Word: gide
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Department delays the institution of an obviously-needed change. Young instructors, who might appear logical to man this sort of course, will hesitate to accept an assignment which they might savor but which they could certainly not utilize in terms of their academic world. Meanwhile the monumental Gide must find a casual comparative niche with Hardy and Conrad in English 62 rather than emerge in the context of his own culture...
...when he was 36, Gide wrote in his Journals: "Never a man, I shall never be anything but an aged child. I live with all the incoherence of a lyric poet, but two or three ideas, crosswise in my brain and rigid like parallel bars, crucify every joy. . . ." Certainly there is little enough of joy in the aged child's day-to-day confessional. Touchy and lacking creative confidence, he worked from compulsion and usually despaired of the results, cringed before criticism, sought solace in voracious reading and five-hour-long sessions at the piano...
...Gide's poems, plays and novels were ignored by the French public from the first (he was 67 when he wrote his first bestseller, Return from the U.S.S.R.). Buttressed by an independent income, he went on writing as he pleased, traveled in Europe and Africa, financed and helped to edit a Paris literary review (Nouvelle Revue Franfaise) that acquired a small but secure world reputation. He had married his cousin Emmanuele, but the Journals make it clear that it was a marriage of convenience. ("But of everything concerning [Emmanuele] I forbid myself to speak here...
With typical Gidean restraint, he suggests his fondness for Arab boys, his rapturous admiration for statues of the male form, his habit of following strangers who attract him ("I go out a bit toward evening and shadow a couple of fellows who intrigue me"). Nothing, it seems, came to Gide so easily as tears. The Journals drip from crying jags brought on by Gide's reading, his music, visits to art shows ("visit to the Louvre . . . wept in front of the Rudes . . . in the theater the mere name of Agamemnon is enough. I weep torrents...
There were times when the Journals bored Gide, long stretches that passed without entries: "I am keeping this journal without pleasure, as an exercise and without any care for the interest I may ever take in rereading it. . . . No more interest in keeping this journal. . . . I interrupt this journal, which is reduced to the dull notation of facts. Good [he wrote after 23 years of keeping it] solely as a way of getting into the habit of writing." In spite of flashes of cold, Gidean brilliance, most readers will probably feel the same way about the Journals...