Autobiography of André Gide (1926). The work had been a long-term project, connected with Gide's determination from an early age to sound out and make manifest all aspects of his personality. In this respect it can be related to Corydon, Gide's justification of pederasty, published in 1924. It has been argued that Si le grain ne meurt was written mainly for the sake of its second part, which tells the story of Gide's journeys to North Africa in 1893-5, during which he underwent a serious illness, discovered a heightened sense of life on his recovery, and, encouraged by Oscar Wilde whom he met there, first gave expression to his homosexuality in encounters with Arab boys. But the volume concludes with his engagement to his cousin Madeleine: its full significance derives from his simultaneous attachment to the spiritual values he had known as a youth. The first part of the text seeks out the sources of his dual nature in a series of oppositions such as that between his father's family background in the Protestant Languedoc and his mother's partly Catholic antecedents in Normandy. At the same time it recounts his unsettled childhood and the development of his literary vocation.
[David Walker]
