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François Charles Mauriac (1885-1970) | |
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French novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, journalist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. François Mauriac belonged to the long tradition of French Roman Catholic writers, who examined the problems of good and evil in human nature and in the world. "There are such things as united families, no doubt; but, when you think of the number of households in which two human beings exasperate one other, disgust one another, at the same table, at the same wash-basin, between the same sheets, it is astonishing how few divorces there are! They detest one another, and still there is no getting away from each other. . . ." (Viper's Tangle by François Mauriac, translated by Warre B. Wells, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933, pp. 13-14) François Mauriac was born in Bordeaux, the youngest son of Jean-Paul Mauriac, a wealthy businessman. When Mauriac was not quite two years old, his father died, and the family lived with grandparents. His mother was a devout Catholic, who was influenced by Jansenist thought. From the age of seven, Mauriac attended a school run by the Marianite Order. The author never ceased to acknowledge the importance of his early education although he was unhappy at Ste Marie. After studies at the University of Bordeaux, Mauriac received his licence (the equivalent of an M.A.) in 1905. Next year he went to Paris to prepare for entrance in the École des Chartes, where he was accepted in 1908. However, Mauriac remained at the school only a few months and then decided to devote himself entirely to literature. Mauriac's work show influence from several writers. Though he published studies on Racine and Marcel Proust, Pascal was perhaps the most important thinker for him. Mauriac's style was poetic, full of suggestion. He said, "I believe that only poetry counts, and that only through the poetical elements enclosed in a work of art of any genre whatever does that work deserve to last. A great novelist is first of all a great poet." (quoted in The Contemporary French Novel by Henri Peyre, New York: Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 121) Mauriac began his literary career as a poet with Les Mains jointes (1909). Many of his novels are connected to his verse. However, Mauriac's prose has always attracted more attention from both critics and the reading public. Once he remarked that Orages (1925) and Le Sang d'Atys (1941) formed the glacier from which all his novels had flowed. (Mauriac: The Poetry of a Novelist by Paul Cooke, Amstrerdam: Rodolpi, 2003, p. 246.) Mauriac's plays never achieved the success of his novels, but Asmodée was performed 100 times in 1937-1938 at the Comédie Française. In 1913 Mauriac married Jeanne Lafon; their first child,
Claude, became also a novelist. During WW I Mauriac served in the
Balkans as a Red Cross hospital orderly. After the war he wrote two
novels. It was Le Baiser au Lépreux (1922, The Kiss
to the Leper), in which he found his own voice. The tragic story was
about a wealthy but hideously ugly young man, Jean Peloueyre, who is destroyed by an
arranged marriage with Noemi, a beautiful peasant girl. She feels pity for him. After his death, she keeps her promise not to marry again and begins to wear only mourning clothes. Mauriac's following novels about tormented souls were viewed with increasing distate by Catholic right wing and eventually the Catholic press in general labelled the author as a renegane, obsessed with degraded characters. Le Désert de l'amour (1925) continued Mauriac's theme of the futility of love. In the story a sexually frigid young widow provokes the passions of both her physician and his son. Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), based on an actual murder trial of Madame Henriette-Blance Canaby, is acclaimed as one of the best French novels. She was accused of having attempted to poison her husband, but he refused to testify against his wife. In the story a young wife, Thérèse, is driven to murder her husband, a coarse landowner. This work contained some of the central themes running through Mauriac's fiction: the oppression of French provincial life, the sexual pressures, the mystery of sin and redemption. The savage beauty of the countryside to the south of Bordeaux provided the backgroud against which the characters portrayed. Fascinated by the fate of Thérèse, Mauriac went on to write two short stories and one more novel about her. Mauriac's early works depicted the struggle of passion and conscience. Following a spiritual cul-de-sac he solved this conflict in favor of the spirit: "Christianity makes no provision for the flesh. It suppresses it." In the aftermath, Mauriac wrote novels which emphasized the force of God's love, and developed a technique, in which the authorial voice, a God-like observer, expresses his own opinions. An exception was Le Nœaud De Vipères (1932, Viper's Tangle), a family drama, one of Mauriac's greatest novels. Written in the form of a series of letters and narrated in the first person, it tells of an old man named Louis, an atheist and misanthrophic, whose determination to keep his money from his wife and children start a counterpoint against him. Again materialism creates an obstacle for spiritual growth. The death of his wife leads Louis to investigate his soul. Mauriac was elected in 1933 to the Académie Française. He
somewhat at odds with its conservative mood after adopting more
liberal views. Yet strangely, Mauriac gave his support to the Fascist-leaning Belgian Catholic monarchist journal Rex.
Its publisher Léon Degrelle later joined the Waffen-SS and fought on
the eastern front. Without hesitation, Mauriac warned of the seduction
of dictatorship in the editorial article 'L'homme qui ne vient pas' (L'Écho de Paris, 1 er juillet 1933). Along with his evolving political thinking, Mauriac began to contribute to the French newspaper Le Figaro, where he often attacked the rising Fascism. During the Spanish Civil War, he campaigned actively for the Republicans, though he had first supported Francisco Franco. When Franco's generals claimed that they were leading a holy war, connecting thus Christianity and fascism, Mauriac expressed his outrage in an article published on 30 June 1938. He also had his praise for Mussolini removed from an article republished in 1937. At the beginning of the German occupation of France in World War II, Mauriac sympathiced with Philippe Pétain, but then joined the side of de Gaulle. Upon writing under the pseudonym of Forez a protest against German tyranny, he was forced to hide with his family for some time. This work, Le Cahier Noir (1943) was published by Les Editions de Minuit and was then smuggled to London, where it was used used as a propaganda tool. La Pharisienne, which came out in 1941, was read as an allegory of France's surrender to Nazi Germany. Noteworthy, Mauriac was the only member of the Académie Française to join Resistance movements such as the Front National and the Comité Nationale des Ecrivains. (François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual by Edward Welch, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, p. 56.) Mauriac believed in France's "mission civilisatrice". He was
a supporter of de Gaulle and his policies in
Morocco, but protested the use of torture by the
French police and military forces in
Algeria; it was the wrong way to act. "They haven't stopped using bludgeons, you know! And how about
the bathtub, or rather the bucket of filthy water in which the head is
dunked to the point of asphyxiation, and the electric shocks under the
armpits and between the leegs, and the fouled water forced into the
mouth with a pipe until the patient faints . . . " ('Friday, January 14, 1955,' in François Mauriac on Race, War, Politics, and Religion: the Great War through the 1960s, translated and edited by Nathan Bracher, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2015, pp. 178-182) Mauriac saw that there is a common ground between Islam and Christianity. As a result of his sympathies toward the regime,
Mauriac lost his stature as a political analyst and a free-thinking
voice, especially in the eyes of the Left. Jean-Paul Sartre was one of
the intellectuals, who expressed his disappointment in
Mauriac's enthusiastic allegiance to the
President. However, like Sartre, Mauriac contributed to L'Express, which sought to liberalize the state and society. When Graham Greene's banned novel The Power and the Glory was published in France, Mauriac wrote for it an introduction. From the mid-1950s, Mauriac was much occupied with his weekly newspaper column, Bloc-Notes,
which he wrote for L'Express. He also published a series of personal
memoirs and a biography of de Gaulle, who embodied his own vision of
France. In 1955 Mauriac met the young writer Elie
Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and encouraged
him to complete his Yiddish memoir: "I think that you are wrong not to speak. . . . Listen
to the old man that I am: one must speak out—one must also
speak out." (quoted in Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence by Joseph Berger, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023, p. 75)
Mauriac was the first to read the French version of Wiesel's
manuscript. He took it to his publisher, Flammarion, where it was
turned down: "No one is interested in the death camps anymore." (Ibid., p. 75) Much of Mauriac's focus in his later writings was on the destruction and mechanization of the world around him. François Mauriac died on September 1, 1970, in Paris. For further reading: François Mauriac by Jacques Robichon (1953); François Mauriac by Martin Jarrett-Kerr (1954); François Mauriac: A Critical Study by Michael F. Moloney (1958); François Mauriac by Marc Alyn (1960); Faith and Fiction by Philip Stratford (1964); Mauriac by Cecil Jenkins (1965); François Mauriac by Maxwell A. Smith (1970); Mauriac by Eva Kushner (1972); Mauriac by Marc Alyn, et al. (1977); François Mauriac by Jean Lacouture (1980); Mauriac: The Politics of a Novelist by Malcolm Scott (1980); Francois Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals, edited by John E. Flower, et al. (1991); Francois Mauriac Revisited by David O'Connell (1995); Female Victims and Oppressors in Novels by Theodore Fontane and Francois Mauriac by Susan Wansink (1998); Mauriac: The Poetry of a Novelist by Paul Cooke (2003); Through the Past Darkly: History and Memory in Francois Mauriac's Bloc-Notes by Nathan Bracher (2004); François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual by Edward Welch (2006); Desire and Persecution in Therese Desqueyroux and Other Selected Novels of Francois Mauriac by Timothy J. Williams (2007); Le Bordeaux de François Mauriac by Michel Suffran (2021) - Claude Mauriac (1914-1996) French novelist and critic, the eldest son of novelist François Mauriac, interpreter of the avant-garde school of nouveau roman, "new nove.l" Mauriac worked a private secretary to Charles de Gaulle in 1944-1949 and later as a film and literary critic for the newspaper Le Figaro. Selected works: Toutes les femmes sont fatales, 1957 (All Women Are Fatal); L'allitérature contemporaine, 1958 (The New Literature); Le Dîner en ville, 1959 (The Dinner Party); La Marquise sortit à cinq heures, 1961 (The Marquise Went Out at Five); L'Agrandissement, 1963 (The Enlargement); La Conversation, 1964; Le Temps immobile, 1974-1988, 10 vols. (Time Immobilized); Une certaine rage, 1977; L'Éternité parfois, 1978 (Occasional Eternity) - See also: Georges Bernanos Selected works:
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