36
PARTISAN REVIEW
These two verses are the Gidean autobiography to date.
I h(J'l)e seen that which is hidden and which flees the day,
And I cannot forget thee, desolating truth.
For I would go down, step by step and rung by rung,
Descend to the 'fJery depths of human sorrow.
For if the springtime is to be reborn,
The grain must consent to die--
Yes, it is the emotional path which Gide has taken. A great many,
with and without a culture approximating his, are doing the same thing
today. It is inevitable as the conflagration approaches and the goats rush
into the flames. And who shall say that the emotional cut is not as valid
and lasting
a.
one as any other at a time like this? For the one who plays
with thought, who mak:es of thought a game, as Gide has done-a play
of thought over an emotion, a sensitivity, which constitutes the basic
stratum-(Valery also plays with thought, but not in the same way) –
for such a one, the emotion, the sensitivity, is the enduring while thought
is the shifting and changeable element. Fernandez was right in suspecting
Gide's theoretic (but not his emotional) Marxism.
It is the fuller, potentially fullest life for all promised by proletarian
collectivism which has been in Gide's case the luring factor. He, the
rampant, Protestant, bourgeois-hating individualist of old now sees m
such a society the sole chance to realize his individuality and his personality.
In this, the man of sixty-five, one whose place, and a high one, in the
world of letters has been made, who has always strenuously insisted that
he wrote not for his own generation but for the generations to come,–
he, Andre Gide, now takes his stand with the world's youth-not that
false youth which is led on by cloudy mysticisms and an emblem to a
machine-made death for money-mad masters; but the real youth, those
who realize that the world, as it is, is a manure-heap, and who are bent
upon cleaning out the whole filthy mess.
In finding Communism Andre Gide has found that youth which
all his life he has sought.
• This article is an extract from a more extended study of Gide to be published
later. The quotations from the
Persephone
are from a transl ation of the po(m
made by the author of the article.
