When I began writing The Prophetic Voice: Jean Sulivan’s Ongoing Relevance in France and Ireland, I imagined that potential readers would want to know a few essential things such as: who is this writer and why would he be of interest to people living in contemporary France and Ireland?
Sulivan’s real name was Joseph Lemarchand, a diocesan priest who was born near the town of Montauban-de-Bretagne on the eve of the first World War. The decision to assume this particular nom de plume was inspired by his interest in cinema, particularly Preston Sturges’s Hollywood comedy, Sullivan’s Travels. Sulivan adopted the main character’s name as a pseudonym, but with just one “l”, because the French word aile, pronounced as “l”, means wing and Sulivan did not want to have two of those, like an angel.
I did my PhD on the theme of marginality in Sulivan’s life and work, and have published many articles on him in English, quite a few in this newspaper, and translated his memoir Anticipate Every Goodbye into English.
Speaking at the recent launch of The Prophetic Voice, former president Mary McAleese expressed her regret that she had never heard of Sulivan until she read my book, because he expresses exactly the kind of sentiments that she has come to espouse in recent times, such as a distrust of the Catholic Church’s absolutist authoritarianism and the magisterium’s refusal to share power.
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She also identified with how Sulivan’s mother, like so many Irish mammies, wanted above all else for her firstborn to be a priest and couldn’t understand why, after ordination, he would not say Mass in the local church where she was a loyal attendee – Sulivan could not bear to engage in what he viewed as posturing.
After ordination, Sulivan taught French at the diocesan Lycée Saint-Vincent in Rennes and became very active in cultural activities in the city. In the 1960s, another avenue opened up when the local bishop, the future Cardinal Roques, gave him permission to move to Paris to pursue a literary vocation – he had already published two books under the prestigious Gallimard imprint by the late 1950s and felt that his literary endeavours might constitute a different way of living out what he viewed as his “priesthood of the pen”.
In 1964, his novel The Sea Remains won the Grand Prix Catholique de Littérature. It is somewhat surprising that this book should have won such a prize given that its main character, Cardinal Ramon Rimaz, discovers towards the end of his life that his career in the Catholic Church was a betrayal of his original vocation, which was to serve the poor and the lowly.
In his retirement villa beside the sea, Rimaz decides to take a drastic step: he will switch clothes with a political prisoner in a nearby jail during one of his visits and allow him to escape from custody. Afterwards, the cardinal becomes something of a pariah in the eyes of the establishment, whose favour he had cultivated during a long and illustrious career.
At the awards ceremony, Sulivan felt like a fraud as he was being photographed and feted as the next great “Catholic” writer. His main reason for accepting the prize was to allay the fears of his mother about why his work was never mentioned in the Catholic press. He therefore thanked the person who had made the prize possible, Henri Daniel-Rops of the Académie Française, for the pleasure it would give his mother.
After The Sea Remains (1964), Sulivan made a conscious decision to adopt a less classical style and to give literary expression to a number of marginal figures: priests, prostitutes, down-and-outs, those who could no longer breathe in the straitjacket of comfortable bourgeois life and who sought spiritual enlightenment on the margins of society instead.
Subsequent novels display a strong 1960s feel of revolt and innovation, but they are also strangely relevant for the times we live in today. These books did not build on the success of The Sea Remains in terms of sales, mainly because of the disjointed nature of the prose and the regular interventions by Sulivan in his texts to give his opinion on characters and situations. For example, in Of Love and Death in Mogador (1970), we encounter a questioning of authorial objectivity:
“I like to see the puppets, but also the puppeteer, his hands, the strings that control the puppets, just as I like to contemplate the narrator who leads his characters, identifies with or separates himself from them. And you, the scribe who leads the narrator, who exactly pulls your strings?”
This is typical of how Sulivan liked to shock people out of their preconceived ideas about literature, to encourage them to follow a more authentic path, one that is uncertain and dictated by chance circumstances and encounters. While he wrote from a strongly French tradition and background, Sulivan’s message transcends borders. His relevance for contemporary Ireland is palpable in the following passage from Anticipate Every Goodbye:
“The priests of this time tended to preach about laws and obligations. In this way they had succeeded in transforming Christianity into something approaching a natural religion. In their eyes the rural order in which the Church still played a dominant role was an expression of the divine will.”
If one were asked to hazard a blind guess as to who wrote these lines, one could be forgiven for thinking that it might well have been the late great Irish writer John McGahern, who expressed similar reservations about the authoritarian church that he encountered growing up in Leitrim/Roscommon in the 1930s and 40s. The relevance of Sulivan’s work for Ireland is very obvious, in my view.
The Prophetic Voice opens with an explanation of the genesis of the book, followed by a brief biography of Sulivan’s life, his very close relationship with his mother, his birth to literature, his trip to India to visit the ashram of the Benedictine priest Henri le Saux, who immersed himself to such an extent in Hindu spirituality that he came to be referred to as Swami Abhishiktananda. It then covers his mother’s painful crisis of faith on her deathbed as her son watched on, unable to assist in any way.
The years Sulivan spent in Paris are also described, his close friendship with Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder and editor of Le Monde newspaper (where all Sulivan’s books were favourably reviewed), the meetings he had with a vast array of readers whose life stories he recounted in his novels and prose writing.
Sulivan is then situated in the French literary context, explaining how he deliberately decided not to prolong the tradition of the Catholic novel when the time for such writing had passed, a decision that does not hide the extent to which, perhaps subconsciously, he was influenced by Bernanos and Mauriac.
The book then moves to Ireland in order to draw a correlation between what Sulivan wrote about and the work of a selection of Irish writers. I look at priests who were or are also novelists, such as Canon Sheehan (1853-1913) and William King (b. 1945) – the latter’s The Strangled Impulse (1997) and A Lost Tribe (2017) show an Irish church struggling to find a meaningful purpose in a post-Catholic society.
There is a section on the Redemptorist Tony Flannery, condemned without trial for what are purported to be views not in keeping with the official teaching of the Catholic Church, such as compulsory celibacy, the ordination of women, the treatment of people in second relationships and the general lack of leadership within the hierarchy.
In From the Inside: A Priest’s View of the Catholic Church (1999), Flannery signalled his discontent: “At various times throughout my life in the Church I have known it to be authoritarian, dogmatic, devious, self-serving and even on occasion corrupt.”
Within a few decades, Fr Flannery would be deprived of the right to say Mass in public, or to publish anything without first submitting it for review – needless to say, he ignored that second restriction and published A Question of Conscience (2013), outlining his issues with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over his attempted silencing, and then From the Outside: Rethinking Church Doctrine (2021), in which he shares his thoughts and views on certain aspects of church teaching.
Sulivan was never subjected to stringent censorship such as this, and he went a lot farther when it came to challenging practices he deemed to be at variance with the teachings and example of Christ.
The inclusion of Colum McCann is justified by the wonderful depiction of Fr Corrigan in the award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin, who is compared to Strozzi, a priest who features in Sulivan’s novel Eternity, My Beloved. Both have an unusual ministry, namely looking after a community of prostitutes in Brooklyn and Pigalle respectively.
McGahern was a natural comparator in terms of the writers’ shared view of art as consolation, their raw description of the emotional wrench caused by the death of their mothers and their use of a subtle form of autofiction.
A prophetic voice words things before others even notice them. Sulivan expressed protest from inside the church or, perhaps more accurately, from the margins of that institution. He is someone whose writings still have the ring of authenticity and the fervour of a prophet some 46 years after his premature death in a hit-and-run outside the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in 1980.
My book will hopefully introduce new readers to his ground-breaking work, which I hope will resonate with readers in the same way as it has done with people such as Mary McAleese.
The Prophetic Voice: Jean Sulivan’s Ongoing Relevance in France and Ireland is published by Peter Lang
