An Unfinished Portrait

...Gide's reply to that charge was published posthumously in Ainsi soit-il where he commented frankly on his Russian trip that he had never enjoyed elsewhere "such indulgence and connivance in that regard.' The less personal charges of his Communist critics Gide took up in Retouches a mon Retour de Z'U.R.S.S...

...His friends were correct in telling him that he would be handing over to his worst enemies a useful weapon...

...Yet, when the ring of Symbolist doctrine began to close round him, he packed his bags for travel and writing...

...In its adult stages it takes up residence in the empty shells of various mollusks, pushing its soft body back into the inner recesses of the shell...

...His next escape from orthodoxy involved the Catholic Church, during the rash of conversions which spread through French intellectual circles before and after World War I. As, one by one, his colleagues and critics-s-Ghcon, Cope au, Riviere, Jammes, Du Bos, Peguy, Jacob, Cocteau-took the road to Rome, Gide struggled against his own mystical bent and the battering-ram technique of Paul Claudel's proselytizing...

...He is the Gide who could confide to Claude Mauriac that he had visited the movies twice that day out of loneliness...

...fatigue, fear, blighted hope, malady, sexual or sentimental impotence...

...For the most part, however, it reads like a course of lectures which, having outlived its usefulness, has now been consigned to print...

...Although political awareness developed late in Gide's writing, the alarming rise of Hitlerism in Germany and Gide's own sense of social injustice drew him close to the Communist cause...

...It is not a matter of malicious curiosity...

...It was an advantage which some of them used rather shamelessly during the German Occupation to brand Gide one of the principal causes for the fall of France and the deterioration of French moral life...

...But Fowlie has, I suspect, a more important book about Gide still in his keeping...

...at certain periods it must seek out and move into new quarters and during these times it is especially vulnerable...

...It is only in the concluding chapters, when Fowlie discusses various aspects of Gide and his career-his vocation as a writer, his marriage, his relationship to Catholicism, his literary reputation after his death in 1951-that we get a heightened sense of the man: that familiar balding pate and the sharp, questioning look behind the old-fashioned glasses...

...The public Gide, of course, is readily available...

...the Gide in whom Francois Mauriac, despite their differences of opinion, could see "a case of terrible sincerity...

...The fact attests to his essential independence...

...Reviewed by JAMES R. MELLOW Formerly Editor, "Arts Magazine," Contributor, "Commonweal" The hermit crab is an odd species of crustacean whicb lives along the coasts of Europe, America and the West Indies...

...I feel them around me...

...While he did not, in fact, join the party-seeing it as a threat to his independence-he did lend his name to various anti-Fascist causes and frequently attended the Youth and Writers' Congresses...

...Wallace Fowlie's study of Andre Gide is a serviceable book...

...The entire structure of Gide's life and work rests upon the ground of moralitynot the hard, protective shell of orthodox morality, but a morality that is more demanding and, perhaps, more humane...

...and les subtils, those impossible spirits who, changing constantly according to circumstances, nevertheless maintained an inner purity behind their various public appearances...

...a service comparable to the one which Leon Edel has been providing in his study of Henry James...

...No matter how ephemeral the issues may seem today, Gide's writing has remained lucid and ingratiating: It is his style which keeps a book like Corydon from sinking altogether...

...he puts himself in my position, and the object of his injunctions is to make me be myself in the greatest possible degree.' What is wanting is not the writer who will ferret out of Gide's published oeuvre the sum of his contradictions, but the French scholar who would be willing to devote years of painstaking research to giving us the final, exhaustive and chronological study of Gide, his work and his personal relationships...

...the affectionate and exemplary Gide of whom Roger Martin du Gard could say, "When he gives me advice about my books, he never, so to say, pulls the blankets over to his side...

...their silence prompts these lines...

...It is obvious that Gide had hoped those letters to his ideal, virtuous and constraining conscience would provide a major explanation of himself for posterity...

...For 60 years, he relentlessly questioned and explained himself in print...

...Corydon, a dialogue between a confirmed homosexual and a prejudiced interviewer, is today a readable but thoroughly unconvincing tract...

...And any reader of his Journals is aware of the energy and thought which he devoted to the literary and social questions of his time...

...But he was, during these changes of conscience and conviction, susceptible to attack Gide's career began auspiciously enough in the rarefied atmosphere of French literary life at the turn of the century...

...Gide's encounter with the Communist party closely paralleled his bout with the Catholics...

...The liaison did not survive his critical spirit...

...Next he placed himself outside the conventions of French public life and beyond the honors which would have accrued (in French society) to a writer of his increasing eminence...

...In the face of this voluminous material- the letters, the journals, the autobiographies, the critical texts, the novels, recits, parables and travel accounts-it may seem strange to claim that the selfportrait which Gide has left us is incomplete...

...The trials of Oscar Wilde and Wilde's subsequent disgrace had always troubled Gide's mind...

...A remarkable fate for the man who set out to reform the public mind on the question of homosexuality...

...One thing is certain from the evidence already at hand: Our evaluation of Gide's stature will depend upon our understanding of his relationship to two womenMadeleine Gide, the wife to whom he played the celibate and absentee husband, and Elizabeth Van Rysselberghe, the mother of his daughter Catherine...

...Not without bitterness, he confided to his Journals: "There is not one of these conversions in which I do not discover some shameful secret motivation...

...In these areas, he was always a stylist of the first order...

...Fowlie's book is not alone in this category, and the fault may well lie with Gide's extraordinary character...

...But behind him there still remains a private Gide, furtive and reticent, of whom we get glimpses in the recollections of his friends and enemies...

...when Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize in J947, he stoutly maintained-with that special crabbiness of spirit which is honorable in old men-that Corydon was his most important book...

...Then, too, he felt that the "dissimulation" of Proust--Sodome et Gomorrhe had then been published-had pandered to public opinion by presenting only the sordid and neurotic aspects of homosexual relationships...

...Its legs are as hard-shelled as any crab, but its body is soft and unprotected...

...His dissatisfaction, the critics claimed, had less to do with the Russian system of government than with the harsh Russian laws against homosexuality...

...He published, in 1924 and 1926, two books-Corydon and Si le grain ne meurt which revealed his own homosexual inclinations...

...His long and arduous public career parallels the saga of the hermit crab: a life of sharp wits and strategic moves pitted against the hostile environment...

...He was labeled a Trotskyite and an agent of Fascism...

...Gide was counseled against the move by his friends, but he felt that the time had come to speak out publicly on the problem...

...In his Retour de [,V.R.S.S., he charged: "I doubt if in any other country today (even in Hitler's Germany) the mind is less free, more bowed, more terrorized, more vassalized...

...For reasons that are difficult to explain, those books which approach Gide through a discussion of his works seem to leave the reader with only a jumble of pieces that do not compose...

...The sense of shock and irreparable loss which Gide felt in 1918, when his wife destroyed his early correspondence to her, may provide a clue...

...The chief danger to the crab's singular way of life comes from its own growth and the resulting constraints of its housing...

...Gide was a writer committed to a public response both in his writing and in the issues which he raised...

...The pamphlet raised a storm of protests from the Communist press and the Communist critics...

...A thorough understanding of Gide's relationship to these two important women in his life is crucial to any judgement on his profession of sincerity...

...Lafcadio, the erratic hero of Andre Gide's Les Caves du Vatican, was initiated into a schoolboy code which distinguished between two categories of men: les crustaces, for whom the habits and conventions of a lifetime formed hard protective shells...

...Yet that seems to be the case...

...More than any writer of his time, Gide opened up for the reader large areas of his private life...

...Now, when every novel of city-life, campus-life or Southern adolescence must have its stock homosexual character, it is difficult to recover the shock which Gide's personal confession must have had upon the French literary scene...

...If not precisely one of les subtils (who does not, eventually, harden to his role...

...The present one has a curious reticence about it, as if Fowlie were maintaining his subject precisely at arm's length...

...Their muffled cries wakened me last night...

...I was thinking of those martyrs when I wrote the words against which you protest, because their tacit gratitude, if my book can reach them, is more important to me than the praises or imprecations of Pravda...

...Gide was never among the camp of the complete crustaceans...

...Gide, not without vacillation and hedging, resisted the aggressive rhetoric of Claude!'s arguments and remained entrenched in his individual freedom, but he earned the sharp criticism of those who had formerly been so solicitous...

...His disavowal came in the form of a satire, Paludes, which took an ironic stance towards his own earlier ambitions and towards the inhabitants of his former environment...

...Often it lives in commensal conditions with other, more sedentary, forms of marine life-sponges and sea anemones-which fasten themselves to the crab's shell, achieving a new mobility while offering the crab protection...

...He frequented Mallarrne's Tuesday nights and Heredia's Saturday afternoons and donned the uniform of the litterateur- flowing cape, flowing tie and flowing hair...

...The correspondence between these two men -the intellectual antipodes of their generation-constitutes one of the fascinating documents of French cultural life...

...It is ironic that that one act of jealousy by a self-effacing wife should provide (in a drama that is not unrelated to James' The Aspern Papers) the revenge which life takes upon the literary man...

...At the end of a long career, Gide had earned the distinction of being placed upon the Index by two powerful and rival orthodoxies: tne Communist party and the Catholic Church...

...Although he liked to maintain a position independent of French literary life, his role as mentor of the Nouvelle Revue Francoise was seminal in the development of modern French literature...

...There, reflecting upon the deportations to Siberia under Stalin, he said: "I see and hear those victims...

...Following a trip to Russia in 1936, Gide set down some strongly worded objections to the Russian system and the Stalinist regime...

...He was the man, uniquely disposed, who could move out from the shell of orthodoxy once he began to feel the pinch...