[In the following essay from her full-length study of the “modes” of Giono's writings, Goodrich traces Giono's autobiographical themes, comparing them to those of writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Leo Tolstoy.]

MORT D'UN PERSONNAGE (1949)

In Mort d'un personnage (1949),¹ where a first-person narrator tells of the aging and of the death of his grandmother, Giono performs a double feat: making an attractive old woman the central character of a novel, and recounting at considerable length the death of a mother. As he admitted to Claudine Chonez and to others,² his heroine for this novel, the Marchioness Pauline de Théus, whose youthful gallantry we have admired in Le Hussard sur le toit, having since that time loved Angélo Pardi and lost him, represents Giono's own mother Pauline, whom he nursed during her last illness. This Madame Giono died after her son's return from his first internment in Marseilles.³ The novel takes place, like much of Noé, which it follows, in that city, along its streets, on the way to and from school, and at a home for the indigent blind.

The novel replies in its title as in its philosophy to Jules Romains's Mort de quelqu'un (1911), for the old Marquise remains from the dramatic confrontation occurring at the end of Chapter I, at which moment the boy narrator, her unnamed grandson, first sees her awesome and noble presence looming above him, to the last rasping breath of air that she takes into her lungs, the central character, the life and breath of the novel, its focus, its charm, and its dark mystery. Far from ever having been a nobody, she lives doubly as a literary character and as a personage. In fact, as the narrator confesses for his fictional grandmother, Giono might have admitted for his own mother: that he made her as he wanted her to be and to have been, particularly when she lay dying.

In her grandson, first as a schoolboy returning from his day school, and then as a young man returning from his travels, the grandmother Pauline sees despite her better sense two lives and two persons: first, a reincarnation, as it were, of her beloved young lover Angélo Pardi resurrected marvelously from the dead in a second, new, and child's body, and then another, special individual whom she thrice mysteriously identifies and designates: “‘Maybe so,’ she said, after having stared at me for a long time. And she drew with her horny fingernail a ring around my forehead and my eyes” (p. 25). Thus, despite Giono's many allusions to his father, as we saw in his apocalypse text called “Le Grand théâtre,” and despite the overwhelming biographical evidence to substantiate their similar philosophical, anarchical, and Protestant leanings, it appears finally here that Giono's quiet mother was, after all, the Jocasta-type woman who bore and fostered a creative artist. Here, after Un Roi sans divertissement, the Oedipus legend surfaces again in Giono's fiction.

Mort d'un personnage belongs with Jean le bleu (1932) as an autobiographical novel. But because it was written in Giono's maturity, it lowers barriers to treat, albeit in a fashion sufficiently veiled to protect the author's privacy and personal dignity, the lower depths of his creative impulses. There is no doubt that the child narrating the early pages of Mort d'un personnage, becoming the mature man who cradles in his arms the skeletal body of Pauline during her last night of awful agony, loved this old woman so passionately that he fiercely disputed with death over her poor bones. He functioned when a boy much as modern psychologists describe persons of “high creative accomplishments,” whether male or female: “This precocious ability to charm and perform for adults is a direct outgrowth of the need to please the mother in the fused, symbiotic interaction characteristic of Jocasta-mothering. The continually escalating demands of the Jocasta mother in her lover's dialogue with the child seem to lead to precocious development and to create force-fields of personality that must perform and be recognized.”⁴

Commenting upon the four post-war novels that were published in 1947 and 1949, Un Roi sans divertissement, Noé, Mort d'un personnage, and Les Ames fortes, Maurice Nadeau, critic of surrealism, remarked that both Pauline de Théus and her grandson Angélo Pardi thrust themselves through life as if each had, as was true in Giono's case, a mission to perform. All were strong-souled persons in that literary family: “It would seem as if in this world they had been entrusted with the accomplishment of a ‘mission.’ … They advance, thus, in their separate directions somewhat like blind persons set on rails so that they cannot stop themselves from arriving eventually at their destinations; these are, to coin a phrase, ‘alive souls.’”⁵ Thus, the grandmother and grandson walked together through the busy city streets of Marseilles, stopping before street hawkers and store windows, or rather she pushed along the child with a hand of iron (p. 37) and a superhuman force. She was, in her absence, all fist, step, heart, and smoke. Rearing up each time just short of death's shadows, calling desperately in total silence to her lost lover, she bore her grandson before her on her fist like a young falcon. While others dragged their feet along solid pavements or firm earth, she threatened to drop into an abyss that only she could have found on some polished dance floor. When at night she prowled the house calling “Angélo!” the blind servant girl whispered to the child not to answer. Fiercely obstinate in her quest, the grandmother passed seventy-five, seventy-eight, eighty, and ninety-five years.

Since he was flesh of her flesh, “puisque j'étais né d'elle” (p. 120), why should the narrator not remember intermittently how he trudged along beside her, how he heard her seeking her lover, how he watched her totter over the down-draughts into hell, and how he rode beside her? When he was sick, she ordered him to vomit, so badly did the city turn her stomach. As earlier in Noé, the narrator repeats a train ride from Marseilles to Aix, this time bound for his grandmother's ancestral estate of La Valette. There in “la solitude désespérée des collines” (p. 64) a bargain is struck with the notary public of Vauvenargues, whom this time the super-narrator Giono is able to pass off without his customary acrimony. Like Ulysses at the gates of hell, the grandmother will use the gold coins from the sale of her property to purchase her entrance into the valley of the shadow. Her son agrees with a pride characteristic of such an indomitable being that the grandson, specially marked on eyes and forehead, will have no need for dross. His father, says the child narrator, resembled Saint Francis of Assisi. The dead Angélo Pardi was St. George. His mother, said Jean Giono in Provence, dedicated him to the Virgin, or first dispatched him out into the world: “My first trip took place in 1911. My mother dispatched me on the dawn pilgrimage to Moustiers-Sainte-Marie. Prior to that occasion, I had seen only the olive groves about Manosque.”⁶

Cuddling close to her warm body in bed, the boy narrator used the blind servant girl Caille as his mother, for his grandmother herself resembled one born blind and without a soul. Every time the youngster ran towards the blind girl, his motion set vibrating the winds of her soul, so that lights flashed on in the milky sapphire of her blind eyes, so that words still unspoken took shape upon her lips, until answering chords twanged across the distance that closed between their straining bodies (p. 102). And yet, he approached his grandmother. She touched him, set him upon her knees, scolded him, looked towards him out of eyes as green as ocean water, and yet she never saw him, for to her he was forever a nothing and a nobody. Much as he strove, he could not spring into life in her eyes. There was absolutely no way for him ever to exist in her eyes, because behind her eyes she herself did not exist.

The narrator's anguish at not being taken to her bosom rises in concentric circles outwards as he reels tragically before the impossibility of being loved by this Jocasta-mother, who automatically casts him out again and again, away from herself:

Not a thing existing upon this earth could live again within my grandmother, on the far side of her eyes: neither the city with its trout flanks flecked with the moving green, pink, and blue shimmerings of its tiles, its zinc, its glass, and its smoke; neither the amphitheater of limestone hills, nor the far distant golden villages hung like bucklers in front of the rostra of rocks, neither the sea which panted against its fretted promontories like the soft underbelly of some gigantic lizard, nor the countryside, sweeping off into the distance, loaded with copses, aqueducts, stands of cypress, olive groves, meadows, cover growth, and the hastening flocks of white mountains which, far beyond our circuit of hills, flocked rounding off in the direction of Aix and the Alps. Not a thing. She could be tenanted only by herself, never by any picture, never by the consolation of a color, of a sound, of an odor, which by adding its own modulation to the modulation of one's blood can elevate and uphold as if one were a vessel under full sail; never by an association of ideas that enlightens, until enchanted one steps forward. She was blind in her heart.

(p. 103)

Deprived of his mother's love, the narrator sought, as she thrust him away from her and out into the world, his triple consolation, as he called it: color, sound, and odor. Thus, here in Chapter IV (p. 103) he restated his structural pattern recalled from Jean le bleu (1932) and again established for this novel in Chapter I. When he was eight years old, says the narrator on the opening page, he was walked to school every day by their servant, Poor Girl. As he was held by her hand, he reveled every morning in the odors (pp. 10-11), in the sounds (p. 13), and in the colors, especially the blacks and whites—for this is an Angélo Pardi speaking—of Marseilles. Dressed in a romantic sailor suit in the corsair-city of Lord Byron, he corresponds to the photograph reproduced by Claudine Chonez in her Giono par lui-même (p. 29), where the boy Giono, eight years old in 1903, stands with downcast eyes looking at another world and holding his hoop in his left hand only because the photographer or his mother has thrust it there to give him some support. Still disconsolate, he poses for his first communion at age ten, in the book of Chonez opposite his mother Pauline Giono from a photograph designated circa 1895 but probably earlier, judging from the smallness of her waist. As the narrator claims, her eyes seem vacant indeed, and her heart-shaped face and delicate bones are his own. Quite truthfully the narrator claims never to have known his mother: “Seul, j'étais vêtu en lord écossais” (and the ten-year-old's resemblance to Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy is striking, as Giono also thought) “car je n'ai pas connu ma mère et j'étais habillé …” (p. 12).

On at least three occasions in Mort d'un personnage the narrator brings his grandmother Pauline to life from a photograph, or from a painting real or imaginary. We first see her at the close of Chapter I (p. 24) when after having advanced—(1) myself, (2) Poor Girl, (3) the morning trip to school with its odors, sounds, and colors—towards the noon-hour recess, the narrator retraces his steps homeward beside Poor Girl, now reeling intoxicated, (3) the evening trip from school with its colors, odors, and sounds, (2) Poor Girl, and (1) Grandmother. Climbing the hill with Poor Girl, the narrator first sees her seated like a poor woman, which in real life, of course, his mother was. As he approaches, she rises, growing taller and taller above him, and becoming, the more closely he can see her, more and more richly costumed. Jet sparkles against her brilliantined white hair, but her face itself flows backwards into the shadows, lighted only on the tip of the nose or the fold of the lips. Splendidly the black silk taffeta of her rustling skirts quivers over her impatient limbs. Thus, she greets her grandson, the future creator of fiction:

“‘What is your name, little boy?’ she asked, when I had climbed up to her.

“‘Angélo Pardi,’ I answered.

“‘That's a lie!’ she said violently. It was my grandmother.”

Thus, Giono has his mother, or grandmother, first label him as a feigner, a reconstructor of reality,⁷ while on another level she reproaches him seemingly for not being, but for pretending to be, her lost lover. In Le Bonheur fou (1957), Angélo Pardi, dressed splendidly in black velvet, leaves his mother Pauline to descend the staircase of their Italian castle of La Brenta.

Another time the young narrator sees her standing in black against a white, limitless, barren space into which the light from her eyes flows outward in a straight line touching nothing into infinity, as in the work of Giono's friend, Bernard Buffet.

In what is visually the most interesting representation of the grandmother, Giono uses a technique of surrealist collage, or what the narrator terms a “superposition” (p. 120). In Chapter IV the narrator, still a pre-adolescent boy, observes his grandmother at an afternoon party among a throng of lovely young girls dressed in “immaculate white organdy” (p. 119). Through a strange, visual delusion the grandmother's head appears above the body of a lovely girl or “furtively” blooms upon another's body in all the exceptional blaze of its own lost youth. Seen with her own head, the pretty girl relapses into an ordinary person, but the grandmother, even after returning to her own black redingote, still emprisons about her person rays of her “gloire attachante.” Imagining “la parole blanche des jeunes filles” (p. 125), and their world of folly, dreams, hope, desires, sufferings, joys, and waiting, the narrator understands why they all clung around his grandmother in that black and white drawing room: to them, she was passion incarnate.

Another time the narrator, seeing her beside a tree, understood how terrestrial she really was (p. 109 ff.). Again, he saw her standing in a meadow where the family had gone in their buggy. The grandmother, as usual, was dressed in closely tailored, body-fitted, all black clothing. She had picked for herself a bouquet of summer flowers, pink daisies⁸ and yellow buttercups. Her gestures recaptured the “gaucherie adorable” of girls' bodies, and of their winsome ways as she turned the flowers around before her face and caressed them with her bare fingertips, holding them in her black lace gloves. Even then, she seemed to moan: “Thus, doubtless without wishing to do so, she offered the agonizing spectacle of her beauty in the sunlight, while, irresistibly seized by the hips, she was being borne away along the paths of the underworld” (p. 110). Thus, from the earliest pages, and before Giono begins to wring our hearts in Chapter V with the death of this aged beauty, we have as readers known that we had entered here through the portals of a passionate love, admitted into the sanctum of such a love story as rarely read before.

For the last fifty or so pages, the skeletal-like remains of a once proud beauty fall by default to the narrator, now a grown man returning from an ocean voyage to Valparaiso, as if he had once signed on for the voyage to Antarctica as recounted in Fragments d'un paradis. Instead of his lovely marchioness, he finds a cachectic, cadaverous crone—blind, deaf, immobile, her head permanently sunken on her chest. She has lost control of her functions. No one wishes to care for her, even for money. Whoever exposes himself to such disgust must do so for love alone.

What is love? the narrator reasons against his loathing. Is it picture-postcard sentimentality, bridal veils, orange blossoms? Is it loving the beloved for one's own satisfaction? Can not the narrator love his grandmother truly and only for herself, by providing her with food, water, soap, care, and cleanliness? Overcoming his revulsions one by one, he undertakes to exercise his utter love, even to the point of looking at her lolling and obscene tongue, even to the point of washing all her body.

Then when only her head and her digestive system remain to some degree under her control, she still provides her grandson with sheer joy, so comical is she in defending herself against everyone else, all stronger than herself. Craftily she makes known her likes and dislikes, refusing vegetables, sucking happily away on olive oil, meats, cakes, and candies. Patiently her grandson feeds her wine and coffee in a teaspoon. Hungrily he watches her alone, in black, where she always desired to be, whence she bends her ears to sounds from the other side, calls through imperceptible fissures (p. 141), and drinks the burning breath of him whom she lost. Despite his continued efforts to hold her back, he sees her rush irrevocably towards her lover as towards earth and matter. When newly cleaned and changed and combed, she sits in her chair, sometimes she confidently stretches out her bony fingers towards her grandson, somehow knowing that it is he, knowing that he is there, and furthermore certain that he will fill her hand with her favorite candy. Then the narrator cries, overcome with ecstasy: “Je n'avais jamais éprouvé une joie si complète” (p. 152). Then, momentarily at least, he feels that truly he is loved by her whose great admirer he has always been.

Even then, however, she finds someone who loves her old bones more than he does: herself. Thus, angrily, she tucks in her fragile elbows when he carries her from room to room, her chair lifted up to his chest and borne before him. Covered as formerly with the magnificence of her beauty, he says (p. 154), she could afford “storms and love.” As brutally angry as a Persian queen, he adds, and mummified also, she now trusts no one.

Then in her final days grandmother has her last love affair with the one person who always sees her only clean, washed, combed, and gentle—the laundress Catherine. These pages (160-67) probe the human condition so deftly, with such memorable sureness, with such tremendous sympathy that no person who has ever been critically ill and entirely dependent can ever forget. Demandingly, grandmother summons the kindly, generous Catherine from her washtubs and like a small child nestles against the warmth and life so ready to be shared from her breasts. Warmed against the creeping cold of death, the old crone expresses her last delight in human contact with “petits sanglots secs” (p. 163). Then she feels her sparse flesh satisfied and contentment steal over her, as it could come only from woman to woman, “odeur … rondeur … chaleur” (pp. 165-66). Aside from this tenderness, she craves only oil and candy. This summarizes her avidity “de fin du monde” (p. 167). Her impedimenta thus stacked up at finger's length for the night, she lies watching the dark hours through.

Before the end, the narrator is not only sad, but inexplicably so, as he watches grandmother send out for violet perfume to please Catherine, but dirty her hands each night. Only Catherine now can be lied to, “le dernier étranger” for whom she can “créer une illusion et en profiter” (p. 174).

The last night of her life, when no doctor can be found, the young man spends alone with his grandmother, holding her warm in his arms, raising her head, having to refuse her summoning of Catherine, and finally having to restrain her wild efforts to swing her cane and call the laundress, who is in any case too distant to hear the summons. Therefore, again at the very end, even at that final moment, the old woman turns her head away from her grandson. Giono's closing passage is superb, for its human pathos and understanding:⁹

Ah! what remorse! She turned away from me. Her head slid down heavily. Again a velvety vertigo swept through my body. I felt for her wrist. No more pulse. I tried to raise her head. Very heavy. Her mouth opened and closed soundlessly. I said to myself, ‘She is dying!’ It seemed to me that I should be running somewhere, in some direction or other. But I did not release my hold either on her arm or on her head. And then my vertigo passed. I said to myself: ‘She is dying, without pain. Heaven be praised. Stay there. Do not call out.’ Once again she opened her mouth.

I heard a laborer pass by on our street, on his way to work. She still felt warm to my touch. I pressed my ear to her lips. After that, I went to awaken my father, and I said to him, ‘Grandma is dead!’

(pp. 182-83)

Although he has struggled against releasing her right up to the last moment, the narrator finally rises and lets her go, for go she will by her own will and weight, and rise he must, and sing again. In her book Le Mythe d'Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine (Paris, 1961), Eva Kushner found that since 1885 French authors, especially, had employed this myth, which apparently responded to what remained on their parts a certain anxiety, or even an anguish that they alone somehow felt obliged to confront. Echoing and apparently making significant, or even comprehensible to them their feeling of solitude, the myth also afforded them escape and a concrete pattern “pour transcender et embellir une reálité décevante” (p. 14). The myth, of course, speaks powerfully to us all of beauty and poetry struggling against a hideous world where doubtless a poet thirsts most for some Ailleurs. His notably is that sensitivity privileged to soar under the wings of some “extraordinary love.” Most interestingly, Kushner concluded that the authors whom she studied—and Giono was not included among them¹⁰—were men apart, “de grands isolés,” without affiliation or tie with any specific literary group, as was, generally speaking, Giono's habit. Their works, based upon the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, certainly uncover common ground: “They recount an episode, which once revealed turns out to be the symbolic representation of some reality that we feel is much more basic in the eyes of the author than was the mere episode itself” (pp. 16-17). As for other modern authors who composed works based upon this particular myth, it expressed on some visionary level a reality particularly true for modern man generally, and for themselves personally and privately. Artists often seem obsessed by one story, which they will repeat over and again because it illustrates their solution to the meaning of themselves in the world—as Giono repeated the Noah legend, for instance. Not only, then, did the myth of Orpheus suit Jean Cocteau's view of himself, but—although he found it unnecessary to be explicit—it also suited Giono's intimate assessment of himself: Julie, the scapegoat modern artist, the novelist imprisoned.

Explicitly, however, Giono draws closer not to Cocteau in his treatment of the myth, but rather to Jean Anouilh, because Eurydice also becomes Giono's main thrust. In Anouilh's Eurydice of 1941,¹¹ a blue-eyed Orpheus also loses to death a green-eyed beauty, and the scene revolves about Marseilles. Thus, according to the discoveries of Eva Kushner, Giono would derive in his usage of the myth rather from the Ovidian / Italian tradition, which understands this legend as primarily a love story, or which focuses upon its “côté sentimentale.”¹² Giono neglects what, had he been other, he might have studied, i.e., Orpheus' journey with the Argonauts, his descent into hell, his especial initiation into the secrets of the kingdom of death, his poetic skill, his tragic death.

In the early pages of Chapter II, after the grandmother has designated the narrator by marking his eyes and forehead, she will not allow him to possess her, and she avoids his eyes: “Later, my eyes sought hers, like Orpheus Eurydice's; but the gods had imposed conditions that were too unendurable” (p. 28). In order to reach and join her, he would, in other words, have to descend into hell. During his voyage to Melbourne, the narrator remains absent for ten years. The hope of Orpheus, he says much later (Chapter IV, p. 101), represents the live world's soul, while Eurydice disdains pale earthly joys, preferring “desperately the groves of hell.” Grandmother, he says in a refrain repeated during a swift, poetic evocation, “lisse et pointue comme un fuseau, lourde et muette comme un plomb” (p. 104) slipped between loving fingers, each day lower into the lovely depths. Perhaps she found hell more verdurous than earth, its meadows more flowered with asphodels, its perfumed breezes and green peace equivalent. Perhaps down there bloomed pools of nymphaeae (nénuphars) beneath noble lindens, nightingales, crystal waterfalls.

“It little mattered that we were all alive, Grandma was very far from us, and even if—jettisoning all the worldly things that one could jettison, and still not die—we tried to join her upon her territory, in order to take her by the hand and draw her back towards the solider ground of earth, she still would not turn her face aside from the valley of shadows into which she was sinking, so that we had either to let her perish, or perish” (p. 108).

While Giono may be the first novelist to have associated the son with Orpheus and his mother with Eurydice represented as the object of passionate love, he is not, of course, the first novelist to have depicted the death of a beloved mother. One recalls at once the illness and the death, dispatched in a few lines however, of Eugénie Grandet's abject mother in Balzac's novel of 1833. Far greater emphasis occurs in Leo Tolstoy's most splendid treatment of the narrator's mother, whom he certainly loves as deeply as does Giono's narrator his mother, in the former's autobiographical novels, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852-1857), where macabre details of physical deterioration both repel and attract the Jocasta-mothered son. Macabre details add again an especial character to the death of Frau Consul in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901). All of these novels, and many others as well, may have furnished Giono with ideas.

Not until Maxim Gorky's Mother¹³ of 1907, perhaps, has a major novelist devoted an entire book, and one that received wide attention, to an aged mother and to her death. Gorky's heroine, Pelagueya Nilovna Vlasova, learns from her son, the revolutionary named Paul, to resent her condition as a mother oppressed, enslaved, persecuted, and unpitied. After having lived in fear all her life, Vlasova finally feels pity for herself so stir in her heart that she becomes, after her son Paul's imprisonment, a clever and indomitable revolutionary, who goes down fighting. People who listened to her were “impressed by the deep significance of the unadorned story of a human being, who was regarded as cattle are regarded, and who, without a murmur, for a long time felt herself to be that which she was held to be.”¹⁴ While there seems no evidence, textual or other, that Giono knew Maxim Gorky's Mother, or any other treatment of a mother's death by Gorky or his admirer and adapter Bertolt Brecht, Giono did mention to me in August 1970 that he had read Grazia Deledda's La Madre (1920).¹⁵

The Italian novel, perhaps closely based upon Gorky's Mother, recounts the story of a Sardinian peasant woman who has devoted herself entirely to raising and educating her son, also named Paul, for the priesthood. All his life, in school as in seminary, he has been ashamed of her poverty, her origins, and her toil. Like Giono's real mother, this woman performs menial labor for her son, even after he has become a priest and taken a mistress. Supporting her son through his great crisis, she dies alone and in pain rather than disturb him. Like the Gorky novel, Deledda's book portrays as the central character an admirable old woman and her fatherless son Paul; both mothers were brutalized into conception. Both are uncomprehending slaves, and uneducated, but both die fighting for their sons.

In 1928 D. H. Lawrence wrote a preface for the Steegmann translation of Deledda's Madre,¹⁶ in which he admired the “old mystery” as apparent in her novel as in Emily Brontë's, the “female instinctive passion,” he called it: “the interest of the book lies, not in plot or characterisation, but in the presentation of sheer instinctive life. … The old, wild instinct of a mother's ambition for her son defeats the other wild instinct of sexual mating.” In his essay on Deledda, Lawrence says nothing of his own intermediary version of a devoted mother and her son Paul, Sons and Lovers of 1913. Here the first four chapters, narrated from the young mother's point of view, amplify the recognition by Mrs. Morel of her son's talent. While Giono confined himself to the recurrent circling of brow and eyes by the grandmother, as experienced without verbalization by the child, and without explanation by the super-narrator, Lawrence had presented her actions, thoughts, realizations, all in detail:

The baby was looking up at her. It had blue eyes like her own, but its look was heavy, steady, as if it had realized something that had stunned some point of its soul. … Its deep blue eyes, always looking up at her unblinking, seemed to draw her innermost thoughts out of her. … She felt as if the navel string that had connected its frail little body with hers had not been broken.¹⁷

This recognition by a Jocasta-mother of her child's talent seems very possibly a source of inspiration for Giono, as well as a knowledge shared by him with Lawrence. As we shall see in our discussion of Jean le bleu, whatever Lawrence feels about blue eyes and artists, Giono also shared. Furthermore, both men knew about the passionate love some sons feel for their mothers. In fact, the death scene of Sons and Lovers suggests in brief Giono's much extended and painstakingly developed treatment. After Mrs. Morel is dead, Paul rushes upstairs to fall across her still warm body, calling “‘My love—my love—oh, my love!’” Then, bending down, he “kissed her passionately” (pp. 466-67). In Giono, the narrator's cry of grief begins, as we have just seen, “‘Ah, quel remords!’”

Before suggesting heirs for Giono, for Mort d'un personnage, even if it were confined only to future readers among liberated women throughout the world, may well be artistically Giono's most popular novel, we must not forget what Giono himself labeled his most pervasive inspiration: William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying (October 6, 1930)¹⁸ seems to have exerted considerable pressure here, first because only Faulkner and Giono clearly treat in a full-length novel the agony of a mother. But, secondly, both novelists depart radically from the stock, hackneyed, traditional view of motherhood. In the only section where she speaks for herself, Addie (the mother who lies dying) says of her first child Cash: “And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. … When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not.”¹⁹ Thus, both Giono's narrator and Addie's children look to the mother for what society has told them they may expect to find but what the mother herself neither is nor can give. Both novelists raise the whole question of the real nature of woman and mother,²⁰ both far surpassing in artistic integrity Gorky's political novel, another attempt to enslave woman and mother.

Giono's impact may be suggested, at least, by recalling Roger Peyrefitte's hastily written La Mort d'une mère (1950), and the much more significant search through hell for his mother and muse of Samuel Beckett, Molloy (1951).²¹ In Céline's Mort à credit (1952) we have the grandmother Caroline as very important in Bardamu's life, and her death occurs in the novel. A more important admirer of Giono's novel seems another southerner, Claude Simon in L'Herbe (1958), which, narrated from the niece's point of view, recounts the agony of the octogenarian maiden Marie, already mummified almost to nonexistence, like Pauline confined to her room, blind, deaf, and of neither sex, just suffering mankind, stipulates the narrator.²² As in the Giono passage juxtaposing such dessication to the lush green vegetation of hell, we have Simon's grass and green garden.²³

Simone de Beauvoir's long essay on old age, La Vieillesse, where again Giono's book seems unknown, demonstrates most amply his originality. As Beauvoir attests in very learned fashion, literature has always shown a particular disgust for old women, from the Greeks, as Peyrefitte and his friend Henry de Montherlant establish,²⁴ or from early Christianity. French poetry, demonstrates Beauvoir,²⁵ has always been notorious in its fear and ridicule of old women, from Rutebeuf into Lorris and Meung, Charles of Orleans' Aage, the lyric poets from Ronsard to Saint-Amant,²⁶ and the dramatists, especially Molière. Even French novelists, despite such champions as Brantôme, Marguerite de Navarre, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Sainte-Beuve, generally adopt the contemptuous attitudes reinforced by the weight of Balzac and Flaubert.²⁷

Interestingly, one tends to place Giono's narrator of Mort d'un personnage, particularly since the title invites us to remain in a world of fictional characters, alongside Perceval, who apparently loved the mother who raised him after his father's death. The Giono narrator would be uncomfortable, to say the least, alongside such fictional company as Aeneas' son Iulus or Camus's character Meursault,²⁸ neither one of whom wept at the death of his mother.

JEAN LE BLEU (1932)

When in 1961 Pierre R. Robert published a pioneer work²⁹ celebrating Jean Giono as a master technician of modern fiction, he linked Jean le bleu (1932) closely with Noé (1947), finding both novels autobiographical, but nevertheless eccentric since neither novel actually granted to the first-person narrator the center of its stage. While the narrator of Noé fritters away his time preparing his descent into hell, as we have seen, he meanwhile establishes himself as Scheherazade, another victim before whom the gates of Hades swing ajar: “(Schoolboys) We knew that the oracle speaks only for the victim and that it is only before the victim that swing open the gates of Hades.”³⁰ Therefore, although Noah speaks in the first person, he lives there, as we have seen, interested primarily in describing himself as an aesthetician telling tales. The same was true even to the young Giono nearer the outset of his literary career when in Jean le bleu he sketched less himself than his first portrait as an artist: “Whatever one attempts, it is only the self-portrait of the artist, by himself, that one actually writes” (Noé, pp. 55-56). Never reticent elsewhere about his poverty, nor embarrassed by his lowly origins and his humble tastes, Giono stressed in Noé his matured methods of composition, and in Jean le bleu his early education and special orientation, for the poor parents who bore and reared him were the first to recognize this blond child as very gifted. From babyhood they held him apart. The future artist early knew himself to be “vraiment celui par qui le scandale arrive” (Noé, p. 21), a special and a rare person.

After this precocious childhood Giono could never pass certain doorsills of his native Manosque without seeing Oedipus standing somewhere near him, or hear that other prince howling blinded. Down certain streets Lord Romeo's Juliet always passed as in Verona, and the local slaughterhouse designated to the artist the underground landscapes of Dostoyevsky.³¹ Having become a world-famous novelist, Giono surveyed from the windows of his home on the Mont d'Or one hundred kilometers of Provence, or sprawled, he often said, like Swift's giant over six square leagues of countryside, his feet on the very house where Marie Chazottes was murdered.³² Comfortably gowned in a woolen robe against cool winds gusting along his native hillside, Giono invited the chestnut tree outside his window to suggest not curtains only, but glassware, sets of crystals, then barbarians' drums, wild gallops, long echoes, and hunting horns. In this workroom he daily indulged his everyday need to daydream, “mon goût pour la sieste,” for at night, fatigued, he invariably plummeted instantly into nine dreamless hours of sleep.³³ At a time near dawn on the morning of October 9, 1970, the artist died in his bed of heart failure. It was a moment of death that, as Giono often said, he expected instantly, so weary was his heart of bearing what he called a flaming burden of this world's suffering.

Writing novels was for Giono a continuous, continuing process from the publication of Colline in 1929: “Finir une, commencer l'autre.”³⁴ Before his receiving eyes, as he daily composed over the decades, ramps on stages lighted up, while words and entire phrases surged unsolicited to mind. It was not so much that he saw as that he saw again each scene played before his eyes.³⁵ After writing four pages after supper, the narrator considered that he had earned his evening stroll with his dog. This other activity exchanged one world for another, sometimes more tragic, as the case might be, or in the instance of Noé, less so, a mere opera buffa.

When during the five hundred days spent writing the 228 pages of Un Roi sans divertissement, Giono needed to leave his room to fetch a handkerchief, for example, he often had callously to pass through characters of the novel, all life-sized like himself. None of them Robinson Crusoes, others were similarly traversed by Sylvie Giono going neglectfully out without her sun hat in plain view of her father's window. Giono reflected endlessly about his characters, describing only those gestures useful to each intrigue, but supplying particular addenda so that the reader could dredge up details from his own experience (“pour que le lecteur puise de ses propres souvenirs—” Noé, p. 32) as he kept up to date an account of each character in his ledger. Sometimes auxiliary narrators like Saucisse lent helping hands (Noé, p. 42), as Giono ticked off a tragedy, “Atrides No. 500,000,” for instance (Noé, p. 47). Each “curriculum vitae,” added Giono, must above all satisfy the reader's critical faculty.

When of an evening he listened to a concert from abroad on the family radio, Giono found himself descending more and more analytically into each character's individual identity, suddenly recognizing Uncle Eugène's particularities, and this despite a curious phenomenon: that music occurs in another part of a consciousness, he affirmed, from that where fictional creation simmers (Noé, pp. 39-43). As he said for Uncle Eugène's personal drama with apocalypse, he found the world of creation occupying various stages that grew dark or bright with brilliant light, where like Saint-Jean the creator also suffered vertigo looking down from atop the ladders in the wings. Fiction differs vastly from both painting and music, because the former depends upon words alone—and readers skip. Fiction can much less express than tangentially convey feeling.

“I am a realist,” explained Giono in Noé (p. 139 ff.), or, as we have suggested, a New Realist, to whom material objects always existed outside himself and independently of his own sensory experiences. As we shall see was true for him in Jean le bleu of 1932, the modern world may be not only green but also blue, not only to Giono, however, but also to Pablo Picasso, or to other foreign contemporaries such as W. C. Handy³⁶ and George Gershwin.³⁷ Would one's sensation be blue unless the world were blue in others' eyes also, as in their mirrors, through their windows, in their photographs, and in their eyes and hearts? Giono's experience is therefore not private, but public, because communicable. Thus, although Giono's view of the world as blue may appear to others as mistaken, illusory, or misperceived, it remains illuminative to many because it is supplementary to conceptions currently conveyed in modern music and painting. Persons and objects are never perceived simpliciter by Giono but at least double, as by mescaline illusion, before being fixed spatially, temporally, and verbally. Giono's esse means, then, percipere, sentire, atque fabulare.

The first sentence of Jean le bleu³⁸ speaks of a world irrecoverably lost to physical actuality, but nonetheless blue—blue—blue in the artist's memory, like the warm blue air that always descended to melt the hoarfrost in the Durance valley, like the blue artisan's apron of father Jean cutting soles out of angel hide in his workshop for a thousand-footed god, the blue cyclone in one's head when an Italian anarchist³⁹ dedicating his life to liberty fearfully glided into the underground railway station, here the poor Giono flat in Manosque. The child Jean watched him stride blue-faced out again into the night, murmuring liberty, freedom, nakedness. Under the lamp, the child's father Jean fed a blue-winged dragonfly to his caged nightingale, which will die just before the child, this other caged singer, first discovers his own voice. As a child, like a little monkey, he whistled and aped, and from his high apartment window already played the flood, himself Noah in the ark.⁴⁰ Very young, the child discovered the awful key to the world in three hushed syllables: “terrible.” By Chapter IV (pp. 63-65) he hears feeble bird song and poor children singing, so terrible that one dares not express it (p. 66), that one can never say it as terrible as it is. Thus, Jean le bleu establishes what remains most characteristic of Giono's style: a heartbroken tenderness for men and women, a quivering pity for adults that keeps him always close to tears.

Giono's artistic consciousness moves in 1932 along the wake of the great Gidian works of fiction, particularly here according to Edouard's explicit ideas on the novel.⁴¹Jean le bleu constitutes another roman de la douleur, like Giono's Solitude de la pitié, which also appeared in 1932. Concurrent with the child's first realizations of the sorrows and griefs suffered by people around him, and with his love for his parents and friends, wells within him the need to share both grief and sorrow, and in his father's footsteps to heal, by songs and persuasions. Thus, also, his feeling of pity stretches out a hand towards others from whom he will not be separated, the ensuing art constituting such a desire grown strong enough to communicate with all who will read books.⁴² Too young to understand the reasons for human degradation, Jean le bleu himself merely observes the shadowy blue ones floating about him.⁴³ The day he understands how the years of poverty and toil have weighed upon his own aging father, the son Jean will like the nightingale deliberately leave the cage. At that point, dressed in his blue flunkey's uniform at the bank, Jean le bleu quits his brief childhood, like a novice emerging, he says, from the hazy Breton forest of Brocéliande. (A Marseilles street furnished Noé the same analogy.)

Most understandably, the very young child Jean became spellbound every time he heard music, as a result of which his father subscribed to classical concerts played by two poor neighbors upon a violin and a flute. In this way and very early, the language of music conveyed Mozart and Bach so thoroughly to this gifted child's attentive ears that notes became words in his mind, and one word chiefly: despair.⁴⁴ Thereafter from his apartment window looking down at the dark well “au fond de son malheur” (p. 87), the child whistled a requiem for a dead girl, and listened to the complaintes of the animals' skins being tanned, and to the complaintes of the solitary Mexican woman weeping ceaselessly for her land of cacti. Up the dark well of the courtyard rose the terrible sobbing of a starving horse as in its agony it ate the wooden door before which it was stabled. The muddy earthen floor of the courtyard served as a pen for terribly crowded sheep, one or two hauled out daily for slaughter. Looking down from a rotting loft above his father's shop—the mother's more prosperous hand laundry occupying a lower floor and engaging two or three girl employees—Jean Giono spent this curious, meditative, dreaming childhood. It was he who learned, and there, that darkness does not fall, that it rises:⁴⁵ “… sans me faire voir je regardai …” (p. 87). Inside his window the narrator cultivated his “beaucoup de mémoire” (p. 91).

When the amateur musicians, Jean le bleu attending, played passages from Bach's Saint John Passion (1723) to the fat, rich woman and her idiot son, their instruments sobbed for all the inhabitants of the dark courtyard. Even then, the boy narrator understood that somehow elect and elected he stood as intermediary between them and her: “J'étais sur le front de bataille” (p. 94), for which reason he unprotestingly went into the trenches during World War I. Therefore the words of Saint John burned forever into his brain: the chorus No. 28 (“Wir dürfen niemand töten”), the soprano aria No. 63 (“Zerfliesse, mein Herze, in Fluten der Zähren, dem Höchsten zu Ehren”), and the chorale No. 65 (“O hilf, Christe, Gottes Sohn, durch dein bittres Leiden, …”).⁴⁶ Exercising his literary ability, the boy Jean recited to the musicians after each concert what he had comprehended during the playing of the music, and in the Bach aria the singer's voice had streamed from the very center “de la douleur” (p. 93).

In his Kafkaesque Chapter V Jean speaks of his father as a healer, who loved epileptics and wounds, particularly those which were alive, like the festering sores treated by Kafka's country doctor.⁴⁷ Graphically and memorably, the man Giono narrates the approach of the boy's diphtheria, the sounds, odors, and colors that heralded his descent into static time (p. 112). Recalled years later, this same illness befalls Jason's blond brother in Deux cavaliers de l'orage, as we have seen. Become even more the favorite of the family, the convalescent boy grows to understand that his destiny has allowed him to survive this descent of darkness where death, garbed as a great golden bird with blue feathers, hovered over the hills.

From Chapter VI (pp. 109-52) to the end of Jean le bleu, for which reason we take this novel as our conclusion, Giono sketches the people, incidents, settings, and stories that will over the years furnish his fiction. Mme Massat will become Pauline in Mort d'un personnage, plus all the self-denying, self-sacrificing, martyred women in Giono's novels. The various tragedies that occur that summer at the mountain village of Corbières where the child convalesces among the shepherds and their flocks, and the boy's games in the fig trees, supply not only the instantly famous pages of the “Baker's Wife” in Jean le bleu but, years later, Fragments d'un paradis, Noé, and Un Roi sans divertissement.⁴⁸ Blanche Lamballe, who hangs herself (pp. 138-60), also prefigures Aurélie and the many other unhappy women whom Giono always pities so deeply. As we have already seen, the stories of the ball, Costes, Costelet, Hortense, and the scapegoat Julie recur twenty years later in Le Moulin de Pologne. In the mountain village the children play at hanging themselves, the object of the game being to strangle oneself enough to “see blue.”⁴⁹ Repelled by both adults and children with their strange sexual desires, and yet pursuing his playmate Anne with his own appetites aroused, Jean le bleu turns in preference to the animals about him, seeing how admirable they are, devoid of “la hantise de la mort,” and “l'hypocrisie de l'amour” (pp. 141-42). Aurélie's passion for the shepherd is conveyed to the reader particularly through the ovulation and fertilization of fishes in the swamps.⁵⁰ From the eyes of a serpent, the child comprehends the coldness of death, which he had twice seen earlier, in the eyes of Costelet and in those of the young prostitute at Manosque, whom despite protests at home he allowed to kiss him.

Giono's personal indebtedness to a guardian angel, in whom he still believed while writing Batailles dans la montagne, derived to some degree at least from the unfrocked young priest whom father Jean engaged to tutor his son that summer at Corbières: “Je lus l'Iliade au milieu des blés mûrs” (pp. 164-65). Under a blue sky mirroring the blue reflection of the earth, the blue lucarne of a storm in a fast-approaching distance, the future artist learned a new way to envision the world. There was the delicate, laundered, pampered city child imprisoned in schools and the dark well of a tenement, let loose under that turbulence of Provence which Van Gogh represented so well in twisted blues and whites, become, with his “man in black,” shepherd to ewes and new lambs. Running wild all day long with children and animals, tucked in warm at night under an eiderdown sprinkled with calico bluebells, the right child matured fast in the right atmosphere. Of all these children, only Giono became a writer, but, then, only Giono had the tutor sent, at great sacrifice on the part of his parents, all the way on foot from Manosque.

With the man in black, the child Jean understood love within himself as he pondered the archetypal friends: Achilles, Patroclus, and Antilochus. What he was learning was textual analysis, “la science du texte” (p. 166) by a method of absorption where “il entrait sensuellement dans le texte,” perceiving ultimately “une telle intelligence de la forme, de la couleur, du poids des mots” (p. 167). The whole world of Troy and the Greek camp played itself anew before his eyes, as with “une vie mystérieuse crée devant mes yeux.” The study of literature, not an end in itself, leads Jean to self-knowledge: “Je sais que je suis un sensuel” (p. 167). This very sensuality, he adds, hindered him from becoming a musician. Long before he knew this prime characteristic of his being, his father knew it and educated him accordingly, lest as child or as man Jean le bleu lose his necessary purity and essential sense of cosmic ecstasy:

He shattered nothing, harrowed nothing within me, stifled nothing, erased nothing with a finger moistened with saliva. With an insect-like prescience he prescribed the proper remedies for the young larva I was then: one day this, another day that; he loaded me with plants, with trees, with lands, with men, with hills, with women, with suffering, with goodness, with pride, all of it as remedies, all of it as provisions, all of it in foreknowledge of what could have wounded me. Ahead of time he gave me the right defense for what could have been a wound, for what, thanks to him, became instead, inside me, an enormous sun.

(p. 168)

Lying in the tall grass on summer evenings, the young priest further explained to the child (p. 169) the philosophy of New Realism originated by Plato: the real world exists beyond our sensory apprehension.

Giono's pastoral vision of the world's harmony stems also from the young priest's teachings and his concept that one has only to stoop and drink from a common spring to be refreshed. All has its proper weight: the emotion felt by granite or the bark of a tree, all sap flowing under a snake's scales, fenced off by skins, like all blood. “Nous sommes le monde” (p. 172), with our anthills of earth and air, our families and villages of trees, our forests of men.⁵¹

Rejoining his beloved father who so understandingly shielded him from evil and profanation, the healed youngster with the “regard bleu” returns home to Manosque at the point of manhood. Feeling the need to live, understanding the imperiousnesses of his blood, he experiences at this moment a great sadness (p. 211) against which his father imparts the final sum of his counsel and knowledge: beware of reason, safeguard your sense of hope (“Avec l'espérance on arrive à tout,” p. 218), recognize that the ultra-superior strength of men comes from the heart, and that proper justice is nothing less than hopefulness and confidence in mankind. For the first time, Jean now sees that his father has become an old man, and for the first time he further sees in all its misery the slum courtyard and well where he had spent his childhood. These sights lead him once more to actual despair.

With the blues humming their sad refrains in his heart, Jean notices how decrepit and how aged the people and the world of his infancy have become, or really are. The nightingale, he learns, has committed suicide. Above all floats the “terrible” odor of the penned sheep down in their muddy, sunless hole. Telling Jean to keep his sights on the blueness of the distant sea, his musician friend succumbs to cold and hunger. Then the neighborhood optician dies from starvation. Mother Montagnier dies, leaving in this urban blight an orphaned child whom no one claims. In a terrible silence Clara (Julie) weds Gonzales (M. Joseph), who has returned from a pagan Mexico of volcanos, gods of stone, ancient barbarousnesses, and blue finger rings.

In his final Chapter IX Giono develops the one other symbol that has informed this fiction—the verticality of the black, foul courtyard, which represents the depth of consciousness into which he plunges deeper and deeper in self-awareness and self-knowledge. Recounting the stories of the impoverished but once noble Italian lodger Franchesc,⁵² Giono implicitly explains how a man can, even in the face of final destitution and starvation, safeguard his cleanliness and like Angélo Pardi nourish his heart on pure water. Singing the blues, Jean celebrates this very courtyard, which usually signifies “defeat and slavery” (p. 272); this slum, which witnesses among its occupants “submission and death”: “de temps en temps, le boucher entrait et menait une bête à l'abattoir.” With Tolstoyan revulsion before slaughter, Jean chronicles the lives of his fellow-sufferers, their medieval city destroyed by modern civilization, their fields burned, their farms buried under factories, their trades useless, their water and air polluted, their freedom and dignity sold for pennies, their most resolute members often departing to wander Les Grands chemins, homeless and destitute.

Through it all, Franchesc is somehow not beaten down, while still being one “des pauvres et des perdus” (p. 275). Even Jesus was powerless before human misery, His hands too small to shelter all the poor, even He, like Jean and Franchesc, with His blue eyes! What can the young man do but become a healer of wounds, like his father, so he can in some way apply balm and stanch the flow of blood? Blind chance, then, led young Jean to his blue flunkey's suit at the bank, where, entering rows of figures in ledgers like Melville and like Kafka, opening and closing doors, bowing and scraping to customers, young Giono continued to read and to study “le tragique de la vie” (pp. 295, 297) as he awaited his departure for the front in World War I.⁵³ His heart broke to see his father descend daily towards death, into definitive loneliness, towards “le terrible” that he as memorialist would all his years strive to avert—the “agonie terrible” of forgetfulness. Art to Giono, or to William Saroyan, would be a long crusade against death.

In the Preface to his edition of Virgile (1960), Giono continued his autobiography, castigating the particular middle class of whom he became for a short time a minor employee until André Gide launched him almost overnight into fame and independence. Leaving the forest of Brocéliande, which was his childhood (v., p. 60),⁵⁴ he recalled to mind, he entered the lunar world of the bank, enduring “de grandes nuits de détresse” because of the poor, life's gentle failures, living without the nobility and the joy even of mountain shepherds. Could he sing the golden calf's cult? These years he sought a victorious faith, such as one nourished by miracles (v., p. 67). The poet's function, as Vergil had also understood it, was to add the gods to men, to speak of their admirable pinnacles, and the immense order according to which they regulated the universe. The true poet will meet gods all along the roads.

The poet in Vergil's manner does not enjoy delight himself; he is rather one of those who tells how one takes delight. He is the one who in his works sings of the entire earth. When as a young man he desires to give the world some perfect work, he studies such masters as Vergil and Homer in order simply to inform himself about technique (v., p. 13). With the whole world as subject matter, shall modern poets remain unable to create a poetry of renaissance? Let the first criterion be frank subjectivity (v., p. 41). The youth under the “thousand buttons” of his blue uniform felt hopeful: “Beings and objects were wrapped within that azure zone which foretells the near approach of light” (v., p. 50). The eyes of Jean le bleu were, in fact, “yeux bleus puits de tant d'espérance.”⁵⁵

On the one hand, then, Giono adopts for Jean le bleu a poetic tradition doubtless characteristic of French letters, or one in which the color blue represents the ideal where the soul soars and also the pure realm of the imagination. Thus, the young Giono, speaking of his father's proclivity, and of his own, for healing mankind might be Balzac's La Fosseuse narrating her story at the end of Le Médecin de campagne (1832-1833):⁵⁶

“‘I had only the blue of the sky as my friend.—I have always become happy whenever I saw the sky entirely blue. … Such times I used to dream that I was a great lady. If I gazed at it intently enough, I felt myself immersed in the blue; in imagination I lived up there within it, no longer feeling any sense of weight, soaring up, up, gradually feeling completely happy.’” Around 1859 Victor Hugo had also expressed Giono's feelings many decades later as the latter completed his Pan Trilogy:⁵⁷

Thanks to the great Pan, god of the beasts,
Son, reality shows its horns
Under the blue brow of the ideal.(58)

In fact, when Wallace Stevens, another office worker, speaks of blue in Giono's manner, he is placed “plainly in a French tradition”: “His (Stevens') recurrent blue and green, north and south, moon and sun are signs for imagination and fact, not symbols.”⁵⁹ Wallace Stevens himself might often have spoken for Jean le bleu, as, for example:

I am the poorest of all.
I know that I cannot be mended.(60)

Young Giono's sorrows at the world and its poor and unhappy persons spending their dreary lives around the well of the courtyard seems to have been captured thirty years before Jean le bleu in the pictures that Pablo Ruiz y Picasso brought to Paris from Barcelona (1904). A watercolor as early as 1902 had portrayed Les Pauvres, but the works of the blue period⁶¹ especially belong to Giono's text, and vice versa. Picasso's Nude, Back View (1902),⁶² which shows a fragile woman with her head resting on her right knee, might well illustrate Giono's forlorn but gallant prostitute. Similarly, Giono's Julie, the dreaming musician from Le Moulin de Pologne (1952), finds another visage in Picasso's Woman in an Armchair: The Dream.⁶³ The whole tone and pervasive atmosphere of Jean le bleu comes to mind when one considers Picasso's blue The Two Sisters (1904). Both women are seated and superbly drawn with their coiffures, round eyes, passive mouths, and watchful postures. Thin, sad, wistful, looking out at the world of unspeakable things, as Jean le bleu saw it, they both hold slender fingertips before their lips.⁶⁴ Having rejected more practical explanations—that Picasso painted in blue for some years because he was too poor to purchase other colors, or because he was used to working at night, or because he was influenced by the blue tints of photographic plates—art historians Frank Elgar and Robert Maillard conclude in words most applicable to Giono's first portrait of himself as artist: “The exclusive use of blue is better explained by the sensual, if not spiritual, meaning of this colour, the colour of night, ashes, melancholy, and death. Bright and vivid shades would be quite inappropriate to the bloodless bodies and dark, frightened faces of human beings wilting beneath a doom they cannot understand. Cold blues and murky greys are more in keeping with that world of suffering and disinherited people.”⁶⁵

Not only a portrait of the artist as a young child and adolescent, barely emerging into maturity, then, Giono's Jean le bleu may, like the works of Picasso's “Blue Period (1901-1904)” be called “social in theme” and representing an “emaciated, underprivileged world.”⁶⁶ It seems even very possible that Giono followed Picasso even further, for the paintings of 1943 might well have been reproduced in Giono's portrayal of the stricken Julie, one part of whose face was blue with paralysis, for so in at least two instances has Picasso represented seated women.⁶⁷

Below the actual and social significances of the color blue as emphasized by Giono there may also extend survivals of Celtic lore, which make even more relevant references to the Arthurian forest. Manosque then resembles the blue city or Glastonbury to which the Sun-King, about to create, returns only to be imprisoned by a lunar deity in a penitential maze, encased in blue and thousand-buttoned.⁶⁸ Thus the special mark traced on the narrator's forehead by his “grandmother” in Mort d'un personnage and the color blue refer similarly to prehistoric Celtic ritual: “This process (wound) is obviously some form of tattooing, and is perhaps the attenuated survival of the ancient British and Pictish custom of tattooing the whole body with blue pigment, a custom which among the witches was not confined to Great Britain, but extended to the Continent as well, particularly to France.”⁶⁹ To many persons with Celtic educations, in fact, the sacred color blue, whether or not it refers to woad,⁷⁰ still attracts a mystical aura, and to French-speaking persons “bleu” may mean “fabulous.”

To Giono through the years the blue of eyes remained in several ways significant, towards the end of his life, for instance, indicative of personal heroism: Ennemonde and Camille in Ennemonde (1968), M. and Mme Numance in Les Ames fortes (1949), Count Pesaro and the major in Le Bonheur fou (1957), Ariane du Pavon in Deux cavaliers de l'orage (1965), and the widow in Un Roi sans divertissement (1947). Both the healer Bobi in Que ma joie demeure (1935) and Saint-Jean in Batailles dans la montagne (1937) have blue eyes and are associated with heroism and fine blue days. Pauline's father in Angelo (1958), on the other hand, more resembles Giono himself in 1953 when he finished Voyage en Italie, both “doctors” having blue eyes that made them look vague, distant, never present at the place where they were. Giono's most important allusions outside Jean le bleu, however, probably occur in his Pour saluer Melville (1943), where he notes that Herman Melville's eyes were gray-blue, lost-looking, but that they were also the fierce blue eyes of a great and a true poet.⁷¹ D. H. Lawrence had already concurred, and more, that Melville was “magic, … abstract, … elemental, … and keen,” and like all blue-eyed persons, quite “curious,” in fact: “He was a modern Viking. … In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice, air, space, but not humanity.”⁷² It is Melville among all authors whom Giono most loved and to whom he therefore turned most often for solace.

Giono's blue is further connected, it would seem, with the blues, a style of music just receiving its first written study at about the time of publication of Jean le bleu.⁷³ Surrounded by the recent miseries of human slavery, Negro jazz musicians, particularly W. C. Handy, with his Memphis (1912) and St. Louis Blues (1914), created a style characterized by rapid alternation of major and minor tonality, the former suggesting happiness, hope, and stability, the latter conveying dismal, whining, and complaining measures like the several complaintes that the child heard from his attic window. By the 1930's it was common to speak of “blue notes” and impossible not to have heard this music of a nature as highly subjective, as tensely emotional, and as socially conscious as the Giono novel.

Thus, Jean le bleu mirrored its century while giving earnest of works to come, advancing a rationale not only for the early pastoral novels of Giono but also for his most positive works, such as Le Hussard sur le toit, and his most tragic, such as Un Roi sans divertissement. Pushing far beyond any ordinary use of blue or blue eyes in fiction,⁷⁴ the young novelist drew his self-portrait as a child destined to become an artist. As a youngster he was doubtless, like Gargantua, Chateaubriand, or Apollinaire, dedicated to the cult of the Virgin, for whom he too wore blue. Very soon, as he demonstrated by refusing to recite his piece to her on Easter Monday,⁷⁵ he substituted for the green Virgin of his parochial school, a green nymph or Eurydice whom he, like a truly blue Orpheus, conjured up from blotches of mildew on his attic wall.⁷⁶ Looking him straight in the eyes, the green muse, lovely earth goddess, not only imposed upon Jean his daydreams and his future poetry, but gave birth in him to all his violets, he confessed, bringing into bloom the jasmine flowers that danced perfumed just over his artist's heart, where, added Giono, in the heart of Jesus flames always flare like exploding suns.

Notes

1. Editions Bernard Grasset (1949), 5 chapters, 183 pp.

2. Giono par lui-même (Paris, 1959), p. 30, for example, and especially Maxwell A. Smith's Jean Giono (New York, 1966), p. 159, and p. 156 ff.

3. January 9, 1946.

4. “Mrs. Oedipus Has Daughters, Too” by Matthew Besdine from Psychology Today (March 1971), p. 64.

5. “Un Nouveau Giono,” Mercure de France, cccvii, No. 1,040 (April 1, 1950), pp. 693-97, and here pp. 694-95; reprinted in Littérature présente (1952), pp. 135-41.

6. See Les Albums des Guides Bleus (Paris, 1954), p. 5.

7. And so W. D. Redfern begins his The Private World of Jean Giono (Durham, 1967): “Jean Giono was born … a liar. … It entails either twisting the truth, or fabricating from scratch” (p. 1).

8. “English” daisies, or pâquerettes.

9. Maxwell A. Smith also admires this novel, which he finds of a “distressing realism,” however, but “ennobled and rendered intensely moving … by the devotion of her grandson,” etc. (Giono, p. 157). On the other hand, Marcel Arland referred to the heroine as “la vieille folle de Mort d'un personnage,” La Grâce d'écrire (Paris, 1955), as cited by Boisdeffre in his Giono (p. 240).

10. Segalen, Debussy, Cocteau, Anouilh, Pierre-Jean Jouve, and Pierre Emmanuel, principally.

11. Pièces noires (1949, 1966).

12. See Kushner's Chapter 1, where she discusses the myth's treatment in its two major sources, Vergil and Ovid.

13. See Mother by Maxim Gorky (New York, 1947), introduction by Howard Fast, trans. Isidor Schneider. The novel, asserts Fast, was written while Gorky was hiding in “a log cabin in the Adirondacks” (p. ix ff.). It takes place in Nizhni-Novgorod, renamed Gorky in 1932. By 1947 the novel had appeared in 106 editions in 28 languages. The author was 39 years old at the time of composition: “This was Gorky, most beloved of Russian writers, as much the reflection of the soul of Russia as Mark Twain was of the soul of America” (p. vii).

14. Mother, Part ii, p. 217. Many traces of this novel and its hero Pavel (Pasha) recur in Doctor Zhivago, which is also worth mentioning in this connection because Boris Pasternak of all modern novelists perhaps most resembles Jean Giono, or seems to have derived in many ways, such as in his constant championship of women, from Giono.

    The lyrical treatment of old women, so unusual in world letters before Gorky and Giono, has become a commonplace in Soviet fiction, according to Olga G. Sorokin's “The Lyrical Voice in the Contemporary Soviet Russian Short Story,” The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. xiii, No. 4 (Winter 1969).

15. Trans. Mary G. Steegmann as The Mother (New York, 1923, 1928), but the London edition (J. Cope) seems to have been entitled The Woman and the Priest. Grazia Deledda (1871[?]-1936) seems to be an isolated case in Italian letters, which are remarkable for a total absence of women as characters. Deledda received a Nobel Prize in 1926.

16. Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London, etc., 1955), pp. 292-94.

17. Sons and Lovers, Chapter ii (p. 46 in Modern Library Edition, undated).

18. Pierre R. Robert in his Jean Giono et les techniques du roman (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961) had already noticed a relationship: “Par sa structure Les Ames fortes rappelle As I Lay Dying.” See note 29, p. 21.

19. As I Lay Dying (New York, 1964), p. 163. The few pages (161-68) narrated by Addie are close to Giono's ideas and treatment.

20. Giono in 1949 is decades ahead of his time. See, for instance, Betty Rollin's “Motherhood. Who Needs It?” Look, Vol. 34, No. 19 (September 22, 1970), pp. 15-18: “The notion that the maternal wish and the activity of mothering are instinctive or biologically predestined is baloney” (p. 15).

21. See my “Molloy's Musa Mater,” Comparative Literature Symposium, Vol. iii, Texas Tech. University (1970), pp. 31-55.

22. L'Herbe (Paris, 1958), p. 81. Marie is described in detail, as in Giono, from p. 76 ff.

23. Particularly similar, and also very beautiful, is the passage beginning (pp. 142-43 ff.): “Donc: la vieille femme—le vieux, le fragile amas d'ossements, …, d'organes exténués, aspirant au repos, au néant originel, gisant— … régnant, … étendant sa présence, son royaume … dans la nuit silencieuse, la nocturne paix du jardin, des frondaisons …”

24. See La Mort d'une mère (Paris, 1950), Flammarion's Livre de Poche (p. 33): “‘Non, l'antiquité avait une civilisation par trop masculine.’” The two modern novelists agree to lay the “cult” of motherhood on early Christianity, and on Christ personally, who scorned his mother. See pp. 34-35.

25. See La Vieillesse (Paris, 1970), pp. 147, 160, 183, 224, 426-27, et passim.

26. Including, adds Beauvoir, Marot, Desportes, D'Aubigné, Du Bellay, and Régnier.

27. Exception must be made, of course, for Félicité in Trois contes (1877), heroine of “Un Coeur simple.”

28. L'Etranger (Paris, 1942).

29. Jean Giono et les techniques du roman, p. 12.

30. Giono's Virgile (1960), pp. 22-23.

31. Noé (p. 12), but also Le Moulin de Pologne, as we have seen.

32. Un Roi sans divertissement.

33. Noé, pp. 12-24, pp. 52-53.

34. Idem, p. 42.

35. “Voir” and “revoir,” Noé, p. 55.

36. The famous Negro composer was born twelve years before Giono, but his autobiography, Father of the Blues appeared nine years after Jean le bleu, or in 1941.

37. 1898-1937. Rhapsody in Blue appeared as early as 1923.

38. Jean le bleu, along with the Pan Trilogy and Que ma joie demeure was published by Bernard Grasset in a printing of 1,851 copies, renewed 8 times between 1932 and 1961. The novel is divided into 9 chapters (316 pp.) containing subtitles listed in a final table, but concerning: (i) early memories, (ii) school days, (iii) the anarchist, (iv) music lessons, (v) the healer and illness, (vi) recuperation at Corbières, (vii) the tutor, (viii) home again, (ix) the discovery of poetry as a modus vivendi, and the arrival at manhood.

39. Chapter iii, pp. 45-59. Page numbers refer to the eighth printing of the original Grasset edition, also entitled Passage du vent.

40. Singe (p. 37); Noah, flood, ark (pp. 14, 39-40, 58, 67, et passim).

41. Part ii, Chapter 3 of Les Faux monnayeurs (1926), a work so popular and wide-reaching that by 1947 it had 264 translations. In Jean le bleu Giono will descend in depth rather than operate a horizontal slice of life; he will propose his ideal reality juxtaposed to facts; he will furnish a kind of recollected journal; and he will expressly allow his book to become, if not a Bach fugue, at least a Bach Passion. Giono will also dispense with chronology or linear reality to play off thens and nows.

42. See “Schopenhauer” in Etienne Souriau's Clefs pour l'esthétique (Paris, 1970), pp. 41-43.

43. Giono resembles, in fact, both John Steinbeck and William Saroyan among the authors castigated by Edmund Fuller in his essay “The New Compassion in the American Novel” from Man in Modern Fiction (New York, 1949), pp. 32-44.

44. Chapter iv, but p. 80 especially.

45. See the title story Solitude de la pitié, where the well of this courtyard has become a well for drawing water within a priest's courtyard.

46. Giono has recalled these three passages in French, all from Part ii of this less-well-known Passion. See Jean le bleu, p. 91. (Giono's Que ma joie demeure is a French translation of the Bach Chorale “Jesu, joy of man's desiring.”)

47. Giono seems most affected by “Ein Landarzt” (1919) not only as here in Chapter v (pp. 97-107) of Jean le bleu when he describes his father as healer, but also in the closing chapter of Le Hussard sur le toit when Pauline and Angélo are lectured by another healing country doctor below his map of Moscow (Marseilles). Contrary to Kafka's pessimism, Giono regards both his healers as successful, but, of course, Angélo had already seen one country doctor succumb to the plague. Thus, we must concur with Claude Mauriac about Kafka: “Son oeuvre préfigure celle de la plupart des écrivains représentatifs de notre époque.” See his “Franz Kafka” from L'Alittérature contemporaine (Paris, 1958), p. 13.

48. Mme Massat, pp. 128 and 138, for example; Fragments, pp. 129-30; Un Roi, p. 131.

49. Chapters vi and vii of Jean le bleu must ultimately be compared, it seems, to Colette's La Maison de Claudine, first published ten years earlier. Both are slim but very dense and psychologically profound novels, both are packed with silence and unsaid words; therefore both succeed in eliciting reader collaboration. No one but Giono, it would also seem, could equal Colette's poetic gifts of evocation and metaphor. Both understand childhood to be a period of sweet liberty, veiled perversion, and wild savagery, and both understand the importance of the games children play. When one reads such lines, it is difficult to know, by the poetry of such homely words, who is writing, Colette or Giono: “La maison était grande, coiffée d'un grenier haut. La pente raide de la rue obligeait les écuries et les remises, les poulaillers, la buanderie, la laiterie, à se blottir en contrebas tout autour d'une cour fermée” (opening paragraph, La Maison de Claudine).

50. Again, this is a mythical landscape and not a real one in a windswept, bone-dry, cold mountain village. Perhaps here also Giono is indebted to Gide, particularly to the magnificent swamp landscape, Paludes (1896).

51. Here Giono celebrates his joyous discovery by telling his wonderful story of how the baker's wife ran off with the shepherd of “Conches” (p. 173 ff.) and knew, exceptionally for a woman, her few days of pastoral bliss. The goddess of the dawn Aurélie spent her brief idyll with a man “as bright as day” (p. 174). Giono's delightful humor punctures their right to the pursuit of happiness as the villagers object: “‘C'est beau, oui, l'amour, mais il faut penser qu'on mange.’” With Aurélie absent, her spouse the baker will not bake bread.

52. These stories and persons bear a strong relationship to Angélo Pardi's home area as portrayed in Le Bonheur fou.

53. The final pages of the novel give us the cave-men analogy as developed in Un Roi sans divertissement and the opening pages of Le Grand troupeau.

54. Virgile, p. 60.

55. Samuel Beckett's “Le Calmant” (1945) from Nouvelles et textes pour rien (Paris, 1958), p. 60.

56. Scènes de la vie de campagne from La Comédie humaine, Vol. viii, ed. Marcel Bouteron (Paris, 1949), p. 521.

57. Colline (1929), Un de Baumugnes (1929), Regain (1930).

58. Chansons des rues et des bois, ed. Zumthor, p. 56.

59. See William York Tindall's Wallace Stevens (Minneapolis, 1961), p. 17.

60. “Idiom of the Hero” from Parts of a World (New York, 1951), p. 21.

61. See No. 6 (Mother and Child, Summer, 1902), No. 7 (Woman at a Bar, 1902), and especially the poignant No. 9 (Les Pauvres au bord de la mer, 1903) with its forlorn, disconsolate man, woman, and child, three persons in the family as in Giono, from Gertrude Stein's Picasso (London, 1939).

62. Oil on canvas. 18[frac18] × 15[frac34] inches.

63. Paris (Jan. 24). Oil. 52 × 38[frac34] inches.

64. Gouache on paper. 21[frac58] × 15 inches. Private collection. Paris.

65. Picasso. A Study of His Work, trans. Francis Scarfe (New York, 1960), p. 24 ff., and here p. 29.

66. Harriet and Sidney Janis, Picasso. The Recent Years. 1939-1946 (New York, 1946), pp. 8 and 20.

67. Ibid. Plate 82 (Seated Woman. Paris. Sept. 23, 1943. Oil on canvas. 39 × 32 inches). “In this face the right profile and the left profile interlock and overlap. Furthermore, the composite of both makes the full face.” In Plate 81 (Figure Seated in a Wicker Chair. Paris. Sept. 24, 1943. Oil on canvas. 39 × 32 inches), four planes of the woman's face are blue: forehead, nose, lip, chin.

68. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York, 1948), p. 88 ff.

69. Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (Garden City, 1960), p. 100.

70. Isatis tinctoria, order of Cruciferae is Julius Caesar's vitrium, a dye made from leaves by Britons. The Coventry dye from woad carries the mark “true blue.” The woaded indigo dyes used in work clothes are fade-resistant.

71. Pour saluer Melville, pp. 14, 29, 33.

72. Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923), but see New York, 1964, edition, p. 131.

73. Hughes Panassié's Le Jazz hot (Paris, 1934).

74. Most novelists, one observes, attribute blue eyes to characters and generally without particular significance, although Alan Sillitoe surprises his readers with the policeman's eyes being called “illiterate blue” (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner [New York, 1959], p. 27). Blue eyes are either innocent, shrewd, and pure (Dreiser's American Tragedy), mild and childlike (Andrić), or blue and innocent (Faulkner's Sartoris). Blue-eyed women are often severely castigated, like George Eliot's Rosamund in Middlemarch and Balzac's horrible old maid, Sylvie Rogron, with the steel-blue eyes; however, as we have seen, Giono much admired them in heroic, old women—but Giono was always a champion of women, in any case.

75. End of Chapter ii, Jean le bleu.

76. Chapter iii, p. 66 ff., and especially p. 69.