Henry de Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte and Karel Egermeier

The Band of Thebes bloggers recently were predictably (sadly!) bitchy about a man who (by their own lights) they really ought to have hailed as a hero.

Hardcore old school aristocratic masculinist, misogynist, and fascist, Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant decried the wimpy, feminized 20th-century male and is said to have celebrated strong Germany's triumph over his weakened native France in 1940. By then, at 45, he had enjoyed widespread literary success, especially with his shockingly prejudiced series The Girls, which sold millions of copies, was translated into more than a dozen other languages, and caused Simone de Beauvoir to attack it for an entire chapter of The Second Sex. Early in his career Montherlant published the gayish novel The Bachelors, [sic] his essays on vigorous sport and the pleasures of youth Les Olympiques [1924], and, in 1929, wrote the far more explicit all-male school romance The Boys which he did not release it [sic] until 1969. His play on a similar love triangle between an older male student, a younger male student, and their jealous male teacher, La Ville Dont Le Prince Est Un Enfant, was produced in 1952 and in 1997 finally became a movie known in English as The Fire That Burns. Expect the classic doomed, sadder but wiser ending: It is Montherlant, after all, who said, "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page." At 77, almost blind, he swallowed cyanide then fired a gun at his head.

In April 1938, whilst checking out the boy-candy at a fair in the Place de Clichy in Paris, de Montherlant met and befriended Roger Peyrefitte, a French civil servant some ten years his junior who was evidently there for the same reason. During the War, Peyrefitte would go on to work for the French Vichy Government, as their representative to the occupying German authorities. His reward for these "collaborationist" activities was to be removed from office in February 1945. This discharge was not revoked until 1960 and his diplomatic status was not finally restored until 1962. His only real claim to fame nowadays is his attempt to out Pope Paul VI.

Peyrefitte clearly read and enjoyed de Montherlant's play about schoolboy love, which de Montherlant had started writing as far back as 1912. Indeed, Peyrefitte even wrote his own version - a novel called Special Friendships, published in 1943, which was made into a film in 1964. This gave the author the opportunity quite literally to make some of his dreams come true when he befriended and seduced one of the young actors featuring in it (in the, er, minor role of a choirboy). This was the 12-year-old aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle, with whom Peyrefitte was to embark on a long-lasting and tempestuous love affair.

There's a lovely article (in French, with photographs) about de Montherlant and Peyrefitte's friendship on the Diagonals of Time blog here. Peyrefitte apparently introduced de Montherlant to the accomplished youth photographer Karel Egermeier who, though he is now celebrated as one of the great boy-artists of modern times, was as yet a comparatively unknown Czech photographer living and working in Paris. In time though, his photographs of Scouts and other French boys would make him the inter-war equivalent of what Robert Manson would later become in the 1950s and '60s. De Montherland was clearly very taken with Egermeier's work, and secretly allowed him to use his house to take photographs of Peyrefitte and two of his "Platonic" young friends.

Peyrefitte and young Roland "Roro" Doudou, probably taken by Egermeier outside the Tuileries Palace in 1939

De Montherlant and Egermeier went on to work together, producing an updated, illustrated version of de Montherlant's Olympics book, entitled Paysage des Olympiques. (The French 'Gay Library' blog has some pictures here.) It was published in France in 1940, at about the same time as de Montherlant started writing for the racist, pro-Nazi Catholic periodical La Gerbe ('The Sheaf'). Like Peyrefitte, after the "liberation" de Montherlant would get into trouble with the new authorities for collaborationism.

The slightly creaky French TV-film version of his play of course came out much too late for de Montherlant to enjoy any authorial perks from it as Peyrefitte had done from his story. (On the other hand, it does at least have a sweet scene between Naël Marandin and Clément van der Bergh.) But in the meantime, oddly enough, the film Au Revoir Les Enfants ten years earlier had done its bit to reclaim the genre (of prepubescent gay French traditionalist Catholic boarding school coming-of-age period dramas!) for the Resistance. (Apparently those traddy frog priests weren't all penning Hitlerite screeds whilst wanking off to little boys' bottoms: they were really risking their lives to rescue Jewish kids from the Holocaust. Who knew?)

BoyWiki has articles on de Montherlant, Peyrefitte and Egermeier here, here and here respectively. It's a sobering but uplifting thought that whereas the traditionalist de Montherlant eventually committed suicide the arch "anti-clericalist" Peyrefitte was eventually reconciled to the Church and died in a state of grace, fortified by the last rites.

One of Egermeier's illustrations for de Montherlant's Olympics book