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WHY bother with Jean Sulivan? Though this French priestnovelist-essayist wrote some thirty books-brought out principally by the distinguished Parisian publisher Gallimardhe died in 1980, and only three have appeared in the U.S.' Even in France, though Gallimard recently published Pages, with brief selections from sixteen of his books, he receives a minimum of critical attention.
The truth is that Sulivan is not a major novelist, never pretended to be a theologian or a philosopher, launched no critical theory, was father of no literary school. After his third novel, The Sea Remains (1964), won the Grand Prix Catholique de Litterature, he disappointed the traditional Catholic public by refusing any official role, and remained outside the competing publicity machines of French intellectual life. What sustained him were the letters of loyal readers who said he had given them the courage to go on in moments of near-despair. They recognized a special quality in his voice-by turns lyrical, ironic, brusque, and impassionedwhich reminded many of Bernanos. Though no one of Sulivan's books is the equal of Diary of a Country Priest, by shedding the latter's nostalgia for an idealized Christendom, he succeeds in communicating a "fugitive joy" to a post-Christian world.
Sulivan is a figure of the transitional generation of the 1960s and 1970s, coming after the great figures of the "renouveau catholique" are retired or dead, when the decline in religious practice was rapidly accelerating. The label of "Catholic writer" was not only no help in sales but largely misleading. Though he grew up on a farm in Brittany where the clergy still dominated village life, and his frame of reference is consistently Christian, his challenge-and invitation to hope-applies as much to agnostics as believers. He rejects the label "Catholic writer" because today the term "reflects a certain kind of society; he is the defender of a special morality, an out-of-date humanism, a mythological faith, the spokesman for a clientele .... A writer has no choice but to break with the order of falsehood" (Plan&e Plus 87).
There is a fundamental paradox in Sulivan's career. Born in 1913, he lost his father in an early battle of World War I, and his peasant childhood was dominated by his close relationship to his mother and to nature itself....