The White Notebook

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“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.

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