Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

His receptivity and malleability were thus deceptive — and he was the first to acknowledge this fact: “By using sympathy, anyone can easily manipulate me. Previously, I warned Claudel, Beware, I am made of rubber. I agree with everything, as much as possible, and I would go to the very edge of insincerity — yet make no mistake: once alone, I revert to my original shape.”[107]

The paradox is that, on the deepest level, he was perfectly blind to the point of view of others and radically unable to perceive glaring truths that had been before him all his life. The most tragic example of this incredible insensitivity can be found in the way he treated his wife, Madeleine: in the end, he managed to alienate — irreparably — the trust of the only person he truly loved.

HERBART

Gide’s enemies spread many calumnies about him during his life; these should naturally be ignored — and, anyway, they pale in comparison with the truths that his friends published after his death.

The most penetrating psychological portrait of Gide was written by Pierre Herbart: À la recherche d’André Gide (1952). Herbart (1904–74) was the husband of the mother of Gide’s daughter (readers who feel confused by this little brain-twister might refer to the entry Daughter above; a diagram of the relationships within the Gidean “family” would rival in its complexity the lines of descent within the chimpanzee cage at the zoo).

Herbart came from a prominent family of northern France, but carried a heavy hereditary burden. After sixteen years of apparently peaceful married life, his father had suddenly left home forever, without a cent in his pocket, become a vagrant and vanished. Some years later, the police asked the adolescent son to identify his dead body, lying in a ditch, by the side of a country road.

The Tiny Lady developed a special affection for her son-in-law, and wrote a short sketch about him.[108] Pierre was enigmatic and attractive, whimsical and unpredictable, high-strung and indolent (“divinely lazy,” said the Tiny Lady — or just “plain lazy” according to Béatrix Beck, who looked at him with less indulgent eyes), violent and tender, harsh and kind, cynical and generous. Women found him irresistible — some men did too (though others, like Gallimard, who occasionally had to employ him, thought that he was “a whore”).[109]

Gide first met the young man (who was twenty-three at the time) in Cocteau’s country house. Herbart was then an opium addict who, later on, became an alcoholic. Gide was impressed by his natural elegance and what he discerned to be “a sort of devilish genius, a frenzied quality — all the seductions from Hell.”[110] In order to help him overcome his addictions, Gide encouraged him to write and eventually persuaded Gallimard to publish his first novel. Subsequently, Gide introduced him to the mother of his daughter; they soon became lovers and married a few years later (Herbart was then twenty-eight, and Elisabeth Van Rysselberghe forty-one). In the early 1930s, Herbart became a communist sympathiser and an ardent propagandist for the Soviet Union; he was instrumental in attracting Gide into the fellow-travellers brotherhood. Together they visited the Soviet Union and shared the same disenchantment. After the war, Gide, who could not bear solitude, became more and more dependent upon Herbart, who acted as his confidant, secretary, adviser, agent, factotum and occasional driver; with him he knew he would not be bored and, in the end, he simply could not do without the young man’s company.

Herbart was intuitive and had sharp psychological acumen. He was devoted to Gide, who repeatedly gave him generous financial support; he knew Gide on a familiar level of daily intimacy hardly equalled by any other friend.

The inner core of the Gidean “family” was made up of the Tiny Lady, Herbart and Roger Martin du Gard. One day, in August 1940, as the trio were chatting together, Herbart gave his friends a first inkling of the original insight he had reached on the subject of Gide. The Tiny Lady recorded their exchange:

I wish to reproduce in its main outline a conversation which we had one morning, Martin, Pierre and I, and during which Pierre was led to say something intriguing about Gide. We were talking about compassion — compassion as a symbol of Christianity. We were wondering if, as Hitler now seems intent on doing, it would ever be feasible to build a new world from which compassion would be excluded. Pierre said yes; Martin, no; we inquired whether compassion was already present in Antiquity, or whether it was a specific contribution of Christianity, whether it is a motivating force in art, etc., etc., when suddenly Pierre said, “I am going to make a point that runs against my own position — but it seems to me that it is this very sentiment that is missing in Gide’s works; had he got it, he would be the greatest, whereas now in fact he is merely one among the great.” With a somewhat mischievous smile, Martin asked, “Is he also lacking compassion in his life?” Pierre and I, we said simultaneously, “This is a much more complex question.” But Pierre pursued his idea: “My explanation for this lack may seem to you very flat. I believe that, in Gide’s case, it all comes down to a lack of virility.” Now we were treading on very delicate ground. As I feared that Pierre might not go to the bottom of the matter, I said, “On the subject of Gide, it would be very difficult not to confront clearly the sexual issue.” “Precisely,” Pierre said. “I believe that Gide’s sexuality has remained in an infantile state, while his sensitivity developed normally, and this imbalance had repercussions on his moral virility.” Martin’s eyebrows shot high up, he was agape, transfixed with attention. At this point, unfortunately, our conversation was interrupted.[111]

Twelve years later, in his À la recherche d’André Gide (which, by the way, was dedicated to Martin du Gard), Herbart was to pick up this broken thread. In his view, Gide’s deepest compulsion was to charm people and to win their sympathy; his obsessive fear was of disappointing their expectations; he was, therefore, totally dependent on others, his own self-esteem being conditioned by their approval. In this attitude, he betrayed his lack of “virility” and his absence of “morality.” Needless to say, both terms should not be understood in any narrow sense: Herbart himself was bisexual and, in his younger years, had led with cool shamelessness the life of a gigolo — unorthodox sexual practices and unconventional moral behaviour could not really shock him. What flabbergasted him, however, was Gide’s monstrous insensitivity — that, for instance, he had the cheek to complain that his long-suffering and saintly wife would not co-operate in procuring local boys to alleviate his sexual needs during his stays on their country estate![112]

Gide is “emasculated,” Herbart continues: one cannot trust his word, nor his loyalty, nor his discretion. He is amoral, not by a bold choice or as a challenge — but simply and literally because he is missing that particular sense. He can experience physical or aesthetic repulsion but rarely intellectual and never moral repulsion: his ignorance of morality is innate and invincible — he does not have the faintest awareness of what morality might mean.[113]

Gide’s inner world is characterised by an extreme spiritual poverty: the entire realm of human passion has remained a closed book to him. He has no great genius, no imagination, no original ideas. With him, style is everything: he picks up clichés and “Gidifies” them — giving them a form that is unique.[114]

His strength resides in his tireless curiosity, his absolute freedom, his uncompromising pursuit of excellence.[115] But he is utterly devoid of the tragic sense of life; he has no experience of pathos. Hence the weird feeling which often affects sensitive readers when they plunge into his works — and on this point, Herbart quotes a passage from Julien Green that is worth pondering, for, once again, this example carries particular weight. Green, though Gide’s junior by thirty years, was a friend who shared both his Protestant upbringing and his sexual orientation: