How the French Invented Love (31 page)

I
n the early twentieth century, two gay writers, André Gide and Marcel Proust, put male homosexuality on the French literary map as never before. No, they were not lovers. They were distinguished authors who knew each other and understood that what they were doing was revolutionary. Gide’s books were the most important apologies for love between men since the time of Plato. His influence in addressing this subject openly and in identifying himself as a pederast cannot be overestimated. On the other hand, Proust—who will be discussed separately in the following chapter—never used the first person in writing about homosexuality. Instead, he presented a variety of homosexual characters, both male and female, in
Remembrance of Things Past
. It is no accident that these two men, Gide and Proust, produced their remarkable texts when Wilde’s tragic history was still fresh and rankling.

To begin with, consider the direct connections between Gide and Wilde. Gide’s first encounters with Wilde took place in fashionable Parisian circles at the end of 1891. Wilde was thirty-seven and enjoying the scandal surrounding his recently published novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. His play,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
, was being rehearsed in London and would become the first of several theatrical successes (including my favorite,
The Importance of Being Earnest
). His Irish genes may have contributed to his deft use of the English language and to his remarkable command of French, which he spoke with a strong accent. Moreover, he was tall, good-looking, rich, witty, deliberately provocative, and entirely immoral. Gide was barely twenty-two and carried with him the austere Protestant baggage of his provincial upbringing in Normandy under the tutelage of a protective mother. He was overwhelmed by Wilde’s personality and hedonistic doctrine. Gide wrote to the poet Paul Valéry on December 4: “Wilde is religiously contriving to kill what is left of my soul.” And again on December 24: “Please excuse my silence: since Wilde, I hardly exist any more.”
⁶
Gide later denied that he knew of Wilde’s sexual orientation at this time, but what can’t be denied is the intellectual and aesthetic influence the older writer had upon him. From this point on, Gide began to turn away from the strict Christian morality of his youth and surrendered himself, fitfully, to a sensualist lifestyle.

Gide met Wilde again, with his lover Alfred Douglas, in Florence in 1894, and then again in North Africa in January 1895. The January meeting would prove decisive in Gide’s homosexual history, for it was Wilde who took him to a café in Blida, Algeria, and acted as a procurer for a young Arab boy. As recounted in Gide’s memoir,
Si le grain ne meurt
(
If It Die
, 1926), Wilde asked: “Dear, do you want the little musician?” and Gide, in a choked voice, answered yes. Gide’s experience with the boy called Mohammed left an indelible memory of sheer jubilation, the template for future encounters with boys in the days and years to come.

Wilde is the source for the character named Menalcas, who appears in Gide’s
Fruits of the Earth
and again in his breakthrough novel,
The Immoralist
. Menalcas is a subversive mentor teaching freedom, sensuous delight, satisfaction of desire, amoral pleasure. He offers the ethic of the “new man,” released from constraining conventions and free to follow his own nature. Rereading
Fruits of the Earth
, I felt echoes of Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Sartre (though the latter was not yet born) in this terribly earnest tract. I put it down with disappointment. But
The Immoralist
, which treats the same theme as a fully developed piece of fiction, held my interest to the end, even though I knew the plot by heart.
⁷

Between 1895, when Wilde had procured for Gide his first homosexual encounter in North Africa, and 1897, when Gide published
Fruits of the Earth
, Wilde served out his harrowing prison term. Immediately after his release, he went to France and settled in the town of Berneval-sur-Mer near Dieppe. Gide was one of the rare writers who went to visit him there. He was shocked to find Wilde
affaibli, défait
—weakened and undone—a shadow of the man he had once been. Both of their situations had changed dramatically: Wilde had undergone a religious conversion and Gide had married. Yes, despite Gide’s discovery of his homosexual nature, in 1895 he married his slightly older cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux, whom he had loved tenderly for seven years. Theirs was what the French call
un marriage blanc
—an unconsummated marriage. By most standards it was a strange union, filled with unspoken tensions, but it also represented for Gide continuity with his Norman childhood and a deep emotional attachment.

Gide’s marriage to Madeleine and his homosexual longings provide the underpinnings for
The Immoralist
. Its narrator, Michel, marries Marceline “
sans amour
” to satisfy his dying father. (In life, it was Gide’s mother’s death that hastened his marriage.) Michel had grown up in Normandy with a rigorous religious upbringing by his Protestant mother and with an education in ancient languages and archeology from his father. At twenty-five, he had become, like his father, a respected scholar. The newly married couple’s honeymoon in Italy and North Africa jolts Michel out of his cerebral existence and propels him into an intoxicating life of the senses.

What precipitates this change is Michel’s near encounter with death. Weakened by his trip and the surprisingly cold North African winds, Michel starts coughing blood and is forced to recuperate for the winter in Tunisia, under the loving care of his wife. In the words of the novel: “What matters is that death had brushed me . . . with its wing. What matters is that merely being alive became quite amazing for me.”

Michel’s recovery coincides with his discovery of the local Arab boys, whose simplicity, physical beauty, and playfulness help bring him back to life. From the start, there are suggestions that he is sexually attracted to them: he is intrigued by their nude feet, their lovely ankles and wrists, their delicate shoulders. He wants to spend all his time with them, first with Bachir, brought to his room by Marceline, then with the group of children he finds outside in the park. Enlivened by these boys, he wills himself to get better. For the first time in his life, he takes an interest in his body. He must eat more, he must breathe the fresh air. He forces himself to forget his fatigue and take walks “in a kind of ecstasy, a silent gaiety, an exaltation of the senses and the flesh.”

Moktir, one of Marceline’s favorite adolescent boys, is responsible for revealing a hidden side of Michel’s personality. Michel observes the boy stealing a pair of Marceline’s sewing scissors and says nothing. Instead of moral indignation, he feels only amusement. Henceforth, Moktir becomes Michel’s favorite. Michel is well on his way to becoming the immoralist of the book’s title.

What does it mean to be an immoralist? Michel comes to believe that his only duty is to regain his health and that health is an affair of the will. Morality is reduced to a simple formula: “I must judge Good everything that was salutory for me; I must forget everything, repulse everything that did not cure me.” Such will be Michel’s doctrine till the end of his story, abetted by his growing fascination with boys and young men.

Gide might have allowed his surrogate self to come out of the closet entirely, but he did not. After the surprising turn of events in the second half of the novel—which I shall leave for the reader to discover—Michel admits only that he is probably drawn more to boys than to girls. While he has gotten into the habit of sleeping with an Arab girl, she claims that it is her little brother who is the real attraction. Michel concedes that “there may be some truth in what she is saying.” In 1902, when
The Immoralist
was first published, that was daring enough. More explicit revelations would come later.

Michel’s attraction to boys may have appeared less offensive to French readers because the boys were Arabs. During the colonial period, when both Tunisia and Algeria were under French rule, pederasty with Arab children did not incite the outrage it might have incited had the children been continental French, which says a great deal about French racist attitudes. Even today, the French don’t seem to make much of a fuss about male relations with boys when they transpire outside the country. For example, there was no public outcry when President Sarkozy named Frédéric Mitterand, the nephew of former president François Mitterrand, as minister of culture, even though he had written a memoir describing in graphic detail how he had paid for sex with boys in Thailand. Certainly in the United States, no public figure would have published such a memoir, wherever the activity took place. Sexual relations between an adult and an underage male are generally considered not only reprehensible but also criminal. The legal age of sexual consent in the United States is eighteen, as contrasted to sixteen in England, and fifteen in France—statistics that speak for themselves.

The Immoralist
maintains a distinction between pleasure and love that is as old as French literature. Pleasure is what Michel experiences with the Arab boys, love what he feels for Marceline. Beneath the figure of Marceline (and the figure of Alissa in his novel
La porte étroite
, translated as
Strait Is the Gate
) is the figure of Madeleine, Gide’s saintly wife, whom he identified with his mother. The maternal wife remained in the permanent realm of pure love, whereas boys offered fleeting physical satisfaction.

Gide’s memoir,
Et nunc manet in te
(meaning “And now she survives in you”), written after his wife’s death in 1938, presents his side of their peculiar marriage, with affirmations of his lifelong love for Madeleine, as well as his admission that his sexual deviations and abandonment of Christianity had caused her great pain. Indeed they had.

When Gide fell in love with Marc Allégret, the son of a pastor in their Norman community, and took off with him for London in June 1918, it was more than Madeleine could bear. She got her revenge by burning all of Gide’s letters, over twenty years of correspondence! For a man of letters like Gide, who had entrusted all his thoughts to Madeleine, this was the worst revenge she could have enacted.

In the 1924 version of his treatise,
Corydon
, Gide tried to bring love and pleasure together. Having experienced both, perhaps for the first time, with Marc Allégret, he defended the right of individuals to follow their natural inclinations, whether they conformed to conventional norms or not. Corydon, a character lifted from Virgil’s
Eclogues
, is presented in dialogue with a homophobic interlocutor. They argue over the merits of same-sex love, which Corydon vigorously defends as both natural and good. One should note that he is speaking specifically about pederasty. Gide came out as a pederast and emphasized the pedagogical value of the love between a mature man and a younger male. He distinguished himself from other homosexuals, such as “sodomites,” who love other mature men, or “inverts” who assume the rule of a woman—groups whom Gide considered inferior to pederasts. It’s hard not to read
Corydon
today as dated and self-serving, despite Gide’s courage in revealing himself. Years later, in 1946, Gide wrote that he considered
Corydon
the most important and the most useful of his books.
⁸

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, when Gide’s works were circulating among an intellectual elite, he helped lay the groundwork for the broader acceptance of same-sex love that would ultimately prevail in France by the year 2000. Certainly, during his lifetime, his stance was met with opposition, especially in Catholic circles. One has only to read Gide’s correspondence with the poet and playwright Paul Claudel to realize what he was up against. Claudel, defender of the faith, tried unsuccessfully to convince Gide that his soul was in danger even before Gide admitted to him his “abnormality.” Claudel attacked this “vice” on the grounds that it was condemned in Scripture (not by Jesus, but by Saint Paul) and that Gide could be seen as proselytizing for homosexuality. Their correspondence, and Gide’s private journal, are invaluable documents in understanding how two great French writers of opposing persuasions thought about God, morality, and love. For Claudel, love was resolutely heterosexual and bound up in the sacred bonds of marriage, so much so that his passionate midlife affair, the source for his drama
Partage de Midi
(
Break of Noon
), ended in renunciation. For Gide, love was both homosexual and heterosexual, the latter reserved primarily for his wife. What did he feel for Elizabeth van Rysselberghe, who bore Gide’s child in 1923? Yes, outside of marriage, Gide fathered a daughter, Catherine Gide, and he was known to have been an affectionate father and grandfather. The person who must have suffered the most from Gide’s unfettered freedom was his wife Madeleine. Yet on the occasion when Claudel, in 1925, asked to see her and discuss the matter of her husband’s salvation, she refused and wrote: “Those who love André Gide should pray for him. I do this every day and you do also.”
⁹
Whether or not the prayers on his behalf helped him in the afterlife we shall never know, but the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1947, is certain testimonial to the esteem he enjoyed during his lifetime.

G
ide was not alone in carving out a space for gay writers. His contemporary Marcel Proust, then Jean Cocteau, Henry de Montherlant, and Roger Peyrefitte, added their daring voices to the impressive body of literature by and about homosexuals. After World War II, Jean Genet, a former jailbird, emerged as the most original gay writer in France, especially with his plays that found favor on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time the American black author, James Baldwin, arrived in the late 1940s, Paris had become an international mecca for many foreign writers and artists who would have been uncomfortable exposing their sexual preferences in their home countries. The next two chapters will deal with other French writers, both male and female, who joined Gide in calling attention to same-sex love.