Irish Jesuit Province

The Novels of Francois MauriacAuthor(s): Alexander BoyleSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 81, No. 953 (Jan., 1953), pp. 26-29Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20516482 .

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THE NOVELS OF FRANCOIS MAURIAC

By ALEXANDER BOYLE

BORN over sixty years ago in the Landes, Fran?ois Mauriac has

returned again and again in a score of novels to the region of

his birth. That bare land of sandy soil and pine forests, with

its merciless winds in winter and stupefying heat in summer, is

evoked by him as a background for those strange dramas of passion and guilt in which his characters play their parts, Dublin is not

more a microcosm for Joyce than Bordeaux is for M. Mauriac. What

he suffered, felt, but, above all, observed as a young man in his native

district has remained with him all his life. When he wishes to depict the struggle against grace, which is, for him, the normal life of

mankind, the protagonists he chooses are those whom he knew

intimately as a young man around Bordeaux.

The picture of the countryside and its people is not a flattering one. The priest, reduced almost wholly to his primary r?le of him

who offers sacrifice, has little contact with the mass of his parishion ers. In the towns the love of money, in the country the lust for

land leaves the adult little time for the practice of the spiritual life.

The young, having made their First Communion, drift inexorably to

their first love affair. The old either tyrannize over households

whose one desire is their timely decease, or, if soft-hearted enough to part with their patrimony to their grasping children are callously

worked to death upon the farm.

An overdrawn picture, no doubt; but then all M. Mauriac's stories

seem to savour of the melodramatic. It is the effect of his method

which is to depict man only in relation to his passions. He seems

to say that in every man and woman there is a beast

which fights all the time against the promptings of grace. Other novelists, even when dealing with the same theme, have de

picted in a naturalistic fashion those trappings of the exterior life

which every individual erects as a barrier around his inmost heart.

The method used in these novels is a surgical one. The body is

stripped of all its adornments, the very covering of its flesh, and

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FRAN?OIS MAURIAC

the loathsome disease is shown at work in its proper habitat, laid bare before the surgeon's knife.

Such a method is apt to give the appearance of melodrama. The essence of melodrama, however, lies rather in the falsification of

speech and gesture than in the realm of action. It is the bombastic

diction, the "

ham "

acting we object to rather than the situation itself. This M. Mauriac understands. If his characters often startle us by their extremism in thought and action, their language is the normal one of the bourgeois everywhere. He is careful, too, to

present them in natural surroundings faithfully, if sparingly, depicted. No blasted heaths or gibbous moons are needed in his work. The

very naturalness of the d?cor heightens the horror of the struggle. In his task of depicting the passions in their struggle against grace,

M. Mauriac has not escaped the censure of his fellow-Catholics. The two main charges against him are his

" realism

" in sexual

matters, where, it is said, he makes vice seem more attractive than

virtue, and his narrow, "

Jansenistic "

attitude to the salvation of souls. Both criticisms have some substance. They appear to deal, however, with something that is aside from the author's main

purpose. If one views his work as a whole, one sees that neither of these charges is fairly descriptive of his method or the effects he obtains. In isolated examples, certainly, one can quote chapter and verse in their favour. They do not constitute a major criticism of

M. Mauriac's work, although he shows how keenly he felt them in his Apologia, Dieu et Mammon, where he says :

" The evil which the

most beautiful character has to overcome in itself and from which it has to sever itself is the reality which the novelist must account for."

The charge of determinism is perhaps the more serious. On the one hand, it can be said that he portrays the Jansenism of his native district in highly unfavourable terms, notably in A Woman of the

Pharisees, or with a character like Madame D?zaymeties in Le Mal. On the other, there are certain passages in his books that take some

explaining away. There is, for example, the recurring concept that some people carry the marks of damnation about with them even in this life. There is the remark (which looks very like 'author's

comment') in Les Chemins de la Mer when the clerk Landin has been murdered.

" The unquenchable fires of hell are lit in this world,

and those whom the theologians count as lost are marked for damnation at their birth or even before it."

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IRISH MONTHLY

Other passages are more ambiguous, as where Herv?, in Ce Qui Etait Perdu, justifies himself to his mother as one predetermined to

sin. On the other hand, the saintly young priest, Alain de For?as, in Les Anges Noirs, who resembles so strikingly Bernanos' Cur?

de Campagne, expressly condemns the whole idea. One has, how

ever, a feeling that this is an id?e fixe with M. Mauriac and one on

which he has not spoken as clearly as he might. It is remarkable when one considers all that has been said about

M. Mauriac's gloomy view of life, how many of the novels convey the assurance of peace. Even Th?r?se Desqueyroux, whose problem fascinated him so much that he returned to it again and again in

his stories, the probable poisoner of her husband, whose hard and

selfish nature demanded perpetual tribute from the other sex, is

envisaged as dying penitent some day. Perhaps, it is hinted, her

deliberate attempt to disenchant the infatuated Georges, her

daughter's fianc?, will swing the balance in her favour. Ir?ne, in

Ce Qui Etait Perdu, dying from a self-administered overdose of

sleeping-tablets, glimpses at last the love she has unconsciously sought all her life and reacts to it like Scobie in The Heart of the Matter.

In Knot of Vipers the bitter old lawyer, estranged from wife and

family for most of his married life, dies writing an act of love and

contrition in his diary. In Le Mal, a powerful study of the effect

of lust on a strong nature, Fabien is left with at least the hope that, if he can subdue his baser instincts, and wait with patience, Colombe

will some day be his wife. Even in the gloomiest of all, Le D?sert

de l'Amour, where both father and son have ruined their peace of

mind for love of a woman who is indifferent to both of them, there is a promise of help as they face each other hopelessly at the railway station :

" There would be no hope for either of them, for father or

for son, unless before they died, He should reveal Himself Who, unknown to them, had drawn and revealed from the depths of their

beings this burning, bitter tide."

We cannot leave Fran?ois Mauriac without associating with him

the names of L?on Bloy and Georges Bernanos. For three quarters of a century these three presented, and one still presents, with all

their differences of temperament and method, a common viewpoint in their chosen field of the novel. All artists react surely to the

mood of their age. With some the reaction is a blind one. They feel things are right or wrong without, perhaps, knowing why. These

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FRAN?OIS MAURIAC

three are distinguished from most of their fellows by basing their

common protest against the modern world on an uncompromising

and outspoken Catholicism. All three have come to the same

conclusion about what is wrong with the modern world?its in

difference to the spiritual. As artists they do not argue the matter

dispassionately. They proclaim their convictions as loudly as they

can, and often, to secure attention, in as bizarre a fashion as is

permissible, this sometimes scandalizing the more sedate. All are

united in their conviction, but each takes his own way of expressing

it. L?on Bloy saw the bourgeois as the enemy, the ** mediocre man,"

whose only interest was in making money. "

No doubt he was fore

seen, but only just, as the worst torture of the Passion."

At extremes from the bourgeois are the Saint and the Outcast.

The misery of the one and the sanctity of the other both infer the

existence of God. The outcast V?ronique, in Le Desesper?, gives

artistic form to this belief of Bloy's. Bernanos, in his best-known

book, The Diary of a Country Priest, combines the conception of

the saint and the outcast in the one person, that of the Cur? of

Ambricourt. Only Mauriac chooses the bourgeois as his own. He

is concerned to show that there is no limit to God's grace. True,

it can act only with difficulty in the breast of the true bourgeois. But

a time will come. We wade through the main body of a Mauriac

novel breast-high in selfishness and intolerance, the petty tyrannies of the base, the infidelities of husbands, the more subtle revenge of

their spouses, the general apathy and mere lip-service towards their

religion and its priests. The mordant pen of M. Mauriac flays the

French middle-classes and exposes each weakness to the light of day. But not with the hopeless rage of a Juvenal or a Swift. Always at hand lies the remedy?the incalculable operations of grace. This

is M. Mauriac's distinction. Instead of the outcasts, the macabre

figures of Bloy and Bernanos, we are introduced to the respectable inhabitants of a house in the better quarters of Bordeaux.

Mercilessly the veneer of good breeding is stripped off. The figures of lust, avarice and infidelity stalk those drawing-rooms as openly as

in any miracle-play. We hear the language of the confessional as

these tortured souls entrust to private diaries or letters to a priest the secret desires, the intolerable remorse that gnaw at the founda

tions of their self-control. Behind it all, a still small voice?can it

be M. Mauriac's??seems to murmur in the words of Baudelaire: ? "

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon fr?re!"

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