Alan Sheridan
André Gide: A Life in the Present
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. 709. $35.00
Reviewed by Rachel Sauvé

Writing the biography of an author who left considerable autobiographical works is a rather intimidating venture; no wonder that so few notable ones have been published on André Gide. It seems that, nearly fifty years after his death, his overbearing shadow is fading, since two major works recounting Gide's long, active, and intricate life have appeared in the past few years: one by Pierre Lepape, André Gide le messager (Seuil, 1997), and the other by Alan Sheridan, the prolific translator of Gide, Lacan, Sartre, Foucault, Ben Jelloun, Kristof, and others. Both have used Gide's memoirs, diaries, travel writings, and massive correspondence (with Martin du Gard, Schlumberger, Valérey, to name a few), as their primary sources. Both are strictly chronological, but Sheridan, indicating the current year at the top of each page, works his way through the eighty years of Gide's life in a less factitious way than Lepape, allowing the reader to recreate the restlessness of the man, as well as his long periods of intellectual barrenness. Unlike Lepape's work, Sheridan's book, on which I will focus here, also provides analyses of Gide's works. It can be read as a literary biography, but scholars and students will make good use of it as a reference book.

Gide was convinced that his profound duality was rooted in his background: Although he was brought up a strict Prostestant amid his mother's Norman family, he was drawn to hedonism through his southern father. He soon realized that here is no certainty of faith, but only, perhaps, sincerity. While Sheridan is too readily satisfied with such facile binarism, he adeptly breaks down this complex life into contextualized, manageable, and minutely recounted anecdotes, thereby shedding new light on Gide's pederasty, marriage, fatherhood, friendships, and love affairs, all of which caused him, in turn, suffering and joy. To satifsy his many interests (intellectual, sentimental, sexual), he traveled constantly. Sheridan follows Gide in all his escapades, from his Parisian mansion, and later his rue Vaneau apartment, which he shared with his informal family (Maria van Rysselberghe, who for thirty years took notes on Gide's daily activities; her daughter Elisabeth, the mother of his daughter Catherine; Marc Allégret, his lover, then lifelong friend) to Cuverville, where his wife Madeleine led a secluded life, to the South of France, home to many a friend, to Germany and Italy, to North Africa, where Arab youths always lured him back, to the Congo and the USSR, both of which yielded controversial books.

Although Sheridan does not focus on Gide's rapport with the writing process itself, Sheridan's clear and perceptive analyses of Gide's works, sources, characters (usually based on members of his entourage or family), plots, and style significantly enhance the depth and the relevance of this biography. He recounts the slow maturing process of each work as well as the practical and circumstantial context that allowed for its completion, and brings out the courage or a writer who defied public opinion, the literary establishment, and even the left-wing leaders of his time. Corydon (1926), his essay in defense of pederasty, is the most remarkable example of his determination to speak out.

In spite of the obvious admiration and lucid sympathy Sheridan has for Gide as a man and a writer, his account remains mostly factual and lacks penetrating insight. Many of his thoughts upon Gide's motivations, his intense curiosity, his self-consciousness are only found in the conclusion, and remain sketchy. As well, the colonial and social contexts, essential for the positioning of Gide as a rich nineteenth-century French bourgeois and for the understanding of numerous aspects of his life (such as his unhappy marriage and his sexual preferences for Arab youths, young Parisian prostitutes, and peasants living on his property), are outlined too briefly.

Another consequence of the book's Gide-centered standpoint is the distortion it creates in regard to the literary scene. The NRF group is really on the front stage here, and other actors in the literary world, such as the Surrealists, are relegated to the remote background. The simple fact that Colette, whose life spans the same period as Gide's, goes unmentioned is disconcerting.

True, Gide's long and active life provides ample material for a seven-hundred page biography. But Sheridan's parti pris of exhaustiveness (the minutiae on Gide's daily, sometimes hourly, whereabouts can make for a rather tedious read, in spite of Sheridan's witty style), while providing the most complete biography of Gide to date, deprives the reader, and especially the newcomer to Gide's life and works, of the prevalent literary, social, and historical circumstances that made the life and works of André Gide so unlikely, and therefore so resounding.