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

by Leys, Simon

  37. This was noted by several critics and connoisseurs. For instance: “André lacks a gift that is essential for any genuine novelist: he is unable to tolerate boredom. As soon as some acquaintance turns stale, he loses all curiosity in him. It is the same with the characters in his novels: generally speaking, somewhere around page 150, his creatures cease to interest him—and then he quickly rushes a slap-dash ending.” (Jacques Copeau, quoted in Martin, p. 30.)

  38. PD 1, p. 371.

  39. PD 2, p. 425.

  40. On the coffee issue (choice between regular or decaffeinated), once, as orders were to be taken to the kitchen ahead of serving, Gide finding himself suddenly confronted with a decision in advance cried out in despair: ‘You are robbing me of my possibilities of hesitation!’ (PD 4, p. 98.)

  41. B. Beck, Preface to M. Saint-Clair: Il y a quarante ans (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. iv. (“M. Saint-Clair” was the pen-name of Maria Van Rysselberghe.)

  42. “Le chemin droit, dit Gide, ne mène jamais qu’au but.” (M. Saint-Clair, op. cit., “Galerie privée,” p. 171.)

  43. Martin, p. 119; PD 3, p. 18: “Je ne m’habitue pas à ce que Pierre (Herbart) appelle si justement la marche en crochet de son esprit, à ses reactions à retardement qui laissent toujours les autres s’engager avec le sentiment de son approbation.”

  44. “[Gide said:] ‘I always found it more beneficial to refuse problems in my life.’ As if this were possible!, I thought . . . But it is true, he always refuses to face problems in any clear-cut fashion, and that is how he is able to reach several solutions that are in contradiction with each other.” (PD 4, p. 132.)

  45. PD 4, p. 103.

  46. Martin, p. 113–14.

  47. PD 4, p. 149.

  48. PD 1, p. 205.

  49. Gide asked the Tiny Lady what he should think of Faulkner’s Light in August (a French translation of which had just appeared). (PD 4, p. 202). Gide had just finished reading the new novel of Sartre, La Mort dans l’âme; the Tiny Lady asks: “What do you think of it?—I am waiting for you to read it, in order to know!” She reflected for herself: “I don’t like this kind of responsibility.” (PD 4, p. 187.)

  50. PD 4, p. 41.

  51. Gide, draft preface to a translation of Nourritures terrestres. This text was discarded by Gide, but the Tiny Lady preserved some fragments—see PD 2, p. 70. See also here below, art. Proteus.

  52. PD 4, pp. 20, 37.

  53. Schlum., p. 316.

  54. Martin, pp. 32–3.

  55. Herbart, p. 67.

  56. PD 2, p. 534.

  57. Martin, pp. 45, 46.

  58. PD 1, p. 12.

  59. Schlum., p. 132.

  60. Boswell, Life of Johnson (entry of 31 March 1772): “A question started, whether the state of marriage was natural to man. JOHNSON: Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.”

  61. Sheridan, pp. 377–8.

  62. Ibid. Also Gide, Journal 1, p. 671. It should be remarked that Gide himself had, to some extent, such an attitude towards Proust. Both met only on very few occasions—each time talking for hours about homosexuality. In this particular area, Gide seems to have been both fascinated and repelled by Proust’s idiosyncrasies.

  63. Even in the eyes of righteous men of Antiquity, did pederasty ever present such a lofty moral character? One may wonder. Otherwise, what sense should be made (for example) of the passage where Marcus Aurelius, praising the many virtues of his adoptive father, Emperor Antoninus Pius, especially mentions “the efforts he made to suppress pederasty”? (Meditations [Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics], Book I, 16, p. 40).

  64. Sheridan largely evades this issue, which he dispatches in one mere paragraph, p. 377.

  65. Sheridan, p. 335; PD 1, p. 44.

  66. Sheridan, p. 294; PD 1, p. 150.

  67. Sheridan, p. 356; PD 1, p. 151.

  68. PD 2, p. 156.

  69. Journal 2, p. 796 (1 January 1942).

  70. Sheridan, p. 551.

  71. PD 3, p. 269.

  72. R. Martin du Gard, Journal 3, pp. 403–4.

  73. PD 3, p. 250.

  74. PD 3, p. 267.

  75. PD 3, p. 307.

  76. PD 3, p. 24.

  77. PD 4, p. 79.

  78. PD 4, p. 53.

  79. Beck, p. 51.

  80. Martin, pp. 18–19.

  81. Schlum., p. 75.

  82. Sheridan, p. 288; quotes from Journal 1, pp. 530, 531, 560, 572, 573.

  83. PD 3, p. 303. Also quoted by Malraux (with a slight variant: “… religion et pédérastie”) in his preface to PD 1, p. xx. In 1950, barely one year before Gide’s death, the Tiny Lady noted once again: “As Gide told me nearly fifty years ago, what interests him most is Christianity and pederasty.” This had not changed. (PD 4, p. 190.)

  84. Sheridan, p. 438.

  85. Schlum., p. 289, also p. 192.

  86. PD 2, p. 437; Sheridan, p. 606. Note that, on the Catholic side, there was no unanimity on this subject. For instance, Georges Bernanos, whose genius was inspired by a profound spirituality, dissociated himself from these anathemas: “I cannot share the rather crude views of Claudel and Massis who believe that Gide is possessed by the devil.” And he proclaimed publicly his admiration for Gide: “a great writer, one of the greatest in our literature”—while reserving his most ferocious barbs for his co-religionist Claudel: “J’avouerais volontiers que la disproportion de l’homme à l’oeuvre, de l’héritier spiritual de Rimbaud à ce Champenois roublard qui ajoute chaque année un galon de plus à sa casquette, donne l’idée de je ne sais quelle truculente imposture.” (See J. Bothorel: Bernanos, le mal-pensant [Paris: Grasset, 1998], pp. 118, 161.) On this issue, Francois Mauriac’s numerous comments are of particular interest. His position was more complex: unlike Bernanos, he knew Gide personally, and unlike Claudel, he retained affection and sympathy for Gide. (Mauriac was a repressed homosexual.) His assessment of the question, however, it is disturbing: “During my life, I had, if not the evidence, at least the feeling that Evil is really and substantially a person. Some individuals who I knew were great sinners did not at all convey to me the impression that they might be possessed, whereas in some others whose life was apparently less dissolute, I felt that sort of presence. Certain lives which I was able to observe over a fairly long period of time, appeared to me as if bathed in a weird and murky light . . . There are people who had to struggle all their lives against a presence which they themselves unhesitatingly identified. I shall only mention one of them—since he himself mentioned it publicly and repeatedly: André Gide, whose example is all the more striking in that, towards the end of his life, it seemed that he could no more speak of the devil without turning it into a joke. And yet, it would appear that, earlier on, he never doubted, not that he was possessed by the devil, but at least that he had to deal with him directly . . .” Mauriac quotes two passages from Gide; the first one, from Si le grain ne meurt: “I recently realised that an important actor in this drama might well have been the devil. At first I will tell it without taking into account the participation of this protagonist, whom I came to identify only long afterwards.” The second passage is from Journal des Faux-monnayeurs: “Certain days, I discover in me such an invasion of evil, that it feels as if the Prince of Darkness had already established Hell within myself.” (F. Mauriac: Oeuvres autobiographiques, Pléiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1990], “Ce que je crois,” chap. VII, pp. 608–9.)

  87. PD 2, p. 432. Gide learned this witticism from his German friend Curtius, who once quoted it to him in 1935, when describing his life in Nazi Germany.

  88. Schlum., pp. 15–16.

  89. “Numquid et tu,” Journal 1, p. 588. The incident at the funeral is described in Schlum., p. 345 and Sheridan, pp. 617–18.

  90. Letter to F.-P. Alibert, quoted by S
chlumberger: Madeleine et André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), p. 171. Ménalque, Alissa and Lafcadio are characters in his books—respectively: Les Nourritures terrestres, La Porte étroite and Les Caves du Vatican.

  91. Journal 1, p. 37 (3 June 1893).

  92. Journal 2, p. 1,066 (3 September 1948).

  93. Beck, p. 167.

  94. Hélène, the neurotic and aggressive wife of R. Martin du Gard. She felt an acute revulsion towards Gide: sometimes, his mere presence made her physically ill.

  95. PD 3, pp. 49–50, 58.

  96. PD 4, p. 119.

  97. Journal 1, p. 1,325.

  98. Journal 1, p. 1,271.

  99. PD 3, p. 38.

  100. Journal 2, p. 663.

  101. PD 4, p. 17.

  102. Schlum., pp. 187, 188.

  103. PD 1, p. 31.

  104. PD 1, p. 408.

  105. PD 3, p. 111.

  106. PD 2, p. 17.

  107. Journal 2, p. 825.

  108. See M. Saint-Clair: “Galerie privée,” in Il y a quarante ans, pp. 169–71.

  109. Schlum., p. 369.

  110. PD 2, pp. 150, 152–3, 156.

  111. PD 3, p. 187.

  112. “He said to an intimate acquaintance: ‘What a wonderful role my wife could have played for me, if only she had agreed to!—Which role?—Well, she could have helped me to attract children into our house.’” (Herbart, pp. 38–9).

  113. Herbart, pp. 35, 40.

  114. Herbart, pp. 52–3. The last point is also made by R. Martin du Gard (Martin, p. 121).

  115. Herbart, p. 75.

  116. Julien Green: Journal—1946–1950 (entry of 15 June 1948), quoted in Herbart, p. 52.

  117. “I am sure these two are the friends whom Gide likes most.” (PD 4, p. 145).

  118. Herbart, pp. 9–10; “I belong to a generation for whom Les Nourritures terrestres was indifferent . . . I felt that Gide was merely charging through open doors.” And Martin, p. 139: “It is a fact: not one book of Gide ever became for me one of these livres de chevet which mould unconsciously one’s personality through long and constant acquaintance. Tolstoy, yes. Chekhov, Ibsen, George Eliot, yes. And some others too. But Gide, no. Not even his Nourritures, not even his Journal.”

  119. Herbart, pp. 69–70.

  120. Music also occupied a significant place in his life; over prolonged periods of time, he would spend many hours a day at his piano—and even, during his various stays abroad, in Italy or in North Africa, securing the daily use of a good piano was always an important concern of his. But he confessed to the Tiny Lady that he was not naturally a musician: “I make do with intelligence and culture, as a substitute for innate talent.” (PD 1, p. 262.) Bach and Chopin seem to have inspired him most. Regarding Chopin, in particular, he was deeply dissatisfied with most of the great interpretations of his time, and he developed his own theories on the subject. His Notes sur Chopin, published in 1939 and 1948, were unfortunately not included in the 1999 Pléiade volume of Essais critiques. (The Notes were at last reissued by Gallimard in 2010.)

  He had no original taste in painting: “Painting did not interest me naturally; my interest for painting is a mere consequence of culture” (PD 2, p. 427). Once, on learning that an important retrospective exhibition of Degas had already concluded, Gide exclaimed with spontaneous relief: “Good! We won’t need to visit it!” (PD 3, p. 14.) This cri du coeur is revealing: looking at painting seems to have been for him more a sort of cultural obligation than a natural enjoyment. Still, he wrote an essay on Poussin (also missing from the otherwise excellent edition of Essais critiques). In his Journal, references to painters are rare, but some are quite shrewd—like this one, for example, on Delacroix: “Neither in his writing nor in his painting does he succeed in getting really close to his inner self—as Baudelaire, Stendhal or Chopin could all do; and yet he knew how to appreciate these artists.” (Journal 2, p. 311.) Other entries are downright frustrating: for instance, he noted having met Vuillard and Vallotton in the Louvre (Journal 1, p. 119)—but he did not record what they said and what they saw. (Then why bother mentioning such a meeting? This is pointless name-dropping!)

  121. They read classics, poetry, essays, novels, in French and sometimes in English—the range and diversity of these readings were formidable. For instance, Gide wrote (in a letter to Dorothy Bussy, 19 November 1918): “On the advice of Mme. (Edith) Wharton, my wife and I are reading aloud Two Years Before the Mast by Dana . . . Do you know it? Rather special, but fascinating.” (I would confidently bet that no other member of the French literary elite of the time would even have known the name of this great American classic.)

  122. Sheridan, p. 411.

  123. As a young man, he wrote down various resolutions for self-improvement (one is reminded of Great Gatsby!), and these already included “devout reading of Virgil” (see Journal 1, p. 48). At the end of his life, his love for Virgil (and also for Ovid’s Metamorphoses) had intensified (see PD 3, pp. 324, 328). In 1947, visiting Germany, he found himself—for the first time in four years—without his copy of Aeneid: he immediately purchased a new one. At about the same time, Martin du Gard described him “walking in the streets at night, and stopping under lamp-posts to pursue the reading of his pocket edition of Virgil.” (See Martin du Gard, Journal 3, p. 810.)

  124. PD 1, p. 50.

  125. PD 2, p. 561; PD 3, p. 166.

  126. PD 3, p. 364.

  127. PD 1, p. 137.

  128. PD 2, p. 43.

  129. PD 1, p. 143.

  130. PD 2, p. 416.

  131. PD 3, p. 364.

  132. PD 4, p. 52.

  133. PD 1, p. 202.

  134. PD 1, p. 169; ibid. p. 45.

  135. PD 4, p. 215.

  136. Journal 2, pp. 912–13.

  137. PD 2, p. 51.

  138. After his 1913 visit, Gide told Schlumberger: “I wish I could do something for Joseph Conrad. It is revolting to see him in his present situation. I just spent three days with him, and I have a very great affection for him. His books are not obtaining the attention they deserve: he can hardly live from his pen . . . When I see the sort of success enjoyed by a man like [Arnold] Bennett, in comparison with Conrad’s poverty, I am overcome with indignation. And on top of all that, Conrad feels tired, worn out. ‘Sometimes,’ he told me, ‘I pace up and down in my study-room without being able to extract one single idea out of myself. I have nothing to say anymore.’ I would like to send a present to his children. Have you any suggestion?” (Schlum., p. 51.)

  In the course of his otherwise very congenial conversations with Conrad, Gide encountered only one point of friction: the mere mention of the name Dostoevsky made Conrad seethe with disgust and indignation; Gide was rightly puzzled (after all, the first chapter of Under Western Eyes is pure Dostoevsky!) and would have wished to pursue the discussion in a more rational manner, but, on this particular subject, all he could draw out of his highly emotional host were a few more confused imprecations. (See Essais critiques, p. 876.)

  139. Essais critiques, p. 877.

  140. Ibid.

  141. Journal 2, p. 923; Journal 1, p. 803.

  142. PD 2, p. 107.

  143. Gide himself made this observation; remarking that Du Bos disliked Balzac, Daumier and Mozart, he added: “It makes sense. It should be very interesting to delineate in this way . . . not exactly the limits (for this would imply passing judgements), but the impossibilities of each one. It would be very revealing.” (PD 1, pp. 347–8.)

  144. Schlum., pp. 142–3.

  145. PD 3, p. 369.

  146. Martin, pp. 38–9.

  147. PD 2, p. 51.

  148. “Tout est saucisse en Allemagne, une enveloppe bourrée de choses disparates: la phrase allemande est une saucisse, l’Allemagne politique est une saucisse, les livres de philologie et de science avec leurs notes et références, saucisses; Goethe, saucisse!” (Paul Claudel: Journal, Pléiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1968], Vol. 1, p. 223.)

  149. For instance, the Tiny L
ady described how Schlumberger read aloud his new novel to Gide continuously over two days; these sessions were followed by Gide’s very frank criticisms (“The book does not succeed in catching our interest,” etc. . . .). The Tiny Lady commented: “The entire discussion was carried out in a completely fraternal spirit, without any artifice, without any touch of vanity—the whole feeling was so pure.” (PD 2, p. 429.) On another occasion, it was Martin du Gard’s turn: he read Les Thibault for ten days—sometimes at the rate of nine hours per day! Once again, criticisms, however severe, were proffered and taken in a spirit of mutual emulation, with literary perfection as common aim. (PD 2, pp. 537–8.) Both Schlumberger and Martin du Gard wrote very harsh letters to Gide at the time of his communist infatuation. Gide immediately telephoned Schlumberger to thank him, and he showed Martin’s letter to the Tiny Lady, adding: “Isn’t this an admirable letter? . . . Such force, such breath! . . . And I feel that he is right on many points.” (PD 2, p. 299.)

  150. Martin du Gard was very much Gide’s junior, both in years and in literary achievements; yet he received the Nobel Prize for literature ten years ahead of Gide. On learning the news, both Gide and the Tiny Lady were positively delirious with joy: “Martin, our Martin has got the Nobel Prize! . . . What happens to us is really fantastic!” (PD 3, p. 48.)

  151. Journal 1, p. 805.

  152. PD 4, p. 213.

  153. See Pascal Mercier, introduction to Schlum., p. 22.

  154. “Billet à Angèle,” in Essais critiques, pp. 289–93.

  155. Reading Le Côté de Guermantes, Gide said: “It is done so well, that it makes me feel a little depressed. In comparison, my own work seems so crude!” (PD 1, p. 71.) Sodome et Gomorrhe, however, greatly upset him: he felt that Proust had slandered homosexuality by reducing it to its effeminate manifestations. (PD 1, pp. 98–9.) He found La Prisonnière exasperating: “It looks as if Proust were parodying Proust and the substance of the book is totally devoid of interest.” Still, he had to acknowledge: “It is of considerable importance for literature. After having read Proust, one can no longer be completely the same person again.” (PD 3, p. 155.)

  156. And yet was he really blind to Simenon’s limitations? One may doubt it. One day, Simenon, who had lunch with Gide, told him: “The main temptation I should guard myself against is . . .” He searched for a phrase, and Gide immediately suggested: “The temptation to fart above your arse.” “Exactly,” said Simenon. (PD 3, p. 359.)