Henry de Montherlant - Biography

Biography

Born in Paris, a descendant of an aristocratic (yet obscure) Picard family, he was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Sainte-Croix boarding school at Neuilly-sur-Seine. Henry's father was a hard-line reactionary (to the extent of despising the post-Dreyfus Affair army as too subservient to the Republic, and refusing to have electricity or the telephone installed in his house).

In 1912, he was expelled from the Sainte-Croix de Neuilly academy for a homosexual relationship with a fellow student. After the deaths of his father and mother in 1914 and 1915, he went to live with his doting grandmother and eccentric uncles.

Mobilised in 1916, he was wounded and decorated. Marked by his experience of war, he wrote Songe ('Dream'), an autobiographic novel, as well as his Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun (Funeral Chant for the Dead at Verdun), both exaltations of heroism during the Great War.

Montherlant was attacked and beaten in the streets of Paris in 1968. He was seriously injured and blinded in one eye. The British writer Peter Quennell, who edited a collection of translations of Montherlant's works, recalls that Montherlant attributed the eye injury to "a fall"; he dates the incident to 1968, and mentions that Montherlant suffered from vertigo.

After becoming almost blind in his last years, Montherlant died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after swallowing a cyanide capsule in 1972.

His standard biography was written by Pierre Sipriot, and published in two volumes (1982 and 1990). It revealed that Montherlant had, apparently throughout his life, been an active paedophile.