Volume 4, Number 7 · May 6, 1965
Whatever Happened to Andre Gide?
By Paul de Man
Andre Gide: His Life and Art
by Wallace Fowlie
Macmillan, 217 pp., $4.95
Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound
by André Gide, translated by George D. Painter
McGraw-Hill Paperback, 192 pp., $1.95
It has almost become a commonplace of today's criticism to state that André Gide's work had begun to fade away even before the author's death in 1951. Compared to Proust, to Valéry, to Claudel, and, outside France, to Henry James, Joyce, and Thomas Mann, he seems hardly to be part of the contemporary literary consciousness. An easy contrast can be drawn between the relative indifference that now surrounds his work and the passionate intensity with which the generation of Europeans born before 1920 used to follow his every word, considering his private opinions a matter of general concern. During the Thirties, he was without doubt the most public literary figure in France, much more so than Malraux, Camus, and Sartre, for all their overt political activity, ever were. Yet his political attitudes were highly inconsistent: they ranged from his adhesion to the ultra right-wing Action Française during the First World War to his brief but full commitment to Communism in the Thirties, ending with a rather withdrawn position of non-participation during the Second World War. None of these changes was ever justified objectively: his Return from the USSR (a book that sold well over 100,000 copies at the time) certainly failed to show any striking insight into political realities. Gide's authority rested entirely on the power of his personality as it was revealed in a literary work almost exclusively concerned with psychological and aesthetic matters. Why then was the extra-literary, political influence of so socially irresponsible a figure so strong?
Review, 3218 words
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