Flesh & The Devil

_ THE DESERT OF LOVE (214 pp.)

Francois Mauriac--Pellegrini & Cudahy ($3)

For the novelist of religious mind, sin is a pervasive subject. But Franc,ois Mauriac, a Roman Catholic and one of the most gifted of living French novelists, was pulled up short 23 years ago by the challenge of a friend and fellow Catholic: Was Mauriac's fascination with sin a shade too rapt for piety? Advised Thomist Jacques Maritain: let Mauriac examine his soul to see whether it was pure enough to portray evil "without conniving with it."

Pained, Mauriac wrote an essay in self-defense. "Christianity," he complained, "makes no allowance for the flesh; it abolishes it." The Desert of Love, written in 1925 and one of eight of his novels (total: 15) published in the U.S., reflects the disturbed Mauriac of those days.

Makings of a Saint. The plot is routine --a middle-aged doctor and his young son each fall in love with the same kept woman--but Mauriac fashions a somber and moving story of frustrated love. The father, Dr. Courreges, has had a drab life, and he idealizes Maria Cross, the mistress of a wine merchant, imagines her as wronged by the whole world. Son Raymond does no idealizing; in his grubby way he just wants to go to bed with her.

Father & son both misunderstand Maria. Neither noble nor vicious, she is simply a handsome, rather slothful woman given to daydreaming, a latter-day Emma Bovary without a husband. And Maria misreads the character of father & son. It never enters her head that so dull a man as the doctor could love her in selfless fashion. She thinks that son Raymond may bring her romance and a fresh start--until he attacks her crudely. She tries, vainly, to commit suicide. Years later, by now a hardened rake, Raymond thinks to himself: "Everything serves as fuel for passion: abstinence sharpens it, repletion strengthens it, virtue keeps it awake . . . It is a frantic and a horrible obsession."

Though love has led all three into deserts, all three have their attractiveness. Mauriac lets Dr. Courreges put his strongest case for Maria Cross: "I know that somewhere in her are the makings of a saint."

The Pleasure of Disgust. The Desert of Love was one of the last of Franc,ois Mauriac's "unregenerate" novels. A year after his cry that "Christianity makes no allowance for the flesh," he underwent deep conversion. He approvingly quoted Pascal: "What pleasure is greater than being disgusted with pleasure?"

Mauriac has written seven novels since then. In most of them the characters win their way to painful knowledge of themselves, gain glimmerings of the love of God. In most, Mauriac writes with surgical brilliance. But only one (Vipers' Tangle--TIME, Nov. 3, 1947) rates with the best work of his unregenerate days: Therese (1927) and The Desert of Love.

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