Julien Green

Julien Green: An American Soul in French Prose

In 1996, at the age of ninety-five, a member of the Académie française attempted to resign on the grounds that he was, as he put it, American, exclusively. The Académie declined to accept the resignation. It had elected him twenty-five years earlier as the first non-French national ever admitted, and it was not about to let the technicality of his passport undo the point.

Savannah, by Way of Paris

Julian Hartridge Green was born in Paris on 6 September 1900 to American Protestant parents: Mary Adelaide Hartridge of Savannah and Edward Green of Virginia. He was named for his maternal grandfather, the congressman Julian Hartridge. His paternal grandfather, Charles Green, had made money in Savannah cotton and built the ornate Green-Meldrim House, completed in 1861. His mother filled his childhood with stories of the Civil War and her regret that the South had lost it, and she was, by his own account, the centre of his emotional life. She died in 1914, when he was thirteen.

He was educated in French schools, including the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, which meant he grew up thinking in a language his parents had not been born to. In 1916, at sixteen, he became a Roman Catholic. The nostalgia for a Georgia he had barely seen and the conversion to a faith his family did not hold arrived within two years of each other, and between them they set the terms of his entire body of work: a man permanently between two countries and two selves.

War at Sixteen

In 1917 he volunteered as an ambulance driver with the American Field Service, then served with the American Red Cross, then enlisted in the French Army as a second lieutenant of artillery, serving through 1918 and 1919. He was still a teenager. In 1919 he went to the University of Virginia at an uncle's invitation and stayed until 1922, writing his first fiction in English — the one substantial period of his life spent inside the country he claimed as his own.

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The Novels of Enclosure

He launched himself as a novelist with *Mont-Cinère* (1926), set in Virginia, and followed it with *Adrienne Mesurat* (1927) and *Léviathan* (1929). The Green novel is a claustrophobic instrument. Its recurring subject is the household as a trap — families bound by tension, resentment and greed — and inside it a soul torn between flesh and spirit, sin and grace. *Le visionnaire* appeared in 1934, the year Green underwent a mystical experience that renewed a faith he had let lapse; he had left the Church over its treatment of his sexuality and returned to it in 1939. *Varouna* (1940) reflected an interest in Eastern mysticism and the migration of souls, a theme the scholar John M. Dunaway has traced through his work.

*Moïra* (1950) is generally taken as his masterpiece. *Sud* (1953), a play, stages a homosexual drama on the eve of the Civil War. *Chaque homme dans sa nuit* (1960), published in English as *Each Man in His Darkness*, is set partly near the Wormsloe estate outside Savannah. Late in life he wrote the so-called Dixie trilogy, Civil War narratives that represent the culmination of a lifelong search for his Georgian roots.

The Journal

Running underneath the fiction for nearly eighty years is the *Journal*, which Green kept from 1919 until his death and of which nineteen volumes appeared during his lifetime. It is a record of writing, religion and sexuality, and it was also, until recently, a carefully edited one. Green's long companion was the journalist Robert de Saint-Jean, whom he met in November 1924. In public the relationship was presented as platonic, and Catholic prelates admired him as a model of righteousness. Beginning in 2019, unexpurgated editions of the journals began to appear, restoring hundreds of previously censored pages that document his sexual life in interwar France in detail. As one reviewer put it: we knew he was homosexual; we did not know to what extent. The posthumous text has changed how the whole shelf is read.

Exile, and the Voice of America

Green fled Paris in July 1940, after the French surrender, with Saint-Jean. In the United States he worked for the Office of War Information, broadcasting to occupied France via the Voice of America — the American writing in French, finally useful for being both. In 1942 he published *Memories of Happy Days*, a memoir of France that has been called one of the most innately beautiful American books on the subject; it won the Harper Prize that year. He returned to France in September 1945.

The Academy's First Foreigner

On 3 June 1971 Green was elected to the Académie française to succeed François Mauriac, the first non-French national in the institution's history to take a seat. He delivered his inaugural lecture on 16 November 1972. The honours accumulated around him: the Prince Pierre of Monaco Literary Prize in 1951, the Académie's own Grand Prix for Literature in 1970, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972, the Polish Grand Prize for Literature in 1988. In 1983 he published a life of St Francis of Assisi, an unexpected late turn toward hagiography by a man who had spent five decades writing about damnation.

Why Julien Is Called a Genius

The distinctive capacity here is linguistic and psychological rather than inventive. Green wrote French of a purity that the French themselves rewarded with their highest institutional honour — the Académie's Grand Prix, then a chair — while remaining, by his own insistence, an American who had never surrendered his citizenship. That is not bilingualism; it is the rarer thing of possessing a literary language from the outside and using the outsider's ear to hear what natives no longer notice. Combined with it is an unusual gift for sustained interior observation: the novels and the *Journal* together constitute one of the longest continuous records in modern literature of a mind examining its own division between desire and belief.

The counter-case has two parts, and both matter. First, the achievement is narrow by design. Green wrote essentially one story — the soul trapped between flesh and spirit inside a suffocating family — and wrote it repeatedly across seventy years; readers who do not respond to that story find little else on offer. Second, the moral authority he enjoyed in Catholic France rested partly on a public account of his own life that the 2019 journals show to have been managed. That does not diminish the prose. It does mean the figure venerated as a model of righteousness was, in some measure, a construction, and the honest reading of Green now has to hold the censored and uncensored texts together.

Legacy

Green died in Paris on 13 August 1998, aged ninety-seven, having outlived nearly everyone who had elected him. His adopted son, the writer Éric Jourdan, served as his executor. He is buried not in France or Georgia but in the Sankt Egid church in Klagenfurt, Austria, in a chapel decorated with a painting he commissioned — a final refusal to be claimed by either of his countries, and entirely in character for a man who spent a lifetime insisting he belonged to both and neither.