibert, Dustan, and Guyotat.
But insofar as they focus on the (objectionable) political sympathies and impact of writers, whether literary authors like Sade and
Montherlant or fellow philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, they also form a tacit literary ethics comparable to Sartre's "What is Literature?" Together with Beauvoir's interventions in literary debates of the 1960s (gathered in "The Useless Mouths" and Other Literary Essays), they develop her unique sense of what it would mean for literature to be "committed."
"Happiness writes white," Henry de
Montherlant said.