André Gide (1869–1951)

"I advanced slowly; the sky was like my joy---warm, bright, delicately pure. No doubt she was expecting me by the other path. I was close to her, behind her, before she heard me; I stopped . . . and as if time could have stopped with me, "This is the moment," I thought, "the most delicious moment, perhaps, of all, even though it should precede happiness itself---which happiness itself will not equal." (p 96)

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way, that show more leadeth to destruction and many there be which go thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." (Matthew 7:13-14).

This is the text from which Gide drew the title of his short novel, Strait is the Gate. It is a first person narrative that begins forthrightly with the words:
"Some people might have made a book out of it; but the story I am going to tell is one that it took all my strength to live and over which I have spent all my virtue. So I shall set down my recollections quite simply, and if in places they are ragged I shall have recourse to no invention and neither patch nor connect them; any effort I might make to dress them up would take away from the last pleasure I hope to get in telling them." (p 3)

The author signals in this short paragraph the importance of virtue (of what sort we shall find out) and that these are personal "recollections", subject to the vicissitudes of memory and desire, but not invented. Finally, the narrator claims to have pleasure, or at least hopes to, in telling them. One may see already the potential for the contradiction of truth presented as fiction and fiction telling the truth.

The setting is the Protestant upper-middle-class world of Normandy in the 1880s. The narrator, Jerome Palissier, originally from Le Havre, is eleven when the story begins. His father having died he is living with his mother and a governess. He is surrounded by family including a creole aunt Lucille who alternately fascinates and terrifies him. She has two young daughters, Alissa and Juliette Bucolin, who are devoted to their father. Alissa and Jerome become childhood sweethearts and this gradually develops into a situation such that it becomes assumed, at least unofficially, that they are engaged. Unfortunately Alissa never truly agrees to any such arrangement. Complicating matters further are the feelings of Juliette for Jerome and the entry of Jerome's good friend Abel Vautier who quickly becomes infatuated with Juliette. The relations among these young people are complicated by the strength of youthful Eros, their own growth, and their search for identity. It is this search that leads Alissa in the direction of religion, in spite of which she professes to love Jerome. But she is no longer her former self and as Jerome is about to leave the country home of Fonguesemare where they have been together she claims that he has been in love with a ghost. Jerome replies that the ghost is not an illusion on his part: "Alissa, you are the woman I loved . . . What have you made yourself become?" Jerome leaves, "full of a vague hatred for what I still called virtue". Strong stuff for teenagers.

Three years later he returns but their relations are never the same; the strength of her religious convictions has altered Alissa both spiritually and physically. The affairs narrated here are apparently drawn from Gide's own life, however loosely. Their are also parallels with Gide's own work as Alissa may be seen as corresponding to Michel, the protagonist in Gide's novel, The Immoralist, written about a decade earlier. Strait is the Gate presents itself as a small gem of a literary work. With its focus on the passions and desires of young love I am reminded of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. Gide's biographer, Alan Sheridan, suggests that it is also a meditation on Gide's relationship with his own wife, Madeleine. Whether that is the case or not this short novel is has a beautiful clarity of prose and a haunting style that suggests the memories of young love that, while strong enough to leave permanent impressions, in some way become ghosts of one's youth. show less

Gide owes a huge debt to Maghreb, which gave him his first poetical, romantic masterpieces. Maghreb was Gide's Roman campagna, where purity of nature harmonised with purity of men, where modernity didn't exist, and handsome young boys blew tunes on rustic pipes while tending fluffy sheep. At least, it was until he could sustain the illusion no longer. In the earliest of his travel notes this hunger for being somewhere entirely different from his origin dominates everything--he is only as show more happy as the circumstances seem foreign, only where other tourists are not, seeing sights they miss, like the cheap puppetry show, and not the staged dances. He is constantly reassuring himself that he is experiencing something authentic, spontaneous. He wants to become invisible to the locals, to meld with them, in fact, he writes in one place, he would give everything to BE this particular Arab, here, now. It's easy to conclude that the 19th century mal du siècle lasted all 100 years of it, that the Western man was already gripped by anxiety, angst, nausea and the lot, in 1896. By the end of the notes in Amyntas, dating from 1904/5, Gide has definitely lost this second paradise, he will never return. Morocco and Algeria aren't Arcadia, the Arabs are troubled, sick and apathetic, not wisely contemplative; even the boys aren't good-looking anymore, barely two out of a hundred. Maybe that's the moment where Gide begins to see the world, for real this time. show less

The story of a man who prefers the company of beautiful Arab boys and strapping peasant youth to that of his pious, tubercular wife was probably quite shocking when The Immoralist appeared in 1902. (The title allowed Gide to be provocative and to shield himself from public contempt at the same time). When a character tells the protagonist that most people are afraid to live their own authentic lives, we know he has hit upon one of the poignant truths of modernity. This is the kind of book show more that makes people think that literature has special powers. show less

First published in 1923, at a time when Dostoevsky had yet to be rediscovered by the West, French author André Gide’s observations about the great writer are fascinating (and revealing about Gide as well). It’s far from a complete account, but there are plenty of gems to be found, such as Gide’s observation that Dostoevsky’s characters “group and arrange themselves always on one plane only, that of humility and pride.” Of special interest also were a sampling from Dostoevsky’s show more letters, including the one he wrote on December 22, 1849, the day his death sentence was stayed by the Tsar at the last minute, and another he wrote five years later which described in detail the journey he and his fellow prisoners took to Siberia, as well as the brutal conditions he found there.

Gide helps reveal the many bitter ironies about Dostoevsky’s life – the fact that despite his delicacy in childhood, he was drafted into the military, whereas his more robust brother Michael was rejected. That after his first four years in exile, when he wasn’t allowed to correspond with anyone, he spent six years pleading with his brother to write him, and to send him books – but never heard a word. “He wept when he bade me good-bye. Has his feeling towards me grown cold? Has his character changed? That would be a grief. Has he forgotten all the past?” he wrote a friend in 1856. That in the last year of his life, despite winning over public opinion, he was still struggling with attacks in the press, writing “For what I said in Moscow [his speech on ‘Pushkin,’ now revered], just look how I’ve been treated by almost the whole of the press: it is as if I were a thief or had embezzled from some bank or other. Ukhantsev [a notororious swindler of the time] is less foully abused than I.” It was during these final years, shortly before he died at just 59, that he would lament “the weakening of his memory and his imagination,” and yet it was at this time that he still produced his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, which is as inspiring as it is humbling.

All of these aspects of his life seem to have fueled his self-doubt as a writer, his humility as a person, his awkwardness around others, and his submissiveness that seemed to channel Christ (e.g. still believing in the Emperor’s kindness after 10 years of exile). They were all facets of a genuinely vulnerable person. He was a man who knew pain, poverty, physical affliction (his epilepsy), and mental obsession (his gambling), and yet through it all he was generous to those around him and remained an optimist, both in Russia and in humanity. He resisted the Westernization of Russa, famously feuding with Turgenev, instead believing that Russia could help heal the party passions that were dividing Europe. And remarkably, during his exile, after having lived in frigid conditions with meager provisions for four years, he wrote, “Brother, there are very many noble natures in the world.”

There is such depth of feeling and authenticity in his work not because it is perfect precise and tidied up, but because it reflects the contradictions in people and remains gloriously messy. As Gide expresses it, he himself was a man of contradictions: “Conservative, but not hide-bound by traditions: monarchist, but of democratic opinions: Christian, but not a Roman Catholic: liberal, but not a progressive … he is of the stuff which displeases every party.” And yet Dostoevsky never tried to fit a mold, and said “The hardest thing on earth is to remain yourself.” He was raw, pure, natural. And thus, “with him there is no attempt to straighten or simplify lines; he is at his happiest in the complex; he fosters it.”

I liked how Gide rather poetically expressed the craft in Dostoevsky’s writing. “Balzac paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt,” he writes in the preface. In one of the lectures that were transcribed for the book, he says “In one of Stendhal’s novels, the light is constant, steady, and well-diffused. Every object is lit up in the same way, and is visible equally well from all angles; there are no shadow effects. But in Dostoevsky’s books, as in Rembrandt’s portrait, the shadows are the essential. Dostoevsky groups his characters and happenings, plays a brilliant light upon them, illuminating one aspect only.”

In a thought-provoking way, Gide also compares Nietzsche’s reaction to the Gospels as one of jealousy leading to the Superman, with Dostoevsky’s which is one of submission. In Dostoevsky, he writes, “the will to power leads inevitably to ruin,” whereas in Nietzsche it’s the opposite. In Dostoevsky, rationality and the mind are “demonic,” he says, and that “Dostoevsky’s heroes inherit the Kingdom of God only by the denial of mind and will and the surrender of personality.” That may sound antithetical to progress or what an atheist intellectual like me may buy into, but if I think of the “mind” in this context as ego, which in turns leads to competitiveness and internal suffering, I see the wisdom that I’ve always found in Dostoevsky.

There were many bits here and there that didn’t ring true e.g. Gide saying the influence of WWI upon literature was “nil,” or that jealousy might not be felt if people hadn’t read of it and expected themselves to feel that way, or subscribing to Mme. Hoffmann’s view that Russian mistrustfulness stemmed from “consciousness of his own insufficiency and proneness to sin,” or stating that “with physical well-being, mental activity is in abeyance.”

However, there is also wisdom in Gide’s anecdotes, such as this one from Walter Rathenau, who had been asking about Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. “His answer was that naturally he had suffered at the horrible abominations practiced by the revolutionaries. ‘But believe me,’ he added, ‘a nation learns to know itself, as a man his own soul, only by passing through the depths of his suffering and the abyss of his sin…And America has not yet gained a soul because she refuses to accept sin and suffering.” I thought that was incredibly prescient, given America’s refusal to truly atone for its two original sins, slavery and genocide.

This is certainly not the final word on Dostoevsky, but it was a pleasure to read the insights from an aficionada in the literati nearly a century ago. show less