Introduction Writing from New York during World War II, in the foreword to Memories of Happy Days, one of the few books he ever wrote in English, Julian Green paid affectionate tribute to the France that he loved. The first pages of that book were written within days of his arrival in America, shocked and heavy-hearted at the humiliation the French nation was enduring. 'It is impossible that she will disappear', he wrote, 'but if she did, a great many reasons for being attached to this life would disappear with her. She has given us more than we know, she has made this world richer and more beautiful for millions of men and women; if she ever went, we might not cease to live, but we should be poorer and something in us would die.' For Green, then a man of forty years of age, it was the second time that his world had collapsed into the nightmare of war.
As he left the shores of France behind him in 1940, by then a respected and successful novelist, Julian Green's thoughts must surely have returned to that earlier, even bloodier, Great War which he had witnessed directly, and to the sense of desolation he experienced when he had been obliged to leave the land of his birth for the first time. That was in 1919; and Europe, after four years that had irrevocably altered the world in which he had grown up, was at peace at last. He was nineteen and on his way to enrol as a student at the University of Virginia. It was not only the war that was finally over; so too was an adolescence that had been full of more than its normal share of pain, sorrow and drama.
American, but born and brought up in Paris, Julian Green was the youngest in a family of eight children. He was fourteen when he lost his mother. A strikingly beautiful woman, and a devout Protestant who was fiercely proud of her Southern blood (she came from Savannah, Georgia), she and her son's memories of her have been the crucial and abiding influences on Green's life and work. It was shortly after this that Green decided to become a convert to Catholicism, never realizing that his father had secretly taken the same step only months before. The anguish of his mother's death, his subsequent spiritual awakening and his earliest childhood memories are described with unusual frankness in Green's first autobiographical book, Partir avant le Jour (translated as The Green Paradise --- Marion Boyars, 1992).
When he was only sixteen, Green's world was to turn over again. In 1917, encouraged by his patriotic father to 'do something' for the war effort, Julian was sent to the front line as an ambulance driver in the American Field Service. He was posted to the Argonne forest in North-Eastern France where, in the evenings, shortly after his arrival, he heard the low rumble of battle reverberating from the furnace of nearby Verdun. It was here, too, that the horror he felt at the sight of a young dead soldier made him a pacifist for life.
Later, when it was discovered that he was actually too young to be at the war, Green was sent home to Paris; but he soon managed to enlist in the American Red Cross and set off to serve as an ambulance driver once more, this time on the Italian front,, north of Venice. Although no two writers could have less in common, it is strange to reflect that at the same time, not very far away, another young American, who was only one year older than Green and also an ambulance driver --- a man who also came to love France, though for rather different reasons --- Lieutenant Ernest Hemingway, was living through some of the experiences he later put to fictional use in A Farewell to Arms.
In the summer of 1918, Green enroled in the École d'Artillerie at Fontainebleau, and it was as an officer-cadet in the French Army that he saw out the last months of the war. After the Armistice, he accompanied his regiment to the Rhineland on occupation duty and there he remained until he was demobilized in 1919.
It is the last two years of the First World War and its immediate aftermath that form the period covered by The War at Sixteen. We leave him on board ship, missing Paris badly, with the New World beckoning and the New York skyline glimpsed on the horizon. Three years of student life in the South (the subject of his third volume of autobiography, Terre Lointaine) lay ahead of him.
Yet if the devastation that ravaged Europe forms the backdrop to The War at Sixteen, it is not really the subject of the book. War to a spirit such as Green's is terrible and unacceptable, but it is only to be expected as the result of man's folly and lack of faith. As in his marvellous journal (a diary begun in 1926 which has now reached Volume 15 and which must certainly be the longest record of a writer's life and times in modern literature) worldly events are observed and commented upon, but they are of little consequence compared to a man's spiritual, artistic and emotional development.
It was only when he reached the University of Virginia that Green became fully aware of his true sexual nature, yet the war years were also an important period of growing sexual awareness for him, and his brief éducations sentimentales with Lola in Genoa and the 'blond cadet' in Oberlinxweiler are delightfully comic and tender interludes by comparison with the agonies of guilt and spiritual torment--- the 'crucifixion of the flesh' --- that future liaisons were to bring.
Green is equally frank about his religious preoccupations. Well schooled in the Bible by his Episcopalian mother, he seems to have been a Catholic by conviction while remaining a Protestant in his love of literal truth. The fervour induced in him by his Jesuit mentor persuaded him that he was destined for the religious life, and it was only a quirk of fate that prevented him from entering the monastery of Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight to become a Benedictine novice.
'Mes livres sont des livres de prisonnier qui rêve de liberté. . .', he wrote in Journal V, and throughout Green's work we have a certain image of man chained unwillingly to his fleshly desires while simultaneously yearning for liberation. However, we should remember that in these autobiographical books it is an older, wiser Green --- he was sixty-four when he wrote The War at Sixteen --- who is holding a mirror to the boy and young man he had been, and trying to grasp that 'gossamer thread that passes through my life from birth to death, the one that guides, binds, explains'.
Many writers have sought to look back at their past and to recreate and confront their younger selves, but few have ever done so with quite as much openness and with such scrupulous honesty as Julian Green does in these four volumes of autobiography. Perfectionist and lover of truth that he is, Green would accept nothing less; it would be no more than his duty to his maker, to his readers, and to himself.
Euan Cameron
London, June 1993work under copyright
copies may be available at:
