Andre Gide Biography and List of Works

French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. As a novelist, and still more as an intellectual figure, Gide has appealed to different audiences: a traditional psychological novelist to some, an innovative modernist to others; he was a major literary critic, social crusader, and spokesman for homosexual rights. Gide's search for self - the underlying theme of his several works - remained essentially religious. Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions. He is as well known for his influence as a moralist and as a thinker as for his contributions to literature.

"It is not so much about events that I'm curious, as about myself. There's many a man thinks he's capable of anything, who draws back when it comes to the point... What a gulf between the imagination and the deed! And no more right to take back one's move than at chess. Pooh! If one could foresee all the risks, there'd be no interests in the game...! Between the imagination and a deed and... Hullo! The bank's come to an end. Here we are on a bridge, I think, a river..."
(from The Vatican Cellars, 1952)

André Gide was born in Paris. His father, a professor of law at the University of Paris, died in 1880 and Gide was raised by his Calvinist mother, who devoted her life to him. Gide was educated mostly at home - he was lonely and ill for long periods. At the age of 13, Gide fell in love with his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux; they married 12 years later. Gide also had homosexual affairs with men and a daughter by another woman.

Gide attended several schools. At the École Alsacienne Gide developed an interest in literature. He made friends with other aspiring writers and artists and attended the literary salons of José Maria de Heredia and Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1891 Gide made his debut as a writer with LES CAHIERS D'ANDRÉ WALTER. It told the story of an unhappy young man. Next year appeared his first poems, but by 1900 he had practically abandoned poetry.

In 1893 and 1894 Gide travelled to North Africa, learning different moral and sexual conventions, which gave a basis for his psychological novels The Immoralist (1902) and Strait is the Gate (1909). He became close friends with Oscar Wilde whom he met in Algiers, and whose caricature Gide drew in his memoir. The Immoralist was a frame narrative in which the distance between the inner narrator and the outer narrator creates moral and psychological uncertainty. The contradictory impulses in the hero paralleled Freud's understanding of destructive human impulses. Strait is the Gate was a critical counterpoint of the former work, showing not hedonism but the aesthetic impulse as a destructive force.

"Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness."
(from Fruits of the Earth)

His book of prose poems, Fruits of the Earth, appeared in 1897. It became in the 1920s his most popular work, influencing a generation of young writers, including the existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. The hymn in prose and poetry to the beauty of all experience urged the receptive youth to cast off all that is artificial or merely conventional. In 1909 Gide helped found the influential literary magazine The New French Review. He wrote for it a large number of essays and reviews. He defended the classicism in French literature, rejected nationalism in literature and stated that "great minds never fear influences; on the contrary, they seek them with a sort of eagerness like the eagerness of being." Gide's defence of homosexuality in CORYDON (1924) was violently attacked, and in the 1930s Gide announced his conversion to Communism. After a disillusioning trip to the Soviet Union, which Gide described in RETOUR DE L'U.S.S. (1936), he made a decisive break.

In 1916 Gide started to keep a second journal, in which he recorded his search for God. On 4 August 1922 he wrote in the journal, "I present my own ethics under the cover of Dostoevsky." Gide's interest in the Russian writer went back to his youth and in 1923 he published a book on Dostoevsky, which consisted mainly on lectures and earlier writings. Gide noted that Dostoevsky's main ideas were expressed through his characters: "He lost himself in each of the characters of his books and for this reason it is in them that he can be found again."

After the mid-1920s Gide became a champion of society's victims and outcasts and demanded more humane conditions for criminals. In July 1925 Gide set out for a journey to the Congo with his friend Marc Allegret, returning in 1927. During this time he experienced religious crisis, and published his autobiography SI LE GRAIN NE MEURT (1924-26), which has been compared to Jacques Rousseau's Confessions.

In the novel The Counterfeiters (1926) Gide exposed the hypocrisy and self-deception with which people try to avoid sincerity. The protagonist, Edouart, keeps a journal of events in order to write a novel about the nature of reality. Another internal author - the 'pseudo-author', an intervening first person voice - comments the action. Edouard falls in love with his nephew Oliver Molinier, and illustrates what Gide saw as a constructive homosexual relationship. Numerous themes are woven into the complex structure, not only the novelist writing a novel about a novelist who is writing a novel about forging. The intrigues of a gang of counterfeiters symbolize the counterfeit personalities with which people disguise themselves to conform hypocritically to convention or to deceive themselves. The novels ends with the suicide of one of the characters.

In The Pastoral Symphony (1919), written in the form of the diary, Gide explored the hypocrisy, which masquerades as Christian pity and duty. In the story a Swiss pastor adopts and educates the blind orphan Gertrude. The pastor is afraid that Gertrude loves him less than his son Jacques, and seduces the girl on the eve of an operation, which may restore her sight. The operation is successful, but when Gertrude understands the truth about the people around her, she commits suicide.

From 1942 until the end of WW II Gide lived in North Africa. In the 1940s he began receive honours, which culminated in the Nobel Prize. Gide's correspondence with his friends Francis Jammes (publ. 1948) and Paul Claudel (publ. 1949) reveals their unsuccessful attempt to convert the author to Catholicism. Among Gide's later works was Theseus (1946), which contributed to the renewed use of Greek myth in the 20th century literature. Gide died on February 19, 1951.

For further reading: Portrait of André Gide by Justin O'Brien (1953); Theory and Practice of the Novel: A Study of André Gide by W. Wolfgang Holdheim (1968); André Gide by G.W. Ireland (1970); Gide: A Study by Christopher D. Bettinson (1972); Portraits of Artist by Arthur E. Babock (1982); Fiction et vie sociale dans l'oeuvre d'André Gide by Alain Goulet (1985); André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality by Emily S. Apter (1987); Réflections sur 'Les Faux-Monnayeurs' by Pierre Masson (1990); André Gide by David H. Walker (1990) - Noter sur André Gide by Roger Martin du Gard - See also: Olavi Paavolainen, Saint-John Perse, Colette, Francois La Rochefoucauld, Rainer Maria Rilke

LES CAHIERS D'ANDRÉ WALTER, (1891)