The White Notebook
Page 6
And what remains now is joy.…
(June 28)
Some evening I shall recall the past and repeat my words of mourning.… Today, however, the sky is too bright, too many birds are singing. I am inebriated by spring and my mind is filled with new lyrics in which our name delicately rimes and alliterates with the names of flowers. It is a sweet melody: an air played on a flute—almost like the warbling of birds—and the sound of wings beneath leaves in visible shadows—O flutes, soaring oboes!…
Love transcends mourning and death.
And the alleluias of victory will drown out the song of the willows.
Bless you, beloved mother! Above your bed of suffering our souls found each other again.
You could separate only our bodies, enabling all three of us to find comfort in the serenity of studied virtue; but through a higher, inscrutable will stern virtue, which seemed at first to separate us, became glorious and consummated the chaste desire in our souls.
It is through obedience that I have found her again—in spite of ourselves and because it had to be that way.
Then I departed.
As soon as the period of mourning had ended, they celebrated their marriage … their marriage …?
And I departed.
I departed, and took refuge in this solitude, for I no longer knew anyone … after the flesh, as the apostle says.
And I am going to write my book.
How changed, my soul! how changed!
You once wept but now you smile.
Do not study yourself—explain nothing—let sentiment rule; and then—forge ahead.… All things have been renewed.…
I said to my soul:
“Why are you smiling? You are hopeless in your solitude. It is as if your erstwhile friend no longer existed. You will have to cease your adulterous dreams.
“Weep. They are gone, all your loved ones, and have left you alone. Weep. Your loves have ended. The time for love is over.…”
“Do you believe this?” my soul replied, still smiling and repeating to itself:
Love transcends mourning and death. Acute sorrows have been blotted out and the willows are silent.
Sing, my soul, to new dawns.
All hopes have blossomed anew.
1 Gide rightly emphasized in many of his writings the influence of his early puritanical training on his art. According to him, two-thirds of the biblical quotations set down in the first draft of the Notebooks were eliminated before publication at the suggestion of his friend, Albert Demarest. (Notes not numbered are supplied by the translator.)
2 The primary vision (la vision commencée) appears in Urien’s Voy age as the idea or principle which each of us is to manifest in his own life. This section reflects the influence of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea on the young writer.
3 In a later preface to the Notebooks (1930), the author expressed regret over its defects, holding that the writer should always exercise absolute control over his medium.
4 Gide later condemned the pride that resulted from such a victory. He insisted that he had at first thought it good to struggle, that true wisdom consisted in accepting defeat, in not opposing oneself.
5 Jean Delay in his monumental work on the early life of Gide (La Jeunesse d’André Gide, Gallimard, 1956) maintains that in the foregoing passage the writer reveals for the first time one of the deepest secrets of his psychology: the influence of his mother in preventing his physical union with Madeleine Rondeaux.
6 Publication of the Notebooks did mark a turning point in the life of the author. It marked the end of his sheltered life of mystic revery and passive introspection and the beginning of an active life of exploration and conquest. Schopenhauer’s visionary became the romantic disciple of Goethe.
7 Setting the pattern that was to serve for a lifetime of creative effort, the author abstracts from reality and freely changes details. His mother’s words might well have been spoken after the death of Emile Rondeaux, the father of Madeleine (Emmanuèle).
8 It is significant that the book originally envisioned as Allain was finally published as The Notebooks of André Walter. The German name suggests of course Goethe’s Werther, which has a similar theme and which Gide was reading during the period of the composition of the Notebooks.
9 And therefore raise thee up, o’ercome thy panting
With spirit that o’ercometh every battle,
If with its heavy body it sink not.…
And said: “Go on, for I am strong and bold.”
(Longfellow’s translation.)
10 The tumultuous inner life with its conflicting passions and ideals is an appropriate theme for Gide’s first published work. During the period of its composition he expressed the opinion that the crisis depicted in it was of such general interest that others might use it before he completed his work. Later, in his autobiographical If It Die (1926), he wrote, “It was not only my first book, it was my summation.”
11 It has been said that Gide’s art is a sustained attempt to understand and explain himself. Perhaps The White Notebook is a symbolic account of his struggle to free himself from carnal temptations through the mystic, idealized love first experienced in his youth. Delay sees the perfect image which he creates here (an Echo for Narcissus) as the projection of his superego: the embodiment in his love of all those qualities which he holds in high esteem. Jean-Paul Sartre’s handling of a similar theme in Saint-Genêt (1952) suggests the connection between André Walter’s search for a kindred soul and André Gide’s predicament.
12 Name crossed out. (Gide’s note.)
13 The notebooks in which Gide recorded his readings show that he read the writers mentioned here during the period of the composition of The White Notebook. Gustave Flaubert deserves special mention since he influenced Gide’s aesthetics and caused him to consider titling his first book The New Sentimental Education. (Flaubert’s Sentimental Education was inspired in part by personal reminiscences, notably those of his unhappy love affair, at sixteen, with an older woman who later lost her mind.)
14 Word missing. (Gide’s note.)
15 The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a romantic adaptation of an old Christian legend, pictures the hermit in the desert, tempted by sensual pleasures and secret intellectual delights but victorious in his struggle to remain virtuous.
16 Gide wrote that Schopenhauer was responsible for his alternating periods of anguish and ecstasy, for his awareness of a second reality behind the visible one, and for his passion for poetry and music.
17 Pierre Louis warned Gide against undertaking an autobiographical work at the age of twenty and cited Goethe’s regret over the shortcomings of Werther as proof that such an undertaking should come toward middle age. Ironically, structural integrity and variety of detail, the two elements advocated by Louis, are missing from the Notebooks.
18 This passage invites comparison of André Walter and his feminine counterpart, Alissa, in Strait Is the Gate (1909). She epitomizes the same ideal and mystical love. Afraid of physical love, she longs for an impossible happiness, for perfect Love, for God.
19 Emmanuèle is the fictional name of Madeleine Rondeaux, who appears under a different name in many other works. Significant details of her life before and after she became Mme. André Gide have been related in subsequent works, notably If It Die, Strait Is the Gate and Et nunc manet in te (1951). These include the infidelity and divorce of her mother, the death of her father, and her unconsummated marriage together with the suffering, privation and shame which she endured for her husband’s sake. In Gide’s imagination Emmanuèle was transformed, idealized, ennobled, imbued with the very qualities he would like to have attributed to himself.
20 The choice of Brittany as the setting may have resulted from Gide’s admiration for Flaubert. The interplay of setting, race, and religion may reflect the thinking of Hippolyte Taine, whose works were of especial interest to him during the period of the composition of the Notebooks. An interesting parallel between t
he two Andrés can be established on the basis of Taine’s three great factors (Race, Environment and Epoch): Walter’s Breton mother was a Catholic, his Saxon father a Protestant; Gide’s Norman mother came from a Catholic family, and his Protestant father traced his ancestry to Languedoc; both were the product of two bloodstreams, two regions and two faiths; the anguish of both was caused by the interplay of Taine’s three factors.
21 Lucie was an older sister whom André Walter had lost in 1885. (Gide’s note.)
22 The influence of the older sister illustrates Gide’s technique of abstracting and reinterpreting reality in terms of his own psychology. It has been suggested that the older sister is identified with Gide’s mother—the symbol of purity and the one who keeps Emmanuèle (Madeleine) and André physically apart even as she makes possible their mystical union.
23 This passage recalls the Tristan legend as well as earlier and later writings that stress gratification through denial: the Orphic cult and Platonism, the troubadours and the chivalric tradition, Dante, German Romanticism.
24 The notion of the role of the poet in bringing out the truth hidden behind the appearance of things, though probably suggested by Schopenhauer, was nurtured by the Symbolists. Gide defended the doctrine of the Symbolists in his second work, Narcissus (1892).
25 Pages rediscovered (note by André W.). (Gide’s note.)
26 The allusion to the courtesan probably has no parallel in the life of the author. We learn from his journals, however, that he began at an early age to practice the solitary vice that caused him to be expelled from school, to incur his mother’s disapproval, and subsequently perhaps to associate sin with sex.
27 It is possible that this is the first allusion in any of Gide’s writings to his sexual aberrance.
28 From earliest childhood the author evidenced a vivid imagination and a preference for dreams in contrast to reality. His answer to a question put to him in his old age might be cited to support theories he first formulated on the basis of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Idea. When asked whether Madeleine was the model for Alissa, he replied, “She became Alissa.”
29 Noteworthy here is the characteristic link between sex and sin, attraction and repulsion with respect to the same object, and the practice of employing external surroundings as memory aids.
30 His Journals reveal that Gide’s virtuous resolutions were made repeatedly only to be broken whenever his demons overpowered him. The Notebooks represent his first attempt to escape through his art from the clutches of his demons.
31 Parts of the Notebooks were written while the author was in seclusion near the Grande Chartreuse. He viewed the monastery, considered visiting it as a tourist, decided against the visit.
32 Gide seems here to anticipate his own paradoxical development, which prevented the consummation of his marriage even while permitting him to father an illegitimate daughter.
33 Frequently in Gide’s writings we find an allusion to his concern for Madeleine, dating back presumably to his discovery of her mother’s infidelity and his intense longing at that time to protect her against the harshness of a counterfeit world.
34 These same notions form the substructure of The Immoralist (1902).
35 Ribot.
36 The conflicts between faith and reason, appearance and reality, carnal passion and ideal love are familiar antinomies that motivate much of Gide’s art.
37 The notion that in Madeleine he had found a kindred soul (an Echo for his Narcissus), persisted for years in Gide’s imagination despite indications to the contrary on her part
38 Gide’s fraternal relation with his cousin Madeleine probably began at an early age. He was present at her father’s funeral in 1890, just as she had been present at the funeral of his father ten years earlier.
39 Frequently and for many years Madeleine’s actions apparently belied Gide’s hopes.
40 Madeleine, though frightened and insecure because of her childhood experiences, was older than Gide and had enough common sense to refrain from marrying him until after his mother’s death. It is doubtful that the two ever fully understood each other.
41 Pierre Louis praised Gide for his choice of quotations, particularly this one from Baudelaire (and gave rise to the suspicion that he considered the quotations superior to the text).
42 Paul Claudel once rebuked Gide for his fascination with mirrors. Gide completed his first book and simultaneously practiced the art of self-scrutiny by setting down his thoughts as he stood before a secretary equipped with a mirror.
43 This section seems to recapitulate Gide’s adolescence and to anticipate his predicament after he had realized the full consequences of the complete separation of (carnal) pleasure and (ideal) love. His reaction to statues is recorded in his Journals, and his sensuousness and sensitivity to physical contact endured a lifetime and caused him alternately to tend toward renunciation and affirmation of the desire “to remain carnal unto death.”
44 Gide was convinced that he had something to say to his generation, that his problem of formulating an austere ideal to free him from temptations of the flesh and protect him from anguish was a familiar problem, and that his time was limited. Though he had long nurtured the project, he was not able to begin writing systematically until the spring of 1890, when he, aged twenty, broke away from his mother for the first time and secluded himself at Menthon, near Grenoble. He felt that before the age of twenty-one he had to finish the work—and he did.
45 Pierre Louis achieved fame (as Pierre Louys) before Gide and knew him during the period of the writing of the Notebooks but not during the year assigned to it in the While Notebook.
46 In the Black Notebook (the Manichean twin of the White Notebook) we learn that he does lose his mind but not before entrusting his notebooks to a friend for possible publication.
47 The enigmatic conclusion may express doubt—conscious or unconscious—on the part of the author. In this section and others we find parallels to Manicheism, based on the doctrine of the two contending principles of good (spirit) and evil (the body).
48 Soon after his arrival at Menthon, where he was writing the Notebooks, Gide installed a piano. Though he was an accomplished pianist, he is said to have played his best when no one was in the room and when he suspected that someone outside was listening.
49 Highly significant in that it anticipates Gide’s conduct toward his wife after their marriage, this passage suggests both her role as the mother-sister image and the presentiment of his inability to consummate a physical union with Madeleine, “the only woman he ever loved.”
50 Alissa, André Walter’s feminine counterpart in Strait Is the Gate, also practices humility and self-denial in pursuit of Christian glory; as in the case of all other Gidean heroines, she succeeds. She dies and Jerome finally possesses her, recalling again the Tristan legend and the tradition of fulfillment through denial.
51 This entry strongly suggests that Gide blamed his mother for interfering with his plan to marry Madeleine and extricated himself from the painful situation by idealizing his love for both. Blinded by his own emotions, he was unable to appreciate the soundness of his mother’s advice to her niece or the perceptiveness of the latter in rejecting his proposal.
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