BOOKS
The Master of Arts
BY COLIN M ACIN NES 'T is possible to imagine an English Marcel Proust, but never could our culture have pro- duced a writer like Andre Gide. To begin with, our gloriously diffuse and poetic language is not one that would ever lend itself to such steely, pearly perfection as that which makes a master- piece out of an apparently slender work like Paludes. Next, we have not the same concept of the Master-writer, the Maitre—the dedicated man of letters who forms styles and moulds a whole generation of disciples, as Gide was able to do; for our own master-writers—as James or Yeats—remain individual splendours, not Socratian figures presiding over literary amides. English writers, however gifted, do not forge for themselves, from adolescence, une carriere dans les lettres as French masters like Gide contrive to do.
Then again, the dualities whose resolution—or the attempt at it—informed all Gide's writing (and so tortured his private life), that of the Protestant in the Catholic country, and of the homosexual in a nation that is almost aggres- sively heterosexual, could not have existed here. For the reverse situation of the Catholic writer in Protestant England is not comparable, since we have no folk-memory of a 'Catholic menace' • as the French have of their much more histori- cally recent upsurge of Protestant thought and power. As for homosexuality, our attitude—in literary circles, at all events—has become in this century permissive and, on the whole, incurious. This aberration is not a source of drama, as it still could be in France at that period in a prime literary figure.
In brief, one must admit that to admire— and even know—the writings of Andre Gide, one needs both to be intimately familiar with French and to be conscious of the far higher place the 'man of letters' occupies in France than he can do in our land. An additional obstacle, in ex- Plaining to any purely English reader what Gide's achievement was, is that in most kinds of writing —novel, drama, poetry, if not criticism and essay—he' was not recognisably a master. What he was, however, was a grand esprit, a key figure of French literary thinking in our cen- tury; and M. Jean Delay's study* of his early years may help us to understand why.
M. Delay's is a highly clinical report, as befits a literary critic who is also a, philosopher, an eminent psychiatrist and an academician. The tone, though respectful (the author knew Gide in his old age), is certainly not enthusiastic, and the style deadpan in the extreme. The analysis is in depth, and the illustrations of it copious; so that the reader must be warned this is a volume which demands his active co-operation, and if possible some prior knowledge of the Gidian * THE YOUTH OF ANDRII GIDE. By Jean Delay. Translated by June Guicharnaud. (University of Chicago Press, 59s. 6d.) life-view. It should be added, incidentally, that the work was first published in French in 1956, and that this English version is an abridgement.
The earlier sections deal with Gide's parentage, whose influences—as in the case of Rimbaud— were so decisive on his writing. His father Paul, an indulgent bourgeois humanist, died when the artist was a boy, and it was his mother Catherine —she seems to have understood his defects very well, and his qualities scarcely at all—who re- mained a dominating irritant in his existence until her death when he was twenty-five. She was an austere, methodical, demanding woman who certainly loved the son she supposed young Andre to be (or whom he ought to be), and was not hostile to his literary career until she became convinced it would lead him—as indeed it did— into 'the vertiginous play between heaven and hell' which became the motive-force of all his thinking. It was not so much that Gide rejected the severities of his mother's faith as that he was determined to rediscover good and evil for hiMself without the hindrance or mainstay of any doctrine. If this spiritual questing endan- gered his immortal soul—the orthodox Paul Claudel concluded that Gide was possessed by demons—it was also undertaken with enormous intellectual daring.
The other woman whose influence on him was profound, and who, in one form or another, is the unfortunate heroine of all his works, was his first cousin Madeleine 'Rondeaux, who, after rejecting him until his mother's death, eventually embarked with him on their celebrated and disastrous marriage. It was not merely Gide's homosexuality that rendered this union so fate- ful .(this, by the way, is documented and analysed in enormous detail in several chapters), but that Madeleine,. a pure woman of natural goodness, perhaps realised instinctively to what extent Gide—to use his own terms—was 'com- pletely . . . virgin and totally depraved.' In Si le grain ne nteurt he wrote of himself in his early years: One would like to believe that in that age of innocence the soul is all light, tenderness and purity, but I still see mine as nothing but shadow, ugliness and deceitfulness.
The fact is, I think, that this immensely com- plex man was neither good nor evil--not good- and-evil in the conventional sense in which most of us arc—but that he lived both his good and evil with equivalent fervour. His spiritual aspira- tions in the direction. of 'angelism' always re- mained, nor did he even believe that he was unfaithful to the traditional Protestant attitude, even though he ultimately rejected all religious sanction. But at the same time, the 'immoralism' which he declared he learned from Wilde (though was Wilde really his teacher?)—that is, an amorality not in the merely sexual sense, but in that of a general spiritual ,perversity--also possessed his s.onl. though Isis actual life was
inmost respects socially blameless. This led him to a condition of self-love and self-hate and, most of all, to a profound narcissism of temperament, so that his thoughts became almost sacred to him whatever they might happen to be.
M. Delay's account of the genesis of this peculiar nature in his early friendships and literary influences provides a fascinating picture of the self-creation of an artist. Two key factors, I feel, were that Gide was always rich, which enabled him to indulge in all his fantasies and which gives to his art, despite its audacities, an unmistakably bourgeois flavour. The other was his chronic ill-health which, like Proust, he turned to excellent use in that he believed art arises not from stability but from imbalance— which factor may also account for his special fondness for the works of Nietzsche and of Dostoievsky. 'A work of art,' Gide wrote in his Journal, 'is an equilibrium outside of time, an artificial health.'
If one word were to be chosen to characterise the Gidian spirit, it could well be its ambiguity : a 'positive' ambiguity, of course, yet one in which no thought exists without its opposite— in which truth is seen constantly to hover be- tween inevitable contradictions. Thus Gide was possessed by 'the fear of being right' (his own words), tended to be fond of his adversaries, and, as M. Delay puts it, was 'a congenitally deter- mined creature of dialogue' with a 'neutralising vocation as arbiter.' And M. Delay concludes:
Through patience, tact, and revision, he did in fact succeed in completing an extraordinary portrait of the ambivalent man, which perhaps has no equal in literature.
There are some neat evocations in the book of the renowned Gidian tone, as of his 'concise and perfidious portraits' of his fellow creatures, and the description of him as 'a virtuoso of insinuating style.' Gide does not emerge as a pleasant person, however much one may admire his talent: for he is too devious, too tortuous in his spiritual affections. But as he is the most autobiographical of artists, one must really like Gide in some manner in order to be able to like his work—or, for that matter, M. Delay's book, whose lengthy discussions of quite minor creations of the earlier Gidian canon may seem to the unsympathetic reader . to be dispropor- tionately. solemn.
M. Delay concludes that Gide's spiritual posture might be described as that of an `aesthetic mysticism:. As such; it had enormous influence over the young in France of the first three decades of this century, perhaps in part because Gide--a4 a man, if not a thinker—re- mained himself immature. From the final sen- tence of this volume:
One might say that he meant to remain per- manently attached to the age of life in which the future still seems completely open, in which the undefined being feels unbounded .and enjoys an availability that is so pure it gives the illusion of freedom.
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