Critic And Commentator

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30983, 12 February 1966, Page 4

Critic And Commentator

Diary 1928-1957. By Julian Green. Translated by Anne Green. Collins and Harvill Press. London. 306 pp. Index.

Allen Tate once wrote that in his opinion the two most valuable works for opening the mind and enlarging the scope of its notions were Plato’s Dialogues and Andre Gide's Journals. The first choice needs no discussion. The relevance of the Dialogues to an examined life is obvious: but what about Andre Gide? R. P. Blackmur perhaps supplied the answer when he spoke of Gide’s candour, sophistication and insight, “which enabled him to react directly and continuously upon society in motion, no matter what the velocity or the bearing.”

Looked at from this point] of view, the value of Gide's] Journals is apparent; but it is immediately obvious that another French writer also deserves to be considered as a critic and commentator in a somewhat similar area. This is Julian Green, best known as a novelist perhaps, but also a playwright, and the author of a journal which he began writing in. 1928. Extracts from the journal appeared in an English translation just before the last war, and this work attracted attention on both sides of the Atlantic at a time when the utterances of a reflective and humane mind could easily have been overlooked.

The present selection skims » more extensive surface, with entries chosen from the beginning in 1928 up to 1957. It is, however, a small selection when it is realised that the complete journal covering these years, published in French, extends to seven volumes.

Perhaps the most notable feature of “Diary 1928-1957" is Green’s keen interest in English literature. This interest he shares with G;de, for if Gide had the guidance of Miss Shackleton. Green had an American family background and residence in the Southern states. Green during the war years wrote in English, and some of his novels have been translated. His success with Eng-lish-speaking readers, however. has been less than might be expected. This selection from his journals should make a stronger impression. His response to Chaucer, for instance, is unexpected.] “In his world, already an old world, he was new. He dis-

covered spring, and all its scents, as though it were the first of all springs. We are too weary, too surfeited to pick a rose and smell it with the simplicity of a man of those times. But it must be said that we have also been too much bombed, torpedoed, and exiled.” Again he describes Caliban in “The Tempest” as “a savage who talks of music like Byrd or Purcell!” His comments on contemporary writers like Auden, for example, are just as pointed.

But there is another uninterrupted current in this stream of consciousness. In May, 1936 Julian Green began to study the ancient Hebrew language, “the most beautiful of all tongues, the one used by God to create the world and call His first servants.” The quality of his devotion may be judged from an entry | thirteen years later. “Marvelled as I read the Book of I Esther in Hebrew. A reward for more than 10 years of I effort. I can at last get at the text that is back of translai tions.”

Considerations such as this lead naturally to the interior life of the writer. It is this life that becomes exceedingly real to the reader as he goes more deeply into this book. There are many notable passages here, some of them even startling, like the one dated October 7, 1948. This, surely an experience of the dark night of the soul, ends with the enigmatic sentence: “This lasted about half an hour, but it was only some time later that I grasped the reason for all this and the presence of whom I had felt within these walls.”

On a lower plane, however, perhaps the greatest profit an ordinary reader may gain from the book is the pleasure in sharing the writer’s sensitivity to more earthly passing impressions. Julian Green speaks of “the vague feeling of danger that I have always had from the mere fact of living in the world.” The world, the passing show, realised in this way, may sometimes be alarming, but it presents itself with a vividness that more stolid mortals can both wonder at and admire. One pointed sentence will illustrate the writer’s method. “The house once belonged to the due de Charost. who was reading a page when he was taken to the guillotine and marked the page by turning down a corner before having his head cut off.”