The Solitude of Compassion Read Free Page A

naked, so desperate, that it breaks the mold. We are face to face with reality, and it is almost unbearable. The technique, so utterly personal, is one from which every writer can learn. Had he not gone to the asylum, had this been merely his baptismal work, we would have had in Nijinsky a writer equal to the dancer.
    I mention this book because I have scanned it closely. Though it may sound presumptuous to say so, it is a book for writers. I cannot limit Giono in this way, but I must say that he, too, feeds the writer, instructs the writer, inspires the writer. In Blue Boy he gives
us the genesis of a writer, telling it with the consummate art of a practiced writer. One feels that he is a “born writer.” One feels that he might also be a painter, a musician (despite what he says). It is the “Storyteller’s Story,” l’histoire de l’histoire . It peels away the wrappings in which we mummify writers and reveals the embryonic being. It gives us the physiology, the chemistry, the physics, the biology of that curious animal, the writer. It is a textbook dipped in the magic fluid of the medium it expounds. It connects us with the source of all creative activity. It breathes, it palpitates, it renews the blood stream. It is the kind of book which every man who thinks he has at least one story to tell could write but which he never does, alas. It is the story which authors are telling over and over again in myriad disguises. Seldom does it come straight from the delivery room. Usually it is washed and dressed first. Usually it is given a name which is not the true name.
    His sensuousness, the development of which Giono attributes to his father’s delicate nurturing, is without question one of the cardinal features of his art. It invests his characters, his landscapes, his whole narrative. “Let us refine our finger tips, our points of contact with the world…” Giono has done just this. The result is that we detect in his music the use of an instrument which has undergone the same ripening process as the player. In Giono the music and the instrument are one. That is his special gift. If he did not become a musician because, as he says, he thought it more important to be a good listener, he has become a writer who has raised listening to such an art that we follow his melodies as if we had written them ourselves. We no longer know, in reading his books, whether we are listening to Giono or to ourselves. We are not even aware that we are listening. We live through his words and in them, as naturally as if we were respiring at a comfortable altitude or floating on the
bosom of the deep or swooping like a hawk with the down-draught of a canyon. The actions of his narratives are cushioned in this terrestrial effluvium; the machinery never grinds because it is perpetually laved by cosmic lubricants. Giono gives us men, beasts and gods—in their molecular constituency. 4 He has seen no need to descend to the atomic arena. He deals in galaxies and constellations, in troupes, herds, and flocks, in biological plasm as well as primal magma and plasma. The names of his characters, as well as the hills and streams which surround them, have the tang, the aroma, the vigor and the spice of strong herbs. They are autochthonous names, redolent of the Midi. When we pronounce them we revive the memory of other times; unknowingly we inhale a whiff of the African shore. We suspect that Atlantis was not so distant either in time or space.
    It is a little over twenty years now since Giono’s Colline , published in translation as Hill of Destiny , by Brentano’s, New York, made the author known at once throughout the reading world. In his introduction to the American edition, Jacques le Clercq, the translator, explains the purpose of the Prix Brentano , which was first awarded to Jean Giono.
    For the French public, the Prix Brentano owes its importance to various novel features. To begin with, it is