Word: gide
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More important was the problem of religious individuality. Claudel gloried in Catholicism as a "closed system," and frankly stated that because "departures from [Catholic] doctrine involve the soul in terrible risk of eternal damnation, [the church] cannot admit what people call liberty of thought . . ." Gide, bred in a tradition of Huguenot Protestantism, could never accept this view. In one of his rare offensives, he wrote Claudel that he could not abide those Catholics who "use the crucifix as if it were a bludgeon...
Neither, Nor? The inevitable blow-up came in 1914 when Gide published The Vatican Cellars, in which he made his homosexuality explicit for the first time. The book brought a wrathful letter from Claudel: "If you are not a pederast, why have you so strange a predilection for this sort of subject? And if you are one, cure yourself, you unhappy man, and do not make a show of these abominations...
...Gide answered defensively: "What right have you to issue this summons? In what name do you put these questions?" But then his voice fell to pathos: "I am speaking now to a friend, as I should speak to a priest, whose binding duty it is to keep my secret before God . . . I cannot believe that religion leaves on one side all those who are like myself...
From then on, the bond of intimacy was broken. Claudel wrote to a friend that Gide seemed to him "simply an over-nervous person who has let himself go . . . and poisoned himself with medicine, philosophy and literature." Not without arrogance, he added: "We others, we Catholics, are built to walk dry-shod through the Red Sea." Today, at 84, Claudel has never changed his mind on that. Gide remained uncommitted until his death, declaring himself "neither Protestant nor Catholic but quite simply a Christian...
Twenty-one years after the correspondence lapsed, Claudel provided an ironic footnote. Interviewed in 1947 by a French newspaper, he said of his old friend and intellectual combatant: "I don't see that Gide has any talent...