Queer Places:
4 Rue Ruhmkorff, 75017 Paris, France
92 Rue Raynouard, 75016 Paris, France
93 Rue de Passy, 75016 Paris, France
Lycée Janson de Sailly, 106 Rue de la Pompe, 75116 Paris, France
Villa du Lac, 1 Avenue Scribe, 78110 Le Vésinet, France
16 Rue Cortambert, 75116 Paris, France
52 bis Rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, France
28 Avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris, France
9 Rue Vaneau, 75007 Paris, France
St. Egid, Pfarrpl. 7, 9020 Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria
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Julien
Green (September 6, 1900 – August 13, 1998) was an American writer who
authored several novels (The Dark Journey, The Closed Garden,
Moira, Each Man in His Darkness, the Dixie trilogy, etc.), a
four-volume autobiography (The Green Paradise, The War at Sixteen,
Love in America and Restless Youth) and his famous Diary
(in nineteen volumes, 1919–1998). He wrote primarily in French and was the
first non-French national to be elected to the Académie française.
Julian Hartridge Green was born to American parents in Paris, a descendant on his mother's side of a Confederate Senator, Julian Hartridge (1829–1879), who later served as a Democratic Representative from Georgia to the US Congress, and who was Julien Green's namesake. (Green was christened "Julian"; his French publisher changed the spelling to "Julien" in the 1920s).
The youngest of eight children born to Protestant parents, he had a puritanical and overprotective upbringing, his mother being sexually repressive. Green received a Calvinist education in his religious education as a child,[1] but became a Roman Catholic in 1916, two years after his mother's death.[2] The following year, still only 16, he volunteered his services as an ambulanceman in the American Field Service. When his age was discovered his enlistment was annulled. He immediately signed up with an ambulance unit of the American Red Cross, and when that six-month term of service ended in 1918, he enlisted in the French Army, in which he served as a second lieutenant of artillery until 1919. After the war, he spent three years (1919–22) at the University of Virginia at the invitation of his uncle—his mother’s brother—Walter Hartridge. It was his first direct encounter with the United States. He discovered the South, where both his parents had been born. He returned to France in 1922, where, after a false start as a painter, he began his career as a French writer, and by 1927 had established himself in the world of French literature.
Back in Paris again in the spring of 1926, Klaus Mann met René Crevel, a committed internationalist for perverse reasons: "He spent his days with Americans, Germans, Russians, and Chinese, because his mother suspected all foreigners to be crooks or perverts". Sitting on Mann’s bed, Crevel read out the early chapters of his novel La Mort difficile, with their "venomous" portrait of his mother. On this trip, Mann also met Jean Cocteau ("The hours spent in his company assume in my recollection a savour both of burlesque show and magic ritual"), Eugene McCown, Pavel Tchelitchew, Julien Green, Jean Giraudoux and others.
Green's career as a major figure of 20th-century French literature began soon after his return from the United States with the novel Mont-Cinère (1926), which was well received by Georges Bernanos.[3] In July 1940, after France's defeat, he went back to America. In 1942, he was mobilized and sent to New York to work at the United States Office of War Information. From there, for almost a year, five times a week, he would address France as part of the radio broadcasts of Voice of America, working inter alia with André Breton and Yul Brynner. Green returned to France after World War II.
During the post-WWII period, the French theatre was dominated by Jean Cocteau's circle, including the stage designer Christian Bérard and the actor Jean Marais; the bisexual Gérard Philipe was everyone's favorite leading man. The foremost members of the Comedic Francaise, such as Jean Weber and Jacques Charon, were familiar faces at gay salons. Julien Green's monumental Sud (South, 1953) clothed his doomed love story in Civil War garb and veiled suggestion; the agony of unrequited affection went even deeper in Henry de Montherlant's La Ville dont le Prince en un Enfant (The City Whose Prince Is a Child, 1951), set in a Catholic school where an obsessive priest roots out the special friendships of the students. Typically, the secretive and suicidal Montherlant considered it unsuitable for public performance by boys.
Julien Green died in Paris shortly before his 98th birthday and is entombed in a chapel designed for him in St. Egid Church, Klagenfurt, Austria.[4][5] His name on the tomb uses the original English spelling "Julian" instead of the French "Julien".[6]
For many years Green was the companion of Robert de Saint-Jean, a journalist, whom he had met in the 1920s.[6] In his later years Green formally adopted gay fiction writer Éric Jourdan. According to Jourdan, Green decided to move to a house which formerly belonged to Caterina Sforza in Forlì, Italy, in 1994. However, Green did not move to this house because his health was failing.
At the Académie française, Green succeeded François Mauriac, taking chair number 22 on June 3, 1971. In 1996, he resigned from the Académie which caused a minor scandal.[6] However, he was only formally replaced upon his death.[8]
It was commonly believed he had dual citizenship, but in fact, although born in Paris and writing almost exclusively in the French language, he had never become a French citizen. President Georges Pompidou reportedly offered him French citizenship in 1972 but Green declined.
My published books:
