The Embrace of Unreason by Frederick Brown

Author:Frederick Brown [Brown, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35163-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Drieu raised hopes of marriage with political factions as well as with women, and so it was that after reading his letter of divorce from the Surrealist group in the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), Charles Maurras, under the pen name “Orion,” publicly urged him to seek intellectual companionship at L’Action Française. In an open letter, Drieu replied that he could not rush headlong into a political trap when his recent denunciation of the Surrealists warned poets against that very danger. “The best way of devoting myself to ideas, to ideal institutions many of which we doubtless share in common, is to remain free of personal bonds. I shall cling to the advantages and disadvantages of a certain solitude, not out of pride or prudence, I assure you, but to husband the limited resources allotted me.” His salutations were affectionate.

While he sidestepped political traps, Drieu made an avocation of touring them with a friend and fellow writer named Emmanuel Berl, who was to play a conspicuous role in left-wing journalism during the 1930s. Like André Jéramec, Berl belonged to the well-off Jewish bourgeoisie residing near the Parc Monceau. He had survived the war decorated but in poor health, had married a young Catholic woman (for her property, he confessed), and settled on a remote estate in Béarn, near the Basque coast, where he met Drieu one summer. Their friendship blossomed even as his loveless marriage withered. Before long Berl had sprung back to life, mingling in Paris with Surrealists at the Cyrano café and receiving invitations to salons of hostesses who liked to sprinkle bright young men among the duller eminences of French politics and letters.

Another bright light was Berl’s former classmate at the Lycée Condorcet, Gaston Bergery, whom Drieu met here and there on his social perambulations. Bergery, a lawyer by training, had set his course for politics after recovering from an injury suffered at the Champagne front and by 1920, at age twenty-eight, was deputy general secretary of the Reparations Commission. When the latter dissolved, he became principal private secretary to the minister of foreign affairs in the Cartel des Gauches.11 Berl, Drieu, and Bergery spent much time together, talking politics. Having survived 1914–18 with emotional and physical wounds to show for it, all three agreed that the hands that had drafted the Treaty of Versailles were wooden spatulas, that Germany should not be ostracized, that the only guarantee against future wars would be a united Europe transcending national egos. “How would this Europe look? Oh, of course,” Berl recalled. “I was surrounded by Socialists.” In 1925, Drieu’s “pivotal” year, Bergery left government to become an appeals litigation attorney whose expertise in private international law took him to the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1928, residents of Mantes, roused by his call for the nationalization of monopolies, elected him mayor and a deputy in the National Assembly, where right-wingers, perceiving his political color to be more deeply dyed than that of his Radical colleagues, nicknamed him “the Radical Bolshevik.

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