The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (16 page)

With the total freedom that his inherited wealth (as well as the considerable fortune of his wife) gave him, Gide devoted the rest of his very long life to literature. He employed his time reading and writing—writing mostly about what he had read—and travelling. Simultaneously, religion continued to claim his soul, and pederasty his body. The conflict reached a climax in 1916, when, under the pressing—and sometimes clumsy—interventions of his Catholic friends (Claudel, first and foremost), Gide came close to conversion. But eventually he resisted the religious temptation and opted resolutely for the pursuit of a sexual obsession which was to assume manic proportions with the passing of the years.

From his earliest work,
Les Cahiers d’André Walter
(published in a private printing, paid for by his mother—1891), Gide’s literary activity never slowed. It is difficult to summarise his production: as he said himself, “Each of my books is designed to upset those readers who enjoyed the preceding one.”[
19
] The critic Jean Prévost described this attitude with a formula that won Gide’s approval: “Gide does not confront himself, he succeeds himself.”[
20
] His metamorphoses were not generated by dialectic contradictions, they were a succession of imaginative happenings: Proteus is constantly reinventing himself.

His most seminal work, the book which established him as the
guru
of rebellion against the bourgeois order, as the
maître à penser
for at least three successive generations of young men, is
Les Nourritures terrestres
(1901). Martin du Gard wondered if one could not apply to it what Sainte-Beuve once said of “those useful books which last only for a limited time, since the readers who benefit from them wear them down.”[
21
] The problem is also that books such as these usually generate mediocre imitations, and eventually we cannot avoid reading them through the prism of their vulgar caricatures. Today, alas!,
Les Nourritures terrestres
reminds us of nothing so much as the kitsch of Khalil Gibran.

The quality of his short fiction is displayed in
La Porte étroite
and shines to perfection in
La Symphonie pastorale
(1919). Both novellas benefit from the inner tension of his religious
inquiétude
, still unresolved at the time; in the latter work in particular, the spiritual ambiguity is handled with diabolical cleverness, and, in spite of its stilted dialogue and cold stylistic mannerisms, the book remains deeply affecting and comes close to being a masterpiece. In his more ambitious and longer fiction,
Les Caves du Vatican
(1914) and
Les Faux-monnayeurs
(1925), he betrays the sorry fact that he is not really a novelist: he is short of breath and has little imagination. These books were hugely successful in their time but have not aged well. Mauriac was probably right when he observed that, half a century later, Gide’s novels had already become mummified, whereas—in paradoxical contrast—those of Anatole France (so cruelly derided by the Surrealist generation) retained an amazing freshness.[
22
]

In 1924, he published
Corydon
,* a defence of homosexuality. His argumentation is clumsy and his sincerity more limited than it may appear at first, but it took considerable courage to “come out” at that time in such a public fashion.

He forcefully commented twice on public affairs—even though his notorious lack of a sense of reality* ill-prepared him for such activity. After a lengthy journey into Black Africa (French Congo and Chad, 1925–26), he wrote an eloquent denunciation of the colonial exploitation of the native populations. Then, during the 1930s, he foolishly became a fellow-traveller of Stalinist communism. His performance as “useful idiot” was short-lived, however—a brief visit to
the Soviet Union opened his eyes. It did not require exceptional percipience to appreciate the plain evidence that was under his very nose, but it certainly took exceptional courage to spell it out publicly. On his return to Paris, he wrote at once a truthful and scathing account of his political disenchantment. Against all expectations, natural justice rewarded his audacity:
Retour de l’URSS
(1936) was prodigiously successful—this iconoclastic little book was reprinted eight times in ten months and sold nearly 150,000 copies; by the end of 1937, it had been translated into fourteen languages. None of Gide’s other works was such an immediate success.[
23
]

Almost until his death (in 1951), Gide continued to write, polish and edit his
Journal
—probably his most important work. But besides his own publications, his role in and influence upon the French literary scene were also exerted through the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, which he had established in 1909 with a few friends. (When the Nazis occupied France, Otto Abetz, who was in charge of German cultural policy, observed: “There are three powers in France: communism, the big banks and the
Nouvelle Revue Française
.”)

Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947. The official statement of the Nobel Committee was typically vague, but Gide wrote a clear reply:

CHARACTER

Gide had a genius for friendship. Those who were in close and constant contact with him all loved him. If we except the sad onset of senility
in his very last years—which, in the end, generated some strain in the harmony of his small “family” circle—for most of his life, his presence seems to have brought permanent stimulation and delight to his entourage. “Good nature is the most selfish of all virtues,” Hazlitt had observed, and indeed it was Gide’s colossal self-centredness that enabled him to be generally benign to all. His selfishness was quite absolute—on this account, those who knew him best and had most affection for him could entertain no illusion[
25
]—and thus he was also tolerant and easy-going: his unflappably pleasant disposition[
26
] was built upon a bedrock of indifference to whatever did not have a direct bearing on his own person.[
27
] His aptitude for happiness was irrepressible and disarming—as he confided to the Tiny Lady: “It is incredible how difficult I find it
not
to be happy!”[
28
]

Gide enlivened all that he touched; routine and stagnation were banned from his life. He was in a state of permanent “availability,” vibrant anticipation of what the next moment would bring. He really never settled down anywhere: “What I need is constant change, I dislike all habits.”[
29
] He was unable to remain in any place for long, either physically or mentally.[
30
] He spent more time in hotel rooms and in friends’ houses than in his own apartment—which presented the forlorn, uncomfortable, gloomy, littered, impersonal and unwelcoming aspect of a temporary shelter, hardly ever lived in, with naked light bulbs dangling from the ceiling and mothballs stacked upon the seats of the armchairs. In a sense, his entire existence was but one long holiday, his leisure was unlimited, his freedom boundless, and his money plentiful. He had no family responsibilities, no professional obligations. At any time, on the spur of a fancy, he could travel to exotic places; and then, on his return, he would rest in the splendid country mansions of various acquaintances, where he enjoyed the status of guest of honour—and of shameless parasite. Most of his initiatives were taken under the impulse of a sudden inspiration, all his moves were dictated by mood and whim. Yet, for a superficial observer, these appearances of carefree and luxurious bohemia could be as misleading as the sight of a bee drifting from flower to flower on a beautiful summer afternoon: the insect may look happily intoxicated on fragrances and sunlight, whereas it is in fact relentlessly driven by the single-
minded urge to deliver a load of nectar back to its honey-making factory. As Herbart perceptively remarked,[
31
]
gratuitousness
was utterly foreign to Gide (which is ironical, considering that he coined in his fiction the very notion of
l’acte gratuit
!): with him “impressions, readings, things and people are being sorted out and assessed in the light of one single criterion: their usefulness.” In this particular respect, it is significant to note the recurrence in his diaries of expressions such as “profit” and “benefit”; whenever he records encounters with new books or visitors, instead of saying “this book is beautiful” or “this person is charming,” most often he writes: “I greatly benefited from reading . . .,” “I derived much profit from the conversation of . . .” Similar phrases crop up literally dozens of times in the
Journal
.

What redeemed his monstrous self-absorption and made his company so pleasant and rewarding for his intimates was his restless and ravenous appetite for discovery, his polymorphous curiosity. Béatrix Beck recalls how exhilarating it was to work as his secretary; at the time, she wrote to her sister: “Gide has become my only interest—which means that, from now on, I am interested in
everything
.”[
32
] Gide used to end his letters with the courtesy phrase “
Attentivement vôtre
”—but, for him, this was not an empty formula; he was indeed paying attention to his interlocutor, whoever he or she might be—and therein resided the rare quality of the Gidean dialogue.* Furthermore, his attention was not directed at people only, it seems to have extended to all creatures. For instance, the Tiny Lady recorded a typical scene: “At lunchtime, in the midst of an exciting conversation, he abruptly stops and examines a fly that has a tiny parasite on one leg. In this area, nothing escapes his eye.”[
33
] Or again, when he went to visit Herman Hesse at home in Switzerland (Gide had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and Hesse was to receive it the following year), during this first meeting between the two grand old men of letters (they had already been corresponding for some time), most of Gide’s time and attention were lavished on a cat which had just had kittens.[
34
] Thus, the interview passed agreeably for both: Hesse was fascinated by Gide, and Gide was fascinated by Hesse’s cat.

Yet, in his dealings with people, one could say of him what André Suarès said of Goethe: “He does not care for a man, however talented,
if he cannot extract from him something that may be of use to his own development.”[
35
] His curiosity was always alert, but quick to shift to another object. The instant warmth of his welcome was only matched by the abruptness with which he could drop hapless visitors once they were no longer of interest to him. Or again, he could not recognise in the street persons with whom he had enjoyed long, congenial and intimate exchanges shortly before; they had exhausted their usefulness, they were already obliterated from his memory.[
36
] He became easily bored not only with new acquaintances in life, but even with the creatures of his own imagination: he could not write long novels, for, after a while, he lost interest in his own characters.[
37
] He worked ceaselessly, however (his stern Calvinist education had instilled in him a deep aversion for laziness and waste), but he could not remain long attached to the same task, and this explains why his best writing is to be found in his slim novellas, in his short critical essays, and above all in the discontinuous jottings of his
Journal
.

CHOICES

Gide’s indecisiveness, hesitations, ditherings, vacillations and contradictions were legendary among his friends. With him, no decision was ever stable or final; sometimes, in the very same breath, he managed to opt simultaneously for one course of action—and for its exact opposite. It was impossible to predict what, in the end, would be his choice, and it was wiser not even to ask.[
38
] He thrived on ambiguity, he relished muddle. In any debate, his interventions were so twisted and contradictory—each affirmation being cancelled by a reservation, and each reservation questioned by an afterthought—that it was impossible to know if he supported or opposed the point at stake.[
39
] This attitude was displayed in all matters—big and small: whether he should seek reconciliation with God, and whether he should have coffee after lunch.[
40
]

Living at his side, the Tiny Lady was at a vantage point to observe on a daily basis his mental pirouettes and somersaults, and, as she herself was bold and decisive by temperament, she recorded these permanent acrobatics with a mixture of amusement, amazement and
exasperation. One day, as Gide was once again deliciously writhing on the hot coals of one of his religious crises, she snapped back: “If it is your wish to go to God—go! But don’t fret:
soyez net
.”[
41
] Alas, for Gide, to be driven into a corner was unspeakable agony; he always avoided the straight line (as he once said: “A direct path merely takes you to your destination”[
42
]) and invariably chose the oblique; his mind progressed only through meanders, or in “hooked fashion” (
en crochet
[
43
]); every issue had to be approached sideways. He was totally incapable of tackling problems head-on; in fact, he would rather not tackle them at all.[
44
] He was forever making imprudent promises, which he could not keep, and then he did not know where to escape. He was constantly torn between the spontaneous effusions of his own irresponsibility and the panic of finding himself unable to meet the obligations he had recklessly contracted. On the one hand, he never felt committed to any course of action, and on the other, he was racked with guilt every time he disappointed other people’s expectations.[
45
]