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BY ERNIE MCLEOD

ndré Gide (1869-1951)
was a man of seemingly
irreconcilable contradic-

tions.

He was a leading intel-
lectual figure of the twentieth
century who unashamedly rel-
ished more earthy pleasures, par-
ticularly ones involving teen-
aged boys. His long marriage to
his cousin Madeleine apparently
was never consummated, though
he fathered a daughter with
another woman. He considered
himself “profoundly Christian”
but found Catholicism “unaccept-
able” and Protestantism “intolera-
ble.” (For its part, the Catholic
Church placed his entire oeuvre
in its Index of Forbidden Books.)
He was a nonconfonnist who
paid attention to societal stan-
dards, his art always negotiating,
in the words of Jean Paul Sartre,
“a compromise between risk and
rule.”

Far from denying the
contradictory elements within
himself, André Gide wrestled
with and embraced them. He
spent his writing life examining
the nature of a true self and the
meaning of sincerity. While his
artistic focus was narrow, his

work took many forms: journals,
essays, letters, criticism, plays,
prose poems, fiction, political
arguments, travel books.

Likewise, he looked at
homosexuality from various
angles, with varying degrees of
directness. The autobiographical
but fictional The lmmoralist
(published originally in French as
L ’Immoraliste) does not — until
its last sentences — overtly spell
out its protagonist’s latent homo-
sexuality, even if there are plenty
of homoerotic clues along the
way. On the other hand, the non-
fictional Corydon consisted of
four dialogues which explicitly
and bravely defended the homo-
sexual’s place in society. It was
published “disastrously” in 1924;
a U.S. edition didn’t appear until
1950.

Biographical factoids,
always reductive, seem particu-
larly so in Gide’s case, since his
work was so inextricably con-
nected to his life and his life was
such a dauntingly influential one.
But here are a few of the.queerer
tidbits: He first threw-off his
puritanical Victorian upbringing
by journeying to North Africa in
the 1890’s, hooking up with none
other than Oscar Wilde, who suc-
cessfully encouraged him to fol-
low his homo-tendencies.
(Among Gide’s works is a book
on Wilde.)

Not long after discover-
ing Arab boys, Gide returned to

France to marry. His marriage,
however, had little effect on his
productive gay sex life. In 1916,
when he was in his late-40s, Gide
began an affair with a teenager
named’ Marc Allégret. Allégret,
considered Gide’s “spiritual son,”
went on to become a well-known
director and later filmed Gide’s
politically motivated travels in
the Congo.

For Gide, the biggest
crisis in his marriage came in
1918 when, in the aftermath of
his affair with Allégret,
Madeleine secretly burned all of
his letters to her.

Gide’s mature years
were increasingly devoted to
humanitarian concerns, among

them the rights of prisoners, ,

women, and homosexuals. In the
1930s he aligned himself with

ance speech he said he suspected
the honor was less for his work
than for “the independent spirit
that animates it.”

One of Gide’s best
known works, The lmmoralist
(published, amazingly, in 1902),
deals with many of the issues
which occupied the author
throughout his lifetime. The book
is basically the confession of a
young intellectual named Michel
to worried friends after his wife’s
death. The confession begins
with Michel admitting he married
not for love but to please his
dying father. Michel and his wife,
Marceline, embark on a honey-
moon trip to North Africa where
Michel has a tubercular attack
and nearly dies.

Gradually, he begins to
recuperate and becomes infatuat-

 

“Upon this, he let himself
go and soon stripped the
countryside of every rag
of respectability. I lapped
up his mysterious secrets
with avidity. They sur-
passed my expectations
and yet at the same time
failed to satisfy me. Was
this what was really
grumbling below the sur-
face of appearances or
was it merely another
kind of hypocrisy?”

Communism but reconsidered
after a disillusioning trip to the
Soviet Union in 1936. His evolv-
ing political conscience went
hand in hand with his perpetual
self-analysis, the link between the
two succinctly put in a biographi-
cal summary of Gide
(www.andregide.org) which sug-
gests that he was “a humanist
only in wishing that nothing
should be alien to him.” Gide’s
open-minded intellectual curiosi-
ty was, no doubt, crucial to his
acceptance of homosexuality as
something non-alien, and there-
fore natural.
Four years before his

death, he received the Nobel
Prize for Literature. In his accept-

ed with some of the local Arab
boys his wife innocently brings
home. In a key — and symbolical-
ly weighty — scene, Michel catch-
es one of these “protégés” steal-
ing a pair of his wife’s scissors
but pretends not to notice.
Keeping the small crime secret
brings him unexpected joy, and
Moktir, the misbehaving protégé,
becomes his favorite.

The second part of the
novel (or récit as Gide referred to
it) finds the couple at Michel’s
childhood estate in Nonnandy,
where he alternately devotes him-
self to a pregnant, increasingly
fragile Marceline and to the idea
of getting rid of all possessions
before he is strangled by the

“calm happiness of hearth and
home.” After Marceline suffers a
miscarriage and her health deteri-
orates due to the tuberculosis he
passed on to her, Michel cruelly
sees his wife as “athing that had
been spoiled.” Often abandoning
her at night, he becomes more
and more interested in fratemiz-
ing with his farm hands, prefer-
ring the “rudest and roughest
among them,” going so far as to
aid them in poaching his own
game.

In the book’s concluding
portion, Michel and Marceline
return to the places they visited
as newlyweds, though the recov-
ery Michel found in North Africa
eludes Marceline. At one point
Marceline justly accuses Michel
of adopting a doctrine that “does
away with the weak.” Gide says

in the preface to The lmmoralist
that he intended the book neither
as an indictment of Michel nor as
an apology for him. Many read-
ers thought the author didn’t
judge his “hero” nearly harshly
enough, though of course it’s
Gide’s neutrality — along with his

simple, seductively elegant prose

— that makes Michel’s story com-
pelling.

I remember reading The
lmmoralist years ago — when I
was in self-confessional mode
where sexuality was concerned —
and being alternately frustrated
and captivated by its reticence on
the matter of queer affections. At
the time, I knew nothing of
Gide’s life. This time around I

had the. benefit of a broader per-
sonal and historical context into
which to place the work. This
more (I hope) mature reading
allowed me to take pleasure in
the coded queemess even when
the half-naked Arab boys and ras-
cally farm hands were well off-
stage. Still, there were moments
when I was tempted to tell
Michel to get over himself and
get laid already. .

A century after The
Immoralist was written Michel’s
rebellion may seem passé and a
bit silly to some queer readers. In
today’s cultural climate it’s his —

I and Gide’s ~ objectification

(exploitation?) of “exotic” boys
that’s likely to raise eyebrows,
and this thorny issue is left unex-
amined. What Gide does success-
fully examine is the ambiguity

that defines the human condition,
whatever moral dilemmas we
may individually or collectively
face. At a time when shades of
gray are increasingly absent from
public discourse, Gide still has
something essential to say about
the importance of exposing to the
light questions for which there
are no easy answers 7

Vermonter Ernie McLeod is
attempting to earn a reputation
as the life of the party in
Montreal. You can reach him at
mcleod@middlebury. edu