ABSTRACT
Europeans generally and the French in particular were by turns appalled and fascinated by what they saw, or thought they saw, in the post-war United States, and scarcely a year passed without a volume of profound superficialities by a French professor or Academician. Henry de Montherlant, with his classical allusions, his extensive psychological analyses, his choice of an intellectual young man as hero, is nevertheless at least as anti-intellectual as Ernest Hemingway, if not more so. His anti-intellectualism is of that romantic variety that substitutes instinct for rationality and places blind faith in the superiority of art to any other pursuit. Both Montherlant's thought and Hemingway's lack of it come down to the same point: a questioning of accepted modes of thought in light of the extraordinary shambles that society was in after the First World War. Conditioned by the extremity of war, they took satisfaction in its peacetime equivalents: sport, bullfighting, eroticism, and violence.
