Born: Bordeaux, France, 11 October 1885. Education: Educated at College des Marianites, Grand-Lebrun; University of Bordeaux, licence es lettres; Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Paris. Family: Married Jeanne Lafon in 1913; two sons, including the writer Claude Mauriac, and two daughters. Career: Freelance writer in Paris from 1906; served as hospital orderly in Salonika, 1916-17; columnist (”Bloc-Notes”), L’Express, 1954-61; contributor, Figaro Litteraire, after 1961. Awards: Heinemann prize, 1925; Academie frangaise Grand prize for novel, 1926; Nobel prize for literature, 1952. D.Litt.: Oxford University. President, Societe des Gens de Lettres, 1932-70. Grand Cross, Legion d’honneur. Member: Academie frangaise, 1934; Honorary Member, American Academy. Died: 1 September 1970.
Publications
Collections
Oeuvres romanesques et theatrales completes, edited by Jacques Petit. 3 vols., 1978-81.
Fiction
L’Enfant charge de chaines. 1913; as Young Man in Chains, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1961.
La Robe pretexte. 1914; as The Stuff of Youth, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1960.
La Chair et le sang. 1920; as Flesh and Blood, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1954.
Preseances. 1921; as Questions of Precedence, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1958.
Le Baiser au lepreux. 1922; as A Kiss to the Leper, translated by James Whitall, 1923; as The Kiss for the Leper, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1950.
Le Fleuve de feu. 1923; as The River of Fire, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1954.
Genitrix. 1923; as Genetrix, translated by Gerard Hopkins, in The Family, 1930.
Le Desert de l’amour. 1925; as The Desert of Love, translated by Samuel Putnam, 1929; also translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1949.
Fabien. 1926.
Therese Desqueyroux. 1927; as Therese, translated by Eric Sutton, 1928; as Therese: A Portrait in Four Parts, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1947.
Le Demon de la connaissance. 1928.
Destins (includes Coups de couteau and Un homme de lettres). 1928; as Destinies, translated by Eric Sutton, 1929; as Lines of Life, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1957.
La Nuit du bourreau de soi-meme. 1929.
Trois recits. 1929.
Ce qui etaitperdu. 1930; as Suspicion, 1931; as That Which Was Lost, translated by J.H.F. McEwan, with Dark Angels, 1951.
Le Noeud de viperes. 1932; as Vipers’ Tangle, translated by Warre B. Welles, 1933; as Knot of Vipers, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1951.
Le Mystere Frontenac. 1933; as The Frontenac Mystery, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1952.
La Fin de la nuit. 1935; as The End of the Night, translated by Gerard Hopkins, in Therese: A Portrait in Four Parts, 1947.
Le Mal. 1935; as The Enemy, translated by Gerard Hopkins, with The Desert of Love, 1949.
Les Anges noirs. 1936; as The Dark Angels, translated by Gerard Hopkins, with That Which Was Lost, 1951; as The Mask of Innocence, translated by Hopkins, 1953.
Plongees. 1938.
Les Chemins de la mer. 1939; as The Unknown Sea, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1948.
La Pharisienne. 1941; as A Woman of the Pharisees, translated by
Gerard Hopkins, 1946.
Le Sagouin. 1951; as The Little Misery, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1952; as The Weakling, translated by Hopkins, 1952. Galiga’i. 1952; as The Loved and the Unloved, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1952.
L’Agneau. 1954; as The Lamb, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1955.
A Mauriac Reader, edited by Wallace Fowlie, translated by Gerard Hopkins. 1968.
Un adolescent d’autrefois. 1969; as Maltaverne, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1970.
Plays
Asmodee (produced 1937). 1938; as Asmodee; or, The Intruder, translated by Basil Bartlett, 1939; also translated by Beverly Thurman, 1957.
Les Mal-aimes (produced 1945). 1945.
Passage du Malin (produced 1947). 1948.
Le Feu sur la terre (produced 1950). 1951.
Le Pain vivant. 1955.
Screenplays: Therese, with Claude Mauriac and Georges Franju, 1963.
Verse
Les Mains jointes. 1909. L’Adieu a l’adolescence. 1911.
Orages. 1925; revised edition, 1949.
Le Sang d’Atys. 1940.
Other
De quelques coeurs inquiets: Petits essais de psychologie religieuse. 1920.
La Vie et la mort d’un poete (on Andre Lafon). 1924.
Le Jeune Homme. 1926.
Le Tourment de Jacques Riviere. 1926.
Les Beaux Esprits de ce temps. 1926.
Proust. 1926.
La Province. 1926.
Bordeaux. 1926.
Le Rencontre avec Pascal. 1926.
Conscience, instinct divin. 1927.
Dramaturges. 1928.
Supplement au Traite de la concupiscence de Bossuet. 1928.
Divigations sur Saint-Sulpice. 1928.
La Vie de Jean Racine. 1928.
Le Roman. 1928.
Voltaire contre Pascal. 1929.
Dieu et Mammon. 1929; as God and Mammon, translated anonymously, 1936.
Mesplus lointains souvenirs. 1929.
Paroles en Espagne. 1930.
Trois grands hommes devant Dieu. 1930.
L’Affaire Favre-Bulle. 1931.
Blaise Pascal et sa soeur Jacqueline. 1931.
Le Jeudi saint. 1931; as Maundy Thursday, translated by Harold F. Kynaston-Snell, 1932; as The Eucharist: The Mystery of Holy Thursday, translated by Marie-Louise Dufrenoy, 1944.
Souffrances et bonheur du chretien. 1931; as Anguish and Joy of the Christian Life, translated by Harold Evans, 1964.
Rene Bazin. 1931.
Pelerins. 1932; as Pelerins de Lourdes, 1933.
Commencements d’une vie. 1932.
Le Drole (for children). 1933; as The Holy Terror, translated by Anne Carter, 1964.
Le Romancier et ses personnages. 1933; reprinted in part as L’Education des filles, 1936.
Journal. 5 vols., 1934-53.
Vie de Jesus. 1936; as Life of Jesus, translated by Julie Kerman, 1937.
Les Maisons fugitives. 1939.
Le Cahier noir. 1943; as The Black Note-Book, translated anonymously, 1944.
La Nation frangaise a une ame. 1943.
Ne pas se renier. . . 1944.
Sainte Marguerite de Cortone. 1945; as Saint Margaret of Cortona, translated by Bernard Frechtman, 1948.
La Rencontre avec Barres. 1945.
Le Baillon denoue, apres quatre ans de silence. 1945.
Du cote de chez Proust. 1947; as Proust’s Way, translated by Elsie Pell, 1950.
Mes grands hommes. 1949; as Men I Hold Great, translated by Elsie Pell, 1951; as Great Men, translated by Pell, 1952.
Terres franciscaines. 1950.
Oeuvres completes. 12 vols., 1950-56.
La Pierre d’achoppement. 1951; as The Stumbling Block, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1952.
La Mort d’Andre Gide. 1952.
Lettres ouvertes. 1952; as Letters on Art and Literature, translated by Mario Pei, 1953.
Ecrits intimes. 1953.
Paroles catholiques. 1954; as Words of Faith, translated by Edward H. Flannery, 1955.
Bloc-Notes 1952-1967. 5 vols., 1958-71.
Trois ecrivains devant Lourdes, with others. 1958.
Le Fils de l’homme. 1958; as The Son of Man, translated by Bernard Murchland, 1958.
Memoires interieures. 1959; as Memoires Interieures, translated by Gerard Hopkins, 1960.
Rapport sur les prix de vertu. 1960.
Second Thoughts: Reflections on Literature and Life, translated by Adrienne Foulke. 1961.
Ce que je crois. 1962; as What I Believe, translated by Wallace Fowlie, 1963.
Cain, Where Is Your Brother?, translated anonymously. 1962.
De Gaulle. 1964; as De Gaulle, translated by Richard Howard, 1966.
Nouveaux memoires interieures. 1965; as The Inner Presence: Recollections of My Spiritual Life, translated by Herma Briffault, 1968; as More Reflections from the Soul, translated with introduction by Mary Kimbrough, 1991; Mauriac et le symbolisme by Bernard C. Swift, 2000.
D’autres et moi. 1966.
Memoires politiques. 1967.
Correspondance 1912-1950, with Andre Gide, edited by Jacqueline Morton. 1971.
Lagordaire, edited by Keith Goesch. 1976.
Correspondance 1916-1942, with Jacques-Emile Blanche, edited by Georges-Paul Collet. 1976.
Mauriac avant Mauriac (early writings), edited by Jean Touzot. 1977.
Chroniques du Journal de Clichy, with Paul Claudel (includes Claudel-Fontaine correspondence), edited by Frangois Morlot and Jean Touzot. 1978.
Lettres d’une vie (1904-1969), edited by Caroline Mauriac. 1981.
Editor, Les Pages immortelles de Pascal. 1940; as Living Thoughts of Pascal, 1940.
Editor, with Louise de Vilmorin, Almanach des Lettres 1949. 1949.
Critical Studies:
Mauriac by Elsie Pell, 1947; Mauriac by Martin Jarret-Kerr, 1954; Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Greene and Mauriac by Philip Stratford, 1964; Mauriac by Cecil Jenkins, 1965; Mauriac edited by A.M. Caspary, 1968; A Critical Commentary on Mauriac’s ”LeNoeudde viperes," 1969, and Intention andAchieve-ment: An Essay on the Novels of Mauriac, 1969, both by John Flower, and Frangois Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals by Flower and Bernard C. Swift, 1989; Frangois Mauriac: A Study of the Writer and the Man by Robert Speaight, 1976; Mauriac: The Politics of a Novelist by Malcolm Scott, 1980; Mauriac: Le nxud de viperes by Kathleen M. McKilligan, 1993; Frangois Mauriac Revisited by David O’Connell, 1995.
Saurai-je jamais rien dire des etres ruisselants de vertu et qui ont le coeur sur la main? Les ”coeurs sur la main” n’ont pas d’histoire; mais je connais celle des coeurs enfouis et tout meles a un corps de boue. (Will I ever have anything to say about the virtuous and open-hearted? The open-hearted have no story. But those whose hearts are buried deep, and mingle with the vile flesh, their story I know.) (From Therese Desqueyroux)
Frangois Mauriac wrote as a moralist and a Roman Catholic, the essence of whose Catholicism lay in a sense of sin. Avarice and greed, selfishness and self-congratulation, sham piety and canting respectability are the very stuff of his novels. His characters are extreme, in the grip of powerful passions. Each craves an absolute, each fashions a ”religion” after his own heart—be it mysticism, sensuality, or veneration for the land and the accumulation of property.
At the centre of Mauriac’s novels is the family: a sacrosanct institution which seals itself in with prejudice, casts out justice and humanity, and imprisons the individual. The family ordains marriage and values procreation for the sake of inheritance, alone, and the preservation of its name: Therese Desqueyroux marries into a family who revere her as ”a sacred vessel, the receptacle of their progeny.” The majority of Mauriac’s characters are so engulfed in materialism that they go through life like sleepwalkers—neither seeing, hearing, thinking, nor understanding. Lacking the ability to ”go beyond themselves” in empathy or love for another human being, they are unreceptive to suffering and, therefore, hopeless of salvation.
Mauriac sees no easy way to atonement. Mere confession may not buy it, nor may mystical exaltation, tainted—as Pierre Gornac’s in Destins (Lines of Life)—with a blind and selfish pride. Only where a human being plumbs the depths of humiliation and despair does Mauriac offer us a glimmer of hope. Solitude and emotional asphyxiation drive Therese Desqueyroux to commit a monstrous crime— the attempted poisoning of her husband; and yet Therese, of all Mauriac’s many sinners, is portrayed with great compassion and is one of his most powerful and sympathetic creations.
Mauriac’s sympathy lies clearly with his victims and his lovers. And yet the problem of sin and atonement remains a complex and ambivalent one. Had Robert Lagave in Lines of Life lived, could his ”simple love” have saved him from degeneracy? Should one see in his horrific death an atonement for sins committed in this life? Elisabeth Gornac wakes from moral stupour to catch a glimpse of the eternal in human love; for the first time she truly ”sees” another human face. And yet she can never rise above a love of the senses, but slips back into the sluggish current of ”death-in-life.”
The very heat and torpor of Mauriac’s Landes evoke the aridity of human passion; the fire ever threatening to consume the pines symbolizes its destructiveness. Mauriac’s characters are isolated, without grace, in a desert as bleak as the wind-blown dunes and marshes that stretch endlessly to the sea. Theirs is a world governed by fatality—for Mauriac is both playwright and dramatic novelist. Robert Lagave is doomed to debauchery by his physical beauty; lack of maternal affection drives Pierre Gornac towards a warped mysticism; Therese is drawn into her crime almost unconsciously—like a sleepwalker.
These psychological dramas have an extraordinary intensity, and an economy and vigour of style—the style of the dramatist. In this lies Mauriac’s striking originality as a novelist, as in his powerful evocation of the landscape of his native Landes, which goes beyond realistic description to become symbol.
