PARTISAN REVIEW
Except for a few months after committing Anne-Marie Roulet to
the lunatic asylum, Leon Bloy made communion every day of his
adult life. Since there were periods during which he took scarcely
any other food, he may be said literally to have lived upon the wafer
and the wine which are regarded by Catholics as substantial body and
blood of Christ. This is, I believe, regarded as a religious excess.
But everything in Bloy is excess.
If
"exuberance is beauty" and "the
road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," Bloy should have
been, in Blake's sense, a superlative artist and superlatively wise.
It would be fatally easy to regard Bloy from the standpoint of
the psychologist. This has in fact been done by Ernest Seilliere, who
argues that Bloy's whole life and work were an enormous structure
of megalomania. Seilliere points to the claims made by Bloy to have
received (via Anne-Marie) a specific revelation, known only to him–
self, and to have been marked out for a leading role in the new
scheme of salvation, which involved some form of Second Coming.
Bloy, according to Seilliere, first sought to ally and later to identify
himself with God, he and Jesus Christ constituting one embodiment
of
le Pauvre.
The answer to this is very simple. It is that despite
enormous deprivations, Bloy lived to the age of seventy-one in full
possession of
his
faculties. What looks like persecution mania and
what look like delusions of grandeur are not so in the clinical sense.
A streak of coprophilia may be detected in Bloy's constant use of
images drawn from the privy, but that it did not assume the propor–
tions of a sexual perversion many years of happy marriage indicate.
Bloy had in fact a complete and sustained vision of the world,
and it is clearly stated in the two novels which he wrote in his fortieth
and fiftieth years. "Complete" is indeed the key-word. Bloy's total
imaginative effort was to extend and interlock the two most perfect
philosophical structures of the European mind, the horizontal Aristo–
telian classification of species or great chain of being and the vertical
Christian doctrine of the communion of saints, which insists- that not
only are all living men brothers but that the living, the dead, and
the unborn constitute a single community, that the dead can "pray"
for the living and the living for the dead or the unborn.
When a coin is given to a beggar with a bad grace, says Bloy
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