ABSTRACT
In a 1951 New York Times review of the American critic Albert Guerard's psychobiographical study Andre Gide, the German novelist Thomas Mann discusses what he calls Gide's 'unending sense for harmony'.1 Mann is more complementary about Gide as a novelist than about Guerard as critic; he applauds Gide's 'prankishness', his 'tendency to hoax', his 'demonic unfaithfulness' and his 'delight in teasing' readers, whereas he is critical of Guerard for making unsubstantiated judgements about the relative qualities of Gide's novels.2 Of course, in commending Gide's major novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1925) over his earlier decadent novella L'immoraliste (The Immoralist, 1902), Mann reflects his own tendency to favour the high modernist novel of narrative experiment and stylistic trickery, most notably evident in his modernist picaresque Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Kmll (Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man), which he began in 1909 but did not publish in incomplete form until two years after the review. The mixture of realism, experimentation and 'new classicism' in Gide's work stimulates Guerard to call him 'a cautious radical and a daring conservative' and motivates Mann to confess his 'brotherly feelings' toward the French writer.3 Despite their different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, Mann's brotherly feelings toward Gide - a brotherhood combining a mixture of friendship, respect, inspiration, rivalry, and misunderstanding - makes for fruitful comparison of their respective work.4
