PARTISAN REVIEW
show up the reply, whatever it may be, as completely ludicrous. The
French do this sort of thing well and Paulhan is no exception.
While the younger generation of novelists haven't been able to
arouse much critical enthusiasm, two books by older writers have ap–
peared recently that are worth noting. Julian Green brought out a
new novel called
Moira
that is of particular interest to an American
reader since it is set in an American university (obviously the University
of Virginia) in the early 'twenties ; it is supposed to be a psychological
study, in Green's suavely conventional manner, of backwoods American
Protestantism. The hero is a Thomas Wolfe character from a hill
village, intensely religious, who ends up by murdering the campus
vamp after she has done him the favor of seducing him. That's
American Protestantism for you, one can hear Julian Green exclaim–
ing in despair!-though he inexplicably writes in a preface that "the
Protestants I have dramatized in no way express my opinion of
Protestantism." I have no particular interest in defending Protestantism
against Julian Green, who was converted to Catholicism not so long
ago, but one can't help asking just
whose
opinion of Protestantism
these characters represent?
Anyway, from a literary point of view, the book seems misbegotten
to my American eyes. I have never been a great admirer of Thomas
Wolfe's elephantiasis of the imagination, but I realized, while reading
Moira,
that Wolfe's provincial people need a certain epic quality to do
them justice. What sticks out in
Moira
is the incongruity between the
main character-the elemental violence of his religious and emotional
conflicts, the monumentality even of his
gaucherie-and
the delicate
fragility of Julian Green's style and psychological approach: the ap–
proach of a novelistic tradition developed to explore highly refined and
highly civilized states of consciousness.
It
is as if Watteau or Fragonard
tried to do Michelangelo's
Moses
in the style suitable for one of their
Fetes champetres
or
V,oyages
a
Cythere.
The result is that Julian
Green's main character seems a preliminary sketch for a figure who
never shows up in his true dimensions. Also, I might add that I find
it hard to believe that any American students-even those at the
University of Virginia in the early twenties-ever felt, thought or acted
like those
in
Moira.
The other novel, by Georges Bemanos, is a posthumous publication.
Brought out under the title
Un mauvais reve,
the book has a curious
history, having been reconstructed by Albert Beguin from notebooks
and uncompleted manuscripts tracked down from as far away as Rio
de Janeiro. The entire second part of the novel was originally written as
