Notes on André Gide
by Roger Martin Du Gard
Helen Marx Books. 99 pages, $14.95
ACCURATELY TITLED, Notes on André Gide is a fragmentary memoir about Gide by a close friend who offers new insights into the great French novelist and essayist whose nonfiction book Corydon was the first defense of homosexuality in modern times. The close friend, Roger Martin Du Gard, an important French writer in his own right, begins his memoir in 1913 with the words: “At last I have met André Gide!”
Du Gard was educated as a handwriting expert and archivist but tried his hand at fiction with Jean Barois, a novel about an intellectual torn between his Catholic faith and advances in scientific materialism. He submitted his manuscript to the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), where Gide, who was a member, read the book and announced: “To be published without hesitation.” After its publication Du Gard visited one of NRF’s informal Sunday soirées, where he saw Gide for the first time. This first glance, he writes, was of someone who looked “like an old, half-starved, out-of-work actor; or like one of those bohemian wrecks who end up in a doss-house when their luck’s right out.” Du Gard, who was barely thirty at the time, thought Gide resembled “an unfrocked priest with a bad conscience,” his hat, cloak, and detachable collar “frayed and hanging loose.” This meeting marked the beginning of a 33-year, presumably platonic friendship, which ended with Gide’s death in 1951. The two men traveled, dined, and spent many hours together over the course of those many years. Du Gard kept a record of their meetings and conversations, which include both intellectual matters and their personal escapades. How does Gide fare under Du Gard’s microscope? Gide is portrayed as an obsessive sensualist who enjoys cruising adolescent boys, looking them over before disappearing with them for periods of time. Du Gard did his best to dissuade Gide from publishing Corydon, Gide’s famous Socratic dialogue in defense of homosexuality. (Corydon was a shepherd boy celebrated by the Roman poet Virgil for his love of the handsome youth Alexis.) Du Gard was adamant that publishing Corydon would be the end of Gide’s career, telling his friend: “The whole thing is absurd. … You’re going to surround yourself with an atmosphere of indignation, contempt, and calumny. I know you will suffer cruelly as a consequence. And this is what really makes me despair: for nothing could be more harmful to the full and final expansion of your gifts.” But Gide was equally adamant about publication: “Understand me, Roger, I must, I absolutely must disperse the cloud of lies which has sheltered me since my youth, since my childhood in fact. I’m stifling behind it!” Du Gard accuses Gide of being haunted by the destiny of Oscar Wilde and says he has “visions of martyrdom.” He blames Gide’s feelings on his reading of Dostoevsky and the mania for public confession. On the other hand, he admits that it’s not Gide’s way to hold a finished manuscript back from publication. As it turned out, world reaction to Corydon was mixed, not as dire a reaction as Du Gard had predicted; but Gide lost many friends and much of his standing in the Communist Party. Du Gard, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937 (Gide would win the same prize a decade later), understands that Gide saw himself as striking a blow for homosexual freedom against all odds. However, laments Du Gard, despite the influence of Freud, “whatever homosexuals may gain in the short term they will lose in the long run because of homosexuality’s inbred stigma.” Du Gard’s observations on Madame Gide reveal her distress, the unhappy outcome of being married to a homosexual man. In the end she comes across as a kind of Mother Teresa married to a selfish narcissist bent on exploring every nook and cranny of his feelings. On balance, Du Gard finds their marriage “distant and uncommunicated.” This is illustrated by the military camp atmosphere of Gide’s house, Cuverville, where Madame Gide toils away “hour after hour, among the heady smells of petrol and beeswax and turpentine.” Gide was indignant when accused by those he saw as the world’s moral guardians of perverting young people. “They assume that anyone who seeks to win the love of a young boy is simply out to corrupt him. That’s as far as their imagination goes!” Perverting young people “really means ‘making young perverts out of them’—profiting by their easy-going, all-accepting natures. … As if it were perverse to initiate a human being in the pleasures of making love!” Gide actually saw himself as a reformer of young boys, asking “How many recreants, idlers, hypocrites and liars have been inspired by my counsels to form a taste for hard work, and order, and beauty, and straightforwardness?” Du Gard writes that his relationship with Gide benefited his life enormously. In Paris, on a Monday, Gide died quietly and peacefully. “Not grief, a quiet sadness, rather,” is the feeling that Du Gard records. Thom Nickels’ books include the recently published Philadelphia Architecture and Out in History (see www.Lincoln-in-louisville.com).
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