The Counterfeiters (52 page)
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Authors: Andre Gide
On all sides life offers us many beginnings of drama, but only rarely do these continue and take shape as the novelist is accustomed to spin them out. And this is exactly the idea I want to give in this book, which I shall have Édouard express.
Cuverville, 20 November
That many acts of a particular generation find their
explanation
in the generation that follows—this is what I started out to show, but my characters run away with me and I was unable to give myself complete satisfaction on this point. If I write another novel I should like to give more importance to this: the way those of a new generation, after having criticized and blamed the actions and attitudes (conjugal, for ex.) of their predecessors, find themselves gradually led to do almost the same things over again. André sees taking shape again in his own marriage everything that seemed to him monstrous in the family of Guillaume during his childhood.
Hospital, 3 January 1925
Bernard endures the indoctrination of a traditionalist who, ignorant of Bernard’s illegitimacy, wants to convince him that wisdom consists in everyone’s prolonging the line his father has begun to trace, etc. Bernard hardly dares come forth with his objection:
“But, after all, suppose I don’t know that father?”
And almost immediately he gets to the point of congratulating himself for not knowing him, and for consequently being forced to seek a moral rule in himself.
35
But will he know enough to rise to the point of accepting and assuming all the contradictions of his too rich nature? To the point of seeking not to resolve them but to feed them—to the point of realizing that for a taut string the amplitude of vibration and the extent of the stretch represent the power of the sound it can produce, that it can come to rest only at dead center?
A like comparison with the two magnetic poles, between which flashes the spark of life.
Bernard thinks: “Strive toward a goal?—No! Rather, go forward.”
Cuverville, end of January
How an ideal team is formed:
The first condition for joining it is that you must give up your name and become simply an anonymous force; to seek victory for the team, but not to distinguish yourself.
Without this there will be only prima donnas—freaks. To win, a high average always helps more than a few exceptional members—who seem all the more extraordinary and are noticed all the more when the team in general is more mediocre.
Classical art:
I complain of my fate less than you think
.
(B
AJAZET
)
36
8 March 1925
Saw Martin du Gard at Hyères. He would like to see my novel stretch out indefinitely. He encourages me to take more “advantage” of the characters I have created. I don’t think I shall follow his advice.
What will attract me to a new book is not so much new characters as a new way of presenting them. This novel will end sharply, not through exhaustion of the subject, which must give the impression of inexhaustibility, but on the contrary through its expansion and by a sort of blurring of its outline. It must not be neatly rounded off, but rather disperse, disintegrate.…
La Bastide, 29 March 1925
Worked rather well for almost a month. Wrote several chapters, which at first seemed particularly hard to me. But one of the peculiarities of this book (which certainly comes from the fact that I constantly refuse to “take advantage of the momentum”) is the excessive difficulty I find in beginning each new chapter—a difficulty almost equal to the one that held me marking time on the threshold of the book for so long. Yes, it has actually occurred to me for days on end to wonder whether I should be able to get the wheels turning again. As far as I can remember, there was nothing like this with
Les Caves du Vatican
, or with any other book. Or has the trouble I had in writing them been effaced from my memory, like the labor pains after the birth of the child?
I have been wondering since last night (I finished the day before Chapter xvii of the Second Part: Armand’s visit to Olivier) if it would not be well to condense into one the several chapters I had planned. It seems to me that the ghastly scene of the suicide
would gain from not being too much announced. With too much preparation you slip into bleakness. This morning I can see only advantage in a condensation that would present the suicide and its motivation in a single chapter.
It can be said of almost all “rules of life” that it would be wiser to take the opposite course than to follow them.
First take the inventory. We can balance the books later. It’s not well to mix them up. As soon as my book is finished, I shall draw a line and leave the rest to the reader—addition, subtraction, it matters but little; I do not think this ought to be up to me. So much the worse for the lazy reader; it’s the others I want. To disturb is my function. The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.
Cuverville, May 1925
I am afraid of the disproportion between the first and second parts—and that the latter, in the end, will seem noticeably shorter. Still, I am fond of sudden endings; I like to give my books the appearance of the sonnet which begins with an octave and ends with a sestet. It always seems useless to me to explain at length what the attentive reader has understood; it is an insult to him. The imagination shoots higher the narrower the end of the tube is, etc. Nevertheless, this morning I have come to the point of considering the possible advantage of dividing the book into three parts: the first (Paris) ending with Chapter xvi, the second comprising the eight chapters of Saas-Fée—which would make the third the most considerable.
37
Yesterday, 8 June, finished
Les Faux-Monnayeurs
.
Martin du Gard sends me this quotation from Thibaudet:
It is rare for an author who depicts himself in a novel to make of himself a convincing figure, by which I mean a living person.… The authentic novelist creates his characters according to the infinite directions of his possible life; the false novelist creates them from the single line of his real life. The genius of the novel makes the possible come to life: it does not revive the real.
38
And this seems so true to me that I am thinking of setting these sentences at the head of
Les Faux-Monnayeurs
as a preface alongside the following, which Vauvenargues wrote, undoubtedly thinking of Henri Massis:
Those who do not get outside themselves are all of a piece.
39
But in the final analysis it is better to let the reader think what he will—though it be against me.
20
Colpach in Luxembourg was the home of Mme Mayrisch de Saint-Hubert, wife of the director of a great metallurgical syndicate. Her château was a meeting-place of French and German cultures since she gathered writers, philosophers, and artists as her guests.
21
Francis Vielé-Griffin (1864–1937) was an American-born French poet of nature, who, inspired by the Greek classics, the Scandinavians, and Walt Whitman, contributed a new breath to the symbolist movement.
22
“Las du triste hôpital”
is a famous phrase from Mallarmé’s Les Fenêtres.
23
These are seventeenth-century novels by Mme de La Fayette and Furetière respectively, the former a novel of psychological penetration, and the latter a work of flat realism.
24
Gide was an almost annual participant in the philosophical and literary discussion-periods organized by Paul Desjardins at the abandoned Abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy.
25
Dare I point out that in
La Porte étro
ite (1909) “pure poetry” is already spoken of (pp. 132–3), merely in passing, to be sure? But it does not seem to me that in Alissa’s mind these words have a very different meaning from the one Abbé Bremond was to give to them years later. [A.]
26
“Vous vous aimez tous deux plus que vous
ne
pensez
,” is a line from Molière’s
Tartuffe
, Act II, Scene iv.
27
Gide is objecting to the vulgarism
“pour ne pas qu’il sorte”
used in place of some such approved, and less awkward, form as
“afin qu’il ne sorte pas.”
28
The original of La Pérouse was obviously Marc de La Nux (1830–1914), Gide’s piano teacher, whom he always venerated. Born on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, he was brought to France at eleven to receive a musical education. At twenty he married the daughter of Anaïs Descombes, of the Nîmes Conservatory, where he studied. A pupil of Liszt (through whom he met Chopin), he taught in Paris for over sixty years and right up to his death knew all the
Beethoven
sonatas by heart. Under the name of La Pérouse he appears likewise in
Si le grain ne meurt
… and the
Journals
.
29
Alissa is the heroine of
La Porte étroite
(
Strait is the Gate
), which first appeared in 1909.
30
Paul Claudel (1868–1955), the French poet and diplomat (Ambassador to Tokyo and to Washington), whose odes and verse dramas struck a new note of genius; an ardent Catholic, he would have liked to convert Gide.
31
Jacques Rivière (1886–1925), the French literary critic, was editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
from 1919 to 1925, after having been identified with the review almost from the time it was founded in 1909 by Gide and a group of friends.
32
Valery Larbaud (1881–1957), French poet, novelist, and essayist, is especially appreciated for his penetrating
Journal d’A. O. Barnabooth
(1913), which introduced into literature a new cosmopolitanism, and for his sensitive translations of Samuel Butler, W. S. Landor, Walt Whitman, etc.
33
At Roquebrune (Alpes-Maritimes), on Cap Martin, between Nice and Menton on the Riviera, Gide frequently visited the French painter Simon Bussy (1870–) and his English wife, who translated many of Gide’s major works into English.
34
Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), who figures in the banquet scene in
The Counterfeiters
, was a French humorist in novel, drama, and poetry, whose fantastic works such as
Ubu Roi
foreshadowed surrealism.
35
Lafcadio is likewise illegitimate. And the attitude of Œdipus in Gide’s play of 1931 is particularly significant: “So long as I thought I was the son of Polybius, I applied myself to mimicking his virtues.… Listening to the lesson of the past, I looked only to yesterday for my so-be-it, my prompting. Then, suddenly, the thread is broken. Sprung from the unknown; no more past, no more model, nothing on which to base myself, everything to create, country, ancestors … to invent, to discover. No one to resemble but myself.… It is a call to valor not to know one’s parents.
36
“Je me plains de mon sort moins que vous ne pensez,”
is a line from Racine’s
Bajazet
, Act II, Scene iii.
37
In the published novel Parts I and III are almost equal in length and each comprises eighteen chapters.
38
This is a passage from Albert Thibaudet’s article, “The Æsthetics of the Novel,” which, first published in the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, was reprinted in his
Réflexions sur le roman
(
Reflections on the Novel
) of 1938.
39
Advice to a Young Man
(quoted by Sainte-Beuve in his
Causeries du Lundi
, Vol. I, p. 8). [A.]
Figaro, 16 September 1906
They operated in the following manner:
The counterfeit coins were manufactured in Spain, introduced into France, and brought by three professional criminals: Djl, Monnet, and Tornet. They were delivered to the middlemen Fichat, Micornet, and Armanet and sold by them for 2 fr. 50 each to the youths who were to pass them.
These latter were bohemians, second-year students, unemployed journalists, artists, novelists, etc. But there was in addition a certain number of young students from the École des Beaux-Arts, several sons of public officials, the son of a provincial magistrate, and a minor employee of the Ministry of Finance.
