JEAN SULIVAN: INSIGHTS FROM A “MINOR WRITER”

by Joseph Cunneen

First appeared in THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC, Feb 2006, and here with permission from the author

The 25th anniversary of the death of Jean Sulivan is being remembered in France with conferences on his work and republication in paperback of five more of his thirty books, half of them fiction. In contrast, only four of his books have been translated into English; once hailed as the most important French writer of Christian inspiration since Bernanos, he is hardly known in the United States.

Sulivan was born in 1913 as Jean Lamarchand in a small village in Brittany. His father was killed in one of the first battles of WW1; his mother’s remarriage may have saved the family farm, but produced an emotional crisis in the little boy. He grew up close to nature and animals; influenced by his pious mother--who knew the parables and many of the psalms by heart--he entered the seminary as a teenager. Soon in rebellion against its mechanistic psychology, he neverthe-less was ordained in 1938, and became a major figure in Rennes as student chaplain, director of a lecture center and editor of a monthly review. In 1958 he published his first novel, adopting a pseudonym from Preston Sturges’s film, “Sullivan’s Travels,” which he encountered while running a film club.

“I became a writer,” he wrote later, “because I was tired of being a priest,” feeling he was only an administrator, someone set apart sociologically. With the success of his third novel, “The Sea Remains,” which won the Grand Prix Catho-lique de Littérature, he received his freedom in the church from Cardinal Roques of Rennes, who relieved him of all pastoral duties so that he could write full time. He moved to a run-down section of Paris, publishing book after book, but remained a priest, never more so than when getting up at dawn to compose the meditative snapshots of his ‘spiritual itinerary,’ “Morning Light.”

“The Sea Remains” concerns a retired cardinal, Ramon Rimaz, living by the sea in Spain, who comes to realize he has dedicated his talents to the externals of religion. The book is a poetic study of his awakening consciousness; no longer holding the trappings of office, he sheds his decorations, and tells his housekeeper to burn his scrap books. Rimaz finds a new freedom in the absence of power; a chance acquaintance with a boy on the beach leads to an extraordinary act of generosity. It is moving to realize that Cardinal Roques saw that the character was to some extent modelled on himself; after a friendly visit to Sulivan in Paris he wrote that he hoped he would come to as good an end as Rimaz.

Sulivan soon received a major shock with the death of his mother, the central subject of his autobiographical memoir, “Anticipate Every Goodbye.” A remarkable fusion of nostalgia, humor, and tenderness, the book dramatizes the mother’s final agony, refusing the “consolations of religion” her priest-son tries to offer. It was a shattering experience, teaching Sulivan that one must learn “how to surrender an image of God that has become too familiar.”

Sulivan offers no philosophical or theological message. He wrote, he said, “in order to lie a little less,” to breathe, to be free. At the same time he recognized that “the writer is congenitally a liar because he does not put in books what he has succeeded in living but what he has not succeeded in living completely.” An ironist, uncompromising but never bitter, he is a tough critic of the external forms of the church, warning against the recurrent temptation to reduce the Gospel to ideology. Although as a young man he dreamed of literary glory, after gaining recognition with “The Sea Remains,” he avoided the publicity mechanisms that might have made him better known and adopted a less polished, increasingly broken style. Sustained by the letters of those who told him that his work hinted at a joy that preserved them from despair, he began to enjoy referring to himself as “a minor writer.”

Sulivan’s first novel after his mother’s death, was “Eternity My Beloved,” featured in the recent Greenwood Press “Encyclopedia of Catholic Literature,” the only one of his books in print in the US ^[1] It tells the story of Augusto Rossi, a maverick priest-friend whose unoffcial parish was made up of the prostitutes, petty thieves, and conmen of the notorious Pigalle district. Its materials, which could easily have been a pretext for sensationalism and false piety, are treated with sublety and delicacy. The narrator involves the reader in his search to uncover Strozzi’s secret; accustomed to explain motivation in terms of the mechanism of desire, he finds it hard to understand the priest’s virtue. When Pâquerette, a young woman Strozzi meets by chance, suddenly blurts out she is a streetwalker, he registers no shock. They have a drink and go to a movie, where Strozzi rests his arm on her shoulder for a moment: “The first man with whom she had ever walked and talked who did not brush against her and touch her, did not try to deceive her, and did not lecture her--which is really just another way to touch and deceive you and treat you like an object.’ For Sulivan, such non-judgmental openness is understood in terms of the divine self-emptying revealed in the Incarnation.

“Anticipate every goodbye,” the only other book of Sulivan still in print in English², is a memoir that recalls a peasant childhood, close to animals and nature. It was prompted by his mother’s last illness, which brought him back from Paris to stand vigil at a hospital in Rennes. Lyrical, sometimes even humorous, it ends with the agonizing death of his mother, who rejects the “priestly comfort” offered by her son and forces him to search for the God beyond God.

Sulivan’s later fiction echoes his predilection for outsiders and rebels. “Kid Zero” is a story of a young woman close to suicide, who seems to find joy as she reaches a final stage of detachment; in “Gloria” a disillusioned young woman who believes she is no longer a Christian has a sudden vision of God the Father while caring for an elderly bearded alcoholic; and “Fidèle Felix” presents an ex-priest who achieves a kind of peace while caring for a wife who is repeatedly unfaithful. These are parables from everyday life, dealing with characters who are signs of contradiction.

His two last novels are not explicitly religious but have at their center mysterious priest-like figures who offer examples of inner strength and disinter-estedness. The literary editor of “Le Monde,” who called Sulivan “a prophet for our time,” considered “Joie errante” his finest work. Blaise, its narrator, visits New York while recovering from an unhappy love affair. The disjointed narra-tive ccnters on characters he meets in the apartment of Joss, a war veteran and former seminarian, who recalls seeing Cardinal Spellman blessing the troops in Vietnam. Joss leaves Géri, a woman who loves him deeply, to take care of Linda, who is dangerously drug-dependent, because the latter has greater need of him. Blaise and Géri reflect on his example and Blaise finally achieves a kind of liberation.

“Quelque temps dans la vie de Jude et cie” is equally complex, while succeeding brilliantly in communicating the fragmentary quality of life. The novel consists of a series of moments in the lives of temporary squatters in a run-down neighborhood. Only at the end do we learn that Jude, the group’s animating center, is a priest. There is no effort at edification, but “Jude et cie” has some deep insights on community. Sulivan’s bias is revealed in the title: Jude’s group is not a model; their effort to create a life together is inevitably provisional, just for “quelque temps.”

Sulivan’s position is hard to classify because he mocks both reformers and conservatives when they discuss “the crisis in the church.” He refuses to lament the fact that the church is increasingly a minority in western countries because he is convinced that a Christianity without the power to impose its will on society is closer to the model Christ established. An excerpt from his non-fictional “L’exode,” a kind of last testament of Sulivan which was published just after his death, shows the profundity of his spiritual understanding:

About the author

Ordering information