It remains a kind of odd distinction: Drieu La Rochelle was the most talented of the French writers who collaborated with the Germans during the Nazi Occupation of World War II. (that is, if we except the case of Louis- Ferdinand Celine, which was a quite different matter.) It was he who in those years continued publishing the famous Paris journal, La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise. But the years and the decades go by, and in recent days the whole affair of “literary collaboration” has been reviewed and reconsidered, and Drieu La Rochelle has indeed become some thing of a “cult object.” So many elements lend themselves easily to a dramatic renewal of interest: his suicide after the German defeat (in order to escape a punishment which he probably need not have feared), his posthumous works which include a “Secret Re port” (his confession of moral bankruptcy) as well as the manuscript of a novel, Dirk Raspe (presumably about Van Gogh).
In the generation of the earlier World War Drieu was with Henri de Montherlant and Louis Aragon among the literary leaders of the socalled front veterans (Celine arrived much later). Among Drieu’s friends was the young Andre Malraux, with whom he remained close even after political differences separated him from his other comrades on the Left; indeed he was the godfather of one of Malraux’ sons (of the relation with Josette Clotis Malraux), and in his last days, when all was lost, he even thought of joining Malraux’ Brigade, in fact named him executor in his testament (which Malraux conscientiously fulfilled).
A biography was recently published by Dominique Desanti, who used to be something of a Communist philosopher and became well known through an earlier book of memoirs about her Stalinist years. She thought of it as a study of “a seducer betrayed.” Now a second book about Drieu has been issued by Hachette and is receiving widespread notice: one of the authors (Pierre Andreu) belonged to the semi-fascist party of the ex-Communist Jacques Doriot and has a certain engagement; the co-author (Frederic Grover) is one of those indefatigable American researchers who, like Herbert Lottman in his Camus biography and Philip Kolb’s Proust Correspondence, take endless pains with factual documentation. All taken together, including a film of one of Drieu’s works made in the 1960s, has pushed the whole case into the center of attention.
Drieu was bom in Paris (in 1893), but his parents had come from Brittany and Normandy; as a young literary aspirant he traveled frequently across the Channel and English indeed became his second language. (He later turned out to be the confidant of Herr Otto Abetz, Hitler’s man in Paris, but he hardly knew a word of German.) Each of the biographical details has a curiously ironic twist. He studied political science, but failed his examination. He first married a Jewish doctor, Colette Jeramec, and later a Polish beauty named Alexandra Sienkiewiscz, who was supposed to be “the ideal wife,” but among his various liaisons, escapades and adventures (often with prostitutes), there was his long passionate affair with “Beloukia,” the wife of the French auto mobile king, Louis Renault.
His experiences at Verdun and in the Dardanelles led to his first stories, and his collection The Comedy o f Charleroi is still very readable. Politically he was for some form of “united Europe,” flirted on the left with Communist tendencies, but moved rightwards towards sympathies for Fascism, out of a bitterness over French weakness and indecisiveness and his supranational hopes. To be sure he would have much preferred a French rather than a Ger man, a Nazi, Europe; but rather the latter than none at all. Drieu was not the only French intellectual who did not simply “go along with the victors” but lost his way in a desperate search for “larger forces.”
There is an analysis of Drieu’s quest in Paul Nizan’s book about “Fascist Socialism” (Nizan had been a Communist, who broke after the Hitler-Stalin pact and was killed in World War II). “There are qualities here,” Nizan wrote, “which cause one to regret the loss of such a man. And yet he was not alone in being the victim of a struggle which led to cooperation with hangmen....” At the time Drieu was a guest at the Nuremberg Party Rally (after which, typi cally, he went on to Moscow).
His latest biographers pay rather more attention to his sexual drives than the interested reader is likely to sustain (how impotent he was, why he was so attractive to women, what kind of love ruled his life), especially when so little is clarified. Unclarified, too, are the complex sources of his turbulent anti-Semitism, even though we now also have a reprint available of the magazine The Last Days, which he edited with Emanuel Berl, a Jewish friend. It was a strange obsession, and evidently it was taken seriously by almost nobody. He could write mean and nasty pamphlets, and yet provoke surprisingly little personal hatred. Neither Colette Jeramec nor his many Jewish friends appear to have held it against him. No doubt about it, there was a certain magical charm to his personality, to his youthfiilness; his adolescent immaturity, his disarming impulsiveness.
For a generation which considered itself “lost” or “desperate” he suc ceeded in capturing the mood both in his novels and in his personal life.
There was also abroad in the land a love for the provocative (and it took Aragon from surrealism to Stalinism). In Drieu it exemplified itself in a weariness with life, a disgust with ideas, which could not lead to convictions and passions. There was no end to his naive disappointments. When he was edit ing the Nouvelle Revue Franqaise he was turned down by both Andre Gide and Francois Mauriac. Why should he ever have thought of asking them? His predecessor, Jean Paulhan, fought in the Resistance; and Drieu wrote badly of him. The inexplicable complexities mount:’ Drieu saved Paulhan from arrest and worse; and was duly thanked in a letter. He also went out of his way to help Malraux and Berl and others during this period of the Occupation and, the Underground. All collaborateurs had their reasons and excuses, but very few actually used their position to “prevent the worst.” In the end he put a simple end to the intricacies of his emotional turmoils: the self-destructive ness, adumbrated in so many of his writings, culminated in his suicide in 1945.
The life and death has, obviously, its dramatic interest; the books, I think, even more so. Beyond the conventional efforts of sympathetic biographers and critics, the paradox and irony of Drieu La Rochelle challenges. I suspect that the new fascination with Fascism and even Hitlerism is not an altogether “negative” attraction, as the recent grotesque Paris cults of figures like Leni Riefenstahl and Amo Breker would suggest. Can it be a genuine nostalgia for such dark journeys “to the end of the night”?
In his own work—see his writings of 1927-28, The Young European (La Jeune Europe) and Geneva or Moscow (Geneve ou Moscou)—he liked to present his own views as symptoms and signals, rather than as directions; and he declined to fulfill the normal expectations of the French intellectual reader for lessons, morals, rules, myths. He had lost his sense for the nation; all the nations were exhausted, useless; the provinces might still barely survive, in which case a greater Europe might well emerge. “There are too many father- lands, and they no longer exist....”
He found something “clownish” in the attempts of the local or the provin cial to assert itself; and perhaps the nostalgic impulse of readers today is driven by the present confusions between exhausted old forces and pregnant European ideas powerless to be bom. He had no fears for the “idea of France” from the Second or the Third International; for him the real dangers of a spiritual disorientation lay in the vapid village historians and their distract ing local color. In the last analysis, readers may be turning again to Drieu as a prophet of disorientation. In another amoral era of foul compromises an enig matic spectacle of desperation takes on a certain pertinence.
June 1980
European NotebooksNew Societies and Old Politics, 1954-1985 Francois Bondy
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