One French Nobel Prize-winning author observing another one
Written: Jul 20 '08 (Updated Jul 20 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: many insights about a very eccentric great writer
Cons: thin volume
The Bottom Line: at once admiring and critical
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Roger Martin Du Gard - Notes on Andre Gide |
Although Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1957) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1937, a full decade before André Gide (1869-1951), Gide was an established figure who advocated for the publication of Martin du Gard's first novel, Jean Barois in 1913. Although Martin du Gard was twelve years younger than Gide, it seems that he played the role of older brother in their relationship. Martin du Gard was the responsible, conventional one; Gide the willful spoiled child (even in his 80s).
From their very first meeting, Martin du Gard was somewhat horrified as well as fascinated by the outlandish idiosyncrasies of the older writer. Even for a Frenchman, for whom a scarf is felt to be a necessity year-round, Gide had an exaggerated terror of drafts and bundled up. And was always ogling boys (infamously doing more than ogling on his honeymoon, thinly fictionalized as The Immoralist.
Martin du Gard attempted to dissuade Gide form publishing Gide's eccentric celebration of pedagogical pederasty, Corydon (1920) and the memoir in which Gide "came out" (long before there was such a notion) in Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die, 1926).
Each writer was a close reader and valued sounding board for the other. Although they constituted a "mutual admiration society" despite being very dissimilar writers, each was frank in criticizing what did not seem up to par in the manuscripts of the other.
Martin du Gard made no public appearances, gave practically no interviews (except on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize) whereas Gide was a public intellectual, returning from the Belgian Congo (and French Chad--now the Central African Republic) to denounce colonial oppression and atrocities, returning from the Soviet Union and criticizing Stalinist terror and the dystopian characteristics of what most visitors came back and praised. Gide (along with the Catholic writer François Mauriac who in turn was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1951) was vocally anti-Fascist and involved in trying to help Republican refugees from the civil war that Franco, aided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, won.
Martin du Gard's Notes on André Gide (1951, originally publised as Recollections on André Gide) are not a memoir. Like Claude Mauriac's Conversations with André Gide (also published shortly after Gide's death within 1951), it is comprised of a set of journal entries. Mauriac's are mostly from 1939, when Claude Mauriac, and his father (François) and Gide were together at the Mauriac estate, Malagar. Martin du Gard's extend from 1913, when Gide came to a Gallimard fête (both were published by the Gallimard publishing house, and Gide evaluated manuscripts for Gallimard, including Jean Barois, which another referee for the publisher had opined was more history than literature).
After that first meeting Martin du Gard confided in his journal (which, unlike Gide's was not kept for later publication), that "Gide seems true to himself even in his preciosities and his coquetry, and it is with enchantment that I yield to his seduction." (Seduction as an interlocutor; Martin du Gard was too old for the other kind.)
In 1920 Martin du Gard recorded that Gide "admits that he always needs --Protestant atavism, perhaps?--to justify his conduct by analysis and explanation and inquiry into hidden motives. not for the satisfaction of proving that he was right to do as he did, but because he claims the right to be as he is; and because, being as he is, he could not behave otherwise than he does." Having read a lot of Gide and a lot about him, this seems to be a very clear analysis of his very essence.
Gide's wife seems to have adored Martin du Gard, and, I'm pretty sure, wished that her husband was as private an individual as Martin du Gard rather than a flamboyant public figure (even if she managed to avoid learning of what was in her husband's writings, which she never read so as not to impinge on his freedom).
Again like Claude Mauriac, Martin du Gard felt that Gide could and should have treated Mme. Gide with greater consideration, though she never seems to have complained. In a 1925 journal entry Martin du Gard quoted Benjamin Constant from Adolph: "The great question in my life is the pain that one causes, and not even the most ingenuous metaphysics can justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him."
The Nazi occupation and World War II kept Gide and Martin du Gard apart and there are only 14 pages that are post-1938, though Martin du Gard was in attendance at Gide's death (and reported that Gide was calm, exhibiting "exemplary submission to the laws of Nature").
Martin du Gard's Notes/Recollections are admiring but very far from being uncritical -- of the man or of his writings after Les faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1927). Mauriac's are more awe-struck (as he engineered time together for the two literary lions, his father and Gide) but also quite pointed in criticism of Gide's treatment of his wife (in this case, posthumous, in a draft of Et nunc manet in te (not published until 1947; published as Madeleine in English) that did not mention Gide having a child by another woman. Mauriac provides a more rounded portrait of Gide in the late-1930s. (Only 16 of its 235 pages extends beyond 1937-39.) Neither book has a preface mentioning how much editing of journal entries occurred.
Those who are interested in Martin du Gard are less numerous than those interested in Gide. Martin du Gard did not reveal much about himself in his writings, including in the journal entries about meetings with Gide. The book has to be of interest, nonetheless, to those trying to figure out Martin du Gard both as a writer and not as conventional a man as the image of his lifetime (except for what peeks through in his play Un Taciturne (The Silent One,1932).
© 2008, Stephen O. Murray
(Obviously!) this is a French find for Barbara's revived French find writeoff.
Recommended:
Yes
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