BOOKS
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ANDRE GIDE AND THE LITERARY LIFE
THE JOURNALS OF ANDRE GIDE. Volume 1: 1889-1913. Tronsloted ond
edited
by
Justin O'Brien. Knopf. $5.00.
Mr. O'Brien has done a wonderful job with very difficult
materials. He has turned Gide's tight and sometimes all but ineffable
periods into excellent English; and he has supplied the text with elab–
orate notes on the persons, books, and events mentioned by the author.
Perhaps the notes are a little over-elaborate: need a reader of Gide be
told who was the author of
Werther
or the
Vita Nuoua?
Mr. O'Brien
seems to have prepared the volume for a wide American public. One
fears there is no such public for Gide, even with the Nobel prize in his
pocket.
"I want to put in everything," said Gide of
Les Faux-Monnayeurs;
but he has not put everything into his journal, at least not consistently.
We see very little of him in relation to his family. "Of everything concern–
ing Em. (his wife) I forbid myself to speak here." She is here only a
delicate and retiring person to whom he reads aloud evenings, to whom
he writes daily when he is traveling. Like some nineteenth-century noble–
man, Gide shuttles between the capital and his country estates. We
observe a very little of his favorite Norman farm, its tradition-bound
retainers, its old gardens where Gide experiments with flowers. But of
the house in Auteuil (Paris) we see--or sense--only the library where
he reads widely in several languages; the piano on which he plays Bach
and Chopin; the bedroom in which he struggles night after night with
insomnia; the desk where he writes his books, often slowly and pain–
fully, in alternating fits of enthusiasm and weariness. A visit or two
to a mysterious bank disposes of his business affairs. Of his fortune he
writes gnomically: "wealth considered solely as a permission to work
freely"; but a friend is quoted as saying of the very rich Valery Larbaud,
"It is always a pleasure to meet someone in comparison to whom Gide
is poor." Finally, concerning his sexual life he is, while not altogether
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