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Le Ramier
by Andre Gide
NRF-Gallimard
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He was the first openly gay Nobel prize winner and arguably France's greatest-ever diarist. Studies of his life and works have been churned out with monotonous regularity ever since his death in 1951. So, what more could we possibly learn about André Gide? Just how he engaged with adolescent boys, that's what. The closest he came to openly describing his sexuality was in the trop indiscrets Egyptian Notebooks of 1939. Deplorably these have never seen the light in English, and they're also largely ignored in his native land.

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But now here's Le Ramier ("The Wood dove"), unearthed after nearly a century from among Gide's papers. It's an account of a summer's evening in July 1907, shared between the author and Ferdinand, a 17-year-old farm lad (though Gide describes him as only 15: wishful thinking?). He'd met the boy while staying with another pederast, the agronomist Eugene Rouart. The beguiling nickname derives from Ferdinand's incessant "cooing" as Gide licked his diminutive suntanned frame, kissed him passionately on the lips, and finally made them both come. The dove offered to suck the master off but Gide, with some apprehension, declined.

Unfortunately what we learn from Gide's mere seven pages (just over 2,000 words) is little more than we already know. The episode echoes several others, starting with magnificent Mohammed, an Algerian boy proffered to Gide by Oscar Wilde in 1895, and ending with the lubricious 15-year-old who crept into his Tunisian hotel room one night in 1942 during a cease-fire. From these and other encounters, Gide captured exactly what he needed: affirmation that he could give boys carnal pleasure without doing them harm.

Nonetheless Le Ramier does provide a valuable lie to the specious, still current, allegation that Gide was never committed to the welfare of his young partners. In fact, he followed Ferdinand's development closely until 1911, when the young man tragically died of tuberculosis: years later Gide was still commemorating the glorious night spent in the wood dove's arms. (Here, an agonizingly unanswerable question: since Ferdinand was hospitalized within a year of meeting Gide, was this perhaps the only mutual sexual relationship he ever enjoyed?)

The real gem here is the book's foreword by his natural daughter, Catherine, who chanced upon the manuscript just two years back. "I find this little text full of the joy of life" she writes at the age of 80: "All perversity is completely absent." Bravo pour les femmes!