Books: Aged Child

THE JOURNALS OF ANDRE GIDE (380 pp.) —Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Justin O’Brien—Knopf ($5).

“Dare to be yourself,” wrote Andre Gide in his diary at 22. “My mind is becoming voluptuously impious and pagan. I must stress that tendency.” If he felt like a pagan, he still acted like a Protestant; he carried a pocket Bible everywhere with him. But he was always seesawing between the assurances of prayer and the doubts of spiritual confusion. Twenty-one years later, he confided to his journal: “Catholicism is inadmissible. Protestantism is intolerable. And I feel profoundly Christian. . . . From day to day I put off and carry a little farther into the future my prayer: may the time come when my soul, at last liberated, will be concerned only with God!”

Gide’s famous Journals have been praised in hushed tones by his admirers ever since their Paris publication in 1939. This first volume in English, covering the period 1889-1913 (two others are promised before 1950), is apt to get about the same degree of critical genuflection—and popular indifference—that French Man of Letters Gide has learned to expect. At 77, it is unlikely that he will live to see his popularity catch up with his reputation (based mainly in the U.S. on one novel, The Counterfeiters). A handful of intellectuals have made a cult of his uncompromising intellectualism; others have sought out his books, having been assured that they might be shocked. But more readers have been discouraged by his stripped, austere style and involved ethical themes than have been shocked by Gide’s involved and discreet researches into homosexuality.

In 1906, when he was 36, Gide wrote in his Journals: “Never a man, I shall never be anything but an aged child. I live with all the incoherence of a lyric poet, but two or three ideas, crosswise in my brain and rigid like parallel bars, crucify every joy. . . .” Certainly there is little enough of joy in the aged child’s day-to-day confessional. Touchy and lacking creative confidence, he worked from compulsion and usually despaired of the results, cringed before criticism, sought solace in voracious reading and five-hour-long sessions at the piano.

Gide’s poems, plays and novels were ignored by the French public from the first (he was 67 when he wrote his first bestseller, Return from the U.S.S.R.). Buttressed by an independent income, he went on writing as he pleased, traveled in Europe and Africa, financed and helped to edit a Paris literary review (Nouvelle Revue Franfaise) that acquired a small but secure world reputation. He had married his cousin Emmanuele, but the Journals make it clear that it was a marriage of convenience. (“But of everything concerning [Emmanuele] I forbid myself to speak here.”)

With typical Gidean restraint, he suggests his fondness for Arab boys, his rapturous admiration for statues of the male form, his habit of following strangers who attract him (“I go out a bit toward evening and shadow a couple of fellows who intrigue me”). Nothing, it seems, came to Gide so easily as tears. The Journals drip from crying jags brought on by Gide’s reading, his music, visits to art shows (“visit to the Louvre . . . wept in front of the Rudes . . . in the theater the mere name of Agamemnon is enough. I weep torrents”).

There were times when the Journals bored Gide, long stretches that passed without entries: “I am keeping this journal without pleasure, as an exercise and without any care for the interest I may ever take in rereading it. . . . No more interest in keeping this journal. . . . I interrupt this journal, which is reduced to the dull notation of facts. Good [he wrote after 23 years of keeping it] solely as a way of getting into the habit of writing.” In spite of flashes of cold, Gidean brilliance, most readers will probably feel the same way about the Journals’.