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Andre Gide: A Life in the Present
One of the most important writers of the twentieth century, André Gide also led what was probably one of the most interesting lives our century has seen. Gide knew and corresponded with many of the major literary figures of his day, from Mallarmé to Oscar Wilde. Briefly a Communist, his critical account of Soviet Russia in Return from the USSR earned him the enmity of the Left. A lifelong advocate of moral and political freedom and justice, he was a proscribed writer on the Vatican's infamous "Index." Self-published most of his life, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, at the age of 77. Although homosexual, he married his cousin; their marriage was unconsummated. At 53 he fathered a daughter for a friend.
Alan Sheridan's book is a literary biography of Gide, an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply entangled with his life. Gide's life provides a unique perspective on our century, an idea of what it was like for one person to live through unprecedented technological change, economic growth and collapse, the rise of socialism and fascism, two world wars, a new concern for the colonial peoples and for women, and the astonishing hold of Rome and Moscow over intellectuals. Following Gide from his first forays among the Symbolists through his sexual and political awakenings to his worldwide fame as a writer, sage, and commentator on his age, Sheridan richly conveys the story of this remarkable man.
752 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1998
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About the author
Alan Sheridan
54 books12 followersBorn Alan Mark Sheridan-Smith, Sheridan read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge before spending 5 years in Paris as English assistant at Lycée Henri IV and Lycée Condorcet.[1] Returning to London, he briefly worked in publishing before becoming a freelance translator. He has translated works of fiction, history, philosophy, literary criticism, biography and psychoanalysis by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget and many others. He was the first to publish a book in English on Foucault's work and has also written a biography of André Gide, plus two novels.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 12, 2014
Another big, boring, block-headed bio by an academic who cannot write. What are we to with them? A para on Wikipedia yields more flush & flash than you'll find in the 600+ pages. The culprit this time is Harvard U Press.
October 16, 2015
André Paul Guillaume Gide lived from 1869 until 1951. He was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 "for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight". 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 exposed to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced 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 puritanical constraints, and centers on 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 indicated by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.
Alan Sheridan's biography of Gide narrates his life year-by-year with beautiful style. He distills the significant biographical writings of Gide (Journals, autobiography, etc.) along with his literary work and very event-filled life. The book, at more than seven hundred pages, is nothing if not comprehensive; providing more detail on his subject’s life than you might want to know, unless you love his writing as I do. It is a scholarly work, with all the apparatus that one has come to expect of contemporary biographies – a forest of footnotes, an extensive bibliography and index.
From a relatively early date, Gide discussed his homosexuality in his books and elsewhere with commendable courage. His earlier autobiographical work, If it Die (Si le Grain ne Meurt), describes his African encounters, and in 1925 he published Corydon, an essay on homosexuality and its place in society, written in the form of a Socratic dialogue. Some of his arguments now seem, inevitably, dated, but to have published such a book at all at that time, even in the relatively more civilised culture of France, was brave. I especially appreciated Sheridan's commentaries on Gide's fiction, most of which I have read and love. Like all but the most famous European writers he is not well-enough known or appreciated in the United States.
Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposed to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced 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 puritanical constraints, and centers on 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 indicated by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.
Alan Sheridan's biography of Gide narrates his life year-by-year with beautiful style. He distills the significant biographical writings of Gide (Journals, autobiography, etc.) along with his literary work and very event-filled life. The book, at more than seven hundred pages, is nothing if not comprehensive; providing more detail on his subject’s life than you might want to know, unless you love his writing as I do. It is a scholarly work, with all the apparatus that one has come to expect of contemporary biographies – a forest of footnotes, an extensive bibliography and index.
From a relatively early date, Gide discussed his homosexuality in his books and elsewhere with commendable courage. His earlier autobiographical work, If it Die (Si le Grain ne Meurt), describes his African encounters, and in 1925 he published Corydon, an essay on homosexuality and its place in society, written in the form of a Socratic dialogue. Some of his arguments now seem, inevitably, dated, but to have published such a book at all at that time, even in the relatively more civilised culture of France, was brave. I especially appreciated Sheridan's commentaries on Gide's fiction, most of which I have read and love. Like all but the most famous European writers he is not well-enough known or appreciated in the United States.
May 1, 2021
An author doesn't want to come right out and say they have written the definitive book on a subject, that should be left to the reviewers, but this author came up with a clever work-around: in his introduction he rattles off all the previous Gide biographies and dispatches each one for insufficiency; two were too short (180 and 192 pages for an eighty-one year life) and two were too long (1,250 pages for Gide's first twenty-six years and the next seven years in 600 pages), a fifth conked out after one volume with Gide at age thirty-eight or -nine. He also describes them as prudish, tendentious, inaccurate, shoddy, eccentric, skimpy, and one "much, much worse."
Gide himself was a homosexual pedophile who married his first cousin eleven days after his nagging mother died but never consummated the marriage, having instead an out-of-wedlock child with the daughter of a soon-to-be former best friend. Born into wealth, he paid for his early books to be published; to have written for money would have been unseemly for a French gentleman of that period. He traveled constantly around western Europe, North and Equatorial Africa, looking for a place to give his muse free rein but as likely as not coming up with something akin to writer's block. He belatedly took an interest in Communism and became a fellow traveler but after four or five (literarily unproductive) years saw the light and renounced it as he had Christianity. World War II was spent in exile in Tunis and Algiers after which he received a Noble Prize for literature.
Andre Gide never visited the United States and as far as I can tell none of his works ever really knocked it out of the ballpark there. I read this book more because the biographer's style intrigued me than for the subject himself. Alan Sheridan was a French-English translator and the book is peppered with brief asides about words and phrases getting lost in translation as they say. There's a great quote that I can't find now from Gide's journal that neatly encapsulates the semantic problem with English-French translation.
One weakness with the book is that the odd little habits and details of a life are few and dispersed. For example, it is only on page 530 that we learn that Gide enjoyed light reading - he "arrived [...] - and promptly plunged into a dozen Simenon thrillers that he had not yet read." Another one, rather humorous, was that in his last year of life his doctor diagnoses heart failure and orders him to cut back to only six cigarettes a day. All this after barely a word previously about smoking. Gide also hired an architect to design a dream house for himself in Paris' 17th Arondissement but the job was completed botched and Gide eventually sold the place at a loss. The details of that story would have been useful to know. But mostly the book just tells us that Gide went from Point A to Point B where he stayed for a week or so then on to Point C or maybe back to Point A. By the time I realized this was what the book and Gide's life amounted to I was too far along not to notch this on my bookshelf and I plowed on through.
This is a trade paperback with thick pages and sturdy binding, I will say that for the Harvard University Press.
Gide himself was a homosexual pedophile who married his first cousin eleven days after his nagging mother died but never consummated the marriage, having instead an out-of-wedlock child with the daughter of a soon-to-be former best friend. Born into wealth, he paid for his early books to be published; to have written for money would have been unseemly for a French gentleman of that period. He traveled constantly around western Europe, North and Equatorial Africa, looking for a place to give his muse free rein but as likely as not coming up with something akin to writer's block. He belatedly took an interest in Communism and became a fellow traveler but after four or five (literarily unproductive) years saw the light and renounced it as he had Christianity. World War II was spent in exile in Tunis and Algiers after which he received a Noble Prize for literature.
Andre Gide never visited the United States and as far as I can tell none of his works ever really knocked it out of the ballpark there. I read this book more because the biographer's style intrigued me than for the subject himself. Alan Sheridan was a French-English translator and the book is peppered with brief asides about words and phrases getting lost in translation as they say. There's a great quote that I can't find now from Gide's journal that neatly encapsulates the semantic problem with English-French translation.
One weakness with the book is that the odd little habits and details of a life are few and dispersed. For example, it is only on page 530 that we learn that Gide enjoyed light reading - he "arrived [...] - and promptly plunged into a dozen Simenon thrillers that he had not yet read." Another one, rather humorous, was that in his last year of life his doctor diagnoses heart failure and orders him to cut back to only six cigarettes a day. All this after barely a word previously about smoking. Gide also hired an architect to design a dream house for himself in Paris' 17th Arondissement but the job was completed botched and Gide eventually sold the place at a loss. The details of that story would have been useful to know. But mostly the book just tells us that Gide went from Point A to Point B where he stayed for a week or so then on to Point C or maybe back to Point A. By the time I realized this was what the book and Gide's life amounted to I was too far along not to notch this on my bookshelf and I plowed on through.
This is a trade paperback with thick pages and sturdy binding, I will say that for the Harvard University Press.
Read
December 13, 2014This biography is more detailed, but less readable than Lepape's work on Gide. It gives an enormous amount of information, but one might wonder whether the author had a similar purpose in mind as Lepape: creating an image of the person André Gide.
The emerging picture at the end is rather that of an active homosexual who also wrote books, most of the time reluctantly, almost out of a sense of duty. It is striking how many pages are spent on Gide's homosexual/pederastic escapades, as if the author cannot hide his surprise at this. Sometimes it gets a bit bizarre e.g. where he says of a certain trip of Gide (p.203/4), almost excusing himself, that this time "we have very little idea of Gide's sexual activities".
Probably Sheridan had a different reading audience in mind than Lepape, Lepape supposing the reader to be familiar with the work of Gide. Sheridan gives as subtitle: 'A life in the century', which he explains as meaning that he intended to look at Gide here and now, and not as a historical figure.
From Sheridan's biography Gide also emerges as a very special person, socially speaking. During some 600 pages we follow Gide on all his numerous trips and encounters outside and inside France; but this gets somewhat boring. It also involves the risk that nothing stands out: e.g. a characterizing (at least in my view of Gide) citation (p.538) almost gets lost in the ocean of less significant facts and citations. It is where Gide writes on the eve of the second World War that he feels that future generations will no longer be able to feel what he has felt, and will not even be able to regret it, since they will no longer be in contact with the admirable culture he and his friends have lived in.
Since this biography is not written in French, the distance to Gide increases. But the author himself also has his distances to anything French (e.g. "Gide's cult of sincerity was untypically French" p.633). And although distance as such is not a bad thing, it nevertheless gives one the impression that Sheridan is less 'in touch' with his subject than Lepape. (I am aware that this is a subjective appreciation.)
The book contains a very fine bibliography of all editions of Gide's published works.
The emerging picture at the end is rather that of an active homosexual who also wrote books, most of the time reluctantly, almost out of a sense of duty. It is striking how many pages are spent on Gide's homosexual/pederastic escapades, as if the author cannot hide his surprise at this. Sometimes it gets a bit bizarre e.g. where he says of a certain trip of Gide (p.203/4), almost excusing himself, that this time "we have very little idea of Gide's sexual activities".
Probably Sheridan had a different reading audience in mind than Lepape, Lepape supposing the reader to be familiar with the work of Gide. Sheridan gives as subtitle: 'A life in the century', which he explains as meaning that he intended to look at Gide here and now, and not as a historical figure.
From Sheridan's biography Gide also emerges as a very special person, socially speaking. During some 600 pages we follow Gide on all his numerous trips and encounters outside and inside France; but this gets somewhat boring. It also involves the risk that nothing stands out: e.g. a characterizing (at least in my view of Gide) citation (p.538) almost gets lost in the ocean of less significant facts and citations. It is where Gide writes on the eve of the second World War that he feels that future generations will no longer be able to feel what he has felt, and will not even be able to regret it, since they will no longer be in contact with the admirable culture he and his friends have lived in.
Since this biography is not written in French, the distance to Gide increases. But the author himself also has his distances to anything French (e.g. "Gide's cult of sincerity was untypically French" p.633). And although distance as such is not a bad thing, it nevertheless gives one the impression that Sheridan is less 'in touch' with his subject than Lepape. (I am aware that this is a subjective appreciation.)
The book contains a very fine bibliography of all editions of Gide's published works.
May 11, 2010
I read this one while I was studying Gide back in college for my honors thesis. Fascinating character. Not always admirable as a person, but he was an amazing writer. The biography was very well done and well researched.
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