Read The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) Online
Authors: Simon Leys
His receptivity and malleability were thus deceptive—and he was the first to acknowledge this fact: “By using sympathy, anyone can easily manipulate me. Previously, I warned Claudel, Beware, I am made of rubber. I agree with everything, as much as possible, and I would go to the very edge of insincerity—yet make no mistake: once alone, I revert to my original shape.”[
107
]
The paradox is that, on the deepest level, he was perfectly blind to the point of view of others and radically unable to perceive glaring truths that had been before him all his life. The most tragic example of this incredible insensitivity can be found in the way he treated his wife, Madeleine: in the end, he managed to alienate—irreparably—the trust of the only person he truly loved.
HERBART
Gide’s enemies spread many calumnies about him during his life; these should naturally be ignored—and, anyway, they pale in comparison with the truths that his friends published after his death.
The most penetrating psychological portrait of Gide was written by Pierre Herbart:
À la recherche d’André Gide
(1952). Herbart (1904–74) was the husband of the mother of Gide’s daughter (readers who feel confused by this little brain-twister might refer to the entry
Daughter
above; a diagram of the relationships within the Gidean “family” would rival in its complexity the lines of descent within the chimpanzee cage at the zoo).
Herbart came from a prominent family of northern France, but
carried a heavy hereditary burden. After sixteen years of apparently peaceful married life, his father had suddenly left home forever, without a cent in his pocket, become a vagrant and vanished. Some years later, the police asked the adolescent son to identify his dead body, lying in a ditch, by the side of a country road.
The Tiny Lady developed a special affection for her son-in-law, and wrote a short sketch about him.[
108
] Pierre was enigmatic and attractive, whimsical and unpredictable, high-strung and indolent (“divinely lazy,” said the Tiny Lady—or just “plain lazy” according to Béatrix Beck, who looked at him with less indulgent eyes), violent and tender, harsh and kind, cynical and generous. Women found him irresistible—some men did too (though others, like Gallimard, who occasionally had to employ him, thought that he was “a whore”).[
109
]
Gide first met the young man (who was twenty-three at the time) in Cocteau’s country house. Herbart was then an opium addict who, later on, became an alcoholic. Gide was impressed by his natural elegance and what he discerned to be “a sort of devilish genius, a frenzied quality—all the seductions from Hell.”[
110
] In order to help him overcome his addictions, Gide encouraged him to write and eventually persuaded Gallimard to publish his first novel. Subsequently, Gide introduced him to the mother of his daughter; they soon became lovers and married a few years later (Herbart was then twenty-eight, and Elisabeth Van Rysselberghe forty-one). In the early 1930s, Herbart became a communist sympathiser and an ardent propagandist for the Soviet Union; he was instrumental in attracting Gide into the fellow-travellers brotherhood. Together they visited the Soviet Union and shared the same disenchantment. After the war, Gide, who could not bear solitude, became more and more dependent upon Herbart, who acted as his confidant, secretary, adviser, agent, factotum and occasional driver; with him he knew he would not be bored and, in the end, he simply could not do without the young man’s company.
Herbart was intuitive and had sharp psychological acumen. He was devoted to Gide, who repeatedly gave him generous financial support; he knew Gide on a familiar level of daily intimacy hardly equalled by any other friend.
The inner core of the Gidean “family” was made up of the Tiny
Lady, Herbart and Roger Martin du Gard. One day, in August 1940, as the trio were chatting together, Herbart gave his friends a first inkling of the original insight he had reached on the subject of Gide. The Tiny Lady recorded their exchange:
I wish to reproduce in its main outline a conversation which we had one morning, Martin, Pierre and I, and during which Pierre was led to say something intriguing about Gide. We were talking about compassion—compassion as a symbol of Christianity. We were wondering if, as Hitler now seems intent on doing, it would ever be feasible to build a new world from which compassion would be excluded. Pierre said yes; Martin, no; we inquired whether compassion was already present in Antiquity, or whether it was a specific contribution of Christianity, whether it is a motivating force in art, etc., etc., when suddenly Pierre said, “I am going to make a point that runs against my own position—but it seems to me that it is this very sentiment that is missing in Gide’s works; had he got it, he would be the greatest, whereas now in fact he is merely one among the great.” With a somewhat mischievous smile, Martin asked, “Is he also lacking compassion in his life?” Pierre and I, we said simultaneously, “This is a much more complex question.” But Pierre pursued his idea: “My explanation for this lack may seem to you very flat. I believe that, in Gide’s case, it all comes down to a lack of virility.” Now we were treading on very delicate ground. As I feared that Pierre might not go to the bottom of the matter, I said, “On the subject of Gide, it would be very difficult not to confront clearly the sexual issue.” “Precisely,” Pierre said. “I believe that Gide’s sexuality has remained in an infantile state, while his sensitivity developed normally, and this imbalance had repercussions on his moral virility.” Martin’s eyebrows shot high up, he was agape, transfixed with attention. At this point, unfortunately, our conversation was interrupted.[
111
]
Twelve years later, in his
À la recherche d’André Gide
(which, by the way, was dedicated to Martin du Gard), Herbart was to pick up this
broken thread. In his view, Gide’s deepest compulsion was to charm people and to win their sympathy; his obsessive fear was of disappointing their expectations; he was, therefore, totally dependent on others, his own self-esteem being conditioned by their approval. In this attitude, he betrayed his lack of “virility” and his absence of “morality.” Needless to say, both terms should not be understood in any narrow sense: Herbart himself was bisexual and, in his younger years, had led with cool shamelessness the life of a gigolo—unorthodox sexual practices and unconventional moral behaviour could not really shock him. What flabbergasted him, however, was Gide’s monstrous insensitivity—that, for instance, he had the cheek to complain that his long-suffering and saintly wife would not co-operate in procuring local boys to alleviate his sexual needs during his stays on their country estate![
112
]
Gide is “emasculated,” Herbart continues: one cannot trust his word, nor his loyalty, nor his discretion. He is amoral, not by a bold choice or as a challenge—but simply and literally because he is missing that particular sense. He can experience physical or aesthetic repulsion but rarely intellectual and never moral repulsion: his ignorance of morality is innate and invincible—he does not have the faintest awareness of what morality might mean.[
113
]
Gide’s inner world is characterised by an extreme spiritual poverty: the entire realm of human passion has remained a closed book to him. He has no great genius, no imagination, no original ideas. With him, style is everything: he picks up clichés and “Gidifies” them—giving them a form that is unique.[
114
]
His strength resides in his tireless curiosity, his absolute freedom, his uncompromising pursuit of excellence.[
115
] But he is utterly devoid of the tragic sense of life; he has no experience of pathos. Hence the weird feeling which often affects sensitive readers when they plunge into his works—and on this point, Herbart quotes a passage from Julien Green that is worth pondering, for, once again, this example carries particular weight. Green, though Gide’s junior by thirty years, was a friend who shared both his Protestant upbringing and his sexual orientation:
A short while ago, in a bookshop, I was browsing a reprint of Gide’s
Journal
. I have never read it in its entirety, but this time,
reading a few pages convinced me, once again, that I shall never be able to pursue it to the end. Why? I don’t really know. Its style is exquisite, and every page is full to the brim with great intellectual riches; but in the same time as the book yields all that it can give, it also freezes the heart, and as one reads on, one feels left with less faith, with less hope, and (I say this with regret) with less love.[
116
]
On the subject of Gide, when reading Herbart—as well as Martin du Gard, for these two were Gide’s favourite friends[
117
]—one wonders, on what did their unquestionable attachment rest? Not on his works: in the inner Gidean circle, there were no disciples, and both Herbart and Martin have stated that no book of Gide ever had a significant impact upon them.[
118
] They simply cherished the man, Herbart says, yet he could also foresee that “The particular value which his life presented will, it seems to me, become unintelligible once those who witnessed it have all disappeared.”[
119
] Indeed.
LITERATURE
Literature was the very meaning of Gide’s life, its exclusive purpose.[
120
] He loved literature with a devotion that was admirable and touching. Reading was as essential to him as breathing; it was both a vital need and a constant joy. Often it was also a convivial celebration, a fervour which he shared with those whom he loved most. When he was with his wife in their Normandy estate, or with his friends in Paris, entire evenings were spent reading aloud to each other.[
121
]
Gide was a deliberate, slow and omnivorous reader. He was never without a book in his hand, or in his pocket, or at his bedside. He read in order to write; he drew all his writing out of himself, as one draws water from a well, and only an uninterrupted stream of reading could ensure that the well would not run dry.
In his approach to literature, besides the solid foundations that traditional French schooling provided to all children of the bourgeoisie, he was equipped only with his own voracious curiosity. His enjoyment
of literature was never warped by the sterile games that academics play professionally—he never attended any university. He belonged (as Sheridan accurately observes[
122
]) to the vanishing breed of “common readers.” (E.M. Forster, who much admired him, was himself very Gidean when he wrote: “Study has a very solemn sound.
I am studying Dante
sounds much more than
I am reading Dante
. It is really much less.”) At the conclusion of a symposium on his beloved Montaigne, Gide’s characteristic contribution was simply to suggest with gentle irony that Montaigne would probably not have understood a word of what had just been said about him.
He was a good Latinist; from adolescence till death, Virgil’s
Aeneid
remained his most constant reading.[
123
] He had a loving familiarity with the French classics: Montaigne first and foremost, and also Pascal, Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, Bossuet, La Bruyère, Voltaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert. On Hugo, he was ambivalent: “Sometimes execrable, always prodigious.”[
124
] He ignored Dumas.[
125
]
What set him apart, however, was his openness to foreign literatures, which was exceptional for his time and in his milieu. He knew some German, a little Italian, and worked hard on his English. His command of foreign languages always remained shaky (“Honestly, as regards foreign languages, I am a hopeless case . . .”[
126
]) but his hunger for learning and discovery was impressive. He applied himself to read Goethe (one of his greatest cultural heroes) in the original, and he devoted years of strenuous work to Shakespeare, painstakingly translating
Hamlet
into French. Strangely enough, however, he eventually became quite disenchanted with the play: “
Hamlet
lacks artistry. I wish an Englishman could explain to me in what respect it is admirable. Reading it, I never feel that I am in front of something beautiful, which I would wish to transmit to others. It is muddled and amphigoric.”[
127
] Actually, on the subject of Shakespeare, his evolution—from admiration to prejudice—very much duplicated that of Voltaire, and he came to some curious conclusions: “I deny that there are any human teachings to be derived from his plays; his most sublime lines are in fact utterly banal, his psychology conventional. Generally speaking, theatrical plays always give me this impression, with the sole exception of Racine.”[
128
] And again: “The English are irritating
with their habit of always praising Shakespeare without reservation.”[
129
] He found
As You Like It
“completely devoid of charm.”[
130
] Immediately after the war he had the chance to watch
Richard III
, staged in Paris by the Old Vic; he confessed he could not understand a word of it.[
131
] At the very end of his life he saw
King Lear
in Laurence Olivier’s interpretation. The Tiny Lady reported: “Gide was utterly disappointed by the play; he thinks it is one of Shakespeare’s weakest works, without any psychological interest, quite boring in fact.”[
132
]
He also expressed some other puzzling value judgements; for instance, he found Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon
much superior to Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
, and he could not understand the popularity of the latter.[
133
]
He loved Browning’s poetry. George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
elicited his enthusiasm; as for Jane Austen, he found her novels extraordinarily well crafted, but with “a somewhat low-alcohol content.” Henry James was a disappointment: “a mere socialite” (
un auteur de salon
): “his characters live only in their heads, they have nothing below the shoulders.”[
134
] He was bored by
The Ambassadors
and could not finish it: “His manner reminds me of Proust, but, unlike Proust, it is dreary, and most of all, it lacks efficacy.”[
135
] He read most of Thomas Hardy’s novels;
The Mayor of Casterbridge
was his favourite.[
136
] Joyce’s
Ulysses
was “needlessly long; in the end, it will remain only as a sort of monster.”[
137
]