Books: Parable of Temptation

JOY—Georges Bernanos (297 pp.)—Translated by Louise Varèse—Panfheon Books ($2.75).

Georges Bernanos is France’s most distinguished Catholic author—and his own Church’s sharpest critic. His literary reputation rests chiefly on three religious novels : Diary of a Country Priest, Joy, The Star of Satan (TIME, June 17, 1940). Joy won the Prix Femina in 1929, and now appears in translation for the first time.

The difference between Joy and such popular religious novels as The Robe and The Song of Bernadette is the difference between a papal nuncio and a parish priest. Essentially a parable of intellectual temptation, the book is primarily dialectical in method, and almost wholly devoid of the usual stage effects of fiction. It is charged with burning vitality, but its drama exists mainly in the consciences of the characters.

Saint & Symbol. Joan of Arc, France’s patron saint—who was persuaded by her inquisitors to deny her visionary powers—has long served Bernanos as a symbol of Republican France. Joy’s heroine, Chantal de Clergerie, is a much-modified Joan, facing present-day inquisitors in modern dress.

Youthful, maidenly Chantal lives in a French chateau whose Second Empire shrubberies and wide, tawny avenues are described by Bernanos with vivid feeling. With her live her timid, pedantic father (who has written volumes of history but cannot stir a step without the counsel of his psychiatrist) and her psychotic grandmother (who still clutches to her bosom the keys of storage cupboards that have long ceased to exist). Of such as them, Chantal says simply: “What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline toward sadness and turn instinctively toward the night?”

Flesh & Blood. It is Chantal’s own obsession with gladness and light that is her undoing. Her moments of spiritual illumination are regarded by those around her as a nervous disorder, and, like Saint Joan, she is forced to submit to questioning. When her first inquisitor, her hysterical father, uncovers nothing but his own cowardice, a psychiatrist is called in. The psychiatrist emerges from the ordeal fit to be put in a strait jacket. Then a perspicacious Catholic abbé, who has secretly doubted the existence of God for many years, is summoned—and finds himself newly inspired with religious faith.

Unlike Saint Joan, Chantal repels her inquisitors. Like Saint Joan, she cannot protect herself against brute force, and her murder by her father’s tormented chauffeur (to whom the spectacle of innocence is intolerable) brings the book to a bloody end.

The bulk of Joy is composed of argument and counterargument, so abstruse that a majority of readers may feel that

Bernanos is trying to explore states of mind too private to be communicable. Few novelists could give flesh and blood to such a clutter of spiritual skeletons as inhabit the De Clergerie chateau; even fewer could use a teen-age girl as the symbol for an exalted faith without making her too good to be true. Joy is fair evidence of why Novelist Bernanos has never influenced many and yet has vigorously influenced a few.