Gide

It's the birthday of writer André Gide (books by this author), born in Paris (1869). Raised in Normandy by his mother and a retinue of female family members and maids, Gide was encouraged by these women to explore his interests with almost total freedom. He did so by roaming the countryside as a boy, picking flowers and indulging in his love of nature, but also by examining and analyzing what he saw and the emotions they conjured. This deep introspection and reflection were traits that later defined his writing.

In school, though, his curiosity won him few friends. He found the requirements of the classroom — monotonous and impersonal, completely unlike the natural world — insufferable, and he claimed to be unable to function within the structure. When a teacher called upon him to repeat a lesson and he remained silent, he was sent to the playground. When he returned and was asked to repeat the lesson, he remained mute, which set the other students laughing — was he really so stupid, or so bold? Eventually, recitation became the one thing at which he excelled in school; the talent made his classmates jealous and irritated, and they began bullying him. He was a good runner and often escaped, but the humiliations finally culminated in his tormentors rubbing a dead cat against his face.

Gide found a way out when he contracted smallpox. Realizing that illness could provide him with a good defense, he feigned dizzy spells at his convenience. Positioning himself in a safe place to fall, he'd fake an attack and collapse. This was, perhaps, the beginning of a dramatic tendency that he continued in adolescence, when he experienced a religious awakening — or at least pretended to. He began carrying a New Testament in his shirt pocket, sleeping on a board, and waking at night to pray and mortify his flesh with ice water. Gide later admitted that he likely enjoyed playing the part of a religious fanatic more than he'd actually believed in what he preached. In fact, Gide was raised a Protestant with a strong sense of discipline and morality, at odds with the sense of passion and sensuous indulgence he'd been allowed to cultivate at home.

It wasn't long before Gide turned the tensions in his life — this sense of moral obligation versus his strong individuality, a highly analytical mind combined with a wild imagination, and a need to be liked despite being a social outcast — to his writing. He published numerous semi-autobiographical narratives and memoirs, as well as book-length essays on everything from a defense of homosexuality to atheism to anti-colonialism. Initially known only within avant-garde circles, Gide became an influential literary critic and widely known for his controversial personal life and beliefs.

Gide said: "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."