André Gide
French writer
in full André-Paul-Guillaume Gide
born Nov. 22, 1869, Paris, France
died Feb. 19, 1951, Paris
Main
French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1947.
Heritage and youth
Gide was the only child of Paul Gide and his wife, Juliette Rondeaux.
His father was of southern Huguenot peasant stock; his mother, a Norman
heiress, although Protestant by upbringing, belonged to a northern Roman
Catholic family long established at Rouen. When Gide was eight he was
sent to the École Alsacienne in Paris, but his education was much
interrupted by neurotic bouts of ill health. After his father’s early
death in 1880, his well-being became the chief concern of his devoutly
austere mother; often kept at home, he was taught by indifferent tutors
and by his mother’s governess. While in Rouen Gide formed a deep
attachment for his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux.
Gide returned to the École Alsacienne to prepare for his baccalauréat
examination, and after passing it in 1889, he decided to spend his life
in writing, music, and travel. His first work was an autobiographical
study of youthful unrest entitled Les Cahiers d’André Walter (1891; The
Notebooks of André Walter). Written, like most of his later works, in
the first person, it uses the confessional form in which Gide was to
achieve his greatest successes.
Symbolist period
In 1891 a school friend, the writer Pierre Louÿs, introduced Gide into
the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous “Tuesday evenings,” which were the
centre of the French Symbolist movement, and for a time Gide was
influenced by Symbolist aesthetic theories. His works “Narcissus”
(1891), Le Voyage d’Urien (1893; Urien’s Voyage), and “The Lovers’
Attempt” (1893) belong to this period.
In 1893 Gide paid his first visit to North Africa, hoping to find
release there from his dissatisfaction with the restrictions imposed by
his puritanically strict Protestant upbringing. Gide’s contact with the
Arab world and its radically different moral standards helped to
liberate him from the Victorian social and sexual conventions he felt
stifled by. One result of this nascent intellectual revolt against
social hypocrisy was his growing awareness of his homosexuality. The
lyrical prose poem Les Nourritures terrestres (1897; Fruits of the
Earth) reflects Gide’s personal liberation from the fear of sin and his
acceptance of the need to follow his own impulses. But after he returned
to France, Gide’s relief at having shed the shackles of convention
evaporated in what he called the “stifling atmosphere” of the Paris
salons. He satirized his surroundings in Marshlands (1894), a brilliant
parable of animals who, living always in dark caves, lose their sight
because they never use it.
In 1894 Gide returned to North Africa, where he met Oscar Wilde and
Lord Alfred Douglas, who encouraged him to embrace his homosexuality. He
was recalled to France because of his mother’s illness, however, and she
died in May 1895.
In October 1895 Gide married his cousin Madeleine, who had earlier
refused him. Early in 1896 he was elected mayor of the commune of La
Roque. At 27, he was the youngest mayor in France. He took his duties
seriously but managed to complete Fruits of the Earth. It was published
in 1897 and fell completely flat, although after World War I it was to
become Gide’s most popular and influential work. In the postwar
generation, its call to each individual to express fully whatever is in
him evoked an immediate response.
Great creative period
Le Prométhée mal enchaîné (1899; Prometheus Misbound), a return to the
satirical style of Urien’s Voyage and Marshland, is Gide’s last
discussion of man’s search for individual values. His next tales mark
the beginning of his great creative period. L’Immoraliste (1902; The
Immoralist), La Porte étroite (1909; Strait Is the Gate), and La
Symphonie pastorale (1919; “The Pastoral Symphony”) reflect Gide’s
attempts to achieve harmony in his marriage in their treatment of the
problems of human relationships. They mark an important stage in his
development: adapting his works’ treatment and style to his concern with
psychological problems. The Immoralist and Strait Is the Gate are in the
prose form which Gide termed a récit; i.e., a studiedly simple but
deeply ironic tale in which a first-person narrator reveals the inherent
moral ambiguities of life by means of his seemingly innocuous
reminiscences. In these works Gide achieves a mastery of classical
construction and a pure, simple style.
During most of this period Gide was suffering deep anxiety and
distress. Although his love for Madeleine had given his life what he
called its “mystic orientation,” he found himself unable, in a close,
permanent relationship, to reconcile this love with his need for freedom
and for experience of every kind. Les Caves du Vatican (1914; The
Vatican Swindle) marks the transition to the second phase of Gide’s
great creative period. He called it not a tale but a sotie, by which he
meant a satirical work whose foolish or mad characters are treated
farcically within an unconventional narrative structure. This was the
first of his works to be violently attacked for anticlericalism.
In the early 1900s Gide had already begun to be widely known as a
literary critic, and in 1908 he was foremost among those who founded La
Nouvelle Revue Française, the literary review that was to unite
progressive French writers until World War II. During World War I Gide
worked in Paris, first for the Red Cross, then in a soldiers’
convalescent home, and finally in providing shelter to war refugees. In
1916 he returned to Cuverville, his home since his marriage, and began
to write again.
The war had intensified Gide’s anguish, and early in 1916 he had
begun to keep a second Journal (published in 1926 as Numquid et tu?) in
which he recorded his search for God. Finally, however, unable to
resolve the dilemma (expressed in his statement “Catholicism is
inadmissible, Protestantism is intolerable; and I feel profoundly
Christian”), he resolved to achieve his own ethic, and by casting off
his sense of guilt to become his true self. Now, in a desire to
liquidate the past, he began his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt
(1926; If It Die . . .), an account of his life from birth to marriage
that is among the great works of confessional literature. In 1918 his
friendship for the young Marc Allégret caused a serious crisis in his
marriage, when his wife in jealous despair destroyed her “dearest
possession on earth”—his letters to her.
After the war a great change took place in Gide, and his face began
to assume the serene expression of his later years. By the decision
involved in beginning his autobiography and the completion in 1918 of
Corydon (a Socratic dialogue in defense of homosexuality begun earlier),
he had achieved at last an inner reconciliation. Corydon’s publication
in 1924 was disastrous, though, and Gide was violently attacked, even by
his closest friends.
Gide called his next work, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The
Counterfeiters), his only novel. He meant by this that in conception,
range, and scope it was on a vaster scale than his tales or his soties.
It is the most complex and intricately constructed of his works, dealing
as it does with the relatives and teachers of a group of schoolboys
subject to corrupting influences both in and out of the classroom. The
Counterfeiters treats all of Gide’s favourite themes in a progression of
discontinuous scenes and happenings that come close to approximating the
texture of daily life itself.
In 1925 Gide set off for French Equatorial Africa. When he returned
he published Voyage au Congo (1927; Travels in the Congo), in which he
criticized French colonial policies. The compassionate, objective
concern for humanity that marks the final phase of Gide’s life found
expression in political activities at this time. He became the champion
of society’s victims and outcasts, demanding more humane conditions for
criminals and equality for women. For a time it seemed to him that he
had found a faith in Communism. In 1936 he set out on a visit to the
Soviet Union, but later expressed his disillusionment with the Soviet
system in Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (1936; Return from the U.S.S.R.) and
Retouches à mon retour de l’U.R.S.S. (1937; Afterthoughts on the
U.S.S.R.).
Late works
In 1938 Gide’s wife, Madeleine, died. After a long estrangement they had
been brought together by her final illness. To him she was always the
great—perhaps the only—love of his life. With the outbreak of World War
II, Gide began to realize the value of tradition and to appreciate the
past. In a series of imaginary interviews written in 1941 and 1942 for
Le Figaro, he expressed a new concept of liberty, declaring that
absolute freedom destroys both the individual and society: freedom must
be linked with the discipline of tradition. From 1942 until the end of
the war Gide lived in North Africa. There he wrote “Theseus,” whose
story symbolizes Gide’s realization of the value of the past: Theseus
returns to Ariadne only because he has clung to the thread of tradition.
In June 1947 Gide received the first honour of his life: the Doctor
of Letters of the University of Oxford. It was followed in November by
the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1950 he published the last volume of
his Journal, which took the record of his life up to his 80th birthday.
All Gide’s writings illuminate some aspect of his complex character. He
is seen at his most characteristic, however, in the Journal he kept from
1889, a unique work of more than a million words in which he records his
experiences, impressions, interests, and moral crises during a period of
more than 60 years. After its publication he resolved to write no more.
Gide’s lifelong emphasis on the self-aware and sincere individual as
the touchstone of both collective and individual morality was
complemented by the tolerant and enlightened views he expressed on
literary, social, and political questions throughout his career. For
most of his life a controversial figure, Gide was long regarded as a
revolutionary for his open support of the claims of the individual’s
freedom of action in defiance of conventional morality. Before his death
he was widely recognized as an important humanist and moralist in the
great 17th-century French tradition. The integrity and nobility of his
thought and the purity and harmony of style that characterize his
stories, verse, and autobiographical works have ensured his place among
the masters of French literature.
