Saint & Satan

THE STAR OF SATAN-Georges Ber-nanos-Macmlllan ($2.50).

Georges Bernanos is a French Catholic Royalist and a writer of furious eloquence. Best known of his novels is The Diary of A Country Priest. Les Grands Cimetieres sous la Lime (A Diary of My Times) was an excoriation of Generalissimo Franco's fascism which has been called "the greatest tract in a hundred years." The Star of Satan, first published in 1926, was awarded the Prix Goncourt. His first novel, it is sometimes spoken of as the fountainhead of the revival of idealism in French literature. In manner as well as in substance it dares extremes of intensity which may be guaranteed to unsettle the digestion of any polite rationalist.

As if to prove to his opponents that he too can be sophisticated, Georges Bernanos opens his novel with a few venomously comic, ugly chapters in which a little 16-year-old wild beast of a girl murders the rural marquis who has seduced her, makes an abject jackass of a hagridden local doctor. That done, Bernanos settles down to his own business.

His business is to show and make credible the violent agonies of an inchoate young peasant priest on the way to sainthood. At their first climax young Father Donnisan contends with Satan face to face and conquers him; at their second, the same night, he meets the young girl, so shatters her that she retreats pell-mell to Satan, cuts her throat. The priest is locked up as a madman. Later he is given an obscure parish.

The closing part of the novel, put together as if from records, deals with his last day alive. An old man, for years unofficially sainted, he is ceaselessly tortured and tempted still. On that day, through the eyes of a child he tries to raise from the dead, Satan stares at him. On the evening of that day a priest, a callow doctor and a distinguished visitor try to find him. The visitor is a dead ringer for the archfoe of all that M. Bernanos holds valuable: Anatole France. By the bloodstains of self-mortification on the priest's bedroom wall, by the silent stone odors of his church, Anatole himself is beguiled to an impotent, sensuous prospect of personal saintliness. It is at that moment that he confronts, to his dismay, the ravaged face of the man who has tried it.

Georges Bernanos is concerned with the least stylish of possible human attributes: holiness. "Compared to it, even the urge of genius is a frivolous game. Lord, every life finely lived bears witness to You. But the witness which is borne by saints must be torn with irons out of their bodies."

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