46
PARTISAN REVIEW
Madeleine married her cousin, a good pious young man, but woke
up one morning beside King Saul, as the wife of the Immoralist, as
the bedfellow of Lafcadio- in short as Madame Andre Gide, the
wife of an eminent and notorious writer. From the outset of their
honeymoon, which took them to the Engadine, to Florence, Rome,
Naples, Syracuse, Tunis, EI-Kantara, Biskra, Touggourt, etc., her
whining indolence, her apathy, her fear of everything left her drag–
ging behind Gide, who was exploding with his passion for discovery.
Pallid and spineless, this woman was like a ball and chain tied to
the ankle of the tireless walker, the eternal lover. "A tragic life,
Nathanael, is better than a tranquil one." Madeleine obviously chose
to invert this. A few years afterwards,
The Immoralist
recounts a
similar journey by idealizing it, that is to say by burying the en–
cumbering wife. Michel who is sick-sick of his puritanical and
family-minded society-recovers his health in the desert. Noticing
that Marceline, on the other hand, cannot bear the African climate,
he returns with her and forces her to walk relentlessly until she ends
up in a little mound in the flowering cemetery of EI-Kantara.
In
short, divorce "African-style,"
"a
la Sahara." Now while it is a good
thing that Goethe, when "suiciding" Werther, found it unnecessary
to die for love of Charlotte, when killing off Madeleine in the effigy
of Marceline, Gide remained just as married and hampered as
before. There are some things that cannot be done only in fictional
form.
It
is true that, of the unhappy pair, it was Gide who called the
tune because he had clung to the idea of marriage with such tenacity.
His mother had been imposed on him by fate. Madeleine was his
own invention, his personal decision.
In
dealing with a writer so
resolutely moral we can I think put the equation of his life in terms of
vice and virtue . But the words must then be given their primary, in–
telligible meaning, where by
vice
we denote whatever reduces a being
and depletes its vital strength; and by
virtue,
on the contrary,
whatever heightens the creative faculties. Gide's life defines itself in
relation to a great virtue and a deplorable vice. His virtue is his com–
prehensive
orexia,
primarily the love for young boys which bright–
ened and warmed his life; it was his liberation and his joy, the well–
spring of all his work. His vice was his affection, his inexplicable,
unspeakable, endless affection for a mediocre woman he never had
the courage to abandon . Madeleine was the old man in Gide, the
dead and rotting past which he dragged around behind him, as if he
