by Leys, Simon
I wish to reproduce in its main outline a conversation which we had one morning, Martin, Pierre and I, and during which Pierre was led to say something intriguing about Gide. We were talking about compassion—compassion as a symbol of Christianity. We were wondering if, as Hitler now seems intent on doing, it would ever be feasible to build a new world from which compassion would be excluded. Pierre said yes; Martin, no; we inquired whether compassion was already present in Antiquity, or whether it was a specific contribution of Christianity, whether it is a motivating force in art, etc., etc., when suddenly Pierre said, “I am going to make a point that runs against my own position—but it seems to me that it is this very sentiment that is missing in Gide’s works; had he got it, he would be the greatest, whereas now in fact he is merely one among the great.” With a somewhat mischievous smile, Martin asked, “Is he also lacking compassion in his life?” Pierre and I, we said simultaneously, “This is a much more complex question.” But Pierre pursued his idea: “My explanation for this lack may seem to you very flat. I believe that, in Gide’s case, it all comes down to a lack of virility.” Now we were treading on very delicate ground. As I feared that Pierre might not go to the bottom of the matter, I said, “On the subject of Gide, it would be very difficult not to confront clearly the sexual issue.” “Precisely,” Pierre said. “I believe that Gide’s sexuality has remained in an infantile state, while his sensitivity developed normally, and this imbalance had repercussions on his moral virility.” Martin’s eyebrows shot high up, he was agape, transfixed with attention. At this point, unfortunately, our conversation was interrupted.[111]
Twelve years later, in his À la recherche d’André Gide (which, by the way, was dedicated to Martin du Gard), Herbart was to pick up this broken thread. In his view, Gide’s deepest compulsion was to charm people and to win their sympathy; his obsessive fear was of disappointing their expectations; he was, therefore, totally dependent on others, his own self-esteem being conditioned by their approval. In this attitude, he betrayed his lack of “virility” and his absence of “morality.” Needless to say, both terms should not be understood in any narrow sense: Herbart himself was bisexual and, in his younger years, had led with cool shamelessness the life of a gigolo—unorthodox sexual practices and unconventional moral behaviour could not really shock him. What flabbergasted him, however, was Gide’s monstrous insensitivity—that, for instance, he had the cheek to complain that his long-suffering and saintly wife would not co-operate in procuring local boys to alleviate his sexual needs during his stays on their country estate![112]
Gide is “emasculated,” Herbart continues: one cannot trust his word, nor his loyalty, nor his discretion. He is amoral, not by a bold choice or as a challenge—but simply and literally because he is missing that particular sense. He can experience physical or aesthetic repulsion but rarely intellectual and never moral repulsion: his ignorance of morality is innate and invincible—he does not have the faintest awareness of what morality might mean.[113]
Gide’s inner world is characterised by an extreme spiritual poverty: the entire realm of human passion has remained a closed book to him. He has no great genius, no imagination, no original ideas. With him, style is everything: he picks up clichés and “Gidifies” them—giving them a form that is unique.[114]
His strength resides in his tireless curiosity, his absolute freedom, his uncompromising pursuit of excellence.[115] But he is utterly devoid of the tragic sense of life; he has no experience of pathos. Hence the weird feeling which often affects sensitive readers when they plunge into his works—and on this point, Herbart quotes a passage from Julien Green that is worth pondering, for, once again, this example carries particular weight. Green, though Gide’s junior by thirty years, was a friend who shared both his Protestant upbringing and his sexual orientation:
A short while ago, in a bookshop, I was browsing a reprint of Gide’s Journal. I have never read it in its entirety, but this time, reading a few pages convinced me, once again, that I shall never be able to pursue it to the end. Why? I don’t really know. Its style is exquisite, and every page is full to the brim with great intellectual riches; but in the same time as the book yields all that it can give, it also freezes the heart, and as one reads on, one feels left with less faith, with less hope, and (I say this with regret) with less love.[116]
On the subject of Gide, when reading Herbart—as well as Martin du Gard, for these two were Gide’s favourite friends[117]—one wonders, on what did their unquestionable attachment rest? Not on his works: in the inner Gidean circle, there were no disciples, and both Herbart and Martin have stated that no book of Gide ever had a significant impact upon them.[118] They simply cherished the man, Herbart says, yet he could also foresee that “The particular value which his life presented will, it seems to me, become unintelligible once those who witnessed it have all disappeared.”[119] Indeed.
LITERATURE
Literature was the very meaning of Gide’s life, its exclusive purpose.[120] He loved literature with a devotion that was admirable and touching. Reading was as essential to him as breathing; it was both a vital need and a constant joy. Often it was also a convivial celebration, a fervour which he shared with those whom he loved most. When he was with his wife in their Normandy estate, or with his friends in Paris, entire evenings were spent reading aloud to each other.[121]
Gide was a deliberate, slow and omnivorous reader. He was never without a book in his hand, or in his pocket, or at his bedside. He read in order to write; he drew all his writing out of himself, as one draws water from a well, and only an uninterrupted stream of reading could ensure that the well would not run dry.
In his approach to literature, besides the solid foundations that traditional French schooling provided to all children of the bourgeoisie, he was equipped only with his own voracious curiosity. His enjoyment of literature was never warped by the sterile games that academics play professionally—he never attended any university. He belonged (as Sheridan accurately observes[122]) to the vanishing breed of “common readers.” (E.M. Forster, who much admired him, was himself very Gidean when he wrote: “Study has a very solemn sound. I am studying Dante sounds much more than I am reading Dante. It is really much less.”) At the conclusion of a symposium on his beloved Montaigne, Gide’s characteristic contribution was simply to suggest with gentle irony that Montaigne would probably not have understood a word of what had just been said about him.
He was a good Latinist; from adolescence till death, Virgil’s Aeneid remained his most constant reading.[123] He had a loving familiarity with the French classics: Montaigne first and foremost, and also Pascal, Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, Bossuet, La Bruyère, Voltaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert. On Hugo, he was ambivalent: “Sometimes execrable, always prodigious.”[124] He ignored Dumas.[125]
What set him apart, however, was his openness to foreign literatures, which was exceptional for his time and in his milieu. He knew some German, a little Italian, and worked hard on his English. His command of foreign languages always remained shaky (“Honestly, as regards foreign languages, I am a hopeless case . . .”[126]) but his hunger for learning and discovery was impressive. He applied himself to read Goethe (one of his greatest cultural heroes) in the original, and he devoted years of strenuous work to Shakespeare, painstakingly translating Hamlet into French. Strangely enough, however, he eventually became quite disenchanted with the play: “Hamlet lacks artistry. I wish an Englishman could explain to me in what respect it is admirable. Reading it, I never feel that I am in front of something beautiful, which I would wish to transmit to others. It is muddled and amphigoric.”[127] Actually, on the subject of Shakespeare, his evolution—from admiration to prejudice—very much duplicated that of Voltaire, and he came to some curious conclusions: “I deny that there are any human teachings to be derived from his plays; his most sublime lines are in fact utterly banal, his psychology conventional. Generally speaking, theatrical plays always give me this impression, with
the sole exception of Racine.”[128] And again: “The English are irritating with their habit of always praising Shakespeare without reservation.”[129] He found As You Like It “completely devoid of charm.”[130] Immediately after the war he had the chance to watch Richard III, staged in Paris by the Old Vic; he confessed he could not understand a word of it.[131] At the very end of his life he saw King Lear in Laurence Olivier’s interpretation. The Tiny Lady reported: “Gide was utterly disappointed by the play; he thinks it is one of Shakespeare’s weakest works, without any psychological interest, quite boring in fact.”[132]
He also expressed some other puzzling value judgements; for instance, he found Samuel Butler’s Erewhon much superior to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and he could not understand the popularity of the latter.[133]
He loved Browning’s poetry. George Eliot’s Middlemarch elicited his enthusiasm; as for Jane Austen, he found her novels extraordinarily well crafted, but with “a somewhat low-alcohol content.” Henry James was a disappointment: “a mere socialite” (un auteur de salon): “his characters live only in their heads, they have nothing below the shoulders.”[134] He was bored by The Ambassadors and could not finish it: “His manner reminds me of Proust, but, unlike Proust, it is dreary, and most of all, it lacks efficacy.”[135] He read most of Thomas Hardy’s novels; The Mayor of Casterbridge was his favourite.[136] Joyce’s Ulysses was “needlessly long; in the end, it will remain only as a sort of monster.”[137]
Claudel made him discover Conrad’s novels, the reading of which gave him the desire to meet the author. He visited Conrad several times in England and developed a deep affection for him.[138] Gide loved Lord Jim: “One of the most beautiful books I have ever read, and also one of the saddest, and yet utterly soul-stirring,”[139] and he translated Typhoon. This translation was made with loving care, yet the result is odd: the style is pure Gide, with all his syntactical mannerisms and it is rife, not exactly with blunders (Gide was too conscientious and circumspect for that), but with omissions and inaccuracies that constantly betray his uncertain grasp of the language of the original.
After Conrad’s death, Gide wrote a short but warm essay in his memory, concluding: “No one ever led such a wild existence; and afterwards, no one was ever able, like him, to submit life to such a patient, deliberate and sophisticated transmutation into art.”[140] Still, for all the praise and friendship he lavished on Conrad, one wonders to what extent he understood either the man or the artist. He was bored by Nostromo and abandoned it; nor could he finish The Secret Agent.[141] His total lack of interest in these two prophetic works suggests an incomprehension that ran deeper than an inability to appreciate Conrad; it makes one doubt that he really understood the twentieth century. In later years, he even revised his earlier admiration and sadly came to the conclusion: “As regards Conrad, I cannot rank the writer as highly as I used to; yet, as I loved the man very much, it pains me to acknowledge this.”[142]
Russian literature occupied an important place in his reading, Dostoevsky above all, and also Chekhov. He disliked Tolstoy and this was often a bone of contention with Martin du Gard, for whom Tolstoy was God. It is always interesting to explore the dislikes of an artist—sometimes they define his mind more sharply than his predilections would.[143] “I keep reading War and Peace, and the further I go, the more I dislike it. Of course, Tolstoy’s direct observation of life is prodigious. In contrast, whenever Dostoevsky reports a conversation, one always feels that no one, anywhere, ever spoke in such a manner—whereas with Tolstoy, one’s reaction is always to say: How true! But Tolstoy’s dialogue, however lifelike, is nearly always devoid of interest. It is full of absurd platitudes . . . For me, everything in Tolstoy is uncongenial, down to the even light that bathes with the same indifference a Napoleonic battle and Natasha’s needlework.”[144] “In Tolstoy, the light is implacably even, there are no shades. Compared with Dostoevsky, it is as if you were to put a painting by Detaille next to a Rembrandt.”[145] (Talking to Martin du Gard:) “You are on the side of Tolstoy. As for me, I am—or at least I wish to be—on the side of Dostoevsky . . . Tolstoy is a wonderful witness, but for me, this is not enough. His scrutiny always bears upon the more general aspects of man—I may say, what constitutes common humanity, what is in all of us, what we share with all other people. He shows me what I already know—more or less—what I could have found by myself with a little attention. He never offers any surprise . . . Whereas Dostoevsky, ah! He always amazes me. He always reveals new things, things I had never suspected to exist: the unseen . . .”[146]
He also followed, to some extent, contemporary developments in German literature. He professed public admiration for Thomas Mann, but confessed private boredom: “Zauberberg is an important book, quite masterly, but German novels are always such a vide-poches: they really pour everything into it.”[147] (Here, Gide seems to be unwittingly joining Claudel, who held that the key metaphor with which to interpret the diverse manifestations of German culture was the sausage.[148])
Gide followed closely the French literary life of his time. Usually, writers are notoriously mean to each other; rivalries, backstabbing, jealousy are all too common among them. Gide’s little circle, however, was remarkably free of these poisonous practices. The three friends—Schlumberger, Martin du Gard and Gide himself—always read out their new works to each other; they exchanged critical comments; the frankness of these could be blunt and ruthless at times, and yet they were invariably received in a spirit of unshakeable friendship.[149] And what is even more remarkable, they derived genuine delight from the successes of their friends.[150] Naturally enough, Gide did experience a mischievous pleasure when he saw his old antagonist Paul Claudel being humiliatingly rebuffed by the Académie Française (his candidacy had been defeated by a very mediocre competitor). Not without humour, he honestly acknowledged his private resentment of the overwhelming poet: “In front of Claudel, I am only aware of my own failings: he is awesome, he is overpowering, he has more breadth, more weight, more health, more money, more genius, more power, more children, more faith, etc., than I; I can only meekly listen to him.”[151] Gide had watched with glee what he deemed to have been a disastrous staging of Claudel’s theatrical masterpiece Le Soulier de satin—and yet, in the end, his own love of literature had the last word. The Tiny Lady described how, a year before his death, he came one night to the dinner table with a copy of Claudel’s play in his hand: “God knows how much I normally dislike this sort of stuff, but I just opened the book at random and came upon this passage—it is truly, absolutely admirable!” For him, the Tiny Lady concluded, the literary excellence of a work always swept away all other considerations: “How I love to see this aspect of his character; it reminds me of what Flaubert said: ‘Aesthetics is but a superior form of justice.’”[152]
All his life, he regretted having once—briefly, but glaringly—failed to uphold this “superior form of justice” when he overlooked Proust’s manuscript of the first part of À la recherche du temps perdu. Although he personally took the blame for this error—and never forgave himself—it seems in fact that the decision to reject Proust’s masterpiece was taken by Schlumberger (who remained largely unrepentant).[153] Eventually Gide made up for his earlier blunder by writing (in 1921) a sensitive and generous essay on Proust.[154] His private comments on Proust, as recorded over the years by the Tiny Lady, do nevertheless reflect curious contradictions—enthusiasm alternating with irritation.[155]
He paid much attention to younger writers. For instance, he felt genuine affection for Malraux; he admired his ebullient intelligence and his passion for heroic activism, but rightly judged that he was not a good writer. From the start, he perceived the exceptional brilliance of Sartre, whom he befriended—though he was disappointed (with good reason) by Sartre’s later novels. He extolled the merits of Simenon (“perhaps our greatest novelist”) at a time when the literati still affected to despise this all-too-successful and prolific author of commercial thrillers. More im
portantly, he discovered the poet Henri Michaux; he sought out both men personally and extended his friendship to them. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, one may feel that he overestimated the achievement of Simenon (in whom he appreciated all the things which he himself most cruelly lacked: a creative imagination, the sense of reality, experience of life[156]); and though he detected the deep originality of Michaux, he never really took the full measure of his genius. Nevertheless, in both cases he displayed qualities of perception and generosity that were truly admirable.
Gide believed that he and his great contemporaries, Valéry (his old friend) and Claudel (his intimate enemy) would eventually be recognised by posterity as having formed “a single team”—not simply because they belonged to the same era, but more deeply because “they had all shared the more or less secret influence of Mallarmé.”[157] In fact, the literary affinities of the members of “the team” are questionable, but what is certainly worth pondering is Gide’s acknowledgement of Mallarmé’s influence, which, in his own case at least, was profound and long-lasting. (Actually, instead of subtitling his biography of Gide A Life in the Present, Sheridan could have called it more appropriately The Last Writer of the Nineteenth Century.)
In Gide’s case, the Mallarmean inheritance found expression in the absolute primacy he gave to form and style over all other concerns. On this point, Gide’s literary aesthetics never wavered: as early as 1910, in an essay on Baudelaire, he stated: “In art, where expression alone matters, ideas appear young for only a day . . . Today, if Baudelaire still lives on, it is thanks to his formal perfection. No artist ever relied upon anything else to reach posterity.”[158] This notion acquired ever-greater importance for him with the passing of the years, and in old age, it reigned supreme in all his writings—sometimes to the dismay of his closest friends, who deplored the facility with which he would too often content himself with lieux communs, banal ideas, clichés and platitudes, so long as he could dress them up in exquisite Gidean garb.[159]
