Vipers' Tangle
By François Mauriac

312 Pages • $12.95

INTRODUCTION
by Robert Coles

Vipers' Tangle
By François Mauriac

[Open a pdf version]

In 1964, several hundred American college students, along with some of their teachers (graduate students and even a handful of tenured professors), assembled in Mississippi for a summer of political activity. The intention was to work at “voter registration”—a term that meant more than enabling individuals to fill out forms. It was, at a deeper level, an all-out effort to take on the bastion of segregation, beginning with the polite but firm request that thousands of Americans be allowed to cast ballots along with their fellow citizens.

At that time, African Americans were not allowed to vote in the Magnolia state and elsewhere across the South. Now relatively privileged white youths were intent on changing that legal, social, and racial state of affairs, and in so doing, alter significantly a nation’s politics. During that summer, the students read books they had brought with them, mostly social-science texts that tried to tell it like it then was throughout Dixie. The books were handed along from person to person, and later there were discussions—questions, answers, surmises, and refutations.

One afternoon as we all sat sweating and considering the world we’d come to witness (and very much wished to change), we made mention of the psychological and sociological analyses we’d been finding in the books we’d been attending, contemplating hard and long together. Our line of inquiry, of shared reflection, was abruptly stopped in its tracks by words I’ve never forgotten, spoken by a college student who had been majoring in French literature and hoped to do a thesis on a French novelist then very much alive (indeed, twelve years earlier, in 1952, he’d won the Nobel Prize). “I wish we would read Vipers’ Tangle,” he urged. He then gave a spirited presentation of what François Mauriac had offered in that novel published in 1932—“a tough dissection of privilege and power, of ambition and greed and hypocrisy,” our student-become-teacher declared. We all sat there enthralled, a bit taken aback—indeed, even today, more than forty years later, when I hear that moment, courtesy of my tape recorder, I feel roused to thought.

A novel’s relentless evocation of a distant nation’s bourgeoisie became a challenge to us, a summons to look carefully at what and who we were and why we were there. (We who had so much going for ourselves, even as we worried so earnestly about the disenfranchised around us and, not to mention, the working-class white folks in Mississippi, who in substantial number were not loath to point out our relative privilege and, too, the smug sense of exemplary virtue we were in danger of demonstrating. I remember one man in particular who said, “You folks come down here pointing fingers at us—I only hope when you get back, you’ll take a good, close look around and see what you’ve got going for yourself and what’s no good for others. See who has to work like hell and pick up the tab for you people, through their sweat, just like you keep saying our colored people here do for us.”)

Soon thereafter, a few of us began reading Vipers’ Tangle and, with each page, realizing some of the social and economic truths that Mississippian, for his own reasons, had been pressing upon us. One student, upon finishing the novel, mentioned Sinclair Lewis, his insistent, sometimes scorching examination of our Main Streets and Babbitts. Still, Mauriac, we all agreed, could be more affecting (and disturbing) because he was not interested in brisk satire; rather, he let his novel explore a character’s vigorously pursued and often lonely life. In fact, before the story of Vipers’ Tangle begins, the author asks his reader to “feel pity and be moved by his [the character’s] predicament”—no doubt a warning of sorts: the idea being that doubt and considerate exploration can prompt kindness, in contrast with the jabs here, the shaking of the head there, that full-fledged satire offers.

To be sure, Louis—sixty-eight years old, sick and dying, writing of his life, calling forth its ups and downs—is not without scorn for others, even for the Catholic Church, for his wife of forty years, and for the family to which she belonged. The point of the novel is to look at the way an individual’s will interacts with chance and circumstance. What have been the consequences of his choices? What kind of life has resulted? What has been missed?

This man who has withheld so much from his family now speaks and speaks, in the form of a bitter letter to his wife, of the greed and self-importance of others, through which is revealed his own sin, his own yearning for money and power and the privileges and perquisites that a rise in class can bring. Yes, the more this dying man renders the “unreflecting egoism,” to use George Eliot’s words, in others, the nearer we get (with no authorial shove or exploratory asides) to the story’s narrator, no mean self-critic, even as he levels away at the pretenses and hypocrisy of those he, nevertheless, aimed so long and hard to join through the binding bonds of family life.

We learn of that life, the conceits and deceits of the French middle to upper bourgeoisie, its landed-gentry version, near Bordeaux, where Mauriac was born in 1885. We learn, alas, of the costs exacted by a developed, ever-present, and ready canni­ness. So it happens with our friends, our family members, who become objects of avarice, of calculation, of use and abuse, of yearning for that ultimate secular sanction, the dough that comes from an inheritance—which is the book’s big ­subject: who will get what, and when, from this dying man who is frank to tell us of his wrongdoing of mind and heart, and yes, soul. “I could touch my guilt,” he confides, and then this confessional self-arraignment: “It was not only that my heart had become a nest of vipers, that it had been filled with hatred for my children, with a lust for vengeance and a grasping love of money. What was worse than that was that I had refused to look beyond the tangle of vile snakes. I had treasured their knotted hideousness as though it had been the central reality of my being—as though the beating of the life blood in my veins had been the pulse of all those swarming reptiles.”

Lest we dwell only on our aging character’s self-incrimination, we are reminded in no uncertain terms that he had busily pursued a given world—it can be said that his creator, François Mauriac, intends for us to take that world’s moral pulse through his character’s remarks: “Once, in the dark hours, in a moment of self-deprecation, I had compared my heart to a knot of vipers. How wrong I had been! The knot of vipers was outside myself.”

Here is a novelist who knows his Bible well; who wrote in 1936, four years after Vipers’ Tangle was published, Vie de Jésus; who gives us St. Teresa of Ávila as his companion psychologist before his own words begin; who wrote at length about Pascal, whose 277th Pensée declares that “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” and who followed in the 278th Pensée with “it is the heart which experiences God, not reason.” Even as Pascal turned to St. Augustine, his confessional mode of searching for spiritual truth, so does Mauriac in Vipers’ Tangle connect us to the unembarrassed craving of those two spiritual predecessors—who dared wish that through their own psychological twists and turns there would somehow come the spiritual peace it is our human destiny to keep trying to find for ourselves, but which happens only by God’s grace.

This moment of grace is veiled and never directly described by Mauriac. But we can see how the space has been opened in Louis’s heart: through confrontation with death, in a meeting with a son who seems to embody the worst of his own character, perhaps even through the sacrifices of his little daughter who, years before, as she lay struck by typhoid fever, managed to murmur her wish to die “for Papa.”

Mauriac’s brilliant exploration of Louis’s soul might discourage us with its vivid portrait of the destructive obsessions that can blind us to love and waste so much of the precious time we have on earth. As we read Vipers’ Tangle, it is impossible to avoid looking in the mirror, perhaps in regret. However, the power of the novel lies in the moments that we, like Louis, can put the mirror down and open ourselves to the hope and grace always at hand and in the realization that it is never too late for redemption.

A man about to die finds life, responding at last to that which has urged him on, haunted him, eluded him, and finally, come to him as a great presence, holding him, a self-described “monster,” in its everlasting arms. A dying man who has been like a Notre Dame gargoyle, surveying the city below, now finds the way to come to life by opening himself to the Unseeable and immersing himself, as God did through Jesus, in the pain and joy of his fellow human beings. All that the word viper suggests—to be shrewd, devious, sneaky, deceptive, tricky, a double dealer—now comes to a kind of naught through the workings of redemptive confession: a heart seized by a knot of vipers is now free, free at last, so that the one in whom it beat all those long years can reach out heartfully toward his fellow human beings, as he himself has been embraced.

Robert Coles is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. His books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Children of Crisis series as well as The Spiritual Life of Children and The Call of Stories.

Back to the top