Country of the Mind
Meet North Africa. By John Gunther, with Sam and Beryl Epstein. (Hamish Hamilton, 15s.) We are asked by the publishers to believe that each of these books has a special interest at the moment; but although this is evidently true of the second, it is only very obliquely so of the first. Mr. Villiers David has made the first translation into English of Gide's poetic notes on North African travel; it is an excellent translation, finely illus- trated and printed in an edition, very properly, of 1,500 copies. Gide thought very highly of Amyntas, and it does contain within it a partial explanation of the extraordinary importance of North Africa in his development; thither he fled six times when he felt himself sink into the quick- sands of morality. But this is not the book that tells one of decisive moments; it covers the period of his marriage, his first homosexual experience with an Arab boy and the momentous encounter with Wilde at Blida without mentioning them. Life, in that sense, is excluded in favour of the Mallarmean prose and an exoticism refined from that of another early master, Loilys. Mr. David conveys well the absorbed interest in sensual ex- perience; taste, smell, the shock of colour. Gide was perversely in love with the ugliness and in- temperance of the desert, a natural setting which `compels all art not to exist,' providing the artist with a kind of negative discipline. 'This landscape exalts and supports my sadness.' The sterile splendours of the desert, the voluptuous moments of the oasis, are later converted into jewels of decadent prose. The anguish of the in- telligence at the strife of humanity with brute matter, at the misery of the indigenes, can be mitigated by a reading of any of Virgil's eclogues (except the fourth; there is no hint of a new age). The Kasbah is a place of strange, sad cafés; sometimes one would like to belong to it, know it from the inside, but one is incorrigibly Euro- pean and an artist. 'I address my prayers this morning to the Apollo of the Sahara; I see him with golden locks, black limbs and porcelain eyes. This morning my joy is perfect.' Nearby an Arab kills the daylight hours of Ramadan by prepar- ing kief for the evening orgy; sunk in misery he prepares his only possible paradise. He is not free' to enter what the young Gide called 'the approximate paradise of art.'
What has all this to do with North Africa now? Even a war-time acquaintance is misleading; General Massu's Algiers is not the town which supported so impassively the landings and the assassination of Darlan, where amiable young Frenchmen drove in glittering dog-carts to the black-market restaurants and the Kasbah was out of bounds. Gide's earlier, intimate knowledge was of another world, a country of the mind. The Arabs, like the landscape, derived what meaning they had from the operation of his imagination; they were things merely, and now they have violently become persons, and that is a difference.
In Meet North Africa the substance of the relevant part of Inside Africa has been revised and expanded for the young (sixteen to eighteen?), It is a conscientious and liberal piece of work, well illustrated, with photographs, though some- what characterless in style. One would more happily recommend it to its intended audience if
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