MARGINAL COMMENT
,By HAROLD NICOLSON
riN Saturday last the degree of Doctor of Letters was accorded ki by Oxford University to Andre Gide. Few distinctions which the world can offer could be more welcome to this veteran of seventy- eight years old. He went there in a mood of apprehension and wist- fulness. He is not a man to relish public ceremonies or popular acclaim ; he had been told 'that the undergraduates might stage a demonstration, either because he had been a Communist or because he had criticised the Communism of Muscovy. He had been told that there would be a procession to the Sheldonian and that he would be preceded by men carrying silver wands ; he had been told even that he would have to wear a wig. I reassured him on such matters. The undergraduates would give him an enthusiastic reception ; he would not have to make a speech ; on the contrary, all he would have to do was to listen to an address in Latin composed in the most intricate Ciceronian prose and delivered in an accent which he would not be expected to understand. No, he would not have to wear a wig ; he would only have to wear a soft black velvet cap, such as Titian had worn and Rodin affected. He was relieved by this information. His attitude towards the impending ceremony was demurely boyish, boyishly demure. " I shall be so satisfied," he - said, "when it is all over." And- then he sighed. "There are so few," he sighed, " of my old Oxford friends who are alive." He was thinking back to the days when he was a young man ; to the days of Andre Walter ; to the days when the literature of England and Germany meant more to him even than his own tradition ; to the days when, first of Frenchmen, he had discovered Blake. How sad it was that so many of his own contemporaries, who had attacked and derided him in the past, were not alive to witness this tribute paid to a prophet in a foreign country. " People have been very kind to me," he murmured, " over here."
I had the feeling that this ceremony, staged in the streets of our oldest university, would in fact bring much comfort to his distressed and uncertain mind. What Mr. Peter Quennell has well called " the moral restlessness" of Andre Gide is composed of many twisted strands. There is his early puritanical background and that intensity which French protestantism, being a minority religion, gives to the sense of original sin. There are his natural pagan proclivities, and the many ardent mythologies with which he peopled his youthful dreams. To this day, Gide never travels without a Virgil in his pocket ; it is, he says, the only Latin which he can still read with ease. There is his conviction, which he once proclaimed aloud to a startled audience of Communist workmen, that his art must always remain for him more important than any other activity or dogma. There is, on the one hand, that reticence imposed upon him by his almost Calvinist sense of discipline and order, and on the other hand his passion for truthfulness, his admiration for what he called " Mon- taigne's happy audacity of personal indiscretion." There is his profound individualism, which tempted him to idealise the acte gratuit, and to urge Nathanael to sever all faiths and all affections which impeded the expression of his own personality. "How much" Jean Cocteau is reported to have said, " I envy Andre Gide, his Protestant upbringing! I visualise him skating with singular grace upon the waters of Russia, with a Bible in his hand. In beautiful English style, he writes his name upon the ice. . .."
" Oh my Nathanael," wrote Gide in the Nourritures Terrestres, "I shall teach you fervour! " Could any man, with so disquieted a conscience, with so divided a will, have ever inculcated fervour? Was it not rather that in Nathanael' (whom he never found), as also in Lafcadio, Gide was himself seeking to discover the younger guide, the man of irresponsible adventure, who would release him from the ambiguities and entanglements of his own sense of guilt? It was all very well for Gide to claim that his task was to illumine the "indistinct curiosities" of youth, it was all very well for him to exclaim: " and where in our travels, Nathanael, shall we find new fruits to give us new desires? " Gide, with his acute self-criticism, with his lucid sincerity, could never have become wholly irrespon- sible or wholly reckless ; in the end his utter truthfulness would stay his hand. It is this abiding truthfulness which, to my mind, is the key to Gide's inconsistencies. He could act impulsively, and he frequently acted impulsively ; but impulse is not fervour ; the needle of his compass returned always to the point where truth was truth and lies were lies. It is this which explains his strange Communist adventure. His journey to the Congo had aroused His sympathy for human suffering ; it had done more than that ; it had inspired him with the desire to express that sympathy in terms, not of art only, but of action. He was, as he admits, led to Communism, not by Karl Marx, but by the Gospels. He did not care for Marx. " I am suffocated," he wrote, " by the climate of his writing. There is something lacking, I don't know what kind of ozone indispensable to my mental respiration." But off he went to the U.S.S.R. to see for himself. He visited amusement parks and hospitals, factories and schools. He was deeply impressed. And then came that after- thought which dogs the footsteps of his impulses ; his conscience, that inseparable and often inconvenient companion, came and stood beside him. And he published his Retouches.
* * * This frank avowal is well worth re-reading today. It was first published in 5937. One of the things that had most struck him during his visit to Russia was the apparent gaiety and cheerfulness of the Russian proletariat. But on returning to Paris he began to ask himself whether their happiness was authentic. " If," he wrote in his Retouches, "everything we saw in the U.S.S.R. seemed cheerful, may it not be that everything which is not cheerful becomes suspect? The fact is that it is very dangerous in Russia to be sad, or at least to allow one's sadness to become apparent. The place where one can complain is not Russia ; it is Siberia." At first, again, he had felt that the decay of intellectual values in Russia was an inevitable accompaniment of their struggle for social equality. On second thoughts he came to question whether the destruction of indi- vidualism might not lead to a loss of both. As in the calm of his flat in the Rue Vaneau he recalled and examined his first impressions, he was appalled by the incompetence, the atrophy of mind, the bureaucratic despotism, the class distinction, the oppression of the working-classes which underlay and overlay what he was forced to describe " as this abominable failure." " It is," he wrote, " because I have acquired the sad conviction that the U.S.S.R. is descending the steps of the staircase which we hoped to see her climb ; that one by one she is abandoning the great advantages which the revolution seized with such tremendous effort ; it is because I am terrified at seeing her dragging the French Communists in her wake towards irreparable disasters, it is because of this that I have felt it my duty to speak out." In Paludes—perhaps my favourite among Gide's books— he had written: "Emotion can never lie." In Retouches he was forced to admit that it could.
Then came the second war and the occupation. Gide, who hap- pened to be in Vichy at the time, escaped to Nice. He was asked to give a lecture to a literary society, but received a letter from the Vichy Fascists stating that if he dared to show his face at the meeting he would be beaten up. The old man, much to everyone's astonish- ment, appeared on the platform. He read aloud to a delighted audience the threatening letter which he had received. " Not that I mind a good fight," he said, " but I am not so young as I used to be. Besides, I am here by myself, whereas our valiant legionaries make it their policy to appear in masses." That was a noble protest. Assuredly, as Sir Richard Livingstone said last Saturday in the Sheldonian, " vir eruditissimus."
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