Mauriac's Latest or Last?
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Mauriac's Latest or Last?_ Maltaverne By Francois Mauriac Farrar, Straus and Giroux 195 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature"; author, "The Writer and...
...Or is it some other kind of continuum, with the changing views and memories, even the fantasies of the remembering participant, necessary constituents...
...As Alain's journal progresses we recognize an increasing preoccupation with the past, and realize that his view of it is changing constantly...
...Mauriac already in his ninth decade and still publishing novels that would stand on their own merits as notable books, even if he were not by now France's Grand Old Man of Letters...
...Simon's parents are dependent on Alain's family...
...Yet one is inclined to doubt this, to believe that if Mauriac continues to live, he will continue to write...
...Maltaveme consists entirely of Alain's diary, written at the behest of a friend (who never appears in the book) as a kind of exercise in exploring his spiritual landscape...
...The substance of the novel is his liberation from this ancestral obsession with the soil...
...The "long ago" is the time of Mauriac's youth, and there is an odd suggestiveness about the fact that Alain, writing his diary before 1914, looks forward to the day when at 80 he "will still be the same person that I am now, while some child-poet in 1970 will watch him from a distance...
...Is it simply a sum of events...
...If Maltaveme is indeed Mauriac's last book, it is a worthy termination of a career that has shown in exemplary manner how the singular life of a minute region, carefully observed and passionately transmuted, can present the universalities of human existence...
...Alain's decision is in part a generational liberation from an overbearing mother...
...the boys grow up in the equivocal intimacy of playmates who realize the difference in their social standings...
...While developing it, Mauriac plays a number of ironic games with his readers...
...His relationship with Marie????A girl with a past?plays a catalytic role, but she is really less important to Alain's maturation than is Simon, a peasant boy turned seminarist, turned infidel, and then reconciled with the church...
...His Catholicism, rather than making him a reactionary of the Maurras breed, became the foundation of a morality as sensitive to questions of justice and compassion in the modern world as that of Georges Bernanos or Graham Greene...
...despite their almost Jansenist pietism, it is the land and not the Lord that ultimately claims their love...
...Yet Mauriac the novelist has always remained the interpreter of a very limited region, and of a very small class within that region...
...It is the power to raise such questions and make them urgent to a reader that marks an author's continuing vitality...
...In France's crisis of conscience over Algeria, he actually stood more clearly on the side of progress than Camus with his divided loyalties...
...In this novel, as in the novels that made him famous, he writes about Bordeaux and the pine-forested remoteness of the landes to the south of it, from which he and his forebears derived...
...Certain events exist in total solidity????the death of the girl, the death of Alain's brother his relationship with Marie????but the past in which they alone stand as fixed points is mutable...
...Sometimes he even reports an incident and then denies it...
...For there is in Maltaverne none of the falling off into ineptitude which afflicts so many writers as they grow old...
...Simon's slow and almost silent rebellion against this relationship is one of the major factors in disillusioning Alain of the permanence of his social position...
...I received the book a couple of days after the death of E. M. For-ster, and I could not help drawing a comparison: Forster living almost as long after his last important novel as he had before it, since Passage to India came at just about the middle of his immensely long life...
...They are land-hungry people, for whom every hectare of pinewood they can acquire is important...
...Maltaverne is a further example not only of the peculiar vigor of the author's literary talent, but also of his power to sustain a vital relationship with his several worlds...
...The central figures are still the peasant-descended members of the landowning class and their priests and employes...
...At points he does not know whether he is recording what actually happened or a memory modified by his active fantasy...
...He calls his book "A Novel about a Young Man of Long Ago," and one realizes that many of Alain's experiences must parallel the author's...
...No doubt it is a joke, but an ambiguous one, for there are times when to Alain the land really does mean more than anyone, divine or human...
...Mauriac has always gained a mental sustenance from the changing present and the apparently unchanging past in his novels...
...The adolescent hero Alain perpetrates what the village priest thinks is an irreverent joke, confessing that he worships a certain oak tree...
...Surely this is a personal reflection on the unchanging inner being of which we are all conscious as we go forward from youth's awakening????mauriac looking back ironically as his character looks forward...
...Looking back so far????more than six decades into the departed world of his youth????mauriac seems to be questioning not merely memory but the nature of the past itself...
...the mind at work seems as alert and inventive as ever...
...There are breaks of time????occasionally as much as two years????As the journal records Alain's shifting consciousness between the critical ages of 17 and 22, when he decided to leave the Maltaveme estate and its greed-warped denizens...
...author, "The Writer and Politics" This is Francois Mauriac's latest novel, and the author, who is now 83, thinks it will be his last...
...But the grim epiphany that truly changes Alain's life, sending him away from mother, lover and friend, is the momentary glimpse of a beautiful young girl swimming in a river pool????who will be brutally murdered shortly after he sees her...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 15
