Yet would it make any sense to call Gide an anti-Semite? With equal reason, he might also be called a Stalinist Bolshevist, an anti-Stalinist and anti-communist, a Christian, an anti-Christian, a defeatist advocate of collaboration with Hitler, an anti-Nazi sympathiser, a libertarian, an authoritarian, a rebel, a conformist, a demagogue, an elitist, an educator, a corrupter of youth, a preacher, a débauché, a moralist, a destroyer of morality…
Literature* was the exclusive concern of Gide — it was the very purpose of his life; beside it — as he himself proclaimed[15]—“only pederasty and Christianity” could absorb his interest and fire his passion. On all other matters — which were of basic indifference to him — he had no strong opinions; his views were vague, contradictory, ill-informed, tentative, inconsistent, malleable, banal, vacillating, conventional. Herbart — who was a close confidant and companion during the last twenty years of his life — observed that he usually thought in clichés that could have come straight from Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Having quoted another of Gide’s offensively stupid remarks (“I suffered yesterday: all the interlocutors I had to chat with were Jews”), Herbart added this flat comment: “This means exactly nothing: he ‘thinks’ by proxy.”[16]
I do not know to what extent such an innocent explanation will satisfy most readers — but Blum himself would certainly have endorsed it, for even though he was hurt when he eventually read the passages of the Journal quoted above, his affection for Gide remained undiminished until his death.[17]
In conclusion: it would be very easy to compile a damning record of first-hand evidence on Gide’s anti-Semitism; most probably, it would also be misleading. This example may serve as a useful methodological warning before perusing my little ABC.
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
André Gide was born in 1869. Though he died in the middle of the twentieth century, he remains in many fundamental respects a nineteenth-century writer.
He was an only child; his father was a scholar (professor of Roman law) — a frail and refined man who died too early to leave any deep imprint upon his son: André was not yet eleven at the time of his death. The mother, possessive and authoritarian, came from a very wealthy line of business people in Normandy; she gave her son a stern Protestant education. From a very early age, Gide experienced an acute conflict between the severe demands of his mother’s religiosity and the no-less-tyrannical needs of his precocious sensuality. Yet it was not until a journey to Algeria in 1895 that he discovered — under the personal guidance of Oscar Wilde — the exclusive orientation of his own sexuality.* That same year, his formidable mother died, and “having lost her, he replaced her at once with the person who most resembled her.” Within two weeks, he announced his engagement with his first cousin Madeleine* (niece of his mother), who had been his beloved soul-mate since early childhood. Their marriage was never consummated, Gide having assumed from the beginning that only “loose women” can have any interest in the activities of the flesh. And, in turn, when forty-three years later Madeleine died, Gide once again felt the same sense of “love, anguish and freedom” he had experienced at the death of his mother, and “he noted ‘how subtly, almost mystically’ his mother had merged into his wife.”[18]
With the total freedom that his inherited wealth (as well as the considerable fortune of his wife) gave him, Gide devoted the rest of his very long life to literature. He employed his time reading and writing — writing mostly about what he had read — and travelling. Simultaneously, religion continued to claim his soul, and pederasty his body. The conflict reached a climax in 1916, when, under the pressing — and sometimes clumsy — interventions of his Catholic friends (Claudel, first and foremost), Gide came close to conversion. But eventually he resisted the religious temptation and opted resolutely for the pursuit of a sexual obsession which was to assume manic proportions with the passing of the years.
From his earliest work, Les Cahiers d’André Walter (published in a private printing, paid for by his mother—1891), Gide’s literary activity never slowed. It is difficult to summarise his production: as he said himself, “Each of my books is designed to upset those readers who enjoyed the preceding one.”[19] The critic Jean Prévost described this attitude with a formula that won Gide’s approvaclass="underline" “Gide does not confront himself, he succeeds himself.”[20] His metamorphoses were not generated by dialectic contradictions, they were a succession of imaginative happenings: Proteus is constantly reinventing himself.
His most seminal work, the book which established him as the guru of rebellion against the bourgeois order, as the maître à penser for at least three successive generations of young men, is Les Nourritures terrestres (1901). Martin du Gard wondered if one could not apply to it what Sainte-Beuve once said of “those useful books which last only for a limited time, since the readers who benefit from them wear them down.”[21] The problem is also that books such as these usually generate mediocre imitations, and eventually we cannot avoid reading them through the prism of their vulgar caricatures. Today, alas! Les Nourritures terrestres reminds us of nothing so much as the kitsch of Khalil Gibran.
The quality of his short fiction is displayed in La Porte étroite and shines to perfection in La Symphonie pastorale (1919). Both novellas benefit from the inner tension of his religious inquiétude, still unresolved at the time; in the latter work in particular, the spiritual ambiguity is handled with diabolical cleverness, and, in spite of its stilted dialogue and cold stylistic mannerisms, the book remains deeply affecting and comes close to being a masterpiece. In his more ambitious and longer fiction, Les Caves du Vatican (1914) and Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), he betrays the sorry fact that he is not really a novelist: he is short of breath and has little imagination. These books were hugely successful in their time but have not aged well. Mauriac was probably right when he observed that, half a century later, Gide’s novels had already become mummified, whereas — in paradoxical contrast — those of Anatole France (so cruelly derided by the Surrealist generation) retained an amazing freshness.[22]
In 1924, he published Corydon,* a defence of homosexuality. His argumentation is clumsy and his sincerity more limited than it may appear at first, but it took considerable courage to “come out” at that time in such a public fashion.
He forcefully commented twice on public affairs — even though his notorious lack of a sense of reality* ill-prepared him for such activity. After a lengthy journey into Black Africa (French Congo and Chad, 1925–26), he wrote an eloquent denunciation of the colonial exploitation of the native populations. Then, during the 1930s, he foolishly became a fellow-traveller of Stalinist communism. His performance as “useful idiot” was short-lived, however — a brief visit to the Soviet Union opened his eyes. It did not require exceptional percipience to appreciate the plain evidence that was under his very nose, but it certainly took exceptional courage to spell it out publicly. On his return to Paris, he wrote at once a truthful and scathing account of his political disenchantment. Against all expectations, natural justice rewarded his audacity: Retour de l’URSS (1936) was prodigiously successful — this iconoclastic little book was reprinted eight times in ten months and sold nearly 150,000 copies; by the end of 1937, it had been translated into fourteen languages. None of Gide’s other works was such an immediate success.[23]