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]