Will O’ the Wisp     by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Translated by Martin Robinson Original title: LE FEU FOLLET Original language: French Published by Marion Boyars Pub. Date: 1998 Format: Paperback, 144 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.36 x 8.50 x 5.33 ISBN: 0714506133 List Price: $12.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.95 Published by CALDER & BOYARS Pub. Date: 1966 Pub. Place: UK Format: 144 pages List Price: £11.95 Not available for ordering

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The protagonist of Will O’the Wisp is based on a friend of Drieu La Rochelle to whom the author dedicates the novel’s epilogue. At thirty, Alain has no aspirations, no friends and no future. Confined to a nursing home, he longs after women because they represent money, and money because it represents heroin. When his American fiancée slips him a check for ten thousand francs he escapes to Paris, hooks up with his junkie acquaintances, drifts around high for an evening and, eventually, shoots himself.


Covering a period of not much more than twenty four hours, the novel has the feel of a Greek tragedy — all the more so as its central preoccupation is the powerlessness of man’s will to out-manoeuvre more basic forces. The doctor who urges Alain to take control of his life also denies, with his medical empiricism, the possibility of the mind’s control over the body; the encouraging words of a well-wisher disappear, as soon as they are spoken, ‘like the scenery and the juggler after the music-hall turn.’


Life itself, Alain decides, is no more than a habit, just like heroin. Ironically, he achieves an autonomy of sorts in the very act of suicide, finally grasping ‘the most precious thing a man has: his death.’

‘Eva inhaled from the pipe which Falet had prepared for her; then she shrank back into her furs, breaking out a little smoke. One of her shoulders, hard and polished, was gilded in the light of the little lamp. This fragment of a broken statue lay fallen in a desert without top or bottom, in the depths of a warm and comforting abyss.’ p84