Volume 38, Number 20 · December 5, 1991
Sex and the Devil
By John Weightman
South: A Play
by Julian Green
Marion Boyars, $14.95 (paper)
The Distant Lands
by Julian Green, translated by Barbara Beaumont
Marion Boyars, 902 pp., $24.95
Paris
by Julian Green, translated by J. A. Underwood
Marion Boyars (bilingual edition), 160 pp., $21.95
Adrienne Mesurat
by Julian Green, translated by Henry Longan Stuart, revised by Marilyn Gaddis Rose
Holmes and Meier, 256 pp., $25.95
Julian, or Julien, Green, an American born and brought up in Paris, is one of the most unusual figures in contemporary French literature. He is probably—after the eighteenth-century philosophe Fontenelle, who lived to be a hundred—the longest surviving French-language author known to history. He was ninety-one on the sixth of September; he made his mark in 1926 with his first novel, Mont-Cinère, and he is still writing. Indeed, he is probably the most prolific French author of the century, since he has produced not only novels, plays, polemical writings, critical essays, and biographies, but also, in addition to a lengthy autobiography, many volumes of an ongoing diary, the published part of which is apparently only a fragment of the full text, much of which is being held in reserve during his life-time. And, more significantly, he is at once Catholic and homosexual; his Catholicism is fervent, and his homosexuality has been open since the early 1950s.
Review, 4471 words
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