Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

“And now?”

She is embarrassed by my inquisitive stare. She does not protest. Obviously, she does not wish to say that, now, she does not hate him. She merely says, “Now, it is no longer the same. It slightly changed this summer.”

I say, “Did he ever suspect anything of this?”

“No, luckily not.”[72]

A little earlier, Catherine was supposed to go abroad, but these plans had to be abandoned. Martin du Gard said to Gide:

“You must be so glad that Catherine did not leave!”

“Oh, my dear, I am more happy than I can express, especially now that our relations have become so charming,” and then, after a silence, he added, “And yet, if she had gone away, after three days I would have forgotten her.”[73]

At about the same time, Gide tried to make Catherine realise that she was enjoying a privileged situation: “I am afraid you may not fully appreciate how rare is the harmony that prevails in our little group. [The little group was comprised of Gide, the Tiny Lady, Elisabeth and her lover, Pierre Herbart — within that small community, Catherine was thus provided with two fathers]. Don’t imagine that most families have such luck.”[74]

In 1942, Gide went to North Africa, where he was to spend the remaining years of the war. On the eve of this long separation, the parting message he left for Catherine was twofold: “1. Had you wished, I could have taught you a way of reciting French verse that is now largely lost. 2. Never do anything simply out of a desire to conform, to be like the others. Do only what deeply pleases you.” And he quoted the famous instruction of Madame de Lambert to her son: “My son, do nothing silly, unless it amuses you.”[75]

In 1945, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Isabelle. Gide was delighted to have a granddaughter. A year later, Catherine married Jean Lambert, a young scholar of German literature (they were to have three more children). Gide greatly enjoyed the company of his new son-in-law. In 1947, the young couple took him on a journey through Switzerland and Italy, but the old man’s manic compulsion to hunt for little boys was now frightfully out of control and caused them constant worry. In France, in these innocent times, Gide’s fame and his Nobel Prize were protection enough against scandal, but once abroad there was a serious risk that foreign policemen might not show a similar tolerance.

Exactly half a century earlier, Gide had thrown the bomb of his Nourritures terrestres , with its famous curse: “ Familles, je vous hais! ” But now, his strange little clan began increasingly to resemble a warm and cosy family. For instance, when Herbart dedicated one of his books to the Tiny Lady, Gide was greatly pleased. The Tiny Lady remarked: “It is so charming this way he has of rejoicing at one’s own joys, with such warmth and sincerity. He is happy to see that those whom he loves are getting ever closer to each other.”[76] At the end of 1947, she noted: “Elisabeth and I are struck by the constancy of Gide’s happy mood — the joyful interest he takes in all the small things of life. Elisabeth said laughingly, ‘It seems that Families, I hate you! is far away now. He has a way of talking about ‘the children’—meaning Catherine, Jean and their two little kids — with an accent that is new; and he is completely besotted with his granddaughter, whose lively mind delights him.”[77] The new year was celebrated by the whole “family”; the Tiny Lady, who was normally not inclined to sentimentality, was moved to write: “It was cheerful, tender, charming… Never before had I felt such harmony.”[78]

In her memoirs, Béatrix Beck made only one mention of Catherine. One day, when she informed the young woman that, “There was a telephone call from Roger Martin du Gard,” Catherine corrected her: “You must say Monsieur Martin du Gard.” Beck still remembered the incident half a century later: “This remonstrance hurt me indelibly. Had I not had to support my own child at the time, I would have resigned on the spot.”[79] Thus, for all her unconventional upbringing, this fruit of a bold experiment, this beautiful specimen of a New Humanity, had come full circle and, by the age of twenty-seven, had already turned into a prim and proper petite bourgeoise , with a most exacting notion of how members of the lower orders should refer to their betters.

DEVIL

In 1920, as Gide was working on his autobiographical narrative Si le grain ne meurt , he explained to Martin du Gard: “Funny to say, my dear: if only I could borrow Christian terminology, if I dared to introduce the character of Satan into my narrative, at once everything would become miraculously clear, easy to tell, easy to understand… Things have always happened to me as if the Devil existed, as if he was constantly intervening in my life.”[80]

At that time, he had already adopted a certain tongue-in-cheek approach to this subject, which, earlier on, had pressed hauntingly upon his mind. Since childhood, his devout Protestant education had given him a familiarity with the Holy Scriptures; more especially, well into middle age, he remained a profound reader of the Gospels, whence he eventually derived a clear awareness of the presence of the Evil One. He remarked to Schlumberger: “It is strange to see the sort of reserve which inhibits Catholics, and Protestants even more, when they speak of the Devil. They simply conjure him away; they grant him only a negative form of existence… And yet, in the Gospels, the reality is totally different: the Devil has a fiercely personal existence, he is even more sharply characterised than God…” And then he made further comments on the theme of “the enslavement to the Devil”: “The Devil forces his slaves to recruit new subjects for him — hence the need to pervert, to find accomplices.”[81]

In 1916, an intense religious crisis brought him very close to a conversion to Catholicism; it is reflected on at great length in his Journal , well summarised by Sheridan: “Gide returns obsessively to talk of God and the devil, sin and guilt, with scarcely veiled references to masturbation and his attempts to resist it.” (Note that he was forty-eight at the time!):

Yesterday evening I gave in, as one gives in to an obstinate child, to have some peace… Since Saturday, I have been assailed again by abominable imaginings, against which I am defenceless; I find no refuge anywhere. At certain moments, I wonder if I am not going mad… Yesterday, an abominable relapse… I get up, my head and heart heavy and empty: full of all the weight of Hell… Yesterday, abominable relapse that has left my body and mind in a state bordering on despair, suicide, madness…

Throughout this period, Gide certainly addresses God as a believing (and doubting) Christian would: “Lord! You know that I have given up being in the right against anyone. What does it matter if it is to escape submission to sin that I submit to the Church! I submit! Ah! Untie the bonds that still hold me back. Deliver me from the terrible weight of this body. Ah! Let me live a little! Let me breathe! Snatch me from evil. Let me not stifle.”[82]

Eventually Gide pulled out of this crisis and broke with the Catholic friends (such as Claudel) who had been trying, with more zeal than tact, to drag him into the Church. Yet the religious issue never really left his mind — to the perplexity of the Tiny Lady for whom this lingering preoccupation was utterly incomprehensible — and he could truthfully state once again: “In the end, only two things have ever interested me passionately: pederasty and Christianity.”[83] But in later years, his religious concerns acquired a purely negative intensity, as Copeau noticed already in 1930: “Gide has ended up with atheism : he preaches it.”[84] At the end of his life, his anti-Catholicism became nasty and obsessive; in 1947, Schlumberger, who admired Gide and was no altar-boy himself, was shocked by the narrow-minded hostility that coloured Gide’s comments on the Church: “I am upset by the stupid anti-clericalism that reigns in his house.”[85]