André Gide, André Malraux: Friendship at Work (1922–1951)

Written by Jean-Pierre Prévost, with the collaboration of Alban Cerisier. Foreword by Peter Schnyder. Paris, co-published by Gallimard and the Catherine Gide Foundation, April 2018.

André Gide and André Malraux met in May 1922, following the publication by the latter of an article devoted to Gide’s work and its impact on the younger generation. The author of Paludes and The Vatican Cellars was impressed by this talented admirer, whose views were original and perceptive. He also proved to have a sense of adventure and to be a man of taste, both in art and literature. Gide therefore welcomed him among the writers associated with La NRF, and authorized him to publish an illustrated version of King Candaules under the imprint of the Aldes, his publishing house.

Having joined Gallimard in 1928 as artistic director and member of the editorial committee, André Malraux went on to become the editor of André Gide’s Complete Works, as well as of beautifully illustrated reissues of his early works.

This literary and editorial friendship was accompanied, in the early 1930s, by a shared political engagement against fascism, in the wake of Soviet communism. Although neither joined the Communist Party, André Gide and André Malraux, Goncourt Prize winner in 1933, together chaired major anti-fascist congresses between 1933 and 1936.

Both men traveled to Moscow. In 1936, André Gide delivered the funeral oration for Maxim Gorky in Red Square, alongside Stalin. Yet Gide’s lucid and uncompromising disillusionment, famously expressed in Return from the U.S.S.R., marked the end of this ambiguous intellectual companionship.

For his part, André Malraux fully committed himself to the struggle alongside the Spanish Republicans.

Les deux hommes restent proches au début de l’Occupation ; ils se côtoient sur la Côte d’Azur, avant que Gide ne s’embarque pour l’Afrique du Nord et que Malraux ne s’engage en 1944 dans le combat armé contre l’occupant. Plus espacées jusqu’à la mort d’André Gide en 1951, leurs rencontres – la plupart du temps au Vaneau – restent placées sous le signe d’une chaleureuse amitié, qui n’exclut pas un jugement croisé, et sans complaisance, sur l’évolution et la signification générale de leur œuvre. Littérature, art, morale, politique et histoire : voilà une amitié à l’œuvre.
Cet album, abondamment illustré, réunit de nombreux documents inédits ainsi que la correspondance échangée entre les deux écrivains.