Alan Sheridan's Andre Gide: A Life in the Present
Glenn, David
ANDRE GIDE: A LIFE IN THE PRESENT by Alan Sheridan Harvard University Press, 1999 634 pp $35 0 ne of the hardest tasks of Andre Gide's long life was a translation of Hamlet, which he completed...
...Their romantic conflicts seem overdetermined, as if Gide were trying to illustrate the social principles he had advanced in Corydon...
...but after a few months he returned to literary life...
...They've got you, the "ungraspable" Gide...
...He jotted down a few words: "Passing through Gori in the course of our wonderful journey, I felt a need to express our cordial feelings . . . ." The translator objected: "You" was not enough when addressing Stalin...
...That recognition came to Gide haltingly during the next few years, as news of the Moscow Trials spread, and as he heard stories from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War...
...But you're castrating your work...
...In 1922, the thirty-two-yearold Elisabeth, who had long wanted to raise a child on her own, asked Gide to father one with her...
...they are straight, like those of someone who has never lied...
...I have always been paralyzed by scruples...
...Only Gide's strenuous objections prevented them from making these changes...
...The Gide of twenty years ago would have been pitilessly severe on the Gide of today...
...his decadeslong devotion to the study of Goethe, Shakespeare, Virgil, and of course to the creation of his own fiction...
...DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 105 BOOKS The book leads us through Gide's early literary development in the milieu of the Symbolist poets in the 1890s...
...I have lost whatever faith I ever had in man's attempts to understand himself in general terms, whether these pertain to soul or psyche, societies or cultures...
...Stop...
...his devoted, painful love for, and (unconsummated) marriage to, his cousin Madeleine...
...his palpable sweetness— his incapacity for deliberate cruelty...
...The happiness that Gide found in his unorthodox extended family after 1918 may have brought more harmony to his soul—but his literary work arguably suffered for it...
...Like Gide, and like Hamlet, we operate in a terrible fog...
...his late career as a beloved literary elder, which was capped in 1947 with the Nobel Prize...
...In 1917, Gide fell deeply in love with the seventeen-year-old future filmmaker Marc Allegret...
...and Elisabeth's daughter Catherine, who was also secretly Gide's...
...Several of his best friends, including Leon Blum, were Jews, but Gide was still capable as late as 1948 of musing in his journal that Gentiles have "more profound" qualities than Jews...
...Little by little you have already been pushed so far [by the Party] that the slightest failure to demonstrate fanaticism would make you look like a coward and a renegade...
...In 1933, a Parisian communist theater troupe adapted Gide's twenty-year-old novel The Vatican Cellars, and they attempted to butcher the novel's plot and tone so as to present it as a crude polemic against the Catholic church...
...I have wasted too many long hours wrestling with such problems, hours that would have been better spent in the company of particular human creations...
...The government distributed hundreds of thousands of post cards with Gide's image, and his arrival was trumpeted in every newspaper...
...He was an early exemplar of a mode of thinking and living—gentle, self-centered, appealingly hedonistic—that increasingly describes the entire middle classes of Western Europe and the United States...
...Maria van Rysselberghe, the "Petite Dame," the widow of a painter, who was Gide's closest friend during the second half of his life...
...I have lived too long, too intimately, with the thought of Christ, to agree to call him today as one might call someone on the telephone...
...ANDRE GIDE: A LIFE IN THE PRESENT by Alan Sheridan Harvard University Press, 1999 634 pp $35 0 ne of the hardest tasks of Andre Gide's long life was a translation of Hamlet, which he completed in 1942 after twenty years of intermittent labor...
...The residents of Vaneau included at various points Marc Allegret, who kept his friendship with Gide for decades after their affair had cooled...
...Already at the very beginning of the drama, in the dialogue with the ghost...
...But there is much more to be said—also in 1926, for example, Gide suddenly decided that the Tunisians, whom he had romanticized so intensely three decades earlier, were "hideous, vile, abject," in contrast to "the good blacks in the Congo...
...Sheridan's closegrained examination of Gide's life helps us, among other things, to meditate on this new mode's virtues (the loosening of sexuality and sex roles, the decline of certain kinds of everyday cruelties and bigotries) and on its appalling inadequacies...
...But on the matter of race, Sheridan glides right over most of the sticky questions...
...Gide protested that Stalin was quite above such nonsense...
...Indeed, he was left cold by the entire visit...
...He was the writer most admired by two generations of French students...
...they implored...
...DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 109...
...So intense was his ambivalence that he once quipped that each of his new novels was written to rebut the premises of the previous one...
...But it would be a gross mistake to remem106 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 ber Gide as a sort of Thomas Paine of literary Paris—as someone who coolly and cleanly spoke truth to power...
...Upon their return he and Allegret campaigned to rescind the police powers enjoyed by the rubber corporations operating in France's and Belgium's African colonies...
...This is very close to the attitude with which the Stalinist apparatus greeted Gide...
...he admires Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, but declares that "there is none the less a 'Jewish question,' painful and obsessive, and far from being settled...
...And that is exactly what Sheridan allows his reader to do with Gide: with great clarity and wit, and with a minimum of analytical fanfare, he brings us into the company of a particular life and a particular body of work...
...FIVE YEARS later, in 1931, Gide suddenly emerged as a full-throated Soviet fellowtraveler...
...Just as there were bourgeois commonplaces," the speech warned, "there are now revolutionary commonplaces...
...his travels into corners of the world that few of his peers ever saw...
...The supporting cast includes, among many others, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Oscar Wilde...
...N THE END, of course, Gide did help to create a new society...
...This modus vivendi did not evolve without BOOKS pain...
...You have propagated heresy by all the means in your power, and now you would elude the duty of allowing Heaven to dispose of you for its own high purposes of instruction and example...
...In 1933 he wrote to Gide: It is painful to see a life, whose finest achievement has been to struggle, with the weapons of the critical sense, against the dogmas of religion and moral conformity, end in an "act of faith...
...he gently rebuts Gide's Red Square speech nearly line by line...
...They attended concerts of music by Palestrina and Bach, and made excursions to Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli"—he immediately rescues himself with something vivid or surprising or lyrical: "Andrê went several times to the old Protestant cemetery, persuading the caretaker to lend him a key for his own use...
...must forget, must repulse whatever did not cure...
...his mature literary work, which alternated between austere neoclassicism and loose-limbed satire...
...In 1891, shortly after they had met at a Paris literary salon, Wilde told the twenty-oneyearold Gide: "I don't like your lips...
...the Petite Dame's daughter Elisabeth...
...Gide explained his sudden political fervor as a byproduct of his advancing age and his expectations of death: "That is why I am involving myself so deeply, so imprudently, in Communism...
...E]xcessive understanding of the other side [has] always held me back," he wrote in his journal in 1930...
...Corydon cost Gide some close friendships and drew down upon him the wrath of the French Establishment...
...When the neoThomist theologian Jacques Maritain begged Gide to pray for guidance about whether to publish the book, he received the reply: "No...
...It was his novels that he hoped would endure, and, in the English-speaking world, it is not clear that they will...
...DAVID GLENN is associate editor of Dissent...
...This present reputation carries two heavy ironies...
...Over the next few years, he served as honorary chair or president of such Party fronts as the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionaires and the World Conference of Youth Against War and Fascism...
...He arrived at his truths through agonies of hesitation, yearning, and doubt that would have made Hamlet proud...
...One great virtue of Alan Sheridan's beautifully written new biography is that it does not try to claim Gide as a trophy for liberalism, modernism, or any other intellectual terrain...
...Before the successful realization, there is always a failure...
...his sexual awakening, in his mid-twenties, in encounters with adolescent boys in Algeria and Tunisia...
...The first is that Gide was above all else a literary person, and was never comfortable playing advocate...
...to tell him, yes, of course it's abBOOKS surd that society objects that your lovers are men—but to eroticize only men who are barely post-pubescent, and to make a fetish of your Arab and African lovers' "primitive" essences...
...A parade of 2,500 Young Pioneers cried "Vive Andre Gide...
...but it may be more accurate to say that he intended it as both...
...This is certainly the case in The Counterfeiters (1925), the novel that most commentators, including Sheridan, promote as Gide's richest and most mature...
...Here Sheridan is not always helpful...
...Gide paid virtually no attention to questions of economic justice until his 1925-1926 journey through the Congo with Marc Allegret...
...Visiting Stalin's hometown in Georgia, Gide, courteous as ever, took it into his head to send the Soviet leader a telegram, thanking him for the splendid welcome that they had been given by the Soviet peoples...
...Rendering Shakespeare's lyricism and wordplay into French was so arduous, he wrote, that each day's effort resulted in "dislocating one's brains...
...This near-fiasco was hugely ironic (and probably ought to have unsettled Gide more than it did) because The Vatican Cellars itself concerns a dogmatically secular scientist who abruptly converts to Catholicism, and is then bullied by church officials into making an elaborate public recantation of his previous ways...
...He began to feel his usual scruples and DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 107 BOOKS doubts well before his final renunciation...
...when they traveled to England together the following year, Madeleine burned all of Gide's letters to her...
...Although he rarely felt shame about his homosexuality per se, he did suffer profound conflicts about how to civilize his promiscuous energies: to reconcile his passions with his ongoing devotion to his shy and pious spouse, and to bring his passions into harmony with his commitments to art and to classicism...
...Here Sheridan notes laconically: "Gide, who did not respond to humanity (even male youth) organized en masse, was not impressed...
...It was not only Gide's temperament that permitted his rebellion, of course...
...The two books Gide published in the months just after his visit (Back from the USSR and Afterthoughts on the USSR) today seem almost comically gentle and even-handed--though what they said was enough to earn him the calumny of the Stalinist press worldwide...
...The Counterfeiters —an impossible-to-summarize novel about a group of mismatched lovers and a band of delinquent children—was Gide's attempt to blend his two modes of writing: earnest classicism and picaresque satire a la Fielding...
...There he visited Keats's grave, reciting lines to himself that he barely understood...
...And these moralistic impulses are not, I submit, merely the arrogance of hindsight...
...This knot of conflicted impulses came together most vividly in The Immoralist (1902), whose hero, Michel, begins a Nietzschean project of self-creation after a near-fatal bout with tuberculosis...
...By the early 1930s, Gide was splitting his time between the country estate he shared with Madeleine and a semi-communal home at 1 bis rue Vaneau in Paris...
...When Gide visited the Soviet Union in mid-1936, that apparatus took elaborate steps to honor him as a literary hero...
...But the characters themselves, at least those who are treated earnestly, are mostly unmemorable...
...Gide made a scene...
...James Baldwin once complained that "both [Gide's] Heaven and his Hell suffer from a certain lack of urgency...
...Gide's spare prose conveys Michel's aesthetic awakening with unmistakable conviction...
...Sheridan reports this comment and others like it, but never critically examines the habits of mind that gave rise to them...
...Sheridan quotes a journal entry in which Gide applauds Leninism's promise that "humanity can change, that a society can take shape on different foundations . . . that the future need not be a repetition and reproduction of the past...
...Although the novel closely mirrors certain events in Gide's life, Sheridan cautions against facile identification of the two...
...It was of course a time of economic crisis...
...But even after this melodramatic purge, the couple maintained a constant devotion—sometimes traveling great distances to care for one another during illnesses— until Madeleine's death in 1938...
...Nearly half a century after his death, Gide is remembered best for two bold acts of truthtelling: his defense of homosexuality and his exposure of Stalinism...
...We in those middle classes will probably be remembered, like Gide, as people who devoted great energies to (real and difficult) problems of personal life, but who responded too late, too clumsily, or not at all to the catastrophes swirling in the larger world...
...It is easy to be drawn, like one of Gide's aesthetic rebels, into a sort of rapture at the great sad beauty of the man's life: his gift for diverse and sustained friendships...
...his embrace of communism in 1931, at the age of sixty-one, and his public renunciation five years later, once he had seen the Soviet Union firsthand...
...Whenever Sheridan threatens to descend into eye-glazing detail, as in this description of an 1898 visit to Rome—"Over the next six weeks, they visited the usual museums and churches...
...Among other things, Gide himself never reached such a state of decadence: Michel took Nietzsche simplistically, absolutely, abandoning Culture for Nature, letting the weak go the wall, etc., and, in the end, lost everything...
...It was this devotion to sincerity, Gide's admirers and enemies agreed, that finally drove him to pierce through his communist friends' dogma and sentimentality, and more bravely, to publish Corydon (1924), a fictionalized Socratic dialogue that stands as the first modern treatise in defense of homosexuality...
...Even after rejecting his parents' rigorous Protestantism, Gide kept one inheritance from their faith: a loathing of hypocrisy...
...A journal entry from late 1943 reads: [E]ach decisive action on the part of Hamlet is preceded by a sort of try-out of that action, as if it had some trouble fitting into reality...
...Gide occasionally wrote that only future generations would truly appreciate his work—that he was helping to create a new society...
...As this last anecdote suggests, Gide's change of heart came largely from his disgust with petty hypocrisies, not from a real recognition of the nature of Stalin's regime or the corpses piling up beneath it...
...In working out a modus vivendi that could accommodate both his marriage and his homosexual adventures, Gide called on the unNietzschean but very Gidean quality of compromise— as, of course, did Madeleine...
...Gide never did become comfortable with lies...
...Party officials forbade Gide from delivering his prepared speech to a group of young writers, because it was insufficiently reverent toward Socialist Realism...
...A close friend, the novelist Roger Martin du Gard, described him, with some disgust and despair, as "an old man in a hurry...
...In the last fifteen years of his old age, living through occupation, war, and their aftermath, Gide befriended a wide range of left-of-center thinkers, but his own energies tended to return to aesthetic and literary questions...
...For better or worse, Gide never again reached this level of political engagement...
...This is not at all how I would act if I could travel back in time .. . One yearns to reach back and shake Gide by the lapels: to teach him the realities of French imperialism, and to clear the racialist cobwebs out of his brain...
...In fact, as Sheridan demonstrates, Gide never was quite grasped entirely by communism...
...Gide was a tireless student of tragedy— and the successes and failures of his studies shed light on our own fragmented condition...
...You, chief of the workers" or "You, master of the 108 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 peoples" would be more in keeping...
...To remember Gide as an archetype of the liberal rebel— as someone who challenged tyranny and bigotry through the sustained application of critical reason—is to grasp only a small fragment of his complex (and sometimes unattractive) existence...
...But by the novel's end, Michel is living a dissolute life in a remote desert village, listlessly conducting a liaison with two Arab adolescents, his energies drained...
...But even after decades of such torture, Gide never lost his fascination with the play...
...I must consider Good, I must call Right, whatever was healthy for me...
...There (alongside his usual sexual adventuring) Gide discovered with horror the colonial authorities' treatment of African workers, especially on rubber plantations...
...A further question that Sheridan doesn't address at all is Gide's streak of respectable antiSemitism...
...Translator and post office were adamant...
...but like many other communist enthusiasts from the literary world, Gide seems to have been motivated more by the Soviet Union's teleology than by any deeply felt rage at poverty or inequality...
...I want to teach you to lie, so that your lips might become beautiful and twisted like those of an ancient mask...
...Gide writes in the novel's introduction that he "wanted to write this book neither as an indictment nor as an apology...
...His literary stature and his wealth—he was an only child whose grandparents had been prosperous manufacturers—cushioned him from public opprobrium...
...The miracle is that, in a volume of nearly three hundred thousand words, the narrative almost never becomes tedious...
...THE CUMULATIVE effect of Sheridan's 634 pages is to lead the reader into a Gidean frame of mind—which is to say, a divided and ambivalent mind...
...But it's also easy to take on the role of "the Protestant pastor" that Gide said he always carried around in his head, and to think, at various points: Wait...
...perhaps more than anyone else, he helped to transmit Emersonianism to France...
...Sheridan's résumé includes a book on Michel Foucault and translations of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, but he begins with this disarming admission: "I have no theory about Gide...
...Gide knew what to leave as well as what to take of Nietzsche...
...His conclusion features a sunny paragraph that emphasizes Gide's tenderness toward particular Arab lovers, and his 1926 campaign to reform the Congo rubber industry...
...That will seem eternally creepy...
...then in any one of Hamlet's ways of behaving, toward his mother, with the King, with Ophelia . . . first he outlines the action, awkwardly...
...to beg him not to waste five years of his life and prestige as a useful idiot for Moscow...
...His discussion of the follies and selfdelusions that went into Gide's communist adventure strikes just the right tone...
...So he deserves, in part, to be judged through exactly this sort of lens...
...Some of its modernist elements, including its exquisitely unresolved ending, have aged well...
...The second irony is that, like Hamlet's, Gide's intelligence was driven, and sometimes swamped, by a volatile chemistry of desire, fear, and ambivalence...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
