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7 A Politics of Sexuality: Henry de Montherlant’s Nobody’s Son Introduction If, as suggested in chapter 4, Simone Jollivet’s representation of a repressively misogynistic culture in The Princess of Ursins was largely, if not entirely, unintended, the same may be said for Jean Cocteau’s gay revisioning of heterosexual society in his pseudo-Boulevard potboiler, examined in chapter 1: In both cases, the playwrights simply painted the world as they saw it. Cocteau’s sensibilities had shaped the point of view discernible in The Typewriter , just as Jollivet’s cultural background and personal experiences had taught her the lessons of misogyny, which, without thinking, she inscribed into the text of her historical melodrama. Neither had set out expressly, he to write a gay suspense play, she to write a feminist tragedy. And with regard to Princess, no one at the time seems to have noticed its sexual-political implications, while the battle waged over The Typewriter appeared to most— including Cocteau himself—to have centered on neither the dramatic nor the theatrical text but on the playwright. Yet the whole notion of intentionality as a solely conscious act seems in retrospect rather narrow: As we have seen, writers write from a variety of intentions and are aware of only some of them. However, with regard to an intentional sexual-political message, the Occupation plays of Henry Millon de Montherlant are significantly different in intent from Jollivet’s and Cocteau’s. In both La Reine morte (Queen After Death, written and produced in 1942) and Fils de personne (Nobody’s Son, written 1942–1943 and produced in 1943) there is a deliberate subtext—even, arguably, a deliberately subversive subtext. Although one may (as I argue in the previous chapter) see the same in Jean-Paul Sartre’s first publicly staged play, the intended political subtext in The Flies is political in conventional, 145 146 THE DRAMA OF FALLEN FRANCE contemporary terms—the politics of Vichy, of collaboration and resistance— and thus, at least in theory, would have been relatively accessible to audiences . At the same time, Sartre’s sexual-political message seems clear enough to be intended though not necessarily consciously. Montherlant’s plays, however , contain a subtext directly concerned with sexual politics. A carefully encoded commentary describing Montherlant’s views on sexuality in general and declaring his own sexuality in particular is included in both his stage works of the period, and this commentary is articulated in unconventional, highly personal terms. Nonetheless, access for audience members to this commentary was restricted. Only those “in” on Montherlant’s message were meant to receive it, and those “in” people were to have included those few who shared the playwright’s private view of the world—that is, those who both knew and partook of his sexuality. In his posthumously published letters (written before and during the Occupation) to Roger Peyrefitte, Montherlant, ostensibly to deceive those reading the mails, refers to these “in” people as members of a “Chivalric Order.” As he implies in the essay, “Les Chevaleries,” written in July 1940 and included as the opening piece in the 1941 collection Le Solstice de Juin, this is the Chivalric Order of adult men who, like Montherlant (and Peyrefitte and other men of their acquaintance) were pedophiles. Although in more formal discourse the practice of identifying pederasty with homosexuality in France is on the wane, the confusion survives in spoken French: For example, in the French translation of Angels in America: Part 1, which opened at the Avignon Festival in July 1994, American slang pejoratives such as “fag” and “queer” were rendered as “pédé,” the French pejorative derived from “pédéraste” and which is generally extended to all male homosexual practices between men. The implication is that all homosexuals are child molesters. As recently as 1989, Dominique Fernandez, perpetuated this belief in his survey of “culture homosexuelle,” entitled Le Rapt de Ganymède; indeed, the very name of the work identifies homosexuality with pedophilia. As we will see, Montherlant sought to negate such an identification, not because he felt that homosexuals did not deserve to be thought of as pedophiles but because he found it vital to believe that pedophiles should not be thought of as “fags” and “queers.” Montherlant had for years practiced sexual acts—for the most part fondling and sodomy—with prepubescent boys, but his activities were conducted very discreetly until his acquaintance with then diplomat, later writer, Peyrefitte...

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