It is hardly going too far to state that one of the principal themes of Maurice is precisely the encounter and interaction between, the confrontation of, these two male homosexual cultures: that of the elite and that of the popular classes. Such transgressions of class boundaries in a society in which they are so rigidly respected can often take on a utopian cast, as when Symonds declares: ‘‘The blending of Social Strata in masculine love seems to me one of its most pronounced, and socially hopeful features. Where it appears, it abolishes class distinctions.’’∞∫ Isherwood and Auden could also be mentioned in this context. After all, the novels Isherwood published in the 1930s, as he tells us directly in his 1976 autobiography, describe his meetings with young working class men in Germany, even if this reality is disguised within the novels themselves.∞Ω One might also imagine, as has been suggested by people such as Isherwood and Auden, that this contact with members of the working class, and the awareness it provided about the realities of life in the working class, was one of the determining factors in the leftist engagements of many such writers.
We have been emphasizing the ways in which these intellectuals are firmly situated within the homosexual subculture of their times, but there is another question, hardly a secondary one, that we should also ask: what did Symonds’s wife think of all this? And Wilde’s? And Gide’s? For all three were married, as were many other gay men.
Symonds’s Memoirs tell us a great deal about the di≈culties he had coming to terms with his homosexuality, but very little about the su√ering his wife must have undergone. Of course he loved her in his own way. He speaks constantly about his a√ection for her and his respect. But what could she have been thinking? We only know the little he tells us and might wonder how much he himself knew of her thoughts. We know that Gide’s relations with his wife Madeleine went through moments of great di≈culty. Yet most of what we know, we know through him. Jean Schlumberger, disgusted by what he saw as the hypocritical manner in which Gide spoke of Madeleine in his book Et Nunc Manet in Te, made an e√ort to allow her voice and her feelings to be heard, to understand what her experience might have been.
The book he wrote is deeply moving and creates the impression of an unending sadness.≤≠
10
From Momentary Pleasures
to Social Reform
When Gide publishes The Fruits of the Earth in 1897, he is still working through the e√ect on him of his meetings with Wilde in Paris and in Biskra in 1891 and 1895. He had also crossed paths with Wilde in Florence in 1894.
Gide’s book is well known: a narrator addresses himself to a future reader by the name of Nathanaël, someone he doesn’t know, yet to whom he wishes to convey his ‘‘fervor.’’ He exhorts Nathanaël to abandon traditional morality and to give in to worldly pleasure: ‘‘Nathanaël, I must speak to you of instants. Do you realize the power of their presence? A not su≈ciently constant thought of death has given an insu≈cient value to the tiniest instants of your life.’’∞ Or, a few pages earlier:
Food!
I await you, food!
My hunger will stay at no half-way house;
Nothing but satisfaction will silence it;
No moralities can put an end to it . . . (31)
It is impossible, stumbling upon these outbursts by Gide’s narrator, not to think of Walter Pater’s writings, writings that electrified an entire generation of young British intellectuals and that became Wilde’s personal breviary. Indeed, Gide’s narrator has learned this philosophy of pleasure and of the van-ishing instant from someone else, the character named Ménalque (Men-
alcas), who, during an evening passed in a garden at the foot of a hill in Florence facing the Fiesole, told his friends the story of his youth and adult life, singing the praises of an Epicurean hedonism. Having learned Ménalque’s morality, or antimorality, the narrator wishes to pass it on to Nathanaël.
There can be little doubt that Ménalque is an incarnation of Wilde. His way of opposing, on one hand, the ecstasy of ‘‘pleasure’’ ( volupté) and physical
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f sensations and, on the other, ‘‘argument’’ ( raisonnement) and philosophical a≈liations not only echoes Wilde’s own writings, it also recalls Wilde’s own behavior and the extraordinary example of personal freedom that he provided to Gide when they met in Biskra.≤ When Ménalque tells his guests about the nights he spent in the company of sailors (‘‘in other ports, I forgathered with the sailors of the big ships; I went down with them to the ill-lit alleys of the town’’ [72]), one immediately thinks of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Endless sentences, even whole paragraphs, in Gide’s book seem to be
copied from Wilde’s novel. Pierre Louÿs, to whom Gide was close in his earlier years and who was distancing himself from him at precisely this moment, had no doubt about what was going on. After reading The Fruits of the Earth, he penned a malicious satirical poem on the book, in which he describes Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou (who would be a model for
Proust’s Charlus and had already been a model for Huysmans’s Des Es-
seintes) as they watch:
The entrance of a man whose soul was vile
Gide, lord of La Roque and Cuckooverville.≥
Ménalque would appear again under Gide’s pen a few years later as a
character in The Immoralist (1902). In the later book, Ménalque’s former friends have abandoned him because he has been implicated in ‘‘an absurd, a shameful, lawsuit with scandalous repercussions.’’∂ The moment in which Gide writes this book is more or less the same one in which, as he tells us in his piece on Wilde, he was tempted to sit with his back to any passers-by when he joined Wilde on the terrace of a cafe on the Parisian boulevards.
This was shortly after Wilde’s release from prison.
In any case, it is di≈cult, when one reads Ménalque’s famous cry in The Fruits of the Earth—‘‘Families, I hate you!’’—a cry transmitted by the narrator to the youth of the future, not to see it as a founding act of gay self-a≈rmation. The cry echoes some Paterian words spoken by Ménalque only a few pages earlier: ‘‘I hated homes and families and all the places where a man thinks to find rest; and lasting a√ection, and the fidelities of love, and attachment to ideas.’’∑ It is also di≈cult not to imagine that the posterity to which Gide was directing his message was made up of young gay men. This seems perfectly clear on the first page of Gide’s New Fruits, a book which, thirty years later, takes up again, with more explicitness, the proclamations addressed to Nathanaël: ‘‘You who will come when I shall have ceased to hear the noises of this earth and to taste its dews upon my lips—you who will
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perhaps some day read me—it is for you I write these pages; for perhaps you are not su≈ciently amazed at being alive; you do not wonder as you should at this astounding miracle of your life. I sometimes feel that it is with my thirst that you will drink, and that what inclines you over that other creature you caress is already my own desire. ’’∏ A few pages later, New Fruits describes in nearly explicit fashion Gide’s love a√air with Marc Allégret in terms that recall both the lyrical exaltation of The Fruits of the Earth and Whitman’s poetry: ‘‘We amused ourselves all day long by executing the various actions of our lives like a dance, in the manner of a perfect gymnast, whose ideal would be to do nothing that was not harmonious and rhythmical.’’π
In the later text, Gide once again writes that he knows how to ‘‘enjoy the quiet of eternity in the fleeting moment.’’ Yet when he publishes the book in 1935, he will have long since taken his distance from the philosophy that is developed in the volume from 1897. Just as Pater in Wilde’s eyes spent his life giving the lie to what he wrote, Gide did all he could to disassociate himself from the song to pleasure and to the glories of the present moment found in this ‘‘book of my youth.’’ He took the occasion of the publ
ication of a new edition of The Fruits of the Earth in 1927 to add a preface in which he reminds the reader that the book was written shortly after his near escape from death from tuberculosis. That circumstance would explain the exalted tone, the
‘‘flights of its poetry’’ and even the ‘‘excess’’ of the book. He specifies that he has himself followed the admonition to Nathanaël on the final page to
‘‘throw away my book and leave me.’’ ‘‘Yes, I immediately left the man I was when I wrote The Fruits of the Earth. ’’ And to those who insist on seeing in this book only a ‘‘glorification of desire and instinct,’’ he responds that he prefers to see, in retrospect, ‘‘an apology for a life stripped to bareness [une apolo-gie du dénuement]’’ (3–5).
In New Fruits, Gide calls on Nathanaël, to whom he now refers as ‘‘comrade,’’ to attain his own happiness by working for the happiness of others (293). The idea of earthly joys has changed. The individualist fever of 1897
has been renounced in favor of a quest for collective happiness.
Still, despite these various evolutions, a part of Gide and his work will always remain attached to the hedonism of his youth. Neither success nor age will quell this tendency.
In 1897, the year in which Fruits of the Earth is published, Gide writes in his journal that he does not remember the moment when he first read Whit-
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f man.∫ There is no doubt, however, that Leaves of Grass became a major reference for him. This can be seen clearly in Corydon, which was published in 1924, for it is a book that both begins and ends with Whitman. In its final version, the book is made up of four dialogues between a narrator, the ‘‘I’’ of the text, who represents ‘‘common sense’’ (homophobic, of course), and a doctor named Corydon who speaks in defense of homosexuality, or, more exactly, of ‘‘pederasty.’’Ω When, at the outset of the book, the narrator arrives at Corydon’s o≈ce, Corydon is seated in front of a portrait of Whitman and has nearby a reproduction of Michelangelo’s ‘‘Creation of Man.’’ The presence of the reproduction and the portrait are, in Gide’s eyes, given the absence of any signs of ‘‘e√eminacy,’’ which ‘‘experts manage to discover in everything connected with inverts,’’ discreet signals as to Corydon’s habits.
Here, at some length, is the passage describing the narrator’s arrival at Corydon’s o≈ce:
On entering his apartment, I admit I received none of the unfortunate impressions I had feared. Nor did Corydon a√ord any such impression
by the way he dressed, which was quite conventional, even a touch
austere perhaps. I glanced around the room in vain for signs of that
e√eminacy which experts manage to discover in everything connected
with inverts and by which they claim they are never deceived. However I did notice, over his mahogany desk, a huge photographic reproduction
of Michelangelo’s ‘‘Creation of Man,’’ showing Adam naked on the
primeval slime, reaching up to the divine Hand and turning toward
God a dazzled look of gratitude. Corydon’s vaunted love of art would
have accounted for any surprise I might have shown at the choice of
this particular subject. On the desk, the portrait of an old man with a long white beard whom I immediately recognized as the American poet
Walt Whitman, since it appears as the frontispiece of Léon Bazalgette’s recent translation of his works. Bazalgette had also just published a voluminous biography of the poet which I had recently come across
and which now served as a pretext for opening the conversation.∞≠
Let us pause for a moment over the ‘‘however,’’ which might seem somewhat odd. The narrator has already mentioned ‘‘the deplorable reputation his
[Corydon’s] behavior was acquiring’’ (3–4) and is therefore surprised to find no signs of e√eminacy in the apartment. ‘‘ However,’’ the ‘‘behavior’’ in question seems nonetheless to be revealed by a photograph that brings to mind Michelangelo and the Renaissance, and which therefore functions—in the
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terms provided by Gide’s presentation—as a homosexual ‘‘code’’ available to be read by those in the know. Yet were it to be necessary to give the lie to such an interpretation, the presence of the reproduction could be justified by artistic interests. It is, however, Whitman who will provide the opening for the conversation that makes up the bulk of the book. Bazalgette’s biography, Corydon tells us, is based on the following syllogism: pederasty is unnatural; Whitman was ‘‘in perfect health,’’ indeed a fine representative of ‘‘the natural man’’; therefore Whitman could not have been a pederast. This is why the narrator can say to Corydon, in the first spoken sentence of the first dialogue, ‘‘After reading Bazalgette’s book . . . I don’t see much reason for this portrait to be on display here.’’ To which Corydon replies, with a certain amount of common sense, ‘‘Whitman’s work remains just as admirable as it ever was, regardless of the interpretation each reader chooses to give his behavior’’ (4–5). Clearly what is at stake is not to decide whether or not Whitman’s work is admirable. Gide places us immediately within the struggle to decide whether certain discourses should be able to be appropriated by homosexuals. Corydon insists on the fact that Bazalgette ‘‘has proved nothing whatever,’’ for ‘‘the work is there, and no matter how often Bazalgette translates the word ‘love’ as ‘a√ection’ or ‘friendship,’ and the word
‘sweet’ as ‘pure,’ whenever Whitman addresses his ‘comrade,’ the fact remains that all the fervent, tender, sensual, impassioned poems in the book are of the same order—that order you call contra naturam. ’’∞∞ Corydon goes on to state that he is preparing an article on Whitman in which he intends to provide ‘‘an answer to Bazalgette’s argument’’ (6). A few lines later, he adds that he also intends to compose ‘‘a long study’’ dealing with ‘‘pederasty’’ and arguing against prevailing psychiatric ideas about homosexuality. Corydon, who is himself a doctor, sets himself the project of demonstrating that there is nothing either abnormal or pathological about pederasty. He says, ‘‘I think you understand now why I want to write this book. The only serious books I know on this subject are certain medical works which reek of the clinic from the very first pages’’ (17). Corydon himself has no desire to ‘‘speak about my subject as a specialist—only as a man,’’ because ‘‘the doctors who usually write about the subject treat only uranists who are ashamed of themselves—
pathetic inverts, sick men. They’re the only ones who consult doctors. As a doctor myself, those are the ones who come to me for treatment too; but as a man, I come across others, who are neither pathetic nor sickly—those are the ones I want to deal with’’ (18).
If Gide wants to fight against psychiatric discourse, it is clearly not to
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f refuse it in its entirety, not to denounce its homophobia and cultural violence. Instead, Gide’s project in this book consists in distinguishing between ‘‘pathological’’ homosexuality, which is the homosexuality of those who are ‘‘sick’’ and who are of concern to doctors and psychiatrists, and noble homosexuality, which belongs to the tradition of Greek homosexuality, ‘‘pederasty’’ as it was lauded in Plato’s Symposium. We are not far from John Addington Symonds here. Gide in fact cites a passage from Symonds’s Greek Poets, in which Symonds gives a commentary on the passages in Homer that speak of Achilles’s love for Patroclus (108). The presence of the references to Whitman and Michelangelo reinforces the sense of similarity to Symonds that one might feel while reading Gide’s book.
In fact, Gide probably hadn’t read Symonds, but rather a book by Edward Carpenter, Iolaüs, an anthology of citations dealing with male friendship in which the passage from Symonds is cited.∞≤ Whatever
the case may be, the fourth and final dialogue in Corydon is almost entirely devoted to the Greek model, including, of course, the inevitable example of the ‘‘sacred battalion of Thebes,’’ whose courage and military worth—described by Plutarch—
derived from the fact that it was made up of pairs of lovers (113–14). After all, one of the main objectives of Corydon is, just as it was for Symonds, to rea≈rm the link between homosexuality and masculinity and to reject any association with e√eminacy: ‘‘I can think of no opinion more false, and yet more widely held, than that which considers homosexual conduct and pederasty as the pathetic lot of e√eminate races, of decadent peoples, and even sees it as an importation from Asia. On the contrary, it was from Asia that the slack Ionic order came to supplant the masculine Doric architecture; the decadence of Athens began when the Greeks stopped frequenting the gymnasiums; and we now know what should be understood by that. Uranism
yields to heterosexuality’’ (115–16). This is why Corydon insists on a number of occasions on the martial, military, warrior-like value of homosexuality.
Consider this exchange with the narrator:
‘‘Have you never wondered why the Napoleonic Code contains no law
aimed at repressing pederasty?’’
‘‘Perhaps,’’ I replied, disconcerted, ‘‘it’s because Napoleon attached no importance to it, or because he reckoned that our instinctive repugnance would be su≈cient.’’
‘‘Perhaps it was also because such laws would have embarrassed
some of his best generals. Reprehensible or not, such habits are so far
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from being enervating, are so close to being military, that I must admit to you I’ve trembled for us during those sensational trials in Germany, which even the Kaiser’s vigilance could not succeed in suppressing. . . .
Some people in France were naïve enough to see such episodes as signs of decadence! while I was thinking to myself: Beware of a people whose very debauchery is warlike and who keep their women for the exclusive purpose of providing fine children.∞≥
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 31