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 neither 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]
*The asterisk indicates a name or a word that is the subject of an article in this glossary.
MALRAUX
MALRAUX IN THE PANTHEON[1]
THIS STORY is somewhat stale, I am afraid, but it still has a point. In a crowded church, the preacher ascends the pulpit and pronounces a moving sermon. Everybody is crying. One man, however, remains dry-eyed. Being asked the reason for his strange insensitivity, he explains: “I am not from this parish.”
I am not French, but French is my mother language and when I am in France I always feel completely at home — with only one reservation. Whenever the issue of Malraux crops up, the evidence hits me: I am not from this parish.
I experienced it for the first time twenty years ago. In November 1976, when Malraux died, a weekly magazine in Paris invited me to write one page on the theme “What did Malraux represent for you?” I always believed that death is not an excuse for withholding judgement; I naïvely assumed that the editors expected me to express a sincere opinion — and this is precisely what I offered them. They were horrified and immediately junked my shocking contribution. And yet, in my innocence, all I had done was simply to repeat what was already obvious to many discriminating foreign critics, from Koestler to Nabokov: Malraux was essentially phony.
For instance, on the tragedy of the Chinese revolution, instead of wasting time with the artificiality of La Condition humaine, one should read the account of Harold Isaacs: at least he knew what he was writing about. (The first edition of The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution appeared in 1938, but it took another thirty years before a French translation was finally published…)[2]
In those early days, Malraux, who only spent a few days in China as a mere tourist in transit, pretended to the French public that he had been a people’s commissar in the Chinese revolution. Later on, the epilogue of his Chinese adventures — his famous interview with Mao Zedong in 1965—proved to be an equally brazen humbug. A French sinologist recently made a comparative study of Malraux’s own description of this episode (in his Antimémoires) and of two other contemporary accounts of the interview in question — one in Chinese (notes taken by Mao’s interpreter, subsequently leaked to the Red Guards and published in China during the “Cultural Revolution”), and the other in French (compiled by the French embassy in Peking).[3] The comparison revealed that the three-hour cosmic dialogue between two philosophico-revolutionary megastars of our century had in fact been limited to a routine exchange of diplomatic platitudes that barely lasted thirty minutes. At one point in this brief and otherwise banal interview, however, Mao, who was already stewing up his forthcoming “Cultural Revolution,” dropped a tantalising hint, indicating that writers and intellectuals were deeply corrupted by “revisionism,” but that the youth might be mobilised against this counter-revolutionary evil. This, in a nutshell, was already a first suggestion of the gigantic explosion that was to shatter China the following year. Any interlocutor with some sense and a modicum of information would have recognised the true significance of this opportunity, jumped upon this unexpected opening and eagerly pursued the issue, but Malraux blindly ignored the cue that had just been offered him; and Mao, who by then could hardly conceal his impatience, brought the audience to an abrupt conclusion.