Books
Her fortunate illusion
Peter Quennell
Selected Letters of Andre Gide and Dorothy Bussy Richard Tedeschi With an Introduction by Jean Lambert (Oxford University Press £17.50)
T ove unrequited is always a tragic sub- ject — sad enough where the emotions aroused are completely one-sided; sadder still perhaps — at least more subtly painful — if a lover, bent on passion, is obliged to settle for affection, and thus, welcome though friendship may sometimes be, re- mains permanently dissatisfied. Such a tragedy occurred in the experience of Horace Walpole, who, as an easy-going middle-aged man, never very strongly sex- ed, found that he was passionately adored by Madame du Deffand, an 'old blind debauchee of wit', and involved in a situa- tion that, at first amusing and mildly flat- tering, soon became desperately embarrass- ing. She continued to pursue him until the very end of her life, and on her death bed sent him through her secretary a touching farewell letter. 'Nous etions presque perdu run pour l'autre (it concluded); nous ne nous devions jamais revoir; vows me regret- terez, parce qu'on est bien aise de se savoir aime'.
Reading the Selected Letters of Andre Gide and Dorothy Bussy, the earliest dated October 1918, the last January 1951, one often thinks of Horace Walpole and of his unhappy old admirer. True, Madame Bussy, a Strachey by birth and Lytton Strachey's elder sister, despite her cleverness had little in common with the 18th-century femme du monde; while Gide's sexual character was very different from that of Walpole. But her devotion to the French novelist was just as tenacious as Madame du Deffand's passion for the good-natured English dilettante, and prov- ed, throughout an attachment that lasted more than 30 years, almost equally frustrating. One doubts if Gide himself would have been quite prepared to agree that we are always glad to know that in the past we have been deeply loved.
His summing-up of the situation, indeed, given to a friend, Roger Martin du Gard, who, towards the end of his life, had hand- ed him, at Madame Bussy's request, an envelope containing some notes that she had made on their difficult relationship, was a good deal less romantic:
The day before yesterday (Martin du Gard records) I gave him Dorothy's envelope. When he returned it to me he said 'This love of Dorothy's has been a pathetic thing ... There is an aston- ishing page where she tells herself that she has been, in my life, the only woman who might have been the cause of my "infidelity" — of my infidelity vis-et-vis my wife, and that is why ... I protected myself against her love ...'
This strange belief, comments Martin du Gard, had been a 'fortunate illusion ... I who have heard his confidences concerning Dorothy since 1920 ... remember that he never felt for her more than a compas- sionate and deeply tender friendship and that it was from natural incapacity and not at all from conjugal fidelity' that he had brushed her 'too ardent love' aside.
Many famous writers, of course, have been pursued, importuned, even successful- ly seduced by attractive y6ung women. But, when she first met Gide in Cambridge dur- ing the summer of 1918, Dorothy Bussy was already 52, and for the last 15 years had been married to Simon Bussy, a talented
and sympathetic French artist; and Gide was accompanied by his handsome protege Marc, whom he liked to call his 'nephew'. With his wife Madeleine, as he would after- wards reveal in a painfully explicit little book, Et Nunc Manet in Te, his union was more or less platonic; and, far from disguis- ing his homosexual tastes, he insistently proclaimed them.
The tale told in the Selected Letters — an abridgement of the full French text publish- ed by Gallimard five years ago — is one of the most extraordinary modern love stories, or descriptions of frustrated love, that I can remember reading. The protagonists were both extraordinary people; and to counteract the gift of self-expression Madame Bussy's only original literary pro- duction, an autobiographical vignette en- titled Olivia, has been saluted as a master- piece — both of them evidently possessed a certain aptitude for self-deception. The standards that Madame Bussy applied to her own life were often considerably more lenient than those she applied to her rela- tions and her friends; and, in 1918, just when she was beginning her passionate put- suit of Gide, she deplored the fact that her learned brother Lytton had set up house with his devoted acolyte Dora Carrington. `So much adoration on one side, so much affection on the other — and the whole thing hopelessly unsuitable', she sharPlY and uncharitably wrote. As for Gide, he was a cautious, secretive man, who, with his coat-collar carefully turned up and his shaggy brows pullei.d. down, had somewhat the air, an Eaglis- visitor once said, of 'an elderly Fallen Angel travelling incognito'. On the back of the present volume an admirable photograph shows thereat novelist and Dorothy Bossy c breakfasting together at PontignY, secularised abbey where French intellectuals foeaf tshtse. dTayhearsesemwabsleda totoeunejhoyotfheeirrotealltkyiar.ni Gide's character — or, if not of deliberate cruelty, of insensitive thoughtlessness —II Jean Lambert points out; and at Pontigu).: during one of these sessions, he made a s aer long bear his child. the datblegfhot den terrible announcement — re of two old family friends would, Catherine Gide was born in April 1923] and Madame Bussy, though she suffer.eu hideous pangs — 'What is this horriblealne- stinct of jealousy?' she demanded. `I n save never really felt it before' — gradually se°,°_ dued her anguish. To the end she retainon: firm conviction that 'of all people ° alive, it is I who have known you best. For the boys you loved were too young, ignorant to understand what it young Ya°or gave them. But I was neither too y a too ignorant to know what it was youtg and what you withheld.' Gide did aannd dis- courage se courage her 'fortunate illusion'; correspondence that had long been the_ii, chief link continued steadily, and often calmly and profitably — both were until critics died in51n1te9mp.orary literature — Gide
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