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A major feature of Montherlant’s writing is its power to disturb. Some of his ideas are unsettling in themselves, others make us uneasy because of the way in which they are related to one another. Most characteristic of all, he has the disconcerting habit of speaking in largely interchangeable terms about his main subjects — war, sex, art, sport and morals. This general attitude of energetic resistance to thoughtless assumptions has confused Montherlant’s admirers almost as often as it has incensed his critics. His literary skill has seldom been called in question, but his moral status has been the subject of many conflicting judgements. He has been called both ‘a Renaissance pagan and ‘an authentic religious voice’, ‘a sadistic patrician’ and ‘a perfect humanist’, a poseur’ and ‘a writer of exceptional integrity’, ‘a pro-Nazi’ and ‘a true democrat’. Obviously Montherlant cannot be all these things. Possibly he is not any single one of them. His work, viewed as a whole, is characterized by its stubborn defiance of easy formulation or neat classification. In a way that is sometimes reminiscent of Gide, Montherlant has tried to frustrate all efforts to make a stereotype of his personality or his work. ‘What is important,’ he writes in the Carnets (1957), ‘is not to be different from other people, but to be different from oneself.’

     If it is true that Montherlant’s literary output defeats generalization, it is equally true that it must not be judged piecemeal. He insists, in theory and practice alike, that diversity and wholeness are inseparable, that genuine unity must absorb contradictions, not evade them. This is a theme running right through his work from his first novel, Le Songe (1922), to his most recent writings. On the purely individual level this ideal of totalisme must give full play to the conflicting elements in any single personality. Montherlant speaks, in Les Olympiques (1924), of our constant duty ‘to model our being until it fills completely the space defined by its own potentialities; until we become exactly and perfectly what we are’. The fulfilment of this duty, as Montherlant conceives it, involves three stages. First, in intellectual terms, we recognize within ourselves the presence of many different, often mutually antagonistic, tendencies. Next, exercising the will, we refuse to sacrifice any single one of these tendencies. Finally, in terms of our daily practice, we resolve the conflict to the extent of alternating between tendencies and living a dialectic which accepts their differences while striving to conserve their unity. Such a Goethean ideal of behaviour (Montherlant calls it ‘syncrétisme et alternance’) requires a complex attitude of will, passion, detachment and lucidity — qualities possessed by Montherlant to a marked degree and which give to his work as a whole its very distinctive moral climate.

     On a more general level, Montherlant accepts the wider consequences of his own doctrine. He may even appear to confuse totalisime with complete abnegation of judgement and responsibility when he says that ‘everyone is always right’. Without an awareness of the twin concepts of syncrétisme and alternance such a statement is likely to be misunderstood. The particular sense in which ‘everyone is always right’ is suggested in L’Equinoxe de septembre (1938):

     Two opposing doctrines are nothing more than different deviations from the same truth; in passing from one to the other we do not change our ideal any more than we change objects in the course of viewing the different surfaces of a solid; hence the orthodoxy of one century is derived from the heresy of the century that preceded it.

     It follows that Montherlant’s ideal of unity is closely linked with an idea of process. It can be pointed to in the context of a prolonged temporal perspective, it can grow out of certain historical changes, but in the immediacy of an individual human life it is often difficult to discern. What one sees, in fact, are the oppositions and conflicts which must be experienced through a period of time before unity can be achieved. This, I think, is why Montherlant has given so many readers an impression of irresponsible inconsistency, or even sheer awkwardness. By identifying unity with totality he has praised action and contemplation, violence and charity, individualism and communalism, self-indulgence and self-sacrifice, classical paganism and Jansenist purity. As a writer he has been by turns subjective and objective, lyrical and austere, the apologist of brute existence and a celebrant of intellectual refinement. Each single book, as it has appeared, has added to the general impression of indiscriminate contradictoriness.

     It would of course be foolish to attempt to deny the existence of self-contradiction in Montherlant’s work. He himself discusses it, with typical frankness and self-awareness, in Textes sous une Occupation (1953). Without attempting to put a premium on inconsistency, he rightly points out that consistency is not necessarily and automatically a virtue. For example, he refuses to praise unswerving fidelity to what he considers a false ideal, an untenable belief, dishonourable behaviour. Referring to his own writings he finds it in no way surprising that a man should contradict himself in the course of a lifetime of thought. What should surprise us, and indeed arouse our suspicions, is a lifetime of flawless consistency. New experiences, some of which will modify our thought, are an inevitable part of living. Experience should therefore be the final arbiter, and where it dictates a change in our ideas that change must be made.

     Although he excuses in this way a certain measure of change and inconsistency, Montherlant maintains that we often claim to see evidence of contradictory things in places where they do not really exist. We lose sight, more often and more easily than we ought, of an underlying unity of which they are only opposite aspects. For example, in the Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (1924) Montherlant writes: ‘one must believe in a place where all that is great is unified’. Such a belief has been a dynamic force behind both the substance and the form of Montherlant’s writing. The search for this place of reconciliation, the attempt both to locate and to describe it, is one of the central threads holding all his work together, giving it a shape and a direction.

     Montherlant’s moral and intellectual equipment for his task is impressive. One of his most striking characteristics is his honesty, an honesty that takes the form of severity with himself as well as with others. One kind of honesty, which he thinks to be of particular importance, finds notable expression in the more violent and dangerous kinds of sport. Belief in the importance of such honesty is one of the several reasons he gives for his admiration and approval of the bullfighter’s art. He mentions more than once the aficionados’ expression, terreno de verdad. The sanded arena is the terrain of truth precisely because the matador, facing the bull, is seen as he really is. He cannot deceive himself, nor can he easily deceive the spectators. Genuine danger, and the skill necessary to avert it, combine to remove his human disguises and enforce honesty. Montherlant’s own honesty — using the word now in a more restricted sense — strikes one as authentic and unaffected. There is a passage in Les Olympiqnes where he insists that he finds something degrading in bodily imperfection, but he admits immediately afterwards that those he admires most, among his contemporaries and from earlier centuries, would almost certainly look hideous if stripped naked. A few pages later, while claiming that, in the realm of sport, the demands of the flesh must be firmly controlled and take second place, he confesses that this is the very view he attacks as being a ridiculous one in the spheres of religion and morals. Similar small instances of self-criticism are common in Montherlant’s writing. They are part of his healthy self-awareness, his realism and his concern to avoid humbug. They also find an echo in one’s own imperfect and contradictory humanity.

     An instinctive honesty of attitude, supported by a capacity for sharp and sometimes ruthless observation, lies behind Montherlant’s preoccupation with authenticity and integrity. This shows itself in various ways. At the social level, Montherlant has studiously avoided le Tout-Paris for the last thirty-five years. His non-appearance in the fashionable social and literary salons and his freedom from entanglement with the mondain makers and breakers of reputation, recall the similar attitude of Camus — an attitude that is rare enough among successful men of letters in France. A clear impression emerges, both from his fiction and his essays, that he likes very few professional intellectuals and is much more at home with ordinary people. He writes with admiration and unusual understanding — sometimes even with tenderness — of Algerian Moslems, private soldiers, the working-class members of sports clubs and social clubs. By the same token, he is severe in his judgement of snobs, self-conscious sophisticates and the ostentatious rich. This emphasis on what is authentic and undisguised has clear consequences for Montherlant’s attitude to literature. In the preface to Service inutile (1935) — one of the works which Camus most admired because its contents corresponded so closely to his own ideas — Montherlant says that the artist should be a man who writes as though he were already dead and placed beyond the power of social pressures. No doubt courage is required, as well as integrity, to allow talent to act as its own solitary spokesman. Montherlant has never lacked courage generally, and he has certainly not lacked this type of courage in particular.

     If honesty provides the moral basis of Montherlant’s search for some ultimate harmony behind the confusion of experience, intelligence is the main instrument he employs. He employs it precisely because intelligence, as he conceives it, is the opposite of systematization and dogma. Doubt and hesitation, he says several times, are an integral part of intelligence. The most convincing evidence of a man’s intelligence is his realization that the conclusions of his intellect must always be subject to further questions. It is this ‘open’ conception of intelligence which enables Montherlant to accept the multiplicity of experience just as it prevents him from ignoring or suppressing those elements which make impossible a neatly logical mental structure. A passage from Service inutile states his position admirably, while also suggesting some reasons for the hostility it has often aroused:

     Nothing, not even an accurate judgement, is more intelligent than a suspension of judgement. A person who says: ‘I don’t know’ is using his intelligence, which enables him to realize that he does not know (what is called knowledge), his integrity, which makes him decide that since he does not know he will not pretend to do so (for this would be charlatanism in the true sense of the word), and his courage, because such caution results in his being treated as a coward by the partisan, as an ignoramus by the learned, as an idiot by the frivolous.

     While Montherlant dissociates intelligence from systematizing, he also links it closely with love of others (charité) and tenderness. The relationship between love in this sense, and intelligence, is carefully examined in the character of Lieutenant Auligny in L’Histoire d’amour de ‘la Rose de Sable’ (1954). Montherlant has said of this novel that human tenderness is its central theme, and his further comment shows the kind of link he wishes to establish between human tenderness and intelligence: ‘In Auligny’s case love (amour) pierces the clouds bringing tenderness (charité) in its wake, but it is intelligence which flows through the breach thus made.’ In short, Montherlant holds intelligence to be a quality associated with the heart as well as the head, something for which love and affection prepare the way. To fail to realize this is to confuse intelligence and intellectualizing. The latter is a game, a form of mental gymnastics lacking any contact with the texture of life as we experience it.

     Despite the various resources of honesty and intelligence, the quest for unity must in some sense be a frustrating one. Whatever our ideas and ideals, life itself will always be experienced as ambiguity and contradiction. Montherlant seems to say that, given human limitations, concepts such as harmony and unity remain intellectualized ideas. No doubt there is some achievement in being able to claim the existence of a unity beyond our immediate, day-to-day experience. But we can do no more than indicate it from a distance. Direct and living knowledge of some unity underlying life is impossible. This, I think, is the reason for Montherlant’s claim that we cannot begin to understand life until we realize that it will always be confused, that the only constant in life is unceasing change. In Un Voyageur solitaire est un diable (1945) he sets out the multiple ideal which this realization imposes:

     To seek, knowing the problem to be insoluble; to serve, smiling indulgently at what we serve; to conquer ourselves, without aim or profit; to write, with the profound conviction that our work is unimportant; to know, to understand and to lend support, having always present in our minds the wretched uselessness of being right: and yet I must find in all this reasons for rising above myself...

     The effort of rising above oneself in such circumstances, of seeking what can never be found in the sense of being directly experienced, is what it means, according to Montherlant, to be a human being. This view of effort as its own, and only, reward contains an austerity recalling the Camus of Le Mythe de Sisyphe. But it is an austerity that can only be arrived at through what Montherlant describes, in Mors et Vita (1930), as the threefold passion of his life: indifference, independence and indulgence.

     Although Montherlant is, to use his own word, ‘tormented’ by an ideal, his strong sense of concrete existence prevents him from becoming its dupe. He seldom stays in the sphere of abstraction for long. He insists that everything we can know comes to us through people. One of the main contentions of Service inutile is that it is infinitely more important to concern oneself with ‘tangible, human realities’ than with the ‘high-minded nonsense’ of most modern myths and intellectual systems. Therefore, although Montherlant’s work is in many ways a monument to his search for unity and reconciliation, such a search leads him neither to mysticism nor to some all-embracing ‘philosophy of life’. At the same time, there must be some evidence of a link between the disorder of experience which he asserts, and the unity which he posits. One of the most individual features of his work is the fact that his writings on sport offer certain indications, at least, of the nature of this link.

     It seems surprising, in England of all countries, that sport has been rarely a subject, and even more rarely a successful subject, for our best writers. Perhaps this is due in part to the fact that so many English intellectuals are mental and emotional refugees from the public school system and still equate sport with aggressive philistinism. At the other end of the scale, to use one’s enthusiasm for sport as a badge of sound working-class origins or sympathies is equally inimical to good writing on the subject. English essays on sport have certainly exaggerated its benefits to health, strength and character, while poetry or fiction devoted to sport has too often proved a mixture of whimsy and condescending class-consciousness of the kind found in stories of village cricket. It has been claimed more than once that the more violent, blood-drawing sports, such as bullfighting, foxhunting, boxing, lend themselves most easily to literary treatment. This is probably true, and Montherlant is only one of several major writers who have included memorable accounts of bullfighting in their novels. But Montherlant has also written highly individual essays and poetry on football and athletics, particularly in Les Olympiques, and his whole attitude to sport is of considerable interest. It continues to be interesting, indeed, even when one is no longer sure whether he is deriving his ideas from sport or imposing them upon it. To discuss Les Olympiques in full would require a separate article. Much would have to be said about the literary qualities of such sections of the book as the one-act play on the subject of football, ‘Les Onze devant la Porte Dorée’, and the ‘sports poems’ about football boots, hurdling, the winner of the women’s 100 metres, etc. In the space that remains I shall attempt, instead, to comment briefly on Montherlant’s attitude to sport as it affects the ideas discussed earlier.

     In the opening pages of Les Olympiques Montherlant praises the natural relationships established by ancient Greek thought between physical and intellectual accomplishment, a relationship symbolized by Hermathena who combined the skills of Hermes, god of the gymnasium, with those of Athena, goddess of wisdom. In his own attitude to sport Montherlant emphasizes the same link. As a result, particularly in his comments on athletics and football, he moves backwards and forwards between technical analysis, prompted by his own knowledge as a performer, and philosophical reflection. Speaking of sport in general, he stresses the importance of style. It is important, not because it necessarily ensures the best results but because, compared with sheer success against the stop-watch, it can arouse a much more completely human response and bring more profound satisfaction to onlooker and athlete alike. When it comes to an individual runner’s style, says Montherlant, we can probably trace the fundamentals of this style to his stride. We may then go on to speak of the rhythmic combination of ease and strength (in a ‘relaxed’ style of running), and we may even analyse it in anatomical terms. In the end, however, none of these things is exactly the style itself. A runner’s style is the intangible order and unity suggested to our minds by the movement of tangible parts of his body, various limbs, various material shapes. His style is an idea prompted in us by what we see. It is not what we see. In fact, style stands in the same relationship to the moving body of the athlete as unity does to the disordered flux of experience. It may even be, Montherlant seems to imply, that by a certain style of life we can attain the harmony we seek, even though such harmony — a style of living through disorder — can never be experienced in the direct way we experience the disorder which it unifies.

     At a later point in Les Olympiques Montherlant briefly analyses the style of an American high jumper in a way that sets off a further train of thought. In this instance he sees the athlete’s style as a perfect, economical, distribution of weight and effort between different parts of his body. Harmony, in this sense, is not absence of difference but a perfectly proportioned use of different elements. There is no attempt here to destroy differences. On the contrary, co-operation becomes possible through the very fact that different units exist. The apparent implications of this view support the idea above that the unity of life can be attained by a certain style of living through disorder. If the various aspects of living receive the right distribution of emphasis (in something like the way in which the athlete’s style distributes weight and effort) unity will be present in diversity.

     In the end, then, Montherlant’s search for unity could be regarded, to this extent, as containing in itself the unity it seeks. The arguments justifying such a view in more detail would resemble in form those used by theologians to elucidate the claim that those who seek God have already found Him. It follows from what Montherlant says that unity is not an unattainable ideal beyond or behind or above life. It consists, rather, in a certain way of living. At the same time, unity can only become a reality if one keeps on searching for it as though it were an ideal separate and different from life. To seek it as an unattainable ideal is the one way to encounter it as a reality. This seeming paradox, at once confusing and encouraging, represents the ultimate conflict in which the many lesser conflicts of Montherlant’s thought are finally resolved.