“Corydon” by André Gide

I read this short book as part of a little reading project involving books that were originally published in 1924 and remain in print a hundred years on. While there are several prominent novels in this category (Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’, the first of Maddox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’ novels and Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’), there is remarkably little non-fiction that can still be bought in the form of a printed, new copy.

Gide’s ‘Corydon’ is thus a rare exception, being a little book containing four ’Socratic dialogues’ defending homosexuality. This was a brave endeavour back in 1924, and while he later considered it to be his most important publication, it caused a lot of grief at the time as so many disapproved of what he was saying. Nowadays most of his points amount to common wisdom and received opinion in many, if not most, circles. Corydon is the name of one of the participants, being that of a shepherd in Virgil who was attracted to another man.

As someone who is exclusively, and I am pretty sure 100%, heterosexual, I found that the fourth of the four sections did not ring true at all. Here Gide argues that adolescent boys are of indeterminate sexuality and only tend to become heterosexual because of social pressures once they reach their twenties. Tosh, surely. But the earlier dialogues are more persuasive. In the first he argues that the vast majority of sex occurs for reasons other than procreation and thus should not be seen primarily as having that purpose. In the second he discusses homosexuality in the animal world and seeks to demonstrate that it is common, and thus should be considered normal and natural. In the third dialogue he shows how homosexuality has flourished at various times in history (notably Ancient Greece) and that this entirely natural act is in his time unjustly stifled by convention and cultural expectation. These are all now, of course, very commonly expressed views.

The book is still in print because a century ago it was daringly ahead of its time. I also think that the original presentation of the argument through imagined conversations between two friends with opposing views makes this book stand out and stick in its readers’ memories.