SOURCE: "Mauriac: Poet into Novelist," in Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Greene and Mauriac, University of Notre Dame Press, 1964, pp. 65-86.

Stratford is a Canadian educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he discusses the development of and literary influences on Mauriac's early work.

In the introduction to Commencements d'une vie Mauriac admits that the intensity of his childhood experience was heightened by the habit of self-dramatization. "As a child I played at being solitary and misunderstood," he writes, "and it was the most fascinating of games. Perhaps I found it so because I instinctively knew that much more than a game was involved, a preparation in fact, an exercise for becoming a writer. To enjoy watching oneself suffer is the obvious sign of a literary vocation." It is the change of that instinctive sense of vocation into conscious purpose that I wish to trace in this...