Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

PORTRAIT by Jackson McCarthy (Auckland University Press, $NZ30) ;  SALT QUILT  by Airini Beautrais  (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ30:00 ); WATCHING TELEVISION IN A LOVE MOTEL by Haro Lee (Te Herenga Waka University Press $NZ30:00 )

 

In his debut collection, Jackson McCarthy deals with loneliness, love, memory and the city. Being part Lebanese, Maori and Pakeha, he has a unique view of New Zealand. It could almost be called romantic in places with many references to the night moon; but he is also a realist and there is a strong thread of gayness in his work. His poem Adam begins “ I met my first man on a bleak street. / Chaos like night surrounded us, dark / but possible, semipermeable. I had been / walking a long while…” Some of his poems are about being rejected, but some are about idolising men as in the poem Love your messy hair spell when he is seeing a man who is “Like a dumber blonder Saint Sebastian / but less tortured and really happy / to see me. O swallow me whole / like Time goes, then conquer Time / with your classical beauty!” But then there are poems about tragedy as in the poem The Lake where a young man commits suicide. As for the poem Uniform, he is warned that he is vulnerable. Gathered together are four poems called The Father which looks carefully at how a father might think. Death, nostalgia and the human body are examined often, but the finale called Song speaks of distant sorrow. Its last stanza says “My cousins in Beirut can feel / the terror in the air, I go on / with so little left to speak; listen / to my heart, these songs / of loss I write while I / cannot hear the bombs”.  The delicate language McCarthy can use, the careful use of structure in his prosody and the earnestness of his ideas makes Portrait one of the year’s best.

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Salt Quilt is a very full collection. But what is a Salt Quilt, the title of Airini Beautrais latest collection? It is all the things that we remember and how we change over the years. Memory is a major part of Beautrais’ interests. Cancer Moon : Poet Life, all nearly 23 pages of neat four-line stanzas, goes through her whole life as a poet from childhood to high school to university to being a teacher to performing in festivals and other gatherings and getting published. And all the while she finds it hard to explain what poetry really is. She ends by saying “I have tutu’d with its conceits. / I have been through its bookshelves. I have slept beside it / I still don’t know what it really is.” Poetry can be many things. Sometimes she is chastising. A poem like “Mantoum” suggests that when she was young she had a devil-may-care attitude and at the same time telling us that she was angry when she is criticised. The poem “ Doll Girl” gives a caution to young girls who over-do their make-up and grow out of it. “Pretty” says “It’s hard for pretty girls when they get old / Plain girls are used to standing in the cold/ Are used to entering a room unseen/ And keeping notebooks filled with silent spleen  / Hands warming all the lonely drinks we hold”. The poem “Swingball” in a way suggests that she makes her way towards a family. Her most thoughtful poem is “An Analysis of Power” where she looks at how the country has changed and where she asks “What will be the artefacts of our age? / Of systems gambled beyond means? The abandoned page.  / Vouchers that couldn’t be spent. Inexplicable machines.  / The city that glowed by night. All the messages sent from satellite  /and cell-phone tower  / but everything’s just a whiteout /  without an analysis of power.” Yes, there is some irony. Look at the poem “What was left in my house”. Many readers could agree that junk accumulates too much. And “Sisters” gives a very wry account of how people behave at or after a funeral . Capping all this there is a pacifist poem, “Ending Song” which advises “We who are weary, spent, in doubt, / we who have hoped the world could be better, /we who have opened the dreaded letter, /whose brightest stars have been put out, / pause at the news an end has come.”  Truly a remarkable collection.

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            Haro Lee is of a South Korean family and often remembers her parents and the country they came from. She was born and raised in Tamaki, Auckland, and has been a teacher. She divides the first collection as Day Time Television, Primetime Television and Late Night Television, and her opening poem “Theme Song from the Living Room” has a girl watching television with a grandmother, soap operas, cartoons, sitcoms, “the terrible laughter rattling within its tin cans” and other inane things. She moves on to telling us about her teenage years, kids misbehaving, maybe drugs. She visits America. In Colorado [if it is indeed her] she seems to be in love. It gives us one of her best tropes “The mechanical valve turning so beautifully its gears, / and clockwork drumming a song  / from its throat. How wonderful / from its throat. How wonderful / is the warmth of your hand in mine. Proof / of blood delivering its oxygen./   The bird in your chest is working so hard. of blood delivering its oxygen.” Her narrative moves through many parts of the United States - Colorado, Seattle etc. and at the “Happy Meal Thoughts past the Drive-Thru” there is a moment when she is dealing with her lover but “grief of work when I am tired  / because I made a mistake /  and if it were anyone else, I’d just  / tell them, it’s okay, it’s okay, /  and how I break my own heart when I  / talk to someone /  and I’d talk to them again  / but they can walk away /  and how I remember you hesitating /  /  to hear my wicked past / and to speak yours too. Though / now I need permission to continue / and trust in time it will get better. / Forget you. Love you / but leave you behind. And all this sorrow / swells in me like euphoria.”  There follow poems where things do not go well and romance seems a fraud. Yet in all this, we are not sure whether poet is writing about herself. In her poem “Needing Religion at Nineteen” we wonder if she has tongue-in-cheek when she writes “That through all the / grief and heartache and many mistakes, / there was a little bit of sweetness. / So maybe water never turned into wine. / Jesus would still love a whore like me.” Finally we are given “Graveyard Slot” in which, over 40 pages, we hear not only parts of her own biography, but even more about the lives of her forebears and parents. For some time they lived in a poor neighbourhood in Noryangjin, Seoul. This is mainly a prose narrative and it reads clearly as a sort of documentary. It reveals a lot.

Something Old

    Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago. 

MONSIEUR OUINE by Georges Bernanos [First published in 1943] First published in English in 1945 as The Open Mind.

 

When I set out to read all of the novels by Georges Bernanos I hoped that it would be an easy task; but, as I read my way through them, I found it was sometimes a very difficult chore. The most difficult was Les Tenebres [Joy], which seemed to be mainly made of philosophical conversations. And now I hit Monsieur Ouine, which is also something of an enigma. Some context: Bernanos spent nine years, on and off, writing Monsieur Ouine. It took him so long because he was preoccupied with other matters. First, he was more and more aware of growing nihilism and Nazism and Communism. Then he wrote his long polemic Les Grands Cimetieres Sous La Lune condemning the violence Franco used in the Spanish Civil War. And as the Second World War developed he wrote a number of long essays calling for real democracy. He was still living in Brazil and one of his sons had joined the Free French. Monsieur Ouine was published quite quickly in England after it had been published in French, partly because he had stood out against those in France who collaborated with the Nazis. But his tone was often pessimistic.

Monsieur Ouine is difficult to read for a number of reasons. First, as many reviewers have pointed out, there are too many characters who disappear after having being introduced for no purpose. Second, there are deaths, some of which involve murder… but in many cases we are never told how or why or who committed the crime. Bernanos seems to have wanted to round it up after dealing with it for too long. The novel is set in the very north of France, bordering Flanders, in a very small town called Fenouille; so some characters can still speak the Flemish language but they speak French. There is also something different from Bernanos’s novels. In his two best-known novels, Sous le Soleil de Satan and The Diary of a Country Priest the major character is a priest who does his best to help and encourage his flock, even though they often ignore him. In Monsieur Ouine there is a priest, but he is not the main character and he is both pessimistic and hoping he will soon be sent somewhere else.

So to a brief synopsis. Philip – often nicknamed Steeny – is an angry 14-year-old boy. Naturally he is interested in girls but his romantic attempts don’t go far. He is more angry because his mother died early and he has been given different ideas as to where his father had gone - was he killed in the [First] World War… and later gossipers say that his father went mad in a psychiatric hospital. So Steeny has to live with distant cousins – mainly old women and others who hang-on. He hates it. 

 

Monsieur Ouine is a retired professor of foreign languages who lives with some eccentrics, like the old rake Anthelme. Monsieur Ouine has never married and has no cousins or family of any sort. But he always notes what people are doing and acts as if he is a sort of philosopher. Steeny sometime talks with him. It is Monsieur Ouine who talks to Steeny about death. He says “I’m going to teach you to love death… Death is so rich! A reasonable man discovers in death all the things which our shame and fear prevent us from asking anywhere else – even initiation into pleasure!... Remember this: you will love death! Indeed I fear the day may come when death will be your only love. If my poor bare little room has seemed so agreeable to you, it is precisely because death inhabits here. You have come to rest in her shadow without knowing it.”   

Later, a small child – a cow herd - is found dead in the bushes. Enter Dr. Malepine with, as usual, his sceptic swagger – he examines the child’s body as the fat and lecher Mayor Arsene and his wife Malvina watch. The child has clearly been murdered. An old woman who spreads gossip says that one of the people living with Monsieur Ouine had told her that Monsieur Ouine had something to do with the death. Gossip raves on and prejudice grows, but more thoughtful people are not sure.

At this time, Ginette, a middle-aged women, tells Steeny what she thinks about Monsieur Ouine. And another older woman, Daisy, gives Steeny a persuasive talk about his foolish ideas about women, making it clear to him that too many men think women are simply there to be used or ruled.

We also learn about the Flemish family lead by an old man – a rather ruthless one – who is nicknamed The Old ‘Un. His son Eugene is under a warrant of arrest for other crimes. Was it likely that he was the killer? But confusingly Bernanos frames it so that he could be referring to many misdemeanours. Are there other deaths? At any rate, Eugene’s girlfriend shoots him.

So far, the priest is rarely seen in this novel, apart from some bantering with Monsieur Ouine. Nobody ever goes to mass, but letters have been sent to the priest with their ideas of who had killed whom. The priest hands the letters over to Monsieur Ouine. But looking about this, on his own, Monsieur Ouine sees nothing as “the presence of human beings had never meant to him help or friendliness, but any coming-together filled him with vague uneasy disgust, the secret of which he could never confide…” He basically does not like most of the human race and avoids as many people as he can. Yet he has many ideas which he wants to pass to others.

And so there is what I regard as the climax of this novel. The little cowherd is being buried and there is a ceremony in the church. For the first time the peasants, the doctor and the few well-to-do attend the mass, but the priest does not give a comforting homily. Instead he condemns the congregation for their gossiping, their lack of charity, their back-biting and their lack of care. After this the Mayor and the Chief Inspector of Schools give their own secular pompous orations. The listening crowd are not impressed… at which point there rushes in an eccentric woman – her official name is Mlle. de Wambescourt, but everybody rudely calls her “Woolly-Legs”. She is notorious for seducing young men and she rides around madly on her horse. When she buts into the orations people throw lumps of dirt at her and chase her and almost kill her.

And so to the long aftermath. The doctor and the priest discuss what has happened. The Mayor realises that his oration was nonsense. The priest politely tells the Mayor that he did well in the circumstances and he admits that his own homily was very flawed. There is a long passage in which the doctor asserts that science and reason will save the world; but the priest says that without faith, more destructive things will come . [Remember Bernanos was writing when the Second World War was going in full blast… and clever scientists were producing more and more weapons of destruction…]

Young Steeny becomes less angry about the world  - a sign  that he is growing up as teenagers gradually  do.

But the last three chapters are focused on Monsieur Ouine. He is sick and dying. In his last words he says what amounts to his confessions. “I have opened myself, to nothing. I was a mere orifice, an intake, a swallowing up, both my body and my soul wide open to all sides. Among the many pastures from which I could choose, smothered like an ox in provender… and at times repellent, and usually despised by fools… I made no substance, either good or evil, one with myself. My soul is no more than a leather pottle full of wind.”. These are almost his last words.

Now what are we to make of all this? It has been pointed out by a number of reviewers that the name Ouine could be read as  oui /non i.e, yes /no. In other words Monsieur Ouine is the type of intellectual who knows much but who never settles down to any stable idea. I take a guess [and only a guess] here but I wonder if Bernanos was decrying those in France during the Second World War who sat back and did not take sides…. Or possibly Bernanos saw Monsieur Ouine simply as a force of evil.

As I repeat, this novel is very difficult to read, with all the changes of characters and the uncertain ideas. There are moments of brilliance, but it is not one that I would give to somebody who wanted to know about the works of Georges Bernanos.

 

Something Thoughful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

A MOMENT OF FEAR  

It was my good wife who brought it up. She said Matariki was on its way and  Matariki was the season when we should greet and meet our children and friends who live outside Auckland. She suggested that it would be good to drive from Auckland to Wellington. And we did. We booked a place to sleep down south [in the Hutt]. After packing and all the bother of making sure that the house was being looked-after, we first had our night’s sleep then, at five in the morning, we were on our way, me taking the wheel. The night was pitch-black, but at that time there were endless cars and trucks heading out of Auckland on their way to Hamilton and further south. Of course we merrily listen to jazz music and some pod-casts as we went along. My good wife took the wheel at Lake Taupo ; then I took over when near Mt. Ruapehu; then we stopped for lunch at Bulls; then she drove the rest of the way to the Hutt… and we were bushed and tired and slept a little at the motel. It was a long haul taking up the whole day.

Our four days in the Hutt and Wellington was a great success – visiting my wife’s cousin in Paekakariki; joining our eldest son and his wife in looking at the modern Maori paintings in Porirua; joining up with the daughter of another son; having lunch with another cousin of my wife; visiting the widower of one of my brothers; and having lunch with my eldest brother and his wife. Mission accomplished. The bonus was that the weather was good when we were in Wellington despite the wind.

So, you ask, where was the moment of fear? It came when I was driving along the so-called Desert Road. We were on our way back to Auckland. No problem there, but once we were past the Desert Road we hit thick fog and – if you know the terrain -  you will know that the road and the hills that follow twist, go down, go up, and make sharp turns. From where I was sitting the fog meant that I could see only a yard or so in front of me. So naturally I slowed down, gritted my teeth and drove reasonably slowly. In itself this was difficult. On the rare occasions when there were laybys I would pull over and let some cars overtake us… but, the fog being so thick, I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to go faster than I was driving. Some drivers behind us did what we did -  pull over to the laybys – but there were a number who thought they had to go faster as if they were in a race. This was where the fear came in. Why, I wonder, do some drive faster when they don’t have to? I doubt if any had some urgent event they had to reach.

The fog cleared after the hills were past. We slept a night in a motel, and then happily drove our way back to Auckland.     

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“STAKES – Dracula and the secret to happiness” by Noelle McCarthy   (Penguin $NZ40)

Before I get to the reviewing part I have to say that Stakes is an excellent and very readable book. Noelle McCarthy writes with gusto and she has a unique way of expressing herself – dare I say it’s a very Irish way with some of the country’s patois. She’s no damned fool either. When it comes to writing about 19^th century books she has done her research and she is right about the way women were treated – often badly. But there was one thing that confused me. In her first book Grand – Becoming My Mother’s Daughter [reviewed on this blog] she told us about her alcoholism and coming out of it and settling in New Zealand, Auckland. She also told us about her time working on New Zealand Radio. But when we come to Stakes, we are not sure where and when these events were. This is a very little gripe.

So to the tale itself.

When she was a young teenager, living in Cork, she read Gothic stories and she became obsessed with Dracula. Indeed she saw Dracula as romantic. She left her window open and dreamed that Dracula might one night ravish her. She has very romantic ideas as when she says: [Pg 24]. “I stared at the path from the top of the rock to the sun hanging over the edge of the horizon, and I felt a longing so strong, it filled my mouth with saliva. I wanted to walk that golden track, out over the smooth water right up into the sunshine and be transformed by it, turned by something magical. I didn’t care what, a mermaid, a see beast,  a flying angel. I wanted to be taken from this body, this version of myself, into the free thing I always should have been.”  This was of course hormones buzzing and youthful desire. A little further on, she got on with boys and more or less looked for sex. She read more Gothic stories. Much snogging, much petting, many details about almost loosing knickers and she heard about girl friends who had had sex [or could it be bravado?].  Somewhere around 15-years-of-age she lost her virginity apparently with a fellow called Daniel. [N.B. An author’s note tells us that, apart from her husband, all the men in Noelle’s book are ”composites”.] She is not overwhelmed by this first swive. [Pg.53] “I have a moment to think, why am I not as moved as moved him? Why am I not on the edge of crying? I lie in the dark with my eyes closed, taking in the new sensations of being next to someone I’ve just had sex with. This is going to happen with other people, the thought comes to me. Boys from college I haven’t even met yet. I will have sex and lie in the dark, and I’ll hear them breathing next to me. And then I push the thought from my mind, appalled by my own disloyalty.” When she goes to university she parties a lot and she has sex with a number of young men. She breaks up with Daniel. But she is serious in her study. She is interested in a lecture about how women were treated in 19^th century novels – almost seen as angels, though often seen as waiting to be ravished. She takes some time off to visit her friend Bernadette who is working in London [as a barmaid]. She picks up another boyfriend called Michael and they cohabit… and then she goes back to see her mother, who drinks a lot just as Noelle does. She learns about how her mother was a nurse and how she used to work in a psychiatric ward. And she is more aware that there is much about her mother’s life that she does not know.

She finishes her university time, having done very well. She writes about 19^th century Ireland. She is still interested in Gothic literature… and Dracula. When she goes to London she links up with friends and enjoys walking around with them around the streets where Jack the Ripper did his work. She works at a counter for a while… and she decides that she wants to leave Ireland.

Noelle first goes to Australia then moves to New Zealand, settling in Auckland. She has an affair with a guy, “Eric”, who is married. She finds a number of jobs in Auckland, but she loses many jobs because she is often drunk and hungover. The alcohol has caught up with her. So at last, with the help of others, she slowly gives up the booze. But there is loneliness now that she has dropped “Eric”. (Pg. 140]. She thinks “My life is small, manageable, contained. It is not so much that I like sobriety as that it is working. Nobody cares that I’ve stopped drinking. It doesn’t make one bit of difference to anyone else.” There is still the temptation to go back to drinking But she also says (Pg. 143] “ I have no problem coming back to the idea of the sinfulness I was born with. I am an alcoholic, inherently flawed, inherently weak. I am powerless over drinking, over the cavernous screaming want inside me.”… But she does still manage to be dry. She decides to go back to Ireland for a while; and there she is able to get work as a free-lance journalist. Still in awe of Dracula, she begins to write her own Gothic novel about vampires. She is very earnest about it and speaks to friends about it… but gradually she understands that it is not working and she lets it go. Even so she goes with some of her family – mother and father etc. – to places where Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, had lived and been interested in ancient castles and ruins. When she goes to Dublin, looking at all the places where Stoker lived and worked, she is more aware that Stoker was not really Irish but rather “Anglo-Irish”, meaning those English who had taken over parts of Ireland.

She is still interested in the ancient times of Ireland. With an archaeologist examining barbaric medieval things, she learns about the way children were mistreated and buried. At the same time she becomes more disenchanted by the Anglo-Irish writers who wrote about the Irish as if they were an inferior species … and she goes back to New Zealand. So she is now back doing work on New Zealand Radio… and she writes articles, including one about how young women want to be models: but they are often exploited and misused by photographers who want sex. She thinks about her life now that she has John and they have a baby and there is responsibility. She is now in her forties. And on the whole she no longer sees vampires as glamorous. They were really versions of men who exploited young women. She thinks about Ireland as it now is. It has changed considerably. There was a referendum in favour of making abortion legal which was once unthinkable in Ireland. There was the scandal when, under the supervision by nuns, many girls and young women were kept in the “homes” until they died. Even worse were “homes” that were run by nuns who took in “illegitimate” new-born children… and research recently showed that many hundreds of new-borns died early and were buried without names. The status of the church plummeted.

And Noelle looks once again at her mother. She now knows that her mother was deprived of her real training as a nurse. She now also knows that – before Noelle was born – her mother had a child out of wedlock, and the baby was adopted out. Noelle feels that she has missed having a sister; and she diligently went though the records to find out where this sister now was. She finally finds her. Her name is Janet. Janet dies . She writes [Pg. 260] “I do not know that I really believed in Dracula, a long pale man with no refection and gleaming teeth. I don’t know that I believed if I left the bedroom window open, he’d actually come in. I believe in death though, the photos on my dresser: Mammy with her dahlia, and Janet grinning in the café the last time I met her.”

Footnote: My wife, who is of distant Irish descent, has already told me off for just giving you a synopsis rather than passing judgment in detail. Sorry for that. Must admit though that Noelle’s teenage and young adult life almost seems like Molly Bloom or Edna O’Brien. Are all Irish girls like that? And once again, Noelle has written a great book.

 

 

 

Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago. 

JOURNAL D’UN CURE DE CAMPAGNE by Georges Bernanos [First published in 1936] First published in English in 1937 as The Diary of a Country Priest.

 

There is no doubt that Journal D’un Cure de Campagne is the most widely read of all Bernanos’s novels. As soon as it was published, it was seen as Bernanos’s masterpiece. He was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Academie Francaise and the novel is still being published, not only in French but in many languages. Years after Bernanos died, Journal D’un Cure de Campagne was made into a film by Robert Bresson, very true to the novel but of course missing much of the priest’s thoughts. As the title tells us, this novel is written in the first person. What we read is what the priest thinks and writes. He has decided to write his diary during one year. This means a degree of artificial language presented by the priest when he gives us verbatim accounts of conversations he has had, but this is a common way of presenting conversations in novels. An alert reader will also be aware that the novel was written after the First World War, when many French people had memories of great loss.

 

The priest [who is not given a name] is a young man, about thirty-years-old. He has been directed to Ambricourt to be in charge of a parish. His church is a small church that was built in the 15^th century. We are aware from the beginning of the novel that the young priest is in poor health. Is he perhaps suffering from tuberculosis or some other complaint? He has been in a sanatorium. His opening words are “My parish is just like all the rest. They are all alike. Those of today I mean… good and evil are probably evenly distributed…”  He is aware that priests are not frivolous, but he is sometimes annoyed when priests are being too interested in pointless anecdotes. Some older priests see him as naïve.  He soon knows that the land he has been sent to is flat and the surrounding fields are usually wet. He makes it clear that he himself came from peasant stock and he was not used to the upper classes. In fact his father owned a rather shabby pub and he often heard fights going on. When he was quite young he had read and admired Maxim Gorky’s account of his impoverished childhood. He has little money to feed himself but sometimes his Aunt Philomene sends him some money. His superior, who often speaks to him, is the Cure de Torcy who seems very worldly and at first the young priest thinks the Cure de Torcy is too interested in keeping order rather than looking after his flock. But he soon understands that his superior knows more than he thought. The Cure de Torcy talks about the decay of the church, how fewer people go to mass and some people go to confession only as a formality. But he also makes it clear that his mission is to look after people, even if they are rough, even if they are uncouth. Referring to the Nativity, the Cure de Torcy says “Bring down fresh straw for the ox, give the ass a rub down”. The message is that nobody is to be looked down upon, even the poorest … and at the same time, the wealthy have to be looked after in a different way. Later the Cure de Torcy gives to the young priest the most compelling lecture about poverty and their duty to always look after the poor. The young priest seems at first not to know how most people get their food. So the young priest writes in his diary “I have undertaken to visit each family once every three months at least. My colleagues consider this excessive, and indeed such a promise will be hard to keep, since first and foremost I must not neglect a single duty. People who set themselves up to judge us from some remote distance, sitting in a comfortable office where they do the same routine tasks every day, cannot begin to realize how ‘untidy’, how scattered our daily work can be. We can barely manage our ordinary parochial round, the kind of thing which – when it is strictly carried out – makes a superior to exclaim ‘That’s a nice well-kept parish!’ There remains the unforeseen. And the unforeseen is never negligible. Am I where Our Lord would have me be? Twenty times a day I ask this question..”

 

The young priest naturally has to deal with mundane things which are part of his work. He has to teach children the catechism… but they are often disrupted by an annoying little girl called Seraphita who learns her lessons very well but who often makes fun of him for the amusement of other children…. Yet much later in the novel it is annoying Seraphita who helps him when he is nearly lost. Of course he says mass regularly even if few are there; and he hears confession. There are other things that he does not fully understand. The Dean of Blangermont tells him off for not keeping accounts properly. He also tells him that he should not ridicule the rich and the middle-classes as they are also the backbone of the country.

Which brings us to that matter of the wealthy. The young priest has to deal with the people who live in the Chateau and he visits them.  Mlle. Louse is the governess at the Chateau. M. le Comte owns many farms… and he is apparently promiscuous… yet he gets on well enough with most priests … though the young priest sees him as shallow. Mlle. Chantal  - a young girl – hates her mother because she thinks her mother is the cause of the death of her brother. And Mlle. la Comtesse worries about both her husband and her daughter. The young priest has a hard time trying to speak with them.

The young priest becomes very sick and it is a Dr. Delbende who examines him. Dr. Delbende is a man who likes shooting in the fields. He explains why he is not a Christian – he is an atheist. He talks about unnecessary pain and gives the priest some pain-killing drugs. This does ease the priest for some time, and he is told that he should eat more as he has almost been starving himself… And then Dr. Delbende is found dead in the fields where he is said to have had his gun caught in a bush and it killed him. Surprisingly Dr. Delbende was a good friend of the  Cure de Torcy. The young priest suggests that the doctor might have committed suicide. The Cure de Torcy says “God is the sole judge” and says Dr. Delbende was “a just man”. At the very least, it is a warning about underrating people instead of being charitable. It leads the young priest to reflect on his own flaws. “No, I have not lost my faith. The cruelty of this test, its devastation, like a thunderbolt, and so inexplicable, may have shattered  my reason and my nerves, may have withered suddenly within me the joy of prayer – perhaps for ever, who can tell? – may have filled me to the very brim with a dark, more terrible resignation with the worst convulsions of despair… but my faith is still whole for I can feel it….” This is a stage when the young priest has doubts about his calling… and he is sent an  anonymous letter telling him to leave the parish. It could be anyone. Maybe  it could be a very angry woman called Mm. Ferrand who thinks something has been stolen from her… but it could be anyone. He is aware of evil in human beings.

At the Chateau, Mlle. Chantal continues to hate her mother. She believes that Mlle. la Comtesse was the source of her brother’s death and she therefore always sides with her father. Whenever the young priest visits the Chateau to talk with her mother, Chantal tries to eavesdrop on their conversation.  The young priest takes it upon himself to have a long conversation with the Comtesse. She has lost her faith in God. Although he is essentially a peasant and she is an aristocrat, he is able to get her to accept her daughter and understand her daughter’s anguish, right or wrong. She also again understands the workings of God. This is the longest conversation in the novel and it is very persuading. The young priest has spoken carefully and the old Comtesse also speaks carefully and intelligently. At first he thinks he has done something brilliant… and then he understands that pride is eating him up. His duty is to help and guide people, not to admire himself. More prayer is needed.

There is more trouble ahead. The old Comtesse dies. The Canon [the superior of the priests] says that M. le Comte wants the young priest to write an account of his conversation with the Comtesse. After all, it was only a conversation; not the hearing of confession. But the young priest cannot do it. He regards the conversation as personal and almost the same as  confession. The Comte is angry because he had hoped the priest would have heard about how much money the Comtesse had; and he was also annoyed because the priest has spoken to his angry daughter. Chantal has tried to compromise the priest, but it did not work.…There are always problems with the rich.

Later, showing how difficult a priest’s life can be, the young priest has a conversation with a peasant who says that many people think he is too precise and fancy in his work; and warns him that he does not eat enough and he is fading away. Once again the Cure de Torcy  tells him about what is needed to be a priest. On his own, the young priest thinks “We’re all called to the priesthood, I agree, but not always in the same way. So to get things straight I start off my taking each one of us back where he belonged in Holy Writ. It makes us a couple o’ thousand years younger, but what of it? Time does not worry our Lord, He sees right the way through. I tell myself that long before we were born – from a human point of view – Jesus met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, or perhaps Nazareth, or along the road to Galilee – anywhere. And one day among all the other days, His eyes happened to rest upon you and me, and so we were called, each in his own particular way… This isn’t theology I’m preaching… It’s simply my own imagination … it amounts to this: if the unforgetting soul in us, which remembers us eternally…” and here the young priest falls into thinks of his own situation.

He is more and more aware of his sickness. His nose is often bleeding  As he walks though the forest he thirsts for a drink of water. It is Seraphita who gives it to him. She has matured… or is he realising that there is good even in people who are flawed. He thinks about the way he prays. “Of course I am ‘praying better’ . But I no longer recognize my prayers.”

He now has to go to Lille to be seen by a Dr. Lavigne. On his way there, a young soldier gives him a ride and he has very different attitudes from those of the priest. The young soldier is annoyed with the Church as it is not as strong as it used to be and it is not as nationalistic as it used to be. He pines for the likes of Joan of Arc. He is not aggressive when he talks with the priest, but he believes that the Church has collapsed… and when the drive ends, the young soldier is courteous. [ Here I think Georges Bernanos is giving a warning about those who confuse Christianity with nationality. As a priest should know, nationalism is not his calling.]

Dr. Lavigne examines him.  Dr. Lavigne was once a morphine addict. He is an atheist as many doctors are; but nevertheless he is a very good doctor. He is able to show that the priest is not suffering from tuberculosis. What is slowly killing him is cancer of the gut… And now the priest has to consider what he can do in what will be his last days. One of the last people he speaks to is a poor working woman who says she is getting on even if she has little. He considers what he has done in his one year. Most of his parishioners have scorned him or have ignored him. His growing pain is slowly killing him. Yet something inside him says that he has seen good people, those who have helped him even if they weren’t really Christians; those who were growing; and he knows that he has done some good. Before he dies, his last words are “Grace is everywhere”. Nobody is to be scorned

Something Thougthful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

          WHERE CAN I FIND A SECOND-HAND BOOK SHOP? [or shouldn’t I bother?]

In days of old (by which I mean about twenty years ago) I was addicted to buying second-hand books. Very well, I am a bibliophile and about a quarter of the books I have on my shelves are books that I have bought from second-hand-book shops. But I was very choosy and bought only books that meant something. I made it a law to avoid the latest “best-sellers” which are usually trite. So, back then, when the week’s work was over and it was Saturday, I would catch a bus from the North Shore and go to central Auckland. In those days there were about five second-hand-book shops in central Auckland, so I would wander around those shops. They were just off  Queen’s Street. Then there was Ponsonby where there was an excellent second-hand-book shop run by a thoughtful man called Bryan Harold. I bought quite a number books from him. And very, very occasionally I would hop into my car and go to Onehunga, where there was another very good second-hand-book shop. And once or twice I went to Devonport where there were two competing second-hand-book shops. There where an abundant number of second-hand-book shops in Auckland .

And then one day I went into Bryan Harold’s shop and he was very gloomy. The rates had been raised so high that he could not pay them, and he had to close shop. He went down south, very far away from Auckland. And then the people who ran the Onehunga second-hand-book shop also had to close-up… but the priests who ran St. Benedict’s church allowed them to set up a second-hand-book shop in rooms where nuns had once taught children. For a number of years it worked. But bit by bit, second-hand-book shops disappeared in central Auckland. Yes, you can find small second-hand-book shops in some suburbs but they are mainly short of stock. In central Auckland there are some traders who offer very expensive first editions, which really can be bought only by the rich. So what is left if you are a bibliophile in Auckland looking for old but thoughtful books? You have to go the Book Mark in Devonport. I hasten to note that it is a very good second-hand-book shop and I usually have a good chat with the owner.  … At which point I have to admit that, as well as buying old books sometimes, I also sell new books to owners of second-hand-book shops. If you read this blog at all, you will be aware that I review new books – some of which are just off the print – but I do so very rarely.

But here is another problem.  Devonport is a charming place, but there is one difficulty. There is only one main road that leads to Devonport; and sometimes, every so often, when one drives back home, there maybe a long traffic jam. some visitors curse that they had gone there at all.

Meanwhile, second-hand-books shops thrive in other parts of New Zealand – especially in Wellington and Dunedin but also in smaller cities. My wife’s cousin Michael O’Leary runs a second-hand-books shop near to Wellington and I am glad to hear that Bryan Harold now runs a second-hand-books shop in the South Island.

Footnote: Many people have told me that Aucklanders prefer to buy their second-hand-books by getting them on line… you send the money and the book is sent to you. But this takes away the delight of being able to walk around a real second-hand-books shop and discover books that you had never heard of. And it’s a good place to chat with other bibliophiles.