PARTISAN REVIEW
bores him." But this spmt is rare in the journal. To Gide, on the
whole, introspection is not an art, not even an objective study, but a
punitive expedition. He records his moments of vanity, of aimlessness, of
indiscretion just as Lafcadio celebrates each sign of weakness in himself
by plunging a knife into his thigh. He writes: "Through my heredity,
which interbreeds in me two very different systems of life, can be ex–
plained this complexity and these contradictions from which I suffer."
Gide suffers from complexity, from contradictions, where Montaigne
and Proust and even, I think, Augustine, rejoiced in them. And they
could rejoice in this way, they could even co.nstruct a kind of aesthetic
of introspection, because to them the self was ultimately an image of
mankind. In the journal Gide's self-analysis too often begins and ends
with Gide.
"The endless boredom I inspire in myself" is the subject of nu–
merous entries; and it must
be
confessed that the journal, at any rate
this early installment of it, sometimes bores the reader. No doubt Gide's
ennui and self-mistrust are essentially matters of temperament; but surely
they have been inflamed by
his
search for a metaphysical selfhood, a
selfhood independent of the social conditions which, for most of us, are
simply the conditions of existence. His greatest tales-La
Symphonic
Pastorale
or
Les Caves du Vatican-transcend
this personal limit, for
in writing them he accepted, in
his
own way, a different set of condi–
tions, the conditions of art. But there is another and perhaps simpler
reason for the deficiencies of the journal. It seems a strange charge to
bring against a writer noted for
his
frankness, but perhaps the journals
suffer from too much discretion. One feels that Gide suppresses details
of
his
domestic and sexual life which, if included, might have helped
to clarify
his
melancholy. As it is,
his
melancholy seems a little in excess
of the circumstances, as T. S. Eliot said of Hamlet.
But Mr. O'Brien warns us against trying to judge the entire journal
by this first installment, and he is probably right. From a slight ac–
quaintance with the whole work as published in France in 1939, I
should guess that the later sections were the more engrossing. Gide's
personality became increasingly relevant, increasingly heroic, beside the
grim orthodoxies-Catholic, Communist, imperialist-with which it had
to contend after 1914. One might say that history gave his individualism
a content and a
raison d'etre.
F. W. Dupee
104
