Woman of the Pharisees.

Francois Mauriac's La Pharisienne (Woman of the Pharisees) was the 1952 Nobel laureate's longest and most ambitious work of fiction. It stands out among all his novels for three principal reasons. First, Mauriac had been irritated by critics during the '30s who claimed that his novels were too short. This was the era of the cycle novel, or roman fleuve, which developed in detail a large number of characters and followed their evolution through many volumes. Mauriac claimed in several newspaper articles of the day that he was indifferent to such criticism, but during the '30s each of his novels nevertheless became longer and longer, culminating in Woman of the Pharisees.

Second, Mauriac had been stung by a vicious attack by a young and as yet largely unknown writer named Jean-Paul Sartre who, in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise in February 1939, accused him of interfering with the "freedom" of his characters. Sartre's principal target was Mauriac's 1935 novel La Fin de la nuit (The End of the Night) in which he brought back to life the character of Therese Desqueyroux, the heroine of an earlier novel. In an ill-advised foreword to the novel, Mauriac informed his readers that he wanted to "save" Therese. This is all Sartre needed to go for the jugular. He accused Mauriac of playing God with his characters and concluded with the comment, very damaging to Mauriac at the time, that "...God is not an artist, but neither is Francois Mauriac."

The third reason why La Pharisienne was unique is that Mauriac used it to push to the limit his own investigation of the Catholic spiritual life as the essential material of a novel. In a sense, the subject of the novel is "what does it mean to be a Catholic and to strive for holiness within the Catholic tradition?"

This fictional project, unique in these three ways, added one last ingredient that had also been absent from all his previous work: concentration of effort and unity of focus. Whereas all his novels before and after had to compete for time with other endeavors like nonfiction books, journalism, political polemics, and the other chores incumbent upon the homme de lettres in the French tradition, Woman of the Pharisees was written while Mauriac was a virtual prisoner in his own house. Begun in July 1940 and completed by January 1941, the novel was written as Mauriac and his family watched and waited to see what was going to happen after the calamitous fall of France in June 1940. To make matters worse, a German officer and his orderlies were billeted in Mauriac's home at Malagar, about twenty-five miles from Bordeaux.

Published in unusual circumstances in 1941, the novel was not even reviewed. The Vichy authorities saw to that. Then, after the war, since the Catholic novel as a genre was undergoing important changes, it was not easy to appreciate the debt that was owed to this particular work. With hindsight, however, we can see and appreciate its true importance.

The Catholic novel in France reached its apogee in the '30s with the publication of a series of masterpieces by Mauriac (1885-1970) and Georges Bemanos (1884-1948). Each novelist stressed an interior piety and conversion in the manner of pre-Vatican II vertical spirituality, that privileged a direct and private relationship between man and God, as did the Latin Mass, Benediction, and the Stations of the Cross. Mauriac's Noeud de viperes (Vipers' Tangle) in 1933 and Bernanos's Journal d'un cure de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest) in 1936, are true and lasting masterpieces. Each recounts the protagonist's private faith journey and culminates in his death. In each case, the reader can feel fairly certain that the hero has made it safely to heaven.

World War II exerted a powerful influence on the Catholic novel in France. After the war, new writers, from a younger generation, like Gilbert Cesbron (1913-79) or Michel de Saint Pierre (1916-87), among others, were less concerned about the Christian's relationship to God than to the world and his fellow man. Cesbron's Les Saints vont en enfer (Saints in Hell, 1952) dealt with the worker priests of the day. Likewise, Saint Pierre's Les Nouveaux A ristocrates (The New Aristherats, 1963) studied the faith and morals of young Catholic boys in a Jesuit secondary school of the 1950s, while his controversial novel Les Nouveaux Pretres (The New Priests, 1966) ostensibly attacked the "new priests" emerging in the wake of Vatican II. Ironically, however, so many concessions are made to the energy of the new found apostolic spirit, that the author's apparent hostility toward certain aspects of Vatican II seemed to achieve just the opposite effects. In any case, the emphasis in both these postwar works was on the new horizontal spirituality. The characters find God principally through other men and women. This tendency in the postwar French Catholic novel is especially interesting because it predates and, in a number of ways, announces Vatican II, paralleling the "nouvelle thiologie" of thinkers like the Dominican Yves Congar and the Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Jean Danielou, whose views eventually triumphed at the council.

This rupture within the genre of the Catholic novel, which represents a clear break with the past, has received little scholarly attention. I would suggest that there is a "missing link" that helps explain how the Catholic novel made the leap from an emphasis on a search for God within oneself to a quest for the divine in engagement with others.

To be sure, the war and German occupation exerted an enormous influence on the French people as a whole. The humiliating defeat of 1940 was followed by the enforced billeting of German soldiers in French homes, and the absence of hundreds of thousands of French men, first as prisoners of war and then as "volunteers" in German factories as a part of the STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire) program. Finally, there was the deportation, based on Vichy's racial laws, of tens of thousands of Jews to the East. Never before had so many families been radically broken apart, and never had so many people experienced incarceration, or at the very least immobility, in one form or another. In the aftermath of these dislocations, it is easy to understand why existentialism with its emphasis on "freedom" and "responsibility" had such an appeal. The Catholic novel, in its own way, reflected these concerns.

Woman of the Pharisees, which is what I would call the quintessential pre-Vatican II Catholic novel of vertical spirituality, may in fact be the missing link. Mauriac wrote the novel with his mother, Claire, clearly in mind. She is reincarnated in the novel's heroine, Brigitte Pian. Claire Mauriac, as a widow, had raised her five children, Francois being the youngest, in the most austere and restrictive of Jansenist straitjackets. In the novel, Brigitte's stepson, Louis Pian, recounts many years later, events that had taken place in the early '20s revolving around his stepmother's interference in the private life of his sister, Michele Pian, her manipulation of a certain M. Puybaraud, an ex-seminarian and penurious catechism teacher who depends upon her monthly allowance to make ends meet (and who incurs her wrath when he announces to her his plans to marry), and the local priest, the abbe Calou.

The novel investigates in minute detail the inner workings of the mind of Brigitte Pian as a pharisee. The pharisee, to Mauriac, is not a hypocrite, like Moliere's Tartuffe. On the contrary, she is totally sincere and utterly convinced that she is carrying out God's will and doing his work. It is this conviction, of course, that accounts for her strength--and also makes her so potentially dangerous to those around her. Since the pharisee thinks she knows better than other people what is good for them, she does not suffer correction easily. Indeed, she offers up to God her sufferings from the rebukes received from those bridling at her domineering ways. Mauriac touches the heights of irony as Louis Pian accuses his stepmother of pharisaism at the same time as the reader is coming to the conclusion that he too has the same faults. Finally, on another level, the novel can be read as reaching the epitome of this vertical spiritual structuring when we realize that Mauriac himself, as a novelist and as a Catholic with a public, indeed almost "official" allegiance to Catholicism, is also asking himself the question, as he writes the novel: "Am I too a pharisee?"

How this novel of vertical spirituality was received in Occupied France in 1941 is especially revealing. Mauriac intended Woman of the Pharisees to be his most fully developed "roman catholique." It was read, however, as a "roman de l'Occupation." (Since what would later be called the Resistance had not yet begun, and since the overwhelming majority of the French population still had an attentiste wait-and-see attitude in 194 and disapproved of armed attacks by French civilians against Germans in uniform, we cannot quite call it a roman de la Resistance. This is a separate literary genre, which comes into being in 1943.

Mauriac's novel struck a vibrant and sympathetic chord among the wavering French public. As proof of this, one need only cite its remarkable sales figure of 35,000 in the first four months of publication. At a time when paper was strictly rationed and people could not spend their money without thinking twice, this was a remarkable achievement. Its widespread appeal was realized despite attempts by the Vichy authorities to squelch the novel. The collaborationists immediately recognized Woman of the Pharisees as an attack upon them, their authority, and their way of governing. They put out the word--and effectively enforced it--that the press was not to review the novel. In fact, mention in print of Mauriac's name or novel was prohibited.

In his voluminous ten-volume diary, Claude Mauriac, the oldest son of Francois Mauriac, recounts how, in June 1941, someone had explained the boycott to him. But perhaps of even greater interest for us is another entry in Claude's diary from several months earlier, after his father had read several chapters aloud to the family. Mauriac commented at that time that the novel was "bold," and not at all "in keeping with the thinking of the New France." His suspicion, in the dark days of the winter of 1940-41, that a political reading of the novel might prove irresistible was confirmed by the positive reaction of the public the following spring.

For Mauriac Pharisees was of necessity refracted through the occupation experience. Brigitte was thus not perceived as a pharisee in the vertical sense of traditional Catholic teaching. Rather, she was seen horizontally as an emblem of the political class of pharisees who were now in power. The pessimism of the collaborationists about the human condition, about what man could accomplish without authoritarian leaders, reflected hers, and it was easy for readers to see the Vichy elite in Brigitte's attitudes. After all, those nostalgic for the ancien rigime did not hide the fact that the defeat of the previous summer on the battlefield only proved that they had been right all along. They interpreted that debacle as a sign that God had wanted to punish the French nation as a whole for its decadence. The obvious shortcomings of the parliamentary system of government in the '30s had required divine intervention.

The image of the priest in this novel, the abbe Calou, is also essential to this political interpretation. He is not only the most fully developed priest in all of Mauriac's fiction, he is also Brigitte's confessor as well as the protector of the young man who thinks he is in love with Brigitte's stepdaughter. When Brigitte concludes that he has not done his utmost to keep his spiritual charge, Jean de Mirbel, away from her stepdaughter, she intervenes with the local ecclesiastical authorities to have him banished from his small rectory. He is forced to live with his brother and the latter's large family, where he is an added burden. The unjust punishment leveled against the low-ranking priest, the church figure who is the closest to the people, by unidentified hidden powers, was a powerful image for many readers in 1941--especially since abbe Calou's only offense was to sin on the side of love, support, and protection of the young and innocent.

The novel's success, welcomed by so many for reasons that the author never fully intended, led to an amazing string of happy coincidences. If Mauriac's innate sense of order had caused him, like so many other Frenchmen, to take a wait-and-see attitude in late 1940, the overwhelming success of Woman of the Pharisees made his name into a living symbol of what only a year or so later would come to be called the Risistance. In fact, already in the summer of 1941, De Gaulle's radio broadcasts from London were singling Mauriac out by name as a beacon of patriotism in the Allied cause. The publication of his pro-Allied pamphlet Le Cahier noir (The Black Notebook) in 1943 solidified this impression (see, Commonweal, April 23, 1993).

As World War II came to an end, Graham Greene, an editor in the London publishing house of Eyre and Spottiswoode, hired Gerard Hopkins to translate La Pharisienne. When the novel was well received on both sides of the Atlantic in 1946, Greene commissioned Hopkins to translate all of Mauriac's fiction, including the novels that had already been translated by others during the interwar years. This commitment sparked American publishers to commission translations of almost all of Mauriac's nonfiction works, so that over the next two decades virtually all of Mauriac's oeuvre appeared in American editions. Amazingly, hardly a year went by without at least one new Mauriac title appearing in the American market.

By now Mauriac was one of the few French intellectuals who did not adopt the pro-Soviet and anti-American attitudes so widespread at the time among those who only a few years earlier had been allies in the anti-Nazi cause. For this reason, throughout this period even Time magazine went all out in its praise for the man, although its understanding of his work was somewhat limited.

The novel also played an important role with the Nobel Prize committee. In awarding him the Nobel in 1952, the committee specifically cited Woman of the Pharisees. Mauriac later voiced the opinion that the Protestant background of most of the members of the selection committee had probably made them particularly sensitive to the problems of conscience raised in the work. At this time, he also could not keep himself from an exercise in irony by noting impishly his literary debt to Sartre. After all, if le pape de l'existentialisme had not attacked him so brutally in 1939, he might not have given so much care to certain technical aspects of Woman of the Pharisees. La Pharisienne is not only the centerpiece of Mauriac's fiction, it can also be seen as a kind of missing link" in the evolution of the Catholic novel in France from a preoccupation with vertical spirituality to a primary interest in horizontal spirituality. In pondering the novel's reception in light of its author's intentions, one cannot help but think of Claudel's dictum, "God writes straight--but with crooked lines."

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In the evening of her life, Brigitte Pian had come to the knowledge that it was useless to play the part of a proud servitor eager to impress his master by a show of readiness to repay his debts to the last farthing. It had been revealed to her that our Father does not ask us to give a scrupulous account of what merits we can claim. She understood at last that it is not our deserts that matter but our love. --Francois Mauriac Woman of the Pharisees

DAVID O'CONNELL is a professor of French at Georgia State University in Atlanta.