Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

In the world of traditional Catholicism, it was widely — though not universally — believed that Gide was possessed by the Devil. Once, during a family dinner, Claudel declared, as he was holding a crêpe flambée on his fork: “This is how André Gide is going to burn in Hell!” A witness of the incident reported it to Gide, who was hugely amused.[86] Frequently confronted with this prognosis of eternal damnation, he repeated La Fontaine’s reply in his own time to similar curses: “I deeply believe that the damned in Hell end up feeling like fish in water.”[87]

If the Catholic side had a biased view on this matter, the testimony of Schlumberger — lifelong companion and loyal friend, who shared not only Gide’s philosophy but also his sexual orientation — cannot be lightly dismissed. Schlumberger witnessed Gide’s end at very close range indeed — and was appalled: “I had to stare at senility in its most perfidious aspect: old age, leaving his intelligence nearly intact, revealed all the more clearly the disorder of his behaviour… I could feel how his entourage was now haunted by the sordid shadows of his devils… His loss of control over his own erotic pulsions inspired terror in them, and could nearly have confirmed the beliefs of those who regard the flesh as the kingdom of the Prince of Darkness…”[88]

When Gide died, he was buried next to his wife, in the village of her country estate. The ceremony was simple and attended only by relatives, close friends and some villagers. Gide’s nephew, a local notable, thought it proper to invite a Protestant pastor to say a few words. The pastor simply read a short passage from Gide’s Numquid et tu , written forty years earlier, at the height of his religious crisis: “Lord, I come to you like a child, like the child you want me to become… I renounce everything that made up my pride and which, in your presence, would make up my shame. I listen and submit my heart to you.”[89] Immediately after the ceremony, Martin du Gard and Schlumberger protested loudly against this religious intrusion, which they deemed to be a betrayal of Gide’s intentions, a denial of his clearly stated beliefs, a violation of his final wishes. They were right, of course. And yet the intervention of the hapless pastor, however indiscreet, was nevertheless poignant; after all, these were once Gide’s own true words, and they were also words of truth. Hell is not “truth seen too late” (as Hobbes said); on the contrary, it is truth seen too soon, and knowingly rejected.

DIALOGUE

“Outside my capacity for sympathy (which constitutes all my intelligence), it seems that I have no existence at all, and my moral persona is nothing but a number of possibilities, which, in turn, are called Ménalque, Alissa, Lafcadio.” Gide wrote this to a friend: he knew himself well.[90]

His instinctive urge to sympathise was itself the reflection of a deeper need: the need to please. He had been aware of this since his youth: at the age of twenty-four, he noted in his Journal : “My perpetual question (it is a morbid obsession) is: Am I lovable?”[91] And fifty-five years later, at the end of his career, he concluded in that same Journal : “My extraordinary, my insatiable need to love and be loved: I believe this is what has dominated my life and driven me to write.”[92]

“He always tried to charm people, and largely succeeded,” Béatrix Beck observed.[93] The Tiny Lady had often to warn him against this excessive eagerness to make himself congenial; for instance, after he managed at last to establish pleasant relations with a person who had previously been hostile,[94] she advised him: “Beware, don’t spoil it. As the situation has become fine and easy, do not exaggerate now, as often happens with you; you get carried away by some sentimental impulse of yours, and you tend to say things that are true only for a short moment — and this is a sure recipe for creating horrific disappointments later on.”[95]

Gide himself was aware of the problem: “I am all too inclined to espouse other people’s points of view.”[96] Even in familiar exchanges, he would instinctively recoil from contradiction and ensure smoothness at any cost. Here is a typical little episode from his Journal :

“Valéry asks me, ‘Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad ?’ I repress a spontaneous impulse to protest, but find it more friendly to reply, ‘Yes, La Chanson de Roland .’ He approves.”[97]

Thus agreement had been secured — but the price of this was the suppression of his own deeply felt views on the matter, for we know how much he actually loved Homer. In the very same Journal , he had noted not long before: “I re-read with delight the last six books of the Iliad …”[98]

Similar occurrences are frequent; for instance, the Tiny Lady records (in 1937) that, chatting with the German scholar E.R. Curtius, Gide, echoing his good friend’s view, expressed his “great admiration” for Thomas Mann’s Joseph .[99] Yet from the Journal we learn that, two years later, he was still plodding through that very same book “with increasing boredom.”[100]

He confessed: “Rather than confronting opposition, I prefer to adopt the opinion of the other party.”[101] Sometimes he would rally so quickly to his interlocutor’s views that it made the latter worry. Schlumberger recorded his uneasy feelings at the outcome of a discussion: “I am somewhat scared when I see him abandoning his position with so little resistance.”[102] In fact Gide himself was troubled by his own instinctive reaction: “I often feel as if I were a horrible hypocrite; I have such an acute need for sympathy, I virtually melt into the other party. With complete sincerity, I adopt other people’s opinions and thus give them a misleading impression of agreement. I would inevitably disappoint my own side — if I had one.”[103]

He suffered from an inability to say “No.” He wished to break with his Catholic friends, but felt hopelessly entangled in the nets of their kind concern. As the Tiny Lady reproached him for his irresolution, he finally exploded in frustration: “You must understand that I am full of weakness, I have no resistance to others, no resistance to any expression of sympathy. These people deprive me of all my resources, they rob me of my arguments, they prevent me from saying what I wish to say. I am bold and free only when I am in front of a sheet of blank paper.”[104]

The written word was the last refuge of his sincerity: “I put all my integrity into my writing, whereas, when I deal with people, my only desire is that everything should go smoothly; probably it is simply that I wish to please, and this is obviously a sort of coquetry.”[105]

The desire to please, the constant fear that he might disappoint other people’s expectations, made him nervous: “I smoke too much, out of nervousness; there are so few people with whom I can be completely natural! I am too tense, and I smoke to give myself some poise, to overcome my agitation.”[106] He was simple and unpretentious, but also very awkward. Yet dialogue remained for him the very essence of human life; he won over his interlocutors not only with his unassuming manners but, more importantly, by being an attentive listener.

Whenever he had drafted a new piece of writing, or if he had made some mistake, he amazed his friends by the meekness and humility with which he would accept their criticism, however sharp and bruising. But his critics were soon to discover that, if he had yielded to their attacks and endorsed their suggestions, it was in order to mend the flaws in his original position, which, in the end, he would re-present in a form that was now impregnable.