Julien Green

American and French novelist

• Born: September 6, 1900
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: August 13, 1998
• Place of death: Paris, France

Biography

Julien Green was born of American parents in Paris on September 6, 1900. His father was from Virginia, his mother originally from Georgia; at the time his father’s business had taken the family to Paris. Although Julien attended French schools and learned to speak French fluently, he was required at home to learn English thoroughly. His mother, who was an Episcopalian, also held daily Bible readings with her family. Thus Green was early affected by the awe and mystery of religion, as well as by its significance to him. In 1915, after his mother’s death, he converted to Roman Catholicism, only to enter a period of apostasy later on. His journals, however, record with deep feeling and humility the account of his return to faith in 1939.

During World War I, he was at first too young to join the army and served in the American Field Service, in which he saw service at the front in both France and Italy. In 1918, he was able to join the French artillery. After the war, an uncle in the United States persuaded Green to pursue his studies at the University of Virginia. While he was there, the university literary magazine published a short piece of his called “The Apprentice Psychiatrist,” an early work holding promise of his later novels. After three years, however, Green became homesick for France and returned without having completed his course of study.

After a brief period of art studies, Green determined to write for his career. His first novel, Avarice House, was favorably received in France and the United States. The story, which is set in Virginia, concerns a niggardly and cruel mother and her neurotic daughter. His second novel, Adrienne Mesurat, written shortly after, shows more maturity. Here the setting is a French provincial town, and the main character is a persecuted, embittered, and bored young girl who, when her love is rejected, loses her reason. This work was awarded a prize for the best French work suitable for English translation, and the translation, The Closed Garden, was chosen as a selection by one of the national book clubs. His next novel, The Dark Journey, tells the story of a man’s unrequited passion for a rather shabby village girl. This work was the Harper Prize novel for 1929. Perhaps his most bizarre novel is The Dreamer, which concerns a sickly young man who imagines himself inhabiting a chateau peopled with a small group of quite weird inhabitants.

Following his early successes, Green interspersed novel writing with short stories, plays, and books of personal recollections. His Journal, published in fourteen volumes between 1938 and 1990, contain reflections on such subjects as death and God as well as glimpses into his literary friendships with such writers as André Gide and Gertrude Stein. During World War II, after the fall of France, Green resided in the United States, where he lectured at various colleges and wrote one of his few English works, Memories of Happy Days, in which he poignantly described his boyhood life in France. During that war, he also served with the United States Army.

In Moira, he returned to an American setting to present a psychological study of a country boy at an American university in the South during the 1920’s. The setting for one of his later plays, South, takes place shortly before the Civil War. In the novel The Transgressor he presents an intensely psychological theme against a French provincial background.

Critics have commented on Green’s impeccable French style. His backgrounds are usually well conceived, the tone of most of his works is excessively somber, and most of his characters are highly neurotic. These qualities give his novels their distinctive blend of external melodrama and inward psychological intensity. His later work is marked also by a spirit of devout mysticism. In 1966, he received the Prix National des Lettres, and in 1970 the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française. Green died in Paris in 1998 a month before his ninety-eighth birthday.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Mont-Cinère, 1926 (Avarice House, 1927)

Adrienne Mesurat, 1927 (The Closed Garden, 1928)

Léviathan, 1929 (The Dark Journey, 1929)

L’Autre Sommeil, 1931 (The Other Sleep, 2001)

Épaves, 1932 (The Strange River, 1932)

Le Visionnaire, 1934 (The Dreamer, 1934)

Minuit, 1936 (Midnight, 1936)

Varouna, 1940 (Then Shall the Dust Return, 1941)

Si j’étais vous, 1947 (If IWere You, 1949)

Moïra, 1950 (Moira, 1951)

Le Malfaiteur, 1955 (The Transgressor, 1957)

Chaque Homme dans sa nuit, 1960 (Each in His Darkness, 1961)

L’Autre, 1971 (The Other One, 1973)

Le Mauvais Lieu, 1977

Les Pay lointains, 1987 (The Distant Lands, 1990)

Les Étoiles du sud, 1989 (The Stars of the South, 1996)

Dixie, 1995

Short Fiction:

Le Voyageur sur la terre, 1930 (Christine, and Other Stories, 1930)

Drama:

Sud, pr., pb. 1953 (South, 1955)

L’Ennemi, pr., pb. 1954

L’Ombre, pr., pb. 1956

Nonfiction:

Journal, 1938–2001 (17 volumes; partial translations in Personal Record, 1928–1939, 1939 and Diary, 1928–1957, 1964)

Memories of Happy Days, 1942

Partir avant le jour, 1963 (To Leave Before Dawn, 1967; also known as The Green Paradise, 1900–1916)

Mille Chemins ouverts, 1964 (The War at Sixteen, 1916–1919, 1993)

Terre lointaine, 1966 (Love in America, 1919–1922, 1994)

Jeunesse, 1974 (Restless Youth, 1922–1929, 1996)

Memories of Evil Days, 1976

Das la gueule du temps, 1979

Une Grande Amitié: Correspondance 1926–1972, 1980 (with Jacques Maritain; The Story of Two Souls: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green, 1988)

Frère François, 1983 (God’s Fool: The Life and Times of Francis of Assisi, 1985)

Paris, 1983 (English translation, 1991)

The Apprentice Writer, 1993

Jeunesse immortelle, 1998

Bibliography

Burne, Glenn S. Julian Green. New York: Twayne, 1972. Provides a comprehensive overview of the first forty-five years of Green’s career, culminating in his induction into the Académie Française in 1971.

Dunaway, John M. “Julian Green.” In French Novelists, 1930-1960, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman. Vol. 72 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1988. An overview of Green’s career to 1988.

Dunaway, John M. The Metamorphoses of the Self: The Mystic, the Sensualist, and the Artist in the Works of Julien Green. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978. Dunaway’s study traces the sources and evolution of Green’s narrative art, exploring the biographical genesis of his major fiction.

O’Dwyer, Michael. Julien Green: A Critical Study. Portland, Oreg.: Four Courts Press, 1997. O’Dwyer provides a biographical introduction and a critical assessment of Green’s short stories, novels, plays, autobiography, journals, and other miscellaneous writings. Highlights the importance of Green’s American background for a full appreciation of his work. Includes a foreword by Green.

Peyre, Henri. French Novelists of Today. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Provides a good overview of Green’s career, presenting him as standing outside both the French and the American traditions from which his work derives. Includes useful readings of Green’s early and midcareer fiction.

Reck, Rima Drell. Literature and Responsibility: The French Novelist in the Twentieth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Characterizes Green as an iconoclast whose impact on fiction has been limited but important.

Stokes, Samuel. Julian Green and the Thorn of Puritanism. 1955. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. A study of Green’s novels, concentrating on the various intellectual influences that help explain the spiritual background of his work. Discusses Green’s use of fiction to relate the lives of individuals to the society in which they live.