Too narrow the way
Anita Brookner
STRAIT IS THE GATE by Andre Gide, translated by Dorothy Bussy Penguin Modem Classics, £6.99, pp. 128, ISBN 0141185244 Andre Gide died 50 years ago, after a lifetime of writing, travelling and heroic if unorthodox moralising. This last faculty perhaps outweighed the other two, though the novels of his maturity, Les Caves du Vatican (1914) and above all Les FauxMonnayeurs (1925), deserve to be raised from the neglect into which they have unaccountably fallen. They manage to be both solemn and subversive, farcical and convincing: strange goings-on in the Roman Curia, schoolboys flooding the market with fake currency. They convey both his irony and his ambiguity, these being the two keys to his character, and they signify stages on his long journey to eminence, his fearlessness in challenging received ideas, his condemnation of colonialism, of communism, his literary legacy in founding the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, his absolute freedom from any kind of prejudice. Strait is the Gate (La Porte etroite) defines his early hesitation between vice and virtue, in both of which he delighted, and which he managed to accommodate, though not without effort and cogitation.
Brought up in a distinguished but puritanical household, he inherited a Protestant conscience from both his parents (his mother was a convert from Catholicism), he managed to forsake a particularly onerous moral legacy for explorations of earthly happiness in the form of homosexual encounters and seductions which brought him rapturous fulfilment. I suspect that the lyrical outpourings of his later emancipation are not much read now: once before their time, they are now beyond it. The major novels are not much read either, which is regrettable, for they have retained their urbanity and their mastery of form.
Strait is the Gate was the first novel he published, in 1909, long before he attained Old Master status, many years before the Nobel Prize and the honorary Oxford degree. It is therefore technically beginner's work, but this beginner is accomplished; he has an unassuming grasp of his narrative powers and is conspicuously alive
to the complexities of faith and doubt. He was too aware of the constrictions of piety, which can lead to needless mortification, ever to condemn his own sexual euphoria. Quite simply, he did not believe that selfrestraint was endlessly required of one, or that there need be any stepping aside from earthly pleasures, however unorthodox these might be. Even more painful than self-denial was the misapprehension caused by religious scruples, when they were allowed to outweigh love and aspiration. It was the existence, and the endurance, of that love that brought about Gide's marriage to his cousin Madeleine and its shaky survival through years of infidelity.
Many of these difficulties can be discerned in Strait is the Gate, which is essentially a true story, a fact which Gide denied. It is a simple story composed of willed complications. Jerome loves Alissa, whom he visits at the oddly named Fongueusemare, a property near Cuverville, in Normandy, where the Gide family did in fact own a house. Jerome and Alissa love each other simply, as children do, and as they grow up it is quite obvious, at least to beaming relatives, that they will marry. Jerome goes to school in Paris, and writes letters to Alissa describing his progress and later his travels. She writes back, even more rapturously, and appears to be living his life at one remove. When he visits her in the holidays he notices a gradual change taking place in her character. Instead of reading widely, as she formerly did, she confines herself to works of increasingly narrow piety. Even Pascal's wager seems too sophisticated for her conscience to endure. Then she decrees that they are not to meet again, for secret reasons of her own which gradually become clear. It is not that Jerome is impeding her spiritual development, but that she is convinced that she is impeding his. They can only be happy in heaven, she tells him. The fact that she has rejected Jerome's love begins to trouble her, but she is adamant, and sends him away, to his bewilderment and sadness. But in the novel, though a broken man, he has the better part. Alissa succumbs to a mysterious illness (all too plain to the reader) and dies. Her diary, which contains ever more distracted fragments, is sent to Jerome, whose reflections remain reticent and gentlemanly. In this way the novel awards them both some kind of heroic status.
In numerous other writings Gide gave voice to his own conviction that impulses should be allowed their own untrammelled expression. It is a point of view at least as valid as Alissa's, and it is the interplay of these two belief systems that constitutes Gide's platform as a moralist. In Strait is the Gate he is still bound by his upbringing, and by a form of correctitude which was imposed on him. The mere fact of his enshrining his dilemma in a novel, and of treating it with unyielding gravity, has its own heroism. It is not a novel that will find many readers today. But as a prelude to Gide's later development it is invaluable, not only as a document but as a demonstration of his integrity and of his controversial but undoubted genius.
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