The Living Gide*
By JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
HE was thought to be anointed and embalmed ; he dies and it is discovered how much he had remained alive. The embarrassment and resentment which were apparent beneath the funeral wreaths grudgingly offered to his memory show that he still gave offence and would do so for a long time to come. He managed to unite against himself " right-minded " people of both political extremes. One only has to imagine the voice of certain eminent nonentities crying, "Lord, thank you ; so it was he who was wrong since I am the one who survives "; one only has to read in the Humanite: "It is a corpse that has just died," to realise what weight this old man of eighty, who had almost given up writing, still carried in the literature of today.
There is a geography of thought. Just as a Frenchman. wherever he may travel, cannot take a step abroad without putting himself nearer to or further away from France, so any movement of the mind brings us nearer to or further from Gide. His clarity, his lucidity, his rationalism, his shunning of pathos permitted others to risk their thoughts in more obscure and uncertain ventures. One knew that at the same time a shining intellect upheld the rights of analysis, purity and a certain tradition. If the adventurer had sunk on the voyage of discovery the human mind would not have been engulfed in the shipwreck. The whole of French thought of these last thirty years, whether it liked it or not, whatever may have been its other co-ordinates, Marx, Hegel, Kierkegaard, had also to define itself in relation to Gide.
For my own part, the mental restrictions, the hypocrisy, to put it bluntly the abject crawling, of the obituary notices have disgusted me too much for me to dream of noting here what separated us from him. It is more worth our while to recall here the inestimable gifts which he has bequeathed us. I have read from the pen of fellow-writers—who have never astonished anyone by their boldness—that he "lived dangerously under three layers of flannel waistcoat." The silly taunt. These timid souls have discovered a curious defence against the audacity of others ; they only condescend to admit this audacity if it is displayed equally in every domain. They would have forgiven Gide for taking risks with his thought and his reputation 1411 rights resen:ed. Copyright Jean-Paul Sartre and Agence France- Pressel if he had also risked his life and defied, of all thines, pneumonia. They pretend not to know that there are different kinds of courage and that they differ according to personalities. Very well, then, Gide was cautious. He weighed his words, he hesitated before giving his signature, and, if he took an interest in a movement of ideas or opinions, he so arranged things as to give only a conditional adherence, so as to remain on the outskirts always ready to beat a retreat. But the same man dared to publish the profession of faith that was Corydon, the indictment that was his Voyage au Congo. He had the courage to side with the U.S.S.R. when it was dangerous to do so, and even greater courage to go back publicly on his opinion when, rightly or wrongly. he decided he had made a mistake.
It is this mixture of wariness and audacity for which he is outstanding. Generosity is not estimable save in those who know the true value of things and, similarly, nothing is more genuinely moving than a calculated boldness. Written by a less responsible author Corydon would have been reduced to a mere question of morals ; but since this astute author weighs up every- thing, the book becomes a manifesto, a testimony whose scope goes far beyond the scandal it, provokes. This cautious audacity should be a "rule for the guidance of the mind ": to withhold one's judgement until the evidence is given and, when one has become convinced, to pay for one's conviction to the last penny. Courage and caution ; this well-apportioned mixture explains the internal tension of his work. The art of Gide seeks to establish a compromise between the risk and the rule ; in him are balanced the law of the Protestant and the non-conformity of the homosexual, the proud individualism of the grand bourgeois- and the puritan's taste for social restraint, a certain dryness, a difficulty in communicating with others and a humanism of Christian origin, a lively sensuality (which would like to be innocent) ; the observance of the rule is united in him with the quest for spontaneity.
This balancing act is at the very root of the inestimable service which Gide has rendered to contemporary literature: he it was who pulled it out of the symbolist rut. The second generation of symbolists came to the conclusion that the writer could not, without falling from grace, deal with more than a very limited number of subjects, all on a very high plane, but that he could, on these clearly defined subjects, express himself in any way he pleased. Gide set us free from this naive chosisme ; he taught us, or rather re-taught ui, that everything could be said—therein lay his audacity—but only according to certain rules of good writing—therein lay his caution. From this cautious audacity derived his perpetual changes of front, his waverings from one extreme to another, his passion for objectivity—one should even call it his "objectivism "- which induced him to look for reason even in his adversaries and led to his being fascinated by the opinions of others. It was, I admit, a very middle-class passion. I do not pretend that these characteristic attitudes of his could be profitable to us today, but they enabled him to turn his life into a severe experiment which we can assimilate without any preparation ; to put it in a nutshell, he lived his own ideas, and in particular the idea of the death of God.
I do not imagine that a single believer of today has been won over to Christianity by the arguments of Saint Bonaventuro or Saint Anselm ; but I do not think either that a single dis- believer has been turned from the faith by the opposite argu- ments. The problem of God is a human problem concerning the relations of men with each other ; it is a total problem to which each individual contributes a solution by his whole life. and this solution reflects the attitude that the individual has chosen towards his fellows and towards himself. Gide's most precious contribution was his decision to live to the bitter end the agony and death of God. He could have, like so many others, taken a wager on a given concept and decided once and for all at twenty years of age on the question of faith or atheism. Instead he preferred to put to the test his relation to religion. and the living dialectic which brought him finally to atheism was a path which others could tread after him, but which cannot be laid down by mere concepts and notions. His interminable discussions with the Catholics, his effusions, his shafts of irony, his coquetries, his abrupt ruptures, his advances, his "mark- times." his retirements, the ambiguity of the word " God " in his work, his refusal to abandon it even at a time when he had come to believe only in man—the whole of this rigorous experi- ment has done more to enlighten us than a hundred demon- strations.
He lived for us a life which we have only to live again by reading his work. He enables us to avoid the pitfalls into which be stumbled or to get out of them again as he did. The oppo- nents whom he discredited in our eyes, if only by publishing their correspondence, can no longer beguile us. All truth, Hegel said, is the becoming. Too often this is forgotten ; one sees the outcome and not the route that is followed, one takes the idea as a finished product without perceiving that it is nothing other than its slow maturing, nothing other than a series of necessary mistakes which are corrected, of limited views which complete one another and grow wider. Gide is an irreplaceable example because he chose on the contrary to become his own truth. If it had been decided upon in ale abstract at twenty years of age, his atheism would have been false ; but as the slowly-won fulfil- ment of half a century of seeking, this atheism becomes his concrete truth and our own. With this point of departure, the men of today can become new truths.
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