TWO NOVELS BY LEON BLOY
Bernanos, novelists, are two of the four unquestionably dominant
Catholic writers, the third (Claude!) being a poet and dramatist,
and only the fourth (Maritain) a publicist.
The French Catholic novel of today was initiated single-handed
by
Uon
Bloy. This will of itself perhaps explain Bloy's own rather
exiguous and frequently confused achievement in the form. For he
wrote but two novels, and as a novel neither of them is fully satis–
fying. Yet it is as a novelist that he should
be
regarded, because of
the trend of
his
influence and because
his
writing outside the form
of the novel also has a narrative and dramatic rather than an ideo–
logical movement.
One of the two novels,
The Woman Who Was Poor/
exists in
English translation. Of an
oeuvre
of some forty books, the only other
to be found in English is
Letters to his Fiancee.
2
These two were
published by Messrs. Sheed and Ward in 1937, and neither sold. A
number of translated extracts from
Exegese des Lieux communs
had
previously appeared
in
Bernard Wall's short-lived
Colosseum
in
1935, together with the translation of a pamphlet on Bloy by Mari–
tain. Karl Pfleger's
Wrestlers with Christ
(
1936) contains an essay
on Bloy, and there were some notes on him by Richard Kehoe, O.P.,
in
Blackfriars
for January, 1936. That seems to be the English total.
In France, numerous books have been devoted to Bl_oy. On my own
shelves, which are by no means those of a specialist, I find five, by
Pierre Termier, Leopold Levaux, Hubert Colleye, Stanislas Fumet,
and Ernest Seilliere.
8
I believe that before the war there was even a
quarterly of Bloy studies under the title
Les Cahiers L eon Bloy.
Jacques Maritain is a convert and godson of Bloy's. In his opinion,
Bloy wrote the finest French prose since Bossuet.
Le
Desespe'fle
(
1887) has at least one of the technical virtues
of a good novel. Its themes are unambiguously present on the first
page. There is no prolonged clearing of the throat. The novel opens
with the hero, Cain Marchenoir (Bloy himself ), writing a letter to
Alexis Dulaurier (Bourget? Huysmans?) to ask for money with which
to bury his father who is just about to die of horror at his son's
1
La Femme pauvre.
2
Lettres
a
sa fiancee.
These were also the first to be published in German.
s A birth centenary vol. by Albert Beguin has now appeared in translation.
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