Word: gide
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...obsession, as readers of his novels would expect, with death; a strong interest in the "macabre" (a word he nowhere uses); a pervasive fear of war, of revolution, of the end of civilization; the constant meditation of a devout man who has abandoned formal religion. There are "portraits" of Gide, Stein, Cocteau; excellent observations on painting, sculpture, music, films, above all on writing...
Between 15 and 19, Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry whose slashing irony and pure music still influence poets. At 19 he wrote Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), an obscure, agonized hodgepodge in which Rimbaud addicts* trace the wrestlings of his André Gide-like puritanism with his André Gide-like passions. But from then until he died, at 37, in a Marseille hospital, Arthur Rimbaud never wrote again. This amazing break with his genius, his lone-wolf prowlings through the lower depths of Europe, his gunrunning in Africa and Asia form a vague, provoking literary legend...
...French writer André Gide once sourly said: "It is impossible to imagine a Frenchman reaching middle age without getting syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor...
When Trifles for a Massacre was published, horrified Left critics who had praised Céline's Journey to the End of the Night damned him as a Fascist. Dissenting, Novelist André Gide declared the book should be taken as a joke, although a dangerous one, being virtually a satire on the absurdity and vulgarity of genuine antiSemitism. Bystanding critics found another explanation in the detachment of modern French literature from French life, the tendency of writers like Céline to regard writing as a disinterested mental game, to be played without thought of the social values...
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK - Vladimir Nabokoff - Bobbs-Merritt ($2.50). The European psychological novel of moral decay, represented at its best by the novels of André Gide, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, is now eclipsed by politically-minded fiction. Sharply reminiscent of such psychopathic fiction, but with an acuteness that raises it above mere imitativeness is Laughter in the Dark, first English translation of a Russian exile. The story tells of a respectable, middle-aged Berlin art dealer who deserts his family for a tart, reaches its climax of corruption when, after he is blinded, she carries...