André Gide

André Gide: The Puritan Who Preached Appetite

At fifteen he pledged a lifelong spiritual love to his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux. In his mid-twenties, travelling in North Africa, he nearly died of the illness that would leave him tubercular, had his first homosexual experience, and met Oscar Wilde. He returned to France, buried his mother, and married Madeleine. The marriage was never consummated. Almost everything André Gide wrote for the next fifty-five years comes out of the space between those two facts — the vow and the appetite — and the Swedish Academy eventually named the quality it produced: "a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight."

A Protestant Childhood, Interrupted

Gide was born on 22 November 1869 in Paris. His father, Paul Gide, was a professor of law at the Sorbonne; his mother was Juliette; the family belonged to the Protestant upper-middle class and descended from Huguenot stock, with more recently converted Catholic relatives on one side. His father died when André was eleven, leaving him in a largely feminine household and under an austere religious discipline that he would spend his adult life picking apart.

His health was fragile and his temperament nervous. Schooling at the École Alsacienne was repeatedly interrupted, and he was sent to the south of France for long stretches with private tutors. The formal education was patchy; the reading was not.

Algeria, and the End of the Symbolist

*Les Cahiers d'André Walter* (1891) got him into the Symbolist circles of literary Paris and announced nothing much except promise. It was the North African journeys of 1893 to 1895 that made him a writer. Severe illness in Algeria brought him close to death and produced a permanent rebellion against the religion he had been raised in — not an abandonment, which would have been simpler, but a rebellion that never resolved.

The first fruit was *Les Nourritures terrestres* (1897), an argument for liberation through sensuous hedonism, written by a man raised to believe the opposite. *L'Immoraliste* followed in 1902 — for many readers his finest novel — and *La Porte étroite* in 1909. Gide's characteristic move was to give each impulse, appetite and renunciation alike, its most persuasive possible statement, and then to decline to hand down a verdict. That refusal is his signature.

He co-founded *La Nouvelle Revue Française*, the avant-garde journal that became the central institution of twentieth-century French letters, though for years it kept his own reputation confined to a narrow intellectual public.

The Great Middle

*Saül* appeared in 1903, *Le Retour de l'enfant prodigue* in 1907, *Les Caves du Vatican* in 1914 and *La Symphonie pastorale* in 1919. Then the two books that cost him.

*Corydon* (1924) is an open defence of homosexuality, published in a France where the subject was not merely private but unspeakable. *Si le grain ne meurt* — *If It Die* — gave his own life the same treatment. Gide wrote about sexual matters with an unprecedented freedom, and he did it under his own name, at the height of his reputation, with a devout wife at home who had chosen piety and domesticity as her refuge from what her husband was. He knew what he was doing to her. It was, by his own account, a great source of guilt and pain, and he returned to it in *Et nunc manet in te*, published posthumously in 1951.

*Les Faux-Monnayeurs* (1926) is the formal masterpiece — a metanovel containing a novelist writing a novel called *The Counterfeiters*, the only one of his books Gide was willing to call a true novel.

Congo, Moscow, and Two Public Recantations

In 1925 and 1926 Gide travelled through the Congo and came back with an indictment. What he had seen was the exploitation of colonial subjects, and he said so publicly, at real cost to his standing, in an era when almost nobody in Paris wanted the subject raised.

He repeated the trick a decade later in the opposite direction. Having converted to communism in the 1930s, he visited the USSR in 1936 and published *Retour de l'U.R.S.S.*, followed by *Retouches à mon Retour de l'U.R.S.S.* in 1937 — a public repudiation of the regime by one of its most prestigious Western sympathisers, written while the fashionable position was silence.

*Œdipe* (1931) and *Thésée* (1946) reworked classical myth. He translated Whitman, Shakespeare and Rilke into French. And across all of it ran the *Journal*, kept from 1889 to 1949 and published in his lifetime, which some readers hold to be the best thing he wrote. In 1947 he received both an honorary Oxford degree and the Nobel Prize. He died in Paris on 19 February 1951 and was buried at Cuverville in Normandy.

Why André Is Called a Genius

The faculty is intellectual honesty operating as an artistic method. Gide's distinguishing move is to construct a book that argues a position with total conviction and then to write its opposite with equal conviction — appetite in one volume, renunciation in the next — and to withhold the verdict. This is not indecision. It is a deliberate refusal to let the reader outsource the moral work, and it required him to be genuinely persuasive about beliefs he did not hold. The Academy's citation named the two halves precisely: fearless love of truth, and keen psychological insight. Formally, *Les Faux-Monnayeurs* did for the novel what few French books of the period attempted, folding the act of composition into the composition itself.

He also paid, repeatedly, for saying the unsayable: on homosexuality in *Corydon*, on colonial exploitation after the Congo, on Soviet communism after Moscow. Camus and Genet both worked in the space he cleared.

The counter-case is grave and cannot be waved through. The Nobel Foundation's own page on Gide now records serious allegations that he sexually exploited minors, documented in his own writings — the same candour that makes him a moral witness is what supplies the evidence against him. A body of work built on the principle of telling the truth about desire includes conduct that the modern reader will judge as abuse, not liberation, and the fact that Gide himself recorded it does not convert it into honesty. There is a lesser objection too: much of his fiction is thesis-driven, closer to the philosophical tale than the novel, and the characters can read as arguments wearing clothes. The genius is real; it sits alongside something indefensible, and any honest account has to carry both.

Legacy

Gide made French literature capable of discussing what it had agreed not to discuss, and he did it while insisting that no position — religious, sexual, political — deserved permanent allegiance. The *Nouvelle Revue Française* outlived him as an institution; the twin habits he modelled, of self-examination without flattery and of publicly changing one's mind, outlived him as a method. He remains one of the twentieth century's most influential writers and one of its most compromised, and he would probably have insisted on both halves of the sentence.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1947
• Goethe Medal for Art and Science
• Grand Prize for the Best Novels of the Half-Century — 1950
• Notable work: The Immoralist
• Notable work: Strait is the Gate
• Notable work: La Symphonie Pastorale
• Notable work: The Counterfeiters
• Genres: prose and theatre