Gide by St-John Perse

8/13/2019 Gide by St-John Perse

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Andre Gide: 1909

Author(s): Saint-John PerseReviewed work(s):Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1952), pp. 593-604Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27538166.

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ANDRE GIDE : 1909By SAINT-JOHN PERSE

1ITERARY France in 1909. Academic, Parisian, opportunist. ... A man of his time, with the advantages of~ his class, had given up taking a hand in the game; like

one of those finely-drawn Huguenot gentlemen of the time ofthe Leagues who, after clipping his beard one day and abandoning his court doublet for a free-flowing, coarse woolen cape,went off to live on his lands.

This man took his stand confronting the literature of France.His honor is the honor of the French tongue; and the "gentlemanliness" of his spirit is indeed the nobility of the liegeman.To confront the literature of France is his self-imposed duty.No compliance or weakness in this very sensitive face, neitherarrogance nor exaggeration, either; only the deep inner prideof a great zeal.

The language itself is his first concern. And to begin with,it is a matter of "propriety"; of that "propriety" lacking whichthere is no intellectual "appropriation," nor any human rele

vance. Hence this cardinal sin of the mind, "impropriety,"which he must fight like a Puritan; the value sought far beyond the syntax, in the elemental substance of the work and itsprimary movement; life reunited with the very source of artistic creation, as surety for the true, the real and the right?surety, too, for a "necessity," without which the work is futile.

That integrity runs through everything of his. There is noleniency for the impure or the hybrid in Art. And in keeping

with the requirements of "propriety," the kindred idea of "authenticity" suddenly flows into the literary language of the day.

Revision of values, establishing of the passive, and revaluat

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594 ANDRE GIDE 1909ing of the active; the forgers are denounced, the rhetoricians

unmasked, the magi confounded, the parasites bowed out, andpoverty of spirit discouraged.

* * * *For that function his qualifications are:

A sense of values which has never yet failed him; an innatesense of the sources and of the very essence of the Frenchgenius; a liking for the human in the written work and forthe universal in the individual work; perception in everything,of quality, of the urge, and of truth.

A sensibility for the intellectual as well as an understandingof the sentient, sureness of instinct and of judgment; a delicacyas intuitive as it is analytical. Above all an elevated taste, moderation, and tact; an aristocracy of resources, developed to thepoint of invisibility, and, through his immediate connection withthe style, an harmonious sense of the whole in the balancing ofthe creative forces.

Lucidity, sobriety, subtlety.That is what Gide represented to those twenty years youngerthan himself who, without knowing him personally, felt happy

to know that he was there, sponsor and guardian of an authenticity in French literature.

* * * .*He was known to be a man of great culture, impregnated by

the best and soundest of all that had filtered down to us throughtradition, but aware also of its limitations, and receptive to every

unforeseeable movement which might arise.Nothing of the revolutionary, certainly, in his open-minded

ness (he is too suspicious of the automatic habit of condemnation in certain forms of negation), but nothing indifferent,either. Caught only in the stream of French thought, its upperas well as its lower reaches. Eager to see its banks widened by



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SAINT-JOHN PERSE 595new tides, whether born of internal storms or alien floods; andto that extent, to broaden the extent of French taste itself.

France hates genius more than I o hated the gadfly's sting.France, too, hates nature "with a frowning brow." But againstthe flood of "angry waters" that must be checked (in the language of the fowler ), the administrators of the Waters andForests of France have always been able to provide a transformation of ornamental waters in a courtly forest. No one more

than Gide hopes for the happy absorption of new and unwonted powers?an attitude different from that of a Voltairetowards Shakespeare and a Gourmont's towards Rimbaud.

A classicist, if you like, but one who thus rediscovered romantic curiosity; and who knew how to pass through the Symbolist fray without becoming identified with it, heedless of anyschool or allegiance, mindful only of the opportunities for

French thought in all the winds that blow. Classic through asecret and guiding logic, but impressionable, changing andvaried; free, multiple, and complex, and attracted always toideas on all sides, and on every side combining reverence withirreverence; sensitive to all oppositions as well as to all alliances,eager, without any rupture, to run all risks of rupture, andphysiologically, as man or writer, closer in everything to thecentral nervous system than to the bony structure. A classic,in short, of a Renaissance far more than of a Golden Age, andreuniting, beyond the rationalist aridity of the 18th centuryand the great inflexible order of the 17th, the human suppleness and the free movement of the 16th?even there, more thehuman than the humanist.

And potential always, in all things at all times; at the end ofa work as on the threshold of action; in his function as coordinator as well as in his duty as mediator. He seemed aunique specimen of Frenchman who was happy to belong to noparticular class. His originality was as much due to everythinghe rejected as to what he accepted. And that he could never



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596 ANDRE GIDE: 1909be defined in anything; was indefinable even when occupiedwith definitions?that is the closest one can get to his real na

ture.What would come of such a potential, of such "availability,"

to borrow one of his own words?In that literary France, which alone knows the privilege of

steering the uneven course of its waters through three differentchannels?the official, the domestic, or the free?what shores,

what trails would he follow, and what would be his final vocation? Seeker after virgin gold? Coiner? Or money-changer?. . .His domain, to be sure, covered more than one province.

And in none of these provinces did he appear actually as acreator; but in each of them (poetry, the novel, theater, evencriticism), he was much more, and how much more than a manof culture or a man of taste. A writer belonging to a large classof French writers well-known in the Europe of the past, aclass which, as need arose, made use of every literary genre,transcending without restraint the limitations of the occasional

work.Would he one day, like a Rousseau, be impregnated by the

latent sensibility of an epoch, the better to leave his mark uponit afterwards? Would he, like Tolstoi, escape beyond the frontiers of art? Would he only follow, at the whim of the moment,the free, the humane course of a moralist like Montaigne?

For the time being, there he was, face-to-face with the literature of France. Of the older generation, still hopeful of animperceivable aim, although already famous for a highly personal work. But in the double aspect, aesthetic and ethical, ofan art in the process of de-intellectualization, the tendency that

would prevail could be foretold. The secret and temporal logicof this Gidean determinism, which had formerly saved him fromliterary narcissism, would henceforth predispose him towardsthe earthly and the human.* * * &



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SAINT-JOHN PERSE 597Of the man himself one knew little. But his name in Litera

ture evoked elegance.His great friendships were known. They corresponded to his

moral character and his behavior as a human being; they borewitness to the loyalty of his relationships. The integrity of hismind and the disinterestedness of his literary life were alreadyknown.

He appeared, actually, far removed from that dilettantismwhich had at first been attributed to him; reflective, self-exacting, in every way devoted and hard-working, he displayedno pride other than that which came from artistic awareness.

His life was far from hermetic; indeed in his owTn way hewas very sociable, attracted by friendships while trying to reconcile his independence with his predilection for the exchangeof ideas. No apparent misanthropy, no pessimism; and no classprejudice, either. In carrying out any joint activities, a warmthof mind and heart led him into showing himself more combativefor others than for himself; courageous in literary action, he

was generous in giving his fellow writers their due, as mostwriters rarely are.

Nor was he apathetic towards the younger generation, for areal curiosity drew him towards all living talent?a curiosity

which was never abstract, but personal and fraternal, which hecould make felt as such without the faintest desire to dominatethe young.

His letters had a rare human quality, and in them his concern for a person's feelings was never sacrificed to the desireto say a witty thing. "Vigilant," always, to use another of his

words.And by his letters was woven, with no premeditated design,

that loose fabric of literary affinities in which, one day in 1909,the diverse and scattered elements of a remarkable Pleiad un

wittingly were born again, without actual ties, with no agreement or charter or manifesto, joined together, as had been the



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598 ANDRE GIDE: 1909original Pleiad of du Bellay, once again for the "Defense"and "Illumination of the French Language."

* * * *I myself saw him very little. Our first meeting was in 1911.

He had, two years earlier, without knowing me, taken chargehimself of the publication of my first writings in the NouvelleRevue Fran?aise. Jammes, in the Beam, had talked to me abouthim; Conrad, too, in England, and then Val?ry. As I waspassing through Paris hurriedly between two stays abroad, itturned out, quite by chance, that I made an appointment tomeet him at an exhibition of tropical fish where Imyself had anengagement to meet a foreign naturalist.

Gide, fancying that he had been invited to some exotic f?te,was politely prepared to admire the show.

"Really, Gide, do you think one ought to arrange to meetyou at H?r?dia's? ... It was you, wasn't it, who said about thecoloring of a fish, 'I'll wager he haunted that part of the ocean

where the sun sets.'? . . .And it is thus that one writes French.And it is this kind of writing we must think about re-introduc

ing into France after all the depredations of the Romanticistsand the Parnassians. . . ."

He looked at me so seriously that I had to stop joking. Andthat first impression of Gide's seriousness was never to fadefrom my memory.

We talked again about the abuse of color in literature; aboutFrench universality even in our love for the exotic?and wasn'tthat the "true lesson of Amyntas"\?of his choice of Galland'srather than Mardrus's translation for reading the Thousand andOne Nights; and in a more general way we discussed the descriptive complacency of the literature of travel. I quoted tohim the soberness of style,?and it enchanted him?of a Frenchtraveler, an unconsciously great writer, from whom an encounter with an appalling Asiatic beggar, rotted to the bone,



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SAINT-JOHN PERSE 599could extract only this entry in his travel diary: "Met a beggar.If this man could see himself in a fountain, he would look fora grave to sleep in." Moreover, there could, strictly speaking,be no literature of travel, for a true traveler, unless he werea moralist in the ancient sense of the word, would never agreeto write about his journey, nor to write about anything else

while traveling."It is as a traveler that I should like to travel today," Gide

said.Next day I lunched at his house inAuteuil.The unforgettable face of Madame Gide?behind her air ofmoral birthright (the very nobility of which seemed to me to

be moral rather than spiritual.) The austerity of the backgroundin spite of its modernism. (Gide apologized for the inconsistencies of his architect.) The only literary association was tobe seen in the big reception hall with its exiled piano, wherethere hung a large painting, for which he again apologized because he appeared in it, among a group of several other contemporary authors. But what was there, there in the wholeambience, which, if it was not at all boredom, was not depressioneither? What nostalgia or what expectation? ... What othersense of uneasiness? ... I was struck, as I had been the day before, by Gide's tone of high seriousness. No high spirits and nogaiety. But no self-sufficiency either, and no worry about imposing any. The only affectation seemed to be that touch of theEnglish casuist which was, nevertheless, natural and necessaryto him for the very utterance of his psychological expression.

He talked like a professional psychiatrist, as a psychoanalystwould speak today.

I still remember my surprise at Gide's simplicity; I remember, too, the tone of extreme sincerity, almost of humility thathe used that day to express a certain human weariness, a weariness as much moral as intellectual, and in which was already



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600 ANDRE GIDE : 1909outlined the admission, as if to himself, of some unknown hu

man slip?towards what philosophic abdication, what ultimaterestriction? . . .All the future drama of Gide's addiction to hisearthly gravitation. He wanted to express his decision honestlyno longer to occupy himself with anything but the human side,according to the accepted plan of his scale of values. And hisvoice seemed to me, at moments, almost Slav, in spite of hisEnglish accent: "... I am afraid that you couldn't like whatI am writing now, what I shall write in the future. . . . For

your plan, which is a poet's, deals with the absolute with whichI have nothing more to do, and wish to have nothing more to

do_""What could be more natural," I replied. "You speak to

me as a well-bred Frenchman. And isn't the Frenchman, afterthe Chinese, the most anti-metaphysical of social animals? . . .

A matter of modesty, too, I imagine. . . ."But Gide protested, "... There is more than all that in

what I was going to say. . . ." But he didn't say it.How to break through our embarrassment? A smile was no

longer suitable, so one could only fall back on generalities, banalities. "You think you are repudiating the metaphysical approach which is also that of the poet. But since you cannotdodge absolute values, they always crop up again in some form,if only in that obvious counterfeit that is the simple physicalconcept of the infinite. French literature, born in a civilizationof courts, of salons, of cliques, and of philosophers' "garrets,"and thus eminently social, anti-metaphysical and anti-poetic, isrediscovering its infinite in the very depths of the well of thehuman heart, as unfathomable as any other for the Frenchman,

who is by nature an analyst and a psychologist. English literature sprang from a more material civilization and, more enamored of nature, is rediscovering its infinite in the cosmic abyss ""That infinite still in the human heart," Gide said, "is just

what I do not intend uncovering in my literary well "



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SAINT-JOHN PERSE 601I had heard Gide's farewell to every manner of poetic vision,

but to much else as well.Then he wanted to talk about English literature; the Eliza

bethans, I think. (We were members, without my knowing itand I really can't quite say why, of a very special London"John Donne Club," composed of three English members andthree French members, of which Gide's friend Edmund Gosse

was president.) He told me of the attraction that an exhaustivestudy of the English language was beginning to exert over him.I, for my part, deplored the denseness of such a concrete language, the excessive richness of its vocabulary and its pleasurein trying to reincarnate the thing itself, as in ideographic writing; whereas French, a more abstract language, which tries tosignify rather than represent the meaning, uses words only asfiduciary symbols like coins as values of monetary exchange.English for me was still at the swapping stage.

There was some nodding and shaking of the head. That wasprecisely, if he was to be believed, just what he most needed atthe moment: to take on weight and mass in the language of

Newton.The conversation had then drifted towards Romanticism. He

admitted that a distinction could be made between its misapplication by the French Romantics and Romanticism itself, in itsprinciples and as a whole. In itself a movement of liberation,which after a century of extreme rationalization, had finallyopened the gates of France to the double invasion of Nature(English Romanticism) and the first stirring of the subconscious(German Romanticism). Hugo?after all, a born poet, that isto say accessible in spite of himself to the secret sources of thesubconscious?had blindly lost his way and along with it hadentangled French Romanticism in verbalism and blindness because he had sacrificed the mystery of poetry to the externalconquest of success and the crass compromises of a great publiccareer. The effect of Hugo was a sort of swallowing-up and



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602 ANDRE GIDE: 1909going Underground of Romanticism, after which the best and

most informed were hard put to it to find even a few tricklesof the most precious stream.

Gide disputed none of all this, nor the bad effects of rationalism in art. We had already spoken of the influence of a

Rimbaud, of a Lautr?amont; of the progress by trial and errorof the Symbolist torrent and its seepage into everything thathad accompanied or followed it. I pointed out to him the needto foment new ideas and that the literary revolution would haveto be resumed on a much higher level, if it was to lead withfull authority to the final legitimizing of the rights of the subconscious in artistic creation.

"The great revolutions are silent," he said, "and are achievedin works."

Did he, eleven years later, remember this conversation? Whenhe saw me again in Paris, after a long stay in the Far East, heasked me what struck me most on my return to Europe.?Thedissociation of personalities, I answered; and that an Occidentalno longer seemed to me so unlike the Dayaks of Borneo, whoimagine that each night they set free "their doppelg?nger" inthe form of a large monkey who, until dawn, is delegated tocarry out at will all the acts which they deny themselves duringthe day. . . .The European, always more logical than the savage, will end by setting free his monkey in the full light ofday. . . .?Gide summoned me back to a serious level by announcing that France in my absence had become Freudian andthat all contemporary art would be affected by it?without control. This time it was I who evaded the subject under discussion.

We lunched that day at a restaurant in the Champs-Elys?es.Some remark about animal mimicry had reminded me of a factin entomology: a rare butterfly in Malaya had acquired duringits evolution a secretion within itself sufficiently corrosive to



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SAINT-JOHN PERSE 603ward off birds. Another insect, quite remote from the lepidoptera, had been so successful in imitating the shape and the markings of the beautiful privileged insect that the birds gave it the

benefit of the doubt and treated it like the more favored one.. . .?Then I saw the smile of a man whose laughter I had

never heard and the author of Pr?textes, leaning over, began tomention slyly the names of several contemporary authors . . .at which moment the waiter felt impelled to interrupt us topoint out, in a neighboring tree, a white blackbird, well knownin the neighborhood. Gide, napkin in hand, ran to the windowlike a child. And when he sat down again I said to him, "Yousee, there are marvels everywhere and it is hardly worth thetrouble of going very far to look for them." But he replied,"Marvels, alas, do not exist even inside ourselves. And the interest here was purely scientific; just a simple case of albinism."

Was he already trying to be like Goethe?I no longer remember the end of our 1911 interview. Gide

suddenly wanted to talk about nothing but music, which he didat length.

Before leaving I again scrutinized the excellent piano in thereception hall. As I walked away through his district of AuteuilI wondered whether music, his most faithful confidante, wasnot, after all, perhaps his most constant law and his best chancefor unity-?the best fitted, in any case, for joining without binding, and gathering together without fettering, the multiple ele

ments of so supple a personality; so sensitive, so mobile, sofluid in its course, so continuous, too. For Gide's thought seemedto embody the continuity of a single and disengaged inflection.. . .Would he not some day tire of his taste for aping in orderto understand? His sincerity would at least protect him fromaping himself. And music maintained in him the source of thatsincerity. One of his earliest letters, I well remembered, discussed music (dealing with a question of doctrine then raised by



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604 ANDRE GIDE: 1909d'Indy on the subject of musical composition). And musicremained a subject of discussion between us. At our last meeting, at the house of friends some twenty years ago, he told methat music, during the previous ten years during which I nolonger heard anything about him, had helped overcome long

periods of depression.Now, here, writing these lines after such a long time, I still

remember today that his last two letters spoke only of music.The last, dated from Taormina, May 29, 1950, "at the heightof the Chopin season," in a state of physical exhaustion, completely recaptured by his old passion; all stirred up this time by"a public discussion" with great professional virtuosi and preoccupied, even in Italy, with a "series of lectures and concertsorganized by the International Fr?d?ric Chopin Institute inhonor of the great Pole" . . .Music, by rousing him, drewfrom him a final vital impulse.

* * * ?KThe suspension of health seemed a Gidean act, a privilege of

the nerves in a constitution as stripped as his art.Long before 1909 his physical lapses were from time to time

a source of anxiety; and each time, moved by the same feeling,friends and enemies were equally ready to appraise just whatthe disappearance of Gide would remove from French literarylife. Who would again, as free as he, devote himself, and withsuch devotion, to the matter of French literature? Who again,

with as much grace and courteous authority, would instigatezeal and severity?

Evocation of Gide in the year of France 1909. . . .Gracious boon of the lovely Norman summer. Wisdom and

wit of the new year. ... In the swaying of the bright foliageof La Roque, there was still being modulated the French sentence with which Andr? Gide had been enriching our time.

(translated byMina Curtis s)

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Gide by St-John Perse