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

by Leys, Simon

  From the beginning, Schlumberger marvelled that “without having had any sort of prior information on the subject, he had a sudden illumination just after reading one or two books on the Five-Year Plan. The lack of nuances, of scepticism, with which he rushes enthusiastically in this new direction confirms once again that, at heart, he is still a perpetual adolescent. Yet, for a man of sixty-one, who had previously displayed so much critical acumen, this sort of primitive fervour is rather embarrassing.”[183]

  Shortly after Gide’s spectacular disenchantment with communism and the extraordinary success of his book Retour de l’URSS, Martin du Gard re-read the book. He was not favourably impressed and noted in his own Journal:

  In the end, what sort of contribution does this book offer? One more description of the non-existence of free speech and free thought in Russia. We already knew all that without having had to go there. And these things have already been said a hundred times, with more solid arguments and stronger documentation. Wonderful innocence! Which makes me love him even more—but this is not reason enough to extol his book . . . Its only value is that it provides further confirmation of his good faith. But this is a consideration that can only concern his admirers and his friends. Otherwise, this book will do him no good. Not immediately, perhaps, but later on.[184]

  Gide’s second great historical test came with the Nazi invasion of France. This time, luckily for him, his performance was not displayed to the public: the vigilant concern of his entourage ensured that his dismal vacillations remained strictly private. But his good friends had ample cause for concern, as indicated in the daily records of the Tiny Lady. For instance, in October 1940, having taken refuge in the South of France, he began to toy with the idea of returning to occupied Paris, to resume the activities of the Nouvelle Revue Française; a young German officer had written him a nice letter, leading him to believe that he would be ideally qualified to negotiate with the German authorities! The Tiny Lady had to warn him against the imprudence of such a plan.[185]

  After the Pétain–Hitler meeting that paved the way for French collaboration with the Nazis, the Tiny Lady was flabbergasted by Gide’s attitude: “It is strange that, on this issue, his reactions remain weak and uncertain. He spontaneously inclines towards this type of view: ‘Anyway, since we have lost, why resist?’”[186]

  In November 1940, Gide told her that he had “read with tremendous interest a page by Renan: ‘World government, should it ever take place, would probably suit best the German genius’—and he went on: ‘Naturally I wholeheartedly wish for a British victory—I cannot do otherwise—and yet, at times, I cannot help thinking that this may not be the best way out of the predicament the world is now facing. Who knows? We are perhaps not being fair to Hitler when we refuse to believe that his ultimate dream could be world harmony.’”[187]

  In 1941, the indecisiveness, volatility and confusion of his political opinions caused Martin du Gard increasing concern: “Our old friend is less and less capable of steering his own boat. I have the feeling that he has lost his compass and allows the stronger winds to determine his course. There is an element of senile childishness in his attitude.”[188]

  In the end, his salvation came by pure accident. In 1942, he went to North Africa on a visit, but the military operations there left him stranded on the other side of the Mediterranean for the remainder of the war—safely out of political trouble. He made only one feeble attempt at commenting on current affairs, in an article published after the liberation of Paris. It did not have any impact, but Schlumberger read it with consternation: “It is full of worn-out clichés and reflects the naïveté of a man completely out of touch with the movement of ideas. He even has one unfortunate phrase on ‘the immense and glorious Russia,’ as if he were trying to forget his Retour de l’URSS.”[189]

  In 1950, “the senile childishness” which Martin had already detected ten years earlier grew to disturbing proportions. One day, for instance, he agreed on the telephone to sign a manifesto—without knowing what the issue was (it concerned the admission of communist China into the United Nations). He cried out to his friends: “I understand absolutely nothing, I have no idea what the matter in question was!” The Tiny Lady concluded with despair: “This small anecdote is typical of his behaviour: ever more vague, unjustifiable, changing, illogical; he was already like that in the small things of life; what would you expect him to do now regarding the fate of Europe!”[190]

  His friends loved him dearly; nevertheless, when he finally died, they breathed a sigh of relief. “He was less and less able to control his own actions; we were living in permanent fear of what the next day would bring. His exemplary death (honestly prepared for, but helped by a set of favourable circumstances) provided a majestic cover-up for everything. It came not a minute too soon!”[191]

  SEXUALITY

  Gide repeatedly confessed his puzzlement: “I shall die without having understood anything—or so little—of the physiology of my own body.” Or again: “I grow old without any hope of ever knowing my own body.”[192] One day, he explained to Martin du Gard with detached objectivity the physiological details of his sexuality.[193] In his own opinion, his condition was abnormal: “a physiological paradox,” “a pathological case.”

  Yet, another time, he also confided to Martin his indignation and sorrow at often being accused of corrupting the young: “How unfair! How could it be perverse to initiate young people into sensual pleasure?” And he explained at great length that his role was always, first and foremost, that of a patient educator: “Nothing, during the troubled years of adolescence, can replace the beneficial influence of a liaison—sensual, intellectual and moral—with an elderly guide, worthy of trust and love.”[194] This is the theme he had developed in Corydon, but it had limited relevance to his own practices, for, in fact, what he called his “adventures” usually involved children, street kids, hotel grooms, little Arab beggars, diverse defenceless little wretches, furtively, in conditions that certainly left neither time nor space for any form of enlightened communication. The Tiny Lady observed: “One could not emphasise enough how odd his temperament is. His sensuality is so deep, so demanding, so tyrannical, ruling an entire part of his life—and yet it reaches its fulfilment so easily, so lightly, so quickly . . . It is bizarre to the point of defying belief. Seeing how devious he can be in order to attain the object of his desire, people naturally misjudge him, and they assume that he must be depraved in that same proportion. On the other hand, one can easily imagine what sort of fallacious pretexts he has to invent in order to justify his insinuating and hypocritical manoeuvres, when one considers how incredibly harmless are the actual activities in which they eventuate. It seems to me that these particular sexual dispositions are an important key for understanding Gide.”[195]

  Eventually, the way in which he became a slave to his mania distressed even the friends who had originally shared his inclinations. Schlumberger concluded: “During his life, Gide’s concern was to win respect for homosexuals; yet, because of his particular obsessions, in the end, he succeeded only in bringing discredit to their cause.”[196]

  Still, any person who happens to believe in the Christian faith that was originally Gide’s would be ill-qualified to censure his infirmities; for the fact is that we all belong to a fallen species; to varying degrees, innocence escapes us; one way or the other, we are all cripples. In Gide’s case, the contrast—extreme and tragic—between, on the one hand, the splendour of his intelligence and culture, the nobility of a mind open to all humanistic endeavours, and on the other, the grotesque and gruesome tyranny of his obsessions, is heart-breaking and should inspire compassion.

  Yet, how can compassion be extended when its very need is being strenuously denied? For, after all, the real problem did not lie in Gide’s sexuality but in his tortuous relation to truth.*[197]

  THE TINY LADY, MARIA VAN RYSSELBERGHE (1867–1959)

  As her familiar nickname indicates, “la Petite Dame” was of dimin
utive stature. Her various portraits—painted by her husband, Théo Van Rysselberghe (1862–1926), and by another Belgian artist, Fernand Khnopff (1851–1921)—all reflect her vivacious and bewitching grace. Born and educated in Belgium like Théo himself, she followed him to France, where they settled in 1898. Théo, who had shown great talent at the beginning of his career, working in a free and robust style very similar to that of his schoolmate, James Ensor, eventually fell under the influence of Seurat and Signac; his art turned into a dogmatic and dreary application of the Pointillist formula and, unfortunately, did not live up to its earlier promise.

  Théo loved his wife, but he seems to have been somewhat bewildered by her liberated behaviour. Maria had genuine affection for her husband; she considered him a good companion, but her own sentimental life developed in tranquil breach of all conventions. She refused to conform both to bourgeois order and to Bohemian disorder.

  In 1896, she fell madly in love—for one season—with the great poet Verhaeren. This intense passion—which was reciprocated, but never consummated—was transposed by her, forty years later, into a short memoir, which is a pure and haunting masterpiece of narrative prose (Il y a quarante ans). Later on, she also had a liaison with the wife of a wealthy industrialist from Luxemburg; it was originally for the private enjoyment of her female friend that she began to write the chronicle of her years with Gide.

  She first met Gide (who was a friend of Théo) at the end of the nineteenth century. As she was to recall: “He was then around the age of thirty . . . He was exceptionally attractive, his charm was overwhelming; most of all he had a deep originality: on no subject did he ever think like anyone else, not out of a taste for paradox, but simply because his vision was naturally new.”[198]

  Over the years, Maria and Gide developed for one another an attachment that was singularly harmonious; their personalities were utterly dissimilar, but they shared the same passion for culture, the same hunger for books and ideas. Their odd intimacy was further strengthened when Maria—through her daughter Elisabeth—became the grandmother of Gide’s daughter,* to the distress of poor Théo, who had only a dim awareness of who the father of his daughter’s child might actually be.

  Shortly after Théo’s death, Maria and Gide made arrangements that enabled them to spend the rest of their lives not exactly together, but side by side. They eventually moved into twin apartments, enjoying each other’s company, while retaining their parallel freedoms. This situation was to last until Gide’s death.

  Their relations were a curious mixture of formality and closeness. For instance, Maria noted, seven years after they had settled into their joined existences: “Gide addressed me as ‘old chap’ [mon vieux]; it is the first time that such a thing has happened to him. He apologised at once.”[199] But in the end they became very much like many old couples: indestructibly linked by a long habit, made of deep affection—and of many small irritations.

  Together with Martin du Gard and Herbart, the Tiny Lady formed the triumvirate that endeavoured to steer with vigilant solicitude Gide’s erratic course in his later years. As she was closest to him, she played the most important role. Her intelligence, culture and sound critical judgement had turned her into an invaluable reader and literary adviser for Gide. Besides, her feminine common sense and sang-froid made her indispensable in the handling and resolution of all the practical problems of everyday life—at which Gide was uniformly inept. And she even, in the final years, performed for him—with the cool detachment of a professional nurse—some services of a more intimate nature, “when no Annamite young boy could be found in the street.”[200]

  Her privileged position as Gide’s companion put her at the very centre of the literary life of her time. Yet she always preserved her privacy. She wrote well, but she published only one small book, under the impenetrable and sexless pen-name of M. Saint-Clair, the key of which was known only to half a dozen old friends. Her great task—keeping a record of Gide’s daily life and fire-side conversation—was pursued in secrecy, with only one private reader in mind, and its publication was posthumous. Her Cahiers de la Petite Dame is truly unique—both familiar in its perspective, and monumental in its scope. There are very few great writers about whom we possess such vivid, detailed and perceptive information. Unlike Eckermann, who was excessively in awe of Goethe and inhibited by a humourless awareness of his own humility, and unlike Boswell, who, after all, was only able to spend a rather limited time in Johnson’s company, she witnessed the private life of Gide over thirty years, and although she admired him and believed in his genius, her intelligence and wit could easily match his, and being a couple of years his senior, she treated him as her equal. She observed him with inexhaustible interest—and perhaps also with a sort of detached and undemanding love; yet she always remained clear-sighted in the face of his foibles, his evasions, his manias and his self-deceptions. Her record was thorough and honest, frank yet discreet; as she explained to Schlumberger, “she never modified any of the things she knew, but there were things which she chose not to know.”[201] After the death of Gide, concluding her great chronicle, she simply reflected: “How beautiful it was to live at his side! . . . I am parting from us with pain, and my soul thanks his memory.”[202]

  But what is most remarkable for such a strong personality and articulate diarist is that she succeeded in erasing virtually all traces of her own passage through life. In this sense, in her very invisibility, she achieved a superior form of liberty. Unlike Gide, she carried no psychological traumas from childhood, no hangovers from traditional morality; she did not harbour the slightest concern for fame, she did not wish to project any image, she was indifferent to public opinion and to posterity. Béatrix Beck was right: in her very freedom, she was much more Gidean than Gide himself.[203]

  TRUTH

  Sheridan observed that “the heritage of Gide’s Protestantism was that he hated lies . . . His cult of sincerity was untypically French, undoubtedly inherited from his Huguenot forebears.”[204]

  Gide loved truth from his early years. He eventually abandoned the faith of his childhood (a forsaking that was not achieved without painful and dramatic turns), but he retained until death a passionate need for self-justification.

  “Lying” haunted his imagination as a worthy topic for tragedy. He explained to Schlumberger: “Believe me, nothing can be as dramatic as the destruction of a mind through lying—be it self-deception or hypocrisy . . . If I were still in the habit of praying, I would pray without ceasing: My God, preserve me from lying!”[205] Some of the characters in his fiction were odious to him, but he knew them from the inside, and he painted them with such understanding that—to his dismay—many critics interpreted them as projections of himself. Thus Gide commented on Edouard—a character in Les Faux-monnayeurs, often seen as a mouthpiece for the author: “He is the archetype of the impotent, both as a writer and as a lover . . . He constantly lies to himself in his Journal, like the pastor in La Symphonie Pastorale. It is the same problem . . . What fascinates me above all else is this self-deception.”[206]

  Once, his friend the philosopher Groethuysen was talking to him about the psychology of “the ambiguous person” (l’être louche), whom he defined as “a man who never manages to transform lies into his own truth, and who constantly shifts his stand.” Gide replied: “It would be fun to create such a character, but if I were to write it, people would once again say that I was painting my own portrait.”[207]

  From his own direct observation, Herbart concluded: “For Gide, lies are as attractive as the truth.”[208] With more subtlety, the Tiny Lady pinpointed the invisible confusion that enabled Gide to reconcile the two at the end of his life: “His commitment to sincerity is stronger than ever, but sincerity does not necessarily coincide with truth.”[209]

  The queasiness (so hard to describe, yet so intensely felt) that readers as different as Flannery O’Connor and Julien Green experienced when confronted with Gide is obviously related to a deeper issue (in nei
ther case was it a question of being shocked by his sexual proclivities: Green himself was homosexual, and O’Connor was shock-proof). Saint Augustine—probably the very first modern psychologist—identified it 1,600 years ago:

  People have such a love for truth that when they happen to love something else, they want it to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be proven wrong, they refuse to be shown their mistake. And so, they end up hating the truth for the sake of the object which they have come to love instead of the truth.[210]