André Gide

by CHARLES J. ROEG and JEAN DE SÉGUEY

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WHEN André Gide published his autobiography in France in the mid-twenties, a scandalized critic twisted the axiom, “La Natare a horreur du vide - Nature abhors a vacuum,”into “La Nature a horreur du Gide.” After suffering this kind of treatment from French reviewers for thirty years, Gidc, now seventy-seven, has lived to see many of them agree that he is the greatest living French writer. His prestige on the European continent — particularly in pre-Hitler Germany—has been immense, and though somewhat diluted in its passage across the English Channel, it still stands high in Britain. The influence Gide has exerted on Continental writing is comparable to that of Joyce and Proust. More has been published about him than by him. In the twenties every other literary ism in Europe claimed among its inspirations Gale’s doctrine of intellectual adventure — L’Inquiétude Gidienne.

By comparison, his impact in this country has been slight. Of the fifty-odd books published by Gide in the last fifty-six years, eleven have appeared in America, but even among serious readers his work is not well known. His talent bears a strongly Gallic imprint; and being a great stylist, he loses much in translation. Though his English translator and friend, Dorothy Bussy, has served him competently, she has not achieved the excellence of C. K. ScottMonerieff’s rendition of Proust. Over and above his Frenchiness, Gide is a difficult and perverse writer, who confesses to having cultivated “the art of being disagreeable to the reader.” “To disturb,” he once remarked, “that is my role.”

With a few exceptions, Gide has cloaked his disturbing ideas in myths, parables, and confessional narratives — forms that seem remote to us and heighten the difficulty of identification. “Don’t understand me so quickly, I beg you,” he once said to an acquaintance. “I write only to be reread. . . . My value lies in my complexity.”Therein also lies inaccessibility.

Still more distasteful to Americans is the perversity which flavors his books and attaches to the man himself, by virtue of his self-advertised homosexuality and seeming moral irresponsibility. His writings show a morbid fascination with neurosis, surreptitiousness, and crime. His hero in The Immoralist derives exquisite pleasure from complicity in an Arab boy’s theft of a pair of scissors; from conspiring to help poachers elude the traps set by the gamekeeper on his own estate.

Gide’s fictional world, in which decency and normal love so rarely figure, is peopled by a singularly unsympathetic array of personages: repellently perverse adolescents; pious fanatics and unctuous priests; French Babbitts, mired in stupidity and selfimportance; ineffective intellectuals, decadent sensualists, and dilettantes in crime. And the inconclusive conclusions which his inner logic demands often seem intolerable to our sense of fitness. There is much, in short, that is unpalatable in Gide. What, then, is the reader’s reward? What is the source of Gide’s greatness?

Taken as a whole, Gide’s body of work, which has a marked symphonic unity, constitutes a passport to the highest possible intellectual adventure: the lifelong quest of an extraordinarily perceptive being for values that are neither secondhand nor counterfeit, for adjustment, not to the world of appearances, but to an inner reality. As his American biographer, Klaus Mann, observes: “All human values on which our civilization is based are at stake in his inner dialogue. . . . He echoes our uncertainties, he articulates our dilemmas.”

Gide looked at contemporary French civilization and was appalled by the ubiquitous pressure of codes and conventions, of Church, society, and family, of political parties and literary schools. The individual, in his attempt to conform to this world of appearances, develops a public personality which, in the Gidean lexicon, is “counterfeit.” It is counterfeit, Gide holds, because it suppresses or denies a whole set of impulses and instincts which constitute our real personality.

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WHAT fascinates Gide about the inner reality of human character is this profusion of incoherent desires, irrational longings, and contradictory moral tendencies coexisting in the shadowy lower depths. Gide’s picture of mankind is “disagreeable" because he feels that the true structure of personality has been falsified by overemphasis on the rational (therefore bowdlerized) facet of man. His formula is: “One must represent everything.”

The first step toward self-knowledge is fearless recognition of man’s diversity, of the polarity of his moral make-up. Consistency is a distortion of character; the man who truly understands himself is consistently inconsistent. Inner reality, in which good and evil overlap, is a marriage of Heaven and Hell à la Blake. Like Blake, Gide is willing to proclaim: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

Enactment of our unacted desires, emancipation from the counterfeit world, bring freedom and fulfillment in the elation of rebirth. But the fulfillment is temporary, for absolute freedom breeds defeat: unfettered expression of our irrational impulses and instinctual longings has social consequences which give pause even to the Gidean hero. That defeat is an inevitable element of the human quest is a pivotal notion in Gide’s view of life. Yet the adventurer’s defeat is preferable to the stagnation of those too weak to seek freedom.

The Gidean hero who follows ihe dictates of his real self will not weigh the proportion of good and evil, elation and defeat, in the cycle of experience. Gide sees defeat not as tragedy but as drama, not as a reason for despair but as an impetus to continued reaching for more life, because defeat itself has a positive moral content.

Experience, then, is its own reward; it may be compared to a slightly overripe fruit in which, after eating through the pulp — part of it sweet, part of it unpalatable — one reaches a core of pure goodness. This affirmative conclusion, arrived at from his premises, which are the reverse of pollyanna, saves Gide from the transcendentalism of Huxley’s flight into the timeless universe of the Hindu mystics; from the nihilism of Sartre’s Existentialist hell and the frustrating pessimism of most of the American realists; from the dogmatism of the surrender to Church and Party Line. Gide is one of the few contemporary novelist-philosophers whose resolution of the problem of defeat in the world as we know it is formulated wholly in terms of that world.

Gide’s affirmative doctrine is one of perpetual exploration, a sort of Don Juanism of the psyche. “Movement,” says Gide, “is the important thing. I have never wished to be, but to become. . . . To seek God is to know him.” Salvation lies in remaining “disponible” — unattached: to ideas, to persons, to possessions. Whenever he has seen a friend’s belief harden into bigotry — aesthetic, political, or religious—Gide has broken with him. When his library threatened to become an attachment, he sold off his rare editions and autographed copies, scandalizing those who knew he had ample private means. Never since his youthful break with symbolism has he adhered to a literary school; his sympathies have ranged from Dada to Dostoevski. But for one interlude in his life he has been “apolitical.” Attracted to a brand of communism inspired by the Bible, he was soon repelled by the commandments of the Kremlin and the orthodoxy of its French cohorts. A godly man, “dazzled by the Gospel,” he quotes Jesus to refute the menaces and prohibitions of St. Paul.

Gide’s ethic is one of supreme individualism. “I came to admit only private morals,” he records in his autobiography, “and these sometimes present contradictory commandments. . . . All effort to submit to a rule became in my eyes an act of treason . . . which I identified with the Sin against the Holy Ghost ‘which will not be forgiven,’ [and] by which the individual loses his . . . savor.” In an unpublished page Gide adds: “[My] strong Puritan education . . . the habit and need of a discipline, enabled me to see, outside the Common Rule, something other than mere anarchy. . . . To rediscover the pure, beyond the factitious, personality was no easy task. And this rule of life forever new which henceforth became mine — to act with the greatest possible sincerity — implied a resolve, a perspicacity, an effort, requiring all my will. I never appeared to myself more moral than when I decided no longer to be moral — that is, to be moral only after my own light. And I came to understand that perfect sincerity — of the motive as well as of the act - which gives to man his highest dignity and worth, is to be won only with ceaseless striving — Le Paradis est toujours à refaire.” In a characteristically ironic afterthought Gide writes: “I am perhaps just an adventurer.”

Gide has squeezed the quintessence out of moral restlessness, and to the resulting threat of anarchy he opposes a sleepless awareness: the categorical imperative must constantly be sought from within. Speaking of Goethe, Gide defined his own notion of serviceable individualism: “I do not mean slavish . . . but ready to serve. He was a man of duty: yes, of duty toward himself. Those who have accused him of . . . egotism seem to me to have misunderstood the austere demands that a healthy individualism often implies.”The nerve of Gide’s antithetic attitude — so far from being irresponsibility — is the desire to awaken in the individual a stringent sense of responsibility to himself. In its widest implications, so pertinent today, Gide’s doctrine is a protest against the submersion of individual responsibility in organized authority, against that “escape from freedom” to which psychiatrists have traced the virus of fascism. In this context, nonconformity becomes anethical impulse, irreverence a moral condition, revolt a duty for the exceptional being. “To be at odds with his times, there lies the raison d’être of the artist. . . . Nothing which pushes to revolt is definitely dangerous.”

Gide’s heroes are men whom unusual circumstances have freed from the need for conformity and submission to authority. Michel, the Immoralist, is a homosexual like Gide, and both are emancipated by the rebirth that follows a dangerous disease (tuberculosis). Bernard, of The Counterfeiters, is illegitimate. Lafcadio, of Lafcadio’s Adventures, is both illegitimate and rootless. The Gidean hero, repugnant though he may be to most of us, has his redeeming social function. He is protest personified, the man who never says “Heil!” — the irrepressible adventurer.

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GIDE’S personal adventure — in literature, friendship, marriage, and the pursuit of ideas — is revealed in his autobiography (Si le Grain ne Meurt, published here in a limited edition in 1935 under the title If It Die), which ends in his twenty-sixth year; and in his five-volume, half-million-word Journal, whieh extends from 1889 to 1942. The Journal is a document whose threefold scope makes it unique in French literature. With the dispassionate intimacy of the camera eye, it records, sometimes in such casual entries as “Visit to Verlaine,” more frequently in alluring detail, personal contacts with almost every artist of importance on the European continent in the past half century. An unsystematized compendium of artistic criticism, of greater range, taste, and prescience than Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi, it comments on every major artistic movement from impressionism to surrealism; delves — in a phrase, a paragraph, or an essay - into the work of some two hundred writers, from Homer to William Faulkner.

Gide has lived to see many of his once heretical judgments vindicated. He saw weaknesses in Remy de Gourmont, Anatole France, and d’Annunzio at a time when their reputations were unassailable; today Gourmont is almost forgotten, Anatole France has been relegated to the second rank, and many will concede that there was more of bombast than genius in d’Annunzio. A number of the unpublished young writers in whom Gide detected talent (Valery Larbaud, Henri Michaux, Max Jacob) have since won a substantial reputation in France.

Gide has a quasi-religious veneration for the great French classics, but his erudition in foreign literature is immense. Though he did not perfect his English until he was forty, his translations of Shakespeare, Blake, and Conrad are among the finest in French. His version of Hamlet, a play which has never fared happily in France, has dazzled both audience and critics in Paris this current season.

Gide, more than anyone else, has clarified the French view of Nietzsche and Dostoevski; reaffirmed the grandeur of Goethe and elucidated Whitman’s greatness; proclaimed the pre-eminence in the novel form of the great Russians and the “ Englishwriting” authors — Swift and Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Dickens and Melville, whose Moby Dick he brackets with his favorite novel, Moll Flanders. The Journal shows less interest in the English and American moderns. It praises The Bridge of San Luis Rey and God’s Little Acre, but makes no mention of Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Dreiser, Lewis, or O’Neill. Upton Sinclair is “fort mauvais,” Huxley “unreadable.”

In its third aspect the Journal records Gide’s personal quest with all of the “Heureuse audace dans l’indiscrétion personelle” which Montaigne prescribed and which Gide regards as a stem duty. It shows a Freudian talent for self-analysis more thoroughgoing in its honesty than Stendhal’s Life of Henri Brulard and his “secret ” journals or than Rousseau’s deliberately sensationalized Confessions. Though the Journal and the autobiography are at times disconcertingly explicit about Gide’s homosexuality, they avoid the pitfalls of salaciousness and sensationalism, for Gide’s most indiscreet revelations are couched in the most discreet manner.

“There are things in everyone’s life one must have the courage not to write about.” Gide is consistent in his inconsistency. The Journal cryptically alludes to his marriage to his cousin, Emmanuele, as “the secret drama of my life,” and the most explicit reference leaves much to the reader’s intuition. “The truth is that I cannot disassociate myself from Em,” he wrote in 1933. “She is the only being I have ever really loved. I love her now more passionately and deeply than ever before. That is why every step forward causes me so much pain. . . . I cannot think without being cruel to her.” When Madame Gide died in 1938, Gide — supposedly indifferent to women - astounded everyone by officially recognizing the grown-up daughter born to him out of a liaison no one had ever suspected.

It is completely in character that Gide, who has revealed so much about himself, should have enjoyed keeping this sensational secret up his sleeve. He is not averse to a bit of play acting in public, and has a decided penchant for the diabolic pose, which has intensified his sinister reputation. He tells in his diary of overhearing a woman complain to her companion, “Every time my lover has a talk with Gide, he beats the life out of me.”

“All extremes meet in me,” Gide once remarked. He offers us God and the Devil, the strait path and the strange fruit. A mixture of Puritan and Pagan, St. Francis and Nietzsche, he is alternately sadistic and tender, angelic and demoniac.

Gide recognized early in life this oscillation between two moral poles, and saw in heredity the origin of his own “discordant’ dualism: “Is it my fault that I was . . . the product of two stocks, two provinces, two faiths ?” His father, a professor of law, came from a poor Protestant family of the rugged Languedoc. His mother’s clan, the Rondeaux, belonged to the wealthy Normand bourgeoisie, and though Protestant, was of Catholic origin. Gide was brought up in a Puritan atmosphere of Calvinist severity. He read the Bible “avidly, gluttonously, but methodically.”He also read the Greek myths and the Arabian Nights, and remained forever captivated by the sensual flavor of the Oriental world. His graat achievement as an artist has been to make bis dualism the energizing force of his work.

Gide’s appearance strangely mirrors the contradiction of his personality. In the inevitable black cloak with upturned collar and broad-brimmed black slouch hat pulled down over the ears, he is Mephistopheles in priest’s clothing. The tail, bony figure with stooping shoulders, the high forehead and bald cranium that crown the slightly diabolic eggshaped face, the scholarly gravity of speech, the the big tragic mouth with its thin, straight lips - as straight, Oscar Wilde said, “as those of a man who has never told a lie" - these traits belong to the intellectual, the Huguenot. But the springy step and the tanned skin stretched tightly over high cheekbones betray the adventurer who still goes mountain-climbing in his seventies. The restless gray-blue eyes that peer observantly from under the camouflage of bushy eyebrows have an independent life of their own. They are oddly youthful, oddly flirtatious in that septuagenarian mask.

Gide is a retiring man, never at ease in a crowded room. He talks with circumspection and one can picture him mentally erasing one word to select another that is more apposite. Gide always talks about other writers - and always writes about himself.

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OSCAR WILDE once said to Gide: “Dear, there is no first person singular in art.” But all his life Gide went on using the “I” in an eternal debate with his “me.” Each affirmation in Gide gives the no to another part of his being.

“ A work of art,”says Gide, “is the exaggeration of an idea.” Each of his books exaggerates a Gidean theme, which is refuted, corrected, or amplified in the succeeding work, itself another exaggeration. Each frees the author from an exaggeration with himself.

Gide started his first book at eighteen. Les Cahiers d’André Walter was the confession of a hypersensitive young introvert who — like Gide - loved his cousin, Emmanuèle, and was in love with chastity. Gide killed off his hero and sought an answer to his own problems in flight. In October, 1893, he set out with a friend for North Africa.

To Gide the Arab world unfolded a terrestrial paradise. His Puritanism relaxed its cold grip under the warming spell of sun and sand, and he was intoxicated by the new sights and smells and savors: the dark cafes of Touggourt, Blidah, and Kairouan: the exotic fruits and cooling syrups; the hot breath ol the Sahara at Biskra; and the “sun’s dark imprint" on native skins. Like Goethe when he saw Italy for the first time, Gide exclaimed: “At last I have found myself!”

A year later Gide and Oscar Wilde were in Algiers. “1 hope to demoralize the whole place,” Oscar cheerfully boasted, Gide was his first victim, and a slender flutist named Mohammed was the tempter’s instrument of corruption. To Gide the experience was a liberation. “Ah, what a hell I now passed out of,”he confessed in his autobiography, recalling the failure of his efforts to “normalize” his instincts. “At last I had found my inborn normality.”

Gale’s next important book, Les Nourritures Terrestres, was a prose poem on the Blakean theme, “Exuberance is beauty,”an exaggerated affirmation of the senses grafted on to the Gidean doctrine of flight and non-attachment. At the conclusion Gide advised his imaginary disciple to “throw away this book,” for it expresses just one possible attitude toward life. Gide himself had returned to his home and married the cousin he had loved since childhood.

The Immoralist, considered by some critics to be Gide’s masterpiece, shows the consequences of applying to life the untrammeled hedonism of Les Nourritures. Michel, an archaeologist, has been stricken with tuberculosis while honeymooning in North Africa, and in the exhilaration of convalescence breaks utterly with his past and its code of values. His wife, Marceline, now becomes infected with the disease. But Michel drags her wherever his thirst for new sensation propels him. Early one morning he returns from an orgy in the native quarter of Touggourt to find Marceline dying - one of the most cruel and coldly effective passages Gide has ever written. The Immoralist has tasted the reward of emancipation and the “bitter ash” of the defeat inherent in absolute freedom. “To know how to free oneself is nothing,”Michel concludes. “What is so arduous is to learn to live in freedom.”

The Immoralist corrected and supplemented the message of Les Nourritures with the notion of suffering and defeat. Le Retour de L’Enfant Prodigue - conceived on a train trip to Berlin and written in fifteen days — answered the interrogatory conclusion of The Immoralist with the doctrine of perpetual exploration, of the ever-renewed escape to freedom. This retouched formula, which now covered the whole cycle of experience, Gide next applied in his two great fictional masterpieces.

Lafcadio’s Adventures (first published here as The Vatican Swindle) is at once an astringent novel of ideas and a burlesque as hilarious as the best of Evelyn Waugh. A gang of swindlers have extorted vast sums from devout Catholics to “liberate” the Pope, supposedly kidnaped by Freemasons who have smuggled a false Pope into the Holy See. Into this hoax, which symbolizes in caricature the counterfeit nature of the world of appearances, Gide projects four main characters who pass through the cycle of escape and defeat.

Here Gide makes it abundantly clear that his dangerous doctrine is not for those who walk in the comfortable ways of ordinary men, for “freedom is terrifying when no longer circumscribed by duty.” Even for Lafcadio, the pure Gidean hero, it holds a moment of shock. Anthime Armand-Dubois, the rationalist, Julius de Baraglioul, the Catholic aristocrat, and Amédée Fleurissoire, the bourgeois Caspar Milquetoast, are deluded by counterfeit appearances stemming from “the Vatican swindle" into breaking with their past. The firsl two return to their roots for reasons which are equally counterfeit, poor Fleurissoire, who has set out to liberate the Pope singlehanded, meets a senseless and pathetic death. His journey to Rome is one of the great comic episodes in the French novel. Wrenched from a sheltered existence, he is bedeviled by drafts and bedbugs, prostitutes and suspicious pimples.

His murderer, Lafcadio, freed by an unusual childhood of all morality, is the descendant of the Immoralist. Young and handsome, irresistibly charming, unpredictable, at once selfish and quixotic, his inward revolt seeks to express itself in something rash and daring - a gratuitous crime. He pushes Fleurissoire out of a railway carriage “just for the hell of it.”

Defeat follows. The law threatens to catch up with him; how can he have thought it possible, Gide interjects, “for any society to exist without laws?” His inner being, too, is stunned: “I lived unconscious; I killed in a dream — a nightmare, in which I have been struggling ever since. . . . Even if I cscaped from the police, I could not escape from myself.” But it looks at the end as if Lafcadio will let another murderer hang for his crime, as if he will again be disponible available for fresh advent ure.

The Counterfeiters, Gide’s last work of fiction, published when he was in his mid-fifties, is generally considered to be his most important book. Into a cross-section of middleand upper-class Paris society, Gide injects a young man, Bernard, seeking emancipation a la Gide, and a Gide-like novelist, Edouard. Gide’s idea of the real and counterfeit personality is explored on the twin levels of action and analysis: in terms of Bernard’s involvement in an intricate set of plots and subplots, each a story in itself; and in Edouard’s notes for a novel to be called The Counterfeiters. Gide handles the multiple personal interrelationships like a conjurer manipulating a deck of cards, and here, as in Lafcadio’s Adventures, shows himself to be one of the subtlest and most economic portraitists in modern fiction.

During the next ten years Gide traveled ceaselessly. Returning to his wife, Emmanuèle, at Cuverville in Normandy, after a trip to Italy, Tunisia, or the Congo, he would be off again a week laler to Switzerland or the South of France; he would appear unexpectedly in Cambridge, Heidelberg, or Munich, or titillate the lion hunters by showing up in Vittel, Biarritz, or Karlsbad. But fashionable resorts proved rather a strain: Gide recalls in his diary that when his Symphonie Pastorale was in vogue, he was once buttonholed by a matron who gushed, “Cher maître, I can’t tell you how much I loved your dear little novel— The Unfinished Symphony.” And he wryly mentions another wateringplace intellectual who raved to him about “that masterpiece of yours, Remembrance of Things Past" — a doubly exquisite faux pas, since as reader for the Nouvelle Revue Fronçaise, Gide had once unforgivably rejected the first volume of Proust’s great work.

A trip to the Congo, where he was appalled by the brutality of French colonial rule, awakened Gide’s political consciousness, and in the early thirties he spoke and wrote like a fellow traveler. The Kremlin, which imagined it had hooked a whale, invited him to Russia. The result was Return from the U.S.S.R., a courageous and concise testament of disillusionment. There were aspects of Russian life Gide praised, but what shocked him lie bluntly condemned: “I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought could be less free, more bowed down, more fearful [terrorized!, more vassalized.”

Gide’s Communist adventure confirmed his distaste for involvement in politics. During the Second World War he lived for a time in the unoccupied zone, then escaped to North Africa and went into hiding. He was silent except for a series of sixteen “Imaginary Interviews,” which were published in Le Figaro, the only Vichy paper that retained any independence. In these dialogues (published here in book form), which deal with French syntax, Goethe’s theater, and other literary matters, Gide interwove a subtle but deadly criticism of the masochistic defeatism of Vichy and the collaborators’ clownish slogans about National Revolution and Renaissance. Yet, though his stand was unambiguous, he refused, after the liberation of Tunisia, to become involved in the political fracas. “I cannot see,” he wrote, “what ‘declaration’ I could make which would not be, were I to remain true to myself, displeasing to all factions.” These words might serve as a comment on all of Gide’s work.

Gide has remained true to himself — unattached. In a century in which statism has claimed the individual’s soul, party lines have competed for the mind, and bureaucracy has circumscribed freedom, he stands out as the genius of nonconformity — the solitary rebel.