Sex and the French Novelist

“Swastika on the roof,” the French novelist Roger Martin du Gard wrote in his diary for June 24, 1940. “Feeling of servitude.” The German armies that overran his country estate in the Orne, west of Paris, left him feeling not just servile but intellectually humbled. Three years earlier Martin du Gard had received the Nobel Prize, largely for his eighteen-hundred-page family epic Les Thibaults. In that book, he sought to do for World War I (in which he fought) what War and Peace had done for the Napoleonic wars: describe from top to bottom the mindset of a society turned upside-down. In France’s case, that mindset was (as he put it in his Nobel acceptance) one of “stupefying inertia.”

Martin du Gard was convinced that Europe was shifting decisively away from an order that had begun with the Renaissance. What it was shifting toward he couldn’t say, but until he found out, he insisted that pacifism should be the fighting creed of all such agnostics: “Anything, anything — literally anything — rather than war!” he wrote. “Invasion, subjugation, dishonor — rather than the massacre of the population.” He backed the Munich agreements. He signed a pacifist petition in the wake of the German takeover of Austria. By the time the Germans marched through his own wrought-iron gates in 1940, he saw that his reasoning had led him far astray. “What I want to do is flee,” he wrote his fellow novelist Andre Gide. “Turn my back on everyone and everything, go to ground somewhere and wait for the madness to burn itself out.”

That’s what he did. Except for a brief memoir of his friendship with Gide, Martin du Gard never published another book. Instead, he spent the last eighteen years of his life — first in Nice, then in Cap d’Antibes in unoccupied France, then back in the Orne after the war — working on a novel that would describe humanity’s path from the Europe of the last decades of the nineteenth century (which Martin du Gard thought the most free society that had ever existed) to the Nazi subjugation of Europe (which he initially feared would endure). He envisioned the book, Le Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, as “the testament of a generation on the eve of a complete rupture between two ages of humanity.”

Born to a family of lawyers outside of Paris in 1881, Martin du Gard was educated at liberal Catholic schools. He had a kind of bold staidness about him. He wanted to write, but instead of trying his hand in Bohemia, he enrolled in the Ecole des Chartes, training himself as an analyst of ancient documents. He was reclusive by nature. Martin du Gard lived quietly in the country, generally refused to be photographed, hid from journalists for days when his Nobel was announced, and in the 1950s would spurn repeated invitations from Charles de Gaulle and Andre Malraux to join the Academie Francaise. His friendships were few but intense. His early novels brought him into contact, around 1913, with the authors associated with the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, particularly with Andre Gide, twelve years his elder.

It was one of France’s great literary friendships. Martin du Gard tried to convert Gide into a writer of big, Tolstoyan novels — and failed. Gide tried to convert Martin du Gard to the anti-ethic of sensual gratification that Gide had limned in such short novels as The Fruits of the Earth (1897), The Immoralist (1902), and The Counterfeiters (1926) — and succeeded. While Gide was a wider-ranging man of letters, and would himself win the Nobel Prize in 1947, Martin du Gard was the better pure novelist, and Gide’s influence would come to erode his quirky gifts.

Martin du Gard’s big final novel is narrated by Lt.-Col. Bertrand de Maumort, a rural nobleman (he doesn’t insist on the title) who wavers all his life between a military and a literary calling. Born in 1870, Maumort attends a debauched Jesuit school in the Orne, comes (through an academic uncle) under the sway of the French intellectual circle around Ernest Renan in the 1890s, gets put on leave from the Army for asserting Dreyfus’s innocence, is widowed in his early thirties, helps build the French empire in Morocco, loses both his sons (and fights valiantly in the trenches) in World War I, and at last retires to his estate to read. When the Nazis invade, he (in one of several versions that Martin du Gard tried) engages in long arguments with the Nazi high command who are holed up in his bedrooms or (in another version) locks himself in his library to write his memoirs.

Martin du Gard considered Le Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort “a work that can grow and be perfected indefinitely: a work that will never be finished for me, and that, however, may at any moment be interrupted by my death.” In short, a roman fleuve, of the sort Marcel Proust, Jules Romains, and Georges Duhamel made a particularly French genre. When death came in 1958, Le Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort consisted of thousands of manuscript pages in various degrees of completion, and boxes and boxes of notes — accompanied by a memorandum asking that the work, if ever published, be dedicated to Gide. These were assembled into a thousand-page novel by the editor Andre Daspre in 1983. Now it has been smartly translated into English by Luc Brebion and Timothy Crouse (the latter an American political journalist who has scarcely been heard from since his 1974 The Boys on the Bus). They present Maumort as “one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.”

Whether we agree with the translators’ grandiose verdict depends on whether we judge the book Martin du Gard outlined or the book he wrote. It was probably the Ecole des Chartes that left Martin du Gard with the lifelong habit of disciplined outlining. He stuck to that habit until the end. “Certainly at my age,” he wrote, “there’s a big risk of dying before having got enough perspective to pass historical judgment. But the risk of talking nonsense is worse, and I’ve made my choice.” In order to keep Maumort from being a mere mouthpiece for his own thoughts, Martin du Gard decided to write Maumort’s biography, as a “purely preparatory exercise,” a kind of scaffolding. In his journals and his letters to Gide, he describes his work on Maumort as resembling the construction of a bee-hive, which he would later go back to, and fill with the honey of narrative. (It was for this diligence that one of Martin du Gard’s youngest friends, Albert Camus, would so admire him.)

If we judge only the book he outlined, then we can take Martin du Gard’s description of a minor character in Maumort — the colonel’s academic uncle Eric Chambost, who spends decades working on a never-to-be-finished book called The Moral Evolution of the Human Mind — as offering the key not just to this posthumous novel but to Martin du Gard’s lifelong project:

The multiplicity of moral ideas, their differences, their contradictions, the incredible variety of traditional notions as to what is good or bad, compulsory or irrelevant, and, moreover, the large number of cases in which the moral imperative outlived the reasons that had given it birth seemed to him, early on, one of the principal enigmas that arise in the human mind and one whose solution had to be pregnant with consequences. It was to this research that he devoted his life.

Such examinations mark the two earlier novels, Jean Barois and Les Thibaults, on which rest Martin du Gard’s reputation as the most Tolstoyan of French fiction writers. His lifelong obsession was to find a set of beliefs that would replace Christianity, specifically Catholicism (which he did not accept), without shaking to their foundations its moral teachings (which he considered the only reliable bulwark against savagery and — more important — despair). The rupture Martin du Gard sought to chronicle was thus a personal thing for him, and he was in a good position to see both sides of any argument that arose from it.

While schooled with Paris’s Catholic elites for eleven years, Martin du Gard claimed that “my atheism was formed at the same time as my mind.” What’s more, Martin du Gard, homosexual by inclination and avocation, was miserably married to a devout Catholic who despised all his literary friends. Many of the incidents in Jean Barois, his novel of doubt and faith set during the Dreyfus affair, arose from battles with his wife over whether their daughter should go to Mass and how she should be instructed. (In the event, the virulent anticlericalism his daughter proclaimed as an adult would exasperate Martin du Gard even more than his wife’s piety.)

Published in 1913 — the same year as Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and Proust’s Swann’s Way — Jean Barois is an extraordinary book: a novel about religion by an unbeliever in which belief fights unbelief to a draw. In Martin du Gard, all doctrinal fights tend to end in draws. On the one hand, Barois would pose as the great liberator of the atheists, the first moralist of a new religion, and the circle of anticlericals around Barois acquit themselves honorably on the admirable side of the Dreyfus affair. On the other hand, their antireligion stance is shown already to have the character of a movement considerably more rife with phonyism and credulity than the Catholicism they fled. And Martin du Gard puts as many stupid, arrogant, dogmatic sentiments into the mouths of his anticlerics as he does into the mouths of his priests.

The politics that results is not distinguishable from that of the disillusioned Catholic dreyfusard Charles Peguy’s Our Youth: regret at that tawdry political hustling of opportunists who latch onto a noble cause after the fact. The fictional character Barois comes to think the vision of the world that pure reason puts before us is manifestly shoddier than the world as we know it by instinct to be — and the real author Martin du Gard sees in his thinking an explanation of why religion is a “universal sentiment.” The world matters more than pure reason can tell us. The particular dogmas of most religions are easily enough assailed; the vision of the importance of the world that all of them offer is much more “reasonable,” more “sensible,” more “logical,” than the vision of atheism. Barois is an atheist who loses his lack-of-faith, who weakens in his will to not-believe, and returns to the church.

For Martin du Gard, the fact remains that Christian dogma is routed by science on every front, and revealed religion can’t evolve without destroying itself. The point on which he insists with most tenacity is that religion is in an all-or-nothing battle with unbelief. Although they are the noblest figures in all of Martin du Gard’s novels, those liberal prelates who seek a “symbolist compromise” — accepting the “spirit” of religion while rejecting its literal truth — are duped. They are on a slippery slope for people on their way out of religion.

The problem is that all the non-religious codes that could serve as replacements are resting places for people on their way out of civilization. In Les Thibaults, which he began in 1920, Martin du Gard uses World War I to show the extent to which this matters. This story of two brothers — the methodical doctor Antoine and the bohemian Communist Jacques — allowed Martin du Gard “the possibility of being able to give simultaneous expression to two conflicting tendencies in my own nature: my instinctive need to escape, to rebel, to reject every sort of conformity, and the instinctive need for order, for moderation, for the avoidance of extreme courses which I owe to my heritage.”

The brothers’ father, the widower Oscar Thibault, is an autocratic and megalomaniacal Catholic hypocrite. He founds a school for troubled boys that is a prison camp and a nest of perversion. He tramples over his subordinates and tyrannizes his family, and uses much of his bequest to endow an “Oscar Thibault Prize for Virtue.” Aside from being a fount of hypocrisy, his Catholicism — particularly when contrasted with the easygoing maternal love of the boys’ Protestant friends, the Fontanins — is the root of vice. It is ripe for discarding. But that is easier said than done.

Oscar’s older son Antoine discards it through duty. A doctor, he takes a “large and complete satisfaction in the scientific development of our times.” He is proud to call himself a “slave of my profession,” without ever considering that that might make him a slave. “People like me start in doubt and impartiality,” he tells a priest, “and allow ourselves to be led by reason, without knowing where it will lead us.” Antoine’s motto is: “Complete liberty, on the condition that one can judge clearly.” And yet, when Antoine wrestles with his conscience after euthanizing a baby one night, he loses. “Funny how a person is almost never satisfied with logical reasoning,” he thinks. Martin du Gard realizes it will lead people to selfishly maximize their own comfort — that’s what “logical reasoning” is for. When war is declared, sensible Antoine, like most of ostrich-like Europe, has no idea what hit him. The younger Thibault son Jacques considers his brother one of the race of “lazy active people.”

But Jacques, although both more “modern” and more astute about the gathering storm, is even more a bourgeois hypocrite. Hundreds of pages of “Summer 1914,” the seventh book of Les Thibaults, are devoted to introducing us to about two dozen expatriate Communists in Geneva — through their ideological disputes. Here as elsewhere, Martin du Gard never stacks an argument. Some of his Communists are infuriatingly stupid, others infuriatingly logical — but all of them are dogmatists of a faith that provides no more permanent a resting place than a rickety Catholicism collapsing under the attacks of twentieth-century science. Jacques comes to see that the “collectivists” around him are closet individualists. Each secretly wishes for a band of others to act collectively in a way that will exalt himself — as a heroic individual.

And Martin du Gard is splendidly astute on the animality at the heart of a revolutionary project that would “rationalize” social relations. “What’s really the reason for this general adhesion to theories of violence?” Jacques asks.

Is it only because we need violence to act efficiently? No. It’s also because these theories appeal to us through the lowest, the oldest, the most deeply buried instincts! The truth is that we stick to them for motives that are much more shameful and much more personal — because all of us have, at the bottom of our hearts, a revenge to take and a grudge to satisfy.

The Achilles’ heel of Jacques’s Communist faith is that he doesn’t believe human nature can change. As such, his faith has nothing transcendent in it. In general “liberation” is almost never liberating in Martin du Gard — and that is because he understands liberation as something more than infantile reaction. “I’m completely free, and never have anything to hide,” says Antoine’s over-sexed girlfriend, mere pages before obediently returning to Africa to service her abusive boyfriend as a sex-slave.

No French novelist is more fluent than Martin du Gard in the language of skepticism. If anyone was capable of writing a book that could serve as a summum of the moral evolution of the first half of the twentieth century, it was he. This should give an idea of what to expect from a Martin du Gard novel that aims to trace a straight line between the confident, credulous, patriotic, free nineteenth century and “Swastika on the roof. Feeling of servitude.” There is nothing more plausible than that a novel to which Martin du Gard devoted the last two decades of his life should be “one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.”

Sadly, that book is not Maumort, and there is no indication that Martin du Gard ever seriously tried to write such a book. Instead, we have a highly tendentious work about sex, written under the influence of Gide. This book comes in three parts: six hundred pages of cleanly written, coherent, “finished” narrative; fifty pages of a failed, late-in-life attempt to recast Maumort as an epistolary novel; and one hundred pages of miscellaneous notes and aphorisms.

It is only in the scrappy, unfinished, undeveloped parts that one gets hints of the preoccupations that made Martin du Gard a giant of French letters. The passages, for instance, concerning his Uncle Eric’s Sorbonne set — “the vanguard of a new, privileged humanity which was suddenly awakening, after centuries of trial and error, and which had at last arrived at the threshold of Truth” — hint at the intellectual degeneration that would lead Europe into war and violence. There is a portrait of Renan, the defrocked priest and apostle of science, who detests all dogmatism and fanaticism, but admits that he might stand aside if they ever made a bid for power:

“One must accept them,” he said. “Let them do their ugly job, and then, as soon as possible, get rid of them. . . .” He smiled, delighted with his idea. “Who knows if this hideous collaboration of evil is not indispensable for the coming of a great good? Criminal and abhorrent, insane and detestable, they certainly are. But the endeavor that humanity is dimly trying to perfect, and that goes beyond them, and that is glorious, needs their madness and their crimes to blossom and to establish itself in a lasting way.”

But these intellectual portraits are mere vignettes worked up out of raw notes, with no indication that Martin du Gard ever tried to integrate them into his narrative.

The same goes for the passages in which Maumort interrogates the Nazi officers billeted in his house. Here Martin du Gard’s resistance to dogma of all sorts inclined him to put irresistible ideas and sentiments into the mouths of the Nazis he clearly found unsympathetic, much as he did with both orthodox Catholics and orthodox Communists. “There are not many absurdities in what Gralt says,” Maumort remarks of the gentlest of the officers, and he generally listens while the Nazis talk:

I sometimes reproach myself as if it were a kind of minor cowardice in me to shy away from any argument with Dr. Weissmuller. Then again, it’s the only reasonable attitude. The advantage of a brain like mine over a thick head like his is that I learn a lot by listening to him, while he would learn nothing from me.

The chapter that would have resulted could have been dazzling. Millions of his countrymen, after all, collaborated with the Nazis, and Martin du Gard shows signs of having a rough explanation of why they did. Surely this is a subject of some moment to an intellectual whose theme is the “complete rupture between two ages of humanity.”

Since it was the Nazi takeover of his house that provided the impetus for the novel in the first place, one can ask why the Nazi chapter was barely started. There is a possible biographical explanation: All the chapters about Germany were written during the war. Once Martin du Gard began to hear word of German barbarism elsewhere in Europe, his sentiments about the war swiftly passed from curiosity to indignation.

Fair enough, but there’s no evidence Martin du Gard did any serious work on these passages, even work that would reflect his new understanding of Nazism, in the last fifteen years of his life. And if we look at the other gaps in the book — seven years of Maumort’s participation in the building of France’s African empire covered in a dozen pages of notes; Maumort’s two decades of reclusion at his country house a blank slate, with not even notes to guide us — we’re left with a different explanation. Martin du Gard covered so little about the evolution of Western consciousness because the subject had ceased to interest him.

What had come to interest him instead was sex. The English translators seem to like the novel that results from this preoccupation — but they make claims for the novel as if that preoccupation were only one among other, more exalted ones. In their introductory essay, they use the pretensions of the master-piece Martin du Gard dreamed of writing — but did not write — to make claims for the sexual Bildungsroman he actually did write. The book proceeds at a pace of about a hundred pages per year of Maumort’s life. The editors explain the gaps by opening chapter after chapter with qualifiers like “Time did not permit Martin du Gard to carry out this project as completely as he had hoped.”

One wants to ask, “How much time did he want? Three hundred years?” Time certainly permitted Martin du Gard to write the novel he wanted to write. And the novel he wanted to write is a sort of slow-motion version of a Gide novel — or, more charitably put, the kind of novel Gide would have written if he had had Martin du Gard’s powers of concentration.

That novel is a remarkably thorough account of Maumort’s sexual life between puberty and early adulthood. Maumort is obsessed with puberty: “Tell me what your puberty was,” he says, “and I will learn your nature, and know your secrets.” In this reading, Maumort’s life up to age twenty-four — and this is the only part of the novel that is really “complete” — has four key events. First, the pubescent Maumort’s spotting some girls bathing naked by a pond. Second, a year spent living with his sex-crazed teenage cousin, who initiates him into the onanistic “bad habits” that allow him to punctuate his days with orgasm. Third, the boy’s school where he joins in stopgap measures of mutual masturbation. Fourth, his loss of virginity at age twenty (after a mystifying delay) to a Martiniquaise immigrant.

The best-drawn character in the book — and one of the best Martin du Gard ever drew — is Maumort’s tutor Xavier de Balcourt, a down-at-the-heels would-be writer from a disgraced noble family. He resembles Balzac’s Rastignac, that archetype of the French country boy on the make (except gay), and his worldview is that of the novel:

Xavier smiled and said something like this, which made so great an impression on me that I have never forgotten it: “You know, every man has two very distinct and often contradictory lives: his social life, that is to say his life in front of others, with his family, in the world; and then his secret life, or to put it bluntly, his sexual life, about which no one around him generally has the slightest inkling; a life completely hidden and disguised, in which each of us lives his true character.” . . . From that day on, I possessed one truth more, and, as it were, one of the keys to the world.

It becomes clear, though, that Martin du Gard thinks it’s the only key to the world, a truer truth. “I am eager,” he writes, “to get to the question which, for me, is the central one, the one that provides the key to that unhappy existence, and that, to my mind, sheds light on everything which in Xavier’s life, death, and character would otherwise remain forever obscure: the question of morals, the sexual question.”

Martin du Gard brings tremendous gifts to the subject of sex. Xavier’s demise is recounted through a fifty-five-page excerpt from his diary (“The Drowning”), which Maumort inserts into his narrative. It concerns Xavier’s attempts, while billeted in a French country town, to seduce a local baker’s apprentice under the eyes of suspicious townspeople — and the catastrophe that unrolls as he draws closer to his goal. This ingeniously paced homoerotic crime novella — to coin a genre — has little to do with Maumort’s own story. It should have been pulled out of this baggy manuscript and published separately, for it is as good a novella as has been written in French in the last century — and the $ 35 price of the book is a pittance to pay for the gripping experience of reading it. Start at page 316.

Here as elsewhere Martin du Gard is most at ease when his characters are drawn towards courses of action that defy not only their common sense but their sworn beliefs. Maumort, for instance, believes that love is crucial to his sexual enjoyment, but adds that (a) it hasn’t worked that way for him in practice and (b) those who follow this belief are miserable:

it is only fair to add that those who do not ‘separate’ the two things — those for whom physical attraction and the act of love are not possible without feeling, those for whom sex necessarily involves the heart and the mind, the entire self conquered and enthralled — are perhaps even more to be pitied. All such people I have known have been wretched, victims of romantic passions that hellishly complicated their lives and that often wrecked their careers, ruined their happiness, and caused everyone who loved them to suffer.

One of the problems with a Martin du Gard novel about sex is that the ground rules of sex under which his characters operate are not those of most people (heterosexual or homosexual). First, almost all of his protagonists have dead mothers and carry their desire for mother-love to the point of obsession — even Maumort, whose mother died bearing him and who has such a hard time losing his virginity partly because he keeps falling in love with the mothers of the women he thinks he’s in love with. Second, there’s a kind of passivity — even asexuality — about the men in his novels.

Daniel de Fontanin in Les Thibault is an exception. Xavier de Balcourt is another. But in general, Martin du Gard’s male characters don’t seek women (or men, as the case may be), don’t seduce them. They just drift into relationships with whoever happens to be there. Jacques and Antoine Thibault both court their maid Lise and their stepsister Gise, Barois drifts into an affair with a collaborator’s wife, and Martin du Gard’s 1931 novella Confidence Africaine has incest as its theme.

The prevalence of incest in all of Martin du Gard’s work (even Maumort has an unnatural spousal affection for his sister Henriette) owes less to any perversion on Martin du Gard’s part than to an intellectual weakness. He sees sex only psychologically, seldom socially. Since sex hits Martin du Gard’s characters (and therefore presumably him) with the force of revelation, it’s in a unique position to assume the force of a dogma in a body of work that’s dedicated to triumphing over dogma. Sex is the only lens that Martin du Gard does not examine for cloudiness or distortion, the one subject that takes him away from his real strengths as a novelist, all of which arise from his skepticism.

In a passage that his editors place at the end, Maumort sums up his own strong points, and they are Martin du Gard’s:

And I think I have figured out the secret of my equilibrium: my brain is built in such a way that I have no need for certainty. The bad fairy did not toss that curse into my cradle. It is quite an exceptional stroke of luck. I have the privilege — which in my generation was less unusual than today — of breathing easily amongst conjectures, contradictions, inconsistencies. Problems interest me without my having to solve them at all costs. Doubt is my climate.

The evidence of this posthumous novel is that by the end, Martin du Gard was growing freezing cold in that climate of doubt. He was just as uncomfortable as Jean Barois with a life that offered neither dogma as an aid to understanding nor hope as an aid to peace of mind — and grasped at a simple explanation. In Le Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, the skeptic of earlier years who had seen in sex a resting place just as precarious as “symbolist” Christianity or radical socialism suddenly chose to renounce his skepticism about sex and be baptized into the church of it.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.