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proaching Flaubert’s ambition to write a book about “nothing.” To a far greater degree
than in The Dark Journey, Green reveals his seldom-used gifts as a social satirist, here portraying in painful detail the empty existence of the idle rich. The Strange River is, moreover, the only one of Green’s novels to be set in Paris, where he himself resided.
As in The Dark Journey, Green derives considerable effect in The Strange River from the presentation of multiple viewpoints, primarily those of Philippe Cléry and his sister-in-law, Eliane, but not excluding that of Philippe’s wife, Henriette. Philippe, rich through inheritance, suffers in his own ineffectual way the double torture of being superfluous and knowing it. As titular head of a mining company about which he knows nothing and cares
even less, he need only appear (and remain silent) at monthly meetings in order to do all that society expects of him. The rest of the time, he is free to remain in his elegant apartment (he owns the building) or go for long walks dressed as the gentleman he is. At thirty-one, he is aware that his marriage has long since become as meaningless and hollow as his professional title; Henriette goes out on the town without him nearly every evening and
has taken a lower-class lover to occupy the rest of her time. Their only child, ten-year-old Robert, spends most of the year out of sight and mind in boarding school; his rare presence during school vacations, when he has nowhere else to go, proves irritating to his parents and aunt, as they have no idea what to say to him. Philippe, meanwhile, unless he is out walking, usually finds himself in the company of Henriette’s elder sister, Eliane, who
secretly loves Philippe even as she comes to despise him for what he is.
Against such a background of silence and mistrust, Green sketches in the private
thoughts and feelings of his characters, expressing the pain of existence in all of its contingency. The plot of The Strange River, such as it is, turns upon an incident that Philippe thinks he may have witnessed in the course of one of his long walks: A middle-aged, shab-bily dressed couple appeared to be struggling on the banks of the Seine, and the woman
may or may not have called out to Philippe for help. In any case, Philippe went on his way, not consulting the police until hours later. As the novel proceeds, the incident often returns to haunt Philippe with its implications.
Anticipating by some twenty-five years the central incident of Albert Camus’s La
Chute (1956; The Fall, 1957), Philippe’s experience disrupts the balance of a previously unexamined life; Philippe, however, is already too weak to do much of anything with what he has learned about himself. For months after the incident, he scans the papers for reports of bodies fished from the Seine; at length he finds one, and it is quite likely that he was in fact witness to a murder. In the meantime, another of his nocturnal walks has provided him with further evidence of his own cowardice; accosted by a stranger, he hands over his bill-fold at the merest threat of violence. Attending a monthly board meeting, he impulsively takes the floor and resigns his post, to the astonishment of his sister-in-law and wife, who fear that he has lost his mind; his life, however, goes on pretty much as before, closely observed by the lovesick spinster Eliane. Like Adrienne Mesurat, Eliane is both powerless
and lucid in her unrequited love, increasingly attached to Philippe even as she begins to 104
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deduce his guilty secret concerning the couple on the riverbank.
Unlike all but one of Green’s other novels ( The Other Sleep), The Strange River is open-ended, leaving the main characters with much of their lives yet before them. The action is not resolved in violence, as in The Dark Journey, or in madness, as in the case of Adrienne Mesurat. Philippe, of course, is too weak to do much of anything except worry
about himself.
Not until The Transgressor, written a quarter of a century later, did Green again try his hand at the sort of social satire so successfully managed in The Strange River; despite his skill in such portrayal, it is clear that Greene’s true interest lay elsewhere, deep within the conscience of the individual. The Strange River is thus in a sense a happy accident; Green, in order to probe the inmost thoughts of a Philippe Cléry, had first to invent Philippe and place him against a social background. The result is a most satisfying work, rather different from Green’s other novels but thoroughly successful in accomplishing what it sets out to do.
For a period after The Strange River, Green’s novels tended increasingly toward fantasy, taking place in a real or fancied dreamworld fashioned by individual characters. It is perhaps no accident that these novels, atypical of Green’s work taken as a whole, were
written during the time of Green’s estrangement from Catholicism, when he was reading
extensively in mysticism and Eastern religions. Reconciled with the Church in 1939,
Green was soon thereafter to leave France and his career as a novelist for the duration of World War II. Moira, the first of Green’s true postwar novels, returns to the familiar psychological ground of his earliest work, going even further in its portrayal of the conflict between the mystical and the sensual.
Moira
Returning to the time and setting of his American university experience, Green pres-
ents in Moira the thoughts and behavior of Joseph Day, a Fundamentalist rustic who is even more of an outsider to the university life than Green himself must have been. Joseph is at odds with the school from the first day of his enrollment, horrified by the license and corruption that he sees all around him. His landlady, Mrs. Dare, smokes cigarettes and
wears makeup, and his classmates discuss freely their relations with the opposite sex. His missionary zeal fueled by a truly violent temperament to match his red hair, Joseph seeks to save the souls of those around him; thus inclined, he is quite unable to see either himself or his fellows as human beings. Derisively nicknamed “the avenging angel,” he burns with a white heat, quite unaware of the eroticism at its source. Early on, he unwittingly rebuffs the sexual advances of a young, male art student, who later commits suicide as a result; meanwhile, Joseph feels mysteriously drawn to the elegant, aristocratic Praileau, who has made fun of Joseph’s red hair. Challenging Praileau to a fight, Joseph is so overcome by an excess of clearly sexual frenzy that he nearly kills the young man, who tells him that he is a potential murderer.
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Unable to reconcile his Protestant faith with his increasingly violent feelings and be-
havior, Joseph confides in a fellow ministerial candidate, David Laird, whose vocation is both stronger and less temperamental than Joseph’s own. David, however sympathetic, is
quite unprepared to deal with the problems of his tortured friend, who proceeds toward the date with destiny suggested in the book’s title. Moira, it seems, is also the name of Mrs.
Dare’s adopted daughter, a licentious young woman who emerges as almost a caricature
of the flapper. Even before he meets the girl, Joseph is scandalized by all that he has heard about her; even so, he is quite unprepared for her taunting, loose-mouthed treatment
of him.
Another apparent gay man, Killigrew, tries and fails to get close to Joseph. Joseph
does, however, vividly recall Killigrew’s description of Moira as a she-monster whenever thoughts of the girl invade his daydreams. At length, Joseph, having changed lodgings, returns to his room to find Moira planted there as part of a prank perpetrated upon the
“avenging angel” by his classmates. Moira, of course, is a most willing accessory, her vanity piqued by the one man, Joseph, who has proved resistant to her rather blatant charms.
By the time the planned seduction occurs, it is Moira, not Joseph, who believes herself to have fallen in love. In the morning, however, Joseph strangles
Moira in a fit of remorse over what they have done. After burying her body without incident, he twice considers the possibility of escape but finally turns himself in to the police, who have sought him for questioning.
Despite a plot almost too tightly rigged to seem quite plausible, Moira ranks with the best of Green’s earlier novels, showing considerable development in the depth and scope
of his literary art. As in The Dark Journey and The Strange River, Green shows himself to be a shrewd and discerning observer of society and its distinctions. Characteristically, however, he remains concerned primarily with the inner workings of the human mind and
emotions, and the variety of characters portrayed in Moira affords him ample opportunity to display his talents. Freed from taboos (both internal and external) against the depiction of homosexuality in literature, Green in Moira seemed to be moving toward a new, mature frankness of expression. However, the novels that he wrote after Moira, though explicit, fail to match that work either in suggestive power or in tightness of construction. The first novel of Green’s “mature” period thus remains quite probably that period’s best.
David B. Parsell
Other major works
short fiction: Le Voyageur sur la terre, 1930 ( Christine, and Other Stories, 1930).
plays: Sud, pr., pb. 1953 ( South, 1955); L’Ennemi, pr., pb. 1954; L’Ombre, pr., pb.
1956.
nonfiction: Journal, 1938-2006 (18 volumes; partial translations in Personal Record, 1928-1939, 1939, and Diary, 1928-1957, 1964); Memories of Happy Days, 1942; Partir avant le jour, 1963 ( To Leave Before Dawn, 1967; also known as The Green Paradise); Mille 106
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chemins ouverts, 1964 ( The War at Sixteen, 1993); Terre lointaine, 1966 ( Love in America, 1994); Jeunesse, 1974 ( Restless Youth, 1922-1929, 1996); Memories of Evil Days, 1976; Dans la gueule du temps, 1979; Une Grande Amitié: Correspondance, 1926-1972, 1980
(with Jacques Maritain; The Story of Two Souls: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green, 1988); Frère François, 1983 ( God’s Fool: The Life and Times of Francis of Assisi, 1985); Paris, 1983 (English translation, 1991); The Apprentice Writer, 1993; Jeunesse immortelle, 1998.
Bibliography
Armbrecht, Thomas J. D. At the Periphery of the Center: Sexuality and Literary Genre in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar and Julien Green. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
Ambrecht compares the representation of homosexuality in the work of Green and
Yourcenar, comparing their depiction of gay characters in their novels and plays.
Includes a bibliography.
Burne, Glenn S. Julian Green. New York: Twayne, 1972. Provides a comprehensive overview of the first forty-five years of Green’s career, culminating in his induction into the French Academy in 1971. Includes a bibliography.
Dunaway, John M. The Metamorphoses of the Self: The Mystic, the Sensualist, and the
Artist in the Works of Julien Green. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978.
Dunaway’s study traces the sources and evolution of Green’s narrative art, exploring
the biographical genesis of his major fiction. Includes a bibliography and an index.
O’Dwyer, Michael. Julien Green: A Critical Study. Portland, Oreg.: Four Courts Press, 1997. O’Dwyer provides a biographical introduction and a critical assessment of
Green’s novels, short stories, plays, autobiography, journals, and other miscellaneous
writings. Highlights the importance of Green’s American background for a full appre-
ciation of his work. Includes a foreword by Green.
_______. “Toward a Positive Eschatology: A Study of the Beginning and Ending of Julien
Green’s Chaque homme dans sa nuit.” Renascence 49, no. 2 (Winter, 1997): 111-119.
An analysis of Each in His Darkness within the context of Green’s ideas about the end of the world. Examines the negative elements of Green’s spiritual vision, the identical
structure of the first and final chapters, and the echoes, resonances, and parallels
between these two chapters.
Peyre, Henri. French Novelists of Today. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Provides a good overview of Green’s career, presenting him as standing outside both the
French and the American traditions from which his work derives. Includes useful
readings of Green’s early and midcareer fiction.
Stokes, Samuel. Julian Green and the Thorn of Puritanism. 1955. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. A study of Green’s novels, concentrating on the various intellectual influences that help explain the spiritual background of his work. Discusses
Green’s use of fiction to relate the lives of individuals to the society in which they live.
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L. P. HARTLEY
Born: Whittlesea, England; December 30, 1895
Died: London, England; December 13, 1972
Also known as: Leslie Poles Hartley
Principal long fiction
Simonetta Perkins, 1925
The Shrimp and the Anemone, 1944
The Sixth Heaven, 1946
Eustace and Hilda, 1947
The Boat, 1949
My Fellow Devils, 1951
The Go-Between, 1953
A Perfect Woman, 1955
The Hireling, 1957
Facial Justice, 1960
The Brickfield, 1964
The Betrayal, 1966
Poor Clare, 1968
The Love-Adept, 1969
My Sisters’ Keeper, 1970
The Harness Room, 1971
The Collections, 1972
The Will and the Way, 1973
Other literary forms
L. P. Hartley published, in addition to eighteen novels, six collections of short stories: Night Fears (1924), The Killing Bottle (1932), The Traveling Grave (1948), The White Wand (1954), Two for the River (1961), and Mrs. Carteret Receives (1971). Reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley (1973), with the exception of ten apprentice pieces from Night Fears, the stories reveal Hartley’s reliance on the gothic mode. At their least effective, they are workmanlike tales utilizing conventional supernatural machinery. At their best, however, they exhibit a spare symbolic technique used to explore individual human personalities and to analyze the nature of moral evil. The best of Hartley’s ghost and horror stories include “A Visitor from Down Under,” “Feet Foremost,” and “W. S.,” the last dealing with an author murdered by a character of his own creation. “Up the Garden Path,”
“The Pampas Clump,” and “The Pylon” reveal a more realistic interest in human psychol-
ogy, and they deal more directly with the theme central to Hartley’s major fiction: the acquisition, on the part of an innocent protagonist, of an awareness of the existence of evil.
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A frequent lecturer, and a reviewer for such periodicals as The Observer, Saturday Review, and Time and Tide from the early 1920’s to the middle 1940’s, Hartley published a volume of essays titled The Novelist’s Responsibility: Lectures and Essays (1967), in which he deplored the twentieth century devaluation of a sense of individual moral responsibility. These essays explain Hartley’s fictional preoccupation with identity, moral values, and spiritual insight. His choice of subjects, particularly the works of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, suggests the origins of the realistic-symbolic technique he employs in both his short stories and his novels.
Achievements
While L. P. Hartley’s novels from Simonetta Perkins to Facial Justice were published in the United States, they did not enjoy the popularity there that they earned in England.
The Go-Between, for example, continued to be in print in England since its publication in 1953, and the Eustace and Hilda trilogy—comprising The Shrimp and the Anemone, The Sixth Heaven, and
Eustace and Hilda—was given a radio dramatization by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In the course of a literary career of roughly fifty years, Hartley came to be a noted public figure, and his work received favorable attention from Lord David Cecil, Walter Allen, and John Atkins. Only in the United States, however, did his novels receive detailed critical attention. The three full-length studies of his fiction—
Peter Bien’s L. P. Hartley (1963), Anne Mulkeen’s Wild Thyme, Winter Lightning: The Symbolic Novels of L. P. Hartley (1974), and Edward T. Jones’s L. P. Hartley (1978)—are all American, as are the notable treatments of Hartley’s work by James Hall and Harvey
Curtis Webster.
Biography
Born on December 30, 1895, near Whittlesea in Cambridgeshire, Leslie Poles Hartley
was named for Sir Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and himself a noted late
Victorian literary man. According to Edward T. Jones, whose book L. P. Hartley contains the most complete biographical account, Hartley’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Thompson,
was the daughter of a farmer named William James Thompson of Crawford House,
Crowland, Lincolnshire. His father, H. B. Hartley, was a solicitor, justice of the peace, and later director of the successful brickworks founded by the novelist’s paternal grandfather.
This information figures as part of the background to Hartley’s The Brickfield and The Betrayal.
Hartley was the second of his parents’three children; he had an older sister, Enid, and a younger, Annie Norah. None of the three ever married. Reared at Fletton Tower, near
Peterborough, Hartley was educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, his stay at the latter interrupted by military service as a second lieutenant in the Norfolk Regiment during World War I. He was discharged for medical reasons and did not see action in France.
In Oxford after the war, Hartley came into contact with a slightly younger generation of 109
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men, among them Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. His closest liter-