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.  

THE DEFINITIVE JUDGEMENT OF GEORGES BERNANOS’S WORKS                                            [No other judgement will be accepted.]

 

 For the last nine weeks I have read my way through all the novels by Georges Bernanos with one exception – the first novel he wrote, L’Imposture, appaired in 1927. It was about a priest who had lost his faith and set out to recover it. Regrettably I was not able to find a copy of this novel. But I did read and commented on all his other seven novels. To give my own view of this novels, it goes like this:  Sous le Soleil de Satan (Star of Satan),             Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette (Mouchette) and his masterpiece Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (The Diary of a Country Priest) are his three most readable novels, all of them dealing with mis-treated women, a lack of charity and a need for saintly help. (Priests are essential in two of these novels.).   Un Crime (A Crime) is lighter, being a whodunnit, very readable but also laced with religious ideas.  The two most difficult of his novels to read are Les Tenebres (Joy) and Monsieur Ouine (The Open Mind), the first riding on long philosophical conversations and the second being filled with characters who come and go for little reason.   As for Un Mauvais Reve (Night is Darkest), his posthumous novel, it is often reviled because it was not polished before he died; but I champion it because it is the only novel in which Bernanos not only criticised himself but he also looked at the young Parisian men who have big ideas of themselves but go nowhere - the tale of nihilism.

So much for my round-up of Bernanos’s novels. But there was much more to the man. To begin with there were the many other non-fiction books he wrote. Most famously was his Les Grande Cimetieres Sous la Lune, in which he condemned the violence and murder Franco was using in the Spanish Civil War. Then there were the many historical books that he wrote, two of the most thoughtful being The Great Fear [about what happened during the French Revolution] and Joan of France. He wrote his play Dialogues Des Carmelites, about the murdering of nuns in the era of The Terror. Later it was turned into an opera by Poulenc.

Bernanos, still living in Brazil, wrote very long essays during the Second World War, aimed at making sense about what was going on in France and other parts of Europe. Letters to the English was published in December 1940. Letters to the Americans was published in September 1941. Letters to the Europeans was published in November 1941. Overall these essays were made part of his Plea for Liberty, hoping that Europe would become democratic but also preserving its traditions. But after the end the Second  World War he had to write what was the most and difficult long essay Reflexions sur le Conscience Francais, in which he had to deal with how there had been heroes and partisans in France, but there had also been many French collaborators and members of the Vichy regime… and the mass of the French simply hoped for the best and sat back.

To put it simply – Bernanos had some ideas on the importance of France, but he was not so deluded as to imagine that France was unique in its many flaws. He was equally aware of the importance of religion. But, if you have been annoyed by the many religious matters in his novels – and especially the Catholic ideas – he at no time said his priests were perfect, and you can find in his novels corrupted priests.