Word: gide
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bullfighting and Protestantism. Manhattan's pinko New Republic published Gide's most recent opinions on U.S. writing. "No other contemporary literature," said Gide, "arouses my curiosity more. . . ." Gide listed among his favorite U.S. authors: 1) Novelist Ernest Hemingway -"I have none of his love for bullfighting, and yet there is no American author I would rather meet." 2) Novelist John Steinbeck-"some of the stories in ... The Long Valley . . . equal or surpass the best tales of Chekhov." 3) Crimester Dashiell Hammett-"I regard his Red Harvest as a remarkable achievement, the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror...
...Gide fans recognized a familiar Gide signal. For Protestantism has been the driving and pursuing force of Gide's life. "Being at odds with his time," Gide once said, " - that is what gives the artist his reason for being." As a child, Gide was at odds with practically everything. His rich, Huguenot parents were part of France's sternly Protestant minority...
...youth, when he attended intellectual gatherings with Paul Gauguin, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Paul Valery and Stephane Mallarme, Gide wore a romantic cape, but always carried a Bible in his pocket. His greatest gaffe was made when as a publisher's reader he turned down the first volume of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past...
Lessons from Oscar. Soon Gide's callow orthodoxy was replaced by a fanatical determination to speak and write the truth as he saw it, regardless of consequences. When Oscar Wilde met young Gide, the Irishman exclaimed: "I don't like your lips. They are straight like the lips of those who have never lied. I will teach you the art of lying. . . ." Wilde failed: but he encouraged young Gide's homosexuality...
...Gide openly admitted his perversion, was often denounced for the influence which critics believed it exerted through his writing. "There is only one word for such a man," thundered one critic, ". . . that word is demonical. [Gide is] a soul of appalling lucidity whose whole art is to corrupt." Retorted Gide: "I was persuaded that each human being . . . had a role to play on this earth, his only, that resembled none other; so that any attempt to surrender oneself to a common rule seemed to my eyes as treason ... to be likened to that great sin against the Holy Ghost...