On the chance that a shepherd boy…

Edmund White

• Andre Gide: A Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan
  Hamish Hamilton, 708 pp, £25.00, October 1998, ISBN 0 241 12729 7
• Andre Gide ou la vocation du bonheur. Tome 1, 1869-1911 by Claude Martin
  Fayard, 699 pp, frs 180.00, September 1998, ISBN 2 213 02309 3

André Gide made his life the very core of his art. In that way he was quite different from Oscar Wilde, who was 15 years his senior and, for a brief but crucial period, a friend. Wilde may have said he put his genius into his life and merely his talent into his art: what is indisputable is that he was careful to keep them well apart. Nothing Wilde wrote is directly autobiographical except De Profundis. Gide, on the other hand, published his indiscreet journals in instalments throughout his long life, brought out his tell-all autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, in 1926, and left a short confession about his marriage, Et nunc manet in te, which he wrote after his wife’s death in 1938 and arranged to have published after his own in 1951.