The White Notebook

INTRODUCTION

“It was not only my first work, it was my summation,” wrote André Gide in If It Die (1926), and the truth of his statement concerning The Notebooks of André Walter was borne out by his intimate writings, some of them not published until after his death. The White Notebook and its Manichean twin The Black Notebook were published in one volume in 1891 (the author was supposed to have died after asking a friend to decide whether or not the notebooks should be published posthumously). Gide had misgivings about allowing the Notebooks to be reprinted later (1930) as one of his Representative Works, but as he noted in a preface, his concern was purely aesthetic and in the early work he probably had put most of himself. Those who have read Et nunc manet in te, published in 1951, the year of his death, will agree.

Gide once complained that La Bruyère painted men as they were but without telling us how they became what they were. Gide’s works are one sustained attempt to understand and explain himself. The White Notebook, his first experiment in self-analysis through the medium of art and the first stage in his quest for authenticity, is a projection onto the printed page of the inner conflicts of André Walter, the ill-starred double of André Gide. Walter’s passions and conflicts, his temptations and anguish, his eventual triumph over demoniac forces through a mystic, ideal love yield a portrait of Gide’s adolescent ego. The portait suggests the direction of his subsequent development.

For months he had nurtured the notion of writing the Notebooks, but not until late spring in 1890 did he begin to work systematically on the project. At that time he was twenty and felt not only that the crisis which he was attempting to depict was typical but also that the world was waiting for his contribution. He isolated himself from the world by moving into a chalet not far from the famed Carthusian monastery near Grenoble in southeastern France. When he set out in May, 1890, he was convinced that in order to complete his work he must find seclusion.

Not since the death of his father ten years earlier had he been separated from his mother for as long as twenty-four hours. The letters which he exchanged with her and the notebooks in which he recorded his comments on his readings provide many details concerning the period of the writing of the Notebooks.

Because of his admiration for the writings of Flaubert and Goethe, the work originally published as The Notebooks of André Walter might well have been assigned another title. Gide vacillated between Allain (or Alain) and The New Sentimental Education in his search for an appropriate title. The influence of Flaubert is also seen in the choice of a Breton hero. Furthermore, Gide had read The Sorrows of Young Werther, much of it in German, and was certainly aware of parallels between Goethe’s early semi-autobiographical work and his own. The similarity between the names assigned to the two heroes is striking.

In all probability, however, the writer who most impressed Gide during the period of the composition of The White Notebook was neither Flaubert nor Goethe. It was Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, which he first read in 1899, produced in Gide a feeling of “ineffable rapture.” Years later he wrote that he attributed to Schopenhauer his philosophical outlook and his awareness of a second reality behind the appearance of things as well as his passion for music and poetry. The style of The World as Will and Idea appealed to him, as did Schopenhauer’s pessimistic analysis of life, his glorification of art as the great source of revelation of the nature of reality, his identification of the will as the source of anguish, his emphasis on the fundamental antagonism between dream and reality, and his advocacy of mortification of the will to live. The influence of Schopenhauer also shows up in the form — or formlessness — of The White Notebook.

Like Schopenhauer, Gide found reality illusory and equivocal. For Walter truth is subject to the will (things become true). His conflicts are always in the inner life, not in the outer world. Reality is transformed and transcended by his primary vision. When asked late in life whether his wife had served him as the model for Alissa, the heroine of Strait Is the Gate, Gide answered, “She became Alissa.” His reply is characteristic and highly significant. The White Notebook sets the pattern of symbolic transformation through which he was to objectify throughout his lifetime the tensions and conflicts that motivated his creativity.

The psychological forces involved in the transformation of his conflicts and tensions are detailed in a recent study by Dr. Jean Delay, The Youth of André Gide (abridged and translated by June Guicharnaud, 1963). Dr. Delay diagnoses Gide’s neurosis in terms of mother image, narcissism, angelism, etc., and calls attention to his devotion to his mother and to her puritanical code. By her conduct both before and during the period embraced by Walter’s notebooks, she interfered with the normal development of Gide’s libido and caused him to turn to art as the only means of liberating his demons. Through the process of objectifying his inner tensions and conflicts he managed to escape from reality and enter into the realm of the imagination. Art was for him a means of transcending reality.

It is easy to establish parallels between the creatures of Gide’s imagination and the persons who were important in his life. Like André Gide, André Walter is the product of two bloodstreams, two cultures and two temperaments. Like Madeleine, who later became Mme. Gide, Emmanuèle is fearful, withdrawn, in need of André’s protection. Like Gide’s mother, Walter’s mother is pious and imperious, and she tries to prevent the marriage of her son. In both situations André can transcend his situation only by overcoming carnal desire and idealizing his love for both his mother and his companion.

Gide had several reasons for writing the Notebooks. One of these was to enhance his chances of marrying his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux. It might be well to review the background against which was unfolded the drama of his literary proposal and its part in an even longer drama.

As a child he had manifested an autoeroticism which had caused him to suffer considerable embarrassment and to incur his mother’s antipathy. An ambivalent feeling toward his mother was manifested at an early age. He apparently was happier when living away from her than when living with her. After the death of his father, however, he never left her side until the spring when he started to write the Notebooks. Shortly after her death in 1895, Gide married.

Gide’s mother had opposed the marriage of her son and her niece, Madeleine Rondeaux, and this for several reasons. Aside from the fact that they were first cousins, she felt that her son was too immature and too irresponsible to care for a girl who, though older than he, had suffered much and needed a sense of stability and security which he could not provide. She may also have doubted the sincerity of their love since they had lived for a long time as brother and sister.

Madeleine also had the same valid reasons for rejecting his proposal. Besides, she probably realized that Gide had a false image of her. There is no doubt but that he consistently refused to face the facts, that in his imagination he transformed circumstances, idealized situations, and attributed to her a personality, a psychology, a character which she would scarcely have acknowledged. That the real Madeleine at the beginning of their marriage was not the Alissa in Strait Is the Gate is obvious to anyone who has read Et nunc manet in te (1951). Unable or unwilling to appreciate the advice of his mother and the decision of his cousin, Gide blamed the former for interfering with his plans and continued his campaign to win the hand of the latter. To retain the love of both, he had to renounce physical possession and build an image that would accommodate both.

His fictional image had to blend the attributes of both mother and cousin. This he accomplished in The White Notebook by fusing the remembered image of an older sister who had died with the Emmanuèle who lived in Walter’s imagination — all purity, all goodness, all that he envisioned as noblest and best in himself. He had fallen in love with a fictitious entity as inaccessible as the reflection of Narcissus: a projection of his superego. Here the supreme achievement of love would be the annihilation of the body and the freeing of the soul. The bedside scene in which Walter renounces possession of Emmanuèle in favor of a higher union anticipates the supposed relationship of Gide and Madeleine after his marriage to “the only love in my life.”

Gide believed not only that his first work was of general interest but also that it would overcome the objections of his mother and the resistance of Madeleine to his proposal. It was to bring glory to him and make everyone concerned realize that his noble, moving declaration of love should be opposed by no one.

The book was published at the author’s expense (or rather his mother’s). In a few special copies the name Madeleine was substituted for Emmanuèle. A copy was presented to her with an appropriate inscription and the request that she read it the same night. Her diary shows that she was moved to tears when she finally read it but that she found it too true to life and considered it an invasion of her privacy. Her polite but formal rejection of his proposal hurt him deeply, but he still felt kindly toward her. It would seem that nothing that she had ever said actually gave him grounds for thinking that she wanted to marry him, and that here again the facts were not as he had imagined them.

He could, however, draw some comfort from the attention given his work by critics. Stéphane Mallarmé and Henri de Régnier praised the delicate quality of its style. Maurice Maeterlinck noted that it “eternalized” the struggles of a virtuous soul. Joris-Karl Huysmans and others saw in Walter’s plight a new “sickness of the century,” or rather of the last half of the century. Rémy de Goncourt hailed the book as the distillation of all the study, dreaming, passion and anguish that make up youth and the author of the anonymous work as a romantic-philosophical disciple of Goethe. The same critic predicted that the author’s future work would take a turn in the direction of irony.

Gide lived up to Goncourt’s expectations by becoming a master in the use of gentle irony. A blend of irony, humor, parable and narrative genius made it possible for him to sustain a rewarding dialog with readers and himself. Though as an avowed purist he expressed misgivings about The Notebooks, he could never divorce aesthetics and ethics. The result is that his dialog is always tinged with ethical considerations. Only a self-imposed morality could enable André Gide — or André Walter, the first typical Gidean hero — to achieve the highest potential of his being.

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I have tried through occasional notes to call attention to significant facts that may be of interest to the reader. In many instances I have borrowed freely from the writings of Dr. Jean Delay. I wish also to express my appreciation to Professor Ralph Behrens, who read the first draft of my translation and made many constructive suggestions, and to the others who have helped me to prepare for publication this edition of Gide’s first work: Jim Barnes, James Gamble, Cherry Jeffrey, Pat Livingston, William McCray and Diane Puckett.

WADE BASKIN

SOUTHEASTERN STATE COLLEGE