Mauriac, Major French Writer, Dead

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32391, 2 September 1970, Page 17

Mauriac, Major French Writer, Dead

(By ALDEN WHITMAN, of the “New York Times,” through N.Z.P.A.) PARIS, August 31. As a novelist—one of the best France produced in this century— Francois Mauriac, who died today,, aged 84, sought to probe the darkest crevasses of the human psyche. His searching tales of French middle-class life and of conflicts between the demands of sexuality and those of morality won him admission to the French Academy at the comparatively early age of 48. These Dostoyevskian narratives also gained him the international renown of a Nobel Prize at 67. A writer of singular resourcefulness and self-criti-cism, he ceased to write novels when his imaginative powers flagged (there was, though, one final novel, a good one, published in 1969 after an interval of 15 years), and turned journalist and polemicist. For the last 30 years of his life he was a trenchant critic at large, fashioning weekly articles for the French press

on politics, literature and life.

Wittily and often maliciously, he wrote about whatever and whomever displeased him. Among his more constant targets for many years were those he thought lacking in sufficient understanding of his friend, Charles de Gaulle. In a country where the views of men of letters are taken seriously, Mauriac’s “bloc-notes,” as he called his opinion columns, had an enormous readership. Indeed, he was better known for these in his late years than he was for his novels. It was a measure of his talent and his integrity that he retained the respect of his adversaries however much he may have dismayed them. Among those often dismayed were those of his own faith. A staunch Roman Catholic, he nonetheless followed an independent secular line. He was, for example, an eloquent opponent of Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who was a hero to many Roman Catholics. His novels, too, brought slight comfort to conservatives in the Church, and some even smelled heresy in them. Mauriac produced 23 novels, the bulk of them be-

tween 1921 and 1941. “Every one,” according to Professor Henri Peyre of Yale, “is a fresh attempt and an adventure into the unknown." They all dealt with some aspect of the problem of evil. “I was and am worried by the problem of evil and the problem of grace,” Mauriac said in 1967. At that time at his country estate near Bordeaux, Mauriac speaking in his characteristically husky voice, disputed the notion that he was a Roman Catholic npvel ist “1 am a novelist who is a Catholic,” he insisted. “With the aid of a certain gift for creating atmosphere, I have tried to make the Catholic universe of evil palpable, tangible, odorous. If theologians provided an abstract idea of the sinner, I gave him flesh and blood.” Mauriac wrote of such matters as the disintegration of an arranged marriage—of a son distorted by his mother’s destructive love—of a bored and suffering wife who tried unsuccessfully to poison her husband—of a father and son who shared a lust for the same woman.

Mauriac, who wrote with classic stylistic limpidity, had the capacity for making the dark motives and lustful pas-

sions of his characters exceedingly real, which prompted his friend Andre Gide to suggest that his novels connived at the sins they appeared to denounce. But Mauriac, under his patina of gaiety, was an intensely serious and devout man. This was to a large degree the result of his unusual upbringing. He was born at Bordeaux on October 11, 1885, the youngest of five children of a prosperous and landed middle-class family. The elder Mauriac, an anticlerical unbeliever, died when Francois was 18 months old and the boy was reared by his passionately pious mother Liking solitude, he was a meditative youth whose fav ourite writer was Blaise Pascal, the religious philosophei who pictured human nature i» dour terms.

After completing his secondary studies at Bordeaux, the young Mauriac went to Paris to prepare for a career in paleography and medieval archaeology. But carrying within him ardent memories of Bordeaux and of the human desires, conflicts and temptations that he had observed, he left school to be come a writer. One of his earliest essays,

a defence of Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mai” against Roman Catholic critics, prefigured Mauriac’s later individualism in secular matters.

Yet, he once said, \ he belonged to “the race of those who, born into Catholicism, realise on the verge of manhood that they can never break away from it, that they are not free to leave or come back to the fold.” What most critics agree was Mauriac’s first masterpiece was “Le Balser au Lepreux” (“A Kiss For The Leper”). Published in 1922, the novel dealt with the arranged marriage of a hideously ugly but wealthy man to a husky peasant girl. Told with pity and satire, the spare narrative projected its author into the front ranks of French writers. In the next 10 years Mauriac produced four other masterpieces, each adding to his fame. He composed them, as he did all his works, first in long hand, then dictating this draft to a secretary and finally revising the typed copy. His novels were “Genitrlx (1923), which told of a maternal lover driven to tyrannical excesses, “Le Desert de L’Amour” (The Desert of

Love), published in 1925, which recounted the dreams of a’father-and-son, each pilgrims in the wasteland of love, for a woman of a certain reputation, “Therese Desqueyroux” (1927), whose heroine seeks unsuccessfully to poison her husband, and “Le Noeud de Viperes” (Viper’s Tangle) issued in 1932, in which the theme of passion for money is elaborated.

By the time the Nobel Prize was awarded him in 1952, specifically for his novels, he was primarily a commentator on public affairs. Toward the close of his life with about 100 books to his credit, Mauriac sometimes wondered if he had lived too long. ' Sitting in his living room at Malaga he confided to a visitor:

“I was brought up and lived in another world. As a child I did not know the cinema or oloptriritv “I knew the old values. This is not my age. I am here as a stranger in this new world of the atomic bomb.

“We live in a polluted world now. It is time for me to go. The future is very, very black because these times sin against nature. Man should turn back to simple values.”