Gide, André (1869–1951)

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GIDE, ANDRÉ (1869–1951)

French writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.

Called France's "leading contemporary" by André Rouveyre, André Gide indeed epitomizes not only the "great writer" but also, before Jean-Paul Sartre, the committed intellectual. Gide was never captive to his political commitments, however, and he always preserved his lucidity and independence of mind.

Born in Paris to a family of academics, André-Paul-Guillaume Gide was educated at the city's prestigious École Alsacienne, where he passed his baccalaureate examination in 1889. The following year he wrote his first book, The Notebooks of André Walter (Les Cahiers d'André Walter, 1891). From then on, literature—writing and incessant reading—would be Gide's world. During the years 1890–1896 he went in search of himself, traveling, discovering his homosexuality, writing Fruits of the Earth (Les nourritures terrestres, 1897) and Marshlands (Paludes, 1895), and making his first literary acquaintances, among them Oscar Wilde, Francis Jammes, and Paul Claudel. In 1895, he married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux. A year later he was elected mayor of La Roque, a commune in Normandy. A supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, Gide took a great interest in the political problems of the time. During this period he also became friends with the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe and his wife, Maria. Later nicknamed "la Petite Dame" (the Little Lady), Maria was to be the faithful chronicler of Gide's domestic life. In 1923 the van Rysselberghes' daughter Elisabeth gave birth to a baby girl, Catherine, whose father was André Gide.

After the turn of the century Gide published two major novels, The Immoralist (L'immoraliste) in 1902 and Strait Is the Gate (La porte étroite) in 1909. Thereafter his literary work would oscillate between two approaches, the one anchored in reality and involved with contemporary issues, the other more introspective, more concerned with formal experiment. At times the two were combined, as in Corydon (1924) or If It Die (Si le grain ne meurt, 1926), works in which Gide defended his homosexuality. Both approaches, moreover, were underpinned by the quest for an ethic lying beyond all traditional morality. Gide's public activities likewise had a dual aspect, at once literary and political.

In 1908 Gide helped found the influential Nouvelle revue française (NRF), and a year later the annual literary and socially progressive ten-day conferences, led by Paul Desjardins, known as the Décades de Pontigny. In 1914 Gide broke with the celebrated dramatist Paul Claudel over a passage in Gide's novel The Vatican Cellars (Les caves du Vatican) that Claudel deemed "pederastic." During World War I he did aid work with refugees, especially those arriving from Belgium, and flirted briefly with the right-wing organization Action Française. His friend Henri Ghéon converted to Catholicism, and Gide experienced a religious crisis of his own (he had himself converted in 1905, but this act was inconsequential).

After the war Gide resumed his international literary activism, seeking with Jacques Rivière to bring about a French-German intellectual rapprochement. In 1919 he published one of his most-read books, The Pastoral Symphony (La symphonie pastorale) and began work on The Counterfeiters (Les faux-monnayeurs, 1925), which would be another great triumph. The 1920s were also years of public political involvement for Gide, most especially with respect to the anticolonialist struggle, as witness Voyage au Congo (1927) and Retour du Tchad (1928), published as one volume in English translation as Travels in the Congo (1929). In the early 1930s Gide was attracted by communism. As the fascist threat grew ever more tangible (Hitler's coming to power, the burning of the Reichstag, the Stavisky affair in France), Gide became a fellow traveler, a militant in the Vigilance Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, and a very active participant in the communists' great international congress "for the defense of culture" in 1935. The following year he was invited with a delegation of writers to visit the Soviet Union, where he even delivered an elegy for Maxim Gorky on Red Square in the presence of Stalin. On his return to France, however, he published Return from the U.S.S.R. (Retour de l'U.R.S.S., 1936) and Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R. (Retouches à mon retour de l'U.R.S.S., 1937), expressing his disillusion with the Soviet regime and condemning the cult of personality. Targeted in consequence by the communist intellectuals, with Louis Aragon leading the pack, he broke with the party. He went so far as to lend his support to the Trotskyist POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) fighters under attack by the communists in Spain. Gide then gradually withdrew from political action, busied himself with the publication of his Journal in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, and resumed his traveling.

During the war and occupation, Gide went first into internal exile in Provence and later into an external one in Tunisia and Algeria. In 1941 he ceased all collaboration with the Nouvelle revue français, which was now under the control of the collaborationist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

The postwar years were a time of consecration for Gide. In 1947 he won the Nobel Prize. The film version of La symphonie pastorale (1946) was a great success, as was the staging of Les caves du Vatican at the Comédie-Française in 1950. The ultimate honor, perhaps, came after Gide's death, when in 1952 his complete works were added to the Vatican's Index of Prohibited Books.

See alsoAction Française; Sartre, Jean-Paul.