A Nihilistic Drug Addict Who Lives Off Women

by Nathan McIvor

This essay will appear in Issue 6—the Fiction Issue—of the Mars Review of Books.

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The Fire Within

by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

translated by Richard Howard, New York Review Classics, 120pp., $15.95

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Study for a portrait of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, by Jacques-Emile Blanche

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s The Fire Within follows the daily malaise of a heroin-addicted literary man while both justifying and lamenting his addiction. Drieu’s protagonist, Alain Leroy, is not a failed novelist: He is a depressed, pre-failed novelist. Unfortunately, you see, Alain realizes that his own and everyone else’s most precious ideas are interchangeable and disposable; his own unhappiness deepens whenever he develops a new insight. Moreover, he fears that he might lay the world bare through his prose and confirm his worst suspicion—that deformity and corruption await all ideas and living things. 

Thanks to an NYRB Classics reprint of Richard Howard’s pungent translation, the novel, which was published in France in 1931 as Le Feu follet, now allows readers of English to witness the gradual decline of Alain as he winds his way through Paris in the aftermath of World War I. Alain’s petite bourgeois childhood left him two desires: the desire for a bohemian, creative life liberated from work, and a contradicting expectation in which “like most of bourgeoisie, he aspired to a financial level only just above the one he had known in childhood. He had incurred, up till now, only small debts.” Money constantly slips through his fingers. Thankfully, Alain possesses a sound financial strategy to at least keep afloat. He reassures a friend, an Egyptologist named Dubourg, that “it’s only through women I have any effect on things. For me, women have always meant money.”  Dubourg responds by assessing Alain’s thought process: “So that’s your problem. You can’t love a woman without money; and you can’t love a woman with money either, because you have to love her money along with her.”  

Alain spends most of his life leeching funds from women with sizable inheritances, though never with any great success, as “he always had money, yet never had any. Always a little, never a lot.” Yet Alain cannot commit to any individual woman, as “he had had only short affairs, and withdrew immediately, discouraged by a word or a gesture . . . .” He exists as a perpetually adolescent romantic, always in the process of becoming, always attracting the next woman, but never settling upon a real lover or wanting commitment. Keep in mind that Alain is an uncommonly handsome man. 

In the novel’s first chapter, Alain departs from a seedy hotel with his current belle, Lydia, who has been cheating on her spouse with our protagonist for several months. He reluctantly recalls how “sensation slid away, elusive as a viper between two stones” and realizes how “her skin was the leather of a de luxe piece of luggage that had travelled a great deal, strong and defiled. Her breasts were forgotten emblems. She dried herself, spreading her thighs where the muscles had begun to go slack. Lydia had returned to the bathroom to paint a strange caricature of life on her dead woman’s face.” Alain then collects his allowance from her purse, and leaves without a second thought. 

Women in this novel invariably join his gallery of grotesques. Alain’s gaze reduces and deforms whatever falls within its field of view; one of the novel’s curiosities is how its protagonist persists in a monotonous impulse to diminish the ontological value of nearly every person or idea that crosses his path. I should mention that though Alain rejects academic philosophy, I suspect that his fixation on negation reflects an instinctive materialism; he thinks that each corporeal thing, rather than containing a Platonic essence, corresponds to nothing—no purpose, no definition or precept of any kind, whether spiritual or psychological. He insists upon this void of meaning. Though I should add that the emptiness of the world does not necessarily condemn him to despair. More on that later. 

Women in particular draw Alain’s eye; he remains sexually attracted to their beauty, but paranoid that their appearances mask the same emptiness within everything else. A few days after his liaison with Lydia, Alain sees a commercial photographer, Falet, on the street, and observes that “the photographer made monsters of all of his models; he deformed them . . . and coaxed an emphatic, improbable ugliness out of their faces and bodies. Eventually, beneath fingers stiffened by desperate malice, nothing of reality remained.”  And then he goes further, realizing that “there was only this moment. There was nothing else. There was nothingness.” 

Alain lives in a sanitarium and boarding house for the “the light-headed,” meaning depressed, eccentric heirs—though he remains the only solvent man in residence and the only one receiving treatment for heroin addiction. His tiny room contains, “on the night-table, detective stories or pornography, American magazines and avant-garde reviews. On the mantle, two objects: one a delicate piece of machinery, a perfectly flat platinum chronometer, the other a hideously vulgar painted plaster statuette of a naked woman that he had bought at a fair and took with him everywhere. He insisted it was pretty, but he was pleased that it polluted his life.” His life follows the same repeating cycle: He leaves in the morning to socialize with what few friends he has left before returning at night to avoid writing.

Despite seeming at the outset to be a novel of addiction,The Fire Within surprises by only occasionally mentioning Alain’s drug use. The urge occasionally grabs him, but throughout the bulk of the narrative addiction produces only a distant murmur. Stabbing heroin into a vein remains the best form of procrastination, of delaying the degradation of the adult world. Alain thinks to himself, securely, that “addicts are the mystics of a materialist age who . . . offer sacrifices to a symbolism of shadows to combat a fetishism of the sun.” Though the narration comes mostly through Alain’s (disturbed) perspective, there is a brief exception in which the authorial voice pities Alain: “for he failed to understand that in our composite age, nothing passes and all old fads continue to live, one on top of the other . . . . Thus Alain could have gone merrily on, but he was not crude enough for that.” In the novel’s most playful touch, it hints that Alain is too pure for his surroundings; perhaps the reader should consider that the world does not deserve Alain; what if he is right in clinging to a childlike state, unspoiled by hollow affectations? After all, each successive chapter implicitly confirms his long-held suspicion: that his perception, kind heart, and physical beauty will never be fully understood or reciprocated by another human being.

The Fire Within dwells almost exclusively within Alain’s anxieties. Aside from a few passing references to Parisian neighborhoods, the novel seldom acknowledges wider cultural or political mores, remaining content to stay within the world Alain and his few threadbare friendships. With only one exception: In a brief aside, the narrator contextualizes one of Alain’s addiction treatments in prose that would make the anti-liberal novelist and philosopher Ernst Jünger proud: “And here, in fact, is the enormous stupidity of our times: the doctor appeals to the patient’s will while his doctrine denies the existence of that will, declares it to be determined, divided between various determining factors. Individual will is the myth of another age; a race exhausted by civilization cannot believe in the will. Perhaps it will take refuge in constraint: the rising tyrannies of fascism and communism promise to flagellate the addicts.” 

Some readers might take this quotation as the author’s personal view of comfortable, increasingly bureaucratized civilian life in post-war Europe. After all, as Will Self’s introduction notes, Drieu mingled alternately with fascists or communists depending on how he felt on a given day; he publicly advocated for fascism in France during World War II–yet told friends in private that he admired Stalin; also, during this time, he shielded his Jewish ex-wife and her friends from persecution during German occupation. His seemingly schizophrenic patchwork of ideology in the public and private spheres gives the impression of a provocateur lacking in self-reflection—or perhaps crying out for attention.

I suspect that Drieu wrote The Fire Within to reckon with the conflicting personas he amassed throughout his life. His creation, Alain, prevaricates when presented with choices. To commit to Lydia; to reconcile with his ex-wife, Dorothy; to commit to recovery from drug use; to hold himself to the promises he makes his friends—or to promises made to himself regarding his literary ambition. Like his creator, Alain is fractured by unfulfilled promises, each of which leads down a path that excludes the others. 

He dreads finishing his manuscript, The Ticketless Traveler, most of all, because “writing, whose meshes ceaselessly gather and combine all the diffuse forces of human life . . . had taken a path that led directly to the grave mysteries that he had always avoided. Since he was . . . no longer choked by those feelings which were . . . so tightly knotted because they had never been articulated . . . he completed two or three pages . . . but he had barely got it underway again before it faltered and collapsed once more in that white wasteland. His friend Dubourg telephoned, and Alain delightedly accepted an invitation to lunch.”

Alain dislikes how psychological and scientific rationalizations appear in every social encounter, whether he is among wards of sanitarium or attending parties among the erudite. At heart, he cannot tolerate even the slightest amount of abstraction. Not due to his lacking intelligence or imagination, but because concepts are weightless to him relative to an object in his hand or the hunger of his sexual organ. 

Alain is not troubled by the lack of inherent meaning in the world, but he feels pain when malleable, academic assumptions—whether from his doctor or Dubourg—pretend to define the world. In spite his literary pretensions, his perspective is pre-intellectual. He is man of lustful, radical simplicity. His uncommonly handsome face—the book never lets us forget this detail—should exempt him from the ordinary burdens of life. Dubourg observes to Alain that “[y]ou were made to be loved and taken care of by a beautiful woman. At least a few people should be able to escape this horrible compulsion to work.” 

The sensitive, literary young man of 2024 will see much of himself in this novel.  Alain reflects such a man’s worst impulses: vanity, perpetual adolescence, and resignation to being a “failson” whose creative potential—though allegedly profound—always remains slightly out of reach. The Fire Within invites us to excuse this listlessness; could it be that, like Alain, today’s sensitive, literary young man was born into a world unworthy of his attention and effort? Though Alain contains the sensitivity and insight of a Henry James or a Mikhail Bulgakov, such gifts are wasted upon an audience of philistines who filter everything—even the most delicate musings of the soul—through a morass of information and social science. While the republication of The Fire Within is well-timed for comparisons to the current literary scene, the novel should not be solely viewed as a diagnosis of creative “failsons.” I do not want to detract from its formal strangeness, especially with regard to its creation of Alain’s interior life. 

Richard Howard’s translation from French impresses—conversations often churn with a peculiar, paranoid rhythm entirely appropriate to the text. Though The Fire Within implies (or outright states) through Alain that the world is void of meaning, “that it has no substance,” the reader should not treat this sentiment as statement of despair. Absence of meaning is simply the only abstract judgement that Alain allows himself. As a sensual creature who only values tactility, he fantasizes about indulging impulses and disregarding all the scripted affectations and rationalizations that seem to follow him. But even his lust only leads to a woman’s inevitable attachment and her desire for marriage.

Alain, the sensitive soul, the handsome face, returns to the same mental holding pattern each night, in which he “still returned for long periods to the idea he had cherished all through his youth–a youth that was coming to an end, for he had just turned thirty, and thirty is a lot for a boy with nothing in his favor but his looks—the idea that everything would be taken care of by women.”

“He did not know what to do, because he had never done anything.”

“And the drugs, then?”

“That’s the solution to the problem.”