Books: Death of an Anarchist

CHAOS AND NIGHT by Henry de Montherlant. 240 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

At the age of 67, Celestino Marchillo resumes a boyhood pastime-the Spanish custom of car fighting. He takes his stand in the middle of ‘he Boulevard Saint-Martin in Paris and shakes his raincoat at the traffic. He is knocked down. “I could have presented the capote when the head passed, as others do, but I wanted to do it honestly, because the bull was honest,” Celestino explains.

“You might have been killed,” says Celestino’s daughter, disapproving but not surprised.

“That’s the whole point,” Celestino answers. But Celestino, a lifelong, dedicated anarchist, has in fact misplaced the point of things-or rather, has lost his anarchist’s well-ordered assurance of their pointlessness.

“Impotent & Dangerous.” Celestino’s decline, as he loses his firm grip on nothingness and stumbles into senescence and death, is told in a novel that for most of its length is wry and likable. But the author, the distinguished French Playwright Henry de Montherlant, has chosen to cast not only Celestino but the novel itself into absurdity. Clearly this was to have been a novel of ideas; in detail it is. Celestino is full of lively observations and prickly comments. And the author appears to have something climactic to say. In successive pages he pastes up his posters, hires his hall, and dims the house lights. But at the last moment he ducks out the stage door and vanishes, leaving his audience to realize it has been swindled.

The fraud is worked this way: Celestino returns to Madrid to settle a will, and there he attends a mediocre bullfight. He comes to understand that a certain ill-favored bull, badly killed with four clumsy thrusts of the sword, represents Man. “More and more wary and more and more duped, more and more vicious and more and more mocked, more and more both impotent and dangerous, ineluctably doomed to die and yet still capable of killing: such was the bull at the end of its life, and such is man.” Deeply troubled, Celestino returns to his hotel, lies down, experiences four agonizing pains along his spine, and dies.

Killed by the Nonexistent. There is an inflexible rule that in a novel about Spain the death of any male character over the age of five must be made to parallel the ritual of the bullfight, and a reader assumes that Celestino’s four pains are merely Montherlant’s notion of a heart attack. Not so. The police come, flip poor Celestino over, and discover “four thin clean holes which might have been made by a knife or sword.” Has Celestino been murdered in some highly symbolic fashion? Apparently not; nor is there any hint that the supernatural is involved. Celestino’s death is, rather, superliterary. He is the first character in the history of the novel to be killed by a wholly nonexistent symbol. This is artistic anarchy, which is not a satisfactory way to write about an anarchist.