I have been, I must admit, reading André Gide at random. His La Porte étroite (1909; Strait Is the Gate, 1924) is the first of his writings I perused in the late sixties. Soon after, I read La Symphonie Pastorale 1919; The Pastoral Symphony, 1931). It is only recently that I discovered that his Les Caves du Vatican (1914; The Vatican Swindle, 1925), had been lying on one of my bookshelves over the years. I have read all the works of André Gide I could lay my hands on in their original French. Despite the passage of time, I went through Les Caves du Vatican with the same anticipation which had earlier led me to his other writings. I was not disappointed. As a result, I wanted to gather more information about the man and the writer. As could be expected, the life of the man behind the writings took me along a journey of discovery which revealed facts which hitherto had been unknown to me.
Strict Protestant Upbringing
While going through his biography, I came to know that at the Civil Status Office in Paris, where he was born on November 22, 1869, he is registered as André Paul Guillaume Gide. He was the sole child of Juliette Rondeaux and Paul Gide. Both were Huguenots in Roman catholic France and believed in a strict protestant upbringing for their son. Paul Gide passed away when André was only eleven years of age. This loss, combined with a somewhat nervous temperament, turned André Gide into a difficult and unhappy young man affected by psychosomatic illness.
At an early age he developed an almost obsessive infatuation for his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux, whom he worshipped as an idealized epitome of pious and pure young womanhood. They saw each other at family gatherings and corresponded regularly for several years. Both families, apparently, were not in favour of their marriage. They could do so only after the demise of Gide’s mother in 1895.
His relationship with Madeleine was platonic and spiritual throughout their married lives. Though he was unfaithful to her, he continued, so to say, to admire her and to find in her the inspiration for much of his best works. Madeleine served as the model for Marceline in L’immoraliste 1902, The Immoralist, 1930) and for Alissa in La Porte étroite, both stand as symbols of Christian morality and purity.
Major Crisis in Marriage
The major crisis in their marriage occurred in 1918, when Gide returned from his jaunts to Switzerland with his lover, Marc Allegret, to learn that Madeleine had burned all the letters he had written to her. Gide was profoundly distressed by the destruction of what he believed to be the expression of the most noble side of his nature. He was also compelled to accept, perhaps for the first time, the pain his duplicitous life was causing her. In the aftermath of Madeleine’s death in 1938, Gide privately published a small volume which bears a latin title, Et nunc manet in te, 1947).The English translation, Madeleine, appeared in 1952. It was an attempt to justify his unorthodox relationship and to express remorse at having forced his wife to lead a life of loneliness and isolation.
Trip to Africa
Critics and other people who have studied his works are of the opinion that “with hindsight, it is easy to identify a moral continuum in the influence of Gide’s mother and wife on his own sense of self. Together, they represent the forces of repression and denial, against which he would find himself struggling his entire life”.
As a timid and shy young man, Gide was uncomfortable with his peers. He felt embarrassed by his own sheltered existence and lack of exposure to the male initiation rites of his generation. The turning point of his life occurred on a trip to Africa in the summer of 1893, following the publication of his first books and his acceptance into the literary circles of Paris.
Paul Laurens, the son of a well-known painter, and André Gide, set out on a journey which led to their involvement with a young Arab girl, and Gide, for his part, began what was to become the first of a series of relationships with young Arab boys. He saw this new life as a kind of rebirth marked by health, joy and sensuality. These experiences, then, became the basis for the natural, unfettered existence he would preach in such works as Les Nourritures terrestres (1897; Fruits of the Earth, 1949).
Gide continued to write prolifically throughout his life. In the 1930’s he also began to play a more active political role, speaking out throughout Europe against the dangers of Fascism. As a precursor to the postwar existentialists, Gide is famous for his credo most clearly articulated by Bernard in Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925; The Counterfeiters, 1927), a belief that individuals must find their own law for living within themselves and then use it as their guide.
Symbolism and Decadence
Gide’s earliest works were influenced by symbolism and decadence. Le Voyage d’Urien (1893; Urien’s Voyage, 1964), for example, takes the reader on a highly ironic journey to a series of perpetually changing landscapes. His first work, Les cahiers d’André Walter (1891, The Notebooks of André Walter, 1968), though published anonymously, brought him into the literary circle of the famous French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé. Gide also became acquainted with the major writers of his time, including Paul Valéry. In Paludes (1895, Marshlands, 1953), however, he satirized the artificiality of Mallarmé credo and “called for an art based on spontaneity rather than on an abstract concept of artistic purity”. Fruits of the earth was Gide’s most successful attempt to give expression to his new artistic beliefs. In this work, Gide demonstrated the influence of Goethe and Nietzche, the German apostles of ‘titanic’ individualism. The Post World War I generation responded to its call “for an honest and spontaneous life and its apparent condemnation of orthodox morality”.
Drama Against a Backdrop of Self-denial
With the publication of The Immoralist in 1902, Gide’s works became increasingly psychological. The plot revolves round a young academic who rebels against repression and conformity. It is often compared to Strait Is the Gate and The Pastoral Symphony, written in similarly concentrated, journalistic style with the same thematic polarities at their centre. Strait Is the Gate tells the story of a young woman, excessive in her piety, who literally tries to destroy herself in renunciation of the love she craves and out of fear that she might resemble the adulterous mother she despises. The Pastoral Symphony is the story of a self-deluded Calvinist minister who falls in love with an innocent, blind girl he has rescued from poverty. Together these three tales portray a complex erotic drama performed against a backdrop of Puritan repression and self-denial. The plots of all three are variations on experiences from Gide’s own life – In particular, the repressiveness of his Puritan upbringing and his unconsummated marriage to Madeleine.
The last period of André Gide long and rich literary life was dominated by the writing of his Journal and The counterfeiters, his most complex and ambitious work, the only one he called a novel. Si le grain ne meurt 1926; If I die……. 1935), Gide’s chronicle of his youth and sexual initiation in North Africa is, in effect, the preface to his Journal. With its publication, Gide’s contemporaries began to understand the close relationship between his life and his fiction.
The counterfeiters is, in a sense, a serious sequel to The Vatican Swindle. It is a farcical tale filled with complex plots and amusing coincidences. Gide spent six years writing The counterfeiters. It was the large major fiction of his career.
The Impassioned Love for Truth
Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. The presentation address acknowledged the controversy surrounding the apparent immortality in his works: “The works of André Gide contain pages which provoke with almost confessional audacity…. One must always remember that this manner of acting is the form of the impassioned love of truth….”.
André Gide breathed his last on February 19,1951, in Paris, after a long and rich literary life that included the publication of more than eighty volumes of stories, novels, memoirs and literary essays. At his death, he was honoured as one of the great moral voices of the twentieth century. Roger Martin de Gard’s tribute comes to my mind. Translated into English it reads, “Above all we are grateful to him for having died so well”.
Mithyl Banymandhub
Bibliography
- Barstow, Jane Missner, Magill’s survey of world Literature, New York, Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1993
- André Gide: 1869-1951 Yale French studies7, New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1965
- Fowlie, Wallace, André Gide: His life and Art, New York, Macmillan, 1965
- Guerard Albert J. André Gide, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1951.