From Trollope to Gide II

 

 

                      Penguin 1st printing - 1960                   Penguin 1st printing - 1952

I read The Immoralist (1902) nearly at one sitting in Salisbury. What I knew about Gide was really only the blurb on the back of the Penguin. His dates, 1869 to 1951, took in the Third (1870-1940) and Fourth Republics (1946-1958), with the 'gap' for the Second World War. After an irregular and lonely upbringing, he emerged, by 1917, as a prophet to French youth - his unorthodox views were a source of endless debate and attack. He married his cousin in 1892...  The book apparently sold only 200-odd copies in the first few years after its publication; thus, if there was a 'scandal' about its contents it must have been limited. Gide, in his Preface, says I intended to make this book as little an indictment as an apology and took care to pass no judgement.  However, his protagonist, Michel - who recounts his marriage to Marceline; his suffering from tuberculosis;, his recovery aided by his fascination with young Arab boys' bodies; his wife succumbing to the same illness but dying partly through his own selfish and hedonistic neglect of her - surely has the novelist more on his wavelength than against. 

A 1995 critic argued that the book, it would not be entirely unfair to say, is the story of a man whose discovery that he is a pederast transforms him from a prematurely dried-up bookworm into a passionate lover of life. I found reading the novel compelling but threatening, even repellant, in its totally hedonistic self-centredness. As another critic has written, Michel is trying to seduce and convince us...he doesn't so much challenge us as suggest that we might feel the same.

Strangely, Strait is the Gate (1909, although the first novel he wrote) 'troubled' me more. Set mainly in Normandy, it is the story of cousins Jerome and Alissa who, aged 10 and 12 respectively, make a commitment of undying love for each other. Alissa is witness to her mother's infidelity and develops, through religiosity, a barrier to human love. Perversely, she keeps Jerome 'hanging on' and we are drawn in to a deeply sad, even tragic, story. The title comes from St. Luke's strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto to you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. Taking Pascal's What is not God cannot satisfy my longing and adding the feeling that their love can only be an impediment to Virtue, Alissa rejects Jerome again and again. Only when she dies at the end, with the reading of sections of her Journal which she allowed to survive, does Jerome fully comprehend her behaviour. I read it is a romantic story of doomed love. I could see little romance in her monstrous virtue and felt less sympathy that I should for her almost self-imposed death. In practice, her behaviour is as self-centred, even as cruel, as Michel's in the previous book. Immoralism versus Moralism! If only, Jerome had turned to the more straightforward love of Alissa's younger sister, Juliette, who clearly still loves him as the story closes - another impossible romance.

Between these two novels I read Gide's The Vatican Cellars (1914).

                                                    Penguin 1st printing - 1959)

In between the previous two books I read Gide's The Vatican Cellars. A plus in my mind was the knowledge that the Roman Catholic Church had banned it (along with Gide's other works in 1952 - 5 years after he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Who was right?!). Here, at last, I found some humour; delicious satire targeting religion and society's official mores. First we meet Anthime and his wife, Véronique; he is a combative atheist until, one night after damaging a statue of the Virgin Mary, he has a vision and wakes up cured of a long-standing (pardon the pun) pain in his leg. His subsequent saint-like behaviour annoys his religiously-minded wife and family even more than his atheism did.

The book then charts the story of Anthime's brother-in-law, Julius de Baragliol, and, even more importantly, a previously unknown illegitimate half-brother, Lafcadio Wluiki. We meet Julius's sister, a comtesse, who is taken in by a scam engineered by Protos, a school friend of Lafcadio. Protos is part of a racket to con people out of money to rescue the pope who, allegedly, has been kidnapped. The comtesse's husband, the rather weedy Amédée Fleurissoire, sets off to Rome with a large sum of money to help ransom the pope. On the same train is the now well-off Lafcadio who, instantly disliking Amédée, throws him off the train to his death. Through a convoluted process, it is Protos who is put in gaol for the murder and the book ends with Lafcadio, having just slept with Julius's daughter, deciding to turn himself in...or not.

There is the usual Gide depravity but it is spiced with (often sarcastic) humour. He called the novel a sotie - a short satirical play once common in 15th-16trh century France. Sots were fools. The front of the Penguin paperback (see above) states it is A dramatic novel in which Gide works out his idea of the unmotivated crime. Well, the prototypical nihilist, Lafcadio is the right man to commit it.

I just have Gide's autobiography, If it Die (1924 second, public edition), in French Si Le Grain Ne Meurt, to read. Then I shall return to Albert Camus (who I read again en bloc a couple of years ago) and his La Chute (The Fall) of 1956 - I see my Penguin was bought in October 1973 in Swindon, another wilderness.