FANTASY NOVELISTS.vp

by Rollyson, Carl E.

Others, focusing on the oppressive atmosphere pervading many of his novels, sought to

  place Green closer to the gothic tradition. Neither classification is quite accurate, yet it was not until after Green’s autobiography began to appear in 1963 that reassessment of his

  novels began in earnest.

  Using a clear, ornament-free style that has been described as classical, Green quickly

  involves his readers in the solitary lives of tortured characters obsessed with the need to escape. Often, the compulsion toward escape leads to violence, madness, or death; when it

  does not, it produces an implied “leap of faith,” which is not, however, totally satisfying to those who would see Green as a religious writer in the Catholic tradition. Even in those rare cases in which solutions are offered, it is still the problems that dominate the consciousness of author and reader alike. Endowed with keen powers of observation, Green

  excels in the portrayal of psychological anguish that any thoughtful reader can under-

  stand, even if he or she does not share it.

  The publication of Green’s autobiography beginning in the 1960’s permitted at last a

  demystification of the novels—in Green’s case, more help than hindrance. In the light of Green’s frankness, many of the tortures undergone by his characters stood revealed as artistic transpositions of the author’s own private anguish as he sought to reconcile his spiritual aspirations with a growing awareness of his homosexuality. Far from detracting from the power of Green’s novels, such disclosures shed valuable light on his life in art, allowing critics and casual readers alike to appreciate the true nature of Green’s novelistic achievement. Whatever their source, Green’s novels remain powerful portraits of alienation and estrangement unmatched in contemporary French or American literature.

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  Biography

  Julien Hartridge Green was born in Paris on September 6, 1900, the youngest of eight

  children. His father, Edward Moon Green of Virginia, had since 1895 served as European

  agent of the Southern Cotton Seed Oil Company. Green’s mother, Mary Hartridge of Sa-

  vannah, Georgia, dominated her son’s early life with a curious blend of love and Puritan guilt; her death in 1914, instead of liberating the young Green from the tyranny of her

  moods and ideas, seems rather to have increased her hold upon his developing conscience.

  Green grew to adulthood torn between a strong, if repressed, sensuality and a mystical desire for sainthood, often equally strong. Converted to Catholicism within a year after his mother’s death, he seriously considered entering a monastic order but deferred his plans for the duration of World War I. In 1917, he served as an ambulance driver, first for the American Field Service and later for the Red Cross; the following year, still (as he remained) a U.S. citizen, he obtained a commission in the French army by first enlisting in the Foreign Legion. Demobilized in 1919, he returned to Paris and soon renounced his

  monastic vocation, a loss that caused him considerable anguish.

  Unable to decide on a career, he accepted with some reluctance the offer of a Hartridge

  uncle to finance his education at the University of Virginia. Enrolled as a “special student,”

  Green read widely in literature, religion, and sociology; in 1921, after two years in residence, he was appointed an assistant professor of French. Still homesick for his native

  France, more at ease in French than in English, Green returned to Paris in 1922 to study art, gradually discovering instead his vocation as a writer and attracting the attention of such influential literary figures as Jacques de Lacretelle and Gaston Gallimard. By the age of twenty-five, already an established author with a growing reputation, Green had found his lifework.

  During his thirties, Green read widely in mysticism and Eastern religions. Returning to

  the Catholic Church as early as 1939, Green was soon thereafter obliged to leave Paris by the onset of World War II. After the fall of France in 1940, he moved to the United States for the duration, teaching at various colleges and universities before and after brief service as a language instructor in the U.S. Army. Returning to Paris in September, 1945, he remained there, pursuing the life and career of a French man of letters until his death on August 13, 1998.

  Analysis

  Educated primarily in the French tradition, Julien Green brought to his novels a dis-

  tinctly French concern for the presentation and development of character. Whether his

  novels are set in France, the United States, or elsewhere, his characters are observed and portrayed with the psychological precision that has characterized French fiction from Madame de La Fayette down through Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert to Marcel

  Proust. With critical and seemingly pitiless exactitude, Green takes the reader inside his characters to show their thought and motivations, achieving considerable identification

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  even when the characters tend toward violence or madness. On the surface, few of Green’s characters would appear to invite identification on the part of the reader; they tend to be misfits of one sort or another, haunted by strange fears and insecurities. It is Green’s singular talent, however, to present them and their thoughts in such a way that they seem almost instantly plausible and authentic, and to hold the reader’s interest in what will happen to them. Life, as particularized in Green’s characters, emerges as both threat and promise, most often as a trap set for the unwary.

  Typically, Green’s protagonists, often female with one surviving and insensitive par-

  ent, find themselves trapped in an existence that they can neither tolerate nor understand; not infrequently, they contribute to their own misfortune through a stubborn refusal to express themselves. Even so, the reader senses that to speak their minds would render them vulnerable to even greater assaults from a hostile environment. Locked within themselves, they suffer all the tortures of an earthly hell from which they yearn to escape. In his autobiography, Green observes that a feeling of imprisonment was a recurring childhood night-

  mare; in his novels, the theme is enlarged to archetypal proportions, assuming the authority of fable. Green’s characters, for all their particularities, emerge as highly convincing exemplars of the human condition.

  Escape, for all of its apparent promise, offers no relief to the suffering of Green’s characters. Adrienne Mesurat, among the most convincing of Green’s early heroines, gradu-

  ally retreats into madness once she has achieved through an act of violence the freedom

  for which she has longed; Paul Guéret, the ill-favored viewpoint character of The Dark Journey, strikes and disfigures the young woman whose attentions he has sought, thereafter becoming a fugitive. Manuel, the title character of The Dreamer, retreats from the un-desirable world into a fictional universe of his own making, only to die soon thereafter.

  Elisabeth, the protagonist of Midnight, seeks to escape with her lover, only to be killed with him in a fall. Clearly, the oppressive atmosphere that stifles Green’s characters is internal as well as external; like Adrienne Mesurat, they remain imprisoned even when they are free to come and go as they please. Even in the later novels, such as The Other One, death is frequently the only means of escape available.

  The power of Green’s novels derives in no small measure from the author’s skill in pro-

  viding motivation for the behavior of his characters. In the case of Adrienne Mesurat, for example, Green quickly and convincingly shows normal desire stifled by silence until it

  becomes first an obsession, then true madness. Philippe Cléry, the main viewpoint character of The Strange River, passes the age of thirty before being obliged to examine his life; thereafter, he becomes most convincingly self-conscious, questioning his every move in

  an aut
hentically ineffectual way. Sympathetic or not (and most are not), Green’s charac-

  ters are inescapably human and believable, commanding the reader’s identification; al-

  though they seem to exist in a world of their own, they are unmistakably drawn from life, the products of Green’s keen powers of observation.

  It is possible, that, had Green not been reared in a time less tolerant than the twentieth 100

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  century, his novels might never have come into being. Arguably, Green’s expression has

  responded somewhat to the temper of the times, dealing more and more openly with ho-

  mosexual attraction in such novels as The Transgressor; indeed, by the time Green wrote and published his autobiography in the 1960’s, his revelations seemed less scandalous

  than timely and enlightening. The restraint that helped to shape his earlier works was in a sense no longer necessary. It seems likely, moreover, that the writing of the autobiographical volumes lessened the sense of creative urgency that marks the best of Green’s earlier writing. In fact, Green’s later novels ( Le Mauvais Lieu in particular), while still holding the reader’s attention, cover little new ground and move perilously close to self-parody.

  The Closed Garden

  Green’s second novel, The Closed Garden, written and published within a year after the success of Avarice House, ranks among his best and is perhaps the most memorable.

  Refreshingly normal at the start of the novel, eighteen-year-old Adrienne quickly erodes into madness and amnesia as a result of the stifling circumstances of her life. Recently out of school (the time is 1908), she lives in a provincial French town with her retired father and her thirty-five-year-old spinster sister, Germaine. A chronic invalid whose illness

  their autocratic father refuses even to recognize, Germaine rules over Adrienne with the authority of a mother but with none of the attendant love. As in Green’s Avarice House, kinship is no guarantee of understanding or even friendship; indeed, the family emerges as perhaps the most inimical and threatening of human institutions. Using heavy irony,

  Green shows Adrienne’s daily interaction with her hostile relatives; the reader, privy to Adrienne’s innermost thoughts, looks on with horror as she is repeatedly unable to

  express them.

  At the start of the novel, Adrienne is looking with healthy scorn at a group of family

  portraits to which she inwardly refers as “the cemetery,” concluding with some satisfac-

  tion that her own features place her on the “strong” side of the family. Dressed as a servant, she is doing the family housework, exhibiting physical strength by moving heavy furniture with ease. It is precisely such apparent strength that will soon prove to be her undoing, as it turns inward upon herself, accomplishing in several weeks a deterioration that otherwise might take years. Deprived of normal human companionship, Adrienne becomes in-

  fatuated with a neighboring physician, Dr. Maurecourt, whom she has seen but once; such

  adolescent passion, harmless enough at face value, functions rather in Green’s universe as an instrument of destruction. Adrienne, unable to confide to her father or sister the relatively innocent causes of her slightly irregular behavior, retreats further and further into her fantasy with each new demand for an explanation.

  Steadfastly refusing to name the object of her secret passion, she soon finds herself literally locked up in the house, forbidden to leave but still dreaming of escape. Ironically, it is the nearly bedridden Germaine, rather than the healthy Adrienne, who in fact does manage to escape the father’s tyranny, sneaking out of the house with Adrienne’s help in order 101

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  to seek refuge in a convent near Paris. Germaine’s departure triggers a rare and violent dispute between Adrienne and her father, who reveals that he, like Germaine, has guessed the identity of Adrienne’s lover. Overcome with shame and grief, Adrienne runs toward her

  father and pushes him downstairs; she is never quite sure whether she intended to kill him.

  In any case, he dies, and although Adrienne is never formally charged with his murder, she is eventually convicted of the crime by the tribunal of malicious gossip. Indeed, the entire village soon takes on the sinister aspect of Adrienne’s now-absent family, hemming her

  within a circle of watchful and accusing eyes.

  A brief attempt at leaving the village finds Adrienne drifting aimlessly from one pro-

  vincial town to another, beset by nightmares as she sleeps fitfully in seedy hotels, imagining that she is being watched. Returning home to live among her tormentors, she falls

  physically ill; Dr. Maurecourt is summoned, and at the end of a lengthy and difficult conversation, she blurts out her unrequited love for him. Maurecourt, a frail widower of forty-five, is understandably nonplussed; with genuine compassion, he explains to Adrienne

  that he is mortally ill, having hardly more than a year left to live, while she, Adrienne, has her whole life ahead of her. For all practical purposes, however, Adrienne’s life is as good as over; she again leaves the house, intending to escape but succeeding only in wandering aimlessly about the town until she is found suffering from amnesia.

  Like other novels and plays of the period—John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra

  (1934) and Jean Cocteau’s La Machine infernale (1934; The Infernal Machine, 1936) come readily to mind— The Closed Garden is the carefully recorded history of what can happen to a human life and mind when everything possible goes wrong. Subjected to torture such as might be inflicted upon a steel rod in laboratory tests, Adrienne’s mind eventually snaps. Until very near the end, however, Adrienne remains painfully lucid, aware of all that is happening to her yet powerless to stop it. Unlike such characters as O’Hara’s Julian English and Cocteau’s Oedipus, Adrienne seems singularly undeserving of her

  cruel fate; neither arrogant nor thoughtless, she seems to have been chosen almost at random by unseen forces bent upon destroying her for no good reason.

  The Dark Journey

  The Dark Journey, Green’s third novel, breaks new ground in presenting several viewpoint characters and a number of interlocking subplots. Each of the main characters, reminiscent of Balzac’s provincial “monomaniacs,” is governed and identified by a ruling passion, much as Adrienne Mesurat is governed by her passion for the helpless Dr.

  Maurecourt. The main viewpoint character, whose life provides a link among the others, is Paul Guéret, an ill-favored and unhappily married man in his thirties who is obsessed by his passion for the young and attractive Angèle. A typical Green heroine, Angèle has been thrust by circumstances into a thankless and sordid existence from which she longs to escape, presumably in the loving company of a young man her own age. A launderer by day,

  she moonlights by sleeping with various gentlemen who frequent the restaurant owned

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  and operated by the insatiably curious Madame Londe. In a sense, Angèle is less prostitute than spy, engaged by Madame Londe to supply her with useful information concerning

  the gentlemen’s private lives. Guéret, to his consternation, is excluded from Angèle’s regular clientele because he is simply not interesting enough, either as a person or because of his station in life, to warrant Madame Londe’s interest. Angèle, meanwhile, is flattered and at least amused by Guéret’s awkward attentions, even if she cannot bring herself to

  return his love in kind.

  Guéret, driven nearly to distraction by Angèle’s flirtatiousness and inaccessibility, becomes increasingly obsessed with his need to possess the girl, and before long his obsession leads to violence. First, after a long and painful struggle to scale the wall of Angèle’s building, he breaks into her room, only to find that she is not there. The next day, unable to tolerate her taunting behav
ior, he beats her and goes into hiding, leaving her for dead on a riverbank. Angèle survives, although disfigured for life. Guéret, meanwhile, is in fact

  guilty of murder, having bludgeoned to death an old man who stumbled upon his hiding

  place. After several months as a fugitive, he is given asylum by the bored and sadistic Eva Grosgeorge, mother of a boy he once tutored. Eventually, Madame Grosgeorge tires of

  Guéret and denounces him to the police against the protestations of Angèle, still convalescent, who does her best to rescue him. Unsuccessful, Angèle lapses into a dreamlike state and, like Adrienne Mesurat before her, wanders about town in what she thinks is an attempt to escape; delirious, she dies of exposure soon after being brought back to her room.

  Madame Grosgeorge, meanwhile, having shot herself melodramatically at the moment of

  Guéret’s arrest, is expected to survive.

  The Dark Journey differs from Green’s earlier novels in both the depth and the scope of its character development. Although both Guéret and Angèle show clear lines of descent

  from Green’s earlier protagonists, such characters as Madame Londe and the Grosgeorge

  couple bear witness to a broadening of Green’s psychological and social observation; Eva Grosgeorge, in particular, is a most convincing grotesque, the bored and self-indulgent

  younger wife of a rather bovine industrialist. Guéret, the misfit, serves unwittingly as the link between these various social types, whose paths would otherwise be unlikely to cross.

  As elsewhere in Green’s work, interpersonal love is shown to be an unattainable illusion.

  Guéret’s passion for Angèle, among the more normal obsessions portrayed in the book, is

  doomed by its own intensity. Angèle, meanwhile, is too lost in her own romantic fantasies to see beyond Guéret’s ugliness to her own genuine feelings toward him until it is too late for them both.

  The Strange River

  Less sensational in subject matter and in treatment than The Closed Garden or The Dark Journey, Green’s fifth novel, The Strange River, remains one of his least known; nevertheless, it ranks among his best. Nearly devoid of external action or incident, The Strange River presents social and psychological analysis of rare accuracy and power, ap-103