Works
His early successes were works such as Les Célibataires (The Bachelors) in 1934, and the tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles (The Young Girls) (1936–1939), which sold millions of copies and was translated into 13 languages. At this time, Montherlant traveled regularly, mainly to Spain, Italy, and Algeria.
He wrote plays such as La Reine morte (1934), Pasiphaé (1936), Le Maître de Santiago (1947), Port-Royal (1954) and Le Cardinal d'Espagne (1960). He is particularly remembered as a playwright. In his plays as well as in his novels he frequently portrayed heroic characters displaying the moral standards he professed.
In Le Songe he described the courage and camaraderie of soldiers, based on his experiences in World War I. In the 1930s, he wrote numerous articles and books advocating intervention against Nazi Germany. During the German Occupation, his book L'Équinoxe de Septembre was banned by the German authorities. However, in Le Solstice de Juin, a book about the defeat of France in May and June 1940 (which he had covered as a reporter), he expressed his admiration for Wehrmacht and claimed that France had been justly defeated. This earned him the reputation of a collaborator, and got him in trouble after the Liberation. Like many scions of the old aristocracy, he had hated the Third Republic, especially as it had become in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.
Although not openly gay, Montherlant treated homosexual themes in his work, including his play La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and novel Les Garçons (The Boys), published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier. He maintained a private correspondence with Roger Peyrefitte—author of Les Amitiés particulières (Special Friendships, 1943), also about sexual relationships between boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school.
Montherlant is remembered for his aphorism "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page," often misquoted in the shorter form "Happiness writes white."
Read more about this topic: Henry De Montherlant
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“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
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