January 1961
By chance there are two novels published on the same day, both exceptionally well written and which I have read consecutively. Both are records of, or discussions upon, suffering; both are set in conditions of violence and physical pain or disease; both treat of man’s cruelty and stupidity to his own kind (the key and degree of all this is, of course, different, but the disharmony is the same); both reveal that the only straw buoyant enough to sustain him has nothing to do with either what he has or can do. The difference between them is fascinating and acute.
The scene of Graham Green’s latest novel, A Burnt Out Case, is a leper colony in the Congo. The supply boat arrives with an unknown passenger called Querry, who stays ‘because the boat goes no further’. Querry is accepted to this community without question, and eventually offers to help in it which results in his driving a truck four days to the nearest town, Luc, for supplies and back. Here he is accosted by the manager of a palm oil factory, who having spent six years in a Jesuit seminary and been refused priesthood, has married an immature girl. Rycker - one of the most unrelievedly poisonous characters it would be possible to meet anywhere - knows who Querry is and is insatiably curious about why he should be in Africa. Querry is forced to stay the night with him, and having been treated to a nauseating mixture of Rycker’s bullying condescension to his wife and his pseudo-holy toadying of himself, leaves with relief, having asked Rycker not to broadcast his presence. In the colony, Querry, who had arrived there far gone in indifference and distaste for life in general and his own in particular, has begun to find some relief and purpose. The doctor has assigned him as servant a leper, ‘a burnt out case’ - one who has been cured, although so mutilated that it would be difficult for him to live or find work outside the colony, and as Querry recognises his affinity to this man, his sickness retreats and he begins to work for the colony in his own capacity. But Rycker is reliably untrustworthy, and a reporter called Parkinson arrives, immensely fat, suffering his first bout of malaria and also from the disease of all bad journalists - the second-hand evocation. After an interview with Querry, when he is told truths wholly unacceptable to him, he returns to Luc to write and publish his articles, aided by Rycker’s gossip. After the second has appeared, Querry tries to beard Rycker, to stop him spreading more grotesque lies, but Rycker is ill, and he finds Marie Rycker - afraid she is pregnant and afraid to tell her husband, who is against having children. He drives her to Luc for tests, and spends a night telling her the fairy story of his life. But Parkinson is still in Luc, and so next morning is the husband: it needs only the childish, breathtakingly simple irresponsibility of Marie to bring this situation to its certain end.
Mr. Greene, as by now almost everyone knows, is master of his craft; his writing pared to its essentials, his incidents always selected to serve his main purpose, his characters all playing their parts in the life: it is impossible to believe that he would ever fail to communicate any experience that he understood and thought worth communication, but his atheist doctor makes two remarks which are both pertinent and revealing to the scope of his scene. Of Querry he says: ‘You can’t cure success … Success is like … mutilation of the natural man’. This implies a one dimensional view of something being made to fit a creature possessed of more than one dimension. External success will only fit the external man, and Mr. Greene would presumably agree that this is not all of him. To Querry, Dr. Colin remarks: ‘Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means we have to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition. With suffering we become part of the Christian myth’. Of course, Dr. Colin is depicted as an atheist, and might therefore not understand the necessity of starting by being in touch with himself, but if suffering is the only way to that, Mr. Green’s my uncle.
Destiny of Fire is the best historical novel that I have ever read, and even people who claim not to like historical novels should try it before lumping it with other dull or frivolous experiences in this category. Mme Oldenbourg has clearly a deep and loving knowledge of the Middle Ages, and has here used it to give the most moving and powerful account of the Albigensian Crusade. She provides an historical note, and for the benefit of those who know nothing about them, here are the barest facts known about the Albigensians or Cathars.
Originating in Bulgaria in the twelfth century, they spread over the Balkans, to Italy, to Flanders, and to the province of Languedoc, where from 1209-1229 there was a bloody and agonising war in which the Catholic Church sought to regain jurisdiction of the district under the French King. The Cathars, who seem rightly to have described themselves as Christians, denied nearly all Catholic doctrine, but it is known that their creed was centred upon Christ, with the gospels as sole scriptural authority, Baptism by the laying on of hands their only Sacrament, and the Lord’s Prayer the only written prayer. Their preaching rested chiefly upon example in their personal lives, and even their worst enemies found nothing to condemn in them apart from their doctrines. After the Crusade their persecution continued - all ministers of their Church, both men and women, were burned alive when captured, and the lay heretics murdered by thousands. A hundred years after the Crusade there were no Cathars left in Languedoc, and nothing of them survives, excepting one Book of Rites made up of quotations from the New Testament with a commentary ‘ which even a Catholic would accept in almost every detail’, but it was strictly forbidden to record a single deed or word of theirs which might present them in a favourable light.
This book is centred upon the fates of a noble Cathar family - the parents, four sons and a daughter. When the book opens the children are all grown up, and the parents have decided to devote themselves to prayer and their Church as soon as their daughter marries. But the daughter, Gentian, wishes to enter a Catharist convent: the war has begun, the sons join the army of their feudal lord; the mother, Arsen, receives the Cathar baptism in order that she may be send out into the country in disguise to teach and administer to the Cathars, and her husband gathers together a band of men with whom he fights a guerrilla war against the Crusaders. We follow them for more than twenty-five years through every imaginable peril, hardship and loss to their severally violent ends. The author says in her preface that: ‘It is not possible to appreciate this novel unless one bears in mind that these candidates for martyrdom felt themselves to be members of a strong, living Church’. Her extraordinary power lies in making one see that this was so, in terms which are easily understood: in her remarkable gift for making people whom one can see and feel for and love, and above all in her most valuable understanding of what the recompenses of such people were. She not only shows most clearly what were their desires and aims, she shows the astonishing peace and joy which some of them attained, and perhaps it is this last which transforms the novel from being simply a scholarly account of atrocity, defeat and annihilation into a work with the quality of lasting significance.
Peter Green seems to have taken a very great deal of successful trouble with the translation, which can have been no mean task, although certainly the most worthwhile achievement.