François Mauriac

François Mauriac: Grace in a Provincial Hell

"I try to make the Catholic universe of evil palpable, tangible, odorous." That sentence explains why François Mauriac was, for four decades, the most uncomfortable writer in French Catholicism — venerated by the Church for his faith and suspected by it for what he did with that faith on the page. His novels are set in the pine forests and vineyards of the Bordeaux country, among families whose money is old and whose cruelty is domestic. God appears in them mostly as an absence, and grace, when it arrives, arrives late.

The Landes and the Mother

He was born in Bordeaux on 11 October 1885 into a prosperous provincial family — the Nobel Foundation's own biographical note calls it a banking family. His father died when he was eighteen months old, and he was raised by a mother the sources describe as stern and puritanically Catholic, and educated by the Marianites. He remembered himself as frail, shy, guilt-ridden, unhappy and introverted. That mother, and the psychology of maternal authority pushed past its limits, would become one of the great recurring subjects of his fiction; she appears, in transposed form, in his own novels.

He read literature at the University of Bordeaux, graduating in 1905, and went to Paris in 1906 to study palaeography and medieval archaeology, briefly entering the École des Chartes in 1908 before abandoning scholarship for writing. His first poetry collection, *Les Mains jointes*, appeared in 1909 and attracted modest notice. His first novel, *L'Enfant chargé de chaînes*, followed in 1913. He served in a medical unit during the First World War. The mature work began around 1920.

The Novels

Recognition came with *Le Baiser au lépreux* (1922), the story of a marriage arranged between a physically repellent man and a beautiful woman. *Genitrix* (1923) took the mother-son bond to its suffocating conclusion. *Le Désert de l'amour* (1925) won the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française. Then, in 1927, came *Thérèse Desqueyroux*, the book by which he is still principally known outside France: a provincial wife who tries to poison her husband and is not punished by the law but delivered instead to a far more thorough sentence — silence, seclusion, and the family's respectable protection of its own name.

His masterpiece is usually taken to be *Le Nœud de vipères* (1932), the *Vipers' Tangle*, narrated by a dying miser assembling a case against the family circling his fortune — a book, as one account puts it, about impure human love in which sinful creatures struggle towards grace. *La Fin de la nuit* (1935) and *La Pharisienne* (1941) followed. Across his career he produced close to a hundred volumes: novels, poems, plays staged at the Comédie-Française, biographies, religious essays, memoirs. His collected works ran to twelve volumes between 1950 and 1956.

The world of these books is narrow on purpose. It is the Landes region, the bourgeois household, the closed provincial town where all sexuality implies sin and love and happiness become impossible. Critics have consistently noted the same double edge: powerful atmosphere and shrewd psychological insight, deployed in a deliberately small field.

Catholic, and Attacked for It

Around 1928 Mauriac went through what his biographers call a crisis of conscience. Before it, readers had complained that his sinners were more convincing than his believers. After it, the possibility of divine grace moved closer to the surface of the books — though scholars note the break is less absolute than it is usually made out to be.

The crisis produced his most searching non-fiction. In *God and Mammon* (1929) and *Le Romancier et ses personnages* (1933) he defended the novelist's right to let characters be as free and as opaque as real people. André Gide argued the opposite: that Mauriac wrote better when he let his characters' desires run without interference. Jean-Paul Sartre went further, accusing him of truncating plot and character by imposing Christian belief from outside — of playing God with people who ought to have been left free. Mauriac's answer was that the writer who starts measuring the distance between himself and his creations "loses forever that state of grace."

The Political Writer

He had begun on the right, close to Action française. The Spanish Civil War moved him decisively leftward; he attacked the Church's support for Franco. He was elected to the Académie française in 1933, at forty-eight. Under the Occupation he stayed in France, joined the Resistance, and published *Le Cahier noir* clandestinely with Éditions de Minuit under the pen name Forez — the only member of the Académie to publish Resistance material with that press. De Gaulle later made him a Grand Officer, and in 1958 he received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.

After the war he became a formidable newspaper polemicist, an editorialist for *Le Figaro* and later the author of the *Bloc-notes* columns. He opposed French rule in Indochina and condemned the use of torture in Algeria. From 1958 he was an ardent Gaullist, and published a biography of de Gaulle in 1964. It was Mauriac who pressed the young Elie Wiesel to publish, and who wrote the foreword to *Night*.

Why François Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on one thing: a psychological instrument of unusual precision, turned on a very small piece of ground. Mauriac could render the interior weather of a person trapped in a family — the calculations, the self-deceptions, the almost geological pressure of respectability — with a compression few novelists have matched. The Swedish Academy's 1952 citation named exactly this: "the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life." Contemporary critics granted him an extremely high reputation while noting that he worked in a somewhat narrow field, and both halves of that judgement are fair.

The counter-case is not trivial and was made by the best writers of his own generation. Gide thought his Catholicism blunted him. Sartre argued that Mauriac rigged his novels — that he knew his characters' fates in advance and so denied them the freedom that makes fiction live, an accusation that damaged his standing with a post-war French readership moving towards existentialism and the *nouveau roman*. His range is genuinely restricted: the same milieu, the same suffocations, the same Bordeaux. He wrote a great deal, and the late fiction repeats. What survives the objections is the fiction's refusal to console. *Thérèse Desqueyroux* and *Le Nœud de vipères* are not books in which faith makes anything easier; they are books in which a believer stares steadily at how little difference belief seems to make, and declines to look away. That is a moral achievement as much as an artistic one, and it is why the word keeps getting used.

Legacy

Mauriac died in Paris on 1 September 1970, aged eighty-four, following a serious fall the previous year. His last novel, *Un adolescent d'autrefois*, appeared posthumously and is read as autobiographical. His son Claude Mauriac was a writer; his granddaughter Anne Wiazemsky an actress. Two literary prizes carry his name. *Thérèse Desqueyroux* remains a fixture of French reading lists — proof, of a kind, that the narrow field he ploughed went unusually deep.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1952
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 1958
• Notable work: Thérèse Desqueyroux
• Notable work: Le Désert de l'amour
• Notable work: Vipers' Tangle
• Notable work: Le mystère Frontenac
• Educated at École des chartes, Sainte-Marie Grand Lebrun and University of Bordeaux
• Worked as writer, journalist and poet