For with the death of James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world of fiction had lost a dimension: the characters of such distinguished writers as Mrs Virginia Woolf and Mr E. M. Forster wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin. Even in one of the most materialistic of our great novelists – in Trollope – we are aware of another world against which the actions of the characters are thrown into relief. The ungainly clergyman picking his black-booted way through the mud, handling so awkwardly his umbrella, speaking of his miserable income and stumbling through a proposal of marriage, exists in a way that Mrs Woolf’s Mr Ramsay never does, because we are aware that he exists not only to the woman he is addressing but also in a God’s eye. His unimportance in the world of the senses is only matched by his enormous importance in another world.
The novelist, perhaps unconsciously aware of his predicament, took refuge in the subjective novel. It was as if he thought that by mining into layers of personality hitherto untouched he could unearth the secret of ‘importance’, but in these mining operations he lost yet another dimension. The visible world for him ceased to exist as completely as the spiritual. Mrs Dalloway walking down Regent Street was aware of the glitter of shop windows, the smooth passage of cars, the conversation of shoppers, but it was only a Regent Street seen by Mrs Dalloway that was conveyed to the reader: a charming whimsical rather sentimental prose poem was what Regent Street had become: a current of air, a touch of scent, a sparkle of glass. But, we protest. Regent Street too has a right to exist; it is more real than Mrs Dalloway, and we look back with nostalgia towards the chop houses, the mean courts, the still Sunday streets of Dickens. Dickens’s characters were of immortal importance, and the houses in which they loved, the mews in which they damned themselves were lent importance by their presence. They were given the right to exist as they were, distorted, if at all, only by their observer’s eye – not further distorted at a second remove by an imagined character.
M. Mauriac’s first importance to an English reader, therefore, is that he belongs to the company of the great traditional novelists: he is a writer for whom the visible world has not ceased to exist, whose characters have the solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose, and a writer who claims the traditional and essential right of a novelist, to comment, to express his views. For how tired we have become of the dogmatically ‘pure’ novel, the tradition founded by Flaubert and reaching its magnificent tortuous climax in England in the works of Henry James. One is reminded of those puzzles in children’s papers which take the form of a maze. The child is encouraged to trace with his pencil a path to the centre of the maze. But in the pure novel the reader begins at the centre and has to find his way to the gate. He runs his pencil down avenues which must surely go straight to the circumference, the world outside the maze, where moral judgements and acts of supernatural importance can be found (even the writing of a novel indeed can be regarded as a more important action, expressing an intention of more vital importance, than the adultery of the main character or the murder in chapter three), but the printed channels slip and twist and slide, landing him back where he began, and he finds on close examination that the designer of the maze has in fact overprinted the only exit.
I am not denying the greatness of either Flaubert or James. The novel was ceasing to be an aesthetic form and they recalled it to the artistic conscience. It was the later writers who by accepting the technical dogma blindly made the novel the dull devitalized form (form it retained) that it has become. The exclusion of the author can go too far. Even the author, poor devil, has a right to exist, and M. Mauriac reaffirms that right. It is true that the Flaubertian form is not so completely abandoned in this novel*1 as in Le Baiser au lépreux; the ‘I of the story plays a part in the action; any commentary there is can be attributed by purists to this fictional ‘I’, but the pretence is thin – ‘I’ is dominated by I. Let me quote two passages:
– Et puis, tellement beau, tu ne trouves pas?
Non, je ne le trouvais pas beau. Qu’est-ce que la beauté pour un enfant? Sans doute, est-il surtout sensible à la force, à la puissance. Mais cette question dut me frapper puisque je me souviens encore, après toute une vie, de cet endroit de l’allée où Michèle m’interrogea ainsi, à propos de Jean. Saurais-je mieux définir aujourd’hui, ce que j’appelle beauté? saurais-je dire à quel signe je la reconnais, qu’il s’agisse d’un visage de chair, d’un horizon, d’un ciel, d’une couleur, d’une parole, d’un chant? A ce tressaillement charnel et qui, pourtant, intéresse l’âme, à cette joie désespérée à cette contemplation sans issue et que ne récompense aucune étreinte . . .
Ce jour-là, j’ai vu pour la première fois à visage découvert, ma vieille ennemie la solitude, avec qui je fais bon ménage aujourd’hui. Nous nous connaissons: elle m’a asséné tous les coups imaginables, et il n’y a plus de place où frapper. Je ne crois avoir évité aucun de ses pièges. Maintenant elle a fini de me torturer. Nous tisonnons face à face, durant ces soirs d’hiver où la chute d’une ‘pigne’, un sanglot de nocturne ont autant d’intérêt pour mon coeur qu’une voix humaine.
In such passages one is aware, as in Shakespeare’s plays, of a sudden tensing, a hush seems to fall on the spirit – this is something more important than the king, Lear, or the general, Othello, something which is unconfined and unconditioned by plot. ‘I’ has ceased to speak, I is speaking.
One is never tempted to consider in detail M. Mauriac’s plots. Who can describe six months afterwards the order of events, say in Ce qui était perdu? One remembers the simple outlines of Le Baiser au lépreux, but the less simple the events of the novel the more they disappear from the mind, leaving in our memory only the characters, whom we have known so intimately that the events at the one period of their lives chosen by the novelist can be forgotten without forgetting them. (The first lines of La Pharisienne create completely the horrible Comte de Mirbel: ‘“Approche ici, garçon!” Je me retournai, croyant qu’il s’adressait à un de mes camarades. Mais non, c’était bien moi qu’appelait l’ancien zouave pontifical, souriant. La cicatrice de sa lèvre supérieure rendait le sourire hideux.’) M. Mauriac’s characters exist with extraordinary physical completeness (he has affinities here we feel to Dickens), but their particular acts are less important than the force, whether God or Devil, that compels them, and though M. Mauriac rises to dramatic heights in his great “scenes’, as when Jean de Mirbel, the boy whose soul is in such danger (a kind of unhappy tortured Grand Meaulnes), is the silent, witness outside the country hotel of his beloved mother’s vulgar adultery, the ‘joins’ of his plot, the events which should make a plausible progression from one scene to another, are often oddly lacking. Described as plots his novels would sometimes seem to flicker like an early film. But who would attempt to describe them as plots? Wipe out the whole progression of events and we would be left still with the characters in a way I can compare with no other novelist. Take away Mrs Dalloway’s capability of self-expression and there is not merely no novel but no Mrs Dalloway: take away the plot from Dickens and the characters who have lived so vividly from event to event would dissolve. But if the Comtesse de Mirbel had not committed adultery, if Jean’s guardian, the evil Papal Zouave, had never lifted a hand against him: if the clumsy well-meaning saintly priest, the Abbé Calou, had never been put in charge of the boy, the characters, we feel, would have continued to exist in identically the same way. We are saved or damned by our thoughts, not by our actions.
The events of M. Mauriac’s novels are used not to change characters (how little in truth are we changed by events: how romantic and false in comparison is a book such as Conrad’s Lord Jim) but to reveal characters – reveal them gradually with an incomparable subtlety. His moral and religious insight is the reverse of the obvious: you will seldom find the easy false assumption, the stock figure in M. Mauriac. Take for examp
le the poor pious usher M. Puybaraud. He is what we call in England a creeping Jesus, but M. Mauriac shows how in truth the creeping Jesus may creep towards Jesus. La Pharisienne herself under her layer of destructive egotism and false pity is disclosed sympathetically to the religious core. She learns through hypocrisy. The hypocrite cannot live insulated for ever against the beliefs she professes. There is irony but no satire in M. Mauriac’s work.
I am conscious of having scattered too many names and comparisons in this short and superficial essay, but one name – the greatest – cannot be left out of any consideration of M. Mauriac’s work, Pascal. This modern novelist, who allows himself the freedom to comment, comments, whether through his characters or in his own ‘I’, again in the very accents of Pascal.
Les êtres ne changent pas, c’est là une vérité dont on ne doute plus à mon âge; mais ils retournent souvent à l’inclination que durant une vie ils se sont épuisés à combattre. Ce qui ne signifie point qu’ils finissent toujours par céder au pire d’eux-mêmes: Dieu est la bonne tentation à laquelle beaucoup d’hommes succombent à la fin.
Il y a des êtres qui tendent leurs toiles et peuvent jeûner longtemps avant qu’aucune proie s’y laisse prendre: la patience du vice est infinie.
Il ne faut pas essayer d’entrer dans la vie des êtres malgré eux: retiens cette leçon, mon petit. Il ne faut pas pousser la porte de cette seconde ni de cette troisième vie que Dieu seul connaît. Il ne faut jamais tourner la tête vers la ville secrète, vers la cité maudite des autres, si on ne veut pas être changé en statue de sel . . .
Notre-Seigneur exige que nous aimions nos ennemis; c’est plus facile souvent que de ne pas hair ceux que nous aimons.
If Pascal had been a novelist, we feel, this is the method and the tone he would have used.
1945
BERNANOS, THE BEGINNER
Sous Le Soleil de Satan, the first novel of Bernanos, is stamped in deep wax with the very personal seal which he never lost. Technically it is full of faults, faults many of them that he never troubled to amend in his later books. He was a writer rather than a novelist; in the impatience and even the fury of his creation he seems to have snatched at fiction because it was nearest to his hand. He belongs in the company of Leon Bloy rather than of François Mauriac, who has patiently through the years pruned and perfected his style and learned his method. Bernanos belongs to the world of angry men, to a tradition of religious writing that stretches back to Dante, ‘who loved well because he hated’.
Bloy wrote in an essay on the Danish writer Joergensen, ‘It will always be known that he wrote for the glory of God . . . and I know it well, that terrible profession.’ Bernanos could have made the same claim. There is no catharsis in his work; his stories are open wounds which refuse, like the stigmata, to heal. The curé of Lumbres dies standing upright in pain pressed against the back wall of his confessional in the empty church where he is discovered by the illustrious member of the Académie Française (like Bloy, Bernanos is ready to spit in the face of his own profession, for literature only exists for him as a means to an end: sanctification):
Toute belle vie, Seigneur, témoigne pour vous; mais le témoignage du saint est comme arraché par le fer.
Telle fut sans doute, ici-bas, la plainte suprême du curé de Lumbres, élevée vers le Juge, et son reproche amoureux. Mais, à l’homme illustre qui l’est venu chercher si loin, il a autre chose a dire. Et si la bouche noire, dans l’ombre, qui resemble à une plaie ouverte par l’explosion d’un cri, ne profère aucun son, le corps tout entier mime un affreux défi:
TU VOULAIS MA PAIX, S’ÉCRIE LE SAINT, VEINS LA PRENDRE! . . .
In this, his first novel, Bernanos too seems to cry defiantly to all the readers of the latest literary prizes, to the readers of feuilletons, even to the avant garde of his own day, ‘Come and read me if you dare’, expecting no more response than did the curé of Lumbres. What astonishment he must have felt when he saw his great world-wide audience assembling.
We musn’t ignore his faults, because they were part of the man, as much as the disordered clothes were part of the curé when we meet him first through the critical eyes of the Abbé Menou-Segrais:
Le désordre, ou plutôt l’aspect presque sordide de ses vêtements journaliers, était rendu plus remarquable encore par la singulière opposition d’une douillette neuve, raide d’apprêt, qu’il avait glissée avec tant d’émotion qu’une des manches se retroussait risiblement sur un poignet noueux comme un cep.
The story, which is written in the form of three linking nouvelles (the only form which Bernanos up till then had tried) begins with the history of Mouchette, the country girl seduced by the aristocratic landowner whom she murders. Only in the second nouvelle do we encounter the curé, who is tempted to despair by the diabolic horse-dealer on his way to assist at a retreat in a neighbouring parish and is afterwards concerned, to the public scandal, in the suicide of Mouchette. In the final nouvelle he has been appointed, after a disciplinary period in a monastery, to the parish of Lumbres, and like the Curé d’Ars he is a saint accepted in his lifetime by all but himself – an object of pilgrimage, even to curious literary men.
It is a weakness, I think, in the novel that it begins with the story of Mouchette, a melodramatic nineteenth-century plot even though seen through Bernanos’s timeless eyes, and if we judge a book strictly as a novel, we have to deplore the intrusions of the author who occasionally mounts the pulpit to draw a lesson which we would have preferred to discover for ourselves. There is even a hint of old-fashioned hagiology:
C’était l’heure de la nuit où cet homme intrépide, soutien de tant d’âmes, chancelait sous le poids de son magnifique fardeau.
Perhaps only in Journal d’un Curé, where a stricter method was imposed by his use of the first person, did Bernanos allow his characters to speak for themselves without explanation or annotation by the author. He never discovered the cunning method of disguised commentary employed by Mauriac who conceals the author’s voice in a simile or an unexpected adjective, like a film director who makes his personal comment with a camera angle.
And yet . . . are we, when all this has been said, only trying to impose arbitrary laws which have no authority higher than Flaubert’s? Even what sometimes seem to be clumsy or undramatized interventions by the author are the very characteristics which give the story of the curé of Lumbres its odd authenticity. It is as though Bernanos were a biographer rather than a novelist. True that on occasion he takes on the tone of a hagiographer, but a work of hagiology has been written about a real saint, and the very faults of Bernanos’s first novel become virtues and authenticate the character of the curé this is not fiction, we tell ourselves: the curé exists in the same historic world as the Curé d’Ars and his parish with him. Surely, just as at Ars, the pilgrims debouch in Lumbres daily from their motor-coaches to examine the rough confessional where the curé died.
And would we for the sake of a stricter discipline sacrifice the pensées, like Mauriac’s not unworthy of Pascal?
Il est naturel à l’homme de hair sa propre souffrance dans la souffrance d’autrui.
Quand l’homme se lève pour le maudire, c’est Lui seul qui soutient cette main débile.
L’enfer aussi a ses cloîtres.
An author, when his greatness is accepted, loses a great deal of his impact; he becomes the reading of the lycées, part of a course in literature; he is taught and not enjoyed. How I wish I could have been one of those who read Sous Le Soleil de Satan for the first time when it appeared in 1926. With what astonishment, in this novel unlike all novels hitherto, they must have encountered le tueur d’âmes when he intercepted the curé on the dark road to Boulaincourt in the guise of a little lubricious horse-dealer with his sinister gaiety and his horrible affection and his grotesque playfulness.
This is surely one of the great scenes in literature, the scenes which suddenly enlarge the whole scope of fiction and like new discoveries in science alter the future a
nd correct the past. Never again will it be possible to write off the infantile devils of Doctor Faustus with their fire-crackers and conjuring tricks. They are more understandable now, masks of the horse-dealer who made his own kind of Host with childish malice out of a pebble. ‘Un jeu d’enfants’, he called it in proud mockery, for infantility, if the inferno exists at all, must surely be a mark of that Hell which is the home of the eternally undeveloped.
1968
THE BURDEN OF CHILDHOOD
THERE are certain writers, as different as Dickens from Kipling, who never shake off the burden of their childhood. The abandonment to the blacking factory in Dickens’s case and in Kipling’s to the cruel Aunt Rosa living in the sandy suburban road were never forgotten. All later experience seems to have been related to those months or years of unhappiness. Life which turns its cruel side to most of us at an age when we have begun to learn the arts of self-protection took these two writers by surprise during the defencelessness of early childhood. How differently they reacted. Dickens learnt sympathy, Kipling cruelty – Dickens developed a style so easy and natural that it seems capable of including the whole human race in its understanding: Kipling designed a machine, the cogwheels perfectly fashioned, for exclusion. The characters sometimes seem to rattle down a conveyor-belt like matchboxes.
There are great similarities in the early life of Kipling and Saki, and Saki’s reaction to misery was nearer Kipling’s than Dickens’s. Kipling was born in India. H. H. Munro (I would like to drop that rather meaningless mask of the pen name) in Burma. Family life for such children is always broken – the miseries recorded by Kipling and Munro must be experienced by many mute inglorious children born to the civil servant or the colonial officer in the East: the arrival of the cab at the strange relative’s, house, the unpacking of the boxes, the unfamiliar improvised nursery, the terrible departure of the parents, a four years’ absence from affection that in child-time can be as long as a generation (at four one is a small child, at eight a boy). Kipling described the horror of that time in Baa Baa Black Sheep – a story in spite of its sentimentality almost unbearable to read: Aunt Rosa’s prayers, the beatings, the card with the word LIAR pinned upon the back, the growing and neglected blindness, until at last came the moment of rebellion.