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.