The Will O' The Wisp-the Enigma of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

Will O' The Wisp is a strange, enigmatic novelette, the first I have ever read by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a French writer and well-known adherent of the Fascist right in that country, who committed suicide in 1945. Indeed, I think it may very well be the only novel of his translated into English to date. I was led to believe that it was a story about addiction and self-destruction, something akin to say, Malcolm Lowry's wonderful Under the Volcano. It is, in a sense, but it's at one and the same time much more and much less than that. The book is best read, I think, as kind of a quest or a journey by a man who has led an almost completely empty and unfulfilling life, a quest for some kind affirmation; affirmation in life and love. It's when he fails in his quest that he kills himself.

Originally published in 1931 under the title of Le Feu Follet, it tells the story of the last two days in the life of a character identified solely as Alain, a heroin addict. Now in his thirtieth year, Alain has essentially lived by firstly sponging off his parents and latterly by the money he has managed to obtain from his relationships with wealthy women. His is a life almost totally devoid of real meaning and purpose. He describes one of his friends, whom he visits after a final encounter with a wealthy mistress, as an 'insipid enigma', but it is really Alain himself who fit this description best.

Some of the passages on drug addiction are fairly insightful;

They begin by taking drugs because they have nothing to do and continue because they cannot do anything.

Drug addicts are the mystics of the materialist age, no longer having the strength to animate things and sublimate them into symbols, undertake the inverted task of reducing them, wearing them down and eating them away until they reach the core of nothingness.

...now, an overworked demon was rushing yet another client through and negligently repeating the same old trick: 'If you take a little today, you will take less tomorrow.

So, from the clinic where he is living in an attempt at an illusory cure, Alain emerges himself in the night of Paris, determined on a fresh fix of heroin. I expected some detailed descriptions drug-induced descent but Drieu La Rochelle does not give that. Yes, Alain takes a couple of fixes but they are quite incidental to the main action, which sees him passing through several encounters with friends in various parts of the city. The alcohol he drinks in the process seems to affect him far more than the opiate.

But, no matter; for the heroin and the alcohol are just methods and means for Alain to avoid a confrontation with a sterile and empty existence. He ends a bit like Jack Worthing's friend, Bunberry: he found he could not live, so he died. He shoots himself. Suicide was a clear temptation, as it was for the author himself for the best part of his adult life.

This is a good story, if not a great one, a kind of modern morality tale with no moral. Some might even read it as a frustrated spiritual quest, the sort of thing one finds in the plays of Samuel Becket. It was certainly a revelation for me, and a slight thrill to read such a tainted author! I would like to think that Pierre Drieu La Rochelle is at last beginning to emerge from the darkness to which his name was consigned for so long. I do not think he was bad man, the politics notwithstanding, just an unhappy one. Like Alain he was also something of an enigma, though far from being an insipid one.

Castle to Castle

Who was Céline? Why, Céline was Céline, a misanthrope and cultural pessimist, who found in Fascism a way of giving some degree of coherence to his thoughts. But he was far too eccentric, far too much of an individualist, ever to be constrained by an ideological straightjacket. You see, Céline does not discriminate in the forms of prejudice he displays: he hates everybody, regardless of race or creed! Castle to Castle (D'un château l'autre), his post-war account of Vichy in exile, in the sheer intensity of the prose, the machine-gun staccato of his delivery, the passion with which he carries his thoughts forward, displays for me the blackest of black humour and satanic irony, though I admit this may not have been the author's intention! Intentionally or not, he makes the absurd look absurd; and what better way of perceiving the dust of Vichy!

Being and Nothingness as Political Commentry

Envisage, if you can, Paris in 1943: a bleak place, one where the arena of personal freedom was growing more circumscribed by the day. In the streets, alongside the German occupiers, there were French Fascist auxiliaries of one kind or another, with links to Marcel Déat and others among the so-called Paris Collaborators. The previous year all French Jews had been required to wear the yellow star, not by order of the Germans, but on the initiative of Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy's Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Round-ups and deportations were now a regular occurrence. Through the city German propaganda, evoking final victory, was an ever-present feature of life in public places. Denunciations, anonymous letters and police raids wee a constant threat. France has been seized by a Judeo-Bolshevik phobia. The atmosphere is stifling.

So, for Sartre, and every other Frenchman, objective freedom has all but gone. It is against this background that Being and Nothingness, was published, a profoundly Cartesian work, one where subjective forms of freedom find their greatest defence.

There, in subjective consciousness, lies the origin of one's absolute freedom, one that is shaped in a state of permanent criticism. All labels are rejected-"How them shall I experience the objective limits of my being: Jew, Aryan, ugly, handsome, kind, a civil servant, untouchable, etc.-when will speech have informed me as to which of these are my limits?" It is from these labels that alienation and inauthenticity are created: "Here I am-Jew or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one armed etc. All this for the Other with no hope of apprehending this meaning which I have outside and still, more important, with no hope of changing it...in a more general way the encounter with a prohibition in my path ('No Jews allowed here')...can only have meaning only on and through the foundations of my free choice. In fact according to the free possibilities which I choose, I can disobey the prohibition, pay no attention to it, or, on the contrary, confer upon it a coercive value which it can hold only because of the weight I attach to it."

Sartre's theory of freedom is expressed, for the most part, in highly abstract terms, but it still has to be read against a specific historical background. The call for freedom, and the parallel denunciation of all forms of bad-faith, was never more meaningful in Nazi France.

Why did the Germans allow this? Well, because they operated in some areas a fairly relaxed censorship policy, especially over such abstract works as Being and Nothingness. It also helped if the author expressed an anti-German message which the Germans themselves could not understand, as Sartre did in his play, No Exit, which concludes with his most famous quote "Hell is other People", or l'enfer, c'est les autres in French. By this time the French ad long ceased to refer to the occupiers as Boches-they were, quite simply, Les autres

Céline and Excess

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, better known as Céline, one of my favourite writers, was always one to take things to excess. His anti-Semitism has an absurdist quality, loopy even by the loopiest of standards! His hatred of all things Jewish became a kind of metaphor for his cultural pessimism, a convenient hook upon which to hang his alienation from the modern age. His anti-Semitic pamphlets, published in the 1930s, are quite deranged in the Gothic extremes of his prejudice. His Bagatelles pour un massacre and École des cadavres were so outrageous that even those on the anti-Semitic right of French politics thought it was part of a deliberate attempt to discredit their ideology. You can understand why when the various 'Jews' identified include Racine, Stendhal, Picasso, Roosevelt and the Pope! Andre Gide even suggested Bagatelles was a kind of Swiftian satire, not to be taken seriously. In the end Celine widened his net to include Adolf Hitler, that well-known Jew!