Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Of course, I do not deny the great merits of some Jewish works, such as the theatrical plays of Porto-Riche, for instance. But I would admire them much more willingly if they were offered to us only as translations. What would be the point for our literature to acquire new resources if it were at the expense of its meaningfulness? If, one day, the Frenchman’s strength should fail, let him disappear, but do not allow his part to be played by any lout, in his name and in his place.

A few years later (August 1921), he confided to his intimate little circle his irritation and disappointment at Proust’s newly published Sodome et Gomorrhe . He blamed Proust’s method: “It betrays avarice rather than riches — the obsession never to let anything go to waste, always adding instead of saving” and ascribed this to Proust’s Jewishness[8]: “The Jews have no sense of gratuitousness.”[9]

In 1929, commenting to the Tiny Lady on a new novel by Henri Duvernois (an author whom he had previously praised to the skies): “Read this, it is excellent; but here, he also shows some of his limitations. Oh, he is very sensitive and subtle, but he lacks a certain…” (he searches for a word) “… a certain virginity. It would be interesting to make a history of Jewish literature” (he had just learned that Duvernois was Jewish) “… Jews often defile somehow whatever topic they touch.”[10] And a few days later, on the same subject, chatting with old friends, he told them: “Of course, it always bothers me when someone happens to be Jewish. Take Duvernois, for instance; when I learned that his real name was Kahn Ascher, I suddenly understood many little things that had always bothered me in his books — my very genuine admiration notwithstanding.”[11] Two years later (May 1931), at lunch with friends: “As we chat about anti-Semitism… Gide says with a laugh: ‘Well, I would not like to receive a transfusion of Jewish blood.’”[12]

In 1935—German political developments were not taking place on another planet! — commenting upon a performance of the American Yiddish Art Theatre, Gide said: “I cannot get used to all these bearded faces; even when they are beautiful, they have no appeal for me… The very idea of any physical contact with them repels me, I don’t know why; I feel closer to animals.”[13]

After the war, at the end of his life, he was still casually making disparaging remarks on the Jewish character, in front of his secretary, Béatrix Beck, a young widow, whose dead husband was Jewish![14]

Yet would it make any sense to call Gide an anti-Semite? With equal reason, he might also be called a Stalinist Bolshevist, an anti-Stalinist and anti-communist, a Christian, an anti-Christian, a defeatist advocate of collaboration with Hitler, an anti-Nazi sympathiser, a libertarian, an authoritarian, a rebel, a conformist, a demagogue, an elitist, an educator, a corrupter of youth, a preacher, a débauché , a moralist, a destroyer of morality…

Literature* was the exclusive concern of Gide — it was the very purpose of his life; beside it — as he himself proclaimed[15]—“only pederasty and Christianity” could absorb his interest and fire his passion. On all other matters — which were of basic indifference to him — he had no strong opinions; his views were vague, contradictory, ill-informed, tentative, inconsistent, malleable, banal, vacillating, conventional. Herbart — who was a close confidant and companion during the last twenty years of his life — observed that he usually thought in clichés that could have come straight from Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues . Having quoted another of Gide’s offensively stupid remarks (“I suffered yesterday: all the interlocutors I had to chat with were Jews”), Herbart added this flat comment: “This means exactly nothing : he ‘thinks’ by proxy.”[16]

I do not know to what extent such an innocent explanation will satisfy most readers — but Blum himself would certainly have endorsed it, for even though he was hurt when he eventually read the passages of the Journal quoted above, his affection for Gide remained undiminished until his death.[17]

In conclusion: it would be very easy to compile a damning record of first-hand evidence on Gide’s anti-Semitism; most probably, it would also be misleading. This example may serve as a useful methodological warning before perusing my little ABC.

BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE

André Gide was born in 1869. Though he died in the middle of the twentieth century, he remains in many fundamental respects a nineteenth-century writer.

He was an only child; his father was a scholar (professor of Roman law) — a frail and refined man who died too early to leave any deep imprint upon his son: André was not yet eleven at the time of his death. The mother, possessive and authoritarian, came from a very wealthy line of business people in Normandy; she gave her son a stern Protestant education. From a very early age, Gide experienced an acute conflict between the severe demands of his mother’s religiosity and the no-less-tyrannical needs of his precocious sensuality. Yet it was not until a journey to Algeria in 1895 that he discovered — under the personal guidance of Oscar Wilde — the exclusive orientation of his own sexuality.* That same year, his formidable mother died, and “having lost her, he replaced her at once with the person who most resembled her.” Within two weeks, he announced his engagement with his first cousin Madeleine* (niece of his mother), who had been his beloved soul-mate since early childhood. Their marriage was never consummated, Gide having assumed from the beginning that only “loose women” can have any interest in the activities of the flesh. And, in turn, when forty-three years later Madeleine died, Gide once again felt the same sense of “love, anguish and freedom” he had experienced at the death of his mother, and “he noted ‘how subtly, almost mystically’ his mother had merged into his wife.”[18]

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.