Andre Gide

From Philosopedia

Gide, André (22 November 1869 - 19 February 1951)

André Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris, the son of a Paris University professor of law who died in 1880. His parents were Protestant but his mother's immediate family was Roman Catholic.

Raised in Normandy, he wrote his first novel at an early age in 1891, Les Cahiers d'André Walter (The Notebooks of Andre Walter).

In 1893 and 1894, in northern Africa, he had a homosexual experience that he wrote about later in If It Die, an autobiographical memoir (first edition 1920) (Vintage Books 1935 translated by Dorothy Bussy:

but when Ali - that was my little guide's name - led me up among the sandhills, in spite of the fatigue of walking in the sand, I followed him; we soon reached a kind of funnel or crater, the rim of which was just high enough to command the surrounding country". . ."As soon as we got there, Ali flung the coat and rug down on the sloping sand; he flung himself down too, and stretched on his back". . ."I was not such a simpleton as to misunderstand his invitation". . ."I seized the hand he held out to me and tumbled him on to the ground."

After his mother's death, Gide in 1895 married but did not consummate the marriage to Madeleine Rondeaux, his cousin. In 1896 he became mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy. From 1901 to 1907 he resided in Jersey, the British Crown dependence off the coast of Normandy. In 1908 he helped found Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary magazine.

The Gide Website

The Gide website is excellent in detailing his early and intense religious fervor, his wealthy family's influence, and his homosexuality as well as his bisexuality; e.g.,

Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions. He is as well known for his influence as a moralist and as a thinker as for his contributions to literature.

He became increasingly introspective and questioned his religious faith, pronouncing himself an agnostic, as he struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality. Gide taught that people must be true to their own nature, but by following this, he was false and cruel to his wife. After her death he was to reproach himself.

In Symphonie Pastorale (1919), written in the form of the diary, Gide explored the hypocrisy which masquerades as Christian pity and duty. In the story a Swiss Protestant pastor adopts and educates the blind orphan Gertrude. The pastor is afraid that Gertrude loves him less than his son Jacques, and seduces the girl on the eve of an operation, which may restore her sight. After the successful operation Gertrude understands the truth about the people around her and she commits suicide. The pastor doesn't realize his own blindness before he starts to re-examine the bases of his thinking and behavior.

He travelled widely. His trip to the Congo in 1926 led to a scathing report on economic abuses by French firms and resulted in reforms. In the same year he published his self-revealing autobiography Si le Grain ne Mert (If It Die: An Autobiography).

In the 1930s he announced his conversion to Communism, which shocked his readers, but he also was rejected by his new admirers after his disillusioning trip to the Soviet Union. His disillusioned report of his journey to Russia, Return from the U.S.S.R (1936), scandalized another. Gide's interests went far beyond the confines of French literature. He translated Shakespeare, Whitman, Conrad, and Rilke. He was an influential literary critic (Prétextes, 1903; Nouveaux Prétextes, 1911) and was especially attracted to problematic writers like Dostoevsky, about whom he wrote a book titled Dostoevsky (1923).

Comments by Critics

Ernie McLeod has analyzed Gide's views:

He was a leading intellectual figure of the twentieth century who unashamedly relished more earthy pleasures, particularly ones involving teen-aged boys. His long marriage to his cousin Madeleine apparently was never consummated, though he fathered a daughter with another woman. He considered himself “profoundly Christian” but found Catholicism “unacceptable” and Protestantism “intolerable.” (For its part, the Catholic Church placed his entire oeuvre in its Index of Forbidden Books.) He was a nonconformist who paid attention to societal standards, his art always negotiating, in the words of Jean Paul Sartre, “a compromise between risk and rule.”

Far from denying the contradictory elements within himself, André Gide wrestled with and embraced them. He spent his writing life examining the nature of a true self and the meaning of sincerity. While his artistic focus was narrow, his work took many forms: journals, essays, letters, criticism, plays, prose poems, fiction, political arguments, travel books.

A. L. Rowse, Ann Sheridan, Martin Seymour-Smith:

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, Gide, a French Protestant, raised many eyebrows with his works. The Immoralist (1902), which revels in hedonism and describes bisexuality, portrays a young person contravening ordinary moral standards. His If It Die (1924) was an autobiographical account of some of his own homosexual experiences, for the Protestant in him could not resist confessing. When he visited Algeria and stayed there for three years, Gide found no Protestant obfuscations about same-sex love, falling for “a voluptuous native boy, Athman,” according to A. L. Rowse in Homosexuals in History.

Then at the age of forty-three and although married, he had a sexual relationship with sixteen-year-old Marc Allégret, who later became a well-known film producer. Critics have noted that by expressing adolescents’ unrest, his works had a large and favorable following among adolescents. Gide’s work showed humans seeking out their own natures, even though they might conflict with the majority’s view of ethics. He used myth in the satirical story, Prometheus Misbound (1899), and he helped bring about a reform of French colonial practices in Africa in his Travels in the Congo (1927). In 1950, the last volume of his Journal, which he commenced in 1889, was published. Among other things, it described his long-standing (although non-sexual) friendship with Oscar Wilde. The work contained more than a million words, described his search for God and his moral crises.

Ann Sheridan’s André, A Life in the Present (1999) explains how Gide’s travels to North Africa distanced him from the stiff upbringing he had had. In the Kasbah, he met men who did not shield themselves from sensuality. Although Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas paid young Arab boys in order merely to watch them, Gide is said to have found the sexual union something close to being sacred, not in the religious sense but in the sense that without hope of Heaven one can be transported by the sexual act into a world of joy and reverence.

Martin Seymour-Smith found him a great and good man:

• Gide was an ambisexual who early sought and obtained sexual pleasure from other men. He explored Africa partly for this purpose and while there met Oscar Wilde. He possessed a brilliant intelligence, much energy, and a multitude of talents (for languages, music, friendship, and much else); all this in the undoubted presence of creative genius, although the degree of his imaginative powers has been debated.

• Since, as his critics agree, his work oscillates between the two almost equally strong poles of a natural puritanism and a natural "pagan" zest for physical pleasure and since his intelligence is so acute and honesty so absolute he is a crucial writer for our times.

• If Gide was influenced by Nietzsche, then he was equally influenced by the scriptures and, indeed, by Christianity. Seldom has a man attracted so much hatred and ill will for such wrong reasons: for Gide was, in the main, a most tolerant, good-tempered, eclectic, gentle, empathetic man - his shrewd remarks about his contemporaries are almost invariably truer than they are malicious.

• Gide married his cousin (the "Em." of the diaries) in 1895 (he had a daughter by Elizabeth Van Rysselberghe in 1923); she was a religiously devout woman and because she was the one consistent love of his life, his ideal, she considerably sharpened the conflict in him between the spiritual and the physical. The pagan side of Gide is revealed in his first significant work, Les Nourritures terrestres (1897). The chief value of this early work lies, however, in its plea - through a series of exhortations to a young man - for liberation from puritanism; its prose, though excellent in an academic sense, has not worn well.

• One has in fact to separate Gide into several compartments: the influential educator - the anti-colonialist, the legal and sexual reformer, the independent fellow-traveller (Gide, as will have been gathered, thrived on paradox); the self-analyst (in the Journals); the friend and correspondent; the translator (Tagore, Shakespeare, Whitman, Conrad, Blake, and others); the critic - and the imaginative writer.

• Gide is, yes, deficient in imagination at the highest level - but his creative work stops only a little short of that level and to all but those certain of their righteousness he is a great and good man.

Although Gide refused a nomination to the French Academy, he accepted in 1947 an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. The Vatican prohibited all his works in 1952, after his death, and after his having won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Gide in 1942 left France for Africa, living in Tunis until the end of World War II, dying of pneumonia there in 1951.

(See Anthony Lane’s “The Man in the Mirror,” which describes Gide’s “unmatched hedonism,” The New Yorker, 9 August 1999. Read Naomi Segal's Andre Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy''.)

{CE; GL; ILP, additus, 15 December 1961; TRI}