Lon Bloy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Lon Bloy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lon Bloy (July 11, 1846 November 3, 1917), was a French novelist, essayist, pamphleteer and poet.

Contents
1 Biography 2 Influence 3 Works 3.1 Novels 3.2 Essays 3.3 Short stories 3.4 Diaries 3.5 Quotation 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Lon Bloy, 1887

Biography
Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Prigueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau, pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier.[1] After an agnostic and unhappy youth[2] in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching,[1] his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d'Aurevilly, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion. Bloy's works reflect a deepening devotion to the Catholic Church and most generally a tremendous craving for the Absolute. His devotion to religion resulted in a complete dependence on charity; he acquired his nickname ("the ungrateful beggar") as a result of the many letters requesting financial aid from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all the while carrying on with his literary work, in which his eight-volume Diary takes an important place. Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault, and the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Roman Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper; and his first novel, Le Dsespr, a fierce attack on rationalism and those

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he believed to be in league with it, made him fall out with the literary community of his time and even many of his old friends. Soon, Bloy could count such prestigious authors as Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, Alphonse Daudet, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget and Anatole France as his enemies. In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died in Bourg-la-Reine.

Influence
Bloy is quoted in the epigraph at the beginning of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, and in the essay "The Mirror of Enigmas", by the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who acknowledged his debt to him by naming him in the Foreword to his short story collection "Artifices" as one of seven authors who were in "the heterogeneous list of the writers I am continually re-reading". In his novel The Harp and the Shadow, Alejo Carpentier excoriates Bloy as a raving, Columbus-defending lunatic during Vatican deliberations over the explorer's canonization. Bloy is also quoted at the beginning of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and there are several quotations from his Letters to my Fiance in Charles Williams's anthology The New Christian Year.[3] Le Dsespr was republished in 2005 by Editions Underbahn with a preface by Maurice G. Dantec.

Works
His works include :

Novels
Le Dsespr (1887) ("Despairing") La Femme pauvre (1897) ("The woman who was poor")

Essays
Propos d'un entrepreneur de dmolitions (1884) ("The Munition Merchant's Plan") Le Salut par les Juifs (1892) ("Salvation through the Jews") Je m'accuse (1900) ("I accuse myself") Exgse des lieux communs (19021912) ("Exegesis of the Commonplaces") Belluaires et porchers (1905) ("Gladiators and swineherds") Celle qui pleure (1908) ("The crying one") Le Sang du Pauvre (1909) ("Blood of the Poor") L'Ame de Napolon (1912) ("Napoleon's Soul") Jeanne d'Arc et l'Allemagne (1915) ("Joan of Arc and Germany")

Short stories
Sueur de sang (1893) ("Sweating blood") Histoires dsobligeantes (1894) ("Disagreeable tales")
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Diaries
Le Mendiant ingrat (1898) ("The Ungrateful Beggar") Mon Journal (1904) ("My diary") Quatre ans de captivit Cochons-sur-Marne (1905) ("Four years of captivity in Cochonssur-Marne") L'Invendable (1909) ("The Unsaleable") Le Vieux de la montagne (1911) ("The Old Man from the Mountain") Le Plerin de l'Absolu (1914) ("The Pilgrim of the Absolute") Au seuil de l'Apocalypse (1916) ("On the Threshold of the Apocalypse") La Porte des humbles (posth., 1920) ("The Door of the Lowly") A useful study in English is Lon Bloy by Rayner Heppenstall (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1953).

Quotation
"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it." (Auden & Kronenberger, 1966)

See also
Our Lady of La Salette

References
1. ^ a b Gilbert Alter-Gilbert. "Lon Bloy: Pilgrim of the Absolute" (http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2008/12/leon-bloy-pilgrim-of-absolute-by.html) , December 9, 2008. 2. ^ F. J. Sheed. Sidelights on the Catholic Revival, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940, p. 181. 3. ^ Quotations from Lon Bloy in "Charles Williams: The New Christian Year" (http://tomwills.typepad.com/thenewchristianyear/lon_bloy/)

Auden, W.H.; Kronenberger, Louis (1966), The Viking Book of Aphorisms, New York: Viking Press.

External links
Works by Lon Bloy (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Lon_Bloy) at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Lon Bloy (http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n50-9572) in libraries (WorldCat catalog) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lon_Bloy&oldid=529073814" Categories: 1846 births 1917 deaths Converts to Roman Catholicism from atheism or agnosticism French diarists

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Lon Bloy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Bloy

French essayists French novelists French poets French Roman Catholics Our Lady of La Salette People from Prigueux Roman Catholic writers

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