God's Frenchman: Recent Autobiographies from France

Extract

Apud barbaros. With this acid phrase Julien Green began his diary when a student at an American university some forty years ago. Feeling himself to be an embittered exile from Europe, a cultured man among philistines, his alienation was completed by the onset of sexual torments which, in a world of evasive hints and implications, gradually led him to realize he was much more radically different from his society than he had suspected. He was a homosexual. Riding on a country buggy to one of the splendid Southern homes owned by members of the American branch of his family, he turned towards the young driver and found his heart gripped as if in a vice: ‘Why do we suffer so when we look upon a human face? We can look and look, suffer and suffer more, but there is in that suffering a cruel happiness which ravages the heart. I did not know what to think, I almost wanted to die. No doubt that will seem exaggerated, but you must have gone through what I went through to understand what I mean.’ The ‘jeunesse merveilleuse’ of the American South of those days captivated him, and inevitably made him think of the Greek statuary the college authorities had disturbingly and unwittingly placed at frequent intervals along the corridors. All the more aware of this misery and unhappiness because he was, as his sister stormily told him, in a society where you had to do as everyone else did, he could not resist the revelation of himself that came through Greek poetry and Virgil.