Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...Devil: "Oh, I'm not limited to just one form of expression...