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

by Leys, Simon

  At about the same time, Gide tried to make Catherine realise that she was enjoying a privileged situation: “I am afraid you may not fully appreciate how rare is the harmony that prevails in our little group. [The little group was comprised of Gide, the Tiny Lady, Elisabeth and her lover, Pierre Herbart—within that small community, Catherine was thus provided with two fathers]. Don’t imagine that most families have such luck.”[74]

  In 1942, Gide went to North Africa, where he was to spend the remaining years of the war. On the eve of this long separation, the parting message he left for Catherine was twofold: “1. Had you wished, I could have taught you a way of reciting French verse that is now largely lost. 2. Never do anything simply out of a desire to conform, to be like the others. Do only what deeply pleases you.” And he quoted the famous instruction of Madame de Lambert to her son: “My son, do nothing silly, unless it amuses you.”[75]

  In 1945, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Isabelle. Gide was delighted to have a granddaughter. A year later, Catherine married Jean Lambert, a young scholar of German literature (they were to have three more children). Gide greatly enjoyed the company of his new son-in-law. In 1947, the young couple took him on a journey through Switzerland and Italy, but the old man’s manic compulsion to hunt for little boys was now frightfully out of control and caused them constant worry. In France, in these innocent times, Gide’s fame and his Nobel Prize were protection enough against scandal, but once abroad there was a serious risk that foreign policemen might not show a similar tolerance.

  Exactly half a century earlier, Gide had thrown the bomb of his Nourritures terrestres, with its famous curse: “Familles, je vous hais!” But now, his strange little clan began increasingly to resemble a warm and cosy family. For instance, when Herbart dedicated one of his books to the Tiny Lady, Gide was greatly pleased. The Tiny Lady remarked: “It is so charming this way he has of rejoicing at one’s own joys, with such warmth and sincerity. He is happy to see that those whom he loves are getting ever closer to each other.”[76] At the end of 1947, she noted: “Elisabeth and I are struck by the constancy of Gide’s happy mood—the joyful interest he takes in all the small things of life. Elisabeth said laughingly, ‘It seems that Families, I hate you! is far away now. He has a way of talking about ‘the children’—meaning Catherine, Jean and their two little kids—with an accent that is new; and he is completely besotted with his granddaughter, whose lively mind delights him.”[77] The new year was celebrated by the whole “family”; the Tiny Lady, who was normally not inclined to sentimentality, was moved to write: “It was cheerful, tender, charming . . . Never before had I felt such harmony.”[78]

  In her memoirs, Béatrix Beck made only one mention of Catherine. One day, when she informed the young woman that, “There was a telephone call from Roger Martin du Gard,” Catherine corrected her: “You must say Monsieur Martin du Gard.” Beck still remembered the incident half a century later: “This remonstrance hurt me indelibly. Had I not had to support my own child at the time, I would have resigned on the spot.”[79] Thus, for all her unconventional upbringing, this fruit of a bold experiment, this beautiful specimen of a New Humanity, had come full circle and, by the age of twenty-seven, had already turned into a prim and proper petite bourgeoise, with a most exacting notion of how members of the lower orders should refer to their betters.

  DEVIL

  In 1920, as Gide was working on his autobiographical narrative Si le grain ne meurt, he explained to Martin du Gard: “Funny to say, my dear: if only I could borrow Christian terminology, if I dared to introduce the character of Satan into my narrative, at once everything would become miraculously clear, easy to tell, easy to understand . . . Things have always happened to me as if the Devil existed, as if he was constantly intervening in my life.”[80]

  At that time, he had already adopted a certain tongue-in-cheek approach to this subject, which, earlier on, had pressed hauntingly upon his mind. Since childhood, his devout Protestant education had given him a familiarity with the Holy Scriptures; more especially, well into middle age, he remained a profound reader of the Gospels, whence he eventually derived a clear awareness of the presence of the Evil One. He remarked to Schlumberger: “It is strange to see the sort of reserve which inhibits Catholics, and Protestants even more, when they speak of the Devil. They simply conjure him away; they grant him only a negative form of existence . . . And yet, in the Gospels, the reality is totally different: the Devil has a fiercely personal existence, he is even more sharply characterised than God . . .” And then he made further comments on the theme of “the enslavement to the Devil”: “The Devil forces his slaves to recruit new subjects for him—hence the need to pervert, to find accomplices.”[81]

  In 1916, an intense religious crisis brought him very close to a conversion to Catholicism; it is reflected on at great length in his Journal, well summarised by Sheridan: “Gide returns obsessively to talk of God and the devil, sin and guilt, with scarcely veiled references to masturbation and his attempts to resist it.” (Note that he was forty-eight at the time!):

  Yesterday evening I gave in, as one gives in to an obstinate child, to have some peace . . . Since Saturday, I have been assailed again by abominable imaginings, against which I am defenceless; I find no refuge anywhere. At certain moments, I wonder if I am not going mad . . . Yesterday, an abominable relapse . . . I get up, my head and heart heavy and empty: full of all the weight of Hell . . . Yesterday, abominable relapse that has left my body and mind in a state bordering on despair, suicide, madness . . .

  Throughout this period, Gide certainly addresses God as a believing (and doubting) Christian would: “Lord! You know that I have given up being in the right against anyone. What does it matter if it is to escape submission to sin that I submit to the Church! I submit! Ah! Untie the bonds that still hold me back. Deliver me from the terrible weight of this body. Ah! Let me live a little! Let me breathe! Snatch me from evil. Let me not stifle.”[82]

  Eventually Gide pulled out of this crisis and broke with the Catholic friends (such as Claudel) who had been trying, with more zeal than tact, to drag him into the Church. Yet the religious issue never really left his mind—to the perplexity of the Tiny Lady for whom this lingering preoccupation was utterly incomprehensible—and he could truthfully state once again: “In the end, only two things have ever interested me passionately: pederasty and Christianity.”[83] But in later years, his religious concerns acquired a purely negative intensity, as Copeau noticed already in 1930: “Gide has ended up with atheism: he preaches it.”[84] At the end of his life, his anti-Catholicism became nasty and obsessive; in 1947, Schlumberger, who admired Gide and was no altar-boy himself, was shocked by the narrow-minded hostility that coloured Gide’s comments on the Church: “I am upset by the stupid anti-clericalism that reigns in his house.”[85]

  In the world of traditional Catholicism, it was widely—though not universally—believed that Gide was possessed by the Devil. Once, during a family dinner, Claudel declared, as he was holding a crêpe flambée on his fork: “This is how André Gide is going to burn in Hell!” A witness of the incident reported it to Gide, who was hugely amused.[86] Frequently confronted with this prognosis of eternal damnation, he repeated La Fontaine’s reply in his own time to similar curses: “I deeply believe that the damned in Hell end up feeling like fish in water.”[87]

  If the Catholic side had a biased view on this matter, the testimony of Schlumberger—lifelong companion and loyal friend, who shared not only Gide’s philosophy but also his sexual orientation—cannot be lightly dismissed. Schlumberger witnessed Gide’s end at very close range indeed—and was appalled: “I had to stare at senility in its most perfidious aspect: old age, leaving his intelligence nearly intact, revealed all the more clearly the disorder of his behaviour . . . I could feel how his entourage was now haunted by the sordid shadows of his devils . . . His loss of control over his own erotic pulsions inspired terror in them, and could nearly have confirmed the beliefs of t
hose who regard the flesh as the kingdom of the Prince of Darkness . . .”[88]

  When Gide died, he was buried next to his wife, in the village of her country estate. The ceremony was simple and attended only by relatives, close friends and some villagers. Gide’s nephew, a local notable, thought it proper to invite a Protestant pastor to say a few words. The pastor simply read a short passage from Gide’s Numquid et tu, written forty years earlier, at the height of his religious crisis: “Lord, I come to you like a child, like the child you want me to become . . . I renounce everything that made up my pride and which, in your presence, would make up my shame. I listen and submit my heart to you.”[89] Immediately after the ceremony, Martin du Gard and Schlumberger protested loudly against this religious intrusion, which they deemed to be a betrayal of Gide’s intentions, a denial of his clearly stated beliefs, a violation of his final wishes. They were right, of course. And yet the intervention of the hapless pastor, however indiscreet, was nevertheless poignant; after all, these were once Gide’s own true words, and they were also words of truth. Hell is not “truth seen too late” (as Hobbes said); on the contrary, it is truth seen too soon, and knowingly rejected.

  DIALOGUE

  “Outside my capacity for sympathy (which constitutes all my intelligence), it seems that I have no existence at all, and my moral persona is nothing but a number of possibilities, which, in turn, are called Ménalque, Alissa, Lafcadio.” Gide wrote this to a friend: he knew himself well.[90]

  His instinctive urge to sympathise was itself the reflection of a deeper need: the need to please. He had been aware of this since his youth: at the age of twenty-four, he noted in his Journal: “My perpetual question (it is a morbid obsession) is: Am I lovable?”[91] And fifty-five years later, at the end of his career, he concluded in that same Journal: “My extraordinary, my insatiable need to love and be loved: I believe this is what has dominated my life and driven me to write.”[92]

  “He always tried to charm people, and largely succeeded,” Béatrix Beck observed.[93] The Tiny Lady had often to warn him against this excessive eagerness to make himself congenial; for instance, after he managed at last to establish pleasant relations with a person who had previously been hostile,[94] she advised him: “Beware, don’t spoil it. As the situation has become fine and easy, do not exaggerate now, as often happens with you; you get carried away by some sentimental impulse of yours, and you tend to say things that are true only for a short moment—and this is a sure recipe for creating horrific disappointments later on.”[95]

  Gide himself was aware of the problem: “I am all too inclined to espouse other people’s points of view.”[96] Even in familiar exchanges, he would instinctively recoil from contradiction and ensure smoothness at any cost. Here is a typical little episode from his Journal:

  “Valéry asks me, ‘Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?’ I repress a spontaneous impulse to protest, but find it more friendly to reply, ‘Yes, La Chanson de Roland.’ He approves.”[97]

  Thus agreement had been secured—but the price of this was the suppression of his own deeply felt views on the matter, for we know how much he actually loved Homer. In the very same Journal, he had noted not long before: “I re-read with delight the last six books of the Iliad . . .”[98]

  Similar occurrences are frequent; for instance, the Tiny Lady records (in 1937) that, chatting with the German scholar E.R. Curtius, Gide, echoing his good friend’s view, expressed his “great admiration” for Thomas Mann’s Joseph.[99] Yet from the Journal we learn that, two years later, he was still plodding through that very same book “with increasing boredom.”[100]

  He confessed: “Rather than confronting opposition, I prefer to adopt the opinion of the other party.”[101] Sometimes he would rally so quickly to his interlocutor’s views that it made the latter worry. Schlumberger recorded his uneasy feelings at the outcome of a discussion: “I am somewhat scared when I see him abandoning his position with so little resistance.”[102] In fact Gide himself was troubled by his own instinctive reaction: “I often feel as if I were a horrible hypocrite; I have such an acute need for sympathy, I virtually melt into the other party. With complete sincerity, I adopt other people’s opinions and thus give them a misleading impression of agreement. I would inevitably disappoint my own side—if I had one.”[103]

  He suffered from an inability to say “No.” He wished to break with his Catholic friends, but felt hopelessly entangled in the nets of their kind concern. As the Tiny Lady reproached him for his irresolution, he finally exploded in frustration: “You must understand that I am full of weakness, I have no resistance to others, no resistance to any expression of sympathy. These people deprive me of all my resources, they rob me of my arguments, they prevent me from saying what I wish to say. I am bold and free only when I am in front of a sheet of blank paper.”[104]

  The written word was the last refuge of his sincerity: “I put all my integrity into my writing, whereas, when I deal with people, my only desire is that everything should go smoothly; probably it is simply that I wish to please, and this is obviously a sort of coquetry.”[105]

  The desire to please, the constant fear that he might disappoint other people’s expectations, made him nervous: “I smoke too much, out of nervousness; there are so few people with whom I can be completely natural! I am too tense, and I smoke to give myself some poise, to overcome my agitation.”[106] He was simple and unpretentious, but also very awkward. Yet dialogue remained for him the very essence of human life; he won over his interlocutors not only with his unassuming manners but, more importantly, by being an attentive listener.

  Whenever he had drafted a new piece of writing, or if he had made some mistake, he amazed his friends by the meekness and humility with which he would accept their criticism, however sharp and bruising. But his critics were soon to discover that, if he had yielded to their attacks and endorsed their suggestions, it was in order to mend the flaws in his original position, which, in the end, he would re-present in a form that was now impregnable.

  His receptivity and malleability were thus deceptive—and he was the first to acknowledge this fact: “By using sympathy, anyone can easily manipulate me. Previously, I warned Claudel, Beware, I am made of rubber. I agree with everything, as much as possible, and I would go to the very edge of insincerity—yet make no mistake: once alone, I revert to my original shape.”[107]

  The paradox is that, on the deepest level, he was perfectly blind to the point of view of others and radically unable to perceive glaring truths that had been before him all his life. The most tragic example of this incredible insensitivity can be found in the way he treated his wife, Madeleine: in the end, he managed to alienate—irreparably—the trust of the only person he truly loved.

  HERBART

  Gide’s enemies spread many calumnies about him during his life; these should naturally be ignored—and, anyway, they pale in comparison with the truths that his friends published after his death.

  The most penetrating psychological portrait of Gide was written by Pierre Herbart: À la recherche d’André Gide (1952). Herbart (1904–74) was the husband of the mother of Gide’s daughter (readers who feel confused by this little brain-twister might refer to the entry Daughter above; a diagram of the relationships within the Gidean “family” would rival in its complexity the lines of descent within the chimpanzee cage at the zoo).

  Herbart came from a prominent family of northern France, but carried a heavy hereditary burden. After sixteen years of apparently peaceful married life, his father had suddenly left home forever, without a cent in his pocket, become a vagrant and vanished. Some years later, the police asked the adolescent son to identify his dead body, lying in a ditch, by the side of a country road.

  The Tiny Lady developed a special affection for her son-in-law, and wrote a short sketch about him.[108] Pierre was enigmatic and attractive, whimsical and unpredictable, high-strung and indolent (“divinely lazy,” said the Tiny Lady—or just “plain lazy�
� according to Béatrix Beck, who looked at him with less indulgent eyes), violent and tender, harsh and kind, cynical and generous. Women found him irresistible—some men did too (though others, like Gallimard, who occasionally had to employ him, thought that he was “a whore”).[109]

  Gide first met the young man (who was twenty-three at the time) in Cocteau’s country house. Herbart was then an opium addict who, later on, became an alcoholic. Gide was impressed by his natural elegance and what he discerned to be “a sort of devilish genius, a frenzied quality—all the seductions from Hell.”[110] In order to help him overcome his addictions, Gide encouraged him to write and eventually persuaded Gallimard to publish his first novel. Subsequently, Gide introduced him to the mother of his daughter; they soon became lovers and married a few years later (Herbart was then twenty-eight, and Elisabeth Van Rysselberghe forty-one). In the early 1930s, Herbart became a communist sympathiser and an ardent propagandist for the Soviet Union; he was instrumental in attracting Gide into the fellow-travellers brotherhood. Together they visited the Soviet Union and shared the same disenchantment. After the war, Gide, who could not bear solitude, became more and more dependent upon Herbart, who acted as his confidant, secretary, adviser, agent, factotum and occasional driver; with him he knew he would not be bored and, in the end, he simply could not do without the young man’s company.

  Herbart was intuitive and had sharp psychological acumen. He was devoted to Gide, who repeatedly gave him generous financial support; he knew Gide on a familiar level of daily intimacy hardly equalled by any other friend.

  The inner core of the Gidean “family” was made up of the Tiny Lady, Herbart and Roger Martin du Gard. One day, in August 1940, as the trio were chatting together, Herbart gave his friends a first inkling of the original insight he had reached on the subject of Gide. The Tiny Lady recorded their exchange: