On another occasion, he listened by my side to the announcement of the armistice on the radio. I realized that the war, which brings most people an end to their loneliness, was for him, as it was for me, the only true loneliness. Sitting around the radio, for the first time we shared the solidarity of the times. On other days, all I knew of his presence on the other side of the door were footsteps, rustlings, the gentle disturbance of his meditations and musings.
What did it matter! I knew that he was there, next door to me, guarding with his unrivaled dignity that secret realm I had dreamed of entering, and toward which I have always turned, in the midst of our struggles and our shouts.
Today, now that he is no longer among us, who can replace my old friend at the gates of this kingdom? Who will look after the garden until we can get back to it? He, at least, kept watch until his death; so it is right for him to continue to receive the quiet gratitude we owe to our true masters. The unpleasant noises made at his departure will in no way alter this. Of course, those who know how to hate are still furious over this death.
He, whose privileges have been so bitterly envied, as if justice did not consist of sharing these privileges rather than mingling everything in a general servitude, is argued over even at the end: people are indignant about such serenity. Not a day goes by without his once again receiving the homage of hatred, envy, or that poor insolence which thinks it descends from Cardinal de Retz, although actually it originates in the scullery.
Yet what unanimity ought to have been performed around this little iron bed. To die is such appalling torture for some men that it seems to me as if a happy death redeems a small patch of creation. If I were a believer, Gide’s death would be a consolation. But if those believers I see do believe, what is the object of their faith? Those deprived of grace simply have to practice generosity among themselves. As far as the believers are concerned, they lack nothing, they are provided for; or at least they act as if that were the case.
We, on the other hand, lack everything but the fraternal hand. Surely this is why Sartre was able to pay Gide, over and above their differences, an exemplary act of homage. Certain men thus find, in their reflections, the secret of a serenity neither miserly nor facile. Gide’s secret is that he never, in the midst of his doubts, lost the pride of being a man. Dying was also part of this condition, which he wanted to assume to the very end. What would have been said of him, if after having lived surrounded by privilege, he had gone trembling to his death? This would have shown that his moments of happiness were stolen ones. But no, he smiled at the mystery, and turned toward the abyss the same face he had presented to life. Without even knowing it, we were waiting for that one last moment. And, for one last time, he kept the rendezvous.
“Homage to André Gide,” from the Nouvelle nouvelle revue française, November 1951
Roger Martin du Gard1
Read, in Devenir!, the portrait of old Mazarelles and his wife. From his very first book, Roger Martin du Gard achieves the portrait in depth, whose secret seems to be lost nowadays. This third dimension, which extends the range of his work, makes it almost unique in contemporary literature. Our present literary production could, in fact, when it is valid, claim descent from Dostoevski rather than from Tolstoi. Inspired or impassioned shadows outline the commentary in motion of a reflection on man’s fate. Doubtless there is also depth and perspective in Dostoevski’s characters; but, unlike Tolstoi, he does not make such qualities the rule for his creation. Dostoevski looks above all for movement, Tolstoi for form.
There is the same difference between the young women in The Possessed and Natasha Rostov as there is between a character in the movies and one on the stage: more animation and less flesh. In Dostoevski these weaknesses on the part of a genius are compensated for by the introduction of a further, spiritual dimension, rooted in sin or sanctity. But, with a few exceptions, such notions are considered old-fashioned by our contemporaries, who have as a result retained from Dostoevski only a legacy of shadows.
Combined with the influence of Kafka (in whom the visionary triumphs over the artist), or with the technique of the American behaviorist novel, assimilated by artists who have more and more difficulty, emotionally and intellectually, in keeping up with the acceleration of history and who, in order to deal with everything, go deeply into nothing, this imperious example has produced in France an exciting and disappointing literature, whose failures are on a par with its ambitions, and of which it is impossible to say whether it exhausts a fashion or foreshadows a new age.
Roger Martin du Gard, who began writing at the beginning of the century, is, on the other hand, the only literary artist of his time who can be counted among Tolstoi’s descendants. But at the same time he is perhaps the only one (and, in a sense, more than Gide or Valéry) to anticipate the literature of today, by bequeathing problems that crush it and also by authorizing some of its hopes. Martin du Gard shares with Tolstoi a liking for human beings, the art of depicting them in the mystery of their flesh, and a knowledge of forgiveness—virtues outdated today. The world Tolstoi described nevertheless formed a whole, a single organism animated by the same faith; his characters meet in the supreme adventure of eternity.
One by one, visibly or not, they all, at some point in their stories, end up on their knees. And Tolstoi himself, in his winter flight from family and glory, wanted to recapture their unhappiness, universal wretchedness, and the innocence of which he could not despair. The same faith is lacking in the society Martin du Gard was to depict and also to a certain extent lacking in the author.
This is why his work is also one of doubt, of disappointed and persevering reason, of ignorance acknowledged, and of a wager on man with no future other than himself. It is in this, as in its invisible audacities or its contradictions accepted, that his work belongs to our time. Even today it can explain us to ourselves, and soon, perhaps, be useful to those who are to come.
There is a strong possibility, in fact, that the real ambition of our authors, after they have assimilated The Possessed, will be one day to write War and Peace. After tearing through wars and negations, they keep the hope, even if it’s unadmitted, of rediscovering the secrets of a universal art that, through humility and mastery, will once again bring characters back to life in their flesh and their duration. It is doubtful whether such great creation is possible in the present state of society either in the East or in the West.
But there is nothing to prevent us from hoping that these two societies, if they do not destroy each other in a general suicide, will fertilize each other and make creation possible once
again. Let us also bear in mind the possibility of genius, that a new artist will succeed, through superiority or freshness, in registering all the pressures he undergoes and digesting the essential features of the contemporary adventure.
His destiny then will be to fix in his work the prefiguration of what will be, and, quite exceptionally, to combine the gift of prophecy with the power of true creation. These unimaginable tasks cannot, in any case, do without the secrets contained in the art of the past. The work of Martin du Gard, in its solitude and its solidity, contains some of these secrets and offers them in a familiar form. In him, our master and our accomplice at the same time, we can both find what we do not possess and rediscover what we are.
• • •
“Masterpieces,” said Flaubert, “are like the larger mammals. They have a peaceful look.” Yes, but their blood still runs with strange, young ardor. Such fire and such audacity already bring Martin du Gard’s work closer to us. The more so, after all, if it does look peaceful. A kind of geniality masks its relentless lucidity, apparent only upon reflection, although then it takes on added dimension.
It is important to note, first of all, that Martin du Gard never thought provocation could be an artistic method. Both the man and his work were forged by the same patient effort, in withdrawal from the world. Martin du Gard is the example, a rare one indeed, of one of our great writers whose telephone number nobody knows. He exists, very strongly, in our literary society. But he has dissolved himself in it as sugar does in water.
Fame and the Nobel Prize have favored him, if I may so express it, with a kind of supplementary darkness. Simple and mysterious, he has something of the divine principle described by the Hindus: the more he is named, the more he disappears. Furthermore, there is no calculation in
