Word: claudell
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...turn of the century, Paul Claudel and André Gide were beginning literary careers, Claudel as poet-playwright, Gide as novelist. In temperament and opinion, they were opposites: Claudel a zealous Roman Catholic, Gide a tormented doubter who could neither accept nor dismiss the Christian faith. The two men became cautious friends, and in 1899 began a correspondence which sputtered and stormed until 1926. Their letters, now published in English for the first time, give a fascinating picture of two first-rate minds locked in a long quarrel about ultimate realities...
...Claudel enjoyed great spiritual confidence; he implored, harried, badgered Gide to become a Catholic. Claudel worked in the French diplomatic service, but no matter where he was-in Tientsin, Prague or Tokyo-he bombarded Gide with letters. For a time Gide was shaken. In 1907 he wrote in his Journal that, after a letter from Claudel, "I. . . have trouble getting back to work...
Little Paws? Gide was far from being a religious skeptic: he scorned freethinkers, and was passionately devoted to the example of Christ. Some of his friends were won over by Claudel's appeals, and at times it seemed as if Gide too would become a convert. One issue that kept them apart was the relation of art to religion. For Claudel, art must bear witness to Christ; he described the whole tribe of modern literary introspectionists as "horrible little terriers who put their paws on one and make one feel the convulsive shivering which animates their wretched bodies...
More important was the problem of religious individuality. Claudel gloried in Catholicism as a "closed system," and frankly stated that because "departures from [Catholic] doctrine involve the soul in terrible risk of eternal damnation, [the church] cannot admit what people call liberty of thought . . ." Gide, bred in a tradition of Huguenot Protestantism, could never accept this view. In one of his rare offensives, he wrote Claudel that he could not abide those Catholics who "use the crucifix as if it were a bludgeon...
Neither, Nor? The inevitable blow-up came in 1914 when Gide published The Vatican Cellars, in which he made his homosexuality explicit for the first time. The book brought a wrathful letter from Claudel: "If you are not a pederast, why have you so strange a predilection for this sort of subject? And if you are one, cure yourself, you unhappy man, and do not make a show of these abominations...