A pair of reading lists had me carrying two seemingly unrelated books around this time last year: for my book club, Dracula by Bram Stoker, and for a graduate course on the art of the novel, The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos. What a strange pair to have occupying my mind and heart for those weeks; they resemble The Odd Couple of novels.
On closer examination, I was surprised to find more in common in these works than you might think. They were published in neighboring countries within forty years of each other, and so respond to a similar period in European history. Though one takes place in the city, the other in the country, both are given in epistolary formats: Stoker’s, a compilation of diary entries, telegrams, newspaper articles, and such, created and collected by what becomes a band of vampire hunters; Bernanos’, the diary of one priest, who is perpetually unsure of himself and his ministry.
Any good novel operates on multiple levels, yet this mode of storytelling specially engages the reader, inviting him to make connections and read between the lines in a manner other than a linear third-person account would. This authorial choice can be read as a response to the times. To a contemporary mind—at the times of publication, but even more so today—startling happenings and supernatural realities cannot be communicated matter-of-factly if they are meant to be believed. Things that feel too far away or too unreal must be taken in sideways, as it were. Certain things need to be approached in a roundabout way.
The Count
The earlier of the two, Dracula was published in London in May 1897. The author, Bram Stoker, was an Irishman and a Protestant. His wife had an interest in Catholicism and converted to the faith in 1904, twenty-six years into their marriage.
Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, editor of the Ignatius Press edition of the book, writes in her introduction that Stoker’s unusual openness to Catholicism results in
not merely a lurid book about bloodsuckers but rather a profound novel that ruminates (albeit indirectly and in the most scattered and inconsistent manner) upon the sacramentally infused reality of a world in which the blood of Christ has been shed for the salvation of sinners. Even more particularly, it is a conflicted Catholic novel that is possible only in a post-Enlightenment, protestantized, and increasingly secularized nineteenth-century British world.
As for those inconsistencies, they are not reserved for misunderstandings about Catholicism. For all Stoker’s research, Nicholson’s footnotes remark such corrections as “There is no known source for or evidence to support this claim for parrot invincibility,” and later, “This assertion [about hypnosis] is quite thorough nonsense.”
The world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him.
Stoker’s novel would have benefitted from a more rigorous copyeditor, but even these errors have not kept it from being read and variously adapted in the century-plus since its publication. Its staying power can be attributed to its elements of mystery, romance, and adventure; it is not an exaggeration to say that for the majority of the novel, the stakes (pardon the pun) are a matter of life and death. Ultimately, these all contribute to the greater driving force in the novel—namely, the willingness to face evil head on.
Early in the novel, an older man named Mr. Swales befriends the two leading females, Lucy and Mina, at the English port where Count Dracula’s ship will land. Swales serves as a prophet of sorts, commenting to Mina that,
life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on. But I’m content, for it’s comin’ to me, my deary, and comin’ quick. It may be comin’ while we be look’ and wonderin’. May be it’s in that wind out over the sea that’s bringin’ with it loss and wreck, and sore distress, and sad hearts.
So much of the novel is the fight for what happens after death, to rescue those threatened with the possibility of being “Un-Dead” and so unable to spend eternity resting in peace. Swales’ commentary, then, is not to be construed as pessimistic or defeatist. Rather, it’s a signal to the characters, as to the reader, to pay attention to what really matters, to what is beyond the question of who marries whom or which house they buy.
Among the aforementioned band of vampire hunters is the Dutch Abraham Van Helsing, an extremely well-educated man with a string of degrees, who is the first to understand what is happening in London. If anyone is poised to discount superstitions, it’s Van Helsing. And yet it is he who suggests that superstitions and traditions hold a kernel of truth that ought not to be ignored.
When another of the band, Dr. John Seward, hesitates to put together what is happening to everyone’s beloved Lucy, Van Helsing encourages him to be open to the seemingly impossible:
You are a clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? . . . Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain it all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet the old, which pretend to be young.
To deny the evil in their midst, Van Helsing knows, is to give it power. He does not discourage the gathering of evidence or logical contemplation. In fact, as the group formulates its plan to defeat Count Dracula once and for all, Van Helsing spends hours upon hours studying the ordered manuscript that Mina has put together. (Mina, who fights valiantly against Dracula’s power within her own being, is described as “one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its lights can be here on earth.”)
The battle is fought—and won—on both physical and spiritual grounds.
The crew must rely on more than what they can see and hear: They must rely on each other; they must rely on God. Though only Van Helsing is Catholic, the others come to see and respect the power of the Rosary, the crucifix, and the Eucharist. (Stoker clearly appreciated the power of the consecrated host, even when he didn’t quite understand acceptable use.) The battle is fought—and won—on both physical and spiritual grounds.
“Thus we are ministers of God’s own wish,” Van Helsing proclaims in a kind of pep talk,
that the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him. He have allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more. Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise; and like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause.
(Spoiler: They don’t fall, but the count sure does.)
The Curé
This sense of suffering for the good of the community is at the heart of The Diary of a Country Priest, published in France as Journal d’un curé de campagne in 1936. The novel appeared in an English translation in London the following year.
Author Rémy Rougeau writes in his introduction to the novel that Bernanos’ writing is as “strong and unsentimental” as it is because Bernanos “did not shy away from a Christian vision of the world.” Bernanos took the author to be a kind of priest, and the act of writing to be a spiritual adventure, and necessarily a martyrdom. Rougeau properly cites “Bernanos’ two biggest preoccupations as a writer” to be “satanic evil, on the one hand, and grace on the other.” In The Diary of a Country Priest, as elsewhere in his writing,
grace is not simply a furtive reaction to evil, as if salvation for Bernanos were a kind of war between two equal powers. Grace is omnipotent. What happens is within the mysterious plan of God, and the subtext of the novel is about a steady rise to holiness.
Indeed, the unnamed narrator endures a “steady physical decline and suffering . . . in proportion to his spiritual growth, until on his deathbed he is able to say with conviction that ‘grace is everywhere.’”
The curé is largely misunderstood in life—by himself as well as by those around him. He begins his diary with the hope that it
might help me to concentrate my thoughts, which will go wandering on the few occasions when I have some chance to think a little. I had thought it might become a kind of communion between God and myself, an extension of prayer, a way of easing the difficulties of verbal expression which always seems insurmountable to me, due no doubt to twinges of pain in my inside. Instead I have been made to realize what a huge inordinate part of my life is taken up with the hundred and one little daily worries I used to think I had shaken off for good.
His parishioners do not respond favorably to his efforts to get to know them. They speak ill of him and make assumptions. When his encounter with Madame la Comtesse—who lost a son, whose husband is cheating on her, and whose relationship with her daughter is nearly ruined—leads to her conversion, he is the only one who knows of her happy death. In fact, the revelation she experiences is so powerful, so overwhelming that she dies the next day. To those on the outside, her death seems tragic; only the curé can see that she has confronted her burden and found peace.
As the curé strives for communion with God, he struggles to find communion with his fellow man. He sees that “in our part of the world, distress is not shared, each creature is alone in his distress; it belongs only to him, like his face and his hands.” Still, he senses that suffering has the potential to come to something beyond this world: “And yet I feel that such distress, distress that has forgotten even its name, that has ceased to reason or to hope, that lays its tortured head at random, will awaken one day on the shoulder of Jesus Christ.”
He sometimes thinks of Satan as understanding the mind of God “the wrong way round; thus unknowingly struggling against the current of life, instead of swimming with it; wearing himself out in absurd terrifying attempts to reconstruct in the opposite direction, the whole work of the Creator.” This is precisely what the majority of his parish is doing, and why they suffer from the “cancerous growth” of boredom, as the curé says all other parishes do as well. When his pain turns out to be stomach cancer (which will eventually take his life), the reader recognizes the connection between this tumor and his bearing their pain, even though the curé cannot see it for himself.
What happens is within the mysterious plan of God, and the subtext of the novel is about a steady rise to holiness.
The curé remains focused on his parish until a persistent message from an old friend calls him out of his territory. Unwittingly, the curé becomes something of a missionary, and so embodies the charism of Bernanos’ beloved St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
People increasingly unburden themselves to the curé. His surrender and growth in sanctity means that they experience something pure in him, something Christlike. And indeed, like Christ, the curé dies in a foreign city, among strangers, having followed a path no one else thought was the plan. It is in being drawn into the unknown that he finds the communion he yearned for all his life. The reversal is reminiscent of that of Madame la Comtesse, though it strikes the reader even more deeply.
Near the end of his life, the curé writes, “For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me”—yet another turn from his concern about “little daily worries” early on. In his last entry, the curé concludes, “How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity—as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.”
He receives absolution from his old friend and dies in peace, rosary in hand.
The Count and the Curé Walk into a Bar
The comparison between these two novels could read like a bad joke: A band of turn-of-the-century vampire hunters and a post-World War II priest walk into a bar. But if that were the case, the ensuing conversation has the potential to reach to unanticipated depths on the nature of evil, the power of grace, and our obligations in the time and place in which we find ourselves.
There might be a language barrier between these characters, but the heart of their stories beat together: There is evil in this world and there is good, and good wins the victory every time. When we suffer for the good of others, we honor Christ, who first loved us.
To paraphrase the book of Esther, perhaps these characters were made for such times as these. The same could be said of those of us who read them.