Ordeal by Hippogriff

THE GIRLS by Henry de Montherlant, translated by Terence Kilmartin. 639 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

It was much easier for M. De Montherlant to think himself a hero when he faced women (and women chosen for his purpose) than when he was obliged to act the man among men--something many women have done better than he, for that matter. --De Beauvoir, The Second Sex

These are harsh words. But Mile, de Beauvoir's view of The Girls and its author is mild compared with the portrait of womankind sketched by Henry de Montherlant in these four novels published separately in Paris between 1936 and 1939 and now issued in America for the first time in a single volume. An accomplished playwright, novelist and gadfly, Montherlant at one time or another has irritated nearly everyone in France. Misogyny, though, is the specialite de la maison--like fetuccine Alfredo served with a silver spoon.

His chief literary agent in such matters is the fictional character Pierre Costals, an aristocratic writer, libertine and dedicated bachelor whom critics, rather unkindly, assume to be Montherlant's alter ego. "Literary men," Costals caustically observes, "attract crazy women the way a lump of rotten meat collects flies." And Costals is, indeed, a man much beset by marriage-minded females, most of whom begin by writing unsolicited letters to him. One, a peasant girl named Therese Pantevin, informs Costals that because of his novels she envisions him as her spiritual savior; when he advises her to see her priest, she goes mad. Another, Andree Hacquebaut, sets a new record in passionate penmanship for the mails (some 200 letters over a period of two years), first offering Costals her provincial, literate, blue-stocking soul and finally her awkward 30-year-old body.

Costals accepts neither. He cannot abide the idea of married coupling ("sublimation, wrangling and frenzy"). Instead, as a change from Andree's overblown (not to say overwritten) femininity, he pursues Solange Dandillot, a pretty and reassuringly placid young thing from the Parisian upper middle class. At first she is just right for him, pliant and emotionally phlegmatic. But soon a monster, which Costals calls the Hippogriff, begins to stir in her. In short, she becomes a woman who wants to get married. To that end, she willingly suffers every humiliation that Costals can devise for her, including the signing of a false letter admitting adultery in the marriage-to-be (giving Costals legal grounds for divorce) and agreeing to have an abortion performed should she become pregnant some time after the ceremony.

These goings-on are cruel and largely preposterous, well calculated to cause ire among women and rouse distaste in anyone who takes them seriously. There is some doubt, though, if Montherlant himself belongs entirely in the latter category. He seems to dislike women. But he also derives considerable amusement from being outrageous in his various literary poses, while needling society with invective. In one of his guises, Montherlant greatly resembles Shaw and his assertion that the sex war is really a standoff skirmish between the Man of Moral Passion and the female Life Force.

Many of Montherlant's jibes seem self-consciously Shavian:

On feminine logic: "My theory

about you helps me live, therefore it

is true."

On love: "It doesn't exist in nature; it's an invention of women."

On Establishment mentality: "One

must never speak ill of stupidity in a

French newspaper."

Much arch commentary, however, edges toward Oscar Wilde: "He even felt glad that he had suffered a little. One must try everything once." Provocative (especially to an age notably short of elegant abuse), nearly always interesting as a tour de force, The Girls lacks narrative substance, a problem of form inevitable, perhaps, in books put together mainly from letters, excerpts from notebooks, oddments of thought and author's asides. The chief irony of The Girls, though, is that Costals, who keeps asserting that creative man must free himself from the constricting influence of women, ends by falling victim to his own fear and rage. Costals never succumbs to the Hippogriff. But by defining himself so incessantly in relation to women, he becomes, in some peculiar and not very attractive way, very much a ladies' man.

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