“He said: ‘I say, are you working?’” André Gide writes, in George Painter’s 1953 rendering of Marshlands; “‘So!’ he said. ‘Hard at work?’” Gide writes, in Damion Searls’s new translation, published in January 2021. These lines, like prize guests chosen from the rhetorical drawing room which constitutes the book’s opening scene, are listed, in each respective edition, in a small supplement included at the end of Gide’s short 1895 satire called “List of the Most Remarkable Phrases in Marshlands.” To read these two almost century-gulfed translations side by side — measuring Painter’s formal, dandyish British English, with its stiff auxiliaries and quaint dialogue, against Searls’s contemporary Americanisms and colloquial ease of syntax — is to take stock of the great French writer’s verbal elusiveness. His trademark “Gidean irony” is a delicate, mercurial thing, teetering between a formal and informal register, with deft comic timing and the cyclical exchanges of inarticulate articulates — always premised on differences in aesthetics or worldview, digressive inquiry, or quick judgements. Any mislaid stress or punctuation could upset the whole apparatus: the farcical setups, the wry one-liners, the lyrical bursts, the ellipses trailing off into thoughts withheld…

Marshlands, written in 1894–95 when Gide was in his mid-20s, came after his escapades in Southern Italy, Normandy, and North Africa which reappeared — like an eye-drawing curio display — in Fruits of the Earth (1897), a roving, polymorphous work of travelog, prose poem, and Nietzschean aphorism, and just before Prometheus Misbound (1899), the revisionist myth Painter included as Marshlands’ eccentric double in Two Satires. At this point, Gide recognized the novel was in crisis. Since the late 1880s, the Symbolists had been preaching against determinism and objectivity, preoccupations of early-mid century literati, and for what seemed to be modernity’s disorganizing principles — intuition, unreality, absolutes. “We dreamed at that time,” Gide later said, “of works of art outside time and ‘contingencies.’” It was an era of creative dissidence. A new literary order was emerging. In 1891, shortly after completing his debut, Gide wrote to his friend Paul Valéry: “So Mallarmé for poetry, Maeterlinck for drama — and though alongside those two I feel a bit puny, I add Me for the novel.” 

As time would prove, Gide’s deconstructive ethos was just what the genre needed. In those early years he was trying, with each formal overhaul, to recover the novel’s capacity for narrative multiplicity. He was searching for some way of disassembling linear temporality (and linear reading), and he found it in the spatial, referential, and discursive forms which ramify his pages: the lecture, the reading, the journal, the myth. Most of his books from this period are populated with intertexts, inter-characters, and their interlocutors — stand-ins for the writer. In Prometheus Misbound, a café waiter seats three strangers (Prometheus, Cocles, and Damocles) at the same table; he makes introductions, he moderates, prompting anecdotes and queries, as conversation unravels what we learn to be incompatible systems of contingency and deific influence.

Marshlands offers a different slant: the book is narrated by a writer and diarist composing a Symbolist allegory, also called Marshlands. This inner text consists of a series of journal entries by Tityrus, the narrator’s meta-dramatic foil, whose isolated existence as a “bachelor living in a tower surrounded by marshes” runs counter to the narrator’s transitory bohemianism in the cénacles and salons of fin de siècle Paris.

Gide would retroactively characterize Marshlands, along with his 1914 book Lafcadio’s Adventures, as soties, carnivalesque farces of fifteenth and sixteenth century France. This was perhaps because he felt they were slighter than novels, and of a dramatic tradition which had more in common with theatrical incident than that which literature of the time could offer. The world of Marshlands is, in fact, like the world of a stage: surroundings are bare, characters dart in and out without authorial introduction, dialogue goes unexamined, the narrative voice is dry and aloof. As Gide’s biographer, Alan Sheridan, wrote, Marshlands “had thus become the prototype of a new category of Gidean fiction” — not only astoundingly comic, but daring in its ironic structure and its intense authorial disquiet (as Gide later said: “I don’t understand Marshlands at all. Did I write the book?”).

Such extreme self-reflexivity is typical of Gide. From his first foray onto the page, his writer-stand-ins have used composition as a means of withdrawal, alternative fulfillment, and girded self-preoccupation. In his 1891 debut, The Notebooks of André Walter, Gide extracts from and assimilates his own diaries into the fictive notebooks of an alter ego who, like Gide, brings an unrequited love to fruition through lyrical composition. Likewise, in Marshlands, the narrator’s diary entries abound with personal directives of composed emotion: “Be stunned at not having received a letter from Jules”; “Think about Richard’s personality”; “Worry about the relationship between Hubert and Angela.” Later, after his girlfriend finally succeeds in wrangling him into a last-ditch romantic getaway, he remarks, much to her displeasure: “In the end, it’s a good thing that this little trip was such a failure — it’s more instructive for you that way.”

This romantic devotion to what the narrator calls “symbolic truth” is one of the book’s richest ironies. Neither he nor any of his circle hold down jobs; they live neither by their pens nor by any other visible means. They brush absently, like Eliot’s cats, against each other’s orbits, in an artist’s utopia free from taxed wages and earned livings. “For us, followers of Mallarmé,” Gide later wrote, “the very idea that literature might ‘bring in’ money was a shameful one. To get paid was, for us, tantamount to ‘selling oneself’ in the worst sense. We were not to be bought.” It is this focus on the droll, bohemian existence of artistic types who can seemingly just be and create, never lifting a finger or pushing a pencil to eke out a living, which constitutes a supreme rejection of the Realists’ barrel-scraped, plaster reproductions of “objective reality.” Marshlands, unlike the narrator’s book of the same name, is Gide’s attempt to go beyond the text: to conjoin literature and reality in the space of one book. To excoriate the self-contained diary entries and mytho-symbolic allegory of André Walter and The Voyage of Urien; to emerge into the world of human incident, contingency, and real-time plot. 

Damion Searls, the translator of the 2021 edition, has a long personal history with Marshlands — suitable for intuiting the positions and footholds in Gide’s balancing act between real and textual drama. In 2009 Searls published “56 Water Street,” a complete reworking of the Marshlands narrative, in What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, a collection of translations — so free as to resemble the originals only in plot structure, completely divorced at the sentence level — of Hawthorne, Inoue, Nabokov, and Landolfi. As the literary parties and bachelor pads in Marshlands coagulate in an atmosphere of convivial detachment, so does the attic room of Searls’s narrator in “Water Street” open onto terraced gardens of post-collegiate fantasy, complete with Oxbridge interiors, unpublished manuscripts, and standing-drinking-talking-but-saying-nothing parties with the perverse ambiance of a Buñuel scenario. “Water Street,” then, can itself be read as a Gidean gesture: the formation of an outer text that, like the book within Marshlands, coalesces into the work’s broader mise en abyme — a grand keyhole beyond which texts infinitely recur.

I first read Marshlands in Searls’s translation, fireside in my parents’ kitchen, shortly after it was published by The New York Review of Books. It was only my second Gide, some five years after my freshman dalliance with The Counterfeiters, which I had read in imitation of William Burroughs’s youthful, private school facsimile in Junky: “I read more than was usual for an American boy of that time and place: Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Beaudelaire, even Gide.” Gide? I wondered aloud, mispronouncing the “G” with the hard, velar stop so common in English. That same afternoon I was at the university library, picking through Gide’s English-language titles until my finger hit upon The Counterfeiters. I sat down on the floor and began to read; an hour went by.

The book had a formative impact on me. For a child of the turn of the millennium public school canon, which owed its stock Victorian and midcentury titles to the mass market paperback, Gide’s sleek French metafiction cut quite the figure. As I moved on, through the titans of Russian absurdism, American Modernists and surrealists, hardboiled detective fiction, the great English comic writers, the postmoderns, Gide’s prose still held pride of place at the back of my head. What was it about that book? The acuity, the melodious Britishisms, and the lyrically encroaching narrator of The Counterfeiters, in Dorothy Bussy’s translation, were, I began to realize, as much a product of English Modernism as they were Gide’s prodigiously self-conscious style.

Bussy was his most indefatigable French-English translator; this much can be surmised from the large number of his works she brought into English, and their correspondence — which straddles their business relationship and the unwieldy serial drama which was their private one. Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy reveals it was as much an epistolary tale of unrequited passion (on her part) as a translator-author relationship. Despite this, she retained her fierce, workman-like devotion to his prose. She translated all his major works — “our books,” as she called them in one letter — within his lifetime, an accomplishment in which she took great pride. In another letter, in what was perhaps as much a matter of ego as craft, she wrote: “hasn’t a translation more chance of being successful if it is contemporary with the original? Other things being equal, it seems to me that the ‘air’ of the epoch is an essential element in any great work. And this must be sacrificed in a later translation.” 

It is this, among other more technical challenges, with which all subsequent translators of Gide have had to contend. Like many non-anglophone writers, Gide’s availability in English over time had much to do with his literary trajectory. Random House initially refused Bussy’s translation of The Fruits of the Earth, claiming it had no commercial viability, and the book was not published in English until 1949, two years after Gide had become a Nobel laureate. In the years following, other neglected works were brought into English for the first time, including Painter’s Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound: Two Satires. But most of Gide’s reputation in the anglophone world is owed to Bussy. She did more than enact a contemporaneous consolidation of his English language style; she rendered it in a sleek, parsable British English which retain’s Gide’s varied tonality. It is this mantle which Searls has taken up. His task: making the enigmatic master a readable one. Readable in all the myriad ways he was meant to be read, starting with this, the early work from which his most characteristic devices spring.

Gide has always been a writer who watches himself writing. Much of his formal sophistication grew out of his desire to marry the universal and the particular — something he felt Symbolism had utterly failed to accomplish. By all accounts, he was one of the first modern writers to draw on painting’s representational and spatial possibilities. In the summer of 1893, months before he began work on Marshlands, Gide began formalizing a method by which he could reproduce his own act of composition within a text. He extensively maps, in his diaries of this period, the device’s painterly forebears: the use of mirrors in paintings by Memling, Quentin Matsys, and Velásquez, most notably in the latter’s cryptic masterpiece Las Meninas. He considers similar formal outings in literature — the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, the puppet scenes in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the story read to Roderick in The Fall of the House of Usher — but concludes that none so far have adequately rendered the Janus he sees in the mirror.

Marshlands, then, is Gide’s first attempt to bring the dualism ever-present in his work — literature and reality — into contact with this new, multi-dimensional framing device: the mise en abyme (a form which would reach its apotheosis in the stolen journal and impinging narrator of The Counterfeiters). By centering the narrative around a writer drafting an analogous text, we as readers are made hyper aware of the fact that literature (and its composition) is not divorced from the everyday; it reflects the narrator’s disenchantment with life, his wish to bend reality’s principles into orderly conventions, his oblique responses to his literary friends’ aesthetic discordance, his girlfriend’s confused appraisal of his work. It also has the added effect — even further enhanced given Gide’s history of doubling himself within his works — of calling attention to the ways in which the book’s incidents parallel those of Gide’s own life. 

The dialogue in Marshlands, specifically that surrounding the narrator’s work in progress (which never seems to progress), echoes discourse among the Symbolists concerning Gide’s writing of the text itself. As Alan Sheridan recounts in his biography, André Gide: A Life in the Present, Pierre Louÿs, a poet and good friend of Gide’s, wrote to him in November 1894, after hearing, incorrectly, that Marshlands (Paludes, in the French) had been completed:

Why the devil is Paludes finished? Just like that, so quickly? It’s very short, then? And anyway, it should never have been finished. P.S. I explain Paludes to the masses thus — am I wrong? Last winter I wrote to Gide: “What are you doing?” Well, he was doing nothing, but he replied all the same: “I’m writing Paludes.” And Régnier asked him: “What are you doing these days, my dear fellow?” Well, he was still doing nothing, but he replied to Régnier: “I’m writing Paludes!”

Louÿs, like Gide, was a fixture at the weekly salons hosted by Stéphane Mallarmé, known as the Mardis. “They consisted, in effect, of impromptu lectures, with very little discussion,” Sheridan writes. “Many have attested to the extraordinary fertility of [Mallarmé’s] ideas and to the clarity of his expression of them — he spoke far more lucidly than he wrote.” The narrator of Marshlands, then, is a kind of anti-Mallarmean figure; he cannot elucidate his writing to his beseeching cohort. To each he offers different explanations: Marshlands is at once “the story of someone who cannot travel,” “the story of a bachelor living in a tower surrounded by marshes,” “the story of neutral ground, that which belongs to us all,” “about the normal man,” “the story of the third person, about whom one speaks — who lives in us all, who does not die with us,” “the story of Man Lying Down.” One friend replies: “I thought it was the story of a swamp.” And so it is.

As its structure makes clear, Marshlands triumphs not only as satire, but as a work of daring self-reflexivity, because the text within the text is itself a work of Symbolist allegory. Here, its creator is not an unseen author, but a character so single-mindedly obsessed with “symbolic truth” that even his diary begins to take on the qualities of his fiction. In this world, literature acts as compensation for the disengaged; Tityrus, the inner text’s protagonist, is a rhetorical device being plied unconsciously inward, in the narrator’s desperate, Sisyphian attempt to convince himself that he, like his creation, is “content.” 

Like Gide himself, his characters tortuously seek, in their texts, the internal coherence their solipsistic personalities cannot produce under the blistering sun of real-life contingency. They turn, instead, inward: to that clean, well-lit stage on which their vision alone disperses and refracts. And yet, the critical character of Marshlands isn't that it reveals the emptiness of symbolic truth or perceived reality, but that it makes you believe in their power despite their clear degradation — which is, in the end, the necessity and impossibility of art.

The book ends (or begins again) with the exchange:

‘So! Hard at work?’

I replied: ‘I am writing Polderlands…’