[Stratford is a Canadian educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he discusses the development of and literary influences on Mauriac's early work.]

In the introduction to Commencements d'une vie Mauriac admits that the intensity of his childhood experience was heightened by the habit of self-dramatization. "As a child I played at being solitary and misunderstood," he writes, "and it was the most fascinating of games. Perhaps I found it so because I instinctively knew that much more than a game was involved, a preparation in fact, an exercise for becoming a writer. To enjoy watching oneself suffer is the obvious sign of a literary vocation." It is the change of that instinctive sense of vocation into conscious purpose that I wish to trace in this chapter, furnishing biographical background and evidence from the novels of the period, but still focusing on those elements which determine the character of Mauriac's creative vision.

One of the forces that contributed most to its development was a passionate love of literature. "As a child books were my unique deliverance," Mauriac states, and adds, characteristically, qualifying the idea of escape, "they provided me with the image of my own confusion and anxieties" [Commencements]. There was nothing exceptional in his early "voracious appetite" [Mémoires Intérieurs] for books. Like any child, he read indiscriminately, and his mother, apart from making sure that what he read was "safe" (as often as not sanctioned by the Bibliothèque Rose), did nothing to guide him or shape his taste. Mauriac thinks that among the children's classics of his time the novels of Zénaïde Fleuriot had the greatest influence. It is hard to say just what these stories of the mis-adventures and heartbreaks of little aristocrats in Brittany could have given him beyond some insight into the pleasure of invention, but they impressed him enough to set him writing numerous imitations of them at the age of ten.

Despite this precocious start, the form of the novel was not to tempt Mauriac seriously for almost twenty more years, and during this time his literary taste was being formed by his reading in French classics. At Grand-Lebrun he was introduced to Pascal and Racine who were to affect him profoundly, not so much by providing him with literary models as by furnishing him with a point of view. Referring to the strict religious practice of his mother and to the dramatic extremes of fear and love which colored family piety, Mauriac says that he was well prepared to fall under the spell of Pascal. The Brunschvicg school edition of les Pensées has never left his bedside, and he refers to Pascal as "the writer to whom I owe the most, who has most permanently left his mark upon me, and who has been my master since my sixteenth year" [Ce gue je crois].

If Pascal's influence was capital in shaping his religious attitude, Racine's was even more important in forming his artistic outlook. Mauriac states that he knows Racine "from the inside," and from his first encounter with the plays in the school curriculum he felt that he had been penetrated by Racine's tragic sense "to the very marrow-bones" ["Préface," Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. VIII]. He assures us that on an adolescent level the Racinian type of conflict between conscience and the passions was lived out with great intensity in a religious college like his own. And in a poem in L Adieu à l'adolescence he says that at sixteen Racine's heroines awakened him to the life of the passions. When he seriously began to write, he found that his novels proceeded directly from Racine's dramas, and he has often acknowledged that Racine's characters, Phèdre in particular, have served as inspiration for his own creation. Moreover, as he advanced in his literary career he felt that Racine's problems as a Catholic writer, led by his artistic vocation to delineate the passions, tallied so closely with his own difficulties that when, in 1926, he was asked to write a biography, the method he employed was to reconstruct Racine's interior life by thinking constantly of his own.

It was really lyric poetry, however, that first captured Mauriac's imagination and fixed his desire to write. In his lonely days at Grand-Lebrun he fortified his solitude with poetry: "I interposed between myself and reality all the lyricism of the last century. Lamartine, Musset, Vigny ... " [Commencements]. Mauriac's father, alone among his family, had been well-read, and it was in his library that, at fifteen, he discovered Baudelaire and Rimbaud, whose books had hitherto been classed as les mauvais livres. The former led him out of childhood into the fallen world, into "the world of sin." The latter represented to his growing dislike of the bourgeois climate of Bordeaux, and the indifference of his next of kin, the romantic image of the artist in revolt. Yet despite the fact that the influence of both poets came early and remained a strong undercurrent, the experience that they dealt with remained foreign to him, and their full effect on him was delayed.

When he began to write poetry himself during his last years at Grand-Lebrun, he turned to more modest regional models. In Francis Jammes he discovered tender and simple love of the Girondin countryside, of that nature which had remained his own first love, even beyond his love of books. "Nothing can change the fact of my indebtedness to him in that secret order of things that is at the very heart of one's inspiration," Mauriac writes.

His verse . . . may not have modified my vision of the world, but it taught me that I could express it in the plainest terms without falling back on the clichés of romanticism. Jammes revealed to me that to write would mean directly expressing what I felt with all the fervour of a country-bred child. He showed me the path which was to become my own, and which was to lead me through the tangible world of nature to the world of human passion. Already at college I knew from Racine that there was nothing more wonderful than to be able to give the passions visible form in invented character. . . . But through Jammes I discovered that human feelings and the moods of nature would fuse together in the novels I would write, and that it would be my special artistic province to so combine them. [Mauriac, in his "Préface" to Clara d'Ellébeuse (1958) by Francis Jammes]

In the works of another poet of the southwest, Maurice de Guérin, whom Mauriac felt he knew "from the inside" ["Préface," Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. VIII], he found an even more intense expression of this communion with the natural world. "De Guérin not only made us sensitive to the beauty of external nature as the great romantics had done," he writes of himself and two young poet friends, André Lafon and Jean de la Ville de Mirmont, "he initiated us to the mute passions of the earth. He gave to our frail and humiliated adolescence the giddy certitude that we were the conscience of the vegetal world. It was through us that the trees tortured by the Atlantic wind and the hills shadowed by the flying clouds knew themselves ... " ["Avant-Propos," in Le Cahier vert (1947) by Mauriac de Guérin].

But although Mauriac felt himself in close correspondence with nature, he was prevented by the Jansenist in him, by the influence of Pascal, from following de Guérin in his paganism. Andwhile sympathizing with de Guérin's romantic idealism and his rejection of the compromises of the adult world, one side of his nature was ambitious for success and esteem; he was drawn by the doctrine of Barrès and his culte du moi to exalt his own individuality and to covet the glory and influence that usually accompany the careers of professional writers in France. On the positive side of the balance he writes of Barrés: "Without the influence of this disciple of Pascal, everything human would never have become for me the object of such an ardent curiosity" ["Discours de réception à l'Académie Françaite," in Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. VIII]. More critically, he speaks of himself in his twenties as being "the perfect little Barrèsian ["Prè-face," l'Élève Gilles (1956) by André Lafon], conditioned by "the ruminations of a scrupulous Catholicism to read Barrés's breviary of egotism like an open book" ["Mes premières années à Paris," Le Figaro, February 24, 1940].

Mauriac's early fiction resounds with echoes of his literary favorites and current reading. In the course of his first short novel, Young Man in Chains (1913), the twenty-year-old hero, Jean-Paul Johanet, finds occasion to quote from Jammes, Pascal, Verlaine, Laforgue, Balzac, LaFontaine (and Mauriac), and to refer respectfully to Chateaubriand, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Henri Perreyve, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Barrès, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Gide and Claudel. Although Mauriac himself was saturated in literature at this time, he was nervously aware of the dangers of such over-exposure. In fact, the central theme of the novel is the conflict between the power of literature over the hero and the call to a life of action, and through the character of Jean-Paul, Mauriac analyzes his own situation as he hesitated in his mid-twenties on the threshold of a life of letters.

"He swims in a tide of books and spends long afternoons alone analysing his empty, complicated little mind," one of the characters says of Jean-Paul, a remark which must have given Mauriac a shiver of self-contemptuous delight. Jean-Paul who "throughout a quiet and lonely childhood . . . had got into the habit of watching himself live," believes his only happiness to lie "in examining myself by the light of what I find in the books I most adore." His cousin, Marthe, warns him that he is a victim of his reading, that he takes his books too seriously, that he talks like a book, and his only rejoinder is to assert complacently: "You're right, Marthe, I've got printer's ink in my veins instead of blood!"

Jean-Paul's infatuation with literature is not innocuous. It sustains him in a self-centered universe and in a kind of emotional vacuum which often borders on despair. One of his friends, Vincent Hiéron, a rather smug young religious zealot, analyzes Jean-Paul's trouble in the following terms: "The love of books, when all's said and done, Jean-Paul, is just love of oneself. One reads only those authors in whom one sees oneself reflected. But worshipping himself, a man fails to live because he is his own prisoner. Before any of us can truly live he must renounce self. . . . And he tries to win Jean-Paul's enthusiasm for an altruistic Christian-Socialist movement called Amour et Foi to which he is committed.

He briefly succeeds, and Jean-Paul becomes an ardent disciple. But accompanying, and perhaps growing out of, his love of literature is an acid self-critical sense which he finds he cannot help turning on the idealistic "Cause" of Amour et Foi. His cynicism results in his expulsion from the movement. Having failed "to free himself from himself and "live" in a spiritual sense, Jean-Paul seeks escape by trying to lose himself in the pleasures of the body. He takes a mistress and lives a life of forced gaiety in Paris. But again he is too self-conscious to succeed. He experiences nothing but an "artificial passion" which is "pieced together. . . from odds and ends of literary memories," and in the end is forced to see himself as "an exile even from the world of human love."

Finally he is rescued from this impasse by an act of Grace, by "the awakening of his religious consciousness." At first, true to his habit of self-examination, he is skeptical of its validity, and wonders if he was "just yielding to it with the shrewdness, the ability he always had to fabricate emotions, to deceive himself." But this time he senses a difference: "At this moment, of all the petty dodges learnt from books, nothing remained." The conversion is a lasting one. His interior change is seconded externally by Marthe's patient love which is now revealed to him, and the young man in chains discovers that "on that day when my thoughts became centered upon Marthe with a tender and a fixed concern, I began to be delivered from myself."

The genuine part of this novel is not the liberation but the chains. Jean-Paul's conversion is literature, contrived to round out the novel. His doubts about being able to come to terms with reality, the curse of incessant introspection, and his mistrust of the literary quality of all his experience reveal the true preoccupations of the young author. These themes run like an obsessive undercurrent through the next three novels. [Note] the curious disability of Jacques, hero of The Stuff of Youth (1914), who cannot react spontaneously to those who love him, but must wait for the intervention of death, either real or figurative, before he can shape a suitable emotional response. The narrator in his fourth novel, Questions of Precedence (1921), is one of the same species and speaks of "those of my race who suffer from the melancholy mania of worshiping that part of themselves that is already dead. They are alive with memories, images, and anterior sensations like badly embalmed corpses." This same character refers to himself elsewhere as to "one whom reading has dispensed from living." And Edward Dupont-Gunther, a major figure in the intervening novel, Flesh and Blood (1914-1920), is a brooding, self-absorbed young man like Jean-Paul who is addicted to literature and has so feeble a hold on reality that, following his morbid penchant, he is led to commit suicide.

In these various characterizations Mauriac explored his own conscience. Unlike Jean-Paul after his conversion, he was by no means free from the prison of himself. He saw that, committed to the passive life of a writer, liberation in art or in action, as he had invented it for Jacques's father, the South Seas painter in The Stuff of Youth, or for Augustin, hero of Questions of Precedence (like Rimbaud, Augustin abandons himself to an inconspicuous and laborious life in Africa), would never be his except in imagination. At about the same time, or a little earlier, he must have given up hopes of a direct religious vocation. Jacques in The Stuff of Youth speaks of a Jesuit priest as having "infected me with his own passion for souls." But he adds, "his attitude was one of absolute detachment. I, on the other hand, though I did not know it, was less moved by love than by curiosity." Mauriac, aware of this distinction, decided, as for himself, that he would try to surpass Jacques's mere quisitiveness, or at any rate, if he was to remain a prisoner it would not be to the kind of listless and sickly curiosity that had ruined Edward in Flesh and Blood. Short of a vocation to the religious life, in his fiction he would try to give the passion for self-analysis and the "taste for the delicious pleasure which comes from probing into the intricacies of human souls" [Young Man in Chains] a Christian orientation.

At the time of Jean-Paul Johanet's conversion, his friend Vincent invokes the enduring power of a Catholic childhood over one's adult life and refers to it as to an imprisonment of a different kind. "No man can serve two masters," he apostrophizes, adding in his preachy way, "Is it not that truth which now torments you? You cannot escape it. It holds you prisoner. . . . " This same truth was to torment Mauriac far into his career, as will be seen in a later chapter, but at least he had fixed a goal for himself. Years later, writing of this period in his life he expressed his attitude in these words: "I took stock of my resources. And my first decision was, whatever happened, never to let go the hand of God . . . I determined that I would no longer let questions of faith arise for me, but that my destiny should be played out in the borderland between nature and Grace, and that I would resign myself to live in the shadow that the cross throws over a human life" ["La Rencontre avec Barrès," Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. IV].

Resigned to his faith, he also resigned himself to a life of literary introspection. "We all belong to the heritage of Rousseau," he wrote [in "Hommage à Charles du Bos," Qu'est-ce que la littérature (1945)], and felt that the greatness and the peril of a literary vocation lay in audacious and sincere self-revelation which must, however, be undertaken with the maximum of lucidity and the minimum of self-indulgence. To write, for an artist of his kind, would be not so much deliverance as surrender of himself: on the one hand to the exigencies of his art, on the other to the curiosity of his public. This sort of self-exposure would require the greatest self-knowledge and the greatest self-discipline. "The perfection of art," he wrote, "is to take those morbid inclinations which threatened to destroy you, isolate them, contain them, and make them serve, on the contrary, to release in you a vital, life-giving power" ["Le Jeune homme," Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. IV].

It was in these terms that Mauriac began to voice the debate between the idea of a life devoted to action and a life devoted to literature. Much more of a struggle is implied in his attempts to resolve it than in the simple intervention of Grace that dispels Jean-Paul's difficulties. Not only was this sense of strain to be felt in every succeeding examination of his literary vocation, but it was also to nourish many of the conflicts of his forthcoming fiction.

Young Man in Chains is partly based on the private journal which Mauriac kept during his last year at Grand-Lebrun, and he recognizes in Jean-Paul the most authentic characterization of his four early novels. The hero's experiences not only reveal the state of his author's mind, but also provide a point of departure for a brief review of some of the actual circumstances of Mauriac's literary debut. The part of the novel which deals with Amour et Foi is a fictionalized account of Mauriac's association with the Sillon movement under the direction of Marc Sangnier (Jérome in the novel) before its condemnation by Rome in 1906. The rest of the novel is drawn from his first impressions of Paris where he had gone in 1906, after completing a licence ès lettres at the University of Bordeaux, with the intention of preparing a diploma at the École des Chartes. A small inheritance made him financially independent, however, and after qualifying in the entrance examinations, he decided to abandon his studies and devote himself entirely to literature. For three years he led a leisurely and introspective life, much like that of the hero of his novel. He busied himself with the affairs of a Catholic students' group, Cercle Montalembert, and published a few poems and critical articles in its review. On the side he began to make contacts which would later permit him to enter the thorny labyrinth of Parisian literary society. During his third year in Paris he attracted the attention of C.-F. Caillard, editor of La Revue du Temps Présent, who gave him the job of reviewing poetry for the magazine and sponsored the publication of his first volume of verse, Les Mains Jointes, which appeared in November, 1909, when Mauriac had just turned twenty-four.

In later years Mauriac judged this verse very severely, writing that he had "stepped on to the literary scene an angelic cherubim, fresh from the sacristy" [Dieu et Mammon], and deploring the facility of its "spineless" technique, as well as the timid sentimentality of its religious outlook. When the book was reprinted in March, 1910, however, it was enthusiastically reviewed by one of Mauriac's adolescent idols, none other than Maurice Barrés, who forecast that his future would be "easy, open, assured and glorious" ["La Rencontre avec Barrés"].

Barrès's approval was an important first step in the fulfillment of this prophecy. From that time on, more and more doors were open to Mauriac; he began to frequent literary circles and to publish in better known reviews. In May, 1911, a second volume of verse, L'Adieu à l'adolescence, appeared; in November of the same year he contributed his first fiction (a chapter from what was to be The Stuff of Youth) to La Revue Hebdomadaire. This was followed by the serialization of Young Man in Chains in the Mercure de France in June, 1912, and by a second installment of The Stuff of Youth in the Revue de Paris in October. After this he published little more verse. By the age of twentysix the change from poet to novelist was well begun.

This metamorphosis, for all that it is a common one, deserves some attention. "If I am first of all a poet," Mauriac wrote in the year of his Noble prize, "and that is something that I, at any rate, have never questioned, I have never deliberately betrayed poetry for the novel." And yet, though the poetic quality of Mauriac's prose is indisputable, it is a fact that, as Mauriac admits, "it was fiction and not poetry which released in me that irresistible revelation of the inmost self, that cry which a man in the grips of inspiration cannot hold back" ["Vue sur mes romans," Le Figaro, November 15, 1952].

What exactly is the relationship between the lyrical and the narrative mode of expression in Mauriac's experience? On the surface the change from one to the other seems largely to be an effect of age. As an adolescent, interested in nothing so much as himself, Mauriac sought to define his sensations by finding their reflection in nature. He made a fetish of his solitude and his sense of difference, and this decided the subject and the mood for most of his early poetry. As revealed in the heroes of his first novels, he felt himself to be alone, even in love, and his soulsearching, his joys and his griefs were almost invariably private and self-centered. While with one side of himself he believed in the universal validity of his experience, with another he held as fervent a faith in his own singularity. Like the romantic poet, he remade the world in his own image and became self-consciously immanent in everything that he created, while the exterior world tended to fade or be transformed by the uniqueness of his own subjective vision.

In retrospect, Mauriac speaks of himself at this time as being under the spell of "a certain type of romanticism which at my age seems to be the very height of absurdity and foolishness"[Mémoires intérieurs]. Although he still acknowledges his debt to his early masters, Jammes and de Guérin, he describes the truth of their work as "the truth of sensation." And while it is too simple to suggest that his change in view from romanticism to realism was made through a transfer of allegiance from one poet to another, his description of Baudelaire, "who was my hero as a young man," points up the change in emphasis:

Baudelaire is the poet of the real, so little romantic that the very language created by his poetry for its purpose is the nearest thing to prose that any poet has ventured to use, the most "figurative"—to use the modern jargon, always strictly controlled by the object. . . . Whatever its nature, Baudelaire saw it with an unswerving eye, smelt it, touched it, and showed it sub specie aetemitatis as Van Gogh did his kitchen chair. [Mémoires intérieurs]

A change in interest of this order stimulated Mauriac's growing interest in fiction in his mid-twenties. Though the poet in him was still very much alive, he began to shed some of his romantic self-centeredness in his first experiments in prose. He began to see his lonely childhood in perspective as an object, not just as a theme. He recalled in detail the facts and people of his early years, as well as his own moods and emotions, now somewhat objectified in memory. He remembered the fascination with which he had listened to the adult members of his family as a child. He speaks of having been "passionately interested in grownups," because they were, to his eyes, deeply engaged in the drama of living, and, even more—since to him they seemed to be close to death—dangerously involved in the drama of salvation. He recalled, too, their stories of local and family history, "of which I have made great use in my work," and he now feels that his own narrative instinct was cultivated by listening to these family raconteurs. From these elements he began to build up his first novels.

The transition from poet to novelist was a gradual one however. It is carried on throughout the first four novels, and in them one can observe a developing process of objectification, particularly in regard to the creation of character. Young Man in Chains, Mauriac's first novel, is little more than a transcription into prose of Mauriac's self-analysis in verse. Jean-Paul is patently a self-portrait and the only significant character in the novel, eclipsing all the other figures who exist only as signposts and soundingboards for his own development. The author is not yet disengaged from his hero whose self-questionings remain fluid, imprecise, and troublesome beyond the requirements of the characterization. And although Mauriac employs the third person narrative technique in an attempt to distance himself from his subject, it is constantly being interrupted by telltale interior monologue in which the author continues his own unresolved debate. . . .

In the best of his characterizations Mauriac strikes a dynamic balance between subjectivity and objectivity, between identification with his fictional creatures and detachment from them. He might learn from the disciplines of objectivity how to create convincingly not only characters who resembled him in some way but also a wide variety of types drawn from outside his own immediate experience. But in so doing he felt he must describe these characters "from the inside," must "draw [them] out of his own substance" ["Le province," Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. IV]. And he brought to the most objectively conceived of the characters in these early novels—to Florence, for instance, in Questions of Precedence—the same intense and deeply personalconcern for his subject as marked the best of his own lyric poetry. To have gained proficiency in the technique of objectivity was, in the end, to have mastered a device which would permit him to penetrate even further into his own private world.