The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  —ANDRÉ GIDE, Les Faux-monnayeurs[1]

  Gide is one of the few writers who really nauseates me, so I am naturally not an authority on him.

  —FLANNERY O’CONNOR, The Habit of Being[2]

  THE STARTING point of this (rather whimsical) little glossary of the Gidean enigma was provided to me by Alan Sheridan’s work André Gide: A Life in the Present (Harvard University Press, 1999). Sheridan’s massive opus (700 pages) is a model of meticulous scholarship.[3] To appreciate the biographer’s achievement, one should consider how daunting was his task. Gide was a compulsive diarist; besides writing some sixty books (essays, fiction, theatre, travelogues, criticism, poetry, literary translations), he kept for more than fifty years a Journal[4] that fills thousands of pages. Members of his small circle of close friends were equally addicted to graphomania. First of all, Maria Van Rysselberghe—nicknamed la Petite Dame (“the Tiny Lady”*), who knew him for half a century and was his most intimate companion (or should we say accomplice?) during the last thirty years of his life (inasmuch as any sort of intimate companionship could be achieved with such a slippery eel)—kept an accurate and vivid record of his daily utterances and deeds, together with perceptive portraits of his literary friends and transcripts of their conversations (four volumes—nearly 2,000 pages—crammed with information). Gide’s best friends were also writers: Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Schlumberger, Pierre Herbart.* After his death, they all wrote memoirs of the Gide they knew. The figure of Gide also looms large in Martin du Gard’s monumental and fascinating Journal (three volumes—3,500 pages) as well as in Schlumberger’s diaries.[5] When they were away from Paris, in their respective country residences, the friends wrote to each other at great length: the correspondence Gide–Martin du Gard and Gide–Schlumberger fills three volumes (1,400 pages). Besides, Gide also corresponded regularly with a great number of literary acquaintances, editors, writers, artists, poets, critics—his position as the co-founder and main financial backer (with Schlumberger and Gallimard) of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française (literary journal cum publishing house) virtually established him as the éminence grise of twentieth-century French literature: his voluminous published correspondence with Valéry, Claudel, Jammes, Mauriac, Jouhandeau, Romains, Suarès, Rivière, Copeau, Du Bos, Cocteau, J.-E. Blanche, Arnold Bennett, Edmund Gosse, Rilke, Verhaeren, etc., etc., amounts to some 20,000 pages.[6]

  Thus, the first and main problem of Gide’s biographer was not how to gather information, but how not to drown in it. Sheridan succeeded in bringing this literary flood under control, and in organising it into a lucid synthesis. Yet, just as the damming of a big river cannot be achieved without inflicting some damage on its wildlife, the discipline which Sheridan had to impose upon his rich material was perhaps not fully compatible with the lush ambiguities and contradictions of the subject. Now, in contrast with whatever certainties the reader may feel able to derive from Sheridan’s authoritative study, the only purpose of my disjointed notes is to warn him against the temptation to draw conclusions—for Gide must always present an irreducible elusiveness: he was truly the great master of intellectual escape—the Houdini of modern literature.

  ANTI-SEMITISM

  In 1914—he was then a middle-aged, well-established writer—after a lunch with his old friend and former schoolmate Léon Blum, Gide noted in his diary[7] how he respected Blum’s intelligence and culture, but resented his Jewishness. He expounded at some length on this theme:

  There is no need to enlarge here on Jewish defects; the point is: the qualities of the Jewish race are not French qualities. Even when Frenchmen are less intelligent, less resilient, less worthy in every respect than the Jews, the fact remains that only they themselves can express what they have to say. The Jewish contribution to our literature . . . is not so much enriching us, as it constitutes an interruption in the slow effort of our race to express itself, and this represents a severe, an intolerable distortion of its meaning.

  One must acknowledge that nowadays there is in France a Jewish literature that is not French literature . . . The Jews speak with greater ease than us, because they have fewer scruples. They speak louder than us, because they ignore the reasons that sometimes make us speak in a lower voice, the reasons that make us respect certain things.

  Of course, I do not deny the great merits of some Jewish works, such as the theatrical plays of Porto-Riche, for instance. But I would admire them much more willingly if they were offered to us only as translations. What would be the point for our literature to acquire new resources if it were at the expense of its meaningfulness? If, one day, the Frenchman’s strength should fail, let him disappear, but do not allow his part to be played by any lout, in his name and in his place.

  A few years later (August 1921), he confided to his intimate little circle his irritation and disappointment at Proust’s newly published Sodome et Gomorrhe. He blamed Proust’s method: “It betrays avarice rather than riches—the obsession never to let anything go to waste, always adding instead of saving” and ascribed this to Proust’s Jewishness[8]: “The Jews have no sense of gratuitousness.”[9]

  In 1929, commenting to the Tiny Lady on a new novel by Henri Duvernois (an author whom he had previously praised to the skies): “Read this, it is excellent; but here, he also shows some of his limitations. Oh, he is very sensitive and subtle, but he lacks a certain . . .” (he searches for a word) “. . . a certain virginity. It would be interesting to make a history of Jewish literature” (he had just learned that Duvernois was Jewish) “. . . Jews often defile somehow whatever topic they touch.”[10] And a few days later, on the same subject, chatting with old friends, he told them: “Of course, it always bothers me when someone happens to be Jewish. Take Duvernois, for instance; when I learned that his real name was Kahn Ascher, I suddenly understood many little things that had always bothered me in his books—my very genuine admiration notwithstanding.”[11] Two years later (May 1931), at lunch with friends: “As we chat about anti-Semitism . . . Gide says with a laugh: ‘Well, I would not like to receive a transfusion of Jewish blood.’”[12]

  In 1935—German political developments were not taking place on another planet!—commenting upon a performance of the American Yiddish Art Theatre, Gide said: “I cannot get used to all these bearded faces; even when they are beautiful, they have no appeal for me . . . The very idea of any physical contact with them repels me, I don’t know why; I feel closer to animals.”[13]

  After the war, at the end of his life, he was still casually making disparaging remarks on the Jewish character, in front of his secretary, Béatrix Beck, a young widow, whose dead husband was Jewish![14]

  Yet would it make any sense to call Gide an anti-Semite? With equal reason, he might also be called a Stalinist Bolshevist, an anti-Stalinist and anti-communist, a Christian, an anti-Christian, a defeatist advocate of collaboration with Hitler, an anti-Nazi sympathiser, a libertarian, an authoritarian, a rebel, a conformist, a demagogue, an elitist, an educator, a corrupter of youth, a preacher, a débauché, a moralist, a destroyer of morality . . .

  Literature* was the exclusive concern of Gide—it was the very purpose of his life; beside it—as he himself proclaimed[15]—“only pederasty and Christianity” could absorb his interest and fire his passion. On all other matters—which were of basic indifference to him—he had no strong opinions; his views were vague, contradictory, ill-informed, tentative, inconsistent, malleable, banal, vacillating, conventional. Herbart—who was a close confidant and companion during the last twenty years of his life—observed that he usually thought in clichés that could have come straight from Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Having quoted another of Gide’s offensively stupid remarks (“I suffered yesterday: all the interlocutors I had to chat with were Jews”), Herbart added this flat comment: “This means exactly nothing: he ‘thinks’ by proxy.”[16]

  I do not know to what extent such an innocent explanation will satisfy most readers—but Blum himself would certainl
y have endorsed it, for even though he was hurt when he eventually read the passages of the Journal quoted above, his affection for Gide remained undiminished until his death.[17]

  In conclusion: it would be very easy to compile a damning record of first-hand evidence on Gide’s anti-Semitism; most probably, it would also be misleading. This example may serve as a useful methodological warning before perusing my little ABC.

  BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

  André Gide was born in 1869. Though he died in the middle of the twentieth century, he remains in many fundamental respects a nineteenth-century writer.

  He was an only child; his father was a scholar (professor of Roman law)—a frail and refined man who died too early to leave any deep imprint upon his son: André was not yet eleven at the time of his death. The mother, possessive and authoritarian, came from a very wealthy line of business people in Normandy; she gave her son a stern Protestant education. From a very early age, Gide experienced an acute conflict between the severe demands of his mother’s religiosity and the no-less-tyrannical needs of his precocious sensuality. Yet it was not until a journey to Algeria in 1895 that he discovered—under the personal guidance of Oscar Wilde—the exclusive orientation of his own sexuality.* That same year, his formidable mother died, and “having lost her, he replaced her at once with the person who most resembled her.” Within two weeks, he announced his engagement with his first cousin Madeleine* (niece of his mother), who had been his beloved soul-mate since early childhood. Their marriage was never consummated, Gide having assumed from the beginning that only “loose women” can have any interest in the activities of the flesh. And, in turn, when forty-three years later Madeleine died, Gide once again felt the same sense of “love, anguish and freedom” he had experienced at the death of his mother, and “he noted ‘how subtly, almost mystically’ his mother had merged into his wife.”[18]

  With the total freedom that his inherited wealth (as well as the considerable fortune of his wife) gave him, Gide devoted the rest of his very long life to literature. He employed his time reading and writing—writing mostly about what he had read—and travelling. Simultaneously, religion continued to claim his soul, and pederasty his body. The conflict reached a climax in 1916, when, under the pressing—and sometimes clumsy—interventions of his Catholic friends (Claudel, first and foremost), Gide came close to conversion. But eventually he resisted the religious temptation and opted resolutely for the pursuit of a sexual obsession which was to assume manic proportions with the passing of the years.

  From his earliest work, Les Cahiers d’André Walter (published in a private printing, paid for by his mother—1891), Gide’s literary activity never slowed. It is difficult to summarise his production: as he said himself, “Each of my books is designed to upset those readers who enjoyed the preceding one.”[19] The critic Jean Prévost described this attitude with a formula that won Gide’s approval: “Gide does not confront himself, he succeeds himself.”[20] His metamorphoses were not generated by dialectic contradictions, they were a succession of imaginative happenings: Proteus is constantly reinventing himself.

  His most seminal work, the book which established him as the guru of rebellion against the bourgeois order, as the maître à penser for at least three successive generations of young men, is Les Nourritures terrestres (1901). Martin du Gard wondered if one could not apply to it what Sainte-Beuve once said of “those useful books which last only for a limited time, since the readers who benefit from them wear them down.”[21] The problem is also that books such as these usually generate mediocre imitations, and eventually we cannot avoid reading them through the prism of their vulgar caricatures. Today, alas!, Les Nourritures terrestres reminds us of nothing so much as the kitsch of Khalil Gibran.

  The quality of his short fiction is displayed in La Porte étroite and shines to perfection in La Symphonie pastorale (1919). Both novellas benefit from the inner tension of his religious inquiétude, still unresolved at the time; in the latter work in particular, the spiritual ambiguity is handled with diabolical cleverness, and, in spite of its stilted dialogue and cold stylistic mannerisms, the book remains deeply affecting and comes close to being a masterpiece. In his more ambitious and longer fiction, Les Caves du Vatican (1914) and Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), he betrays the sorry fact that he is not really a novelist: he is short of breath and has little imagination. These books were hugely successful in their time but have not aged well. Mauriac was probably right when he observed that, half a century later, Gide’s novels had already become mummified, whereas—in paradoxical contrast—those of Anatole France (so cruelly derided by the Surrealist generation) retained an amazing freshness.[22]

  In 1924, he published Corydon,* a defence of homosexuality. His argumentation is clumsy and his sincerity more limited than it may appear at first, but it took considerable courage to “come out” at that time in such a public fashion.

  He forcefully commented twice on public affairs—even though his notorious lack of a sense of reality* ill-prepared him for such activity. After a lengthy journey into Black Africa (French Congo and Chad, 1925–26), he wrote an eloquent denunciation of the colonial exploitation of the native populations. Then, during the 1930s, he foolishly became a fellow-traveller of Stalinist communism. His performance as “useful idiot” was short-lived, however—a brief visit to the Soviet Union opened his eyes. It did not require exceptional percipience to appreciate the plain evidence that was under his very nose, but it certainly took exceptional courage to spell it out publicly. On his return to Paris, he wrote at once a truthful and scathing account of his political disenchantment. Against all expectations, natural justice rewarded his audacity: Retour de l’URSS (1936) was prodigiously successful—this iconoclastic little book was reprinted eight times in ten months and sold nearly 150,000 copies; by the end of 1937, it had been translated into fourteen languages. None of Gide’s other works was such an immediate success.[23]

  Almost until his death (in 1951), Gide continued to write, polish and edit his Journal—probably his most important work. But besides his own publications, his role in and influence upon the French literary scene were also exerted through the Nouvelle Revue Française, which he had established in 1909 with a few friends. (When the Nazis occupied France, Otto Abetz, who was in charge of German cultural policy, observed: “There are three powers in France: communism, the big banks and the Nouvelle Revue Française.”)

  Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947. The official statement of the Nobel Committee was typically vague, but Gide wrote a clear reply:

  If I have represented anything it is, I believe, the spirit of free inquiry, independence, insubordination even, protest against what the heart and reason refuse to approve. I firmly believe that the spirit of inquiry lies at the origin of our culture. It is this spirit that the so-called totalitarian regimes, of left and right, are trying to crush and gag . . . What matters here is the protection of that spirit that is “the salt of the earth” and which can still save the world . . . the struggle of culture against barbarism.[24]

  CHARACTER

  Gide had a genius for friendship. Those who were in close and constant contact with him all loved him. If we except the sad onset of senility in his very last years—which, in the end, generated some strain in the harmony of his small “family” circle—for most of his life, his presence seems to have brought permanent stimulation and delight to his entourage. “Good nature is the most selfish of all virtues,” Hazlitt had observed, and indeed it was Gide’s colossal self-centredness that enabled him to be generally benign to all. His selfishness was quite absolute—on this account, those who knew him best and had most affection for him could entertain no illusion[25]—and thus he was also tolerant and easy-going: his unflappably pleasant disposition[26] was built upon a bedrock of indifference to whatever did not have a direct bearing on his own person.[27] His aptitude for happiness was irrepressible and disarming—as he confided to the Tiny Lady: “It is incredible
how difficult I find it not to be happy!”[28]

  Gide enlivened all that he touched; routine and stagnation were banned from his life. He was in a state of permanent “availability,” vibrant anticipation of what the next moment would bring. He really never settled down anywhere: “What I need is constant change, I dislike all habits.”[29] He was unable to remain in any place for long, either physically or mentally.[30] He spent more time in hotel rooms and in friends’ houses than in his own apartment—which presented the forlorn, uncomfortable, gloomy, littered, impersonal and unwelcoming aspect of a temporary shelter, hardly ever lived in, with naked light bulbs dangling from the ceiling and mothballs stacked upon the seats of the armchairs. In a sense, his entire existence was but one long holiday, his leisure was unlimited, his freedom boundless, and his money plentiful. He had no family responsibilities, no professional obligations. At any time, on the spur of a fancy, he could travel to exotic places; and then, on his return, he would rest in the splendid country mansions of various acquaintances, where he enjoyed the status of guest of honour—and of shameless parasite. Most of his initiatives were taken under the impulse of a sudden inspiration, all his moves were dictated by mood and whim. Yet, for a superficial observer, these appearances of carefree and luxurious bohemia could be as misleading as the sight of a bee drifting from flower to flower on a beautiful summer afternoon: the insect may look happily intoxicated on fragrances and sunlight, whereas it is in fact relentlessly driven by the single-minded urge to deliver a load of nectar back to its honey-making factory. As Herbart perceptively remarked,[31] gratuitousness was utterly foreign to Gide (which is ironical, considering that he coined in his fiction the very notion of l’acte gratuit!): with him “impressions, readings, things and people are being sorted out and assessed in the light of one single criterion: their usefulness.” In this particular respect, it is significant to note the recurrence in his diaries of expressions such as “profit” and “benefit”; whenever he records encounters with new books or visitors, instead of saying “this book is beautiful” or “this person is charming,” most often he writes: “I greatly benefited from reading . . .,” “I derived much profit from the conversation of . . .” Similar phrases crop up literally dozens of times in the Journal.