Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Malle, Jacques Rigaut, and the Dandy suicide
New York Review Books have published a new translation of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel Le Feu Follet (1931) as The Fire Within, previously translated as Will O’ the Wisp. The novel concerns the last two days alive of Alain Leroy, a recovering heroin addict living in a sanatorium who has decided to commit suicide. He spends a day in Paris meeting a succession of old friends, to try and persuade himself there may after all be a reason to continue living. He visits a close friend, Dubourg, who has become an Egyptologist, married and had two children, his old drug buddies, and a rich, decadent bourgeois couple, Cyrille and Solange. None of these encounters are enough to persuade him to not go through with the suicide he has planned for the next morning.
Rochelle’s novel is based on the life of his friend Jacques Rigaut, a minor Dadaist who committed suicide at thirty. Rigaut never produced very much in the way of writing, just a slim volume of diary entries, aphorisms about suicide and prose poems. He was mostly known as a dandy, the “best dressed and most handsome of the Dadaists”, a heroin addict, and someone obsessed by suicide from an early age, seeing it as his “vocation”. Like Leroy, he married a rich American heiress who returned to America, leaving him behind in Paris. He was briefly employed by sculptor Jacques-Emile Blanche as amanuensis, but lived for the most part off rich women and the generosity of friends, “other people’s money”, as he put it.
In the novel, Leroy is ageing, losing his looks, laments that he can’t find a rich woman to keep him, and is perfectly open about money being the only interest in his life and being a ponce. Leroy tells his friend Dubourg that one of the reasons he wants to end his life is that he “fait mal l’amour” - makes love badly, although he’s not impotent. There’s no evidence that Rigaut had such difficulties. For Rigaut, eventually, "other people’s money” ran out, and the life of a gigolo was no longer being tenable. In 1929, he shot himself in the heart, “after paying close attention to his toilette” according to Breton, placing a rubber sheet over the bed, and finding the exact position of his heart with a ruler.
Jacques Rigaut
Neither does Rochelle come across as particularly charming. He was a fascist, and edited the Parti Populaire Francais’s anti-Semitic journal L'Emancipation Nationale. A Nazi collaborator, he committed suicide at the end of the Second World War rather than answer for his treachery. The novel is held together by sub-Sartrean existential philosophising between barely drawn characters, and Leroy is an insubstantial presence, and it's not of much value apart from serving as the bare bones of Louis Malle’s 1963 film of the same name.
One difference between the film and the book is the sense that the movie’s Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet) cannot accept the impending mediocrity of his life, nor the incipient banalisation of the world around him, whereas the Leroy of the novel, like Rigaut himself, was mediocre from the beginning. In the film Leroy comes with no real back story, we have to guess to an extent; what we know is that he has an ex-wife in the States who is paying for his drying-out-clinic in Versailles, is an ex-soldier, a legendary carouser, that he writes, though it’s not made clear with how much success, and is an alcoholic (rather than the novel’s junky). He is attractive and sympathetic: thoughtful, sensitive, well-liked, loved even, by his friends. Malle’s film far surpasses Rochelle’s moralistic tale of aimless hedonism and dispenses with his tedious and artificial dialogue.
The cinematic Alain Leroy is also an alter-ego for Malle, a dandy himself, who had gone through a severe bout of clinical depression, and who at the time of the film’s productions was a semi-alcoholic night owl, trying to come to terms with the suicide of a close friend. He wrote in regard to his movie that “the best way to avoid committing suicide is to make a film about it”. The clothes Ronet wore were Malle’s, as was the esoteric miscellany of objects in Leroy’s room at the drying-out clinic where is living, as was the Luger with which Leroy ends his life.
When Leroy comes back to the drying out clinic after his day of meeting friends and a night wandering Paris, he shaves, packs, lays on his bed and finishes reading The Great Gatsby, then shoots himself through the heart. He is ageing, has no trade, no home, no purpose, no future; having tried to convince himself to reconnect with life, in the end he simply prefers not to, and his suicide is calm and without histrionics. The film is an elegiac mood piece and character study, and what Malle brings to the story is style, a kind of cinematic dandyism. Ronet’s performance is understated and for much of the time he has the affectless demeanour of the severely depressed, his face a spent bulb. The elegiac mood is established in part by a soundtrack of Satie’s Gnossienne number 1, its melancholy laid over scenes of the insectile, scurrying city Leroy observes.
The cinematic punctum
For several years, until I saw it a second time, I misremembered Le Feu Follet as being wholly about Alain Leroy trying to purchase a pack of Sweet Afton cigarettes in Paris and that it is his failure to do so, after wandering around Paris from tabac to tabac, that precipitates his suicide. In fact, it takes up just one short scene, so for a long time I was haunted by a non-existent film. But for me it is the most important scene. It represents Leroy’s will and desire being thwarted and how this affects him psychologically, perhaps fatally. It is the film’s ‘punctum’. Barthe’s term can be reconfigured for cinema: a moment or scene that pierces the viewer, that shoots out of the screen “like an arrow”, a shot or scene of high, intense and inspired affect or concentrated semiosis that may leave one viewer completely indifferent, or that may provoke in another a deep and personal reaction.
These puncta, which can and often do come at the close and opening of a film, include for me the money blowing away at end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); Anthony Quinn weeping on the beach for Gelsomina at the close of La Strada (1954); Sterling Hayden, dead, home at last, nuzzled by horses, in the final scene of The Asphalt Jungle (1950); the 'freaks' crawling through the mud and rain to exact a dark and droll revenge in Todd Browning's Freaks (1932); Mercedes McCambridge's screaming face gargoyled by murderous sexual envy in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954); Shirley MacLean’s run back to Jack Lemmon’s apartment near the close of The Apartment (1960).
Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle
A punctum can lie in the transition from one scene to another, in the power of the cut itself, in the break with what went before, like a symphonic shift. One of the most affecting of these is in The Deer Hunter (1978): an artistically bold, brutal, emotionally shattering cut from the scene in the bar in which George Dzundza plays Chopin’s Orphically stilling Nocturne No. 6 in G minor to sudden, unexpected, emotionally overwhelming immersion in a chaotic and bloody battle in a Vietnamese village.
Film noir and idiot contingency
In his room, Leroy is seen reading another Fitzgerald story, Babylon Revisited. This tells the story of an American man who has previously lived as an ex-pat in 20s Paris, a legendary drinker indirectly responsible for the death by pneumonia of his wife. He comes back to Paris on a visit to try regain the guardianship of his daughter from his hostile sister-in-law. Having finally managed to persuade her to relent, two of his old drinking buddies, an obnoxious American couple who have inveigled the address from someone, barge in, drunk, and his sister in-law changes her mind. Malle replicates the scene in which Fitzgerald’s protagonist calls in at a bar a and reminisces with the barman about his fabled drunken exploits.
It is the intrusion of idiot contingency that is key to Fitzgerald's story. It is also fundamental to Malle’s earlier film, Lift to the Scaffold (1958). Also starring Ronet and Jeanne Moreau. In this tightly plotted, quintessential noir, which has been described as “unique blend of Hitchcock and Bresson”, Ronet stars as Julien Tavernier (also an ex- paratrooper, this time one who served in Indochina) who murders his arms-manufacturer boss, and the husband of his lover (Moreau), there are two such intrusions of fatal contingency. One is in the form of a young couple that steal Tavernier’s car, then murder a German couple, leading to a manhunt for Tavernier. The other is Tavernier’s being stuck in a lift in his office building for the whole night after going back to retrieve a piece of evidence he left behind.
Richard Brodie criticised this plot element as being ‘ludicrous’. But this ludicrousness is the whole point, the obtrusion of senseless contingency to ruin well-laid plans - this kind of intrusion, some petty detail or ludicrous accident or foible that ruins the heist, the escape, that perfect murder is a mainstay if not the mainstay, of noir plotting. Exemplary is the scene in Edgar J Ulmer's grubby Poverty Row masterpiece Detour (1945) - we nervously laugh along with that sadistic and unpredictable psycho Fate, when he has Tom Neal pull on the telephone cord running under a closed bedroom door which, unbeknownst to him, is wrapped around the neck of vicious two-bit chiseller Ann Savage as she lays passed-out drunk on the bed.
This trope perhaps reaches its almost abstract apotheosis at the close of Elliott Chaze’s 1953 novel Black Wings has My Angel, the most stylish, purest and darkest of literary noirs, in which the two main characters, having finally enriched themselves and seemingly home free, have everything ruined by a hole in the ground: “To my delight she broke into an exuberant little clog dance, so free and light and easy …she kicked front and back and sideways … …Then all of a sudden she did a crazy little sideways jig .. and her back arched prettily as she went over the edge into the hole”.
Jeanne Moreau in Lift to the Scaffold
Mouchette
Four years after Le Feu Follet, Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) was released, a film which also ends in suicide, one whose severe aesthetic rigour and intense moral seriousness makes Le Feu Follet seem self-indulgent. The story of the spatupon life of an impoverished and profoundly alone teenage girl, Mouchette (Nadine Nortier), in rural France, this film of savage and lacerating beauty paradoxically leaves you in a state not of despair but of lifehungry exaltation at its close. Born into a squalid world of poverty and gelid indifference, with alcoholic parents, bullied, raped, derided and rejected, in a word, defiled, the life of a Mouchette puts that of an Alain Leroy into perspective.
Shortly after the death by cancer of her mother Mouchette, walking by the river, rips a dress she has just been given on some brambles, and sees the kicking death-spasm of a rabbit shot by hunters; she then waves at a farmer passing on a tractor, who does not return her wave. This is enough. As she approaches the river, Mouchette wraps herself in the dress and rolls down the bank into the water. For the first time in the film there is music, Monterverdi’s Magnificat, and as it irrupts, we see only the sunlight on the water and the quivering of some bankside foliage before the screen fades to black. Like the tangled heap of gore-spattered armour that ends Bresson's Lancelot du Lac (1974) and the charred stake at the end of his The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Mouchette ends on an image of stasis, an unavoidable, inevitable terminus.
George Bernanos, author of the source novel, wrote that “suicide is inexplicable and frighteningly sudden”, commenting that the story was ultimately about “the tragedy of solitude”. If there is a moment of redemptive beauty in the film it is not Mouchette’s suicide, the meaningless consummation of a life of arbitrary suffering, it is rather when Mouchette is at the town fair looking longingly at the rides and a woman – a passing stranger who we see only from the back and the neck down - slips some coins into Mouchette’s hand so that she can have a go on the dodgems. This is a moment of, and the meaning of, true grace.
Nadine Nortier as Mouchette
Cioran, Schopenhauer, and the Philosophy of Suicide
For the philosopher E M Cioran writing was, as film making was for Louis Malle, a way of staving off suicide. A book, he wrote, “is a suicide postponed”. Peter Sloterdijk claims that, in turn, Cioran’s writings have been “an effective form of prevention for many readers.” He got a reputation for recommending suicide, but did nothing of the kind. For Cioran, like Nietzsche, the greatness of someone, indeed the level to which he has being, resides in how much suffering he or she can bear. The suicide lives on the false assumption that suffering is something we should avoid, whereas for Cioran anything that attenuates the cruelty of truth, and the truth of cruelty, is bad: “How much truth does a spirit endure is the measure of value … we exist only insofar as we suffer”. Joyfully facing the simple, unadorned experience of the real is a tragic, time-conquering way of facing the cruel real, and involves a Dionysiac loss of self, a becoming nothing.
In the eyes of Cioran, if the abyss looks back you, you must laugh in its face, blow it a raspberry. Once you have accepted your insignificance, ephemerality and meaninglessness, that you are a speck upon a ball, you are free. And there is none so callous - or generally so humourless and boring - as the optimist. “The discipline of suffering”, Cioran writes, “has created all the enhancements of man so far” and “we exist only so far as we suffer”. For Cioran, suicide always comes too late; the worst, being born, has already happened; there may be no reason to live, but likewise, there is no reason to die.
Emile Cioran
Schopenhauer, like Cioran, also gained an undeserved reputation for recommending suicide to others but not going through with it himself. This too is false; whilst he might have sketched a view of the world and social relations that might make the weak-minded or emotionally fragile consider it, he condemned suicide. Like Cioran he saw a positive value in suffering, which is caused, in his system, by the in-itself of the world and of all phenomena, the Will.
If one commits suicide, one is prevented from achieving salvation by negating the Will to Life and achieving a state of will-lessness, a state from which one can objectively observe and empathise with suffering and the malign workings of the Will in the world: “the person who commits suicide wills life, and is only dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has been given to live”. Schopenhauer condemns suicide as a “strong affirmation of the will”, a desperate way of finally taking control. This Sartrean notion of suicide, as the one remaining way of expressing your freedom in a buffeted, failed life, is, for Schopenhauer, the ultimate pyrrhic victory, cutting off your life to spite your nose. If the controlling, defeating and thwarting forces outside you have forced you into suicidality, then, rather than having gained your autonomy, you have surrendered it entirely, serving your head upon a plate for Fate.
A Schopenhauerian state of will-lessness is achieved through aesthetic contemplation. The ideal way to live life for this philosopher is as an ascetic-aesthetic life. Rather than suicide, the “fatal error which solves nothing”, “what is greatly superior is continuing to exist in an attitude of resignation in the face of suffering”. The act of willing (and its concomitant frustrations) can only be suspended in disinterested aesthetic contemplation: for Schopenhauer, a genius is one who has the utmost capacity for contemplation. Art reveals the general, abstract and eternal forms by which the Will manifests itself, and it in turn becomes an object or representation. As the Will is now in the service of aesthetics, art has taken a kind of revenge upon it.
Schopenhauer as a young man
The highest form of this will-lessness via art is achieved in and through music. Schopenhauer exalted music because it is non-representative, non-mimetic, independent of the phenomenal world, and therefore a direct representation of the Will at its purest and most abstract. Schopenhauer’s is an ascetic aesthetic: rather than seeking voluptuary pleasures or the obtention of happiness, one seeks through art the cessation of suffering, willing and desire. From both a Ciornian or Schopenhauerian perspective, Alain Leroy is a coward and his suicide vain, egotistical and selfish. Unlike Rochelle’s novel, however, Malle’s film is neither judgemental nor sentimental, and it’s left unclear whether the world is not enough for Alain Leroy, or too much, whether he commits suicide out of strength or weakness. Writers have been particularly prone to suicide, often due to guilt and shame at the bewhoring of their art or a sense of declining creative powers:
Gerard de Nerval, mad, hung himself with an apron string he claimed was the Queen of Sheba’s garter, Ernest Hemingway, mad, with a shotgun, like his father, Hunter S Thompson, with a shotgun, whilst on the phone to his wife, Primo Levi, threw himself from a stairwell, Sylvia Plath, clinically depressed, gas, David Foster Wallace, clinically depressed, rope, Thomas Bernhard, you would have thought so wouldn’t you, but no, Tadeusz Borowski, gas, Marina Tsvetaeva, by hanging, Gilles Deleuze, threw himself from a window, Unica Zurn, threw herself from a window, Ingeborg Bachmann, perhaps, Robert Burton, by hanging, in order to align with his astrological predictions, Jack London, morphine, Arthur Koestler, barbiturates, in a pact with his wife, Stefan Zweig, barbiturates, in a pact with his wife, Heinrich Kleist, shot his crippled lover then his mad self, Walter Benjamin, morphine, John Berryman, the Mississippi, Hart Crane, the Gulf of Mexico, Virginia Woolf, the Ouse, Paul Celan, the Seine, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a pistol shot to the head, Thomas Chatterton, arsenic, Mark Fisher, by hanging, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, chloroform, Anne Sexton, carbon monoxide, Yukio Mishima, a grotesquely botched Seppuku, Seneca, on the orders of a mad emperor, hemlock, Socrates, by judicial decree, hemlock, Iris Chang, mouth, revolver, Richard Brautigan, head, revolver.
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