Julien Green (1900–1998): Exploring the Intersection of Religion and Literature

The extent and quality of Julien Green's work has earned for him a place in the pantheon of French, and, indeed, world letters. Born in Paris at the very start of the twentieth century to American parents, Green never felt completely at home in France or in the American South, where he went to pursue a university education. His parents were Protestants and when he was young, Julien's mother, in addition to relating incredible stories about the American Civil War, also used to read the King James Bible aloud to her children, an activity that left an indelible mark on her son. He was greatly taken with the dramatic language and stories from that book. We will see that a number of his characters, nervous about their standing in the eyes of God, seek in the Bible signs that they are saved. Like Flannery O'Connor's fictional creations, the majority of Green's characters are Protestants, a fact that does not prevent him from being a distinctly Catholic writer, as we shall see. Indeed, the early engagement with Catholicism culminated in his conversion ceremony in the crypt of the Chapelle des Soeurs Blanches, 26, rue Cortambert in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris on the 29 April 1916, after undergoing a period of preparation with a family friend, le Père Crété. There were periods during which he became alienated from his adopted religion, and from God, but he nevertheless always remained a staunchly committed Catholic.

A noteworthy incident which occurred during his youth was when one day his sister noticed his hands exploring the forbidden area of his body and reported him to his mother, who entered his bedroom brandishing a knife and shouting: 'I'll cut it off!' Ever afterwards, Green was haunted by the fear of castration, a fear that was exacerbated by his mother's exclamation, 'Oh, isn't it ugly!', on seeing him as a boy nude in the bath and referring to the same body member that she had previously threatened to remove forcibly.¹

The recent publication of Green's unexpurgated Journal², covering the years 1919–1940 when his homosexual activities were at their most intense, offers invaluable insights into the complex balancing act that the writer had to maintain throughout his life between his sexual orientation and his religious convictions. Green had always kept a journal, which he published regularly and in which he shared many anecdotes from his personal life and the political events that were shaping French life and world affairs – the two World Wars being the most significant of these – but, out of a desire to protect his adopted son, Eric, and his lifelong lover, mentor and best friend, Robert de Saint Jean, he also kept a separate journal which recounted in graphic detail many of his sexual adventures. His homosexuality would have been well known in Parisian literary and social circles, but what the Journal intégral reveals is the extent to which he acted out on his impulses. On almost every second page, we read about his encounters with strangers in parks, public toilets, baths, homosexual clubs, public transport, streets and alleyways. In an entry on the 17 September 1928, he wrote: 'I want to put my entire existence into these pages, with total frankness and exactitude. What will this book become? I have no idea, but it will be satisfying for me to know it exists' (89–90). Not only was it satisfying for Green to know that these hidden facts would one day come into the public domain, but it was also incredibly useful for those of us who are students of his work to learn about his preoccupations and behaviour during this critical stage of his development. Remember that this is the man who remarked on the close links between his fiction and his autobiography in the following manner:

I write out of an urgent need to forget, to plunge myself into a fictional world...