André Gide

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André Paul Guillaume Gide ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French writer and author whose writings spanned a wide variety of styles and topics. He was awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide's career ranged from his beginnings in the symbolist movement, to criticising imperialism between the two World Wars. The author of more than fifty books, he was described in his obituary in The New York Times as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide expressed the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality (characterized by a Protestant austerity and a transgressive sexual adventurousness, respectively). Gide engaged in child rape; having sex with young boys who were not of the age of consent. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints. He worked to achieve intellectual honesty. As a self-professed pederast, he used his writing to explore his struggle to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without betraying one's values. His political activity was shaped by the same ethos. While sympathetic to Communism in the early 1930s, as were many intellectuals, after his 1936 journey to the USSR he supported the anti-Stalinist left; during the 1940s he shifted towards more traditional values and repudiated Communism as an idea that breaks with the traditions of the Christian civilization.

Early lifeEdit

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Gide in 1893

Gide was born in Paris on 22 November 1869 into a middle-class Protestant family. His father Jean Paul Guillaume Gide was a professor of law at University of Paris; he died in 1880, when the boy was eleven years old. His mother was Juliette Maria Rondeaux. His uncle was political economist Charles Gide. His paternal family traced its roots to Italy. The ancestral Guidos had moved to France and other western and northern European countries after converting to Protestantism during the 16th century, and facing persecution in Catholic Italy.<ref>Wallace Fowlie, André Gide: His Life and Art, Macmillan (1965), p. 11</ref><ref>Pierre de Boisdeffre, Vie d'André Gide, 1869–1951: André Gide avant la fondation de la Nouvelle revue française (1869–1909), Hachette (1970), p. 29</ref><ref>Jean Delay, La jeunesse d'André Gide, Gallimard (1956), p. 55</ref>

Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy. He became a prolific writer at an early age, publishing his first novel The Notebooks of André Walter (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter), in 1891, at the age of twenty-one.

In 1893 and 1894, Gide travelled in Northern Africa. There he came to accept his attraction to boys and youths.<ref>If It Die: Autobiographical Memoir by André Gide (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." [p. 251]</ref>

Gide befriended Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in Paris, where the latter was in exile. In 1895 the two men met in Algiers. Wilde had the impression that he had introduced Gide to homosexuality, but Gide had discovered homosexuality on his own.<ref>Out of the past, Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the present (Miller 1995:87)</ref><ref>If It Die: Autobiographical Memoir by André Gide (first edition 1920) (Vintage Books, 1935, translated by Dorothy Bussy: "I should say that if Wilde had begun to discover the secrets of his life to me, he knew nothing as yet of mine; I had taken care to give him no hint of them, either by deed or word....No doubt, since my adventure at Sousse, there was not much left for the Adversary to do to complete his victory over me; but Wilde did not know this, nor that I was vanquished beforehand or, if you will...that I had already triumphed in my imagination and my thoughts over all my scruples." [p. 286])</ref>

The middle yearsEdit

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Gide photographed by Ottoline Morrell in 1924.

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André Gide by Paul Albert Laurens (1924)

In 1895, after his mother's death, Gide married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> but the marriage remained unconsummated. In 1896, he was elected mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy.

Gide spent the summer of 1907 in Jersey, with friends Jacques Copeau and Théo van Rysselberghe and their families. He rented a room in La Valeuse Cottage in St Brelade. Whilst there he worked on the second chapter of Strait Is the Gate (French: La Porte étroite), and van Rysselberghe painted his portrait.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française (The New French Review).<ref name="Nobel">Template:Nobelprize</ref>

During World War I, Gide visited England. One of his friends there was artist William Rothenstein. Rothenstein described Gide's visit to his Gloucestershire home in his autobiography:

André Gide was in England during the war...He came to stay with us for a time, and brought with him a young nephew, whose English was better than his own. The boy made friends with my son John, while Gide and I discussed everything under the sun. Once again I delighted in the range and subtlety of a Frenchman's intelligence; and I regretted my long severance from France. Nobody understood art more profoundly than Gide, no one's view of life was more penetrating. ...
Gide had a half satanic, half monk-like mien; he put one in mind of portraits of Baudelaire. Withal there was something exotic about him. He would appear in a red waistcoat, black velvet jacket and beige-coloured trousers and, in lieu of collar and tie, a loosely knotted scarf. ...
The heart of man held no secrets for Gide. There was little that he didn't understand, or discuss. He suffered, as I did, from the banishment of truth, one of the distressing symptoms of war. The Germans were not all black, and the Allies all white, for Gide.<ref>William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, Faber & Faber, 1932, p. 344</ref>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}

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In 1916, Gide was about 47 years old when he took Marc Allégret, age 15, as a lover. Marc was one of five children of Élie Allégret and his wife. Gide had become friends with the senior Allégret during his own school years when Gide's mother had hired Allégret as a tutor for her son. Élie Allégret had been best man at Gide's wedding. After Gide fled with Marc to London, his wife Madeleine burned all his correspondence in retaliation– "the best part of myself," Gide later commented.

In 1918, Gide met and befriended Dorothy Bussy; they were friends for more than 30 years, and she translated many of his works into English.

Gide also became close friends with the critic Charles Du Bos.<ref>Template:Cite encyclopaedia</ref> Together they were part of the Foyer Franco-Belge, in which capacity they worked to find employment, food and housing for Franco-Belgian refugees who arrived in Paris following the 1914 German invasion of Belgium.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Their friendship later declined, due to Du Bos's perception that Gide had disavowed or betrayed his spiritual faith, in contrast to Du Bos's own return to faith.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>Template:Sfn

Du Bos's essay Dialogue avec André Gide was published in 1929.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The essay, informed by Du Bos's Catholic convictions, condemned Gide's homosexuality.Template:Sfn Gide and Du Bos's mutual friend Ernst Robert Curtius criticised the book in a letter to Gide, writing that "he [Du Bos] judges you according to Catholic morals suffices to neglect his complete indictment. It can only touch those who think like him and are convinced in advance. He has abdicated his intellectual liberty."Template:Sfn

In the 1920s, Gide became an inspiration for such writers as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1923, he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky. When he defended homosexuality in the public edition of Corydon (1924), he received widespread condemnation, so much so that he was blocked from being nominated to the Académie Française.<ref name="copley1989">Template:Cite book</ref> He later considered this his most important work.<ref name="copley1989"/>

In 1923, Gide sired a daughter, Catherine, by Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, a much younger woman. He had known her for a long time, as she was the daughter of his friends Maria Monnom and Théo van Rysselberghe, a Belgian neo-impressionist painter. This caused the only crisis in the long-standing relationship between Allégret and Gide, and damaged his friendship with Théo van Rysselberghe. This was possibly Gide's only sexual relationship with a woman,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and it was brief in the extreme. Catherine was his only descendant by blood. He liked to call Elisabeth "La Dame Blanche" ("The White Lady").

Elisabeth eventually left her husband to move to Paris and manage the practical aspects of Gide's life (they had adjoining apartments built on the rue Vavin). She worshipped him, but evidently they no longer had a sexual relationship.Template:Citation needed

In 1924, he published an autobiography If it Die... (French: Si le grain ne meurt). In the same year, he produced the first French-language editions of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim.

After 1925, Gide began to campaign for more humane conditions for convicted criminals. His legal wife, Madeleine Gide, died in 1938. Later he explored their unconsummated marriage in Et nunc manet in te, his memoir of Madeleine, published in English in the United States in 1952.

AfricaEdit

From July 1926 to May 1927, Gide traveled through the colony of French Equatorial Africa with his lover Marc Allégret. They went successively to Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo), Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic), briefly to Chad and then to Cameroon. He kept a journal, which he published as Travels in the Congo (French: Voyage au Congo) and Return from Chad (French: Retour du Tchad).<ref name="Nobel"/>

In this work, he criticized the behavior of French business interests in the Congo and inspired reform.<ref name="Nobel"/> In particular, he strongly criticized the Large Concessions regime (French: Régime des Grandes Concessions). The government had conceded part of the colony to French companies, allowing them to exploit the area's natural resources, in particular rubber. He related that native workers were forced to leave their village for several weeks to collect rubber in the forest, and compared their exploitation by the companies to slavery. The book contributed to the growing anti-colonialism movements in France and helped thinkers to re-evaluate the effects of colonialism in Africa.<ref>Voyage au Congo suivi du Retour du Tchad Template:Webarchive, in Lire, July–August 1995 Template:In lang</ref>

Political views and the Soviet UnionEdit

During the 1930s, Gide briefly became a Communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveler (he never formally joined any Communist party), but he, an individualist himself, advocated the idea of Communist individualism.<ref name="gf" /> Despite supporting the Soviet Union, he acknowledged the political repression in the USSR. Gide insisted on the release of Victor Serge, a Soviet writer and a member of the Left Opposition who was prosecuted by the Stalinist regime for his views.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="bio"/> As a distinguished writer sympathizing with the cause of Communism, he was invited to speak at Maxim Gorky's funeral and to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of Writers. He encountered censorship of his speeches and was particularly disillusioned with the state of culture under Soviet Communism. In his work, Retour de L'U.R.S.S. (Return from the USSR, 1936), he broke with such socialist friends as Jean-Paul Sartre Template:Citation needed; the book was addressed to pro-Soviet readers, so the purpose was to expose a reader to doubts instead of presenting harsh criticism.<ref name="bio"/> While admitting the economic and social achievements of the USSR compared to the Russian Empire, he noted the decay of culture, the erasure of the individuality of Soviet citizens, and the suppression of any dissent: Template:Quote Gide does not express his attitude towards Stalin, but he describes the signs of his personality cult: "in each [home], ... the same portrait of Stalin, and nothing else"; "portrait of Stalin... , in the same place no doubt where the icon used to be. Is it adoration, love, or fear? I do not know; always and everywhere he is present."<ref>Return from the U. S. S. R. translated in English, D. Bussy (Alfred Knopf, 1937), pp. 25; 45</ref> However, Gide wrote that these problems could be solved by raising the cultural level of Soviet society.

When Gide began preparing his manuscript for publication, the Kremlin was immediately informed about it,<ref name="rg">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and soon Gide would be visited by the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg, who said that he agreed with Gide, but asked to postpone the publication, as the Soviet Union assisted the Republicans in Spain; two days later, Louis Aragon delivered a letter from Jef Last asking to postpone the publication. These measures didn't help, and as the book was published, Gide was condemned in the Soviet press<ref name="rg"/><ref name="bio"/> and by the "friends of the USSR": Nordahl Grieg wrote that the reason of writing the book was Gide's impatience, and that with his book he made a favour to the Fascists, who greeted it with joy.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In 1937, in response, Gide published Afterthoughts on the U. S. S. R.; earlier, Gide read Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed and met Victor Serge who provided him more information about the Soviet Union.<ref name="bio">Alan Sheridan. André Gide: A Life in the Present (1999)</ref> In Afterthoughts, Gide is more direct in his criticism of the Soviet society: "Citrine, Trotsky, Mercier, Yvon, Victor Serge, Leguay, Rudolf and many others have helped me with their documentation. Everything they have taught me so far I had only suspected it – has confirmed and reinforced my fears".<ref name="aft">Afterthoughts: A Sequel to Back from the U.S.S.R (1937)</ref> The main points of Afterthoughts were that the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of Stalin, and that the privileged bureaucracy became the new ruling class which profited by the workers' surplus labour, spending the state budget on projects like the Palace of Soviets or to raise its own standards of living, while the working class lived in extreme poverty; Gide cited the official Soviet newspapers to prove his statements.<ref name="aft"/><ref name="bio"/><ref>Gide answers his Bolshevik critics libcom.org</ref>

During the World War II Gide came to a conclusion that "absolute liberty destroys the individual and also society unless it be closely linked to tradition and discipline"; he rejected the revolutionary idea of Communism as breaking with the traditions, and wrote that "if civilization depended solely on those who initiated revolutionary theories, then it would perish, since culture needs for its survival a continuous and developing tradition." In Thesee, written in 1946, he showed that an individual may safely leave the Maze only if "he had clung tightly to the thread which linked him with the past". In 1947, he said that although during the human history the civilizations rose up and died, the Christian civilization may be saved from doom "if we accepted the responsibility of the sacred charge laid on us by our traditions and our past." He also said that he remained an individualist and protested against "the submersion of individual responsibility in organized authority, in that escape from freedom which is characteristic of our age."<ref name="gf">The God that failed chinhnghia.com</ref>

Gide contributed to the 1949 anthology The God That Failed. He could not write an essay because of his state of health, so the text was written by Enid Starkie, based on paraphrases of Return from the USSR, Afterthoughts, from a discussion held in Paris at l'Union pour la Verite in 1935, and from his Journal; the text was approved by Gide.<ref name="gf" />

1930s and 1940sEdit

In 1930 Gide published a book about the Blanche Monnier case titled La Séquestrée de Poitiers, changing little but the names of the protagonists. Monnier was a young woman who was kept captive by her own mother for more than 25 years.<ref name="Pujolas">Pujolas, Marie. En tournage, un documentaire sur l'incroyable affaire de "La séquestrée de Poitiers". France TV info. Feb 27, 2015 [1]</ref><ref name="Levy">Levy, Audrey. Destins de femmes: Ces Poitevines plus ou moins célèbres auront marqué l'Histoire. Le Point. Apr 21, 2015. [2]</ref>

In 1939, Gide became the first living author to be published in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

He left France for Africa in 1942 and lived in Tunis from December 1942 until it was re-taken by French, British and American forces in May 1943 and he was able to travel to Algiers where he stayed until the end of World War II.<ref name=OBrien>Template:Cite book</ref> In 1947, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He devoted much of his last years to publishing his Journal.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Gide died in Paris on 19 February 1951. The Roman Catholic Church placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952.<ref>André Gide Biography (1869–1951). eninimports.com</ref>

Gide's life as a writerEdit

Gide's biographer Alan Sheridan summed up Gide's life as a writer and an intellectual:

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"Gide's fame rested ultimately, of course, on his literary works. But, unlike many writers, he was no recluse: he had a need of friendship and a genius for sustaining it."<ref>Alan Sheridan, p. xii.</ref> But his "capacity for love was not confined to his friends: it spilled over into a concern for others less fortunate than himself."<ref>Alan Sheridan, p. 624.</ref>

WritingsEdit

André Gide's writings spanned many genres – "As a master of prose narrative, occasional dramatist and translator, literary critic, letter writer, essayist, and diarist, André Gide provided twentieth-century French literature with one of its most intriguing examples of the man of letters."<ref>Article on André Gide in Contemporary Authors Online 2003.</ref>

But as Gide's biographer Alan Sheridan points out, "It is the fiction that lies at the summit of Gide's work."<ref>Information in this paragraph is extracted from André Gide: A Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan, pp. 629–33.</ref> "Here, as in the oeuvre as a whole, what strikes one first is the variety. Here, too, we see Gide's curiosity, his youthfulness, at work: a refusal to mine only one seam, to repeat successful formulas...The fiction spans the early years of Symbolism, to the "comic, more inventive, even fantastic" pieces, to the later "serious, heavily autobiographical, first-person narratives"...In France Gide was considered a great stylist in the classical sense, "with his clear, succinct, spare, deliberately, subtly phrased sentences."

Gide's surviving letters run into the thousands. But it is the Journal that Sheridan calls "the pre-eminently Gidean mode of expression."<ref>Information in this paragraph is extracted from André Gide: A Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan, p. 628.</ref> "His first novel emerged from Gide's own journal, and many of the first-person narratives read more or less like journals. In Les faux-monnayeurs, Edouard's journal provides an alternative voice to the narrator's." "In 1946, when Pierre Herbert asked Gide which of his books he would choose if only one were to survive," Gide replied, 'I think it would be my Journal.'" Beginning at the age of 18 or 19, Gide kept a journal all of his life and when these were first made available to the public, they ran to 1,300 pages.<ref>Journals: 1889–1913 by André Gide, trans. by Justin O'Brien, p. xii.</ref>

Struggle for valuesEdit

"Each volume that Gide wrote was intended to challenge itself, what had preceded it, and what could conceivably follow it. This characteristic, according to Daniel Moutote in his Cahiers de André Gide essay, is what makes Gide's work 'essentially modern': the 'perpetual renewal of the values by which one lives.'"<ref>Quote taken from the article on André Gide in Contemporary Authors Online, 2003.</ref> Gide wrote in his Journal in 1930: "The only drama that really interests me and that I should always be willing to depict anew, is the debate of the individual with whatever keeps him from being authentic, with whatever is opposed to his integrity, to his integration. Most often the obstacle is within him. And all the rest is merely accidental."<ref>Journals: 1889–1913 by André Gide, trans. by Justin O'Brien, p. xvii.</ref>

As a whole, "The works of André Gide reveal his passionate revolt against the restraints and conventions inherited from 19th-century France. He sought to uncover the authentic self beneath its contradictory masks."<ref>Quote taken from the article on André Gide in the Encyclopedia of World Biography, Dec. 12, 1998, Gale Pub.</ref>

SexualityEdit

In his journal, Gide distinguishes between adult-attracted "sodomites" and boy-loving "pederasts", categorizing himself as the latter. Template:Quote Template:Box quote Gide's journal documents his behavior in the company of Oscar Wilde. Template:Quote

Gide's novel Corydon, which he considered his most important work, includes a defense of pederasty. At that time (before 1945), the age of consent for any type of sexual activity was set at 13.

BibliographyEdit

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ReferencesEdit

CitationsEdit

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Works citedEdit

Edmund White, [3] André Gide: A Life in the Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998]

External linksEdit

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Website of the Catherine Gide Foundation, held by Catherine Gide, his daughter
Center for Gidian Studies
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List of Works
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André Gide at Goodreads
Amis d'André Gide in French
Period newspaper articles on Gide interface in French
André Gide, 1947 Nobel Laureate for Literature
André Gide: A Brief Introduction
Gide at Maderia in Jersey, 1901–07
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