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Overview
Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), one of the twentieth century's most powerful and idiosyncratic writers, was also the most original Roman Catholic writer of his time. The Impostor, the second of his novels published in French, is the last to be translated into English.
J. C. Whitehouse is Visiting Reader in comparative literature at the University of Bradford. He is the author of Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos and the translator of many books including Bernanos's Mouchette.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803261532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNP - Bison Books |
| Publication date: | 05/01/1999 |
| Pages: | 250 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
J. C. Whitehouse is Visiting Reader in comparative literature at the University of Bradford. He is the author of Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos and the translator of many books including Bernanos’s Mouchette.
Read an Excerpt
The Impostor
By Georges Bernanos
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 1999 Georges BernanosAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780803261532
Chapter One
Father Cénabre's fine voice was slow and grave. "Some attachment to the good things of this world is legitimate, my son, and protecting them from others seems to me to be a duty as well as a right, provided we're not unjust. Nevertheless, we need to act prudently, discreetly, and with discernment ... Living as a Christian in the secular world calls for proportion and measure. For balance, in fact, in all things. We can hardly resist such attacks at the purely natural level, but we can control them if we are very patient and diligent ... We should defend only what we need to defend, without prejudice to anyone. Then we shall keep our peace of mind, or regain it if we've lost it."
"Thank you, Father," Monsieur Pernichon replied, his voice betraying his obviously sincere feeling. "I must confess that the battle of ideas sometimes produces more heat than light. But the example of your own life and thought is a great comfort for me." (His mouth was still twitching, making his bearded chin tremble as he spoke.)
"I accept," he went on, "that someone else could have been entrusted with the annual report. Some of my colleagues are better qualified. For instance,I would willingly have stood aside in favor of the senior Catholic journalist, but from the very beginning he gave up all the claims to what was his by right... We could hardly have foreseen that a seasoned fighter holding back like that was going to thrust Larnaudin into the limelight ..."
"I've no objection to Monsieur Larnaudin," replied the fine, slow, grave voice. "In fact, I've rather a high opinion of him. I've always benefited to some extent from his criticisms, even the unfair ones. You see, my friend, the useful thing about doctrinaire people is that because they're so different from us they stimulate certain of our faculties that custom and the experience of life weaken. They provide us with useful points of reference."
He gave a harsh laugh.
"I admire you!" Pernichon cried out fervently. "In all this sound and fury, you still observe other people calmly. You're priestly on the altar and everywhere else. And yet not even someone as well disposed as you are can turn a blind eye to the harm Larnaudin's polemics, bias, and obstinacy have done to our very worthy cause. Yesterday evening I heard your eminent friend Monsignor Cimier urging us to give pledges and more pledges, for that was the way forward! Well, we have given them, all except one. I mean, that we should name, yes, name, and formally disown one or two fanatics with no mandate at all and a following of only a tiny handful of gullible fools. Is that too much to ask for?" (Sweat had finally broken out on the little man's forehead, which seemed to give him enormous relief.)
Pernichon wrote the religious column in a radical paper subsidized by a conservative financier for socialist ends. What soul he had flourished in the threefold equivocation, feeding like a patient and industrious insect on the humiliation the position involved. He was virtually a stranger in the offices of The New Dawn, and his brooding and prematurely decrepit form, further disfigured by a limp, was best known in the very distinctive group of writers without books, journalists without newspapers, and prelates without a diocese that exists on the fringes of church, politics, society, and academia. Its members are so anxious to sell their services that supply is often greater than demand, and the bottom is always cruelly threatening to fall out of the market. Once the slump is well underway and the saturation point is reached, their short-lived and hence valueless commodities are dumped in outer offices and left to rot away.
He had studied at the junior seminary of Notre Dame des Champs, playing out until the very last moment what he half knew was the comedy of a bogus vocation to the priesthood. Then, once he was over the hurdle of the baccalaureate, he had disappeared from sight for a long time until the decisive moment when he was commissioned to write signed weekly contributions—first uplifting news items and subsequently Letters from Rome, written in the house of a small caterer in the rue Jacob—to a parish publication. Who else could have apparently managed to turn that kind of obscurity to his own advantage? But he was able to save up for his future fame by putting aside one small coin after another like his ancestors from the Auvergne, who had ploughed their sweat into an unproductive land in summer, coming to Paris in winter to sell the chestnuts the pigs refused, slowly piling up their savings until their ridiculous dream collapsed about them, leaving them released rather than requited. Eventually, they were hurriedly cleaned up, for the first time, by the old woman who washed and laid out their bodies before the public health officer's visit.
His Letters from Rome were not, however, entirely without merit. They were as good as other less well-known ones written in the same spirit by conceited and disappointed men as a vehicle for the bitterness they exuded drop by drop. The wording might, of course, vary from one writer to another, but not the deeper hidden meaning, the enduring malice, the unmistakable longing for the worst and, disguised as a desire for social harmony, a pathological hatred of any remaining sense of honor in the Church.
Pernichon looked respectfully at the priest's magisterial face for a moment and then smiled, clearly showing the mass of premature wrinkles on his own. He spoke again.
"I've given up the idea of making you angry with anyone ... but yesterday the Nuncio was saying ..."
"Can we please not mention him?" Father Cénabre asked. "His Holiness's determination to upset no one will eventually look like an insult to our republican ministers ... democracy likes a show, and we send appallingly low, scheming little prelates. And he doesn't even understand Greek! At Senator Hubert's ..."
He rubbed his hands over his cheeks. For a moment, he was lost in thought, and then said quietly:
"What's the point? Neither do you."
"You're forgetting," cried Pernichon, forcing out a laugh, "you're forgetting that I took the prize for translation from Greek in 1903, in the Paris seminary. It's a pity ... I should have preferred to do something more literary ... but the sad events we've lived through ..."
"Tagore says that the secret of peace is not to expect good fortune ... St Thérèse said it earlier ... these meetings, my friend, have something strange and bitter about them ..."
His hand, tapping irritatedly on the scarlet cloth of the Louis Seize desk, called them edgily back to their business. The clock struck eleven.
"I'm afraid I'm tiring you," said Pernichon. "I know that you rarely keep late hours. But these all-too-infrequent occasions when I can rest in the solitude you live in, a stone's throw from all the noise and bustle of Paris, do me a world of good! I always come away filled with certainty and faith. The way you look at events and people is so calm, and even your mischievous remarks are so indulgent and refined! I'm proud, I repeat, proud, my eminent master, to see you not only as a protector in the worldly sense of the term, but also as the spiritual director I hardly deserve."
Father Cénabre looked at the clock, sank further into his chair and, raising his right hand for silence, spoke with striking authority:
"My friend, I appreciate your patience and your submission to a priest who spares you neither rebukes nor occasionally rather severe criticism. But I'm very reluctant to hear your more or less weekly confession. You know that I find it hard to carry out my ministry, and that my modest efforts as a historian take up the bulk of my time. And a pious young man shouldn't be seeking absolution from such a controversial figure. Of course, you'll be welcome to my advice if you find it useful, but I'd like you to go to another priest for the sacrament. You have a wide choice, if you prefer not to go to some excessively simple curate ... so today is the last time."
They walked to one end of the enormous room. Canon Cénabre sat on a very ordinary simple straw-bottomed chair near a similar prie-dieu on which his penitent knelt. To enlarge his study, the priest had had the dividing wall knocked down, opening up a storage room with whitewashed walls and a red-tiled floor. It was as if Poverty, which he hated so much, had suddenly breached the wall and burst into the famous library, a miracle of disciplined luxury for the few connoisseurs capable of appreciating its exquisite detail. For Cénabre, the contrast seemed precious. He had scantily furnished the bare little corner with a wretched table, chairs whose straw was yellowed with age, and simple shelves on which, however, those with taste could admire a very fine and extremely rare collection of naively bound missals, the treasures of rural piety through the ages. On the bare wall hung a cross which, as a final touch of sophistication, was the only one in the house.
Pernichon's murmuring recitation of the confiteor was already rising and falling in the surrounding silence, for he affected an impeccably stressed Latin. With his head bent forward and a painful smile on his tightly closed thin lips, Father Cénabre seemed to be listening closely to the familiar sound, although as yet all he was aware of was the smell that accompanied it. A dull, flat odor, not so much foul as sickly, did indeed hover around the puny and joylessly envious man. But his conscience was even more sweetly fetid than his smell.
It was not that the piety of the young editor of Modern Life was mere hypocrisy. Indeed, it could perhaps be said to be sincere, as it had its roots in his innermost being, in his obscure fear of evil and the hidden desire to attain it deviously and with the least possible risk. What little he had in the way of social or political doctrine was governed by the same longing to yield to the enemy and hand over his soul. What the fools around him called his independence or boldness was merely the outward, though misunderstood, sign of his morose yearning for total surrender and the final elimination of self. Anyone opposed to the cause he claimed to serve already had his heart, and any objection from his opponents found a secret welcome in his mind. Any injustice against his own kind immediately aroused in him not revolt, or even cowardly connivance, but, in the hidden depths of his womanish soul, a hatred of the victims and an ignoble love of the victor.
His inner life was similarly muddied, ambiguous, airless, and unhealthy. Although he took liberties with the Church's teaching, he made a show of scrupulously respecting her moral precepts. He certainly kept certain major rules of his game, but he also feared Hell with such a covert envy of those who braved its torments that he merely thought that he despised them. Anxious to avoid any fuss in this world or the next, he managed his conscience with a certain distaste, rather like a retailer surveying a shop with no customers, and gave the impression of a frighteningly static and decaying adolescence that had outlived itself and survived into adult life. Once, when it had looked as if he might be in danger of dying, he had braved the ordeal of a general confession. The experience of stirring up the sour residue of his empty life had taught him the frightening lesson that the sum total of all his faults did not provide the matter for any real remorse.
Cénabre heard all the usual admissions in their usual order. Indeed, Pernichon liked to make a quick, methodical confession, begun in a ridiculously authoritative way and conducted and completed like a clinical lecture. Simple priests were left at a loss, hardly daring to absolve such a well-informed penitent. Never before, however, had the author of The Florentine Mystics deigned to interrupt the flow before the final sigh, which sometimes even turned into a discreet and irreproachably guileless cough. Once again, the little man was heard in silence. When he had finished, however, and was surprised at the continuing silence, he looked up and caught the priest's motionless and sinister eyes looking straight into his.
Curiosity does not have such somber fire, scorn such sadness, or hatred such bitterness. Deathly pale, Pernichon felt that he was held in a vice, suddenly slit open and probed to the depths of his being. He could not hold or beat down his confessor's incomprehensible gaze and for a second tried desperately to see in it the almost imperceptible deflection, the oblique flame, of madness. It simply fell straight down onto his shoulders. He could literally feel its shape and weight, as if it spurned the chance of merely passing through his wretched conscience and was moulding it, kneading it with disgust, playing a light on it. Even feeling ourselves to be the mere objects of an intrusive keener perception is intolerably humiliating, but our shame reaches its peak when the lucid gaze of others fully exposes our own degradation to us. And Cénabre's gaze, free of all idle curiosity, suggested a roughly comparable but even more offensive type of attention, a means of assessment involved in all the higher and more spiritual types of shame: the kind we pay to things so totally and substantially base that they do not merit a specific judgement.
One might wonder what the priest was comparing Pernichon with in his own mind, since all we consider in that particular way is what we have dishonored in ourselves.
"My friend," he suddenly asked, "how do you see yourself?" As he did so, his scrutiny became less intense.
"How do I see myself?" Pernichon breathed. "I don't really see ..."
"Listen to me," Cénabre went on gently. "The question may seem strikingly simple. We all judge ourselves, but, whatever our intentions, very insincerely. Our picture of ourselves has been endlessly touched up. It's a compromise. Observation is a mental act taking place at two or three different levels, whereas seeing involves only one. What I'm asking you to do is to look at yourself simply and directly, to catch sight of yourself with your fellow human beings as you live out your life among them."
"I see what you mean ..." said Pernichon, freed from his initial anguish. "I must admit ... that I'm full of contradictions."
Cénabre thought silently for a long while, and even a more perceptive man than Pernichon might have assumed that he was praying.
"I also admit," Pernichon immediately continued, "—and I'm sorry to have to raise this objection—that the kind of introspection you're suggesting ... isn't one that ... well, it's rather unusual. I always thought that in such matters we shouldn't be too methodical or attentive. I might have been afraid of ..."
"Don't be afraid of anything," the priest answered icily. "But don't answer if you prefer not to."
"No, I'll do as you ask," the little man continued wretchedly, full of a burning zeal. "Of course, I can't tell you anything you didn't know already, Whatever efforts I make, in spite of my small number of real faults, sensuality is a constant trial. You know that, too. But perhaps it's good to be made to repeat it and feel the shame of it again."
At first Cénabre said nothing. The wick of the simple oil lamp within reach on the table (he could not bear any other kind of lighting) spluttered and gave off a thin line of black smoke inside the glass. As the priest leaned over and stretched his arm out, Pernichon saw his long fingers trembling. Almost immediately, the bright new flame lit up the bony, leonine head, the extremely pale, almost livid, forehead and cheeks. The sudden and totally unexpected appearance of the tense features produced a sense of vague remorse and a feeling that he had been intolerably indiscreet.
"So," Cénabre finally said, "sensuality is a trial for you, is it? Perhaps that's how the mind sees it. You think you have strong passions. And yet, I think, you accuse yourself only of what are, at least apparently, minor faults."
"I didn't expect such criticism from you," Pernichon murmured, immediately regretting the rash phrase, for the same icy voice, so icy now that the almost imperceptible northeastern accent was neutralized and undetectable, did not trouble to reply directly.
"You've nothing to fear from sensuality. You don't deceive me, and perhaps not yourself. Oh, all that's scarcely of any interest. It's hardly worth bothering with. In spite of what people always think, any experienced priest attaches no more than symptomatic importance to sexual life. Anyone who turns it into the sole object of his investigation is certain to make a serious mistake. Indeed, it's only of interest, only provides useful information and illuminates the high ground, when it gives us a blurred and semicomprehensible image, a material sign, of the contradictions in the innermost life of a real human being. Even though it has to have its own independent existence and history, its own specific character."
"Perhaps one needs to accumulate a lot of failings to deserve the reputation of being a lofty soul?" Pernichon asked timidly, more irritated by the tone of these rather obscure observations than by their meaning. "I'm listening to what you say in a spirit of submission, but however severely I judge myself, I'm allowed to be aware of the efforts I've made and the temptations I've overcome! Perhaps I've not been able to advance very far along the way to perfection, but at least I've not given ground. The wound is still open, of course, but I haven't been swallowed up by sin, thank God."
He was breathing heavily, with his hands to his face, and once again his forehead was covered with sweat.
"For both our sakes, this final meeting will be taken to its ultimate conclusion," the voice went on. "I'm to blame for having waited so long. You see how right this first probe has been and the revealing outburst it has caused. I've seen the abscess bursting, my son."
"Father," said Pernichon, choking with astonishment and anger, "I can't understand why you're being so harsh with me!"
"I've listened to you many times, in this same place, with one question on my lips: Do you think, then, that you're alive?"
"I can't believe," Pernichon repeated, "that true apostolic zeal is expressed with that kind of hatred."
It was as if, as he heard the words, only "hatred" affected Cénabre, who almost lost his usual self-control. He flushed, struck the table sharply with the flat of his hand as his face turned a deeper red, and continued in a quieter voice.
"Please forgive the momentary outburst of bad temper. I'm not, and could never be, an apostle. A critical mind is my most important characteristic, or at least it absorbs all my other faculties. In the end, concentrated attention devours pity."
He took Pernichon's hand.
"My friend, I'm astonished by the partiality of those rather foolish, limited, and indiscreetly zealous priests who foster the illusion of so many good people that they're struggling with all the demons of lust. The military terms they use merely make such commonplaces all the more ridiculous. It's all a matter of fights, attacks launched or repulsed, defeats or victories ... Ah, my son, what do you expect me to say about that illusory struggle, where wretched people try to judge themselves in terms of the saints, including the most discerning of them, whom I think I can claim to be familiar with? Much more ..."
He pressed Pernichon's hands more warmly.
"That's not only an error of judgment," he went on. "There's a very high level of perverse duplicity in it. To take your own case alone, if I may, I think, and take it as being obvious, that far from resisting external temptations you try very hard and consistently to keep alive a level of concupiscence that grows less toxic with each passing day. The well has dried up, but you stir up the mud in it to be able to smell it, at least. So as not to overtax your strength, you like to live out the lie that you're subject to endless sexual temptation, when in fact your sexuality is barely strong enough to provide you with real occasions of sin. Why are you talking about a struggle inside you? It's all too easy to see your suspect thoughts, your lukewarm desires and actions that come to nothing. Anyone bringing such fantasies to life would be doing you a cruel injury. What your desires want to consume is that shadow, not something living. I'm talking to you now more from the point of view of knowledge than that of ministry. A rake throws himself into his pleasures like a madman, but at least he looks like someone who doesn't hang back all the time ... whereas you ... my son, your interior life has a minus sign."
Pernichon gasped sharply, like a bather entering cold water.
"Your idea of yourself," the voice continued with a kind of dreadful tenderness, "isn't wrong. It's like those mathematical equations where all you have to do is invert the signs. Your mediocrity tends naturally towards nothingness, the state of indifference between good and evil. Painfully keeping one or two vices alive is all that gives you the illusion of living."
Pernichon stood up at these words, waiting mutely before his torturer.
"The experience of life, and more so my modest historical researches," Cénabre resumed, "have shown me how few lives are positive ..."
"I respect your character and yourself enough to let you finish. But what you are saying belongs to the category of remarks that one ignores," the journalist burst out with some dignity.
"In that case, my final ones to you will be all the less hurtful," the priest answered. "Your presence has been the occasion, not the cause, of all that has gone on. All you have done wrong is to have been here with me, at this time on this day."
He breathed in noisily, and when had finished, the blood seemed to have drained away from his cheeks and forehead again, leaving them livid and pale.
"There comes a time, my son," he went on, "when life lies heavy on us. We should like to put the burden down, have a good look at it, and make a choice, keeping what we absolutely can't do without and throwing the rest away. Remember what I've said to you in confidence, aloud, this evening. I'll try to make that choice. I have to. I'm ready."
He stopped abruptly and looked down. Then extremely violently, he screamed "Get out! Get out?"
No doubt anyone but Pernichon would have done as he was told, but there was something potentially tragic in his clumsiness. And fate always saw grimly to it that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and kept him there to the bitter end, a perfect way of using the ridiculous or the odious.
"I'm sorry to have been the unintentional cause ..." he started to say.
"Cause of what?" Cénabre begged him. "I've told you, you caused nothing. Why should I humiliate you for no reason? But just listen to this observation: the world is full of people like you, and they stifle the best by sheer weight of numbers. Why did you join in our baffle of ideas? You'll leave it without regrets, but with little profit."
Despite its vulgarity, Pernichon's face now looked truly human and almost noble.
"Nevertheless, I didn't choose the winning side," he said.
"That's because the winning side is the masters' side, and you're painfully aware that you aren't one. But you live in their shadow, and you find it reassuring when they flatter your vanity."
For a moment he was silent, and then added quietly:
"And you needed something to bargain with."
"No, Canon," Pernichon cried. "My enemies have never seen me as a man who could be bought, I tell you?"
"My son," said Cénabre, "don't be angry if I use my special knowledge of your inner resources and moral abilities. You're a born middleman. Why should the Catholic party—or, to use their own language, Catholic circles—tend to create an abundance of such people? Because, in an increasingly interdependent political society almost exclusively made up of rigidly disciplined groups with no room for individualism, they're the ideal haven for old-fashioned opportunists. In theory, it looks easy to move from radicalism to socialism. In practice, it certainly isn't, because it means changing one set of voters for another. But believing in God and accepting the light yoke of the Church is a very convenient position! One is in a party without being of it. From that point of view, there's nothing less rigid than dogma, for some people even think it generally proposes indifference in political matters. With all the distinctions and shades of difference, there's a very wide range of choices for the dilettante. In a world of more and more concessions and enticements, an ambitious young man who hates a fuss and works methodically can go as far as he likes without losing the valuable privilege of being an ally rather than a party man, and an ally from outside at that, who has to be watched and can't be taken for granted. He's rather like those unfortunate ladies who, in holy wedlock, for which they certainly weren't made, still have a rather unappealing whiff of their past."
"You really are being very cruel," said Pernichon shakily. "Even if what you are saying is for my ears alone ..."
"It's all yours," said Cénabre. "Do what you like with it."
Suddenly an irresistible inner change transformed his features once again. The smile froze on his lips, his gaze hardened, and his hands were visibly trembling again. Even his anger seemed to have been swallowed up by some more violent and mysterious emotion.
His lids dropped slowly. The ensuing silence was difficult to break.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Impostor by Georges Bernanos Copyright © 1999 by Georges Bernanos. Excerpted by permission.
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