‘Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all - important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation’ André Gide.
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author, moralist and humanist. In 1947 Gide received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout Gide’s career he wrote more than fifty books. His career was concerned with the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars and the Symbolist movement. The New York Times described Gide as ‘France’s greatest contemporary man of letters’. Andre Gide was known for his fictional works as well as his autobiographical works. Gide’s chief writings include Les Nourritures terrestres (1897) (Fruits of the Earth), Le Retour de l’enfant prodigue (1907) (The Return of the Prodigal) and the drama Saul (1903).
André Gide’s Early Life
Gide was born in 1869 on the 22 November in Paris. His family were middle class protestants. His mother was called Juliette Maria Rondeaux and his father, Jean Paul Guillame Gide was a Paris University professor of law. His uncle was Charles Gide, a political economist.
Gide grew up in Normandy and started writing from an early age. At the age of twenty one, he published his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter.
‘We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see’ André Gide.
André Gide’s Life & Career
André Gide married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux in 1895 after his mothers death, the marriage however was loveless.
In 1896, André Gide became the mayor of La Roque-Baignard, Normandy region in Northwestern France. In the early 1900s, Gide had established himself as a literary critic. The literary magazine, Nouvelle Revue Française (The New French Review) was founded with the help of Gide in 1908. The New French Review helped to unite progressive French writers until World War II. Many of André Gide's works align with the Symbolist movement, a French literary movement in the 1880s.
Symbolism: an artistic and poetic movement/ style which used symbolic images and indirect suggestion to express mystical ideas, emotions, and states of mind.
‘Les Nourritures terrestres (1897; Fruits of the Earth’ is a lyrical prose poem that conveys symbolist themes. The poem reflects Gide embracing the needs to accept his own impulses and the act of freeing himself from the fear of sin.
Gide’s Le Prométhée mal enchaîné (1899; Prometheus Misbound), is his last discussion of man’s search for individual values. Gide attempted to achieve harmony in his marriage and his tale, La Symphonie pastorale (1919; “The Pastoral Symphony”), explores this idea as well as the treatment of the problems of human relationships.
‘Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable, you must know this in order to concentrate on life.’ André Gide
Gide travelled to North America in 1893 and 1894. He sought to find a release there as he was dissatisfied with his strict Protestant upbringing and the Victorian social and sexual conventions he had experienced.
Whilst in Algeria in 1895, Gide met his good friend Oscar Wilde, an Irish poet and playwright.
Gide often wrote about sexual matters with freedom in his works such as ‘Corydon’ (privately published 1911, public version 1924).
‘Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.’ André Gide
Gide called his work Faux- Monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters), his only novel. He meant by this that this work was on a vaster scale compared to his other tales and short satirical plays. Faux- Monnayeurs is the most complex out of all his works.
Gide travelled through the French Equatorial Africa colony with his lover Marc Allegret from July 1926 to May 1927. He visited the Middle Congo, Ubangi - Shari (the Central African Republic) and briefly to Chad and then Cameroon before returning to France. Gidon documented his journeys in a journal titled Travels in the Congo and Return from Chad.
This image below shows André Gide during an inauguration ceremony for Maxim Gorky. Maxim Gorky was a russian-soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method. He was a five time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. André Gide briefly became a communist in the 1930s. His writings often sympathized with the cause of communism. Gide was invited to tour the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet Union of Writers. He was also invited to speak at Maxim Gorky’s funeral.
Gide’s last work was the reworking of an old myth titled Thesee (1946). André Gide’s works have been published in fifteen volumes (1933-39). Gide died on February 19, 1951.
‘One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore’ André Gide, Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters] (1925).
Discover more images of André Gide in the Bridgeman Archive
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Gide
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1947/gide/biographical/