Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Gide had invested all his resources in his style; he trusted that it alone would ensure its immortality. We are not yet in a position to assess whether this wager will ultimately pay off. Predictably enough, Claudel took a dim view of the matter: “André Gide deludes himself that he is simple, whereas he is merely flat; and he thinks he is classic, whereas he is bleak — as bleak as the moonlight over a beggars’ jailhouse.”[161] Yet even his loyal friends eventually came to entertain doubts about the virtues of his famed style. Schlumberger remarked that, on certain topics, Gide’s unctuousness evoked “a sexton’s speech”; and after re-reading Les Caves du Vatican , he noted: “I had forgotten the preciosity of his writing; in several chapters, Gide tries to compensate for the poverty of the contents with an accumulation of rare words, of archaic phrases and tortured syntax. At times the flavour is admirable, but it can also become tedious.”[162]

MADELEINE

Two different images of Gide’s wife have emerged. Recent accounts have portrayed her as a gloomy and narrow-minded bigot, who was a hindrance to her husband’s human development. But it is noteworthy that none of those who expressed this view ever had the chance to meet Madeleine Gide; whereas those who actually knew her — and especially André Gide’s closest friends — have given very different testimony. Shortly after Gide’s death, Schlumberger was moved to write an entire book (characteristically titled Madeleine et André Gide : the very sequence in which the two names are printed restores a hierarchy more in accord with natural justice) to vindicate Madeleine’s memory. And the Tiny Lady herself (who would have had reason to feel awkward, if not hostile, towards her) was deeply impressed by her personality. Three years before Madeleine’s death, she noted: “Even though she is self-effacing, she cannot remain inconspicuous; there is a superior quality of sensitivity that radiates from her entire person.”[163] She never doubted Gide’s sincerity when he claimed that Madeleine was the only person he had ever really loved, and she clearly analysed what her death meant for him — a disintegration of his own life: “He has been hit in the most vulnerable part of his heart. The principal character in the play of his life is no more. He has lost his counterpart, the fixed measure with which he confronted his actions, his true tenderness, his great fidelity; in his inner dialogue, the other voice has fallen silent.”[164] Her comments echoed Gide’s own confession: “Since she is no more, I am merely pretending I am still alive, but I have lost interest in all things, myself included; I have no appetite, no taste, no curiosity, no desire; I am in a disenchanted world, and my only hope is to leave it soon.”[165]

Madeleine’s intelligence matched her sensitivity; she was highly cultured and possessed sound literary judgement. For instance, though she admired Gide’s works, her admiration was never blind; whereas Gide greatly valued his own poetry, she told him with frank accuracy that it was embarrassingly mediocre. She wrote well: her letters and diary fragments (quoted at length by Schlumberger) are impressive, both for the natural elegance of their style and for the lucidity of her psychological perceptions.

Gide’s personal predicament sprang from the radical divorce that, in him, separated love from sensual desire. For him, these two emotions were mutually exclusive — he could not desire whom he loved, he could not love whom he desired. Madeleine must have confusedly sensed this from the beginning (after all, in his Cahiers d’André Walter , Gide had confessed, “I do not desire you. Your body embarrasses me, and carnal possession appals me”[166]). She originally rejected his first offers of marriage and yielded only at long last, under the pressure of his unrelenting entreaties. She had suffered a psychological trauma in her childhood: she had witnessed the infidelity of her mother and, as a result, sex inspired in her instinctive fear and revulsion. Thus, the prospect of entering with her cousin André into that pure union of souls which had enchanted their adolescent years could appear genuinely attractive.

Gide, on his side, had started his conjugal life in a state of ignorance; later he would bring to it his inexhaustible resources of self-deception. After twenty-five years of marriage, he earnestly expounded to Martin du Gard his theory that homosexuals make the best husbands:

The love I have for my wife is like no other; and I believe that only a homosexual can give a creature that total love, divested of all physical desire, of all trouble of the flesh: an integral love, in all its limitless purity. When I compared my marriage to the wretched, discordant marriages of those around me, I thought myself privileged: I thought I had built the very temple of love.[167]

It was only after Madeleine’s death that he eventually woke up — to some extent — to what had been her grim fate:

I am now astonished at the aberration that led me to believe that the more ethereal my love, the more worthy it was of her; and in my naïveté I never asked whether she would be content with so disembodied a love. So, the fact that my carnal desires were directed towards other objects hardly concerned me. I even arrived at the comfortable conviction that things were better thus. Desires, I thought, were peculiar to men; I found it reassuring to believe that women — except “loose women,” of course — did not have similar desires… What I fear she could not understand was that it was precisely the spiritual power of my love that inhibited any carnal desire. For I was able, elsewhere, to prove that I was not incapable of making love to a woman, providing nothing intellectual or emotional came into it… It was only later that I began to realise how cruelly I must have hurt the woman for whom I was ready to give my life… In fact, I could only develop as an individual by hurting her.[168]

When she entered into the marriage, Madeleine was innocent but not blind. Her intuition made her aware very soon of the peculiar nature of Gide’s sexual compulsions. According to Gide himself, the discovery was completed for her during their honeymoon in North Africa. During a railway journey, she witnessed his furtive and frantic attempts to caress some half-naked boys who were on the train, and that same night she told him, not with reproach, but in anxious sorrow: “You looked like a criminal, or a madman.”[169]

A pattern of separate lives progressively developed between husband and wife. Their intimacy was maintained through the constant flow of loving letters which Gide kept writing to her while they were apart — which was most of the time. Gide pursued his life of freedom with his friends in Paris and abroad; Madeleine withdrew alone to Cuverville, their country estate in Normandy. Gide came for occasional visits; they would again share their old enjoyment of literature and, as in the past, they would spend their evenings reading aloud to each other their favourite authors. Madeleine’s only request was that Gide, while in the country, refrain from preying upon neighbouring children, so as to avoid any scandal. (“Do it elsewhere if you must, but not in Cuverville. Here at least, spare me this shame.”[170]) Gide promised, but found the constraint unbearable. He often complained in his diary of the “suffocating” atmosphere of Cuverville, and “the bad sexual hygiene” from which he had to suffer there; he thought that this repression of his sensual impulses severely hindered the inspiration for his literary work. Often, he would furtively break the rules — or advance the date of his departure, and escape back to Paris.

Then came the only tragedy of Gide’s entire life. He fell in love with a sixteen-year-old adolescent, Marc Allégret. Marc’s father was a Protestant pastor who, in his missionary zeal to evangelise French Africa, neglected to look after his own family — or rather, worse than neglecting it, whenever he was away and busily engaged in converting the heathen, the pious fool could think of nothing better than to entrust the care of his five sons to Gide, an old friend of the family, who diligently undertook to debauch as many of them as he could lay his hands on. (I am not competent to adjudicate on the vexed issue of priestly celibacy; I only feel that the one major objection one can make to a married clergy is that it is too cruel and unfair to their children.)