Richard Luckett on an address to the doubly converted
It is not, I hope, disrespectful to that great director Georges Bresson to reflect on the sad paradox that his compatriot Bernanos should be best known in Britain through the farmer's adaptations of his work for the screen. A paradox because Bernanos's novels succeed by means of their specifically literary qualities. Their plots and characteristic situations have little that is original in them, little that a director could not conveniently find elsewhere. They are remarkable for precisely those elements that are the hardest to repro-.
duce in cinematic terms: the sense of ai place, a climate and a culture; the realisation, in emotionally apprehendable images, of metaphysical states. The Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette were fine films, but their quality was an index of the way Bresson quickened to the books; a degree less sensitivity and they would have been catastrophic failures. As for the sadness of the paradox, that is more or less self-explanatory; three of Bernanos's works are currently available in English, and not more than half of his writings have been translated in English at any time. The books that have appeared have done so in a dress that has presupposed an audience — the cleyots whom Bernanos was never foolish enough to hate but who were surely not, despite his ardent Christianity, his chosen readers. Perhaps Mr Speaight's new biography* will encourage a wider audience, but good as it is I fear that, almost unconsciously, he is addressing the doubly converted, and that is not as it should be.
It was, by all accounts, a strange career. Bernanos was born in Paris in 1888 of middleclass parents; the supposed Spanish origins of his family remain unproven. His parents had a holiday home in Artois, and this was the emotional centre of his childhood; in later years, when he was constantly on the move, his memories of that countryside inspired much of his most powerful fiction. He was educated by the Jesuits, and the closure of their colleges by an anti-clerical government caused him to attend several different schools. At the Sorbonne he read for the bar in a desultory manner, reserving his serious attentions for inflammatory journalism in periodicals which were both Catholic and Royalist. His allegiances were given practical expression by his enrolment in the ranks of the camelots du roi, and his part in an assault by students on a professor who dared insult the name of Joan of Arc earned him ten days of painless martyrdom in the Sante gaol. He was an early adherent of Action Francaise, anti-semitic, anti-democratic, an admirer of Maurras, and his first job was the editorship of the Avant-Garde de Normandie, not a provincial organ of the modernists but a royalist weekly based at Rouen. There he met a Mme d'Arc, President of the Dames de l'Action Francaise de Rouen, a direct descendant of one of the Holy Maid's brothers, and to her daughter Jeanne he was soon, and as predictably, engaged.
The war ended Bernanos's editorship and delayed his marriage by four years. He served with bravery and incompetence as an NCO, emerging from the trenches to face the disilldsion, the 'great treason ', of the post-war years. To an extent he had lost his taste for journalism, and for a time he was forced to support his family by selling insurance. A novel, begun at the time of the Armistice, progressed painfully and slowly. Action Francaise showed signs — which few were able to read — of the changes that would bring it from being a party of the counter-revolution, sustained by serious thinkers and high in romantic ideals — though sullied by anti-semitism — to the status of a fellow-travelling fascist organisation, the direct progenitor of Petain's government, which the Marshal termed " a social hierarchy rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of man." The rhetoric of chivalry had become the basis of collaboration with the Nazi gangs.
Why was it, then, that Bernanos did not go the way of Celine, who errded the war holed up in a German castle full of high-ranking Nazi refugees, or of Gide, whose conduct implied to many that he tolerated the new regime? After all, Main spoke, as Mauriac declared, from "the depths of our history." France could now become once more an "essentially agricultural nation," and it was there, in the peasant communities of France, that Bernanos's ideals might most easily be realised. Was it simply the patriotism of a veteran that kept him from adherence to Vichy? If so, what was his answer to Maurras's assertion that" our worst defeat has had the fortunate result of ridding us of democracy?"
In fact there had never been any chance that Bernanos would swallow the fascist bait. Even during the first war he had moved away from the Action Francaise, though he never foresook his Royalism or his dislike of democracy, and modification of his view of Jewry was slow. But he came to distrust the opportunism of Action Francaise, its .manipulation of a body of believers for whose faith its leaders had in reality little regard. Bernanos himself described his Catholicism as " ultimately that of the penny catechism "; in this lay his greatest strength. He was not a triumphalist, the glories of the church's temporal state meant little to him as his novels show; his priests are poor, their circumstances mean. He was not a theologian, though his education and native wit always gave him a greater understanding of theological niceties than he admitted to possessing. The constant factor was his rejection of any intellectualisation of feelings ultimately emotional in origin, and this rejection saved him from a host of temptations. Above all it con firmed him in his demand for the truth. • From 1926, when after a prolonged parturition his novel Sous le Soleil du Satan achieved widespread acclaim and satisfactory sales, he was a professional writer. It was a role he rejected: "I'm no author. The mere sight of a blank sheet makes my spirit tired, and the physical isolation imposed by the job is so distasteful to me that I evade it as much as I can. I sit scribbling in cafes, at the risk of being thought a drunkard ..." He wrote in cafes not to observe, but for company. Yet in a way it came to much the same thing. During the composition of The Diary of a Country Priest,in 1935-6 he moved to Majorca, how ing to profit by the lower cost of living, and he was there when the Spa.nish Civil War broke out. Before Franco raised the banner of revolt churches had been burnt and priests and nuns maltreated without the government interfering. Bernanos therefore had good reason to sympathise with the insurgents, and his sixteen-year-old son joined the Falange. When fighting threatened on the island Bernanos and his family stayed put. But what began as sympathy steadily turned into something quite different. The process is recorded in Les Grands Cimetieres sous la Lune, which was published, creating a storm of controversy, in 1938, It is the most remarkable book by a foreigner to emerge from the Spanish Civil War, free from the political mendacity of Koestler's Spanish Testament or the artistic mendacity of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and greater in its range than Homage to Catalonia. It is a chronicle of disillusion, and perhaps the only contemporary account of the war in which the truth is consistently and unflinchingly told. Because Bernanos had no great social hope he felt no impulse to distort his report to serve that cause, and because he believed in truth and in pity he wrote with precision and feeling. The result is terrifying and moving. It cut him off completely from his former allies, and made him few new friends. He published nevertheless.
It was partly as a .result of this that he decided to emigrate for good and moved on with his family to South America. There, in Brazil, he heard of the German invasion of France, and there, where the image of his country was both a physical and historical dream (for it had ceased to exist) he was able to recover, as one of the first adherents of de Gaulle, a sense of national identity and a measure of hope. If, from a literary point of view, it is unfortunate that his last years were spent largely on polemics, it was not something that the Free French had occasion to regret at the time. The vision was transitory, and it was soured by experience of the liberation: Bernanos had begun to be pessimistic even before his return in 1945; the visiqn 4.ad largely vanished by the time of his death two Years later. But whilst it held it served a purPose that was never totally betrayed.
At the beginning of Les Grands CiMetieres sous la Lune Bernanos writes of his deepest belief that "the only world which May yet be redeemed is the world of children, of heroes, of martyrs "; near the end he observes that "it would indeed be strange if the nationalism of dictators did not exploit childhood to the full, like any other raw material ". Both remarks are characteristic, and it is in his ability to apprehend the dichotomy that his greatness as a writer lies. His sense of the reality of evil, and of its closeness to innocence is the real subject matter of all his works. He saw evil as "a universe of greater reality than that which the senses perceive, With sinister landscapes, pale skies, cold sun and cruel stars ". He could read its lineaments even in the beloved landscape of his youth, amongst the "leaves of Artois at the very end of autumn ... paths rotting in November rain, huge prancing clouds, the clamour in the skies ". He saw it made manifest in the Europe of the dictators, making a mockery of the hierarchies by which he had hoped that it Might be restrained. He opposed to it the kingdom of God. It is the last point that will bring many readers to a check, but without that belief he could not have known the rest.
Robert Speaight's account is consistently lucid and thorough. Sometimes he presumes too much on a knowledge of background, both political and doctrinal, which is why he may not get the audience his book deserves. In another respect, however, he is evidently aware of English ignorance of both Bernanos and his background, since his accounts of the books are largely summaries of plot or sub ject-matter. This is a pity, since It restricts his literary analyses and leads him into asserting that there is 'room for a thesis' on this or that aspect of Bernanos's work. No doubt there is, though the results would probably be horrible, but it's not a valid excuse for only doing half of a job. But this is ungrateful; a 'life and works' as informed and readable as this is a rare event, and Bernanos himself has at last received some of the attention that he deserves.
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