[In following essay, Peyre summarizes Giono's work and its changing emphases during the author's lifetime.]

Historians and philosophers, with their faculty for proposing impressive generalizations, will some day speculate on the ‘necessary’ correlation between society and literature in France during the period between the two world wars. In the view of these thinkers, artists and writers stand in close dependence upon the environment in which they have grown up and reflect the prevailing mood of their age. Those who have remained aloof are ruled out as solitary exceptions confirming the common rule, as the absurd saying puts it; or they are branded as dwellers in an ivory tower, who refused their duty to society.

The truth is that the spirit of an age as it is reflected in history is often contradicted by the image of the same era mirrored in its art and letters. In western Europe the period from 1919 to 1930 was a time of economic reconstruction, of relative political stability, of social optimism, and of the pursuit of prosperity. Yet the literature of the period was characterized by an all-pervading sadness, even when it advocated hedonism. This generation cared little about stability and unambiguously dismissed any concern with eternal values. While official prophets celebrated the creed of social service and the steady improvement of man and his world, the rebels of letters bewailed the solitude of the modern civilized individual, and his failure to reach harmony with others and find peace within himself. The writers stressed introspective self-analysis as never before. When many declared that woman had at last come of age and would henceforth share man's role in the world, heroines practically disappeared from literature or were depicted with ferocious severity. While the world, one was told, was entering upon a century of indefinite progress, literature expressed discouragement, describing the disintegration of man and his world and the disintegration of the novel and other art forms.

France was struck last by the economic crisis of 1929-33, and for a time she seemed only mildly affected. Yet a worm undermining her political structure was gnawing more and more deeply. A cleavage was widening daily between antagonistic social elements. The country, with her nostalgic attachment to the past and her innate turbulence, avid for innovations, seemed reluctant to accept the modern world, with its methods of mass production, its faith in machines, and its worship of efficiency. While other nations were artificially fostering their much-advertised ‘dynamism,’ they revived the old accusation that France was backward and ‘decadent.’ Yet intelligence, subtlety, humor, and originality were as abundant as ever in Paris. Unfortunately, action seemed to be divorced from intelligence, and subtle minds seemed unable to envision the forces of the future and to harness them in the interest of their country and of mankind.

At the very moment when her political and economic leaders seemed powerless to avert an impending catastrophe, France produced a number of writers whose robust audacity and faith were scarcely equaled elsewhere in Europe. Jean Giono is probably the most original among these men; his appearance in the French literary firmament was truly meteoric. At the very time when Marcel Proust seemed to have established his supremacy in French fiction and to have oriented it toward the minute analysis of man's remembrance of things past, when Jules Romains, Jacques de Lacretelle, and André Maurois were delighting in the delineation of hypercerebral and sensual characters, when François Mauriac was populating his fervid récits with miserly bourgeois men and love-starved wives frantically seeking God to put an end to their isolation, a new voice rang from the remote Alpine countryside. It sang of nature, of the starry skies, of the wind, of ardent and simple creatures, and of intoxicating sensations, with the accents of a primitive bard. The novels of that newcomer to literature were not skillfully built; they ignored academic subtleties and the fashions of the day. Their heroes were not poisoned by complexes, nor did they blend desire and hatred in ‘that mutual torture,’ which was, for Proust, synonymous with love. In them the tone of a psychological dissector had given way to that of a poetical master of suggestive language and an epic storyteller.

Giono was also a prophet, and his message was soon acclaimed by eager disciples. He rejected much of our urban and analytical civilization; but he held out hope for despairing moderns. He aimed at rebuilding a new unity in man and endeavored to instil in him the sweet, or bitter, ‘lore that nature brings.’ The shades of other prophets of revolt were recalled by critics: Rabelais, Rousseau, Rimbaud. Once again, indeed, from the land most famous for analytical introspection and destructive irony, there sounded an appeal to listen to nature alone and to delve into the mysteries of precivilized life. This new hymn to nature and to joy at once found echoes in other lands. Giono's prose, unusually difficult because of its wealth of vigorous words, was enthusiastically deciphered by students in foreign universities. The screen consecrated first Harvest (Regain), then the ‘Baker's Wife’ (inspired by an episode in Jean le bleu), a typically Gallic picture, which caused American journalists and commentators to throw moderation to the winds in their praise.

Giono is a Frenchman of the south, but there are many varied domains within the vast and vague realm called ‘southern France.’ His petite patrie is not the playful Southwest of Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Gobineau, nor the mysterious land of the Basques. It is not the Provence of the cavalcades and of the Félibres, of colorful costumes and a sonorous language revived, not without some artifice, by Mistral and his circle. Alphonse Daudet's graceful tales, fragrant with rosemary and thyme, are pale sketches when placed beside Giono's flamboyant description of mountains and storms and floods. The ferocious logic of Charles Maurras and of other southern Royalists clinging to a bygone order, or the subtle Greek intellectuality of Paul Valéry, are no less alien to this new romantic. Although Giono's native city is not many miles distant from the Mont Sainte-Victoire, now familiar to museumgoers of two continents, his luxuriousness seems to set his landscape in a different world from that of Cézanne's essential sobriety. With Zola, Cézanne's compatriot, Giono seems at first to have more in common. But he embellishes reality and exalts man, while Zola, a romantic at heart, found bitter rejoicing in the somber poetry of vice and too often cultivated ugliness.

Giono is not merely a provincial novelist or what the French call un écrivain du terroir. His appeal is to all modern men, as is Thomas Hardy's or William Faulkner's, even though the setting and the characters of their books are narrowly localized. But Giono's reader cannot divorce the message implicit in his books or in the beings to whom he gives life from the landscape, which is always part and parcel of the story. His Provence is not the conventional Riviera with its cosmopolitan tourists, its equable climate gentle to invalids, retired officials, and undersexed esthetes. It is not the Provence of imposing Roman ruins or of pine-clad promontories still haunted by Greek memories. It stretches between the Durance Valley and the Italian frontier, north of Aix and Draguignan. Its soil is poor; indeed the Basses-Alpes, being one of the least favored of all the French departments, has remained unspoiled by industry and by the tourist trade.

Manosque, Giono's birthplace, is a town of some five thousand inhabitants, whose history, as a few picturesque relics still testify, goes back to the Middle Ages. Its narrow lands, contained within the perimeter of old fortified walls, afford vistas of the countryside studded with dark tapering cypresses, long rows of century-old ashen-gray olive trees, and, in the early spring, the delicate beauty of almond trees in bloom. Beyond stands the mountain of Lure, a familiar presence in Giono's novels. On its slopes there are scattered farmhouses with their ancient wells shaded by a broad fig tree, and a threshing ground for the wheat that grows sturdily in the dry, red earth. Farther up, there stretch green pasture lands to which shepherds repair in the summer with their flocks, after driving their sheep and a few male goats along the dusty roads of the plain all the way from Camargue. Stags and birds, depicted with an uncanny insight into their physical being and their wild, delicate nature in some of Giono's books, haunt the many glades, which resound at night with their calls. The fauna of Giono's landscapes is bewilderingly rich: swarms of insects buzzing in the trembling noonday heat, partridges and larks and nightingales, rabbits, martins, and weasels appear in his stories, not as a pretext for elaborate descriptions, but briefly characterized in the felicitous images of a sensuous pantheist. Snakes are especially dear to him, as they were to Shelley, for their strange gracefulness and peaceful communion with the earth in which they wind and burrow. The river Durance is ever present; now almost dried up by the summer drought, with innumerable islets overgrown with osier and tall, marshy grasses in which the baker's wife and her lover take refuge; now impetuously overflowing the plains, swollen with the thaw of Alpine snows and swinging against its banks in wrath.

The chief actors in Giono's stories are the great elemental forces: the wind, the torrents of spring unleashed over field and marsh, the parched earth in summer, the Dionysian dance of reeling odors, which intoxicate his men and his women, and above all, the stars that guide their works and their humble meditations. The novelist's purpose is to create living beings not unworthy of such a simple and yet grandiose setting, and the best of Giono's books are those in which he has conjured up the people who enchanted his childhood and taught him the meaning of life and the acceptance of fate. They are his father, a few women with their wise intuition and their revelations of the mysteries of physical delight and of spiritual otherness, an occasional artisan or peasant, now and then a village healer or an itinerant acrobat who attempted to cure the evil in souls. These characters are robust children of nature, hardly literate, little addicted to pondering mental problems or to repressing their healthy enjoyment of all senses by inhibitions of religion or culture. Yet they are never coarse, like the degraded peasants of Zola or of Erskine Caldwell. Their passions are ardent when aroused, but they never become abnormal nor indelicate. Clumsily but with earnest good will, they grope toward an end; and that end is almost always charity, the gift of themselves to others, the fraternal desire to help their fellow creatures reach joy. Idealized though they may be, and sweet-tongued or figurative in their language, they seldom appear false to those who are familiar with their native province. The humble shoemaker in Jean le bleu, the simple and devoted journeyman from Baumugnes, the farm laborers in Que ma joie demeure, even the more primitive men and women struggling against fate and against each other in Le Chant du monde are as true to life as any other peasants in French literature.

Giono was born at Manosque on March 30, 1895, the first of a brilliant group of writers who came into the world before the dawn of the new century. His father, who died in 1920, was a shoemaker in his small town. Giono learned much from watching his father at work with his leather, awl, and cobbler's wax, and from listening to his slow, thoughtful conversation with friends and customers. Unlike other writers born in humble condition, who hasten to become members of the middle class or to knock at the doors of salons and academies, Giono always took pride in his humble origins. His semifictional autobiography, Jean le bleu, movingly portrays his father guiding his son through the awakening of adolescence to the shrewd wisdom of inner contentment and fraternity. He has often alluded to three other French writers of some repute (Jean Guéhenno, Louis Guilloux, and Lucien Jacques), also sons of shoemakers, as constituting with him the brotherhood of cobblers in present-day literature.

Giono's father, like Zola's father and Valéry's mother, was of Italian descent. His grandfather, who had conspired with other Italian carbonari, had fled from Italy across the French Alps, then served with the French in Algeria in 1835. Giono's father, born near Marseille, had eventually settled at Manosque; there he married, in 1892, Pauline Pourcin, whose father came from Provence and whose mother came from Picardy. She was a laundress by trade, and Jean le bleu as a child roamed from the tools of the shoemaker's workshop to the lower floor of the laundry where the smell of clean linen, of hot irons and, as he proclaims, of perspiring women delighted his precocious adolescence.

His father was his most influential teacher. To him Giono owes a spirit of indomitable independence in his political and social views, a seriousness of purpose, which may have been strengthened by certain leanings in his father toward Protestantism, and a durable attachment to the concrete and the palpable in life, which recalls a craftsman plying his wood, leather, and thread. Giono's sense of touch is second only to his extraordinary sense of smell. The boy went to school in Manosque from the age of six to that of sixteen, then entered a local bank as a petty clerk and remained there until the war broke out. His amazing mastery over one of the richest stores of words ever handled by any French writer was apparently acquired not in lecture rooms and university libraries but at the truest fountains of language: a few great books, read and reread, and the talk of peasants, shepherds, and artisans.

Little is known about Giono's sources, and even the most inquisitive scholar need not know much more; except for a few reminiscences of Gide's Nourritures terrestres, Giono owes little to the works of his contemporaries. The two great events in his youth were his discovery of the classics and his initiation into music, related with emotion and humor in the early chapters of Jean le bleu. To his love of music, especially that of Bach and Mozart, different as Giono is from them, some of his ideological essays will later bear witness. His novels, with their alternating phrases of sonorous exuberance and of slender flutelike melody, occasionally recall musical symphonies. They certainly aim at seizing the whole of the reader's sensibility and they unleash the same elemental forms that Beethoven and Wagner translated into sounds. They hardly reflect the preference for design, often accompanied by too sharp a relief given to lines and too conscious a control of one's material, that has marked the French novel since Stendhal.

The reading of ancient poets in translation was for the young Jean the supreme revelation. Others, born comfortably into the middle class with the advantages of a liberal education, have derived nothing but boredom from their enforced construing of the lines of Homer and Sophocles. Giono had not learned Greek, but he grew up in a land where peasants to this day winnow their grain, pluck their olives, and milk their goats much as their Mediterranean forefathers did in the time of Ulysses or Theocritus. He felt the classics spontaneously and lived them in his body. They gave him, according to his favorite phrase, ‘a kick in the stomach.’ They aroused in him at fifteen an impulse to write, which he was to obey only many years later. In one of the few passages in which he has enlightened us on his training and technique, Giono declared:

Born in a poor family, the son of a shoemaker, then a small clerk in a bank, I bought one day the ancient classics in the cheap Garnier collection. The Greeks were revealed to my dazzled mind … I have revived, or rather I have made actual, the heroes of Homer and of Sophocles whom I found unchanged in my native province. … From that day on, I had found my path: to renew the great Greek tragedies.¹

In his autobiographical novel, Jean le bleu (blue because he loves to close his eyes and to feel his dizzy head all filled with blue), he recalls the intoxication of his fourteenth year. Once, at harvest time, a mysterious farm laborer lent him a copy of the Iliad in translation. He read it among the yellow ears of wheat, while scythes were creaking and long forks were pitching the sheaves. The text penetrated into his very senses and marrow. ‘Into me was Antilochus throwing the spear. Into me was Achilles ramming the soil of his tent, trampling in the wrath of his heavy feet. In me was Patroclus shedding his blood.’

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes are still the authors most often taken from their shelves; then Shakespeare and Spinoza. Hardly any of the French classics and only, among the moderns, Melville (for whom he wrote an eloquent preface, Pour saluer Melville, in 1940), and Walt Whitman, whom he has frequently read aloud to the peasants of Provence. With the Old Testament he is obviously familiar, and some of its myths have lately haunted his imagination. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he refrains from belittling Hellenic themes with irony and facile anachronism when he goes to them for his inspiration; he also refrains from technical tricks and from such manipulations with time, syntax, and words as have tempted many moderns, naïve in their sophisticated desire to disconcert their readers. His only principle is to grasp the subject fully, squarely, banishing all subterfuge; the rest follows slowly but surely.

When the war suddenly broke out in 1914, the bank clerk, then nineteen, was soon called to the colors. For almost four years he served as a private in an infantry regiment, exposed to the sordidness of mud and carrion, watching men intoxicate themselves with the smell of blood or resort to the lowest pleasures in order to forget. Miraculously, he escaped wounds and death. But he saw his dearest comrades fall in combat by his side; he returned home on brief furloughs, to watch desolate parents and widows pining in grief and to count the friends of his youth whom war was ravishing one after the other. Giono hated war. His anger against Christianity springs in part from the lamentable record of modern history, with war condoned or incited by religion. Leaving Nietzschean hymns to the virtues of the dangerous life and the heroism of hardhearted warriors to the lucky or timid ones who had stayed behind at their desks, he spoke as a plain soldier who had seen too much actual shedding of blood ever to celebrate the mystical value of that rite. ‘I have stayed at Fort de Vaux [near Verdun] for forty-two days, and it is difficult for me to get excited over a corpse … The stupidity of war is what disgusts me most in it. I love life.’ Indeed, his war stories, ferocious in their bitter emphasis on the grim aspects of the fighting, contain some of the most haunting evocations of the butchery of Verdun and Kemmel. But the bruised flesh and the eyes of dead soldiers eaten up by rats and vultures revolted Giono less than the immense waste that characterizes war. Peasant that he is, he cannot be reconciled to the senseless mowing down of young bodies and ripe crops and cattle, and the laying waste of old trees and carefully tended meadows.

In 1919, Giono finally came back to Manosque, sad in mind although unharmed in body. Other young men who had shared the same experience were driven by the lust of escape to exotic lands; or they were eager to make up for their lost years and rushed to Paris, the eternal goal of all provincial Frenchmen with literary, political, or financial ambitions. Giono did not share in the postwar race for pleasure, speed, and ‘intense living.’ He quietly took up his former position at the local bank, worked underground in the vaults at the Service des Coupons, endlessly clipping off bits of strangely colored and engraved paper and crediting them in big ledgers. But a banker he was never meant to be. He resigned from the bank when, in 1929, his company offered to send him to Antibes to direct a new branch there. Money inspired him with neither respect nor greed. He will later contrast ‘the true riches’ with those squares of green-backed or yellowish thin paper that most men worship. In 1920, he had married and soon had had two daughters.

After he had resigned from the bank, he devoted most of his day to writing. He began by composing poetical tales of nature and delicate eclogues set in the Manosque region, then a more ambitious volume inspired by the Odyssey, or rather reinterpreting the old epic imaginatively, La Naissance de l'Odyssée (1930). His friend Lucien Jacques took one of his manuscripts to Marseille and had it published there. He was thus encouraged and in 1929, Colline, printed in a Parisian review, revealed him as a writer of original talent. The doors of the literary world suddenly swung wide open.

Giono did not rush to conquer the salons and the cénacles of the French capital. He chose to remain a provincial. The streets of the busy metropolis appeared inhuman to him, for they were filled only with vacant eyes and the hurried steps of people who had lost contact with trees and rocks, horses and foxes, even with the sun and the sky. He traveled there seldom, to visit his publisher or to watch the performance of his plays, two of which were given on the Parisian stage with scant success, for Giono's talent is not truly dramatic. He avoided literary circles, but fame came to him as it had come to few modern French writers since Proust and Valéry. Still Giono lived on in his old house in Manosque, writing in his ‘lighthouse’ as he calls his clear sunny room overlooking the valley. His friends remained the humble folk of the country: the postman, the grocer, the shepherd, and their wives, whom he persuaded to bake their own bread, as the first step to the recovery of pristine wisdom.

Giono, however, is no modest hermit singing in unadorned language of simple life and the joys of the earth. He soon became conscious of his rare power over words; at times he became intoxicated with it. He was not content with portraying what he saw or writing of the feelings and the sensations that he imagined. His later tales had a message, and the message was in danger of devouring the tale. In the years immediately preceding World War II, Giono turned into a Tolstoyan prophet. Many men and women of France, and still larger numbers from central Europe, flocked to Manosque to seek the counsel of the Master. Tourists on their way to the Riviera included Manosque in their journey and came in the luxurious comfort of their automobiles to revere the advocate of simple living. Enthusiasts, reported a German friend of Giono who became a French writer of no mean talent, Ernst E. Noth, even claimed that pilgrims to the Giono abode should not walk or ride but crawl on their knees from the railway station to his house!

Giono's career was, from 1929 to 1937, an uninterrupted flowering, which brought forth over a dozen volumes and probably another dozen that have remained in manuscript to this day. These works can, without too much artifice, be divided into several groups.

In his first attempts, the sage from Manosque was trying his hand at stories of limited length, sketching only a few characters but already investing his tales with symbolic significance and discovering his gift for the earthy, striking metaphor. Along with Naissance de l'Odyssée, a fanciful tale of Ulysses' home coming (written five years before its publication in 1930), Giono first revealed himself with a collection of short stories, Solitude de la pitié. Several of them are intensely moving because of the simplicity of the theme and the directness of the style. The two words linked in the title point toward the leitmotivs of the book. Giono has none of the impassive objectivity of Guy de Maupassant. He is less intent on building his stories up to a dramatic climax; he seems to whisper his tale into the reader's ear with a heart-rending, though unsentimental, force of emotion, rare in the short-story writers of our century. Giono already draws upon some of the mainsprings of his inspiration: his hatred of urban civilization and of Paris, against which he launches a burning anathema (in ‘Destruction de Paris’); the visitation of Pan, herald of rapturous joy, to a village (‘Prélude de Pan’); and his ambition to write a book in which man will be merged into the surrounding world, attuned to its supreme harmony (‘Le Chant du monde’), a brief tale with the same title as the novel.

Soon after, three short novels appeared, which Giono grouped as the Trilogie de Pan: Colline (1929), Un de Baumugnes (1929), and Regain (1930). The second of these volumes was translated into English as Lovers Are Never Losers, and the third is known as Harvest; both were made famous by screen adaptations. This trilogy revealed Giono to be a master of adroit stylistic effects; his sentences are short and concise and seem to grasp the object in its very shape and mass and odor. They render, more faithfully than Giono's later exuberance succeeded in doing, the dry heat of Upper Provence and the parched earth strewn with pine needles. Great God Pan, reborn after centuries of Christianity, or, rather, never dead in spite of Plutarch's sailor hearing the voice announcing his end, reigns supreme in that pagan land. Colline is a tale of peasant witchcraft as well as a hymn to the true life that flows in communion with nature. Regain is the new grass growing on reclaimed meadows and again mown, and the new crop of wheat in fields that had long remained untilled: a victory of man over the earth he had misunderstood and over his own selfish and bitter solitude. The story ends in fairy-tale fashion, with too obvious a moral lesson, which detracts from the artistic quality but was made more palatable in the moving picture.

The middle book of the trilogy, Un de Baumugnes, on the contrary, is a masterpiece of its kind. The novel has a moral purpose, but it is not obtrusive, and the tale in itself is breath-taking. The scenery is suggested with subtle restraint, so that the description remains secondary to the plot and creation of character. The story is told in the first person by a farm laborer who, at harvest time, met in the village café a tall young man with a heavy weight on his heart. He is Albin, from the village of Baumugnes (Vaugnières is the real name of the village on the map, but it has also been identified as St. Julien en Beauchêne, where Giono occasionally spent the summer months), a silent, clumsy, kindhearted giant, who inherited from his Huguenot ancestors an uncanny gift for playing the harmonica. Persecuted by the people of the plain because they clung to their different religion, these Huguenots had had the tip of their tongues cut off by their Catholic enemies during the religious wars, so that they would no longer be able to sing their hymns. They fled to the mountains, and, unable to speak, they called each other through the music of their harmonicas.

Albin was strolling in the village one evening after work when he was struck by the apparition of a tall, slim girl from one of the farms. But another lad had seen her too, a rascal from Marseilles, who was eager to earn his living more speedily, if less honestly, than by threshing corn. More wily and eloquent than Albin, he lost no time in arranging a meeting with the girl, Angèle, lured her with mendacious promises away from her home, and, after a child was born to her and she was ashamed to go back to her parents, forced her to sell herself to other men. When she broke away and returned with her fatherless baby to the farm where she was born, her parents, nearly crazy with shame, imprisoned her in a silo so that she would never again be seen. But Albin could not forget the vision of Angèle. His friend, the narrator of the story, undertook to discover her; he had himself hired at the desolate farm and, risking the wrath and the gun of the old father, discovered at last the subterranean prison and called for Albin. Albin's harmonica, played at night with skill and with feeling, revealed to Angèle the faithful young man who had once gazed at her. The novel ends when, after eluding the attacks of the old maniac, Angèle eloped with Albin, taking her baby, which became his. They went to the mountain village to live happily ever after. The story is simple but told with consummate art, with none of the complex layers of motives and desires dear to the novels of the nineteen-thirties. It is credible throughout, flowing with life. Unashamedly, it portrayed in postwar literature a man who was sincerely and naïvely in love and a woman worthy of being loved.

These early novels of Giono reflected the radiant search for joy of a young man exulting in his rediscovered bonds with the mythical forces of nature and eager to rebuild a new communion through love. Soon, however, the author became obsessed with the memories of war. Giono is the author of two war books, Le Grand Troupeau (1931) and Refus d'obéissance (1937). A third one, Jean le bleu (1933), receives its full significance from the last chapters on the tragic massacre that buried the rosy dreams of his adolescence. ‘Beyond this book, there is the huge gaping wound by which all men of my age are gangrened,’ he writes as a mournful conclusion to that enchanted autobiography.

Refus d'obéissance is vitiated by too crude an emphasis on the bloodcurdling aspects of the carnage in the trenches; its propagandist intention almost defeats its own purpose. It recalls the era when well-meaning pacifists thought they would undermine fascist appeals to the heroism of battle by dwelling on the horrors of gore and blown-out brains. The war scenes in Le Grand Troupeau are horrifying too, but so was the reality they describe; they do not try to provoke or convert the reader, and they strike one as graphically true to life. But the splendid part of this book is the delineation of civilians; for example, the opening scene with its epic descent of the flock of sheep through the dusty Alpine villages, the solitude of women dreaming of their absent husbands after the day of hard physical labor on the farm, haunted, in Giono's usual manner, by odors: ‘When he was undressing, it would swell your nose; an odor of leather and of perspiring hair on his body. It smelt as when one prepares the dressing for the big Summer salads and crushes vinegar and garlic and powdered mustard in the salad bowl.’ The volume, which is less a novel than a series of disconnected vignettes of the front and the villages in the remote rear, with the omnipresence of death contrasted with the resilience of life, ends when an old shepherd visits a newborn baby on the farm and wishes for him the true blessings of life.

If God may listen to me, it will be thy lot to love slowly, slowly in all thy loves, like one who holds the arms of the plow and digs a little more deeply every day.

Thou wilt never weep the watery tear through thy eyes, but, like the vine, through the cleft opened at random.

Thou wilt often carry the burden of others, and be by the roadside like a fountain.

And thou wilt love the stars!

The last word of the grim war book is an appeal to lead the great flock of men, and not let oneself be led, a message of hope, which Giono will henceforth regularly propose to his contemporaries.

Jean le bleu similarly lacks the well-balanced unity of a carefully composed novel. It meanders among the profuse reminiscences of the author's childhood and adolescence, treasures the sounds and the smells through which young Jean awoke to the exterior world, and conjures up, in an order as capriciously alien to time sequence as that of Proust's saga, visions of nature, farmers, animals, all reeling in a dizzy feast of the senses, amid the pagan setting of upper Provence. The book overflows with vitality; its very images are heavy, like pendant clusters of grapes. Yet there is wisdom in that debauchery of sensations, and purity in the pagan naturalness with which these peasants face the basic realities of life. The personality of Giono's father, the reflective shoemaker, dominates the book. Toward the end, the old man, his heart weakened, feels death approaching. In magnificent language, he explains to his son the meaning of the words ‘God,’ ‘Death,’ ‘Life,’ and tells him how much more difficult it is to suffer all alone than to live all alone, and how soothing it would be to invent God to console one's suffering if one has failed actually to find Him.

The news had just reached the quiet Southern village of the American who had succeeded in keeping in the air for one hundred and fifty feet. Some day it would be one hundred and fifty miles and many more, but the village sages nod their heads dubiously.

All that will not change anything, for the happiness of man is enclosed in small valleys.

Close to us, against the wall, there were swallows' nests, and mother-birds came to feed the little ones …

The tragic thing about our lives is that we are nothing but halves. As long as inventions are made in mechanics and not in love, men will not reach happiness. We are still only halves. The curse of heaven on us had been to make our hearts single. One for each. Once halved in two, you must find your exact counterpart, or else you will remain alone all your life. … You are not any the happier for these magical inventions, for you have invented nothing new in the call you send around you for the other half of your heart.

And while the milk of the earth streams through all the blades of grass, while tree and beast are in all their glory of early summer, the young men leave for war, singing. Half of them never again will gaze at the beauty of this world.

Giono had proved himself a master of the robust idyl in Un de Baumugnes and had given in Jean le bleu a happy blending of fancy and of warm and sensuous realism. His next masterpieces, Le Chant du monde (The Song of the World) and Que ma joie demeure (Joy of Man's Desiring), can best be defined as epic novels. Giono was predestined among the French novelists of the century to attempt an epic novel. His humble origins and his obstinate determination to remain a provincial and a man of the people preserved him from the cleverness that gives a veneer of charm, but nothing more, to many brief French novels. He did not aim at speed and did not shrink from the plodding gait of the farmer pacing his furrow. His gift was one of the imagination rather than of analysis, and his instinct kept shy of the studies of desire, passion, and jealousy in which his compatriots think they excel. He had no cynicism and hardly any irony, not even much of a sense of humor, which is a saving grace in some writers but which occasionally paralyzes creation.

Le Serpent d'étoiles, published in 1933, is a strange tale of Provençal and Piedmontese shepherds gathering their flocks on the high pastures of the Alps during the summer. At the end of their long trip across the parched plains, they improvise a splendid epic drama in which the dialogues and the choruses leap with the untrammeled freedom of primitive inspiration. If, as he avers, Giono has preserved the original integrity of these folk songs and folk dramas, the book contains some of the most unique documents ever recorded in popular and spontaneous literature. The setting is described with a splendor of imagery that recalls the greatest of primitive epics, the Vedas and The Iliad. The reader feels the wind graze the palm of his hand, drinks the sky in long gulps, sniffs the smell of the hay in rapture, marvels at the multitudinous stars ‘sown into the night as from a sack of rice’ and as brightly pure as if they had never before twinkled in the luminous darkness. In this book, Giono first decided to apply to his writings the Whitmanian question: ‘Can your work face the open countryside and the ocean shores?’

Le Chant du monde (1934) takes us back to the world of man with its passions and hatreds. It is, of all Giono's works, the one nearest to our idea of a novel, with characters presented in motion, struggling against each other, and integrated into a closely woven plot. Antonio, a fisherman, starts on an expedition along the river banks to a high mountain, with an older man, Matelot. The latter, having lost one of his twin sons in some wild fray, has resolved to explore the country for the other twin, a red-haired young man who has lately mysteriously disappeared. The pasture lands above the valley and the fantastic city halfway up the mountain are ruled over by a much-feared tyrant by the name of Maudru. Cowherds for leagues around obey Maudru's bidding. Antonio and Matelot reach the town and repair to the house of a hunchback, who is versed in old books, herbs, and plasters. The hunchback, who had been frustrated in some early love, had retired into that spacious house, the old palace of the bishops, and had devoted his life to healing the sick and the lunatics, who flock to him in long caravans from the countryside. There he had given refuge to the red-haired twin, who had dared fall in love with Gina, a girl of the Maudru family, and had eloped with her, after killing her fiancé, Maudru's own nephew, in a fight. He had promised her escape into the plains far away, freedom, and joy. But freedom is slow in coming; and the girl's hot blood boils while she is kept in concealment by her husband. But the couple cannot face the wrath of Maudru and his vassals in midwinter. They must wait until the snow melts and uncovers a raft, which the husband has built and concealed in a lonely creek.

Meanwhile, Matelot is killed in an ambush by Maudru's men, who have sniffed an enemy in him. His son, outraged and furious, with Antonio's help, sets fire to Maudru's stables and frees the bulls, which, maddened by the smell of fire, race wildly across the fields and overpower the cowherds. Then, while the great disorder of spring sends off steaming clouds from the forests of firs, quickens their trunks with sparkling sap, and thaws the face of the earth into rivulets and swamps, the two men launch their raft and float down the swollen river. Gina at last sees her dream of freedom fulfilled and admires in her husband the fearless killer, as tender in his love as he was furious in battle. With Antonio is a blind woman, Clara, whom he had met one day in the woods, while she was giving birth to a baby. He had tended her clumsily but devotedly and had accepted her insight and her faithful gratitude, while she worshipped his smell of a robust male. The two young couples sail down the river on their Noah's ark, as if determined to remold their own lives and the world. Slowly the blind woman deciphers the names of the trees, of the mud, of the stars, through the eyes of her lover; and he listens to her strange metaphors, which translate nature through other senses than sight; through her, he learns that seeing is deceptive. The secrets of life have to be questioned patiently, in humble submission.

Throughout the novel, the forces of nature—mountain and river and snow and the tender spring buds—are united with the wild passions of men, clan hatreds, vengeance, and desire. The story takes on a frantic violence at times, then subsides in the end, where the dominant feelings are those of protective love bestowed on the frail by the strong and of tender pity for the meek. The actors, except Toussaint, the healer, the meditative character who always appears among Giono's primitive souls, are above the common stature of men. They are epic heroes not because they accumulate feats in violent battle but because they are the very forces of nature embodied in simple, strong creatures; they echo the song of the world.

Each pair of lovers, at the end of Le Chant du monde, reaches happiness in mutual love and in bowing humbly to nature in her moods of fury or of gentleness. But man cannot long ignore other men; even the senses and the passionate desire that fully rewarded love had momentarily appeased will soon aspire beyond the walls of their selfish retreat.

Que ma joie demeure, published one year later, in 1935, is a more ambitious attempt. It portrays a group of diversified human beings who want to reach happiness and to preserve it when once won. The title is taken from the opening of Bach's choral, from which the first word, Jesus, considered by Giono as a limitation, has been erased. The volume, an ample and at times meandering novel of five hundred pages, is one long, surging aspiration toward joy. The plot is too loose to be summarized. A peasant has risen in the middle of the night to plough his field, vaguely disturbed by a brooding sense of the incompleteness of his own life and of that of the farmers around him. Suddenly a stranger appears on the ploughed furrow, under the dance of the stars, asks him to look up at Orion so like a carrot flower, questions him on his secret sorrow, and promises joy to him: let him leave some strips of land unsown, and grow lavish daffodils, and daisies, and merry hawthorn. The thrifty farmer listens, and obeys. And his neighbors, amused at first, also fall under the sway of Bobi the stranger, a mountebank and a prophet. They understand that to live is not to economize and to hoard in selfish possession. To live is to seek joy and to find it in what is useless. ‘Youth is a passion for what is useless.’

The new faith spreads. The farmers banish the mutual diffidence that had caused them to live like lepers. They learn to co-operate and to trust each other and to listen to nature. Their consecration of a new community bond is sealed at an epic dinner, in which meat and game and fragrant herbs and wines pour out with Rabelaisian lavishness. Their senses and their hearts vibrate with the new fraternity. They let their colts and mares roam free about the pastures; they uproot the fences that jealously enclosed their fields; they harvest their wheat and mow their hay in communal glee. Bobi had brought with him a stag. The men start on an expedition to a nearby forest, described by Giono with exuberance and splendor; they surround and catch hinds as companions for the stag. It is like the dawn of a new world.

Tragedy soon breaks the idyllic dream. Aurore, a girl in her teens, an Ophelia-like creature, who has secretly fallen in love with Bobi, the wise man working his natural magic, commits suicide in her grief at seeing her love unrequited. Hearts are stung with jealousy. Greed proves hard to eradicate. Joy, easily attained in an élan of youthful faith, is hard to retain. Bobi knows that he has gone too fast and aimed too high. The world cannot be transformed overnight. His message must, once sown, slowly germinate. He decides to go away. He is ascending a mountain path, alone, when a storm gathers around him. Rain streams on his body, gusts of wind buffet his back; he walks on; and a lightning stroke, like a dagger, pierces him between the shoulders.

Although the meaning of the novel is cloudy at times and contradictory, the book is made alive through Giono's splendid art. The ardent love of nature, the insight into the life of animals obeying sovereign forces, mating in the woods with a grave delight worthy of Lucretius' evocations, the portraying of the changing seasons and of the works and days of peasant life reminiscent of Hesiod—these are the finest merits of the book. Its magic descriptions unite the splendor of the epic with a familiar simplicity of dialogue that few realistic novels have struck so felicitously. The volume is probably too long and its plot too thin or too unconventional, the behavior of the characters too insufficiently motivated and their pronouncements on life, joy, and fraternal love too cryptic to rank Que ma joie demeure among the most satisfying novels of this century. But nowhere has Giono risen higher than in certain chapters of this book.

Batailles dans la montagne, which followed in 1937, is an even more ambitious attempt at the epic and is even more disconcerting to the common reader of fiction, who expects the smooth flow of narrative and true-to-life characters. The story leaps almost beyond human bounds; the actors are hardly made real. Saint-Jean, the chief character, a carpenter who saves the village from a threatening flood, is more a symbol than a living man: Jacob wrestling with the angel or Prometheus defying the gods to serve men. After his superhuman feat, he aspires only to the calm serenity of death. His epic stature alone fills the novel; but the dramatic and even the plain human equality of Giono's earlier works seems gone. Words are rich in sap and juicy as sunny grapes, but their impetuous torrent appears no longer controlled by the author. Giono's epic qualities have swollen dangerously.

The novelist then appeared to be attracted by another medium. The next phase of his career was similar to that which came at the end of Tolstoy's and D. H. Lawrence's literary careers. (In all likelihood, Giono's evolution was accompanied by a loss of artistic creation similar to that of Tolstoy and Lawrence.) More and more, as he became sensitive to the evils of the world, the prophet in him triumphed over the teller of tales.

His gift of style has not left him. His message, earnestly felt, is often expressed with great force. An anthology of Giono's thoughts, detached from a certain verbose repetitiousness, which weakens them in their context, would include some of the most convincing denunciations of the social and moral wrongs of modern life, couched in sumptuous language. But Giono's books have become loose in structure, occasionally declamatory, and wearying in their revolt against the inevitable. The distinction the Stoics make between evils that we may hope to cure and evils that are not under our control is not observed by this son of old pagan wisdom. Les Vraies Richesses (1936) recalls Gide's paean to the sensuous joy of living in Les Nourritures terrestres and, even more, the Nietzschean assertions of Zarathustra. It is an impassioned protest against the dehumanization of men in our industrial age and the ensuing reign of greed and fear. Le Poids du ciel, published in 1938 with sumptuous photographs of stars and interplanetary spaces, also contains pages of beautiful prose. Giono, Antaeus-like, seems to draw unto him the strength of the earth and Atlas-like, carries with ease the weight of the skies on his shoulders. He interprets the lessons of nature with convincing eloquence.

His reasoning is less cogent when he attacks our civilization indiscriminately, and it is difficult to think that he could have seriously believed that his message of nonresistance to war was timely preaching in 1938, before the Munich capitulation and when one half of Europe was bent upon annihilating the other half. ‘All conquered people have become the masters of their conquerors. Violence and force may satisfy those who think only of what is temporary; it might be time to think of what is eternal.’ These words of Giono were to bring little solace to Frenchmen in their years of oppression. His message was one of resignation to the inevitable enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life, of poetical familiarity with the great forces of nature; it was also one of peace at any price. At a time when tanks and airplanes were rumbling out of German factories, Giono became an ardent pacifist. When Austria and Czechoslovakia were suffering their supreme national humiliation, he was preaching passive resistance against the call to arms.

Only the greatest, that is, the humblest of masters can resist the wine of flattery, which worshipful disciples dispense to them. A group of rebels against modern civilization gathered around the sage of Manosque. With his friend Lucien Jacques, Giono founded Les Cahiers du Contadour, from the name of the plateau on which the new gospel was preached; communal living in harmony with nature was practiced there by these pagan cenobites. Much vain declamation was poured forth. Giono issued two small pamphlets to his friends the peasants: Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvreté et la paix and Précisions (1938 and 1939). These advocated resistance to war through nonobedience, resistance to the state, which serves nothing but its own tyranny, contempt for money and machines. ‘No political regime ever gave men in a thousand years the thousandth part of the happiness which they find in one night's sleep.’ In 1942, in a volume of long and rather diffuse reflections on the same themes, Giono, apparently unperturbed by the plight of his compatriots who had lacked machines and had been crushed, continued his preaching. The logic of his position led him to espouse some of the doctrines of collaboration with the Nazis, for instance, to contribute to an abject periodical, La Gerbe, inspired by a traditionalist Breton nobleman who was also a gifted novelist and a blinded admirer of the ‘New Order,’ Alphonse de Chateaubriant.

Giono practiced passive resistance himself when France mobilized her men in 1939. He was thrown into prison for a brief while, then released. While the Germans oppressed his country, he failed to realize that if war is evil, it is a far worse evil when waged by a Frenchman at the behest of German conquerors than by a Frenchman and his logical allies against his oppressors. His volumes published during the war years, while not actually praising the enemies of his country or supporting the absurd doctrines of Vichy, did not bring added glory to his name. He was imprisoned for a little while after the liberation of France, but apparently left unharmed or ignored by the reprisals that ensued. His part as a leader of French youth or even as an inspired writer of epic fiction seems to have been brought to a close when World War II broke out. In 1947, he emerged from the war years a completely different writer, content once more to be a storyteller. Could he, at fifty, find himself attuned to a changed world?

Giono is significant in French letters because he is, primarily, a great artist. This son of a Provençal shoemaker enriched the French novel of his age with an infusion of virility and of poetry. He broke with the tradition of the psychological novel of Stendhal, Proust, and Gide, as well as with the tradition of huge realistic sagas that Roger Martin du Gard and Jules Romains had tried after Zola.

His first astonishing gift is sensation. Giono plunges into the world with a freshness of perception denied to most adults. But that freshness is not the delicate sensitiveness of children, which blends the concrete and the magical. His sensations are as robust and earthy as they are intense. They do not diffuse objects in a halo of evanescent glimmering light; they accept them whole and capture their essence, concrete and spiritual. The novelist's world is a world of smells, tastes, palpable masses and shapes, caressed by the body; visual sensations account for little, and the intellectual content of perceptions is sacrificed to their sensuous revelation.

What he has perceived is almost instantaneously rendered through images. Giono is one of the most prolific creators of images in modern literature. He has occasionally abused his gift, but he has seldom indulged in the tricky metaphorical phrases for which Jules Renard, then Paul Morand and Jean Giraudoux became famous. Giono's images do not aim at surprising the reader, even less at debasing the person or the object, as was the fashion when a ‘gentleman’ would compare his lady's pale complexion to ‘that yellow paper in which butchers wrap up meat.’ Giono's rarest gift is his inexhaustible ability to create precise, yet expanding and soaring, images. He fixes the essense of reality through them and ennobles it at the same time; he simplifies, and yet transfigures.² Later, when he became conscious of his gift of coining metaphors and became more ambitiously epic, Giono developed his metaphors into ample comparisons. ‘Intelligence is a miserable and stately Antigone: it appears, leading man by the hand. …’ And, in a passage of Que ma joie demeure not unworthy of Homer, the simple farmer gazing at the distant village at night, perceives fiery signs flickering; they are, of course, the rays of light filtered irregularly through the shutters. But before he realizes their origin, the old man slowly spells them like letters of the alphabet: ‘L', f, o, m, l', f, o, m, … like one of those great shapeless words which must have designated the sun, the moon and the stars in the mouths of early men.’

Giono is no master of the art of fiction in the traditional sense of the word; and his wealth of digressions and lavish use of description deprive his books of the purity of outline associated with many French novels. The structure and the pattern of his volumes (with two or three exceptions, such as Un de Baumugnes and Le Chant du monde) would not stand the strict critical scanning of a disciple of Henry James or Gustave Flaubert. They are often loosely built. Even in character creation, where Giono is far stronger, he can lay no claim to having molded individuals overflowing with life, as are the heroes of Balzac or Proust. His women in particular remain indistinct. We know much of what takes place in their sensations and, as it were, along and under their skin, but much less about their feelings and less still about the intellectual side of their nature, their moral or social reactions.

They are nevertheless real human beings and as true peasants as exist in fiction. It is not easy to give life to simple, robust, uncouth people, naïvely groping for joy, clumsy in the expression of their emotions, but unafflicted with the contagious disease of Gide's, Huxley's, and Mann's heroes, who discourse endlessly on their view of the world or conveniently reveal in a diary all the reader should know about them, and more. Giono's characters are not made of elaborate synthetical combinations of disconnected elements patiently pasted together; they surge into life at one stroke, as if impelled by a powerful creator to appear and haunt us. We may know little about them and their reflections and their inhibitions; but, as might be said of D. H. Lawrence's heroes, we become aware of their mysteriousness and live with them through three hundred pages.

Giono is also an artist with words. His vocabulary is extraordinarily varied—one of the richest in French since Balzac and Hugo. He seems to have the right word always ready at his disposal to express any part of a flower, of a tree, of an animal, or of a house, for the precise sensation received from the wind or the rain. His language is as robust as it is rich. The reader actually smells Giono's verbs, breathes the fragrance of his adjectives, feels the caress of his adverbs on his skin. A voluptuous artist was born in the son of the Manosque cobbler. ‘Before I write a word,’ he confessed to his biographer, ‘I taste it as a cook tastes the ingredient that he is going to add to his sauce; I examine it against the light as a decorator gazes at the Chinese bowl that he will place in its proper setting.’ Elsewhere one of his characters speaks of the magic of images that transfigure reality, of the legerdemain practiced, as by a dyer, by the artist in words, who changes the colors of objects. ‘Poetry is the dynamite that blows up and tears away the rock.’

Where he has avoided the traditional pitfall of southerners, verbosity and lavish eloquence, Giono has indeed proved one of the finest masters of contemporary French prose. One is at times uncertain whether this primitive artist is not a false primitive, pretending to write clumsy dialogue or endeavoring not to compose his descriptions with the obvious artistry of a more conventional writer. But in his best moments, when rendering the cataclysms of nature or the sensations of men, Giono has succeeded in creating a style that appears devoid of artifice, more naïvely natural than the poetic prose of Chateaubriand or Barrès, more animated than Flaubert's dead cadences, less ‘clever’ and self-conscious than that of most moderns.

If art is the chief quality to be demanded from an artist, the artistic gift of creation and of expression that distinguishes a novelist like Giono is nevertheless nourished by a personality that feels and thinks. Giono's ‘thought,’ when reconstructed with some consistency by the critic, is neither profound nor original. Tolstoy's was no more so when he undertook to elucidate art or to comment on Shakespeare, nor Lawrence's when he pontificated on the fantasia of the unconscious and the ‘dark mysteries’ of sex. Even Shakespeare's pronouncements on life's brief candle and dusty death and self-slaughter, if translated into dull prose, would appear shallow or commonplace. The value of an artist's ‘ideas’ lies in the intensity with which they have been felt and clothed, and in the dramatic fitness with which they are expressed by the imaginary characters of the drama or the novel at a chosen moment. Giono feels his ideas with a burning ardor and makes his creatures live them.

But the critic's task is to restate in his own colorless language, and probably with clearer logic than his subject would like, a ‘philosophy’ that was merely implicit in the novelist or the poet. He cannot shirk this task if he studies writers like D. H. Lawrence and Giono, Claudel and Dostoevski; for their ideas, profound or shallow, trite or original, counted vitally for these men, and for their followers. Giono's message shook many a European in the early 'thirties; and its influence, assimilated and transformed, has probably not yet ceased acting as a ferment in the emotional aspiration of our age.

Giono, like Lawrence whom he often recalls (although the southern Frenchman, accepting sex with the sanity and restraint of the peasants of his country, is remote indeed from the mysticism of the flesh preached by the inverted Puritan of the Midlands), rejects the civilization that surrounds him. The modern world is utterly bad if it dooms man to be a cog in a crushing wheel. Greed, gregarious pleasures, meaningless ambitions, and aimless and soulless efficiency for efficiency's sake drive most modern men to a death-in-life worse than death. ‘You must have been told,’ Giono declares to his imaginary disciple in Les Vraies Richesses, ‘that you should succeed in life; and I tell you that you should live: that is the one true success in the world.’ And again: ‘We have forgotten that our only purpose is to live, and this is a thing we must do every day, and at each hour of the day we fulfill our true Destiny if we live.’ Let us therefore go back, and abandon the path of death and war which has misled us so lamentably. We can and we must recover deeper sources of life today, and thus make it possible for our sons to become harmonious beings once more.

Not only have we forgotten how to live, but we foolishly revel in our inner emptiness. We even lack the courage to look for the remedy, which lies within our reach. ‘Modern times have not merely solved the problem of the disintegration of the atom; they have accomplished the disintegration of our beings, needlessly freeing and wasting spiritual forces that were necessary to us if we were to lead a human life.’ We build and drive machines, we go to the bank and sign checks and clip off coupons, we read books and dissect them, we dictate from an office chair to a meek and neatly manicured secretary who obeys us punctually, and we give the name of life to that routine activity. But no true contact with the realities of life enters into that stultified existence. We devise mechanical contraptions that we force our customers to buy from us, through wars if need be; but we do not know how to make our own bread any more. We talk of mastering economic forces, but we have allowed the wind and the rain and the snow and the forests to be taken from us.

The secret of happiness is to recover our lost unity; the road lies through the restoration of a threefold communion. First, with nature. Such a communion, more necessary today than in Rousseau's times, as our urban lives have become more mechanized, is not to be effected through spending a few weeks at a seashore resort, not even through diligently mowing our lawns on week ends or sawing trees in a summer camp. Only through humility can we penetrate into the secrets of nature. ‘Now I understand why we are the salt of the earth,’ exclaims the prophet of Les Vraies Richesses. ‘The wide still fields cannot of themselves express their deep intentions; silently, they blow a foam of vegetals. The extraordinary thing about our human destiny is not the intelligence that we have carefully molded for ourselves and that we direct at will like a revolving beam … it is our power to fuse ourselves with things; it is that divine part of ourselves, always in rebellion, which makes us the mouthpiece of the world.’ Earlier, in a preface to a deluxe edition of Colline, Giono had already proclaimed in striking language: ‘All the errors of man spring from his imagining that he is treading a dead earth, while his footsteps are imprinted in a flesh full of good will.’

The lessons of nature must bring us back to a sense of unity with the world around us. But the storms that tear our own world are no less tumultuous than the fierce rending in the clouds and the salubrious gusts of mountain wind that sweep across Giono's novels. It is easier to find contentment in submission to nature than to reconcile our own inner conflicts. Ignoring the call of our senses or repressing it is a false way of reaching an illusory peace with ourselves. Giono, to be sure, never advocates gratification of the senses; his novels do not contain precise love scenes, and bodily embrace and sexual indulgence are remarkably absent from his stories. But he knows that true wisdom is not of the intellect alone. Asceticism is to him a criminal mutilation. The obsession of the senses is never worse than when the unhealthy lover has to gird himself daily for the fight against his desires and his poisoned thoughts. Full acceptance of one's body is more chaste and wiser, Giono declares, echoing perhaps unconsciously Zarathustra's aphorism:³ ‘To satisfy our intelligence is not difficult; to satisfy our mind is not difficult either. But to satisfy our body seems to humiliate us. Yet the body alone partakes of a dazzling knowledge.’

Thus the novelist who has rendered sensations with unrivaled vividness and reveled in their richness happens to be one of the least morbid and least libertine in contemporary French literature. Giono does not leave women out of his stories, as Malraux does, except for Malraux's few scenes of eroticism. He is completely alien to the subtle perverseness that fills many French stories of amorous friendships of adolescents. Proust's sadism is equally remote from him, as well as the recent fashion that, under the guise of friendship and equality of the sexes, reduced many heroines to the role of willing partners to man's drinking bouts and amorous games. Giono's women do not resort to the hysterical screams dear to movie actresses, nor to the hardhearted calculations of would-be and accomplished spouses destined to arouse and maintain man's desire before and after marriage. His peasant women always win the esteem and affection of men, as well as their love. Seldom do their senses overpower their will; or rather the two hardly ever enter into conflict. There is little brutality and much mutual respect in the free giving and receiving of their love.

Yet it may be relatively easy to reach communion with another being in the passionate ecstasy of love or through the painted veil woven between lovers by the magic of desire. The truly rare communion is that which may spring from love between a man and a woman and outlive it, or link several men and women together in unreserved trust and the common pursuit of a higher goal. Giono, like Duhamel, Malraux, and Saint-Exupéry, is obsessed by the necessity of nurturing among us the plant of true friendship, rarer, as La Rochefoucauld once said, than true love. For friendship is more than comradeship of youth, of students or soldiers who have not yet been thrown into divergent paths by ambitions, selfish pursuits, or routine habits. It requires an unstinted sacrifice of our self-centeredness, a victory over secret jealousy and spite, a determination to spread joy around us and to accept it from others. It is perhaps the highest fulfillment that men can accomplish, for it demands the greatest immolation of our pride. It should combine the spontaneous gift of oneself that youth is prone to offer with the patient tolerance and the wise humility that mature years alone can bring.

It is such a purification of the soul that Giono advocates in his disciples. This prophet of a new paganism⁴ here concurs with the sages of Christianity and of oriental religions. He spurns the denial of the body, which is a mutilation of our being, but he decries no less vehemently the lavish attention paid by many to their feminine or effeminate bodies. Modern times provide us with luxurious pink, pistachio, and sky-blue bathtubs, with a whole pharmacopoeia of almond creams and odorous and deodorant perfumes and nail polishes. But who attends to the pustulant rash of our souls? Where are the hygienic experts to wash away their crust of filth?

This is the function of the artist. He creates beauty; but he must also extend his prophetic gaze beyond the narrow horizon of other men, discover and radiate joy, teach hope. ‘The true artist always stands at the vanguard,’ says Giono. ‘He leans over from the top mast; he is the discoverer of new lands, of all the joys, the delights, and nourishment which await men—not for men to capture such riches greedily and shut them up in a safe, but for him to live with this treasure in a harmonious integration.’ And again: ‘The poet is a professor of hope … the horizon of men having fallen lower, his gaze flies far beyond, and the fragrance of stars is wafted to him.’ Joy is the keynote of Giono's pagan message as it is of Claudel's Catholic teaching.

But can joy be long possessed? In the resplendence of his early creative years, Giono had seemed content with the delineation of humble characters reaching joy and living content in its fulfillment. That, however, gave an appearance of unreal idyls, almost of moral Sunday-school teaching, to his first novels. For joy is not all.

If joy is better than sorrow joy is not great;
Peace is great, strength is great.
Not for joy the stars burn, not for joy the vulture
Spreads her gray sails on the air
Over the mountain; not for joy the worn mountain
Stands, while years like water
Trench his long sides. …

Thus, at the remotest end of the world from Giono's Provence, wrote Robinson Jeffers, the tragic pessimist of California in one of his finest short lyrics. In his more mature works, Giono became aware of suffering and of the inevitable brevity of joy. ‘I believe that one cannot make joy last, and even that one should not desire it. … Suffering is an inventor of remedies; an inventor of hope. When man suffers the most hopelessly, then also has he the most hope. Suffering is then an immense apple-orchard in Autumn, under the rain, with beautiful washed apples at the end of the branches.’

It is on that word ‘hope’ that Giono's message concludes. He realizes that no regression is possible for men; machines will not be scrapped and probably should not be; but ‘the true riches’ should be shared by many of those who are at present absorbed in machines. If we cannot deny or undo mechanical civilization, we can go beyond it. To the suffering man of today, oppressed by a load of monstrous drudgery and living in terror of fierce cataclysms, Giono extends words of solace and hope. ‘I can no longer accept the works of art unless they serve man, and the sign of the highest is that they express at the same time the strange misfortune of man's fate and man's reasons for hope.’

A passionate protest against man's fate—this is the significance of Giono's work. Some will smile at these outbursts against modern civilization and affix the familiar labels: romanticism, primitivism, anti-intellectualism. There will doubtless be a measure of truth in their scoffing. But Giono's art laughs in turn at such philosophers who treat man as a purely logical and reasoning animal, or rather as hardly an animal or plant at all, while he differs only in degree from trees and horses. His creed is not likely to be long discussed by professional thinkers or to be weighed carefully by experts on economic science. But it is the living faith of a poet, the passionate and anguished cry of a sensitive man protesting against ‘what man has made of man.’

Giono, like Rousseau, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Rimbaud, and Gauguin,⁵ has written about one of the most significant moods in the psychological history of mankind in the last two centuries: dissatisfaction with modern civilization. We have changed the face of the earth, filled the air with our engines and our sound waves, mastered explosive energy, but we have hardly scratched the surface of man's spirit. Can we not change man also and bridge the chasm that has too often separated our hearts and our heads, our religion and our philosophy? A Chinese sage of our time, Kou Houng Ming, has aptly expressed our tragic dilemma: ‘Europe has a religion which satisfies its heart but does not satisfy its head, and a philosophy which satisfies its head but fails to satisfy its heart.’

A NOTE ON GIONO'S NOVELS SINCE WORLD WAR II

Giono has not recovered his earlier prestige with the youth of France and of other countries; his writings since the conclusion of World War II have commanded respect from the more conservative part of the French public, which Giono's paganism and pacifism used to frighten, while the young have acclaimed philosophical literature stressing the absurdity of man's fate and see little meaning in a creed of harmony with nature. The resentment noticeable among the new readers is in no way due to Giono's marked lack of heroism during the war and his sentimental pacifism, which was respected for its sincerity. Admirers of Montherlant and of Jouhandeau, who both have enjoyed a new lease of glory after adopting an attitude to the war and to the resistance even less heroic than Giono's, and many disciples of another son of Provence, the Marquis de Sade, have turned away from Giono's romanticism and from his prophet's message. Like many men of letters who have once known the intoxication of success, Giono writes too much; but, unlike some others who, like Duhamel, Romains, Mauriac, and Maurois, have coveted official honors and multiplied ephemeral writings on the problems of the day, Giono has remained free from the deterioration that allows famous men to dispense advice to newspaper readers and to sell in ever-thinner slices the memories of their lengthening lives. No articles of importance have appeared on Giono since 1938, and no serious study of his work in any language has yet been attempted, while books on Saint-Exupéry, on Bernanos, and on Malraux are multiplying. Pierre Bergé has promised one, which would stress the later phase of Giono's career, supplementing the disconnected and uncritical, but valuable, pages of Michelfelder's earlier hagiographic volume.

On World War II itself, his attitude and his experiences then, Giono prefers to remain silent. He devoted most of his time during those years to writing. The stage tempted him, as it did every writer in those years, and one of his plays enjoyed some temporary success in a very small Paris theater. But the practice of the dramatic form mostly helped Giono to strip his prose and cultivate terse dialogue. His dramatic attempts were published in one volume in 1943, including Le Bout de la route, Lanceurs de graines, La Femme du boulanger, to which a divertissement romantique in three acts, Le Voyage en calèche, was added in 1947. They do not gain for Giono an enviable rank as a dramatist.

Giono also tapped the vein of Jean le bleu in a few sketches of his native Manosque; in an introduction to selections from Virgil, which first appeared in August 1947 in the periodical Hommes et mondes, he conjured up with great charm his reading of the Latin poet in translation and his rapture over those ancient writers who illuminated his creative understanding of his Provençal countrymen. Through Aeschylus and Virgil he learned to perceive in the women of Manosque selling or buying in the market place ‘daughters of Minos and Pasiphae, Electras, Clytemnestras, perhaps even Jocastas.’ Dido was alive around him. Through their friendly presence he interpreted his native city anew and could survive the inferno of his years as a bank clerk.

Between 1947 and 1951 Giono published five volumes of a long, loosely connected series of novels with the very general title Chroniques. He made no secret of the fact, which must have daunted the most enterprising of publishers, that the remaining fifteen of the twenty volumes of the work were ready in manuscript, as well as eight other novels composing a second parallel saga.⁶ The Chroniques are said by their author to remind him of Froissart, perhaps because of a certain colorful truculence and naïveté in the narrative, while the other series would be closer to Alexandre Dumas. Giono may, indeed, almost rival the fertility of Dumas. He confessed to interviewers that work is everything and imagination is never wanting or never necessary. He goes to bed every night at seven and writes every morning from four to twelve. Posterity may wish that obstacles had impeded such a smooth flow of inspiration.

The break with the prewar Giono is complete. The style is concise, bare, familiar; the exuberance of metaphors and of comparisons is gone. Gone also are the elaborate descriptions of nature. A few vignettes suffice to picture the colors of the dawn, the marvel of the stars, the smell of hay in the fields, the winter roads slippery with snow and ice. The trees and the rivers, whose impetuous life Giono used to recapture in torrents of imagery, are still the kings of his landscape, but sketchily evoked. The scene of the novels themselves is not specifically laid in the Upper Provence dear to the earlier Giono. Un Roi sans divertissement, the first of the Chroniques, is a ‘regionalist’ story, supposed to have occurred in 1843, somewhere in Dauphiné. The fifth, Les Grands Chemins, shifts from some Alpine region to the Rhone valley and a landscape of dry bushes beaten by the wind. Nature has ceased to be the protagonist in Giono's novels. His manner, humorous and familiar, now cuts short all the poetical élans of the cosmic pagan. Eloquence is pursued and banished. The stories are usually told in the first person by some observer and narrator who has been an actor in the events related. His own language is rendered with some realistic accuracy; it is never coarse, as in many recent writers, but earthy, picturesque, close to the ‘green’ language of slang, and it moves in a swift tempo.

The volumes themselves are brief. They leave much unsaid, so much indeed that the inquisitive reader may think himself inadequately repaid. The novelist makes little effort to enter the minds of his most important characters (such as the dying old lady in Mort d'un personnage, the domineering peasant woman in Les Ames fortes, or the card player and thief who inspires the story-teller in Les Grands Chemins with a strange fraternal and maternal devotion until he is shot by him, almost tenderly). He alludes to some events, briefly sketches a scene, describes bewildering behavior, sometimes bordering on the fantastic (as in the short story, ‘Faust au village’), then passes on. It would take extraordinary power in the novelist to win the credibility of his readers, and Giono does not always win it. The novels strike one as a little thin, their psychological depths insufficiently explored, told with ease and verve but not truly compelling belief.

The admirer of Giono is ready to concede that the author had to renovate his earlier manner, which had been in danger of stifling plot and characters with an overgrowth of poetry, allegory, and imagery, and that the cosmic or epic novel should not be attempted too often. He may also, however, resist the latest ‘chronicles’ of peasant life delineated by Giono and his attempt at sketching real characters. The most successful are those of Mort d'un personnage, with the skillful picture of a home for the blind in the late nineteenth century and of a strong and spiritually blind woman withdrawing from the visible world. Giono's mastery is that of a superb craftsman. His sensitiveness is more human, more attuned to our average statures, than it was in his former volumes. But none of the Chroniques thus far published would be enough to grant Giono an exalted place in French letters today. His portrayal seems strangely detached and cool. His narrative technique is too smooth.

Le Moulin de Pologne, published in 1953, is in our opinion equally remote from Giono's earlier achievement. Some scenes, that of the ball especially, are related with a rare skill for creating suspense, and the character of Monsieur Joseph, who baffles all the inhabitants of the slumbering provincial town, is delineated with much verve. The tragic story of an implacable series of misfortunes striking three or four generations of the Coste family, owners of the ‘Moulin de Pologne,’ appears gratuitous. Too little is explained, and the pace is too swift for the reader to become absorbed in the tragicomic tale of Atrides or Amalecites transplanted into Provence.

Le Hussard sur le toit (1952), which, unfortunately, Giono has followed up with a lengthy sequel, Angelo, is on the contrary one of the most youthful and freshest novels of the last fifteen years. The hero is a young Piedmontese and a colonel of hussars, a very close relative of Stendhal's Fabrice. He had to flee his country for political reasons in 1838 and, on returning home, he encounters a terrifying epidemic of cholera in upper Provence. He escapes from the hostile inhabitants over the roofs of the city, falls into the room of an aristocratic young lady, and meets her again on the road while escaping both the plague and the fury of the populace dreading contagion. They flee together, respect each other to the end, and their comradeship, their virile restraint and their chivalrous sense of humor prove stronger not only than love but than the plague and the wickedness of men. This long adventure novel does not win the reader's credence throughout; the contrast between the lurid scenes of drought and cholera and the fantastic heroism of the Italian colonel appear lacking in nuances; the Stendhalian tone is too conspicuous, and one wonders whether the author intended a historical novel or a pastiche of The Charterhouse of Parma. But alone among the seven or eight volumes published by Giono since 1946, Le Hussard sur le toit gives evidence of true original power and promise of a renewal in a novelist who will be a sexagenarian in 1955.

Notes

1. The passage is from an interview given to Les Nouvelles Littéraires on March 13, 1937. Most of the other details about Giono's family, his manner of living, his reading, and about the successive drafts of his novels, as well as several very valuable quotations from unpublished manuscripts, are to be found in the only essential book on Giono, Jean Giono et les religions de la terre, by Christian Michelfelder (Gallimard, 1938).

2. Here are a few examples: ‘Through the slit of the vale, one sees a country russet-red like a fox.’ ‘The air, full of flies, creaks like a greenfruit that is being sliced.’ ‘Aubignane clings to the edge of the plateau like a small nest of wasps.’ ‘That beautiful round breast is a hill.’ ‘The lizards sleep in the sun; then they jump, snap up and slowly chew bees which taste of honey. And they shed golden tears which sizzle on the burning-hot stone.’ ‘The transparent shade of the olive-trees holds in its spider's web the siesta of a little girl.’

3. ‘There is more reason in thy body than in the best of all wisdoms.’

4. Giono professes paganism, not atheism. ‘The atheist says no; he is content with refusing. But the pagan wishes, wants, hence destroys and rebuilds … atheism retains something of the sour atmosphere of spiritualistic religions; paganism truly liberates.’ Thus spoke Giono in a conversation reported by Christian Michelfelder.

5. As a prophet, Giono belongs with these men; as an artist, however, and as a powerful delineator of peasant life and of men living in harmony with nature, his spiritual family counts more central Europeans and Scandinavians than Frenchmen or even than English writers who, like Mary Webb, lack a certain robustness and elemental vigor. The Pole Ladislas Reymont, the Scandinavians, and the Swiss Charles Ramuz are perhaps nearest to Giono in modern literature.

6. See La Gazette des Lettres, September 6, 1947, and two articles by Maximilien Vox and Pierre Bergé in Livres de France, II, 1, January 1951, published by Hachette.

Bibliographical Notes

The Viking Press, New York, published a translation of Regain (Harvest) in 1937, Que ma joie demeure (Joy of Man's Desiring) in 1940, and Jean le bleu (Blue Boy) in 1946. Knopf published Le Hussard sur le toit (The Hussar on the Roof) in 1954.

Useful information, much of it given by Giono to the author, will be found in Christian Michelfelder's Jean Giono et les religions de la terre (Gallimard, Paris, 1938). A German thesis, Giono als Dichter der Provence, was done as early as 1934 by Heinz Ciossek from Posen, and published at Greifswald. A French thesis, far more important, was done by the translator into English of Blue Boy and Joy of Man's Desiring, Katherine Allan Clarke, L'œuvre de Jean Giono (unpublished).

There are only a few good articles on Giono. Keen reviews of novels by a compatriot of Giono, Henri Fluchère, appeared in Les Cahiers du sud (March 1932, pp. 144-49; July 1935, pp. 588-91), and by Christian Michelfelder (Ibid., February 1938, pp. 144-47). Pierre Varillon had two essays in Etudes (Vol. 230, 5 and 20 February 1937, pp. 337-51 and 469-83). Henri Pourrat, himself a gifted provincial novelist, discussed ‘La pensée magique de J. Giono’ in the Nouvelle Revue Française (October 1938, pp. 646-58). In this country, Hélène Harvitt studied Giono's comparisons and the excessive use he makes of them in The French Review (March 1934, pp. 284-99), and Alphonse Roche undertook a solid and precise study, which met with Giono's approval, ‘Les provençalismes et la question du régionalisme dans l'oeuvre de Giono’ in Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXIII, iv, December 1948, pp. 1,332-42.