The Men Covered in Women

On Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s 'Gilles' (1939) and the perennial victimhood of the ‘Longhouse’

Pierrot/Gilles (1719) by Jean-Antoine Watteau

This lofty mystery I must now unfold,

Goddesses throned in solitude, sublime,

Set in no place, still less in time,

At the mere thought of them my blood runs cold,

They are the Mothers!

………………….

Goddesses, unknown to mortal mind,

And named indeed with dread among our kind.

To reach them you must plumb earth’s deepest vault;

That we have need of them is your own fault.

- Goethe, Faust

I suspect that the publicist who sent me the first English translation of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s Gilles (1939), and the translator of the book itself, though going by different names, may be the same person. It amuses me to imagine that the work of this publisher, Tikhanov Library, is driven by the labour of this dedicated, obsessive (slightly mad) individual with multiple personas for different roles, as such a situation would accord with the type of work which they have so far published, and will hopefully continue to publish. Since I am engaged in a similarly thankless and mad publishing endeavour, I appreciate that such passion projects still exist. The introductory essay to this volume is nuanced and informative, and its enigmatic epigram is a quote by the African Marxist revolutionary Thomas Sankara. However, a cursory glance at Tikhanov’s other offerings (H.L Mencken, F.T Marinetti, Harukuichi Shimoi, the memoirs of White Russian aristocrats, et al.) seems to suggest a certain ideological persuasion. I may, of course, be wrong in this appraisal and I’m happy to be corrected. In any case, there is very little that is so politically objectionable to me as to prevent intellectual exchange and dialogue, which most people forget is usually possible right up until the bullets start flying…and in some cases even long after.

Such a dynamic would not have been unfamiliar to a ‘fascist intellectual’ like Drieu la Rochelle, who counted among his close friends Communist artists and provocateurs such as André Breton and Louis Aragon, and the liberal writer and statesman Andre Malraux. The latter remained his friend until Drieu’s last days in occupied Paris, where he would eventually commit suicide days before liberation in the certainty that he would be executed as a collaborator. One of Drieu’s last requests was that Malraux be present at his funeral. Malraux later remarked that ‘Drieu La Rochelle fought for France. Until Death.’ The two men, though on different sides of the political divide, admired one another as intellectuals and ‘men of action’ raised under the unwieldy influence of Nietzsche. They were part of a generation that shared a fervent belief that one must live life fully and strenuously, not shying away from the great upheavals and conflicts that defined their age. Yet if the prose of Malraux survives to this day as a historical curiosity (the work of a liberal ‘man of action’, much admired by the late, great, Robert Silvers, legendary editor of the NYRB), in my opinion, it has limited interest as literature. On the other hand, I believe the work of Drieu la Rochelle speaks more to our present than it did in the decades after his untimely demise. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the conspicuously pathological character of his writing, where private anxieties concerning women and sexuality found disturbing, oftentimes lyrical and affecting, expression in his rich fictional work. In many ways an exceptionally talented novelist with a deep knowledge and love of the French literary tradition, as well as an equally knowledgeable proponent of European modernism - it is nevertheless unlikely that Drieu la Rochelle’s reputation will ever escape the taint of his activities as a fascist collaborator.

Over the years, some people have questioned my interest in fascist literature, suspicious of some potential latent ideological tendencies. This is, of course, absurd. My interest is not merely anthropological, however, and is probably better described as a slightly morbid fascination with the aberrant psychology at play. Admittedly at the outset of my research, I mostly sought confirmation of certain biases, which for the most part were easy to locate since much of it is overt and explicit, given that such personalities tend towards the theatrical. What I also found, however, is that when one delves deeper into the damaged psychology behind the literature of fascism, it reveals some things that are more universal to masculinity and its aesthetic expression, evident in writing across the ideological continuum from that period and beyond. An intangible factor, this elemental interiority encompasses both a creative will and a will to self-destruction - something which thrives in proximity to some affirming Élan vital, and yet remains fixated by a palpable death drive.

Elements of this tendency are to be found in the novel Gilles, an evocative, self-referential bildungsroman set mostly in Paris. It recounts episodes from the life of a young man named Gilles Gambier from the First World War until the Spanish Civil War, and is undoubtedly Drieu’s most accomplished novel, ambitious at a scale comparable to modernist classics such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg though never quite attaining their greatness. Jean-Paul Sartre, offering ambivalent praise in a 1948 review, described it as un roman doré at crasseux (a golden and dirty novel), capturing the dual effect of its grand ambition and its sordid historical material.

Drieu intended Gilles to be in the tradition of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830) and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869), works that provided French literature with its most memorable portraits of ambitious and deeply flawed young men navigating a world riven by conflict and revolution. Drieu was heavily influenced by visual art and this stimulus comes to the fore in his magnum opus, which takes its title from an enigmatic painting of a Pierrot-like character by the 18^th century painter Antoine Watteau. Drieu seems to have been obsessed with this particular painting, reflecting on it 1941 following the publication of Gilles:

Until 1750, man is substantial, solid, intimately related to himself, filled with a solid joy. I see him painted by Watteau. Gilles is a crucial point of reference for those who love life and eagerly seek its incarnations. He is an important station between the graceful power, the velvety austerity of the figures in Reims and the shrinking bones, the tense nervous fatigue of men depicted at the end of the nineteenth century, the men of the impressionistic and symbolist era, the last and most acute romantics […] In Gilles what vigor and health. A hint of introspection is barely sketched. His faintly mocking, imperceptibly disillusioned smile marks a turn towards the self that has not yet become wicked…The malady of the soul has not yet passed into the body.

These insights, with their longing for a time before the turmoil brought by the Enlightenment and the dual Revolutions, have an obvious analogue in contemporary Neo-reactionary thought. The novel Gilles consists of four parts, roughly chronological, beginning in 1917 before proceeding to 1927, taking in the late twenties and thirties, and ending in 1937. We encounter Gilles at various points; as a young soldier, as a government functionary on the make in the 1920s and as a collaborator of the Surrealists whom he eventually comes into conflict with; as a journalist and political firebrand embracing and proselytizing for the fascist cause in wake of right-wing riots of 1934, and eventually as a volunteer for the Falangists in Spain during the Civil War. Rather than aiming for historical verisimilitude, each of these episodes sought to break with the totalizing linearity of the 19th-century realist tradition, to provide instead a non-synthesizing and impressionistic account. We witness Gilles, the tragic Pierrot-like figure who resembles the author, in different poses and costumes, a figure of a bygone era - a Julian Sorel, a Frederic Moreau – forced to navigate a world seemingly on the cusp of some impending cataclysm, but mired in decadence and entropy.

In my long overdue scholarly work on technology, masculinity and fascist modernism – which has a chapter on Drieu la Rochelle – I contend that if one wishes to truly understand the nuances of the writer’s relation to what I describe as the fascist Ideological Aesthetic, we can do no better than reading his finest and most well-known novel Le Feu Follet (1931). The rather middling American English translation was published in 2023 by NYRB, and for some reason accompanied by a characteristically silly and verbose introduction by the journalist Will Self. I maintain that Gilles, ostensibly an auto-biographical account of Drieu’s embrace of fascism, is too on the nose to provide the requisite illumination into the complex nature of Drieu’s ideological path. It does, however, provide incomparable psychological insight into a certain psychological type overrepresented within the ideology

On paper, Drieu possessed many of the attributes associated with masculine prowess, reflecting men's sense of their desirability to women - a sense that (much like its opposite) often falls short of reflecting reality. He was a decorated war hero, wealthy, socially affable, handsome, refined, an intellectual and an artist. Drieu was nonetheless unable to assuage his pathological feelings of insufficiency up until his suicide. In this sense, as Renee Winegarten noted, he was a highly representative figure of the generation of 1914:

This dandy who frequented the Parisian nightclubs and brothels of the twenties, this perspicacious egoist whose principal subject is himself, this self-loathing and self-destructive nihilist serves as a valuable witness of his age, more revealing in this particular regard, perhaps, than many of his contemporaries of superior talent. Immersed in his epoch, sensitive to local undercurrents, at once troubled and exhilarated by vast new upheavals, he confesses his reactions with an almost bare simplicity, even at times with naiveté.

From his celebrated debut collection of war poetry Interrogation (1917) onwards, it’s clear that the theme of masculinity loomed large in Drieu la Rochelle’s literary imagination. If it was one of his principle themes, however, women were his idée fixe. The title of an early novel L’homme couvert des femmes (The Man Covered in Women) provides a recurring leitmotiv that permeates his fiction. Throughout his oeuvre, Drieu presents for our consideration a variety of protagonists that betray a certain temperamental consistency; the successful womanizer who can’t seem to get beyond a sense of inadequacy with women; the man who compulsively uses women but can never satiate his psychological dependence on them. Women for Drieu are suffocating; objects of intense fixation, and a fascination which often transmutes into hatred.

Drieu seems to have been overly fond of speculating on the effect of his dysfunctional family dynamics on the negative development of his character, enumerating them in his diaries. The relationship with his father seems to have been one of intense hatred, evidenced in Gilles – and his other fictions – by protagonists who are orphans and without paternal attachment. The father - a financially unsuccessful provincial lawyer, reactionary, and philanderer – seems to have styled himself as a stern, sometimes violent, disciplinarian who valued virility and manliness and scorned any perceived weakness in his son. However, he was, above all, mostly absent and indifferent – which I am increasingly convinced is among the worst sins a father can commit.

The absence of the father caused a hatred that was only tempered by the son’s latent desire for approval, which becomes an insatiable desire to prove his courage and manliness. The opportunity would come in war, where Drieu led a bayonet charge against a machine gun position at the Battle of Charleroi. The charge was repelled, but having survived this absurd and brutal ordeal he came to regard it as his defining moment, his trial by fire. I’ve noted that the most interesting facet of his recollections is the emphasis on the physicality of this event and its attendant symbolism; the human body facing down the machine, the rebellion of a corporeal subjectivity against the encroaching subjugation of technology. He would remark retrospectively, though not aware of it at the time – that it was at that very moment that he became a fascist. In this particular vein, however, it seems necessary to acknowledge the other sentiments he expressed in a letter around this time:

I called for war because I wanted to die, because I wanted to efface by death the too weak being that I thought I was. Not thinking I could be great by living, by creating, I desired to achieve grandeur at least by a military death, by a public sacrifice. And also I expected the war to fill men with love and devotion and power.

These rather adolescent yet sincere thoughts would, without much modification, later find their way to descriptions of the eponymous hero of Gilles, for whom the masculine realm of war is a welcome reprieve from the domestic realm of women:

For a few moments during the war, he had felt alive, no longer like a plant or an animal that grows and then declines with ravishing inflections, but like a spiritual quiver ready to detach itself, motionless, mysterious and therefore unspeakable. It was in these moments, when he was closest to death, that he secretly felt the most alive. Beyond the agony, an intimate life was calling him. In the trenches, he had had hours of ecstasy; it had taken the most terrible convulsions to wake him up. During his first periods of leave, he had had no desire for women or for Paris. As if in a daze, at his Guardian’s house in Normandy, he would look out at the sea or walk endlessly in the village church, glancing from time to time at the Virgin, Mother of God, at the God who became man to take man by the hand and lead him into the depths of hell. He felt drawn into the divine cycle of creation and redemption. This was his most exquisite beatitude in the trenches: the imperceptible sigh of the eternal within being.

Proximity to death providing a lease on life is something intellectually comprehensible to most men, even in a present that is characterized by technological alienation and anomie. Despite the recent re-emergence of anachronistic and internecine wars of position, ethnic cleansing revenge campaigns, aggressive diplomacy, re-armament, and a marked shift towards bellicose rhetoric among the political class - a culture of psychological, emotional and decadent Safetyism is deeply embedded within the modern subject. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to notice the suppressed hints of a spectacular death drive, an aberrant longing, which we can see in ‘conflict reporting’ social media accounts, popular across the political spectrum, where mostly young men consume fetishized images of war and destruction with the flimsiest of ideological justification or rationalization.

Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of the Todestrieb (Death Drive) departed significantly from Freud, who originally conceived of it as a natural phenomenon; a resonance of biological determinism that instils in every living being the fundamental alterity of the inanimate in relation to itself - as a forewarning of the eventual state to which it will return. In stark contrast, Lacan held the death drive to be cultural rather than wholly natural. For Lacan, every drive is ‘virtually’ a death drive, because each attempts to push beyond the pleasure principle to attain an excess of Jouissance, where enjoyment eventually transmutes into pain, abjection and suffering:

man’s death, long before it is reflected […] in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through from the trauma of birth.

This is, of course, very familiar territory; the interplay between death and sex, Eros and Thanatos etc. However, anyone who has witnessed a birth first-hand, though awe-inspiring, will understand that it truly warrants the somewhat overused term ‘trauma.’ They will also be forced to accept that it is impossible to speak of the ‘trauma of birth’ without speaking of the influence of the Mother. Without giving too much credence to a lazy taxonomy of psychological types, the biographical elements of the fascist writers I have studied do tend to cohere with a certain rough pattern of neglectful, cruel, and violent fathers - and doting, demure, and indulgent mothers.

The hero of Gilles declares that he can do ‘without’ men, whom he finds easy to hate, but cannot do without adoring and being adored by women. His actions and thoughts, however, demonstrate moments of unbridled hatred, manifested in several instances of covert and overt sexual violence. It is not surprising that in Gilles and elsewhere, Drieu’s protagonists seem to desire older women the most, towards whom they feel a quasi-maternal-filial relationship. Much like his fictional counterparts, Drieu’s reliance on women was among other things also material. The extravagant dandy lifestyle Drieu lived was supported by the rich women he married. A ‘kept man’ for much of his life, scholars and critics have questioned whether much of Drieu’s fascist politics didn’t simply derive from the resentment of a petit bourgeois who felt economically and socially humiliated by women, as an attempt at compensation for the material emasculation he had suffered.

The familial wounds ran much deeper, however. ‘I hated and feared my father’, Drieu wrote in his secret war diaries at the end of his life. But this fear of the father reveals a grudging admiration at his strength and virility, with the brunt of hatred transposed onto the young and beautiful mother. He came to feel that she coddled and overprotected him in childhood, taking him everywhere on her errands, on her visits to friends, keeping him apart from other children she considered vulgar; giving him the ‘life of a pusillanimous and domesticated bourgeois female.’

He would attempt to elaborate on these dissonant feelings towards his mother, who was on the one hand a

…young woman, a pretty maman. I loved her youth, her sex, her perfume, the grace of her tenderness. I loved her flesh as she loved mine. Joined by the same substance, we were not yet distinctly separated. Children ignore the affection, the friendship which is the stuff of the spirit. They are all sensuality […] I loved the kisses of my mother rather than her goodness. I loved to be in her room, near her, breathing in her half-opened wardrobes. I did not knock long before entering her room so that I might surprise her off-guard in her physiognomy and posture.

These distinctly Oedipal, though by no means uncommon, recollections later become something darker and more condemnatory when the love of the mother is given to fall short; variously neglectful, inconsistent, insufficient – and we suspect simply not enough because it can never hope to wholly compensate for the hated (though intensely desired) paternal presence and attention. Admiration thus mutates into hatred:

My mother did not do enough for me to love her…I love what I admire. My mother might have been able to attain a certain grandeur by rigorously sacrificing herself. But she regretted the most paltry things…Her face was puffy from heavy crying and I lose my way in the depths of disgust when I think that without her unhappiness she would have been trivial…She chose the path of renunciation rather out of social responsibility than out of fear of God.

Drieu hated his mother because she suffered the cruelties of his father in silence. Such clear irrationality should inform us of a certain masculine psychopathology - the resentment, hatred and disgust of weakness in others in lieu of self-hatred, which is usually not far from the surface either. Despite accomplishing acts of physical bravery, courage, and heroism – a man can still betray spiritual cowardice through a deficient attitude to weakness.

Louis Ferdinand Céline, also a writer with a disreputable political trajectory, also similarly affected by a violent yet ultimately indifferent father – provided an uncomfortable fictional insight into the hatred of feminine (motherly) weakness that often results from this pathological dynamic. Convalescent after being wounded in battle, the mother of Ferdinand Bardamu, the protagonist of Voyage au bout de la nuit, comes to visit him in hospital. She is visibly, and he feels rather extravagantly, distraught at her son’s wounded condition:

She was glad to see me again and whimpered like a bitch whose puppy has been given back to her. She thought she was doing me a lot of good by kissing me, but was miles behind the bitch, because she believed what they said when they took me away from her. A dog only believes what it can smell.

The genius of Céline lies in his ability to succinctly express psychological complexity through demotic speech and ‘vulgarity’, in a manner that evoked the tradition of Rabelais. The above also relates to the ‘trauma’ of birth, of the young man removed from the safety of the maternal embrace and sent off to war, just as the infant was once removed from the safety of the mother’s womb and thrust involuntarily into the world, and eventually charged with the task of prolonging his own life long enough to ‘succeed’ in the struggle for existence - which he is, in the end, fated to lose nonetheless in death. Without the ability to physically ‘grow’ life, unable to regard his role in creation in anything other than abstract terms – the fixation with death remains throughout, difficult to surmount completely.

For C.G Jung, the figure of the masculine hero is an expression of the ‘libido’, an integral part of the ego which should be understood not only as sexual desire, but more properly as a psychological ‘purpose.’ The individual ego desires to replace a dependency upon the unconscious with some form of autonomous direction, but to do so he must struggle against, and come into harmony with, the figure of Mother – who represents the chaotic and imaginary realm of the unconscious. In examining the perennial images of this struggle in mythology, Jung was emphatic about the need for a man to attain ‘deliverance’ from the mother. The actual person of the mother pales in significance to what she represents. Jung was clear on the consequences of an inability to attain deliverance:

The forward striving libido which rules the conscious mind of the son demands separation from the mother, but his childish longing for her prevents this by setting up a psychic resistance that manifests itself in all kinds of neurotic fears- that is to say, in a general fear of life. The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious cycle is formed: fear of life and people cause more shrinking back, and this in turns leads to infantilism and finally “into the mother.” […] The son will naturally try to explain everything by the wrong attitude of the mother, but he would do better to refrain from all such attempts to excuse his own ineptitude…

Indeed despite all of the rarefied intellectualism and blustering pronouncements, in the person of Drieu la Rochelle we see that the fascist persona’s adoration of force, the fixation with virility and strength, the profound disgust at weakness, when rooted in a personal sense of lack, amounts to a distinctly passive psychological state. Francois Mauriac described this tendency in Drieu as the ‘crime of female natures.’

In the literature of fascism, the metaphor of the Crowd plays an equivocal role, simultaneously attractive and repellent. On the one hand, the Crowd is a symbol par excellence of the individual Will subordinated to the collective; the mannerbund, the marauding mob dispensing justice; Vox Populi, Vox Dei - the single branch that becomes unbreakable when bundled into the Fasces – the weapon carried by Roman magistrates that provides the ideology with its etymological origin. It is, however, also something else, something less desirable. As Wyndham Lewis suggested in 1914 - the role of the media in modern societies is to keep men in crowds, thereby ‘enslaving them to the feminine entity of their meaningless numbers.’ The same observation was reflected by Drieu in 1933:

When there is a dictator it is because there is no élite, it is because the élite is no longer doing its duty…you have not done anything against misery and boredom, so all that remained was the crowd, the female crowd. And it searched for a male.

The above quote seems to capture well the dichotomy inherent to this aberrant psychology. An uneasy self-image as belonging to an ‘elite’ sits alongside another – perhaps more unconscious – of oneself as a passive member of ‘the crowd’, unable to assume one’s masculine duty, waiting to be dictated to by a Paternal authority. As ever, the significance of the Nom du Pére is more profoundly felt by his absence. Such a temperament also signals a fundamental infantilism and feebleness, an inability to manfully bear struggle and adversity - a disavowal and refusal of the masculine principle of action, of self-making, which the subject purports to hold dear. Robert Soucy perceptively recognized this characteristic within the various contradictions of Drieu’s la Rochelle:

[he]…regarded himself as a victim rather than the bearer of decadence, as an object that was acted upon rather than a subject responsible for his own actions – as if he were still a child dominated by adults, too weak to assert any will of his own. In not assuming the responsibility for his own weakness, he remained a child all his life, a dependent personality. In Drieu’s eyes, his parents were to blame, women were to blame, France was to blame, liberalism was to blame – but not himself, not really.

When one recognizes this pattern, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere in the present moment, particularly within the dynamics of tedious and ever-evolving culture wars fueled by grievance and ressentiment. Particularly apposite to this is the concept of the ‘Longhouse’ popular among the heterogeneous collection of aggrieved personalities that constitute the online ‘Right.’ The term invokes the communal hall that served as the focal point of settled agrarian societies. Within this domestic sphere, an effective matriarchy ruled as a consequence of abandoning the masculine principles of violence and aggression common to warrior societies in exchange for safety and security. According to Jonathan Keeperman, publisher of Passage Press, the Longhouse ‘is a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary’

It is my understanding that Keeperman himself for a long time hid behind a pseudonym and online avatar for fear of reprisal, and to protect his employment as a university lecturer in expository writing (his writing, and thinking, appears to bear the mark of that distinctly American cultural imprimatur). This seems to be a consistent pattern within the online vitalist ‘Right’, who purport to valorize masculine Virtu but can’t seem to surmount the Safetyism of online anonymity, which they cling to as petulantly as they presumably did to their mothers’ skirts. For these men, beyond being the focal point of their ressentiment, the ‘Longhouse’ is a cause of great dread and anxiety - an almost fetishistic disquiet. To be “cancelled”, Keeperman rather ambivalently posits with dread bordering on exhilaration ‘is to feel the whip of the Longhouse.’ For Keeperman, the devouring maternal dominion of the Longhouse is the fons et origo of all the ailments in contemporary society, a powerful thing to fear:

The implications of the Longhouse reach yet further across the social landscape. The Longhouse distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist. When Marc Andreesen declares that it is time to build, he must understand that the recognition of merit and willingness to assume risk that such building depends on cannot be achieved under Longhouse rule.

He appears to be somewhat confused in his aetiology, mistaking symptom with cause. The function of Safetyism as a constraint upon contemporary masculinity serves a distinct purpose. Like much else within the culture war – it exists merely to distract and deflect from the increasingly brazen peculation of the public purse enacted by the political class; much like the championing of superficial diversity and inclusion perpetuates the appearance of benevolence and largesse, while it insulates the dominance of the economic order and its profligate and perverse logic. After all, the primary aim of the sham existence perpetrated by social media and the Nerd plutocracy, as made explicit by ideologues such as Peter Thiel, is the curbing of political and revolutionary violence (‘Divine Violence’) which has historically proved the most efficacious means for fundamentally re-making society.

As with Drieu la Rochelle, what we can observe in the pronouncements of the online ‘Right’ who decry the Longhouse, beyond their admiration of superficial strength and assertive will, is an admission of being dependent personalities, passive victims of psychological conditioning imposed upon them, thereby providing a retroactive excuse for their deficiencies, and rendering them incapable of giving a plausible account of the true nature of the problem, let alone of themselves. In acknowledging the ‘rule’ of the Longhouse, one tacitly admits a proclivity (and willingness) to being ruled.¹

The Longhouse metaphor itself is not without interest, but Keeperman and others seem to be mistaken as to its actual significance. If there has been a feminization of the social field that has resulted in Safetyism, it is merely a symptom of a much wider transformation – the supremacy of material and mercantile principles over intangible metaphysical ones. These principles were, after all, the economic reasons why the Longhouse came into existence, as humans emerged from the forests into clearings, as harmony with nature gradually became a dependence upon culture. Much like the ‘death drive’, this transition instils within the subject a sense of his atavistic alterity; not only to death, but to the very principles of a civilization made possible only through repression and sublimation.

The primordial myth of this first, and perhaps most poignant loss, was to my mind best evoked in Akira Kurosawa’s magisterial Seven Samurai, perhaps one of the greatest films of all time. In 16th Century Japan, a motley band of impoverished Rōnin are hired by a village of farmers to protect them from marauding bandits who plan to raid their harvest. The samurai ultimately succeed in repelling the bandits, but the majority of them are killed in battle. At the film’s close their stoic leader, watching the jubilant peasants harvesting their crops and shunning the samurai, looks to the graves of his fallen comrades and reflects that they have lost the battle too, since the victory, and thus the future, will belong to the farmers.

Like all good parables, the message is ambiguous. Those best suited to defend society because of their capacity for violence and loyalty to abstract principles will - almost by necessity - eventually be shunned by those they have protected when a society is at peace. This should not in any way affect the duty of the strong towards the weak, even if as a consequence, the higher metaphysical principles of nobility and honour are replaced by others less venerable and exalted. To decry that such societies fail to recognise one’s merit (if such merit does exist) is a failure to apprehend that the perennial lesson of honour and masculine virtue has always been the injunction to perform one’s duty, and one’s work, for itself without expectation of dues and rewards. The situation of peace may not itself last, and may eventually lead to stagnation, corruption and decadence - but as long as it does last, this is the price that must be paid for civilization.

1. When Paul Robeson, the African American actor, athlete, lawyer, early civil rights activist and one of the most famous singers in the world - a Communist targetted by the US Government - released his autobiography Here I Stand in 1958, The New York Times not only refused to review it - but by not listing it on the books published page for the day, sought to deny its very existence. In contrast, The NY Times recently hosted a discussion with Keeperman and columnist Ross Douthat, which suggests that the ideas proposed - the replacement of existing cultural institutions with amorphous and purposefully non--committal and nominally ‘Right-Wing’ ones - are ripe for recuperation, and thus pose no real threat to the current regime.