Word: gide
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Chess & Cape. Still slender and erect, Gide has a leathery brown skin, sharp eyes and decisive gestures. His rambling Left-Bank apartment is shared with stout, 82-year-old writer Maria Van Rysselberghe, her daughter and son-in-law, Newspaperman Pierre Herbart. Gide's daughter, Catherine, now in her 20s, lives near Paris with her husband and two children...
...Wicked Old Man." Many of Gide's friends have been converted to Roman Catholicism, but Gide embraced another faith. In 1932, he announced that Communism was man's hope. He was promptly hailed by fellow travelers as the world's greatest writer. Then, in 1936, Gide and a party of friends were invited by the Soviet government to Russia. While thousands looked on, Gide stood in Moscow's Red Square with Stalin and Molotov (see cut), and delivered a funeral oration for Maxim Gorki. Almost overnight, Gide, the longtime champion of individualism, became the literary hero...
...trip disillusioned Gide. Even before his Russian junket he had said: "The climate in the writings of Karl Marx is suffocating to me. There is something lacking, I don't know what kind of ozone indispensable to my mental respiration." Gide's Return from the U.S.S.R. (his first bestseller, at 67) astounded and infuriated the Communists. He wrote: "I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler's Germany, thought be less free, more bowed down, more fearful, more vassalized." The faithful, who had seen Gide treated like a hero, were now instructed...
Despite his weak heart (which caused him to cancel his announced U.S. trip this spring), Gide is still a prodigious worker. He is up at 6:30 every day, writes steadily until 9, works with a secretary until noon. After lunch and a nap he writes again until 5, has tea and receives friends. He hates to lose at solitaire or chess, loves the movies. A voracious reader, he rates Dashiell Hammett with Faulkner and Steinbeck, was greatly impressed by the Kinsey Report...
...Gide was once a gifted pianist but played badly when he thought anyone was listening (he has not played since his wife's death). Because of a morbid fear of strangers, he cries "I am at home for nobody" when the doorbell rings; then he peers from behind a door at the visitor, often ends by asking him in for a chat...