Notes
Julien Green (September 6, 1900 - August 13, 1998), was an American writer, who authored several novels, includingLéviathan and Each in His Own Darkness. He wrote primarily in French.
Julian Hartridge Green was born to American parents in Paris, a descendant on his mother's side of a Confederate Senator,Julian Hartridge (1829-1879), who later served as a Democratic Representative from Georgia to the US Congress, and who was Julien Green's namesake. (Green was christened "Julian", the spelling was changed by his French publisher in the 1920s to "Julien".)
The youngest of eight children born to Protestant parents. He had a very puritanical and overprotective upbringing, his mother being extremely sexually repressive (later Green would grow into an anguished and egodystonic homosexual).Green became a Roman Catholic in 1916, two years after his mother's death.The following year, still only 16, he volunteered his services as an ambulanceman in the American Field Service. When his age was discovered his enlistment was annulled. He immediately signed up with an ambulance unit of the American Red Cross, and when that six-month term of service ended in 1918, he enlisted in the French Army, in which he served as a second lieutenant of artillery until 1919. He was educated at the University of Virginia in the United States from 1919-22. His career as one of the major figures of French literature in the 20th century started soon after his return from the United States.
In July 1940, after France's defeat, he went back to America. In 1942, he was mobilized and sent to New York to work at the United States Office of War Information. From there, for almost a year, five times a week, he would address France as part of the radio broadcasts of Voice of America, working inter alia with André Breton and Yul Brynner. Green went back to France right after the end of World War II. Most of his books focused on the ideas of faith and religion as well as hypocrisy.
Several dealt with the southern United States, and he strongly identified with the fate of the Confederacy, characterizing himself throughout his life as a "Sudiste". He inherited this version of patriotism from his mother, who came from a distinguished southern family. Some years before Julien's birth, when Julien's father was offered a choice of posts (with his bank) in either Germany or France, Julien's mother urged the choice of France on the grounds that the French were "also a proud people, recently defeated in war, and we shall understand one another." (The reference was to France's 1871 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War).
In France, both during his life and today, Green's fame rests principally not on his novels, but on his journals, published in ten volumes, and spanning the years 1926-1976. These volumes provide a chronicle of his literary and religious life, and a unique window on the artistic and literary scene in Paris over a span of half a century. Green's style, austere and employing to great effect the passé simple, a literary tense nearly abandoned by many of his French contemporaries, found favor with the Académie française. Green resigned from the Académie shortly before his death, citing his American heritage and loyalties.
While Green wrote primarily in the French language, he also wrote in English. He translated some of his own works from French to English, sometimes with the help of his sister, Anne Green, an author herself. A collection of some of his translations is published in Le langage et son double, with a side-by-side French-English format, facilitating direct comparison. Despite his being bilingual, Green's texts remain largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Thus far three of his books have been turned into films: Léviathan (1962), for which he wrote the screenplay, is the most famous. Adrienne Mesurat (1953), and La Dame de pique (1965) were also adapted to film.
Green adopted gay fiction writer Éric Jourdan as his son. According to Jourdan, Green decided to move to a house belonging to Caterina Sforza in Forlì, Italy, in 1994. However, Green did not move to this house because his health was failing.
Green was the first non-French national to be elected to the Académie française. Fittingly, he succeeded François Mauriac, taking chair number 22 on June 3, 1971. It was commonly believed he had dual citizenship, but in fact, although born in Paris and writing almost exclusively in the French language, he had never become a French citizen. President Georges Pompidou reportedly offered him French citizenship in 1972 but Green declined.
He died in Paris, shortly before his 98th birthday, and was buried in the parish church of Klagenfurt, Austria.
Julien Green, novelist, autobiographer, dramatist, critic, and first non-French national elected to the Académie Française (1971), was greatly attached to his American nationality and to his roots in Georgia. A large section of his writing constitutes a quest for identity by an American living abroad in France.
Early Years
Green was born in Paris of American parents; his mother was from Savannah, Georgia, his father from Virginia. He was baptized Julien Hartridge Green in honor of his maternal grandfather, Georgia congressman Julian Hartridge. His paternal grandfather, Charles Green, from Halesowen, England, attained great wealth in the cotton industry in Savannah, where his magnificent Tudor-style mansion, the Green-Meldrim House, was completed in 1861.
Green's father, Edward, had a bent for speculation that led to financial losses and the acceptance of a post with a cotton agency in Le Havre, France, where he already had business contacts. The family left for Le Havre in 1893 and moved in 1897 to Paris, where their eighth child, Julien, was born on September 6, 1900. Julien's childhood was imbued with his mother's stories of the Civil War (1861-65) and her regret that the South had lost the war. This created in Green a nostalgia for his Georgian roots and a sense of exile, a prominent theme in his novels. His mother died when he was fourteen, and he was converted to Catholicism at sixteen. In 1919 he thought of becoming a Benedictine monk but later abandoned the idea.
University of Virginia, 1919-1922
During World War I, Green enlisted in the American Field Service in 1917 and later transferred to the French Foreign Legion and then to the regular French army. After the war, in 1919, he left for America to enroll at the University of Virginia, where he studied Latin, Greek, English literature, history, German, and elementary Spanish.
This was a significant period in his career. On the level of his quest for identity, he became acquainted with various family relatives in Savannah and elsewhere. On a personal level there was his encounter with a man whom he called Mark. This platonic relationship left Green burdened with his inability to express his love for Mark. Many of Green's characters share this trait. He also discovered his homosexuality, which intensified his inner religious struggle between flesh and spirit, sin and grace. This conflict constitutes the central drama of his main works. Ultimately, Green's homosexuality led him to reject Catholicism, and he did not rejoin the church until 1939.
Green published his first literary work, a short story, "The Apprentice Psychiatrist," in the University of Virginia Magazine in May 1920. In the 1920s he continued to write short stories, some of them set in Savannah. He also wrote an important article on Joyce's Ulysses that was published in the review Philosophies in May 1924. It was around this time that he began the writing of his journal, an activity that was to engage him all his life. The entries written in Virginia contain the embryo of his novels of the 1940s. Green returned to France in 1922, but he visited America again in the 1930s and spent the World War II years (1941-45) there as well.
Green the Novelist
Green's first novel, Mont-Cinère (1926; published in English as Avarice House), occurs in Virginia on the property of Kinloch, owned by one of Green's relatives. Set twenty-three years after the end of the Civil War, the novel focuses on a mother and daughter who live in an atmosphere of tension, resentment, and greed. His novels of the 1930s and 1940s deal with family relationships, violence, the quest for identity, and escape into the fantastic and the world of dreams. The main novels of these years are Epaves (1932; The Strange River), Le visionnaire (1934; The Dreamer), Minuit (1936; Midnight), and Si j'étais vous (1947; If I Were You). Green's interest in eastern mysticism, which developed during the 1930s, is especially evident in such novels of the 1940s as Varouna (1940; Then Shall the Dust Return) and Si j'etais vous, both of which, according to critic John M. Dunaway, concern the migration of souls.
Green's masterpiece is undoubtedly Moïra (1950; published in English under the same title), an autobiographical novel set at the University of Virginia and dominated by the conflict between flesh and spirit, sin and grace. His next novel, Chaque homme dans sa nuit (1960; Each in His Darkness), is partly set in the Wormsloe Historic Site near Savannah and presents a more positive vision of Catholicism.
The culmination of Green's quest for his Georgian roots is his series of novels on the Civil War, "the Dixie trilogy," written in the 1980s and 1990s. Here Green gives full vent to his passion for the South in a vivid and sometimes sentimental evocation of life in Savannah before and during the Civil War.
Other Writings
Green's journal stretches from 1928 to 1996 and deals with a wide variety of topics, including the problems of creative writing, religion, travel, and his conversations with leading twentieth-century French writers. It gives an interesting and moving analysis of his childhood, of his involvement in World War I, and of his study in Virginia. Green also wrote plays, the most important of which, Sud (South; 1953), explores a homosexual drama on the eve of the Civil War. In 1983 he published a biography of St. Francis of Assisi entitled Frère François (God's Fool: The Life and Times of Francis of Assisi).
Julien Green died on August 13, 1998, and is buried in Klagenfurt, Austria, where he frequently spent his holidays.
