Word: deviled
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Taking the Bread Away. Trouble comes in threes, say the gypsies-from the devil, his wife and their son. It was that way after World War I; the gypsies were beset by the passport,, the factory and hygiene (they called doctors the "makers of dead men"). Hungary introduced compulsory bathing for gypsies; in Moravia, they were shorn bald; in Soviet Russia, they were put to work in factories and on collective farms-their songs, complained the Communists, were too melancholy. "Astrologists and psychologists are taking away the bread from the mouths of our wives and mothers," complained the chairman...
...moral and ethical anguish as ever got into print. Not even in Gide's own sensationally indiscreet autobiography, It Die (a limited edition appeared in the U.S. in 1935), is the reader treated to a grimmer spiritual wrestling match than in this account of Gide v. his personal devil, Gide v. an inhospitable world, Gide v. his Puritan conscience...
...sold ten copies in ten years). Gide wrote in his Journals: "I do not know where I am going; but I am making progress." His progress was imperceptible to other eyes. Critics lambasted everything he wrote; to French Roman Catholics, his Corydon, a frank defense of homosexuality, was the devil's own mischief...
Talk with the Devil. One thing the Journals make clear: Gide's "insatiable Hell." His daily antagonist is a very real devil. In 1914 he told a friend that what "kept me from believing in the devil was that I wasn't quite sure of hating him." Two years later he confided to his Journals: "When I say: the Evil One, I know what that expression designates just as clearly as I know what is designated by the word God. I draw his outline by the deficiency of each virtue ... he is more intelligent than I, everything...
...Devil: "Your inclination is I. In short, you give me such a wonderful role that I wonder if sometimes you do not confuse me with God. The amusing thing, I tell you, is that henceforth you cannot believe in One without the Other. Just listen to the fable of the gardener...