Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

With Marc Allégret, Gide experienced for the first time — at the age of forty-nine! — the ecstasy and the agony of being totally in love with another human being. He discovered passion, he discovered jealousy. Desire merged with love — it had never happened to him before. And even, many years later, after the great fires of passion had burned themselves out, the relationship with Allégret retained a sort of warm glow that was to last until Gide’s death. Marc was not a homosexual — Gide actually seduced him with a promise to procure him his first mistress (“Uncle André” delivered the goods: he introduced Marc to the daughter of the Tiny Lady, Elisabeth). He turned into a very active womaniser and eventually made his career (financed at first by Gide himself) in film-making. His works proved to be rather facile and shallow; but later on, he was followed on the same path by his younger brother, Yves Allégret, whose films have better stood the test of time.

In 1918, Gide decided, against Madeleine’s most earnest entreaties (she had guessed the entire situation, and her personal distress was compounded by her realisation that Gide was leading the adolescent astray, while betraying the naïve trust of the father), to take Marc with him on a long visit to England. On his return, however, his life changed forever — though he did not realise this immediately. One day, some time later, he asked Madeleine to lend him his old letters, just to check some information, and she told him that these letters — his very best writing, their common treasure! — existed no more: she had burned them all during his recent absence. Gide was so stunned by the news that he thought he would die. As he was to recall later: “Those letters were the most precious achievement of my life, the best of me… Suddenly there was nothing! I had been stripped of everything! Ah, I can imagine what a father might feel on arriving home and being told by his wife, ‘Our child is dead, I have killed him!’”[171] Madeleine said: “If I were a Catholic, I’d enter a convent… I was suffering too much… I had to do something… I re-read all those letters beforehand. They were the most precious thing I had.”[172] In the memoir he published after his wife’s death, Gide returned to this episode:

For a whole week, I wept; I wept from morning till evening… I wept without stopping, without trying to say anything to her other than my tears, and always waiting for a word, a gesture from her… But she continued to busy herself with petty household chores, as if nothing had happened, passing to and fro, indifferent to my presence, as if she did not even notice that I was there. I hoped that the constancy of my pain would triumph over that apparent insensitivity, but no; and she doubtless hoped that my despair would bring me back to God, for she admitted no other outcome… And the more I cried, the more we became mutually estranged; I felt this bitterly; and soon it was no more on my lost letters that I was crying, but upon us, upon her, upon our love. I felt that I had lost her. Everything was crumbling within myself: past, present — our very future.[173]

Madeleine knew of Gide’s pedophilia; it scared her, it hurt her — but it had not affected her feelings for him. After all, an intelligent and virtuous woman may continue to love her husband even after she discovers that he is an alcoholic, or a kleptomaniac, or a drug addict. With his passion for Marc Allégret, however, Gide had betrayed her — he had killed their love.

Eventually, the couple’s old way of life resumed its original course — at least in its outward appearances. Yet Madeleine renounced all her earlier enjoyment of culture and literature, devoting herself entirely to numbing household chores and charitable work among the local poor. She came close to converting to Catholicism; but finally she did not make the move, as she probably feared that her husband might misinterpret this as a further break away from him.

The very heart of their union had died. Martin du Gard, who was their guest for some days, left this description:

Their behaviour with one another is odd; it is a sort of caring politeness, a mixture of spontaneity and formality; an eager exchange of courtesies — there is tenderness in the way they look at each other and chat together, and simultaneously, at the very bottom of it all, there is an impenetrable cold — something like the low temperatures of the deep; it is not only the conjugal intimacy that is missing here, but even the simple sort of familiarity one would find between two friends, or even between two people travelling together. Their mutual love is obvious, but it is sublimated, devoid of communion. It is the love of two strangers who are never sure they really understand each other, nor really know each other, and who, deep in their secret hearts, do not have the slightest communication.[174]

A few weeks after Madeleine’s death in 1938, Gide visited Martin, who wrote in his diary:

[He told me that] this was the first real grief in his life. He spoke to me about her, at great length, of their past together, distant and recent. It is with me, he said, that he feels the freest to confide, and I believe this to be true… But I was amazed to observe that his sorrow is not compounded with any sense of guilt. Not the slightest expression of remorse. In fact, he does not feel at all at fault, nor in the least responsible for her sacrificed existence. He merely thinks: I was such, she was such; hence, great sufferings for both of us — it could not have been otherwise.[175]

PROTEUS

In Homer’s Odyssey (IV, 351), Proteus is a minor god who possesses vast knowledge and is able to adopt diverse forms in order to elude questions. The only way to force him to answer is to pin him down firmly until he resumes his original shape.

Gide often referred to the figure of Proteus, not without a degree of self-consciousness; one of the most characteristic passages is found in his draft for a preface to his play Saül : “Because of his multi-faced inconsistency, Proteus is, among all the gods, the one who has least existence. Before he chooses, an individual is richer; after he chooses, he is stronger.”[176]

REALITY

In a long passage of his Journal , Gide developed an intriguing observation: “What is lacking in me, I think, is a certain sense of reality.” He gave various illustrations of this; for instance, the difficulty he had in recognising people:

It is not that I lack attention or interest… but even though I am extremely sensitive to the outside world, I can never fully believe in its reality… The real world always remains somewhat fantastic for me… I have no feeling of its reality.[177]

The material circumstances of his life certainly contributed to his abiding sense of unreality. In 1935, under the influence of his short-lived and sentimental conversion to Marxism, he had a sudden illumination and realised for the first time — at the age of sixty-seven! — that he had never known what it meant to have to work for a living. He noted in his Journal : “I experience today — earnestly, acutely — this inferiority : I have never had to earn my own bread.”[178] But this belated discovery does not seem to have occupied his mind for very long: he made no further mention of it.

His attitude towards money could provide another example of his uncertain perception of the practical world. His stinginess was notorious — there are countless anecdotes that document his odd obsession with economy — but there is equally abundant evidence of his extravagant generosity. So, on balance, was he profligate or miserly? The mass of contradictory information on this subject suggests one conclusion: he simply had no concept of money — for him, money had no reality.