André Gide

• 1. Introduction

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  André Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris on the 22nd of November 1869, and by the time he died on the 19th of February 1951, his New York Times obituary would call him "France's greatest contemporary man of letters." He wrote more than 50 books, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, and attracted admirers as varied as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also attracted enemies. When he published a public defense of his own sexuality in 1924, the resulting outcry blocked him from ever being nominated to the Académie Française. The Roman Catholic Church waited until a year after his death to place his works on the Index of Forbidden Books.

  Gide's life was shaped by a tension he never quite resolved: a Protestant austerity on one side, a defiant sexual adventurousness on the other. He spent decades trying to write his way through that conflict rather than away from it. His career carried him from the symbolist movement of the 1890s through the anti-colonial campaigns of the late 1920s, a brief fellow-traveling with Soviet Communism in the 1930s, and a disenchanted retreat toward tradition in the 1940s. What drives each of these turns, and what made him one of the dozen most important writers of the twentieth century, is what the rest of this story will examine.

• 2. Protestant Roots and Early Formation

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  Gide's father, Jean Paul Guillaume Gide, held a professorship of law at the University of Paris, and when he died in 1880, his son was only eleven years old. The family was middle-class and Protestant, and the boy grew up in relative isolation in Normandy. The paternal line traced its ancestry to Italy, where the family had converted to Protestantism in the 16th century and subsequently faced persecution in Catholic Italy, eventually dispersing across France and other parts of western and northern Europe.

  His uncle was the political economist Charles Gide, a figure of some public standing. The household's Protestant austerity left a permanent mark. Gide published his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter, in 1891 at the age of 21, a remarkably early debut. Two years later, in 1893 and 1894, he traveled through Northern Africa, and it was there that he came to accept his homosexuality.

  The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde entered Gide's life in Paris, where Wilde was living in exile. In 1895 they met again in Algiers, and Wilde held the mistaken impression that he had introduced Gide to homosexuality. Gide had already settled that question for himself. The encounter nonetheless shaped him. Years later he recorded in his journal the details of a night in Algiers that he described as a moment of unbounded joy, one whose memory he said he had pursued in every subsequent search for pleasure. That remembered night in 1895, shadowed by the figure of Wilde, would later surface in his published writings as a defining event.

• 3. Marriage, Friendship, and Rupture

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  In 1895, the same year as the Algiers meeting with Wilde, Gide's mother died. He married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux shortly afterward. The marriage was never consummated. The following year, 1896, he was elected mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy.

  Friendship was, by his biographer Alan Sheridan's account, not a peripheral feature of Gide's life but a central one: "unlike many writers, he was no recluse: he had a need of friendship and a genius for sustaining it." In 1908, that genius helped bring the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française into existence, a publication Gide co-founded and whose influence on twentieth-century French letters was lasting.

  The summer of 1907 placed him in Jersey at La Valeuse Cottage in St Brelade, working on the second chapter of Strait Is the Gate while his friend Théo van Rysselberghe painted his portrait. Van Rysselberghe was a Belgian neo-impressionist painter, and the friendship with him and his wife Maria Monnom would eventually produce one of the more complicated episodes in Gide's private life.

  The severest rupture in his personal world came in 1916. Gide, then around 47 years old, took Marc Allégret as a lover. Marc was 15, one of five children of Élie Allégret, a man who had been hired as a tutor by Gide's mother during Gide's own schooling and who had served as best man at Gide's wedding. When Gide fled to London with Marc, Madeleine burned all of his correspondence in retaliation. Gide later called what she destroyed "the best part of myself."

• 4. African Journey and Anti-Colonial Writing

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  From July 1926 to May 1927, Gide traveled through French Equatorial Africa with Marc Allégret, moving through Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari, briefly into Chad, and then into Cameroon. The journey produced two published journals: Travels in the Congo and Return from Chad.

  What Gide encountered in the Congo was a system he described in terms that stopped well short of diplomatic hedging. The French government had granted portions of the colony to private companies, who were permitted to exploit the territory's natural resources, above all rubber. Native workers were compelled to leave their villages for weeks at a time to collect rubber in the forest. Gide compared what he observed directly to slavery, singling out the Large Concessions regime for particular criticism.

  The books contributed to the growing anti-colonial debate in France and gave intellectuals a firsthand account from a writer of Gide's standing. The journey also fell across the longest relationship of his adult life. Marc Allégret had been his companion since 1916. By this point, the pairing between an aging celebrated writer and a young man he had known since the man was a teenager had acquired a kind of settled permanence, even as Gide's personal life remained complicated by his daughter Catherine, born in 1923 to Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. Catherine was his only blood descendant.

• 5. The Soviet Disillusionment

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  During the early 1930s, Gide became what he himself described as a fellow traveler with Communism. He never formally joined any Communist party, and he was, by his own account, an individualist first. He advocated what he called Communist individualism and worked to secure the release of Victor Serge, a Soviet writer and member of the Left Opposition who had been prosecuted by the Stalinist regime.

  His standing as a sympathetic Western writer earned him an invitation to speak at Maxim Gorky's funeral and to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of Writers. What he found there was censorship of his own speeches and a culture he described as suppressed. His 1936 work Retour de L'U.R.S.S. addressed pro-Soviet readers directly, choosing to plant doubts rather than issue a frontal attack. He acknowledged Soviet economic and social gains over the old Russian Empire, but documented the erasure of individual identity and the crushing of dissent: "I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler's Germany, thought to be less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized."

  Before he could publish, the Kremlin was informed of the manuscript. The Soviet author Ilya Ehrenburg visited Gide and agreed with his findings but asked him to hold off, pointing to Soviet aid to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Two days later, Louis Aragon delivered a letter from Jef Last making the same request. Gide published anyway. The Soviet press condemned him, and Nordahl Grieg wrote that he had done the Fascists a favor.

  In 1937, Gide published a follow-up, Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R., which he grounded in documentation from figures including Trotsky, Victor Serge, and others. The main argument was that the dictatorship of the proletariat had become the personal dictatorship of Stalin, and that a privileged bureaucracy had become the new ruling class, spending public resources on projects like the Palace of Soviets while workers lived in extreme poverty. Gide cited the official Soviet newspapers themselves as evidence.

• 6. The Journal and the Question of Legacy

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  Beginning at the age of 18 or 19, Gide kept a journal, and when it was first made public, it ran to 1,300 pages. When the critic Pierre Herbert asked him in 1946 which of his works he would save if only one could survive, Gide answered: "I think it would be my Journal."

  His biographer Alan Sheridan described the journal as "the pre-eminently Gidean mode of expression." Gide's first novel grew out of his own journal entries, and the first-person narratives he wrote across his career read, many of them, like extensions of it. His novel The Counterfeiters includes a character named Edouard whose journal provides a secondary narrative voice running alongside the main narrator.

  Corydon, the work he considered most important, defended pederasty in public and cost him the Académie Française. He produced the first French-language editions of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim in 1924. He helped found the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1908. In 1918, he met Dorothy Bussy, who became a close friend for more than 30 years and translated many of his works into English.

  In 1939, he became the first living author published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. During World War II he left France for North Africa, living in Tunis from December 1942 until Allied forces retook the city in May 1943, after which he moved to Algiers for the remainder of the war. The Nobel Prize arrived in 1947, awarded, in the committee's words, "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight." Four years later he was dead. A year after that, the Church placed him on the Index of Forbidden Books, a distinction he might well have found fitting.