The Apprentice Writer: Essays.

Julian Green is the first American ever to have been elected as one of the forty "immortals" who can belong to the French Academy at any one time. He has been a major French novelist since the 1920s, when works like Adrienne Mesurat (1927), Mont-Cinere (1928), and Leviathan (1929) appeared. Then in the '30s he began to publish his diary, which has attracted a good deal of critical attention over the last half century. Since the 1960s, large sections of the diary have been available in English. Most recently, two very long historical novels, dealing with life in the antebellum American South, have appeared. Les pays lointains (which the publisher of the books under consideration here has already brought out under the title The Distant Lands), appeared in Paris in 1987 and its sequel, Les etoiles du sud, in 1989. These works have enabled Green to reach an extremely wide audience rather late in life. A recent elaborate photo essay in the magazine Paris-Match reflects this newly found popularity. Yet, despite Green's many literary accomplishments spanning almost three quarters of a century, his name is still not as widely known in this country as it should be.

These two important volumes seem to reflect a British publisher's commitment to make Green's work more readily available in the English-speaking world, to which he belongs by birth and family upbringing. Born in 1900 and raised in Paris as a boy where his American parents lived, Green developed an ear for the cadences of the American South listening to his parents speak. His father worked for the Southern Cotton Oil Company and specialized in importing cottonseed oil into France. As a boy, Green was initiated into French culture by attending grade school and secondary school in Paris. He received a bicultural upbringing in an age when that word had not yet been invented and when we still had to make do with the word "bilingual" which, in stressing language at the expense of culture, seemed to imply that the worlds of Paris on the one hand and of Savannah on the other were essentially the same and that it was only the words that people spoke every day that were different.

Green finished his French baccalaureat degree in 1917 and then, after service in the ambulance corps at the end of World War 1, came back to his family roots in Virginia and Georgia by enrolling at the University of Virginia, where he remained for three years (1919-22) without finishing his degree. After this first reimmersion in his native culture, he went back to France determined to become a French writer; and by the end of the twenties he had established a solid reputation as a young Catholic novelist and man of letters. Green emerged in the wake of the major Catholic cultural figures that I call the Generation of 1885: Mauriac, Bernanos, Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin, Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, among others. Later, after the five-year period spent in the United States between 1940 and 1945, he returned to France since he considered that country to be his true cultural home.

These volumes show us the two sides of Green's persona, the French and the American. The Green Paradise, translated by his sister Anne Green, is the first volume of his autobiography, Partir avant le jour, which first appeared in Paris in 1963. It shows the self-absorbed sensitivity of a young man and in so doing reminds us of so many of the other French mama's boys from a bourgeois background who have poured out their inner feelings to their readers. Like his elders Gide (b. 1869) and Mauriac (b. 1885), for example, Green in this confessional memoir deliberately positions himself in the French tradition through his keen awareness and sharply observant eye for everything that goes on both around him and inside of him. In fact, what goes on outside often takes on meaning only to the extent that it reverberates on the inside.

The experiences of an American boy growing up in Paris in the years before World War I are recounted here from the perspective of the sophisticated French writer he later became. His Christian faith, inherited from his mother, is already firm, and the evolution from the Episcopal upbringing to the Catholic church parallels the shift from American to French culture. For Green the adhesion to Catholicism as both a religious and cultural phenomenon is necessary if he is to participate fully in French culture. His special attachment to two churches in the Latin Quarter, Saint-Severin and Saint-Julienle-Pauvre, symbolizes this aesthetic attraction. When he walks along the river after having visited and prayed in each of these churches, he glances up at the spires of Notre Dame in the distance and says to himself: "This is my city. It is mine. I belong here." In this he speaks simply and eloquently for many Catholics from around the world who have had a similar experience. In March 1916, he freely converted to Catholicism.

The limpid style, the sensitivity, the delicatesse, the discretion in talking of his sexual awakening are all in the French tradition of restraint, sobriety, and good taste. His achievement is all the more striking since his carnal desires were directed toward members of his own sex.

This book is marred by the lack of an index. Even more troubling is the lack of any kind of serious introductory essay that would place this first volume of Green's autobiography within the context of his career. It is important to know, for instance, that when Partir avant le jour first appeared in 1963, it was conceived by Green as a recounting of a spiritual itinerary, a description of the action of grace within his soul as seen by a man in his midsixties able to recognize more clearly in retrospect how God had worked within him during his early years. The fact that Green's decision to write an autobiography coincides in time not only with the beginning of the sexual revolution but also with Vatican 11 is worthy of note. Green, despite his sexual orientation, was sure of his place in the church even though the church itself might not have been. (It should be noted that this first volume of the autobiography was previously published in New York in 1963 under the title To Leave before Dawn.)

The essays contained in The Apprentice Writer represent Julian Green the American, the one who in midcareer came back and spent five years in the United States. These texts were written in English and, except for a short story that was published in The University of Virginia Magazine while he was still an undergraduate at Charlottesville, consist for the most part of lectures he gave, usually in academic settings, during the war years. There are also three short pieces published in Commonweal at the time. Since the editorial policy of the editors of Green's complete works in the Oeuvres completes published by Gallimard's prestigious series called Editions de la Pleiade is to publish only those works written in French, these texts are hardly known in France, even to specialists.

They cover the subjects that interested him most at the time. Thus, diary-keeping, novel-writing, translation, and the Catholic tradition in French literature are given special attention. There are beautiful pages here on Charles Peguy's poetry in praise of Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary (large portions of which Green was translating at the time). He also shows the extent to which the daily routine of the diary is essential to his fictional oeuvre and posits the power of linguistic structures over mind and inspiration by assuring us that an essay on the subject of France must of necessity go in quite different directions depending upon which language it is written in.

Green's intelligence, sense of humor, humility, and deep faith are all in evidence in this most interesting collection of essays.

One day in September 1908, Peguy had a conversation with his friend Lotte, about his many worries, when all of a sudden his eyes filled with tears and he said: "I have not told you all. I have found faith again. I am a Catholic." This was the outcome of a long struggle about which we know practically nothing. What went on in Peguy's soul from the time he declared himself an atheist, around '92 or '93, to the minute when he unburdened his heart to Lotte is a mystery that will probably never be solved. Nor did this conversion mean a simplifying of life's problems for Peguy. On the contrary. Only from the outside do conversions appear to simplify life's problems.