Word: gide
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...just published (the third volume will be out next year), is probably as candid a confession of a writer's 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...
...Some Sort of Craziness . . ." While many another writer (Poe, Dostoevsky, Melville) fought battles against poverty, Andre Gide did his struggling without ever missing a meal or muddying his boots. The only child of wealthy French...
...Gide published his first book, anonymously and at his own expense, when he was 21. The Notebooks of Andre Walter (1891) was the thinly disguised story of his own neurotic love for his cousin Emmanuele. Novelist-Critic Charles Huysmans promptly labeled it "a product of hideous vulgarities." Few people read it and fewer still bought it; but it admitted Gide to Paris' literary set. It brought him the acquaintance of Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, Whistler, Gauguin, Rodin and Mallarme...
...Gide averaged about a book a year (poetry, fiction, drama or criticism); he also had a hand in half a dozen magazines. On the Revue Blanche he succeeded Leéon Blum as literary critic. ("Blum has the precise kind of mind that congeals mine at a distance and whose lucid brilliance keeps mine muscle-bound as it were and reduced to impotence.") Trying his hand as a publisher, Gide pulled one of the greatest boners in literary history when he turned down a first novel by Marcel Proust: Swann...
Nothing But Flops. At 23 Gide was a pale, thin neurotic who roamed the streets of Paris with brown beard, affectedly long hair and a spectacular cape. Timid and tongue-tied in public, he was constantly depressed about his work, his cousin Emmanuèele's refusal to marry him and the discovery that he had tuberculosis...