And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
* Lecture to the Chesterton Society of Western Australia, Perth, September 1997.
PORTRAIT OF PROTEUS
A Little ABC of André Gide
To tell the truth, I don’t know what I think of him. He is never the same for long. He never gets engaged in anything, yet nothing is more engaging than his permanent evasions. You cannot judge him, for you haven’t known him long enough. His very self is in a constant process of undoing and remaking. You think you have pinned him down, but he is Proteus:* he adopts the shape of whatever he happens to love. And you cannot understand him unless you love him.
— 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]