André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author whose writing 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. Author of more than 50 books, he was described in his New York Times obituary as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti."
Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide expressed the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality. 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, like many intellectuals, after his 1936 journey to the USSR he supported the anti-Stalinist left. Towards the end of his life, in the 1940s, he shifted towards more traditional values and repudiated Communism as an idea that breaks with the traditions of Christian civilization.
Early life
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 11 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.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, in 1891, at the age of 21.
In 1893 and 1894, Gide travelled in Northern Africa. There he came to accept his homosexuality.
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 mistaken impression that he had introduced Gide to homosexuality, but Gide had already come to terms with his preferences.
The middle years
In 1895, after his mother's death, Gide married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, 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, and van Rysselberghe painted his portrait.
In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française.
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:
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 said.
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. 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 after the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. 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.
Du Bos's essay Dialogue avec André Gide was published in 1929. The essay, informed by Du Bos's Catholic convictions, condemned Gide's homosexuality. Gide and Du Bos's mutual friend Ernst Robert Curtius criticised the book in a letter to Gide, writing that the fact that 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."
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, he received so much condemnation that he was blocked from being nominated to the Académie Française. He later considered this his most important work.
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, and it was very brief. Catherine was his only descendant by blood. He liked to call Elisabeth "La Dame Blanche".
Elisabeth eventually left her husband to move to Paris and manage the practical aspects of Gide's life. They had adjoining apartments in Montparnasse. She worshipped him, but evidently they no longer had a sexual relationship.
In 1924, he published an autobiography, If it Die.... 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. He explored their marriage in Et nunc manet in te, his memoir of Madeleine, published in English in the United States in 1952.
Africa
From July 1926 to May 1927, Gide traveled through the colony of French Equatorial Africa with his lover Marc Allégret. They went to Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari, briefly to Chad, and then to Cameroon. He kept a journal, which he published as Travels in the Congo and Return from Chad.In this work, he criticized the behavior of French business interests in the Congo and inspired reform. In particular, he strongly criticized the Large Concessions regime. 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 reevaluate the effects of colonialism in Africa.
Political views and the Soviet Union
During the 1930s, Gide briefly became a Communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveler, but as an individualist himself, he advocated the idea of Communist individualism. Despite supporting the Soviet Union, he acknowledged the political repression there. 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. 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. His work Retour de L'U.R.S.S. was addressed to pro-Soviet readers, to expose them to doubts instead of presenting harsh criticism. 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:Gide does not express his attitude towards Stalin, but he describes the signs of his personality cult: "in each ,... 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." But 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, and soon Gide was visited by the Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg, who said that he agreed with Gide, but asked to postpone the publication, as the Soviet Union was aiding the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Two days later, Louis Aragon delivered a letter from Jef Last asking to postpone the publication. These efforts failed, and as the book was published, Gide was condemned in the Soviet press and by the "friends of the USSR": Nordahl Grieg wrote that Gide wrote the book out of impatience, and that with it he did a favour for the Fascists, who greeted it with joy. 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 gave him more information about the Soviet Union. In Afterthoughts, Gide criticises Soviet society more directly: "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". 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 claims.
During World War II, Gide concluded 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 traditions, writing, "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, 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 civilizations rise and fall, 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."
Gide contributed to the 1949 anthology The God That Failed. He could not write an essay because of his health, so the text was written by Enid Starkie, based on paraphrases of Return from the USSR, Afterthoughts, a discussion in Paris at l'Union pour la Verite in 1935, and his Journal; Gide approved the text.