Francois Mauriac
1885-1970
We met Mauriac one day during Easter Week this year at his
beautiful apartment in Avenue Theophile Gauthier at Paris. He was
seated on a divan in pain because of a broken shoulder blade which
he had suffered a few weeks before, yet he generously lent himself
to conversation, brief but basic. His voice, which had always been
soft and low, was now hardly a breath. But his mind was alive.
After a few remarks about his health he spoke about means of
communication such as cinema and television in regard to the task
of conveying the Christian message and discussing the problems
raised by Christianity. Contrary to expectation, he said he was
optimistic about them, as an indispensable supplement to
literature. He looked forward to the appearance of able and
disinterested people who might bend those means, which are
indifferent in themselves, to the noble aim of educating the
masses. He also referred to the negative effects which flow from
perverse or merely individualistic use of cinema and television.
As a man of letters, he had never ceased being aware of his times
and involved in their problems. This is why be carried on a long
political campaign by means of his pen-in his Bloc-Notes published
in one or other Parisian newspaper. He devoted his mind to the
problems facing France and the world and all those social,
political, cultural and religious changes which accelerated in the
last decades of his existence. He lived till he was almost 85, so
his life stretched far back, to times and persons which are
already historical.
He was born at Bordeaux and took a degree in Letters. He then
devoted the whole of his life to writing and journalism, producing
poetry, then novels essays, biographies, history and plays- more
than a hundred titles in all. His first collection of poetry was
published at his own expense. Three years later (1912) he founded
a Catholic review entitled <Les Cahiers>, and soon began to write
his novels, the first of which appeared in 1920. <The Desert of
Love> published in 192;, brought him international fame, and in
1933 he was elected to the French Academy, by a first-count
unanimous vote. The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded in 1958
"for the penetrating psychology and artistic intensify with which
he has expressed the drama of human life in his novels." The
general public had long held the opinion expressed by the Nobel
Prize givers. Mauriac's novels enjoyed enormous sales. <Vipers'
Tangle> sold more than a million copies. <Therese Desqueyroux>
sold nearly as many, and was translated into thirty languages.
<The Desert of Love> and <The Frontenac Mystery> came near these
figures.
Mauriac was a man of orthodox faith and constant practice. He was
a convinced and a convincing Christian. Yet many of his novels
dismayed Catholics with their pessimism, their presentation of
vice in all its turpitude, and his continual near obsession with
sin. But there was no mistaking the fidelity with which he
represented the realities of living and showed that no kind of
happiness is possible without God. He displayed the squalor and
emptiness of souls from which faith is missing. He exposed the
misery and horror prevailing in some families which are outwardly
in order.
It has been well said that Mauriac is not a novelist of the human
condition, but of the human exile. He does not depict man's
humanity: he depicts his fall, his loss of grace, his deprivation
of paradise, his concupiscence, and the sad weight of heredity
which lies upon his free will. He showed the power of the flesh
and its apparent incompatibility with love for God; he described
the final vanity and despair of passion and even-according to
Francesco Casnati -of Christian marriage. In <God and Mammon>
Mauriac wrote: "Every human love sets up a block against the one
Love, and so involves and marks its own destiny." But the same
human souls which he studied with such pitiless pessimism when at
their lowest and in their greatest misery, are forced to raise
their heads, to look up. His constant purpose was to show the
contrary of all that sadness: to demonstrate the value of Christ's
words "Without me you can do nothing" and to do so by means of
human decadence.
His activity as a novelist was really coming to an end already at
the end of the 30's. He took an active part in the political
controversies of France and Europe in that decade: he opposed the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia, General Franco's war in Spain, and
the Munich Pact. He supported the Basques against
Franco and he was the only member of the French Academy to make a
stand against Marshal Petain. He stayed on in France during the
occupation, took part in the Resistance, and after the liberation
of Paris in 1944 campaigned for a "great common front against
fascism." His adversaries accused him of going along with the
Communists, but his attitude was really the result of a higher,
national view: he saw a need for all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen to
be united against the forces in France which had led the country
to ruin, but also to be united in confessing that they themselves
had contributed to that collapse. He esteemed General de Gaulle
because of his ability to rally the French, but at that stage did
not approve his political initiatives, particularly his foundation
of the "<Rassemblement du Peuple Francais.>"
During the fifties he continued to lend support to the ideal of a
great democratic and liberal union of all the French under the
leadership of De Gaulle and Mendes-France. But facts and events
made such a goal impossible, for France entered the great crisis
of the collapse of her colonial empire in the Far East and in
Africa, the great events of which were the defeat at Dien-Bien-
Phu, the withdrawal from Indochina, and the independence of
Algeria. Mauriac was for decolonization, and at the height of the
crisis he supported de Gaulle without enthusiasm, as the only
alternative to catastrophe.
From that moment began his agreement with and admiration for the
General, which was to be expressed in many a fervent Bloc-Note,
and reached its peak in his <Life of De Gaulle>, published in
1964. Yet he did not hesitate to reproach him for the lack of
moral renewal in France.
Mauriac's political commitment continued right down almost to his
death. His Bloc-Notes were his weapon, and besides the political
war he also carried on the literary dialogue through them,
sometimes with comments on his colleagues which were as caustic as
they were illuminating. He was noted for his fine humour and his
brilliant yet deep conversation.
His death marks the end of a period in the history of French
literature and is a sad loss, not only for French, but also for
the world's cultural life.
Mauriac's work will continue to arouse debate. He dealt with
important literary problems, such as the perennially unsolved one
of "the Catholic novel." Two aspects of his personality which are
continually coming to light in his work seem to be in contrast
with each other: the artist in him and the believer in him. But at
the same time they express his fundamental sincerity, and are not
simply the result of philosophical or theological thought.
Together, those two aspects sought to transpose a view of life
into art; as he himself said they tried to make the Catholic
universe of evil apprehensible to the senses. by touch and smell
as it were.
The problem which Mauriac struggled with was well expressed by
another French Catholic novelist, Julien Green, who said that he
would like to know whether the fact of writing a novel is
compatible with being in a state of grace. The English novelist
Graham Green replied by saying that there is no need to try to be
explicitly Catholic, for, if you are Catholic then the fact will
fill your work and come out on all sides.
There is no doubt that Mauriac has left his mind and personality
as part of this century. His little <Life of Jesus> would alone be
enough to win him honour, for its striking and paradoxical
observations have touched many souls most profoundly.
Taken from the September 17, 1970, issue of "L'Osservatore
Romano". Editorial and Management Offices, Via del pellegrino,
00120, Vatican City, Europe, Telephone 39/6/698.99.390.
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