Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life.
—George Meredith, Modern Love

What precisely is the relationship between literature and painting? Certainly, writers have been inspired by painters, and painters by writers. Nowadays, however, the academic mode for interdisciplinary speculation goes much further: it offers a venturesome study that aims to show a close link between methods of writing and painting in the unlikely person of the poet, novelist, and publicist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945).¹ Still a highly controversial figure, perhaps Drieu is best known outside France for the film that Louis Malle adapted in 1963 from the novel Le Feu Follet (1931), about a self-destructive drug addict, transformed by the script into an alcoholic.

For some idea of Drieu’s mature aesthetic responses, let us follow him on his visit to Germany in 1935, as an official guest of the Nazi establishment. By then in his early forties, he had ended his flirtation with the Surrealists, and had broken off his intimate literary and brothel-crawling friendship with Louis Aragon, one of the leading poetic lights of the Surrealist movement. In the previous year Drieu had published his Socialisme Fasciste. His German hosts took him to see the concentration camp at Dachau. What mightily impressed Drieu was the “remarkable comfort” of the place. Bernard-Henri Lévy, in the published text of his 1991 television film about the vagaries of modern French intellectuals, Les Aventures de la