Existence and Imagination, the Theatre of Henry de Montherlant by John Batchelor (review)

450 MODERN DRAMA February (i.e., erotic love) results in death. She is in general accord, therefore, with Edwin Engel, who proposed in 1953 that O'Neill's purpose in writing the play was the "unmasking" of Io.ve. Mrs. Frazer points out that the paradoxical relationship between love and death finds frequent expression in myth and literature, and that the word "co.me" (O'Neill's "cometh") in the traditional jest about the iceman and the unfaithful wife has the same meaning as the word "die" in, for example, the sons of John Dryden. It signifies, that is, the climax of the sexual act and the death, at least for the moment, of the erotic impulse. O'Neill relished the co.njunction of the ribald and the religious in the title of his play, and is said to. have considered it the key to. the understanding of his intentions. Mrs. Frazer builds her case on these foundations. Allusions to. the eroticism of death can be detected, she believes, in what is gradually revealed concerning the psychological degradation of the various characters, in the rhythmic four-act structure of the playas a whole, and even in the sunless, tomb-like setting. The leading characters, she notes, have all been destro.yed by love. They are spiritually dead, and although they do not admit it, such love as they once may have had for the woman in their lives has turned into hate. Parritt and Hickey are obliged by circumstances to face this truth, and having faced it, having relinquished their ultimate illusions, they proceed with necrophilic ecstasy from spiritual to physical death. Larry faces it by an act of will, and stares straight in front of him, as the curtain falls, waiting for death. Mrs. Frazer is a perceptive critic. She rides her theory a trifle too hard, perhaps, but in the course of her critical excursion she manages to thro.w a good deal o.f new light on the subtle craftsmanship with which O'Neill, in The Iceman Cometh, both revealed and concealed his desolate view of the universe and his contempt for the mud and manure called men. CYRUS DAY EXISTENCE AND IMAGINATION, THE THEATRE OF HENRY DE MONTHERLANT , by John Batchelor, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, Australia, 1967, 267 pp. Henry de Montherlant is one o.f those French writers who do not go. over well in this country. First, he totally lacks the common touch; second, he depends fo.r his success very greatly upon style. Temperamentally, Montherlant seems haughty and disdainful, living apart from ordinary mortals in a world of his own created out o.f the heroic past-a world of Roman virtue, Renaissance virility, and Spanish asceticism. His plays are not all historical plays, but the attitudes they convey seem to be not of our times. Devoid of action and plot in any sense of story, they seem wholly given o.ver to language, the sumptuousness of which is often matched by the tableaux. The themes of the plays are psychological or moral problems argued out by characters usually presented in pageant-like setting and costume, who deploy in their speeches all the shimmering devices of rhetoric. Americans are apt to be insensitive to the verbal charm of Montherlant's plays and indifferent to the problems they raise. To my knowledge, only one has been presented in New Yo.rk and that one in a church. The lack of popular interest in Montherlant in the United States is understandable enough; what is surprising is to find it matched by academic neglect. American literary and dramatic scholarship has pretty generally igno.red Montherlant. 1969 BOOK REVIEWS 451 In view of his eminence in France and his intrinsic interest as a playwright, this is regrettable and makes the appearance of an excellent book in English like the present one from Australia particularly welcome. The work deals with Montherlant and his plays in a fairly general way, although (according to the dust-jacket blurb) it avoids the "conventional 'man and his works' technique" and is mainly addressed to a public of students or specialists in the theater who are capable of reading quotes in the...