André Paul Guillaume Gide () (22 November 1869 — 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.
Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a strait-laced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.
"A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.""Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.""Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.""Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.""Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.""Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.""Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.""Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.""Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.""God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.""Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.""I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress.""In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.""It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.""It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.""It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.""It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle.""It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.""It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.""Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.""Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.""Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.""No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.""Not everyone can be an orphan.""Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.""Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.""Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.""One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.""Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.""Sin is whatever obscures the soul.""The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.""The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.""The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.""The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious.""The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.""The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.""There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.""There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome."""Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.""Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.""To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.""To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.""Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.""What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself-and thus make yourself indispensable.""What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.""Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change."
Gide was born in Paris on 22 November 1869, into a middle-class Protestant family. His father was a Paris University professor of law and died in 1880. His uncle was the political economist Charles Gide.
Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age, publishing his first novel, The Notebooks of Andre Walter (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter), in 1891.
In 1893 and 1894, Gide traveled in Northern Africa, and it was there that he came to accept his attraction to boys. He befriended Oscar Wilde in Paris, and in 1895 Gide and Wilde met in Algiers. There, Wilde had the impression that he had introduced Gide to homosexuality, but, in fact, Gide had already discovered this on his own.
In 1895, after his mother's death, he married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, but the marriage remained unconsummated. In 1896, he became mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy.
In 1901, Gide rented the property Maderia in St. Brelade's Bay and lived there while residing in Jersey. This period, 1901—1907, is commonly seen as a period of apathy and unsettlement in his life.
In 1908, Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française (The New French Review) . In 1916, Marc Allégret, only 15 years old, became his lover. Marc was the son of Elie Allégret, best man at Gide's wedding. Of Allégret's five children, André Gide adopted Marc. The two fled to London, in retribution for which his wife burned all his correspondence, "the best part of myself," as he was later to comment. In 1918, he met Dorothy Bussy, who was his friend for over thirty years and who would translate many of his works into English.
In the 1920s, Gide became an inspiration for writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1923, he published a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky; however, when he defended homosexuality in the public edition of Corydon (1924) he received widespread condemnation. He later considered this his most important work.
In 1923, he sired a daughter, Catherine, by Elisabeth van Rysselberghe — a much younger woman whom he had known since childhood — who was the daughter of his closest woman friend, Maria Monnom, the wife Belgian neo-impressionist painter Théo van Rysselberghe. This would cause the only crisis in the long-standing relationship between Allégret and Gide. This was possibly his only sexual liaison with a woman and it was brief in the extreme, but Catherine became his only descendant by blood. He liked to call Elisabeth "La Dame Blanche" ("The White Lady"). Elisabeth eventually left her husband to move to Paris and manage the practical aspects of Gide's life (she had adjoining apartments built for each of them on the rue Vavin). She worshipped him, but evidently they no longer had a sexual relationship. Gide's legal wife, Madeleine, died in 1938. Later he used the background of his unconsummated marriage in his novel Et Nunc Manet in Te.
In 1924, he published an autobiography, Unless the seed dies (French: Si le grain ne meurt).
After 1925, he began to demand more humane conditions for criminals.
From July 1926 to May 1927, he travelled through the French Equatorial Africa colony with his lover Marc Allégret. He went successively to Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo), Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic), briefly to Chad and then to Cameroun before returning to France. He related his peregrinations in a journal called Travels in the Congo (French: Voyage au Congo) and Return from Chad (French: Retour du Tchad). In this published journal, he criticized the behavior of French business interests in the Congo and inspired reform. In particular, he strongly criticized the Large Concessions regime (French: régime des Grandes Concessions), i.e. a regime according to which part of the colony was conceded to French companies and where these companies could exploit all of the area's natural resources, in particular rubber. He related for instance how natives were forced to leave their village during several weeks to collect rubber in the forest, and went as far as comparing their exploitation to slavery. The book had important influence on anti-colonialism movements in France and helped re-evaluate the impact of colonialism.
During the 1930s, he briefly became a communist, or more precisely, a fellow traveler (he never formally joined the Communist Party). As a distinguished writer sympathizing with the cause of communism, he was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of Writers. The tour disillusioned him and he subsequently became quite critical of Soviet Communism. This criticism of Communism caused him to lose socialist friends, especially when he made a clean break with it in Retour de L'U.R.S.S. in 1936. He was also a contributor to The God That Failed.
My faith in communism is like my faith in religion: it is a promise of salvation for mankind. If I have to lay my life down that it may succeed, I would do so without hesitation
—André GideThe God That Failed
...and after his visit to the Soviet Union:
It is impermissible under any circumstances for morals to sink as low as communism has done. No one can begin to imagine the tragedy of humanity, of morality, of religion and of freedoms in the land of communism, where man has been debased beyond belief
—André Gidequoted in Culture, Civilization, and Humanity
Gide left France for Africa in 1942 and lived in Tunis until the end of World War II. In 1947, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He devoted much of his last years to publishing his Journal. Gide died in Paris on 19 February 1951. The Roman Catholic Church placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952. Andre Gide Biography | (1869—1951) (André Gide Biography)
