The Fire Within

Inspired by the 1929 suicide of Dadaist poet Jacques Rigaut, La Rochelle’s 1931 novella presaged the fate of its author, a veteran of World War I and a disillusioned Nazi collaborator whose third attempt at suicide in 1945 was successful. Alain Leroy, a prematurely aging roué with a heroin addiction, returns home to his overly indulgent sanitarium after an unsatisfying tryst, newly resolved on a cure: death. Setting out to make the rounds of old friends, lovers, socialites, and denizens, he observes the futile commotion of their lives and his own insensate anomie with “the distant, derisive tenderness of a dead man.” Richard Howard’s eloquent 1965 translation captures every exquisite twist of Alain’s graceful spiral into despair as he attempts to shake the stubborn habit of survival, affirming his quizzical musing: “Perhaps there was a great deal of life in Alain’s rejection of life?”