Andre Gide: A Life in the Present

Contemporary Review, May, 1999 by Geoffrey Heptonstall

Alan Sheridan. Hamish Hamilton. [pounds]25.00. 709 pages. ISBN 0-241-12729-7.

The stature of a great writer lies not only in the work written, but in the influence diffused. Few writers in the twentieth century have been as influential as Andre Gide. Perhaps no other (with the possible exception of Virginia Woolf) has exercised such a range of influences. Gide affected the way people think about public affairs and the nature of private life. He broadened the scope of fiction to deal with difficult areas of human conduct. He brought change in the techniques of writing fiction. Gide's revolution was one of the few of its time to survive. Marxism and Freudianism may have been discredited, but Gide, like feminism, has barely begun to turn the world.

The impressionistic, dream-like narrative style, which so amazed E. M. Forster, produced another form of truth, an imaginative contrast to a declining realism. Within the substance of the narratives was a frank perception, sensitively realised, that human nature is too complex to be readily categorised.

Gide as a young man was slowly awakening to the form of his sexual identity. The story is fascinating, not least because of Gide's own commentaries, and it is well-told here. That awakening is the key to the remaining, restless and productive years of the writer's long life. He had to reject what would deny him the truth about himself. That was to lead him through some curious avenues, each one illuminated by his incomparable prose.

Alan Sheridan's account is perhaps best in dealing with the critical moments of his subject's life. The meetings with Wilde; the acceptance, then world-shaking rejection, of Stalin, are narrated as if by an eye-witness.

But Mr Sheridan too often confuses detail of fact with perception of truth. Length is no guide to quality. This book is too long because it contains too much pointless information.

The central problem in this book is the author's stated belief that a writer's work bears a direct relation to a writer's life. This, surely, is dangerously simplistic? The forces that work upon a writer are varied. Influences are often subtle, and perhaps unconscious. The world contains many men with Gide's experiences but not a palimpsest of his genius. It wasn't an especially clever life. Imagination transformed the failings and the contradictions into art. Lives of creative minds are notoriously difficult. There is a life behind this life of Gide, somewhere among the relentless facts.

GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL