Andre' Gide, His Life and Art.
by Wallace Fowlie.
Macmillan. 217 pp. $4.95.

The repeated use of the term “provocative” on the dust-jacket of Mr. Fowlie's new book is puzzling, because there is nothing at all startling in his study of Gide. True, he begins from, and consistently adheres to, the common academic assumption that his subject is a “great man,” the details of whose life and work must be treated with reverence, because all the complexities and discrepancies are somehow reconciled in the concept of greatness. Mr. Fowlie dismisses as carping the views of people like Pierre Herbart and “Victor,” who have given a hostile account of Gide's character, and he is keen to accept the testimony of such a witness as Jean Schlumberger, who maintained that Gide had painted too black a picture of himself. This pro-Gidean bias may appear provocative to those few critics who, following Aldous Huxley, dismiss Gide as “a faux grand homme,” but within the context of contemporary French studies it is quite conformist. Gide may not be the handbook for the young that he was in the France of the 30's—literature itself, perhaps, has ceased to be the seminal force it was in those passionate years—but most of the comments made on him since his death have been favorable. There is no longer any need to defend him against the criticisms of Paul Claudel or Henri Massis or François Mauriac; Sartre and Camus spoke up for him, and even Mauriac has revealed in his recent book on de Gaulle that the General himself, on returning to France after the Liberation, inquired most solicitously after Gide. Some of Gide's novels have now come out as paperbacks. And, above all, most of the principles he represented, or was thought to represent—sexual freedom, including the right to be homosexual, the total expression of the personality, religious sensibility without the acceptance of dogmatic belief—are now part of the everyday cultural pattern. In fact, the danger of his position as a maître à penser is that he may seem outdated because his battles have been won, while the precariousness of his position as an artist is that the aesthetic framework of his compositions may seem inadequate, once his “message” has been accepted.

As Mr. Fowlie rightly says, Gide's “experimentations . . . were the efforts of a twentieth century humanist to discover who he was and therefore who man is.” In other words, his books were exploratory acts in his process of living, and the critical problem is to discover what value they can have for new generations that they can neither surprise nor shock. I find Mr. Fowlie rather disappointing on this central issue. He describes but he does not really discuss. He summarizes the contents of the books, defines their place in the context of Gide's life, refers to what various critics have said about them, but when it comes to the point he appears to have no definite opinions of his own, except vague approbation tinged with curious contradictions.

Why does he say, for instance, on page 141, that Gide's autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (“If It Die”), “seems almost embarrassingly indiscreet”? If a writer is by definition a confessionalist who sets out to describe himself as a specimen of humanity, how can he possibly be too indiscreet? As I shall argue in a moment, Gide, if anything, is not indiscreet enough. Further, Mr. Fowlie says, on page 140: “From the Journal, Gide's life seems uneventful and even monotonous,” while on page 176 he declares: “His work luminously reflects all the passionate interests of his life.” Either the Journal, which is an important part of Gide's work and indeed the bulkiest, reflects his passionate interests or it does not. Mr. Fowlie's approximate phrasing sometimes complicates still further Gide's already considerable complications.

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It is difficult, of course, for those of us who were students of French just before the war to see Gide in perspective, because he was so much a part of the climate in which we grew up. I don't know how old Mr. Fowlie is but I imagine he is about the same age as myself, and therefore I sympathize with his uncertainties. Having recently had to reread Gide's complete works for teaching purposes, I am rather at a loss to decide, for instance, how far he was a genuine liberator committing himself in a vital way at each step and working out a valid doctrine of individualism, and how far he was a cultured but egocentric bourgeois rentier trying both to have his cake and eat it, i.e., to combine the habits of the rich with a genuine social conscience, and high-mindedness about marriage with a taste for little boys. I am as prejudiced in his favor as Mr. Fowlie, because at the stage when one needs a liberator I found him more subtle and intelligent than D. H. Lawrence. But now I suspect L'Immoraliste (“The Immoralist”) and Les Caves du Vatican (“Lafcadio's Adventures”) of being, to some extent, silly and cruel books. In the first, admittedly, Gide himself is putting the question: “Am I right to enjoy myself with little Arab boys, thus killing my wife emotionally?” and it is not every husband with outside interests who goes to the trouble of writing a novel to ask himself such a moral question. However, in spite of the title, L'Immoraliste, Gide is composing the book to provide himself with the answer, yes, because he surrounds his hero, Michel, with an atmosphere of approbation. There is something insufferably smug about the tone of the book. Nor does Gide appear to see clearly, either in this story or in his other writings about little Arab boys, that he is a rich European encouraging homosexual prostitution in an underdeveloped country. It may be that such prostitution is a useful, blameless, and even educational part of the tourist industry; I would not like to prejudge the issue. All I am saying is that there is an issue, and it is one that a moralizing writer should take cognizance of, without pulling any poetic wool over his own, or the reader's, eyes. Gide's delicately lyrical style is sometimes used to dress up matters that might appear less savory if translated into colloquial language.

Only on the religious question does Gide seem to me to arrive at a clear attitude. He eventually rejected belief in any revealed religion and his old age was as serene in this respect as that of David Hume or Paul Valéry. In some other connections, his contradictions do not proceed so much from a protean richness of possibilities as from genuine confusion and from the fact that a late 19th-century rentier could dabble in a great many things without fully accepting their consequences, because his financial independence always ensured him a safe line of retreat. The best and most significant part of L'Immoraliste, I now think, is the beautiful description of how Michel, back home on his Normandy estate, gets a thrill out of poaching his own game with the local bad lad and then, when his behavior is discovered by his conscientious steward, sells the estate in disgust. This has a ring of truth and, at the same time, is profoundly silly, but I don't think Gide is fully conscious of the silliness, any more than he is when, in the same book, he preaches dénuement (bareness of living) on a private income. He wants us to admire the splendidly diabolical Ménalque as an example of dénuement because that gentleman has disencumbered himself of his worldly possessions, has put his money in the bank, and is roughing it in a hotel suite with only a few precious Oriental carpets and choice bottles of Tokay around him to relieve the nakedness of his condition.

Even on the subject of homosexuality, Gide's ideas are not easy to follow. He writes at length about the dissociation between love and sexual desire; he “loved” his wife, with whom he never consummated his marriage because, he says, women aroused no sexual appetite in him, and he “desired” a series of boys. (At the same time, he was shocked by sodomy, or so he implies, so that certain taboos operated for him even within the concept of freedom.) But the final, irrevocable break with his wife, which led her to burn all his letters, was caused by his falling in love with one of the boys, Marc Allégret, and going off to England with him. That this was a case of love, and not simply of desire, is clear from the diary entries. Gide does not appear to notice that his practice conflicts with his theory. Then, not so very much later, Gide had a child by the daughter of one of his best friends, and the mother of the child eventually married another of his best friends. About this strange situation I cannot find one word of comment in Gide's writings, although it is exactly the sort of thing one would have expected a confessionalist to expatiate on at length, especially since it appears to contradict a principle for which he was world-famous. Perhaps he did write about it and his comments have been withheld, but why should he be indiscreet about his wife, whom he claimed to love more than anyone else in the world, and discreet about less important people?

In asking these questions, I am not denying Gide's role as a stimulator of individual freedom; I am saying that in his own case there is a great deal of fuss, muddle, and unexpected reticence that has not yet been sorted out. In criticizing L'Immoraliste, I am not underestimating the merits of parts of that book or the great virtues of some of his other works. My point is that Mr. Fowlie's study, in spite of its interest as an introduction, still leaves the field wide open for a detailed, provocative, and critical treatment of Gide's life and art.