Seeking a Good Life through Great Books: "Moon Tiger" and "The Diary of a Country Priest"

Two award winning novels. Two protagonists dying of stomach cancer. Each offers a profound meditation on what is most worth pursuing in life.

Not long ago I read Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987) and Georges Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest (1936) back-to-back. Oddly enough, both novels feature main characters dying of stomach cancer, so it quickly became impossible not to reflect on each character in light of the other. This proved serendipitous as it magnified a question central to both novels—that of what a life well-lived looks like.

Terminal illness aside, you couldn’t find two protagonists more dissimilar than Moon Tiger’s Claudia Hampton, a controversial yet popular historian, and Bernanos’ unnamed priest, unpopular and seemingly unsuccessful in his parochial duties.

The geographic scope of their lives, too, is vastly different. Claudia’s narrative takes us to England, Egypt, and beyond, whereas the majority of the priest’s diary recounts his daily life in his rural parish.

And even their interior lives seem to take place on unrelated planes with Claudia’s mental eye constantly, philosophically roving from the prehistoric to the present day while the priest is weighed down by worries about his personal shortcomings, tedious administrivia, and his spiritually bored parishioners.

Yet a close reading of each narrative reveals a defined worldview and shows how these characters’ understanding of history and man's place in it influences the way they live.

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The Statues of the Memnons, Charles Vacher

“I am…imprisoned by my time”

In Moon Tiger, we find Claudia at the end of a long life lying in a hospital bed and drifting in and out of consciousness. The novel begins with her impressive pronouncement: “I am writing a history of the world.”

A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own. The Life and Times of Claudia H. The bit of the twentieth century to which I’ve been shackled, willy-nilly, like it or not. Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents.¹

This opening passage begins to reveal much of Claudia’s ideas about history—notably, that it is random and indifferent to the fate of humans. We are “shackled, willy-nilly, like it or not” to our particular time in history. For Claudia, man’s life is but a transient blip against the “cosmic chaos”² of history, too often victim to its “disorder” and “death and muddle and waste.”³ The afterlife, she says, is only a matter of surviving “in the heads of others.”⁴

And yet there is a tension in Claudia’s beliefs that is never fully resolved. For all her confidence that man only exists until the impersonal, capricious universe disposes of him, she clearly believes human life is dignified and unique in some way.

She disdains those, such as her respectable mother, who are comfortably sitting history out. She feels compelled to be a “front-liner”⁵ recording the significant events of her time, while also probing the past, an endeavor she says “enlarges” her and “frees [her] from the prison of [her] experience.”⁶

Claudia believes that, unlike animals, humans “act as hinges—fortuitous links”⁷ to each other, and that our lives have a meaningful structure. “Most lives have their core, their kernel, the vital centre,”⁸ she tells us—the core of Claudia’s life being a love affair tragically cut short during her time as a war correspondent.

But why, I want to ask Claudia, does it matter if one sits history out? Why attempt to be free from the prison of one’s experience if all experience ends in oblivion? What is the meaning of an individual person’s life having a “vital centre” if history has none of its own but instead is a “muddle”? Why does it matter that we are connected to one another if the most resounding sound emitting from the depths of history is a “concerted howl of the mass of humanity…who died because they were unfortunate enough to be around at a climactic moment in [it].”⁹

Time’s relentlessness and death’s finality are key themes in Moon Tiger, which takes its title from a type of mosquito repellent that is, itself, an image of the ephemeral. The sole description of the Moon Tiger comes from a night Claudia spends with Tom, the great love of her life, in Egypt:

On the bedside is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that burns slowly all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of green ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.

Tom will die shortly after this scene, and thenceforth, Claudia and he will be “no longer in the same story.”¹⁰ This is the bleakness of Claudia’s vision: that even in moments where we feel wholly content and unified to another, time is “feathering down into the saucer”, and death is around the corner ready to rend us irrevocably apart.

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Still from the 1951 film Diary of a Country Priest by Robert Bresson

“Man would have known he was the son of God”

Moon Tiger juxtaposes image after image of Claudia’s youth, beauty, and intellectual prowess with her decline in old age. While emotional pain has sharply defined her life, Claudia’s final illness, ensconced in palliative care, is free from grim details.

Georges Bernanos’ socially-awkward young priest, on the other hand, is being eaten away by cancer from the start, and the entire novel is shaped by his growing agony. His circumstances might tempt any of us to subscribe to Claudia’s notion of a godless, fatalistic universe, but the priest is convinced of the goodness of a created world—a world animated by “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame.”¹¹

Near the beginning of the novel, his mentor, M. le Curé de Torcy, expounds on man’s pre-Enlightenment understanding of himself:

Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy—we’d never be able to pocket the devil once and for all, you may be sure. But man would have known he was the son of God; and therein lies your miracle. He’d have lived, he’d have died with that idea in his noddle…we’d have made that idea the basis of everything…What we would have got rid of, what we would have torn from the very heart of Adam, is that sense of loneliness…But you couldn’t get away with that kind of thing nowadays. A people without the Church will always be a nation of bastards, foundlings.¹²

You “couldn’t get away with that kind of thing” with Claudia who, at age nine, rejected God as a childish fancy and took up the label of agnosticism. But for all his worldly ineptitude, Bernanos’ young priest does live by this miraculous knowledge that he and everyone he encounters is a child of God.

In the priest’s eyes, we begin life as “a spark, an atom of the glowing dust of divine charity,” and history is the story of man’s ongoing cooperation or rejection of that divine charity.¹³ He, too, believes that the individual life has its “vital centre” but only because history first has its own: that of the life of Christ.¹⁴

The very structure of The Diary of a Country Priest highlights this relationship between man's life and the meaning of history. One’s life only makes sense in light of Christ’s life; it is only ultimately fulfilled in conformity to Christ's life. And the priest's life bears this out taking on the shape of Christ's passion in such poetic details as his diet of “bread soaked in wine” or the slander he endures from his parishioners.¹⁵ As his condition worsens and he becomes more alienated in the village, he comes to this realization: “The truth is that my place for all time has been Mount Olivet.”¹⁶

What saves the narrative from becoming saccharine is the extremity of the priest’s suffering and the realism of his humanity. He is plagued by self-doubt, undergoes bouts of profound spiritual desolation, feels a natural repulsion towards unpleasant people, and is painfully aware of how ridiculous he appears to others.

However, his understanding of an en-graced world loved into being gives him a reserve of inner peace which allows him to hope that his distress “that lays its tortured head at random, will awaken one day on the shoulder of Jesus Christ.”¹⁷

As he is dying in squalid circumstances forgotten by the parishioners he's tirelessly served, he can still say: “I have loved men greatly, and I feel this world of living creatures is so pleasant.”¹⁸

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A drapery study for ‘The Love Potion’, Evelyn de Morgan, 1903

“I am a Myth”

Believing herself to be locked into a world she will only evaporate from eventually, Claudia embraces a self-centered existence.

“Self-centered? Aren’t we all? Why is it a term of accusation? That is what it was when I was a child. I was considered difficult. Impossible, indeed, was the word sometimes used…I always ached—burned—to go higher and faster and further. They admonished; I disobeyed.”¹⁹

Claudia defines herself apart from anyone else, and judges others based on how they reflect her own self back. The person she most admires is her brother, Gordon, whose face “always mirrored, eerily” her own and with whom she had an adolescent, incestuous relationship.²⁰ “Incest,” Claudia says sans shame, “is closely related to narcissism.”²¹

Tom also matches Claudia in physical beauty and intellectual strength and so attracts her attention. However, he begins to draw out a more tender side in her. Claudia, who has “made people angry, restless, jealous, [and] treacherous,” is startled to find she’s capable of making someone happy.²²

Tom dreams up a future for the two of them that challenges Claudia’s self-centeredness and personal ambitions: “‘I want to make provision for the future. I want to lay up riches on earth…green fields and fat cows and oak trees. Oh, and there’s one more thing I want. I want a child.’”²³

Rather than chafing at the confines of time and place, Tom envisions a life rooted in the goodness of their particularity out of which new life can emerge. Binding one’s life with another person’s in such a way requires much sacrifice, but we don’t get to see if Claudia could live by a self-giving paradigm. The death of Tom and their unborn child means the death of that dream.

Ruthlessly cheated by the universe, Claudia feels more bound than ever by her time and place, and her life takes a very different trajectory than how it might have looked with Tom. Her private grief augments her self-centeredness. She feels continually misunderstood by everyone in her life.

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“I was not a good mother, in any conventional sense.”

Several years pass and Claudia is enjoying a successful professional career when she discovers she is pregnant. Because she is adamant that she does not have the “mentality to cope with children,” it’s hard not to read her choice to keep her child as an attempt to fill the loss of Tom and the miscarriage.²⁴

And as she’s always done, Claudia looks in her daughter to find her “own alter ego”.²⁵ But Lisa is “a dull child” who bears no resemblance either in looks or personality to Claudia.²⁶ Lisa, a disappointment and bore to her mother, will forever feel “extinguished by Claudia.”²⁷

Claudia insists that Lisa call her ‘Claudia’ and leaves the care-giving to Lisa’s grandmothers. The only part of motherhood that holds attraction for Claudia is the possibility of forming her daughter in her own image and likeness, so she swoops into Lisa’s life intermittently to “show her how to think and act.”²⁸

Claudia is particularly interested and involved as a mother when Lisa takes a “step towards maturity” in learning to talk.²⁹ Lisa and Claudia’s relationship, however, is stunted in maturation, and becomes shaped over the years by silent omissions and mutual alienation.

Claudia acknowledges that she was also a disappointment to Lisa while loving Lisa in her way. The trouble though, says Claudia, “is that [Lisa] has never been able to realise this.”³⁰ Claudia's judgment on her daughter's lack of understanding calls to mind Shakespeare's King Lear. When Cordelia will not profess the filial love Lear desires—one that is out of proportion and on his own terms—he declares: “Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity, and property of blood, / As a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this forever.” Though Lisa is no Cordelia, she does have a mother who has largely disclaimed maternal care and kept her heart estranged because Lisa would not understand and esteem Claudia on Claudia’s terms.

An inborn impulse towards caring and human interdependence rises and falls within Claudia throughout her life, but it is clear that her worldview, her desire to burn brightly in this passing lifetime, and her emotional calcifications from grief have impeded her ability to inhabit the role of a mother and receive her daughter as she is.

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Village Church and Cemetery, Brittany, Frank Edwin Scott

“Poor as I am, an insignificant little priest…I still knew what fatherhood means”

There’s a character in The Diary of a Country Priest who also eerily mirrors Claudia. Madame la Comtesse is the matriarch of the local aristocratic family, and like Claudia she has a private grief enshrined in her heart which in turn corrodes her relationship with her daughter, Chantal.

Following her son’s death in infancy, Mme la Comtesse entered into permanent mourning and emotionally cut herself off from her husband and daughter. For years afterwards domestic chaos follows. M. le Comte, locked out of his marriage, has affairs with other women. When Chantal finally discovers this about the father she had idolized, she is consumed with a destructive hatred for both of her parents and for her own existence.

The priest fears what lies ahead of Mme la Comtesse if she refuses to leave the hermetically-sealed world she occupies with the memories of her son. He bluntly puts the situation before her: she does not love her daughter, she may drive Chantal to suicide, and her “hard heart may keep [her] from [her son] for all eternity.”³¹

At the beginning of their conversation, Mme la Comtesse, like Claudia, speaks with a tone of rational detachment regarding her daughter. “I don’t reproach my daughter for not understanding me, or my husband either. Some kinds of misunderstanding can never be bridged. One just gets used to them,” she says, as if her grim resignation is magnanimous.³² But the priest cuts through her illusions. “One gets used to not loving,” he tells her.³³ Then he unsparingly paints the reality of what it means to be incapable of love:

Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more! That sounds quite ordinary to you. To a human being still alive, it means to love less or love elsewhere. To understand is still a way of loving. But suppose this faculty which seems so inseparably ours, of our very essence, should disappear!…To stop loving, to stop understanding—and yet to live. The error common to us all is to invest these damned with something still inherently alive, something of our own inherent mobility, whereas in truth time and movement have ceased for them; they are fixed for ever.³⁴

If Mme la Comtesse dies embittered against her family, then in the life to come, the priest warns her, she and the child she lost will “cease to know one another.”³⁵

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“Death is a very narrow difficult passage—certainly not constructed for the proud.”

In the Christian vision, death is a paradoxical birth from this vale of tears into everlasting life (or else as a stillbirth into hell where one is “fixed for ever”). Mme la Comtesse will die from heart failure soon after her confrontation with the priest, and it is fitting that the scene between them possesses many parallels to a birth scene. The priest acts as midwife to Mme la Comtesse’s soul drawing her out of her rationalizing stupor into the blinding apprehension of reality.

Later in the novel, the priest writes in his diary: “I believe that ever since his fall, man's condition is such that neither around him or within him can he perceive anything, except in the form of agony.”³⁶ And it is through the spiritual birth pangs by which she releases her death-grip on grief that Mme la Comtesse is able to see clearly and be free.

Just before her death, Mme la Comtesse writes a letter to the priest and tells him, “I have lived in the most horrible solitude, along with the most desperate memory of a child. And it seems to me that another child has brought me to life.”³⁷ And when he looks upon her lying in her casket, he says, “And poor as I am, an insignificant little priest, looking upon this woman only yesterday so far my superior in age, birth, fortune, intellect, I still knew—yes, knew—what fatherhood means.”³⁸ These two quotes contain much in them that elucidates how the priest's and Claudia's ideas on human maturity and fulfillment differ.

Claudia eschews vulnerability and is willingly untethered from any origins of her existence either in her parents or God. Human value comes of self-actualization, of intellectual development, of commanding language. “I have put my faith in language…I control the world so long as I can name it,”she says.³⁹ It is for this reason that she finds babies “repellent” and for the same reason that when language fails her in old age, she panics.⁴⁰ Her value and sense of self is dwindling.

But for the priest, human life only makes sense in light of its creator—a God who chose to be born into the world as a vulnerable infant and died in every worldly sense a failure. But a God who at the same time is a Father, the begetter and nourisher of human life, who destines mankind to participate in his divine life. Our nameless priest, by all worldly metrics a failure, realizes his vocation most especially in this scene where, as both child and father, he shepherds Mme la Comtesse’s soul into eternity.

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I’ve made it obvious who I think has chosen the better part. Perhaps I have “appallingly misrepresented” Claudia as she suspects of her enemies—though I imagine she could hold her own against me. She's certainly a divisive character among readers. Even Penelope Lively said that while she admired her, she might not like her if she met her in person. However, Moon Tiger is worth reading for its lush writing and the many profound questions it asks.

But of the two, Bernanos’ novel is the one I’ll be rereading till the end of my days. In The Diary of a Country Priest, the protagonist’s mentor, M. le Curé de Torcy, tells him, “Your simplicity is a kind of flame which scorches” other people.⁴¹ The Diary of a Country Priest is a book that changes my life a little more every time I read it. Every time I'm scorched a little more by its flame.

1. Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (New York: Grove Press, 1988) 1.

2. Ibid., 6

3. Ibid., 152

4. Ibid., 125

5. Ibid., 21

6. Ibid., 159

7. Ibid., 181

8. Ibid., 12

9. Ibid., 158

10. Ibid., 206

11. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1965) 139.

12. Ibid., 19

13. Ibid., 106

14. In The Wellspring of Worship Fr. Jean Corbon puts it both beautifully and dramatically: “the event that is the Cross and Resurrection does not pass away…it is the only true event in history. All other events are dead and will always be dead; this alone remains.”

15. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1965) 76

16. Ibid., 203

17. Ibid., 53

18. Ibid., 294

19. Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (New York: Grove Press, 1988) 2.

20. Ibid., 20

21. Ibid., 136

22. Ibid., 120

23. Ibid., 122

24. Ibid., 52

25. Ibid., 52

26. Ibid., 9

27. Ibid., 60

28. Ibid., 51

29. Ibid., 42

30. Ibid., 171

31. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1965) 162.

32. Ibid., 159

33. Ibid., 159

34. Ibid., 164

35. Ibid., 162

36. Ibid., 199

37. Ibid., 175

38. Ibid., 181

39. Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (New York: Grove Press, 1988) 51.

40. Ibid., 42

41. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1965) 187.