Books: Modern Miracle

SONG OF BERNADETTE—Franz Werfel—Viking ($3).

Franz Werfel is a second-flight European man of letters with the schooled competence of his breed and with a reverence for the human spirit which too many of his literary superiors lack. In this novel about the miracle of Lourdes, which is an act of piety transcending blood and creed (“I am not a Catholic but a Jew”), he brings that reverence into clean, spacious focus.

The Song of Bernadette is the story of an adolescent girl in the French Pyrenees who saw, or indestructibly believed that she saw, the Queen of Heaven. Werfel solemnly vowed to write it one day in 1940 when, in Lourdes, in desperate flight from the Nazis, it must have seemed a miracle to him that he might ever survive to see the shores of the U.S. He reached those shores in safety, and he kept his vow. He has also kept an “older and far more unconscious vow”: “In the days when I wrote my first verses I vowed that I would evermore and everywhere magnify the divine mystery and the holiness of man.” For any save the most hopeless skeptic the story of Bernadette Soubirous, fully and devotedly told as it is here, is a strong recall toward “these ultimate values of our mortal lot.” Her life is not merely, as Werfel says, “the greatest miracle of modern times,” it is also the victorious pitting of the undefended and essential spirit against the whole musculature of those times. For it took place in the middle of that sick century of which the present decade is the death paroxysm; and it had every feature of that century to contend with, and to defeat.

The Lady. Bernadette Soubirous was born on a Jan. 7, which was the birth date also of Jeanne d’Arc. On Feb. 11, 1858, a backward, asthmatic girl of 14, she beheld, in a swine-fouled little grotto near Lourdes, a dainty, gay and ineffably dressed young lady who talked and gestured with her in the silence of her enchanted heart. During the next few weeks Bernadette saw her many times, though the lady was invisible to the increasing hundreds (Bernadette had talked) who gathered at the grotto.

At the lady’s request, one day, Bernadette swallowed some of the damp cave mud (and vomited); the mud became an abundant spring. That spring, according to scientific analysis, is pure drinking water; but in it, a few days later, a paralytic baby in the spasms of death was immersed, recovered, and lived to see Bernadette sainted 75 years later in the greatest 20th-century feast of the Roman Church.

Between those years lies the touching and astonishing life of Bernadette, whose simple nature and unimpeachable replies confounded all other dubious hierarchies of human intelligence. Few lives have better illustrated what happens when a perception (or “hallucination”) of extraordinary intensity and faithfulness is turned loose in the heavy normality of the world.

The Wild Beast. What happened was this: the ignorant, the primitive and the poverty-stricken believed and defended the miracle. Roused to .a pitch of hope such as seldom touches the earth’s hopeless, they became as powerful a fact for the world to reckon with as the vision itself. Franz Werfel builds up a compassionate and ludicrous picture of how state, science and the Church handled this strange wild beast against which no weapons had been invented. Scientists trembled in scorn and terror at the challenge to their royalty over the century. The Church, sternly resolved to distinguish between truth, fraud and demonism, had also its own safe-playing dread of scientists and statesmen to contend with. The Church most scrupulously anatomized Bernadette’s miraculous possibilities, but was also most bewildered how to handle her. She was funneled off into the untouchable silence of a convent, where she devoutly suffered the slow agonies of tuberculosis of the bone and died at 35. But at her exhumation, in 1925, her body was as uncorrupted as every word she had spoken in life.

No less instructive is what happened afterward. Little by little the wild beast captured and institutionalized itself. In the grotto a sentimental statue stood in for Bernadette’s lady; a great church improved the living stone of the mountainside; the healing virtues which her spring retained were put to the service of the great institutions which had opposed them.

Possibly the most moving passages in The Song of Bernadette give account of the conversion of Werfel’s archskeptic, one Hyacinthe de Lafite, a neighborhood patrician. In his youth, an arrogant atheist” individualist-poet, he had not bothered even to visit the newborn, crowded shrine. But now in his old age he confronts in Lourdes’s hospital the full weight of disease and death, and is reborn into the mysteries of his childhood. As Lafite, a cancer pregnant in his throat and his weary mind working at its poor height, is drawn, hypnotically, nearer & nearer the iron grille which now shields the wet stones of the grotto, Werfel ceases to be the reverent and grateful craftsman. He becomes, for a few pages, one of the best things a man without genius or sainthood may hope to become: a great artist, communicating nobly with the other Hyacinthe de Lafites of his time.