Word: gide
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ever a writer had reason to give up, it was young Gide. All of his early books were critical and popular failures (one 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...
...Gide once subscribed to a clipping service to see what his critics were saying. Typical was the comment of the Revue...
After his mother's death, Gide finally married Cousin Emmanuèele. She is the prototype of characters in several of his books, always as a devoted friend, with a long-suffering piety and a love of God that Gide sometimes found irritating. Em, as Gid e refers to her, is an off-stage character in the Journals. Critic Georges Lemaitre says of Emmanueéle that "when she came to understand his moral perversity, she shrank from him and 'took refuge in God.'" The Journals prove that she had unusual endurance. She died...
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...
...Gide jots down one of his exchanges with the Evil...