Word: claudel
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...fourteen hundred ninety-two, as any schoolboy knows, Columbus sailed the ocean blue to discover a passage to India. But that is not the way the story goes in Christophe Colomb, the 25-year-old opera by Darius Milhaud, with a text by French Poet Paul Claudel. In Rome last week, the gigantic work got a full stage performance for the first time since its 1930 Berlin premiere (it has had concert performances in Manhattan and Paris, abridged productions in Cologne and Buenos Aires). Unfortunately, Rome's critical opera audience was neither wholly delighted musically nor enlightened historically...
Poet Paul Claudel: "I believe that I shall have the strength to turn down the seductive prospect of cremation. The question reminds me of the story about a British statesman whose mother-in-law had died in Argentina. He received a cable asking what should be done with the body-'Bury her or cremate her?' He cabled back: 'Both. Take no chances...
...morally simpleminded" standards of the legion, Kerr continues, would automatically ban the filming of much of Nobel Prizewinner François Mauriac's work, or that of English Novelist Graham Greene, both Catholics. Concludes Kerr, after recalling a maxim quoted by French Catholic Paul Claudel ("God writes straight with crooked lines"): "Art without crooked lines is unnatural art-inevitably inferior art. And in its production not only the creative mind is betrayed; the Catholic mind, in its fullness, in its scope, in its centricity, is betrayed as well . . . We are moving closer and closer to the sort of stand...
From then on, the bond of intimacy was broken. Claudel wrote to a friend that Gide seemed to him "simply an over-nervous person who has let himself go . . . and poisoned himself with medicine, philosophy and literature." Not without arrogance, he added: "We others, we Catholics, are built to walk dry-shod through the Red Sea." Today, at 84, Claudel has never changed his mind on that. Gide remained uncommitted until his death, declaring himself "neither Protestant nor Catholic but quite simply a Christian...
Twenty-one years after the correspondence lapsed, Claudel provided an ironic footnote. Interviewed in 1947 by a French newspaper, he said of his old friend and intellectual combatant: "I don't see that Gide has any talent...