JACQUES RIVIÈRE’S LETTERS

Jacques Rivière’s case brings us back to the problem which was our generation’s—that of sincerity. It presents itself only to a small number of Christians; the greater part never question the principles they received in school; from childhood they inclined the automaton and repeated the formulas; their natures are entirely made up of that habit. With the most fervent of them, the mechanism of their spiritual life stiffens itself against all self-examination. The slightest stirring of uncertainty, a question that comes to their mind, is written down immediately under the heading of pride, blasphemy, temptations against the faith. The intermittences of Grace, God’s silences, barrenness, everything enters into an order accepted once and for all. That supreme test of the Saints, that of little Sister Theresa, during her last illness, the complete loss of faith which no longer survives except under its most wilful and deliberate aspect, even that is put into the ranks of tests reserved for great souls. The most ordinary Christian would not even allow himself Christ’s last question to his Father: “Why have you abandoned me?” The system teaches them why they are abandoned. There is nothing that does not receive an interpretation within the general line of doctrine.

Other minds resist all that appears so natural to most believers and revolt against it by their very nature, although they are everywhere open to mystical influences, and even more sensitive than the others to God’s presence. But at certain hours only. They do not interpret the different states that pass through their souls, they verify them. God is God; barrenness is barrenness; passion is passion.

Passion does not appear to them under the guise of the adversary whom one either resists or to whom one yields, but as something that is and that is not able not to be, just like that God by Whom they were possessed yesterday, and Whom they will find again to-morrow perhaps.

Jacques Rivière’s letters that I publish date from the last months of his life. From 1914 to 1918 he had passed through the hell of captivity, and God had visited him in prison; or rather, forced by the circumstances themselves to live turned inward on himself, he had had no other recourse than to pick up the divine traces in his own heart. But scarcely was he free than the outside world crowded anew into that heart emptied for years of all that was not God. The eternal was submerged there by the ephemeral, by creatures at first (especially by woman whom he discovered at an age when so many others expected nothing more of her but pleasure), but also by literary work in its most dangerous form, Marcel Proust’s, which has no other object than itself, and whose analysis pulverizes and destroys the human personality.

God Who occupied Rivière the prisoner retires, and the director of the Nouvelle Revue Française, is now given over to other forces against which he will not defend himself now any more than formerly he defended himself against God. When Rivière writes me that the Christian in him is suppressed by his will-power alone, by his reflection alone, and when he thanks me for recalling to him that grace exists, it is a last manifestation of the grace that subsists in him, and that nature is dominating a little more each day. Beginning with the following letter, he recovers himself and demands for his book and also for himself the title of reflective man. We understand what he means by that: that sort of reflection that questions everything, that observes what is, without claiming to change anything in the heart to which he applies it. Jacques Rivière knows very well there is no worse offense since Christianity demands death in us, and the assassination of the old Adam, the creation of a new Adam in whom everything is made over, recomposed, including attitudes, gestures and language. Since he has taken the direction of conforming himself to the exigencies of God, Rivière must first make an effort to conform to those of the natural life; whence that tone, liberated and a little affected in his last letters. That did not prevent a novel from interesting him at that time to the extent that he found in it a hint of struggle against the angel; it is a sign that it was only interrupted in him, and that he remained harrowed by that secret struggle.

Even when a boy, born Catholic and French like Jacques Rivière, takes the side of humanism, it is really a side that he takes; that is to say, he is torn in half; one side of him protests and debates. That art of leading his reflection and his life freely without taking any account of religion, or feeling any embarrassment because he belongs to it (honored, nevertheless, and even practiced, but on a plane considered beyond the grasp of the intelligence), the art which was Montaigne’s, that was what Rivière was, doubtless, the least capable of. “The human mind stands ever in perplexity,” writes Emerson, “demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared.”

Jacques Rivière aspired to the domination of that discontent at the end of his life. He had searched for the reconciler in all the masters who, one after the other, had disappointed his adolescence. With the passing of his tormented youth, he no longer counted on anything but the law which he received from himself. “I am frightfully autonomous,” he wrote me. He thought he was; but approaching death was going to impose the supreme renunciation on his autonomy and submit him harshly to Another’s law, that Other Whom he had never renounced. Some weeks before his death (it is Ramon Fernandez who reports it) he protested that he had not renounced God … nor God Jacques Rivière.

 

Paris, February 16.

My dear friend,

I have just reread the proofs of the last part of your Fleuve de Feu. I take back all the criticism that I made to you in regard to it. It is very good as it is. And I have a stronger proof of this than what any reasoning could furnish me: namely, the state of emotion in which I find myself.

The first time, as a matter of fact, I was held back and bothered by another subject than the one you wanted to treat and which had substituted itself for it in my mind; the subject was entirely human; it was Gisèle fought over by Daniel Trasis and Madame de Villeron. You sketched that struggle of two beings around a soul and for that soul, but you yourself refused to bring it to fulfillment, to its maximum intensity, since you attributed to man that nostalgia for purity that dooms him in advance to failure, since, on the other hand, you show Lucile pierced by the doubt and torpor that diminish her will-power, her activity and her influence.

Yes, the drama such as you have conceived it is, properly speaking, religious, and you succeeded in giving it, on that plane, a splendid reality. Massis is, perhaps, right; maybe there is in me a religious being repressed (but not by Gide, by my willpower alone, or rather by my reflection which is much more serious). In sum, that is why, at first reading, I did not want to understand your novel. The force you put on the stage, Grace, to call it openly by its name, I had believed in spontaneously for a long time, then (it is the war that did it to me; I felt myself too forsaken) I decided to consider them as not having occurred, not to recognize them any more. I know that what I am saying here is atrocious. and surpasses natural atheism in impiety; but with me, when the mind is deceived, I mean when what it had believed true seems to steal away, there is born in its stead a formidable, frightful resentment which pushes it toward extreme scepticism.

However that many be, my first resistence to your dénouement evidently had its origin in that will not to believe in Grace. It gives way now that the evidence forces me to see what you wanted to do, what you have done.

My dear Maúriac, it is possible that you appear to certain Catholics as a perverted being and an evil genius; as for me, for the time being, you serve me as a good councilor; you recall to me the existence of my better self that evidently I have made great efforts to forget, that life also—to my credit it must be said—has worked hard to stifle in me.

The book I have in my mind at this time, and in which there will not be an indecent or blasphemous line, is more terrible than all the Immoralistes in the world. If I succeed in not writing it, something that, in certain respects, I deeply hope, it is to you I shall owe it, to your example, to the demonstration you furnish me, in the only form that it can strike me now, of all the resources, of all the depths there are in the Christian conception of the world and of life.

Cordially yours,

Jacques Rivière.

 

P.S.—I know a Gisèle de Plailly—without Grace—but very touching too. That is why your book touched me so much at once. All the same, how interesting women are! Your defense of G. is admirable. But, between you and me, it is very difficult for me to defend, as a writer and novelist, someone who does not like women. G. will never be great, for lack of that love, don’t you think so?

If you consent, I will write the notice of your book when it appears.

 

April 6.

 

My dear friend,

If I have been a long time answering you, don’t be angry with me. Your letter gave me so much pleasure! But I am a regular galley-slave, and when I come from dictating thirty letters to ask for notices or refuse manuscripts, you can guess in what mood I am to write to my friends. Then I had to write an article on politics. A fine piece of work!

And still again, I had the affair Boissard-Romaine, the affair Salmon-Cl.-R. Marx, the affair Breton-Rivière, the affair Waldo Frank-Valéry Larbaud. It is frightful how small and tiresome writers can be!

We shall speak of Bourget again. If I asked you for the article, it is because I did not necessarily consider him “ferocious.” It seems to me there could be a few little things to say in favor of the good man, even if there are many others with which to overwhelm him.

Besides, I must admit his work is almost unknown to me.

As for the notice on Marsan, there is still time. I consent to a longer time than I first gave you; would you like until the twelfth? And if that still seems too short for you, well, you can write the notice for the next number. Unless you dislike the book. But there are many fine things in it.

I should tell you that I had some regrets for the dramatic manner in which I spoke to you of my next book. In the last analysis, it was a little ridiculous. Is it really as terrible as I gave you to think? Not, at any rate, in the way you might think: by the indecency or impiety of the sentiments that I have confessed in it. No, if I gave it a subtitle—something that I shall not do—it would simply be: Life History of a Reflective Man. And indicated there is the only scandal that you must expect to find in it; the scandal that can be born of a perfectly tranquil and objective reflection on oneself, and the adaptation of a being to the exigencies of life. You see that my theme has nothing demoniacal about it, and that it is made to disappoint Massis.

I am beginning to have a horror of drama, at least of the kind that one superadds to his inner difficulties to magnify them, to make something interesting out of them. I am beginning to find out that pleasure and happiness, if one can arrange so as to attain them, are the most interesting things to be had in the world. I am almost ashamed of all the time I have passed in telling myself that happiness was impossible. It was cowardice.

There, my dear friend, you have the sense, and the only sense, in which I am becoming impious, and that is the only declivity from which I was thinking of having you hold me back. But is a man ever held back from that inner declivity, even by the help of the most devoted friends? In the final analysis, if I have been very lonely until now, it is because I am frightfully autonomous.

Yes, do not fail to show me your poetry. I think that Gallimard would accept it with pleasure as a booklet (in the collection: A work, a portrait).

Goodbye for the present. I thank you again for your letter, and for the friendship you show for me. Very affectionately yours,

Jacques Rivière.

 

 

January 4.

My dear friend,

I have finally read Genitrix. I do not have the book handy as I left it with Gide whom one casual glance at it enticed.

You know how much I like everything you are doing now; this new book is no exception. Why had Jaloux’ article made me think it was so different from what I found it to be? I found it at the same time simpler, more unilinear, more moulded, if I dare say so.

Your leisurely composition, your wise manner of retailing the past by little snatches interspersed into the present, your way of overtaking life wherever it suits you, where it appears to you, pleases me infinitely in certain respects. This always allows you to be concrete, clear, and it reproduces admirably the manner in which, in practice, we learn the story, from both ends, as it were.

But that also upsets somewhat my mind which is morbidly in love with continuity. I should like to grasp from inside, follow with a glance that nothing would distract, the relationship between the mother and son. I half see it, I have some feeling about it, but too many elements remain hidden from me, escape even hypotheses. It is the same for the son’s passion for Mathilde, after she is dead.

I know I am tiresome and indiscreet. But take good account of all the interest that this indiscretion bears for your characters and your work.

They live, my dear friend, since I should like to know more about them. They live; and that is the important point.

Your beginning is magnificent. The precision of the atmosphere is almost dizzying. And the mind remains impregnated by it to the point that I never pick up your book again from my shelves without immediately smelling the odor of coal and syringa.

I pour out my impressions to you hurriedly and in disorder; but you know how weighed down I am by my work.

I hope to see you soon. We shall only be gone Wednesday, the 16th. (I am going to Belgium.) I am waiting for your notices on Métérie et Ideologues. Short, please.—Thank you! I am very happy to have a Cahier Vert of your Genitrix. You were very kind to save me one. I am

Your friend,

J. R.

 

Domaine de Saint-Victor,
Cénon (Gironde).
September 12.

 

My dear François,

I thank you for your notice, excellent in spite of the bad conditions under which you say you had to write it. You were right to bring out that second Madame de Noilles whom one does not notice sufficiently, or at any rate does not distinguish enough from the gardener and the ecstatic one. Nevertheless, may I say to you that my enthusiasm even for the second remains a little more hesitant than yours?

I told you, I believe, how anxious I was to get acquainted with your new novel. Your development as a novelist is the one that interests me most to-day; it is the most dramatic that I know; your progress is always surprising, in the strongest sense of the word. When can I read something?

I no longer remember what you told me about its publication in a magazine. But if it has not yet been taken, the N. R. F. would most enthusiastically place its candidacy for the honor of undertaking it. I won’t write a preface for you, you know, because it seems that when I do, they only “snuff out” the good of the article.4

Your sincere friend,

Jacques Rivière.

 

P.S.—Where should I send you the proofs of your notice?

 

Monday evening.

My dear François,

I am profiting by a moment’s leisure to begin to give you my detailed impression of your novel; but as I am dead-tired, permit me to use the most commonplace style.

This time you did it. I felt a little shiver at the beginning of the fourth part (conversation between Raymond and Maria at the bar). I thought it was going to turn to simple, melancholy reminiscences of the past, like Jaloux’. But not at all! The following scenes surge up magnificently, and the last between the father and son is splendid. It is a novel, a real one.

I, whose profession and perhaps gift it is, to see directly into the minds of creatures, see very well all there is of you in it, all the scraps of your soul that you have abandoned to it. But that is because it is my profession. The work, in reality, is completely detached from you, and lives its own personal life. All your characters are constructed to the last detail. There is not a trace of that slackness of imagination which sometimes held you back in the preceding ones, and which produced dead parts, or rather parts of the author, where the author alone was active. In Le Desert de l’Amour, the action is absolutely everywhere characteristic of the characters; you had the patience to allow each of them to secrete his acts and thoughts very completely.

There is also very remarkable composition; I mean … that the elements are utilized with the most happy economy….

(I stop on this point; I can not develop my thought very well.)

But, yes, I can; the lives of the characters evolve in a manner at the same time distinct and perfectly combined; there is that reciprocal repercussion of one on the other that is indispensible if there is to be a novel, and yet each one can be seen developing in his own desert. I do not know how you succeeded in doing that, but it is a remarkable success.