THE first of three volumes to be translated of the Journals of André Gide (Knopf, $5.00), this book covers the years 1889-1913. Justin O’Brien’s translation is excellent, and his introduction and notes are intelligent and helpful. Sometimes they are even over-helpful. Are American readers so cultureless that they need to be told that Wilhelm Meister is a “novel of biographical interest by Goethe,” and that The Fall of the House of Usher is “one of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales”?

This, however, is a small matter. The important thing is that Mr. O’Brien has made available for American readers one of the most important works of one of the most important intellects of our time, and since we can never have enough of French influence on our culture, we must be grateful that he has done his job so well.

Hide’s evident aim is to be as conscious as possible, and he has a rich and complex nature to be conscious of. His childhood was, he says, “sullen and solitary,” presided over by three anxious women and the stern God of Protestantism. This background is reflected, in the early part of the Journal, in a number of self-admonitions: —

I must learn to take myself seriously; and not to hold any smug opinion of myself. To have more mobile eyes and a less mobile face. To keep a straight face when I make a joke. Not to applaud every joke made by others. Not to show the same colorless geniality toward everyone. To disconcert at the right moment by keeping a poker face. . . .

“Everything in life,” he writes, “must be intentional, and the will constantly taut like a muscle.” Together with this rigidity, however, is another impulse: “One must at any price manage to free one’s soul.” The conflict in Gide’s nature (“I am a creature of dialogue; everything within me struggles against and contradicts itself”) is partly the result of the difference between these two impulses; the Journal is an account of the various paths of emotion, thought, and action down which he has been led. “I am merely a little boy having a good time — compounded with a Protestant minister who bores him.”

Until 1895 the Journal is largely introspective, full of the aphorisms — very good ones — of youth; after that crucial year, when Gide discovered his sexual direction, it becomes more objective, and we have many revealing accounts of the French literary scene, in which Gide played an important part.

The descriptions are sharply etched: “Paul Claudel came to lunch. Too short a jacket, aniline-colored necktie; his face still more square than the day before yesterday; his speech both precise and full of images; his voice staccato, clipped, and authoritative.” We are also given an excellent picture of Léon Blum, of Valéry, and of Gide’s other literary friends. The most moving passage is the lengthy account of the death of Charles-Louis Philippe. The cold, rather inhuman character of the Journal (reflected in Gide’s masklike photograph) is here warmed by real feeling about someone other than Gide himself.

The firmest and toughest thread in the manystranded consciousness which Gide reveals is his work. He has not been guilty of a sloppy sentence from the Cahiers d’André Walter to the last pages of the Journal. Each of his books has had a fresh shape, a fresh character, and Gide has never succumbed to the writer’s worst temptation, to copy his own writing instead of returning continually to life. He has worked scrupulously and hard; his own maxim is an indication of how hard that work has been: “The sentence that is personal to us must remain as peculiarly difficult to stretch as the bow of Ulysses.”

In Gide’s writing, which of course is a reflection of his personality, two things are eminent : his absolute honesty, and his consciousness of the necessity of being in front, of being in the vanguard of awareness. That is why he seems, at seventy-nine, to be still so admirably young. He has allowed no callosities to grow on his sensibility or his intelligence. It is for this reason that he has been so fine an example to writers. He has kept his instrument always screwed up to the right pitch, always in tune, and in this respect he is a challenger and a model.

The Journals have been compared with two of Hide’s favorite books, the Essays of Montaigne and Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe. This is only partly correct. They are in the same genre, but they are not, admirable as they are, of the same size. They are, for example, almost entirely devoid of humor. They have wit, penetration, edge; they record suffering and pride, but the uneasiness which is a corollary of their honesty leaves no room for the assured humorous sympathy which is so important a part of Montaigne. Both Montaigne and the Goethe recorded by Eckermann are masters of life in a way that, the cross-hatched soul of Gide would seem to make impossible. It is important to recognize the difference, and not to let our admiration for Gide’s honesty, his rigorous standards, his fearlessness, blind us to what he lacks. For there is not, however one dislikes to admit it, real greatness in Gide. What we have instead is something different, and perhaps equally rare, a spirit that is fine, in both the French and English meanings of the word.