The Solitude of Compassion (2 page)

No, a man like Giono could never be a traitor, not even if he folded his hands and allowed the enemy to overrun his country. In
Maurizius Forever
, wherein I devoted some pages to his
Refusal to Obey
, I put it thus, and I repeat it with even greater vehemence: “I say there is something wrong with a society which, because it quarrels with a man's views, can condemn him as an arch-enemy. Giono is not a traitor. Society is the traitor. Society is a traitor to its fine principles, its empty principles. Society is constantly looking for victims—and finds them among the glorious in spirit.”

What was it Goethe said to Eckermann? Interesting indeed that the “first European” should have expressed himself thus: “Men will become more clever and more acute; but not better, happier, and stronger in action—or at least only at epochs. I foresee the time when God will break up everything for a renewed creation. I am certain that everything is planned to this end, and that the time and hour in the distant future for occurrence of this renovating epoch are already fixed…”

The other day someone mentioned in my presence how curious and repetitive was the rôle of the father in authors' lives. We had been speaking of Joyce, of Utrillo, of Thomas Wolfe, of Lawrence, of Céline, of Van Gogh, of Cendrars, and then of Egyptian myths and of the legends of Crete. We spoke of those who had never found their father, of those who were forever seeking a father. We spoke of Joseph and his brethren, of Jonathan and David, of the magic connected with names such as the Hellespont and Fort Ticonderoga. As they spoke I was frantically searching my memory for instances where the mother played a great rôle. I could think only of two, but they were truly illustrious names—Goethe and da Vinci. Then I began to speak of
Blue Boy
. I looked for the extraordinary
passage, so meaningful to a writer, wherein Giono tells what his father meant to him.

Towards the close of the book, the father nearing his end, they have a quiet talk under a linden tree. “Where I made a mistake,” says his father, “was when I wanted to be good and helpful. You will make a mistake, like me.”

Heart-rending words. Too true, too true. I wept when I read this. I weep again in recalling his father's words. I weep for Giono, for myself, for all who have striven to be “good and helpful.” For those who are still striving, even though they know in their hearts that it is a “mistake.” What we know is nothing compared to what we feel impelled to do out of the goodness of our hearts. Wisdom can never be transmitted from one to another. And in the ultimate do we not abandon wisdom for love?

There is another passage in which father and son converse with Franchese Odripano. They had been talking about the art of healing.

I beg the reader's indulgence for quoting at such length from Giono's works. If I thought for one moment that most everyone
was familiar with Giono's writings I would indeed be embarrassed to have made these citations. A friend of mine said the other day that practically everyone he had met knew Jean Giono. “You mean his books?” I asked. “At least some of them,” he said. “At any rate, they certainly know what he stands for.” “That's another story,” I replied. “You're lucky to move in such circles. I have quite another story to tell about Giono. I doubt sometimes that even his editors have read him.
How to read
, that's the question.”

That evening, glancing through a book by Holbrook Jackson,
³
I stumbled on Coleridge's four classes of readers. Let me cite them:

Most of us belong in the third category, if not also in one of the first two. Rare indeed are the mogul diamonds! And now I wish to make an observation connected with the lending of Giono's books. The few I possess—among them
The Song of the World
and
Lovers are never Losers
, which I see I have not mentioned—have been loaned over and over again to all who expressed a desire to become acquainted with Jean Giono. This means that I have not only handed them to a considerable number of visitors but that I have wrapped and mailed the books to numerous others, to some in foreign lands as well. To no author I have recommended has there been a response such as hailed the reading of Giono. The reactions
have been virtually unanimous. “Magnificent! Thank you, thank you!” that is the usual return. Only one person disapproved, said flatly that he could make nothing of Giono, and that was a man dying of cancer. I had lent him
The Joy of Man's Desiring
. He was one of those “successful” business men who had achieved everything and found nothing to sustain him. I think we may regard his verdict as exceptional. The others, and they include men and women of all ages, all walks of life, men and women of the most diverse views, the most conflicting aims and tendencies, all proclaimed their love, admiration and gratitude for Jean Giono. They do not represent a “select” audience, they were chosen at random. The one qualification which they had in common was a thirst for good books…

These are my private statistics, which I maintain are as valid as the publisher's. It is the hungry and thirsty who will eventually decide the future of Giono's works.

There is another man, a tragic figure, whose book I often thrust upon friends and acquaintances: Vaslav Nijinsky. His
Diary
is in some strange way connected with
Blue Boy
. It tells me something about writing. It is the writing of a man who is part lucid, part mad. It is a communication so naked, so desperate, that it breaks the mold. We are face to face with reality, and it is almost unbearable. The technique, so utterly personal, is one from which every writer can learn. Had he not gone to the asylum, had this been merely his baptismal work, we would have had in Nijinsky a writer equal to the dancer.

I mention this book because I have scanned it closely. Though it may sound presumptuous to say so, it is a book for writers. I cannot limit Giono in this way, but I must say that he, too, feeds the writer, instructs the writer, inspires the writer. In
Blue Boy
he gives
us the genesis of a writer, telling it with the consummate art of a practiced writer. One feels that he is a “born writer.” One feels that he might also be a painter, a musician (despite what he says). It is the “Storyteller's Story,”
l'histoire de l'histoire
. It peels away the wrappings in which we mummify writers and reveals the embryonic being. It gives us the physiology, the chemistry, the physics, the biology of that curious animal, the writer. It is a textbook dipped in the magic fluid of the medium it expounds. It connects us with the source of all creative activity. It breathes, it palpitates, it renews the blood stream. It is the kind of book which every man who thinks he has at least one story to tell could write but which he never does, alas. It is the story which authors are telling over and over again in myriad disguises. Seldom does it come straight from the delivery room. Usually it is washed and dressed first. Usually it is given a name which is not the true name.

His sensuousness, the development of which Giono attributes to his father's delicate nurturing, is without question one of the cardinal features of his art. It invests his characters, his landscapes, his whole narrative. “Let us refine our finger tips, our points of contact with the world…” Giono has done just this. The result is that we detect in his music the use of an instrument which has undergone the same ripening process as the player. In Giono the music and the instrument are one. That is his special gift. If he did not become a musician because, as he says, he thought it more important to be a good listener, he has become a writer who has raised listening to such an art that we follow his melodies as if we had written them ourselves. We no longer know, in reading his books, whether we are listening to Giono or to ourselves. We are not even aware that we are listening. We live through his words and in them, as naturally as if we were respiring at a comfortable altitude or floating on the
bosom of the deep or swooping like a hawk with the down-draught of a canyon. The actions of his narratives are cushioned in this terrestrial effluvium; the machinery never grinds because it is perpetually laved by cosmic lubricants. Giono gives us men, beasts and gods—in their
molecular
constituency.
⁴
He has seen no need to descend to the atomic arena. He deals in galaxies and constellations, in troupes, herds, and flocks, in biological plasm as well as primal magma and plasma. The names of his characters, as well as the hills and streams which surround them, have the tang, the aroma, the vigor and the spice of strong herbs. They are autochthonous names, redolent of the Midi. When we pronounce them we revive the memory of other times; unknowingly we inhale a whiff of the African shore. We suspect that Atlantis was not so distant either in time or space.

It is a little over twenty years now since Giono's
Colline
, published in translation as
Hill of Destiny
, by Brentano's, New York, made the author known at once throughout the reading world. In his introduction to the American edition, Jacques le Clercq, the translator, explains the purpose of the
Prix Brentano
, which was first awarded to Jean Giono.

Twenty years since! And just a few months ago I received two new books from Giono—
Un Roi Sans Divertissement
and
Noé
—the first two of a series of twenty. A series of
“Chroniques,”
he calls them. He was thirty years old when
Colline
won the
Prix Brentano
. In the interval he has written a respectable number of books. And now, in his fifties, he has projected a series of twenty, of which several have already been written. Just before the war started he had begun his celebrated translation of
Moby Dick
, a labor of several years, in which he was aided by two capable women whose names are given along with his as translators of the book. An immense undertaking, since Giono is not fluent in English. But, as he explains in the book which followed—
Pour Saluer Melville—Moby Dick
was his constant companion for years during his walks over the hills. He had lived with the book and it had become a part of him. It was inevitable that he should be the one to make it known to the French public. I have read parts of this translation and it seems to me an inspired one. Melville is not one of my favorites.
Moby Dick
has always been a sort of
bête noir
for me. But in reading the French version, which I prefer to the original, I have come to the conclusion that I will some day read the book. After reading
Pour Saluer Melville
, which is a poet's interpretation of a poet—“a pure invention,” as Giono himself says in a letter—I was literally beside myself. How often it is the “foreigner” who teaches us to appreciate our own authors! (I think immediately of that wonderful study of Walt Whitman by a Frenchman who virtually dedicated his life to the subject. I think, too, of what Baudelaire did to make Poe's name a by-word throughout all Europe.) Over and over again we see that the understanding of a language is not the
same as the understanding of language. It is always communion versus communication. Even in translation some of us understand Dostoievsky, for example, better than his Russian contemporaries—or, shall I say, better than our present Russian contemporaries.