The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (21 page)
Read The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) Online
Authors: Simon Leys
The love I have for my wife is like no other; and I believe that only a homosexual can give a creature that total love, divested of all physical desire, of all trouble of the flesh: an integral love, in all its limitless purity. When I compared my marriage to the wretched, discordant marriages of those around me, I thought myself privileged: I thought I had built the very temple of love.[
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It was only after Madeleine’s death that he eventually woke up—to some extent—to what had been her grim fate:
I am now astonished at the aberration that led me to believe that the more ethereal my love, the more worthy it was of her; and in my naïveté I never asked whether she would be content with so disembodied a love. So, the fact that my carnal desires were directed towards other objects hardly concerned me. I even arrived at the comfortable conviction that things were better thus. Desires, I thought, were peculiar to men; I found it reassuring to believe that women—except “loose women,” of
course—did not have similar desires . . . What I fear she could not understand was that it was precisely the spiritual power of my love that inhibited any carnal desire. For I was able, elsewhere, to prove that I was not incapable of making love to a woman, providing nothing intellectual or emotional came into it . . . It was only later that I began to realise how cruelly I must have hurt the woman for whom I was ready to give my life . . . In fact, I could only develop as an individual by hurting her.[
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When she entered into the marriage, Madeleine was innocent but not blind. Her intuition made her aware very soon of the peculiar nature of Gide’s sexual compulsions. According to Gide himself, the discovery was completed for her during their honeymoon in North Africa. During a railway journey, she witnessed his furtive and frantic attempts to caress some half-naked boys who were on the train, and that same night she told him, not with reproach, but in anxious sorrow: “You looked like a criminal, or a madman.”[
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]
A pattern of separate lives progressively developed between husband and wife. Their intimacy was maintained through the constant flow of loving letters which Gide kept writing to her while they were apart—which was most of the time. Gide pursued his life of freedom with his friends in Paris and abroad; Madeleine withdrew alone to Cuverville, their country estate in Normandy. Gide came for occasional visits; they would again share their old enjoyment of literature and, as in the past, they would spend their evenings reading aloud to each other their favourite authors. Madeleine’s only request was that Gide, while in the country, refrain from preying upon neighbouring children, so as to avoid any scandal. (“Do it elsewhere if you must, but not in Cuverville. Here at least, spare me this shame.”[
170
]) Gide promised, but found the constraint unbearable. He often complained in his diary of the “suffocating” atmosphere of Cuverville, and “the bad sexual hygiene” from which he had to suffer there; he thought that this repression of his sensual impulses severely hindered the inspiration for his literary work. Often, he would furtively break the rules—or advance the date of his departure, and escape back to Paris.
Then came the only tragedy of Gide’s entire life. He fell in love with
a sixteen-year-old adolescent, Marc Allégret. Marc’s father was a Protestant pastor who, in his missionary zeal to evangelise French Africa, neglected to look after his own family—or rather, worse than neglecting it, whenever he was away and busily engaged in converting the heathen, the pious fool could think of nothing better than to entrust the care of his five sons to Gide, an old friend of the family, who diligently undertook to debauch as many of them as he could lay his hands on. (I am not competent to adjudicate on the vexed issue of priestly celibacy; I only feel that the one major objection one can make to a married clergy is that it is too cruel and unfair to their children.)
With Marc Allégret, Gide experienced for the first time—at the age of forty-nine!—the ecstasy and the agony of being totally in love with another human being. He discovered passion, he discovered jealousy. Desire merged with love—it had never happened to him before. And even, many years later, after the great fires of passion had burned themselves out, the relationship with Allégret retained a sort of warm glow that was to last until Gide’s death. Marc was not a homosexual—Gide actually seduced him with a promise to procure him his first mistress (“Uncle André” delivered the goods: he introduced Marc to the daughter of the Tiny Lady, Elisabeth). He turned into a very active womaniser and eventually made his career (financed at first by Gide himself) in film-making. His works proved to be rather facile and shallow; but later on, he was followed on the same path by his younger brother, Yves Allégret, whose films have better stood the test of time.
In 1918, Gide decided, against Madeleine’s most earnest entreaties (she had guessed the entire situation, and her personal distress was compounded by her realisation that Gide was leading the adolescent astray, while betraying the naïve trust of the father), to take Marc with him on a long visit to England. On his return, however, his life changed forever—though he did not realise this immediately. One day, some time later, he asked Madeleine to lend him his old letters, just to check some information, and she told him that these letters—his very best writing, their common treasure!—existed no more: she had burned them all during his recent absence. Gide was so stunned by the news that he thought he would die. As he was to recall later: “Those letters were the most precious achievement of my life, the best
of me . . . Suddenly there was nothing! I had been stripped of everything! Ah, I can imagine what a father might feel on arriving home and being told by his wife, ‘Our child is dead, I have killed him!’”[
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] Madeleine said: “If I were a Catholic, I’d enter a convent . . . I was suffering too much . . . I had to do something . . . I re-read all those letters beforehand. They were the most precious thing I had.”[
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] In the memoir he published after his wife’s death, Gide returned to this episode:
For a whole week, I wept; I wept from morning till evening . . . I wept without stopping, without trying to say anything to her other than my tears, and always waiting for a word, a gesture from her . . . But she continued to busy herself with petty household chores, as if nothing had happened, passing to and fro, indifferent to my presence, as if she did not even notice that I was there. I hoped that the constancy of my pain would triumph over that apparent insensitivity, but no; and she doubtless hoped that my despair would bring me back to God, for she admitted no other outcome . . . And the more I cried, the more we became mutually estranged; I felt this bitterly; and soon it was no more on my lost letters that I was crying, but upon us, upon her, upon our love. I felt that I had lost her. Everything was crumbling within myself: past, present—our very future.[
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Madeleine knew of Gide’s pedophilia; it scared her, it hurt her—but it had not affected her feelings for him. After all, an intelligent and virtuous woman may continue to love her husband even after she discovers that he is an alcoholic, or a kleptomaniac, or a drug addict. With his passion for Marc Allégret, however, Gide had betrayed her—he had killed their love.
Eventually, the couple’s old way of life resumed its original course—at least in its outward appearances. Yet Madeleine renounced all her earlier enjoyment of culture and literature, devoting herself entirely to numbing household chores and charitable work among the local poor. She came close to converting to Catholicism; but finally she did not make the move, as she probably feared that her husband might misinterpret this as a further break away from him.
The very heart of their union had died. Martin du Gard, who was their guest for some days, left this description:
Their behaviour with one another is odd; it is a sort of caring politeness, a mixture of spontaneity and formality; an eager exchange of courtesies—there is tenderness in the way they look at each other and chat together, and simultaneously, at the very bottom of it all, there is an impenetrable cold—something like the low temperatures of the deep; it is not only the conjugal intimacy that is missing here, but even the simple sort of familiarity one would find between two friends, or even between two people travelling together. Their mutual love is obvious, but it is sublimated, devoid of communion. It is the love of two strangers who are never sure they really understand each other, nor really know each other, and who, deep in their secret hearts, do not have the slightest communication.[
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A few weeks after Madeleine’s death in 1938, Gide visited Martin, who wrote in his diary:
[He told me that] this was the first real grief in his life. He spoke to me about her, at great length, of their past together, distant and recent. It is with me, he said, that he feels the freest to confide, and I believe this to be true . . . But I was amazed to observe that his sorrow is not compounded with any sense of guilt. Not the slightest expression of remorse. In fact, he does not feel at all at fault, nor in the least responsible for her sacrificed existence. He merely thinks: I was such, she was such; hence, great sufferings for both of us—it could not have been otherwise.[
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PROTEUS
In Homer’s
Odyssey
(IV, 351), Proteus is a minor god who possesses vast knowledge and is able to adopt diverse forms in order to elude
questions. The only way to force him to answer is to pin him down firmly until he resumes his original shape.
Gide often referred to the figure of Proteus, not without a degree of self-consciousness; one of the most characteristic passages is found in his draft for a preface to his play
Saül
: “Because of his multi-faced inconsistency, Proteus is, among all the gods, the one who has least existence. Before he chooses, an individual is richer; after he chooses, he is stronger.”[
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]
REALITY
In a long passage of his
Journal
, Gide developed an intriguing observation: “What is lacking in me, I think, is a certain sense of reality.” He gave various illustrations of this; for instance, the difficulty he had in recognising people:
It is not that I lack attention or interest . . . but even though I am extremely sensitive to the outside world, I can never fully believe in its reality . . . The real world always remains somewhat fantastic for me . . . I have no feeling of its reality.[
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The material circumstances of his life certainly contributed to his abiding sense of unreality. In 1935, under the influence of his short-lived and sentimental conversion to Marxism, he had a sudden illumination and realised for the first time—at the age of sixty-seven!—that he had never known what it meant to have to work for a living. He noted in his
Journal
: “I experience today—earnestly, acutely—this
inferiority
: I have never had to earn my own bread.”[
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] But this belated discovery does not seem to have occupied his mind for very long: he made no further mention of it.
His attitude towards money could provide another example of his uncertain perception of the practical world. His stinginess was notorious—there are countless anecdotes that document his odd obsession with economy—but there is equally abundant evidence of his extravagant generosity. So, on balance, was he profligate or miserly? The mass
of contradictory information on this subject suggests one conclusion: he simply had no concept of money—for him, money had no reality.
It is not rare for creative artists to have only a limited grasp of the trivialities of practical life; often, this very infirmity is the price they pay to be able to concentrate on their art. Yet such a disposition is certainly not conducive to shrewd political judgement, and scarcely qualifies aloof poets or imaginative authors to pronounce with authority upon all the major issues of the day. Gide not only took pride in the fact that he did not read the newspapers—hence, his famous utterance, “I call
journalism
whatever will present tomorrow less interest than it does today”[
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]—but he sternly upbraided his friends for wasting their time on such a futile activity. Take this typical dialogue, as recorded by the Tiny Lady:
Gide
: You read too many modern things, things without any value; you should discipline yourself, and read every day some pages by a great classic: Montaigne, Goethe, La Bruyère, any one of them. It would enable you to distance yourself from daily events, from transitory facts, it would enlarge your perspective . . .
Martin
: Yes, I often tried, but this . . . does not provide me with material for observation and for notation, as much as modern information does.
Gide
: Yes, right, I see: you are unable to actualise the ideas of the great authors of the past; for you, their thoughts remain remote; with me, the reverse is true. If after having swallowed the prose of the daily paper, I open again my Diderot, it is the latter that I find timely.”[
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There is, of course, much value in Gide’s advice; nevertheless, it should be remarked that, on all the momentous issues of their eventful times, it was Martin, simply equipped with his common sense and information drawn from the daily papers, who proved unfailingly capable of understanding the sort of world they were living in, whereas Gide allowed himself, with reckless naïveté, to be abominably deceived and manipulated by the criminal impostors of politics.
The most notorious episode was his foolish flirtation with Stalinist communism during the 1930s.[
181
] His political conversion was built upon the flimsiest foundations: for a while he carried Marx’s
Capital
in his pocket. (He took the first four volumes on one of his sex-tours to Morocco, proclaiming: “I am plunging into them with the greatest interest”—but it seems he never finished the first volume.) When, in 1931, he began to talk about the Soviet Five-Year Plan “with great enthusiasm,” Schlumberger remarked dryly: “But you seem to have suddenly discovered things that have occupied people’s minds for a long time now.” On homosexuality (which always remained his primary concern), he immediately assumed (without the slightest shred of evidence) that “Soviet law not only should be liberal, but even that it would probably encourage it, in order to foster virile emulation, as was done in ancient Sparta.”[
182
] He wished the USSR would translate
Corydon
: “It seems to me to have been written for them.” As late as 1936, after having been confronted with painful evidence of Soviet intolerance on this issue, “he told a half-astounded, half-amused Ilya Ehrenburg that he intended to speak to Stalin about the legal position of homosexuals in the Soviet Union.” Whenever some specific misgivings would occasionally creep into his mind, Stalin soon provided the solution: “I read with the greatest interest Stalin’s new speech, which exactly answers my objections and fears”; or again, “Stalin’s last speech, enthralling in its lucidity and good faith, has satisfactorily addressed my very question.” The problem of Trotsky, however, did slightly disturb him for a short while; and he reflected with disarming candour, “I don’t really know what to think. It was so restful to fully approve of something.”