Brignoles, 27 March
The style of Les Faux-Monnayeurs should offer no surface interest—no handhold. Everything must be said in the flattest manner possible, which will cause certain sleight-of-hand artists to ask: what do you find to admire in that?
Venice, 29 March
From the very first line of my first book I have sought a direct expression of the state of my character—some sentence that would be a direct revelation of his inner state—rather than to portray that state. The expression might have been clumsy and weak, but the principle was right.
30 March
All those heroes I have hewn out of my own flesh lack this one thing: the modicum of common sense that keeps me from carrying my follies as far as they do.
31 March
Lady Griffith’s character is and must remain somewhat outside the book. She has no moral existence, or even, as a matter of fact, any personality; this is what is soon going to irritate Vincent. Those two lovers are made to hate each other.
Roquebrune, 33 10 April 1924
The difficulty lies in not constructing the rest of my novel as a prolongation of the lines already traced. A perpetual upheaval; each new chapter must pose a new problem, be an overture, a new direction, a new impulse, a forward plunge—of the reader’s mind. But the reader must leave me as the stone leaves the slingshot. I am even willing that, like a boomerang, he should come back and strike me.
Paris, 17 May
Wrote the three chapters to precede the opening of the school year at the pension (Édouard’s Journal: conversations with Molinier, with the Vedel-Azaïs family, with La Pérouse).
I want to bring each of my characters successively before the footlights to allow him the place of honor for a few moments.
A breathing-space necessary between the chapters (but I’d have to make the reader take one too).
27 May
Bernard’s elder brother convinces himself he must be a “man of action.” In other words, he becomes a partisan. He has his riposte ready before his adversary has spoken; he hardly lets his interlocutor finish his sentence. Listening to others might weaken him. He works steadily and aims to teach himself, but in his reading he seeks only ammunition for his cause. In the beginning he still suffered from a slight discrepancy he felt between his thoughts and his words; I mean that his words, his statements before like-minded friends, were often ahead of his thoughts. But he took care to get his thoughts into step with his words. Now he really believes what he affirms, and doesn’t even feel it necessary to add “sincerely” to each of his declarations as he used to do.
Bernard has a talk with him after his bachelor’s exam. He was on the point of going back to his father. The conversation he has with his conservative brother throws him back into revolt.
The poor novelist constructs his characters; he controls them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them function; he eavesdrops on them even before he knows them. It is only according to what he hears them say that he begins to understand who they are.
I have put “watches them function” second—because, for me, speech tells me more than action. I think I should lose less if I went blind than if I became deaf. Nevertheless I do see my characters—not so much in their details as in their general effect, and even more in their actions, their gait, the rhythm of their movements. I do not worry if the lenses of my glasses fail to show them completely “in focus”; whereas I perceive the least inflections of their voices with the greatest sharpness.
I wrote the first dialogue between Olivier and Bernard and the scenes between Passavant and Vincent without having the slightest idea what I was going to do with those characters, or even who they were. They thrust themselves upon me, despite me. Nothing miraculous in this. I understand rather well the formation of an imaginary character, and of what cast-off part of oneself he is made.
There is no act, however foolish or harmful, that is not the result of interacting causes, connections, and concomitances. No doubt there are very few crimes of which the responsibility cannot be shared, to the success of which several did not contribute—albeit without their knowledge or will. The sources of our slightest acts are as diverse and remote as those of the Nile.
The renouncement of virtue through the surrender of pride.
Coxyde, 6 July
Profitendieu must be completely redrawn. When he first launched into my book, I didn’t properly understand him. He is much more interesting than I thought.
Cuverville, 27 July
Boris. The poor child realizes that there is not one of his qualities, not one of his virtues, that his companions cannot turn into a shortcoming: his chastity into impotence, his sobriety into absence of appetite, his general abstinence into cowardice, his sensitiveness into weakness. Just as there are no bonds like shortcomings or vices held in common, likewise nobility of soul prevents easy acceptance (being accepted as well as accepting).
Jarry.34 He had a keen sense of language; or rather, of the weight of words. He constructed massive, stable sentences, their full length touching the ground.
Cuverville, 10 August
Another article of their code was what I might call “the doctrine of least effort.” With the exception of a small minority, who were considered show-offs and malcontents, all of these children made it a point of honor, or of self-esteem, to obtain everything by paying or straining as little as possible. One of them might be proud of having obtained a desired object at a bargain, another might have discovered the solution of a problem without having devoted any effort to calculating, perhaps a means of locomotion that will allow him to leave for class five minutes later—the principle remained the same. “No useless effort” was their foolish motto. None of them had been able to comprehend that there can be reward in effort itself, that there can be any other recompense than the goal achieved.
There is a possibility that this attitude of mind (which I personally consider one of the most tiresome) becomes less dangerous as soon as it is catalogued. It happens that we name things only when we are breaking with them; this formula may quite well presage a new departure.
The clothing of these children reflected the same ethics. Everything about them breathed strictness; everything was parsimoniously measured. Their jackets (I speak of those who were most elegant) circled them like the bark of a tree burst in front by the growth of the trunk. Their collars left their neckties only the tiniest space for the tiniest knot. This even applied to their shoes, of which several of these young fellows artfully tucked in the laces so as to let only the indispensable be seen.
Cuverville, 1 November 1924
I was to have left on 6 November for the Congo; all the arrangements were made, cabin space booked, etc. I put off the departure until July. Hope of finishing my book (this, however, is not the principal reason for my staying).
I have just written Chapter x of Part Two (Olivier’s unsuccessful suicide). Ahead I can see only a terrible confusion—underbrush so thick I don’t know which branch to begin hacking. According to my method, I take patience and study the thicket carefully before attacking it.
On all sides life offers us many beginnings of drama, but only rarely do these continue and take shape as the novelist is accustomed to spin them out. And this is exactly the idea I want to give in this book, which I shall have Édouard express.
Cuverville, 20 November
That many acts of a particular generation find their explanation in the generation that follows—this is what I started out to show, but my characters run away with me and I was unable to give myself complete satisfaction on this point. If I write another novel I should like to give more importance to this: the way those of a new generation, after having criticized and blamed the actions and attitudes (conjugal, for ex.) of their predecessors, find themselves gradually led to do almost the same things over again. André sees taking shape again in his own marriage everything that seemed to him monstrous in the family of Guillaume during his c
hildhood.
Hospital, 3 January 1925
Bernard endures the indoctrination of a traditionalist who, ignorant of Bernard’s illegitimacy, wants to convince him that wisdom consists in everyone’s prolonging the line his father has begun to trace, etc. Bernard hardly dares come forth with his objection:
“But, after all, suppose I don’t know that father?”
And almost immediately he gets to the point of congratulating himself for not knowing him, and for consequently being forced to seek a moral rule in himself.35But will he know enough to rise to the point of accepting and assuming all the contradictions of his too rich nature? To the point of seeking not to resolve them but to feed them—to the point of realizing that for a taut string the amplitude of vibration and the extent of the stretch represent the power of the sound it can produce, that it can come to rest only at dead center?
A like comparison with the two magnetic poles, between which flashes the spark of life.
Bernard thinks: “Strive toward a goal?—No! Rather, go forward.”
Cuverville, end of January
How an ideal team is formed:
The first condition for joining it is that you must give up your name and become simply an anonymous force; to seek victory for the team, but not to distinguish yourself.
Without this there will be only prima donnas—freaks. To win, a high average always helps more than a few exceptional members—who seem all the more extraordinary and are noticed all the more when the team in general is more mediocre.
Classical art:
I complain of my fate less than you think.
(BAJAZET) 36
8 March 1925
Saw Martin du Gard at Hyères. He would like to see my novel stretch out indefinitely. He encourages me to take more “advantage” of the characters I have created. I don’t think I shall follow his advice.
What will attract me to a new book is not so much new characters as a new way of presenting them. This novel will end sharply, not through exhaustion of the subject, which must give the impression of inexhaustibility, but on the contrary through its expansion and by a sort of blurring of its outline. It must not be neatly rounded off, but rather disperse, disintegrate.…
La Bastide, 29 March 1925
Worked rather well for almost a month. Wrote several chapters, which at first seemed particularly hard to me. But one of the peculiarities of this book (which certainly comes from the fact that I constantly refuse to “take advantage of the momentum”) is the excessive difficulty I find in beginning each new chapter—a difficulty almost equal to the one that held me marking time on the threshold of the book for so long. Yes, it has actually occurred to me for days on end to wonder whether I should be able to get the wheels turning again. As far as I can remember, there was nothing like this with Les Caves du Vatican, or with any other book. Or has the trouble I had in writing them been effaced from my memory, like the labor pains after the birth of the child?
I have been wondering since last night (I finished the day before Chapter xvii of the Second Part: Armand’s visit to Olivier) if it would not be well to condense into one the several chapters I had planned. It seems to me that the ghastly scene of the suicide would gain from not being too much announced. With too much preparation you slip into bleakness. This morning I can see only advantage in a condensation that would present the suicide and its motivation in a single chapter.
It can be said of almost all “rules of life” that it would be wiser to take the opposite course than to follow them.
First take the inventory. We can balance the books later. It’s not well to mix them up. As soon as my book is finished, I shall draw a line and leave the rest to the reader—addition, subtraction, it matters but little; I do not think this ought to be up to me. So much the worse for the lazy reader; it’s the others I want. To disturb is my function. The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.
Cuverville, May 1925
I am afraid of the disproportion between the first and second parts—and that the latter, in the end, will seem noticeably shorter. Still, I am fond of sudden endings; I like to give my books the appearance of the sonnet which begins with an octave and ends with a sestet. It always seems useless to me to explain at length what the attentive reader has understood; it is an insult to him. The imagination shoots higher the narrower the end of the tube is, etc. Nevertheless, this morning I have come to the point of considering the possible advantage of dividing the book into three parts: the first (Paris) ending with Chapter xvi, the second comprising the eight chapters of Saas-Fée—which would make the third the most considerable.37
Yesterday, 8 June, finished Les Faux-Monnayeurs.
Martin du Gard sends me this quotation from Thibaudet:
It is rare for an author who depicts himself in a novel to make of himself a convincing figure, by which I mean a living person.… The authentic novelist creates his characters according to the infinite directions of his possible life; the false novelist creates them from the single line of his real life. The genius of the novel makes the possible come to life: it does not revive the real.38
And this seems so true to me that I am thinking of setting these sentences at the head of Les Faux-Monnayeurs as a preface alongside the following, which Vauvenargues wrote, undoubtedly thinking of Henri Massis:
Those who do not get outside themselves are all of a piece.39
But in the final analysis it is better to let the reader think what he will—though it be against me.
20 Colpach in Luxembourg was the home of Mme Mayrisch de Saint-Hubert, wife of the director of a great metallurgical syndicate. Her château was a meeting-place of French and German cultures since she gathered writers, philosophers, and artists as her guests.
21 Francis Vielé-Griffin (1864–1937) was an American-born French poet of nature, who, inspired by the Greek classics, the Scandinavians, and Walt Whitman, contributed a new breath to the symbolist movement.
22 “Las du triste hôpital” is a famous phrase from Mallarmé’s Les Fenêtres.
23 These are seventeenth-century novels by Mme de La Fayette and Furetière respectively, the former a novel of psychological penetration, and the latter a work of flat realism.
24 Gide was an almost annual participant in the philosophical and literary discussion-periods organized by Paul Desjardins at the abandoned Abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy.
25 Dare I point out that in La Porte étroite (1909) “pure poetry” is already spoken of (pp. 132–3), merely in passing, to be sure? But it does not seem to me that in Alissa’s mind these words have a very different meaning from the one Abbé Bremond was to give to them years later. [A.]
26 “Vous vous aimez tous deux plus que vous ne pensez,” is a line from Molière’s Tartuffe, Act II, Scene iv.
27 Gide is objecting to the vulgarism “pour ne pas qu’il sorte” used in place of some such approved, and less awkward, form as “afin qu’il ne sorte pas.”
28 The original of La Pérouse was obviously Marc de La Nux (1830–1914), Gide’s piano teacher, whom he always venerated. Born on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, he was brought to France at eleven to receive a musical education. At twenty he married the daughter of Anaïs Descombes, of the Nîmes Conservatory, where he studied. A pupil of Liszt (through whom he met Chopin), he taught in Paris for over sixty years and right up to his death knew all the Beethoven sonatas by heart. Under the name of La Pérouse he appears likewise in Si le grain ne meurt … and the Journals.
29 Alissa is the heroine of La Porte étroite (Strait is the Gate), which first appeared in 1909.
30 Paul Claudel (1868–1955), the French poet and diplomat (Ambassador to Tokyo and to Washington), whose odes and verse dramas struck a new note of genius; an ardent Catholic, he would have liked to convert Gide.
31 Jacques Rivière (1886–1925), the French literary critic, was editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française from 1919 to 1925, after having bee
n identified with the review almost from the time it was founded in 1909 by Gide and a group of friends.
32 Valery Larbaud (1881–1957), French poet, novelist, and essayist, is especially appreciated for his penetrating Journal d’A. O. Barnabooth (1913), which introduced into literature a new cosmopolitanism, and for his sensitive translations of Samuel Butler, W. S. Landor, Walt Whitman, etc.
33 At Roquebrune (Alpes-Maritimes), on Cap Martin, between Nice and Menton on the Riviera, Gide frequently visited the French painter Simon Bussy (1870–) and his English wife, who translated many of Gide’s major works into English.
34 Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), who figures in the banquet scene in The Counterfeiters, was a French humorist in novel, drama, and poetry, whose fantastic works such as Ubu Roi foreshadowed surrealism.
35 Lafcadio is likewise illegitimate. And the attitude of Œdipus in Gide’s play of 1931 is particularly significant: “So long as I thought I was the son of Polybius, I applied myself to mimicking his virtues.… Listening to the lesson of the past, I looked only to yesterday for my so-be-it, my prompting. Then, suddenly, the thread is broken. Sprung from the unknown; no more past, no more model, nothing on which to base myself, everything to create, country, ancestors … to invent, to discover. No one to resemble but myself.… It is a call to valor not to know one’s parents.
36 “Je me plains de mon sort moins que vous ne pensez,” is a line from Racine’s Bajazet, Act II, Scene iii.
37 In the published novel Parts I and III are almost equal in length and each comprises eighteen chapters.