AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LIFE AND WORKS OF JEAN SULIVAN (1913 - 1980).
Eamon Maher

Ten novels of French priest-writer Jean Sulivan (nom de plume of Joseph Lemarchand) reached publication; four have made it into English translation; one was awarded the Grand Prix catholique de litterature - but they have received little critical attention. (Lycee teacher, newspaper editor, contributor to Le Monde and La Croix, essayist, short-story writer, Sulivan also successfully ran a cineclub and cultural centre).

His memoir, Anticipate Every Goodbye, centres on traumatic events in the life of his mother: (1) His father is killed at war while he is a toddler, and, in order to preserve their Breton farm, his mother has to marry again; the boy is shocked at the time. (2) Her eventual death severs a mother-son companionship that had become very close later in life when the second family had dispersed. (3) Her death was preceded by her own crisis of faith - when the young priest found himself unable to help. So this autobiography - and several subsequent major works - feature individuals broken and wounded by life.

Sulivan is firm in his resolution not to be seduced by success in the world of literary fashion - nor to complacently consolidate his readership by sparing them ever more radical explorations of the human mystery. An early novel, The Sea Remains, can be seen as a cautionary tale : A Spanish Cardinal comes to the end of his life, and wonders whether his whole ecclesiastical career has been nothing more than acting a part.

Eternity My Beloved renders the predicament of a priest confronted by opposition to his work with the prostitutes of Pigalle. Wounded individuals like Father Strozzi (based on a real-life figure) are the kind of Christian witnesses who move Sulivan : “All human life is snatched from them, tossed into the unknown, the solitude grafted into their hearts is so profound that their only hope is flight or an immense love”. He wants the writing (like the Gospel parables) to push the reader towards new levels of spiritual awareness : “The type of readers I want are those who say : ‘This book, this page, changed my life’”.

In this work, the author no longer trusts to the action of plot and unfolding of character - but steps out from the wings, intervening in his own voice to facilitate the interaction between the reader and the novel's protagonists. By the time his second-last novel, Wandering Joy, appears, he has pared things down to anecdotes, or juxtaposed snapshots, of what the characters teach one another by their actions. And the language, under the strain put upon it, has fragmented into something like “stream of consciousness”.

Joss, hero of Wandering Joy, opts out of a serious relationship with Geri - in favour of Linda, a nymphomaniac drug addict. She was wounded, wandering in a spiritual desert - so (says Joss) “No one but I could help her to live and to die. To unconditionally assist a single human being to live - it sometimes seems to me that this is sufficient to justify an existence”. Meanwhile, Joss's message for Geri would seem to be something like : “You and I have to die to our love, if you are to resurrect the resources for happiness that lie hidden in you”...There are no longer any absolutes, no clear distinctions between good and evil, sin and grace. Each person has to make his way through a labyrinth that is full of darkness and uncertainty. When he emerges from this maze, he discovers that he must start his search all over again because when we stop searching, when we become immobile, there is no longer any authentic spiritual life.

Eamon Maher lectures in Humanities at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Dublin.