The Solitude of Compassion

by Jean Giono

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  from “The Books in My Life” by Henry Miller

  The Solitude of Compassion

  Prelude to Pan

  Fields

  Ivan Ivanovitch Kossiakoff

  The Hand

  Annette or A Family Affair

  On the Side of the Road

  Jofroi de Maussan

  Philémon

  Joselet

  Sylvie

  Babeau

  The Sheep

  In the Land of the Tree Cutters

  The Great Fence

  The Destruction of Paris

  Magnetism

  Fear of the Land

  Lost Rafts

  Song of the World

  Copyright Page

  from “The Books in My Life” by Henry Miller

  It was in the rue d’Alésia, in one of those humble stationery stores which sell books, that I first came across Jean Giono’s works. It was the daughter of the proprietor—bless her soul!—who literally thrust upon me the book called Que ma joie demeure! (The Joy of Man’s Desiring). In 1939, after making a pilgrimage to Manosque with Giono’s boyhood friend, Henri Fluchère, the latter bought for me Jean le Bleu (Blue Boy), which I read on the boat going to Greece. Both these French editions I lost in my wanderings. On returning to America, however, I soon made the acquaintance of Pascal Covici, one of the editors of the Viking Press, and through him I got acquainted with all that has been translated of Giono—not very much, I sadly confess.

  Between times I have maintained a random correspondence with Giono, who continues to live in the place of his birth, Manosque. How often I have regretted that I did not meet him on the occasion of my visit to his home—he was off then on a walking expedition through the countryside he describes with such deep poetic imagination in his books. But if I never meet him in the flesh I can certainly say that I have met him in the spirit. And so have many others throughout this wide world. Some, I find, know him only through the screen versions of his books—Harvest and The Baker’s Wife. No one ever leaves the theatre, after a performance of these films, with a dry eye. No one ever looks upon a loaf of bread, after seeing Harvest, in quite the same way as he used to; nor, after seeing The Baker’s Wife, does one think of the cuckold with the same raucous levity.

  But these are trifling observations…

  A few moments ago, tenderly flipping the pages of his books, I was saying to myself: “Tenderize your finger tips! Make yourself ready for the great task!”

  For several years now I have been preaching the gospel—of Jean Giono. I do not say that my words have fallen upon deaf ears, I merely complain that my audience has been restricted. I do not doubt that I have made myself a nuisance at the Viking Press in New York, for I keep pestering them intermittently to speed up the translations of Giono’s works. Fortunately I am able to read Giono in his own tongue and, at the risk of sounding immodest, in his own idiom. But, as ever, I continue to think of the countless thousands in England and America who must wait until his books are translated. I feel that I could convert to the ranks of his ever-growing admirers innumerable readers whom his American publishers despair of reaching. I think I could even sway the hearts of those who have never heard of him—in England, Australia, New Zealand and other places where the English language is spoken. But I seem incapable of moving those few pivotal beings who hold, in a manner of speaking, his destiny in their hands. Neither with logic nor passion, neither with statistics nor examples, can I budge the position of editors and publishers in this, my native land. I shall probably succeed in getting Giono translated into Arabic, Turkish and Chinese before I convince his American publishers to go forward with the task they so sincerely began.

  Flipping the pages of The Joy of Man’s Desiring—I was looking for the reference to Orion “looking like Queen Anne’s lace”—I noticed these words of Bobi, the chief figure in the book:I have never been able to show people things. It’s curious. I have always been reproached for it. They say: ‘No one sees what you mean.’

  Nothing could better express the way I feel at times. Hesitatingly I add—Giono, too, must often experience this sense of frustration. Otherwise I am unable to account for the fact that, despite the incontrovertible logic of dollars and cents with which his publishers always silence me, his works have not spread like wildfire on this continent.

  I am never convinced by the sort of logic referred to. I may be silenced, but I am not convinced. On the other hand, I must confess that I do not know the formula for “success,” as publishers use the term. I doubt if they do either. Nor do I think a man like Giono would thank me for making him a commercial success. He would like to be read more, certainly. What author does not? Like every author, he would especially like to be read by those who see what he means.

  Herbert Read paid him a high tribute in a paper written during the War. He referred to him as the “peasant-anarchist.” (I am sure his publishers are not keen to advertise such a label!) I do not think of Giono, myself, either as peasant or anarchist, though I regard neither term as pejorative. (Neither does Herbert Read, to be sure.) If Giono is an anarchist, then so were Emerson and Thoreau. If Giono is a peasant, then so was Tolstoy. But we do not begin to touch the essence of these great figures in regarding them from these aspects, these angles. Giono ennobles the peasant in his narratives; Giono enlarges the concept of anarchism in his philosophic adumbrations. When he touches a man like our own Herman Melville, in the book called Pour Saluer Melville (which the Viking Press refuses to bring our, though it was translated for them), we come very close to the real Giono—and, what is even more important, close to the real Melville. This Giono is a poet. His poetry is of the imagination and reveals itself just as forcibly in his prose. It is through this function that Giono reveals his power to captivate men and women everywhere, regardless of rank, class, status or pursuit. This is the legacy left him by his parents, particularly, I feel, by his father, of whom he has written so tenderly, so movingly, in Blue Boy. In his Corsican blood there is a strain which, like the wines of Greece when added to French vintages, lend body and tang to the Gallic tongue. As for the soil in which he is rooted, and for which his true patriotism never fails to manifest itself, only a wizard, it seems to me, could relate cause to effect. Like our own Faulkner, Giono has created his own private terrestrial domain, a mythical domain far closer to reality than books of history or geography. It is a region over which the stars and planets course with throbbing pulsations. It is a land in which things “happen” to men as aeons ago they happened to the gods. Pan still walks the earth. The soil is saturated with cosmic juices. Events “transpire.” Miracles occur. And never does the author betray the figures, the characters, whom he has conjured out of the womb of his rich imagination. His men and women have their prototypes in the legends of provincial France, in the songs of the troubadors, in the daily doings of humble, unknown peasants, an endless line of them, from Charlemagne’s day to the very present. In Giono’s works we have the sombreness of Hardy’s moors, the eloquence of Lawrence’s flowers and lowly creatures, the enchantment and sorcery of Arthur Machen’s Welsh settings, the freedom and violence of Faulkner’s world, the buffoonery and licence of the medieval mystery plays. And with all this a pagan charm and sensuality which stems from the ancient Greek world.

  If we look back on the ten years preceding the outbreak of the war, the years of steep incline into disaster, then the significant figures in the French scene are not the Gides and the Valérys, or any competitor for the laurels of the Académie, but Giono, the peasant-anarchist, Bernanos, the integral Christian, and Bréton, the super-realist. These are the significant figures, and they are positive figures,
creative because destructive, moral in their revolt against contemporary values. Apparently they are disparate figures, working in different spheres, along different levels of human consciousness; but in the total sphere of that consciousness their orbits meet, and include within their points of contact nothing that is compromising, reactionary or decadent; but contain everything that is positive, revolutionary, and creative of a new and enduring world.1

  Giono’s revolt against contemporary values runs through all his books. In Refusal to Obey, which appeared in translation only in James Cooney’s little magazine, The Phoenix, so far as I know, Giono spoke out manfully against war, against conscription, against bearing arms. Such diatribes do not help to make an author more popular in his native land. When the next war comes such a man is marked: whatever he says or does is reported in the papers, exaggerated, distorted, falsified. The men who have their country’s interest most at heart are the very ones to be vilified, to be called “traitors,” “renegades” or worse. Here is an impassioned utterance made by Giono in Blue Boy. It may throw a little light on the nature of his revolt. It begins:I don’t remember how my friendship for Louis David began. At this moment, as I speak of him, I can no longer recall my pure youth, the enchantment of the magicians and of the days. I am steeped in blood. Beyond this book there is a deep wound from which all men of my age are suffering. This side of the page is soiled with pus and darkness…

  If you (Louis) had only died for honorable things; if you had fought for love or in getting food for your little ones. But, no. First they deceived you and then they killed you in the war.

  What do you want me to do with this France that you have helped, it seems, to preserve, as I too have done? What shall we do with it, we who have lost all our friends? Ah! If it were a question of defending rivers, hills, mountains, skies, winds, rains, I would say, ‘Willingly. That is our job. Let us fight. All our happiness in life is there.’ No, we have defended the sham name of all that. When I see a river, I say ‘river’; when I see a tree, I say ‘tree’; I never say ‘France.’ That does not exist.

  Ah! How willingly would I give away that false name that one single one of those dead, the simplest, the most humble, might live again! Nothing can be put into the scales with the human heart. They are all the time talking about God! It is God who gave the tiny shove with His finger to the pendulum of the clock of blood at the instant the child dropped from its mother’s womb. They are always talking about God, when the only product of His good workmanship, the only thing that is godlike, the life that He alone can create, in spite of all your science of bespectacled idiots, that life you destroy at will in an infamous mortar of slime and spit, with the blessing of all your churches. What logic!

  There is no glory in being French. There is only one glory: in being alive.

  When I read a passage like this I am inclined to make extravagant statements. Somewhere I believe I said that if I had to choose between France and Giono I would choose Giono. I have the same feeling about Whitman. For me Walt Whitman is a hundred, a thousand, times more America than America itself. It was the great Democrat himself who wrote thus about our vaunted democracy:We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen and tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.2

  No, a man like Giono could never be a traitor, not even if he folded his hands and allowed the enemy to overrun his country. In Maurizius Forever, wherein I devoted some pages to his Refusal to Obey, I put it thus, and I repeat it with even greater vehemence: “I say there is something wrong with a society which, because it quarrels with a man’s views, can condemn him as an arch-enemy. Giono is not a traitor. Society is the traitor. Society is a traitor to its fine principles, its empty principles. Society is constantly looking for victims—and finds them among the glorious in spirit.”

  What was it Goethe said to Eckermann? Interesting indeed that the “first European” should have expressed himself thus: “Men will become more clever and more acute; but not better, happier, and stronger in action—or at least only at epochs. I foresee the time when God will break up everything for a renewed creation. I am certain that everything is planned to this end, and that the time and hour in the distant future for occurrence of this renovating epoch are already fixed…”

  The other day someone mentioned in my presence how curious and repetitive was the rôle of the father in authors’ lives. We had been speaking of Joyce, of Utrillo, of Thomas Wolfe, of Lawrence, of Céline, of Van Gogh, of Cendrars, and then of Egyptian myths and of the legends of Crete. We spoke of those who had never found their father, of those who were forever seeking a father. We spoke of Joseph and his brethren, of Jonathan and David, of the magic connected with names such as the Hellespont and Fort Ticonderoga. As they spoke I was frantically searching my memory for instances where the mother played a great rôle. I could think only of two, but they were truly illustrious names—Goethe and da Vinci. Then I began to speak of Blue Boy. I looked for the extraordinary passage, so meaningful to a writer, wherein Giono tells what his father meant to him.

  If I have such love for the memory of my father, it begins, if I can never separate myself from his image, if time cannot cut the thread, it is because in the experience of every single day I realize all that he has done for me. He was the first to recognize my sensuousness. He was the first to see, with his gray eyes, that sensuousness that made me touch a wall and imagine the roughness like porous skin. That sensuousness that prevented me from learning music, putting a higher price on the intoxication of listening than on the joy of being skillful, that sensuousness that made me like a drop of water pierced by the sun, pierced by the shapes and colors in the world, bearing in truth, like a drop of water, the form, the color, the sound, the sensation, physically in my flesh…

  He broke nothing, tore nothing in me, stifled nothing, effaced nothing with his moistened finger. With the prescience of an insect he gave the remedies to the little larva that I was: one day this, the next day that; he weighted me with plants, trees, earth, men, hills, women, grief, goodness, pride, all these as remedies, all these as provision, in prevision of what might be a running sore, but which, thanks to him, became an immense sun within me.

  Towards the close of the book, the father nearing his end, they have a quiet talk under a linden tree. “Where I made a mistake,” says his father, “was when I wanted to be good and helpful. You will make a mistake, like me.”

  Heart-rending words. Too true, too true. I wept when I read this. I weep again in recalling his father’s words. I weep for Giono, for myself, for all who have striven to be “good and helpful.” For those who are still striving, even though they know in their hearts that it is a “mistake.” What we know is nothing compared to what we feel impelled to do out of the goodness of our hearts. Wisdom can never be transmitted from one to another. And in the ultimate do we not abandon wisdom for love?

  There is another passage in which father and son converse with Franchese Odripano. They had been talking about the art of healing.

  ‘When a person has a pure breath,’ my father said, ‘he can put out wounds all about him like so many lamps.’

  But I was not so sure. I said, ‘If you put out all the lamps, Papa, you won’t be able to see any more.’

  At that moment the velvet eyes were still and they were looking beyond my glorious youth.

  That is true,’ he replied, ‘the wounds illumine. That is true. You listen to Odripano a good deal. He has had experience. If he can stay young amongst us it is because he is a poet. Do you know what poetry is? Do you know that what he says is poetry? Do you know that, son? It is essential to realize that. Now listen. I, too, have had my experiences, and I tell you that you must put out the wounds. If, when you get to be a man, you know these two
things, poetry and the science of extinguishing wounds, then you will be a man.’

  I beg the reader’s indulgence for quoting at such length from Giono’s works. If I thought for one moment that most everyone was familiar with Giono’s writings I would indeed be embarrassed to have made these citations. A friend of mine said the other day that practically everyone he had met knew Jean Giono. “You mean his books?” I asked. “At least some of them,” he said. “At any rate, they certainly know what he stands for.” “That’s another story,” I replied. “You’re lucky to move in such circles. I have quite another story to tell about Giono. I doubt sometimes that even his editors have read him. How to read, that’s the question.”

  That evening, glancing through a book by Holbrook Jackson,3 I stumbled on Coleridge’s four classes of readers. Let me cite them:1. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied.

  2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.

  3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.

  4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.

  Most of us belong in the third category, if not also in one of the first two. Rare indeed are the mogul diamonds! And now I wish to make an observation connected with the lending of Giono’s books. The few I possess—among them The Song of the World and Lovers are never Losers, which I see I have not mentioned—have been loaned over and over again to all who expressed a desire to become acquainted with Jean Giono. This means that I have not only handed them to a considerable number of visitors but that I have wrapped and mailed the books to numerous others, to some in foreign lands as well. To no author I have recommended has there been a response such as hailed the reading of Giono. The reactions have been virtually unanimous. “Magnificent! Thank you, thank you!” that is the usual return. Only one person disapproved, said flatly that he could make nothing of Giono, and that was a man dying of cancer. I had lent him The Joy of Man’s Desiring. He was one of those “successful” business men who had achieved everything and found nothing to sustain him. I think we may regard his verdict as exceptional. The others, and they include men and women of all ages, all walks of life, men and women of the most diverse views, the most conflicting aims and tendencies, all proclaimed their love, admiration and gratitude for Jean Giono. They do not represent a “select” audience, they were chosen at random. The one qualification which they had in common was a thirst for good books…