The Saturday Review of Litterature
"with a french accent" (31 mars 1951)
Dans une pile de The Saturday Review
of Litterature, revue américaine parue entre 1924 et le début
des années 80, un numéro « frenchy » attire notre
attention : alors qu'on y voit en couverture un vieil homme portant
lorgnon, canne et melon se pencher sur les boites des quais, le titre
dans l'angle annonce « The Perennial Youth of André Gide »,
par Justin O'Brien. Ouvrant ce numéro du 31 mars 1951, l'éditeur du
Journal en anglais rend hommage à Gide en donnant en
avant-première la préface au 4e volume à paraître à l'époque.
In a stack of The
Saturday Review of Literature, an American
magazine published between 1924 and the early 80s, a "Frenchy"
issue attracts our attention : the cover shows an old man with
monocle, stick and bowler hat who is looking in the boxes of parisian
booksellers. And a title announces "The Perennial Youth of Andre
Gide," by Justin O'Brien. Opening this issue of March 31, 1951,
the translator and editor of the Journals
honors Gide with a preview of his preface to the fourth volume that
is about to be published.
(clic gauche pour afficher le diaporama puis
clic droit et "afficher l'image" pour les agrandir)
The Perennial Youth of André Gide
Justin O'Brien
« I HEARTILY scorn," André
Gide wrote at the age of sixty-one in his "Journal" for
January 1931, "that sort of wisdom that is attained only through
cooling off or lassitude." We must not then expect to find him
even twenty years later, soothing himself or his reader with the
maxims of senility. In the fourth volume of his "Journals,"
written between his seventieth year and his eightieth, his mind had
lost neither its incisive vigor nor its vital warmth. We find the
same disciplined intelligence freely expressing itself, equally
removed from facility and dryness, in a constantly maturing thought
which is as far from smugness as it is from feverish restlessness.
Ever in contact with life, that intelligence maintained a perpetual
ardor—the hard, gemlike jerveur which his "Fruits of the
Earth" extolled over fifty years ago. This was doubtless the
secret of Gide's perennial youth and of his undiminished favor with
the young.
Rich with the lessons of experience, a
man in his eighth decade must of necessity take many a backward
glance. The Second World War naturally suggested parallels with the
First one; voluntary exile from France and loved ones recalled the
past and even the dead. Problems encountered in writing and fresh
attacks launched by his enemies caused him to review his judgments of
earlier works: in 1942, for instance, and again in 1946 he
reconsidered the significance, effectiveness, and artistic
achievement of his "Corydon" and again returned to that
book through an interviewer's indiscreet question at the time of the
Nobel Prize Award. Several times he turned back to the period of his
flirtation with Communism, the better to define the misunderstanding
which led to his position of the early Thirties. And the postwar
emphasis, largely among the existentialists, on the necessity of committing oneself and
writing a "litterature engagée" led him to
re-examine his past commitments and eventually to issue in 1950 under
the ironic title of "Litterature engagée" a collection of
his tendentious and polemical writings, all of which he considered as
extra-literary. Indeed, he had already noted in mid 1940: "The
social question! ... If I had encountered that great trap at the
beginning of my career I should never have written anything
worthwhile."
But, like his own Theseus venturing
into the unknown while unwinding his link with the past and tradition
in the form of Ariadne's thread, Andre Gide found it more natural to
look forward. Even in the early stages of the war he foresaw with
remarkable clarity the postwar plight of France; elsewhere he
reflected on the literature and art of the future. Despite his
extensive travels and those he undertook the moment Tunis was
liberated, he deplored the fact that the map was still studded with
territories unknown to him. Finally, but without dread or false
solemnity, he frequently meditated on death and the possibility of an
after-life. Some of the finest pages of this latest "Journal"
in fact, reflect a serene contemplation of his own—of
everyman's—future.
Nothing was perhaps more characteristic
of Andre Gide than this consistently healthy forward-looking
attitude. Not altogether lightly he early identified himself with
Prometheus, who revolted against the gods and communicated to man
"the devouring belief in' progress." That active belief
never left him. Recognizing his inaptitude for contemplative
stagnation, he could state at seventy-three that "real old age
would be giving up hope of progress." Thus it is that, smiling
at his impulse to improve himself so late in life, he continued the
study of German, exercised his memory by learning hundreds of lines
of French verse by heart, and, rediscovering Virgil, devoted three or
four hours a day to the arduous and
delightful deciphering of Latin. His mind always open and alert, he
reread the French classics and Shakespeare and Goethe and Euripides,
often revising his impressions with startling results. Leaving the
main highway, he explored such diverse writers as Cyril Tourneur,
Eichendorflf, Grimmelshausen, James Hogg, Dashiell Hammett, Pearl
Buck, Jorge Amado, and Ernst Junger. In his eightieth year we find
him discussing the latest volume by Sartre, catching up on the
contemporary dramatists, disputing with Koestler and James Burnham.
Simultaneously he could become captivated, as in the past, by a new
treatise on radioactivity, a study of the metamorphoses of sea
animals, a history of Moslem customs, or a revolutionary approach to surgery. A lively curiosity
was always one of his dominant characteristics.
SINCE the fourth volume of the
"Journals" covers the period of the Second World War the
reader might justly expect conflict and the occupation of France to
play a large part in Andre Gide's reflections from day to day. In the
beginning, however, he deliberately planned to omit events, noting
that thought was most valid when it could not be modified by
circumstances. In September 1940 he reflected that "the number
of stupidities an intelligent person can say in a day is not
believable. And I should probably say just as many as others if I
were not more often silent." In contrast to the invasion of the
timely, to the anguish resulting from current events, there is always
the timeless, to be found in the classics of art and literature. In
an article dated 1936 he had written: "I have a great need to
maintain in myself the feeling of permanence; I mean a need of
feeling that there are human products that are invulnerable to
insults and degradation, works on which temporal changes have no influence."
But viewed without perspective the
timeless often appears to be merely the untimely; to some it may seem
shocking that only a month after the French defeat of 1940 Gide could
momentarily forget his country's tribulation by reading Goethe in the
original. Throughout the "Journals," to be sure, from 1889 to 1949 thoughts out
of season abound: Unzeitgemdsse Betrachtungen, to borrow from
Nietzsche a title that Gide obviously liked. Almost equally frequent
are statements to the effect that the artist is "out
of harmony with his time" and that this constitutes his raison
d'etre: "He counteracts; he initiates. And this is partly why he
is so often understood at first by but a few" (July 6, 1937).
Yet, whether in the south of France for
the first two and a half years of the war or in North Africa for the
duration, Gide was unable to maintain such an ideal aloofness. Never
do his "Journals" come so close to journalism ("I call
'journalism' everything that will be less interesting tomorrow than
today," he wrote in 1921) as during the long siege of Tunis in
1942-43. There we have a marginal history of events recorded by an
eyewitness whose vision was necessarily limited, a sort of "Journal
of the Plague Year" with all the dispassionate, flat reportage
of Defoe's document. There is a fascination for us who were on the
outside in sharing the intimate feelings of a particularly sensitive
person on the inside of the vast concentration camp set up by Hitler.
Despite Gide's effort to heighten and enliven that account by a
running description of the child Victor, a portable microcosm of all
that was distasteful in the world around him, nonetheless this is the
part of the "Journals" that will doubtless age least well.
Several times in recent years Andre Gide had expressed the desire for
simultaneous publication of those pages in French and English, in the
naive hope, unshared by his French publisher, that such a delicate
attention would somewhat mitigate the sting of his remarks about the
American forces in Tunisia. But Americans are hardly so susceptible
as not to appreciate such frankness; the men who took part in the
North African campaign should be interested in the way they looked to
"those they were about to liberate, especially since that view
changed so drastically upon contact. During the decade from 1939 to
1949 Andre Gide's creative activity did not slacken, for he wrote (in
addition to this volume of the "Journal") the "Imaginary
Interviews," a play entitled "Robert ou l'intérêt
général," a book on Paul Valery, "Autumn Leaves,"
and "Theseus", which last should come to be considered as
one of his major works. Meanwhile he finished his inspired
translation of "Hamlet," compiled an "Anthology of
French Poetry," wrote several prefaces including that for the
collected edition of Goethe's drama, and with Jean-Louis Barrault
adapted to the stage Kafka's "The Trial"—besides working
on still unrealized film-scenarios of his novels "Isabelle"
and "Les Caves du Vatican." One of the last entries in the
latest volume of his "Journal" (June 4, 1949) states: "Some
days it seems to me that if I had at hand a good pen, good ink, and
good paper I should without difficulty write a masterpiece." An
index of Gide's continuing vitality can be found as readily in the
attacks directed against him as in his own production. Throughout his
long career he had been the object of frequent, often savage,
assaults. If they are remembered at all in literary history, some of
his accusers — such as Henri Beraud, Jean de Gourmont, Rene
Johannet, Camille Mauclair, Eugene Montfort, and Victor Poucel—will
receive mention only for the crude shafts they aimed at Gide. Others
like Francis Jammes and Henri Massis have sullied their reputations
by contributing to the picturesque and fanciful Gide legend.
DESPITE the intention of such critics,
they did not bury their enemy very deep. During and after the recent
war the weight of his years did not keep him from serving frequently
again as whipping-boy. As early as July 1940 an anonymous journalist
in Le Temps accused him of exerting a baneful influence on
youth and contributing to the forming of a "deliquescent
generation." A year later in California Fernand Baldensperger
blamed the French defeat on such demoralizers as Gide, Proust, et al.
In January 1942 Rene Gillouin echoed in Geneva an unfounded
accusation of Gide's having led a susceptible young reader to
suicide. Hardly had Paris been liberated than Louis Aragon, the
literary spokesman of the French Communist Party, which could not
forget Gide's return from Moscow, repeated the charge of
anti-patriotism and defeatism made in the Provisional Consultative
Assembly in Algiers by a certain Giovoni. Soon thereafter Julien
Benda and Edmond Buchet separately accused Gide of
anti-intellectualism and Alexandrinism, somewhat as Arthur Koestler
was to do in English. Probably the most categoric crushing of Gide
was found in an interview with the Catholic poet Paul Claudel, a
contemporary and early friend, published in March 1947. "From
the artistic point of view, from the intellectual point of view, Gide
is worthless," said Claudel. Gide himself was more equitable
toward his former friend, for in February 1943 he noted in the
"Journal":
There is and always will be in France (except under the urgent threat of a common danger) divisions and parties; in other words, dialogue. Thanks to that, the fine equilibrium of our culture: equilibrium in diversity. Always a Montaigne opposite a Pascal; and, in our time, opposite a Claudel, a Valery. At times one of the two voices prevails in strength and magnificence. But woe to the times when the other is reduced to silence! The free mind has the superiority of not wanting to be alone in enjoying the right to speak.
If there could have been any doubt
before, there can surely no longer be any since the publication in
1949 of the correspondence between Claudel and Gide that to the world
at large the name of Paul Valery was less appropriate in the above
passage than would have been that of Andre Gide.
Another important Catholic writer,
François Mauriac, who never ceased to admire and to acknowledge his
debt to Gide, seems to have recognized this when, writing in Le
Figaro about certain pages detached from the latest "Journal,"
he finds Gide's thought "serenely aggressive as on his finest
days" and regrets that "this elderly Faust, who is so dear
to us, should fix himself permanently in the definitive affirmation
that man must be put in the place of God."
Coming from the pen of Mauriac the
expression "serenely aggressive" is most appropriate. In
his eighth decade Andre Gide had achieved a measure of serenity,
manifest in his "Theseus" and "Autumn Leaves" as
well as in his "Journal." One thinks of the Olympian
serenity of Goethe, Gide's lifelong companion, and notes with
pleasure that during the ten years covered by this volume Gide reread
both the "Conversations with Eckermann" and Boswell's "Life
of Samuel Johnson," as if recognizing the company in which he
belongs. In fact, the complete "Journals," representing
sixty years of a varied life, form one prolonged, intimate
conversation, a single, often interrupted dialogue of the author with
himself. Such a document precludes the necessity of any other
interlocutor; after all, Montaigne had neither Boswell nor Eckermann.
The serenity to which Gide attained was that of a dynamic equilibrium
between opposing tendencies within him, the classic balance toward
which he had tended ever since youth. Yet there was nothing static
about this condition; as he noted in the "Journal": "The
sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends
toward serenity."
On the last page of the most recent
instalment of his "Journals" Andre Gide had scribbled a
note implying that he had forever ceased to keep a journal. Since
this was in fact the end of his long and rich self-scrutiny, the
final distilation of his reflections on man and the universe, what
definitive revelation or ultimate message does it contain for his
readers? Those who followed him this far knew him better than to
expect such a thing or be surprised by his note of December 15, 1948:
"Last words ... I do not see why one should try to pronounce
them louder than the others. At least I do not feel the need of doing
so."
Justin O'Brien is professor of
French at Columbia University. This essay will form the introduction
to his edition of the fourth volume of Gide's "Journals"
which will be published, by Alfred A. Knopf on April 9.
________________________________
* « Je méprise de tout mon
cœur cette sorte de sagesse à laquelle on ne parvient que par
refroidissement ou lassitude. »
