André Gide

A Protestant childhood between Paris and Normandy

André Paul Guillaume Gide was born on 22 November 1869 at 19 rue de Médicis in Paris, in an apartment facing the Luxembourg Gardens.[4] He was the only child of Paul Gide, a professor of Roman law at the University of Paris, and Juliette Rondeaux, who came from a wealthy Protestant family of Rouen industrialists. The economist Charles Gide was his uncle. In 1875 the family moved to 2 rue de Tournon, a short walk away.

Both sides of the family were Protestant, a small minority in Catholic France, and the household was strict. His father died in October 1880, when André was ten, and the boy was raised by his mother, whose Calvinist discipline governed everything from his reading to his clothes. Summers were spent on the Norman properties of his mother's family, including the house at Cuverville where he and his wife would later live.

Gide wrote about this upbringing for the rest of his life. He had been taught that his desires were sinful, he went on having them, and he never claimed to have settled the argument with himself. Most of his early books are about people in that position.

School, illness and the Journal

Gide entered the École Alsacienne, a Protestant school in Paris, at eight.[5] His schooling was constantly interrupted — by real illness, by nervous conditions, and by long stays away from Paris for treatment — and he was not a distinguished pupil. He finished his education at the Lycée Henri-IV.

The steadiest part of his intellectual life began outside school. In 1887, at seventeen, he started keeping a journal. He kept it for more than sixty years, into his final illness, and it grew into one of the largest and most read diaries in French literature. The Journal records his friendships, his reading, his religious struggles and his sexual life with a frankness that made it a work in its own right rather than a writer's notebook.

Mallarmé's Tuesdays and the first book

As a young man Gide was drawn into the Symbolist circle around the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who received writers at his apartment at 89 rue de Rome on Tuesday evenings. The Symbolists prized suggestion over statement and treated literature as something close to a religion. Gide's earliest writing belongs to that world.

His first book, Les Cahiers d'André Walter, appeared in 1891, when he was twenty-one.[2] He published it anonymously, though people in Paris knew who had written it. The book is the diary of an invented young man who wants to be pure and also wants sex, which is what Gide was going through at the time. Mallarmé admired it. The book sold almost nothing, but it introduced Gide to literary Paris, and literary Paris took note of him from then on.

North Africa, 1893

On 18 October 1893 Gide sailed from Marseille for Tunis with his friend the painter Paul-Albert Laurens. He was twenty-three and had never been out from under his family's supervision. In Tunisia he fell dangerously ill with what was diagnosed as tuberculosis. In January 1894 the two settled at Biskra, an oasis town in Algeria, for his convalescence, and his mother travelled out to join them.[6] The illness and the recovery together became the turning point of his life.

Away from Paris and his mother, Gide had his first sexual experiences with adolescent boys, and stopped treating his desire for males as a sickness to be cured. The discovery did not free him from his Protestant conscience — nothing ever did — but from then on he regarded the war between the two as his real subject. He went back to North Africa many times over the next years, and the oases, the heat and the freedom he felt there appear in the books he wrote over the following decade.

Oscar Wilde and the slate at Blida

Gide had met Oscar Wilde in Paris in 1891, when Wilde was at the height of his fame and Gide was a promising beginner. Wilde's conversation dazzled him, and Wilde's French astonished him. The older writer took a mischievous interest in the pious young man, and Gide left their meetings shaken.

They met again early in 1895, in Algeria, weeks before Wilde's trials began in London. Checking out of his hotel in Blida, Gide saw the names of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas chalked on the slate of arriving guests. He erased his own name and left for the station. On the way he decided the erasure had been cowardice, turned back, and wrote his name up again. Gide told the story himself, in his memoir of Wilde, as evidence of how much the older man frightened him.

In the days after Blida, the two met again in Algiers. In his memoir Si le grain ne meurt, Gide describes a night there that Wilde arranged for him with a young musician, and presents it as the moment he stopped lying to himself about what he wanted. Months later Wilde was in prison. Gide's short book about him, published after Wilde's death, is one of the earliest sympathetic accounts of his ruin.

His mother's death and marriage to Madeleine

Juliette Gide died in 1895. Within months, Gide married his first cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, whom he had loved since childhood. The wedding took place in October 1895 at Cuverville in Normandy, where Madeleine's family had its house.

The marriage was never consummated. Gide loved Madeleine and wanted men, and he did not think the two cancelled each other out. She never said publicly what she thought of the arrangement. They lived much of each year at her family house at Cuverville. The marriage was affectionate, unhappy, and impossible to fix, and it lies behind several of his books. Strait Is the Gate, about a woman who gives up the man she loves in order to be holy and destroys herself doing it, was drawn from Madeleine.

Mayor of La Roque-Baignard

In May 1896 Gide became mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a small [7]commune in Normandy where his mother's family owned property. He was twenty-six, and he took the duties seriously enough to preside over council meetings and local ceremonies while writing Les Nourritures terrestres, the most anarchic book of his career.

The mayoralty was a small episode, but it captures something constant in him. Gide spent his life inside respectable institutions — the mairie, the marriage, the review, the publishing house — while writing books that questioned the foundations of each one.

Les Nourritures terrestres

Les Nourritures terrestres, published in 1897, is not a novel but a rhapsody. It addresses an imagined young reader named Nathanaël and urges him to throw off books, teachers, habits and families, and to give himself to sensation and the present moment. It came directly out of the North African convalescence, when Gide had learned what it felt like to want to be alive.

The book sold almost nothing for twenty years. After the First World War, a generation that had watched the old certainties destroy themselves adopted it as a manual, and it became one of the most influential French books of the century. Gide watched the delayed triumph with some unease, and later warned readers that the book was a stage to pass through, not a place to live.

The Immoralist

The Immoralist, published in 1902, is the book where Gide's method arrives whole. Michel, a young scholar, nearly dies of tuberculosis on his honeymoon in North Africa. Recovering, he decides that health, sensation and his own desires outrank every duty he has been taught, and he tests that creed while his wife Marceline sickens. He follows it to the end, and the end is her death.

Gide called the book a récit: a short story told by one person about himself. Nobody in the book tells the reader that Michel is wrong. Michel explains himself well, his wife dies anyway, and the reader is left to put the two together. Readers have argued ever since about how much of Michel is Gide. The book found few readers when it appeared; its reputation grew with his.

Strait Is the Gate

La Porte étroite — Strait Is the Gate in English — appeared in 1909 and is The Immoralist's mirror image. Alissa Bucolin loves her cousin Jérôme and is loved in return. Step by step she renounces him, and finally life itself, in pursuit of a holiness that admits no earthly attachment. The novel records her self-erasure through Jérôme's baffled memory and her own diary.

Michel destroys other people to please himself; Alissa destroys herself to please God. Gide wrote the two books as a pair, said so, and treated both endings as disasters. The two récits made his name, and Strait Is the Gate reached a far wider readership than anything he had published before.

Founding the Nouvelle Revue Française

In November 1908 Gide and a group of friends — Jean Schlumberger, Jacques Copeau, Henri Ghéon, André Ruyters and Marcel Drouin among them — brought out the first issue of a literary review, the Nouvelle Revue Française. They disliked the result, disowned it, and relaunched the review with a new first issue on 1 February 1909.[8] That second start is the one that counted.

The NRF had one rule: judge writing as writing, not by the politics or the sales of the author, which is how the older reviews worked. Gide never edited it day to day, but he was its conscience and its most famous name, and his judgment shaped what it printed. Within ten years it was the most important literary review in France, and being printed in it made a writer's reputation. Its offices at 31 rue Jacob, and later on the rue de Beaune, became an address writers aimed at.

The publishing house that became Gallimard

On 31 May 1911 the review added a publishing arm. Les Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française was founded by Gaston Gallimard, a young man of means brought in to run the business, together with Gide and Jean Schlumberger. The imprint later took its manager's name and became Éditions Gallimard, the most important literary publisher in France.

Gide's part in the firm was editorial rather than commercial. He read manuscripts, argued for and against them, and gave the house its early identity as the publisher of the NRF's kind of literature. Most of Gide's own books appeared under the imprint for the rest of his life.

Turning away Marcel Proust

At the end of 1912, Marcel Proust submitted Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, to the NRF. The review turned it down, and Gide bore the largest share of the decision. Proust seemed to him a society amateur, a snob with too many duchesses in his pages, and the manuscript was barely read. Proust published the book at his own expense with Bernard Grasset in 1913.

Gide understood the mistake within months. In January 1914 he wrote to Proust calling the refusal the gravest error the NRF had made — and, he added, one of the sharpest regrets of his life, since he was largely responsible for it. Proust answered graciously, and the NRF went on to publish the rest of In Search of Lost Time. The episode has become the most famous rejection in publishing history, and Gide's apology is part of why: the error was total, admitted in writing, and repaired.

Récits, soties and one novel

Gide sorted his own fiction into categories. The short, single-voiced books — The Immoralist, Strait Is the Gate, La Symphonie pastorale — he called récits. The satirical entertainments he called soties, a medieval word for fools' plays. Of everything he wrote, he reserved the word novel for only one book, The Counterfeiters.

Les Caves du Vatican, a sotie published in 1914, follows a swindle built on the rumor that the Pope has been kidnapped and replaced. Its most discussed figure, the young Lafcadio, pushes a stranger from a moving train for no reason at all — the "gratuitous act" that moralists and philosophers argued about for decades afterward. La Symphonie pastorale, published in 1919 in the NRF and then as a book, is a récit again. A Swiss pastor takes in a blind girl, educates her, and hides his desire for her from himself inside the language of Christian charity. It became one of his most widely read books.

Marc Allégret and the burned letters

In 1916 Gide began a love affair with Marc Allégret, the teenage son of a pastor whose family Gide had known for years. The relationship consumed him, and in 1918 he left for England with Marc for the summer, making little effort to hide what was happening.

Madeleine's answer came while he was away. She gathered every letter he had written her since his youth and burned them all. Gide called the letters the best of himself and grieved over their destruction for the rest of his life. They remained married until her death. Allégret grew up to become a film director, and remained close to Gide for decades.

Corydon

Corydon is Gide's defense of homosexuality. It is written as four dialogues in which a doctor answers the objections of a hostile visitor. Gide printed it privately and anonymously twice, twelve copies in 1911 and twenty-one in 1920. In 1924 he published a signed trade edition, against the advice of nearly everyone he trusted.

The book argues from Greek history, from natural science as Gide understood it, and from the plain existence of men like himself, that same-sex desire is natural and has been part of every civilization. Friends begged him not to put his name on it. He thought it was his most important book for exactly that reason: someone respectable had signed it. It damaged him. The scandal shadowed the rest of his public life and is generally counted among the reasons the Académie française never elected him.

Si le grain ne meurt

Si le grain ne meurt — the title quotes the Gospel of John, "unless a grain of wheat dies" — is Gide's memoir of his childhood and youth, ending with his engagement to Madeleine. Partial private printings circulated from 1920, and the trade edition went on sale in 1926.[9]

The book tells, in the first person and under his own name, what the novels had told in disguise: the Protestant household, the awakening in North Africa, the nights in Algiers with Wilde, the decision to marry. No French writer of his standing had published such a thing before. Alongside Corydon it made Gide the most visible homosexual man in European letters, four decades before that visibility stopped being dangerous.

The Counterfeiters

Les Faux-Monnayeurs — The Counterfeiters — appeared in 1925, and Gide called it his only novel. It runs dozens of characters through interlocking plots about counterfeit coins, counterfeit feelings and counterfeit literature, centered on a novelist, Édouard, who is writing a book called The Counterfeiters and failing at it.

The novel questions its own telling as it goes — the narrator breaks in, judges his characters, and admits uncertainty about them — and Gide published his working notebook, the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, alongside it. The techniques were adopted by writers across Europe, and the book stands with the major modernist novels of its decade. It was also, quietly, the first of his books to place homosexual characters at the center of an ordinary social world rather than in confession or defense.

A daughter, Catherine

In April 1923 a daughter, Catherine, was born to Gide and Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, the daughter of the painter Théo van Rysselberghe and of Maria van Rysselberghe, one of Gide's closest friends. Gide was fifty-three. The birth was kept from almost everyone, including Madeleine.

Catherine was the only child Gide ever had, and their relationship grew close in his later years. After his death she managed his literary estate, and the Fondation Catherine Gide, which she created, now holds his archives.

The Congo journey

In July 1925 Gide sailed from Bordeaux for French Equatorial Africa with Marc Allégret. They travelled for ten months through the colonies of the Congo and Chad basins, returning on 31 May 1926. Allégret shot a documentary film; Gide kept the journal that became Voyage au Congo, published in 1927, and Le Retour du Tchad, published in 1928.

What Gide found was forced labor. The great concession companies, granted enormous territories by the French state, were working African populations to death collecting rubber, and local administration either could not or would not stop them. Gide named companies, quoted figures, and described what he had seen village by village. The books caused a public controversy in France and strengthened the campaign against the concession system. He had left France as a novelist and came back as a witness, and he wrote about politics for the rest of his life.

Communism and the return from Moscow

In the early 1930s Gide declared his hope in the Soviet Union. He never joined the Communist Party, but he was the most famous French writer to align himself publicly with the communist cause, and his name was worth a great deal to it. In June 1936 he finally accepted an invitation to see the country, arriving in Moscow days after the death of the writer Maxim Gorky. He spoke at Gorky's funeral on Red Square, then toured the country as an honored guest.

The tour disillusioned him. Everywhere he found the same rehearsed answers, the same fear of opinion, the same worship of Stalin, and a conformity of thought stricter than anything he knew in the capitalist West. Retour de l'U.R.S.S., the short book he published that November, said so plainly. The communist press, which had celebrated him for years, turned on him overnight; in Moscow his books were pulled from circulation. He answered his critics with a sequel, Retouches à mon Retour de l'U.R.S.S., in 1937, sharper than the original. He never recanted either book.

The war years in Tunis and Algiers

Gide was seventy when France fell in 1940. He spent the first years of the war in the south of France, and in May 1942 crossed to Tunis. He was still there when German forces occupied the city that November, and he lived under the occupation until the Allies took Tunis in May 1943, keeping the journal later published as his wartime diary.

From Tunis he moved on to Algiers. There in 1943 he saw his old friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, with whom he played chess; Gide had written the preface to Saint-Exupéry's Vol de nuit a decade earlier. He returned to Paris after the Liberation and published Thésée in 1946[10] — an old Theseus looking back over his labyrinth, generally read as Gide's own farewell to his life's work.

The Nobel Prize

On 13 November 1947 the Swedish Academy awarded Gide 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." Earlier that year Oxford had given him an honorary doctorate, the first university honor of his life.

He was seventy-seven. The citation's phrase "fearless love of truth" was the point. The Academy was rewarding not only the novels but the career-long insistence — in Corydon, in the memoir, in the Congo books, in the Moscow book — on saying what he had actually seen and actually was.

Death at rue Vaneau

Gide had lived since August 1928 in an apartment at 1 bis rue Vaneau, in the seventh arrondissement, surrounded by the Van Rysselberghe household and a changing company of friends. Madeleine had died at Cuverville in 1938; he attended her decline with a guilt he wrote about privately for the rest of his life.

He died at the rue Vaneau apartment on the evening of 19 February 1951, at eighty-one, of pulmonary congestion. He was buried beside Madeleine in the small churchyard at Cuverville. The following year the Catholic Church placed his complete works on the Index of Forbidden Books.

The Journal

Gide's Journal may outlast the fiction. Begun in 1887 and kept for over sixty years, it runs to thousands of pages. It records the religious crises, the marriage, the men, the books read and written, the quarrels of literary Paris, two wars, and his long political education.

In 1939 the Journal was published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, making Gide the first writer to enter the series in his lifetime. For French readers the diary became the great example of a life examined in writing. It also shows him avoiding things and excusing himself, which he left on the page instead of tidying up.

Gide and Paris

Gide's Paris ran along the Left Bank and out to Auteuil. He was born at 19 rue de Médicis, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, at what is now 2 place Edmond-Rostand. The family moved to 2 rue de Tournon in 1875. As a young man he attended Mallarmé's Tuesday evenings at 89 rue de Rome, and the NRF's offices at 31 rue Jacob and later the rue de Beaune anchored his professional life.

From 1906 he lived at 18 bis avenue des Sycomores in the Villa Montmorency, the gated enclave in Auteuil, in a house he had built by the architect Louis Bonnier. In August 1928 he moved to 1 bis rue Vaneau, his last address. Between those apartments came decades of movement — Cuverville, North Africa, the Riviera — but Paris held the institutions he built, and it is where both his career and his life ended.

Why André Gide matters

Gide matters for two separate reasons. As a writer he perfected the récit and produced in The Counterfeiters one of the inventive landmarks of the modern novel. As a public figure he demonstrated, decades before it was safe, that a writer could tell the truth about his own sexuality and survive. He also twice reported against his own side — on the colonial companies in 1927, and on the Soviet Union in 1936 — when staying quiet would have been easier.

The generation that followed measured itself against him. Albert Camus discovered Gide as an adolescent in Algiers, echoed Gide's position on the writer's responsibility in his own Nobel address ten years after Gide's, and met him once in Paris shortly before Gide's death. The institutions are the other monument: the Nouvelle Revue Française and Gallimard shaped what French literature was for a century, and both were, at the beginning, largely his.