Les Enfants humiliés

“In 1939 Bernanos wrote Les Enfants humiliés. It is a diary, and it is not a diary. It is the war seen from Brazil, France seen from the forest, God seen from childhood. In writing it, Bernanos loses his command of his craft, forgets his trade, and lets slip from his hands a patched-together book, burning with fever. He does not watch himself write. He is like an apple tree in the garden […]. One may find an apple tree in blossom beautiful, and one may pass the same judgment on Bernanos’s book. But one must understand that beauty is not the tree’s concern, nor the writer’s. It is only a consequence, a very secondary one, of the answer they have found to the question posed by pain, in a fit of fever. In 1939, the Bernanos apple tree bears sour, green apples. Partly out of love, partly out of anger — though perhaps at bottom these are the same thing — he brings back the child he once was, the little boy with thin legs and round eyes.” (Christian Bobin, La Bartavelle, no. 1, December 1994).

A fine copy.
Rare on deluxe paper.