engaged in typing from a manu–
script. Gide asked her to find
in
the files a copy of a letter to Roger
Martin du Gard, in which he dis–
cussed the wisdom of Barrault's
opening the Martigny Theater as
a new venture with a play as dif–
ficult as
Ham/et.
Gide felt that
Kafka's
Trial,
in its play fonn,
suited the times more closely.
As he returned to the room,
bearing the letter and the copy of
Hamlet,
I
thought how like Yeats
was this old man before me, out–
living the tragic generation of
Wilde and of Proust, renewing
himself constantly and revealing a
mind more efficient and far-rang–
ing than that of a business execu–
tive or a scientist in the atomic age.
His business was literature; his
theme of research was not the
medieval one of Proust, of what
happens to people, but the modern
one of Kant and Nietzsche, of what
people do. The energy in his bari–
tone voice, in his walk was the
energy of a man who returns from
each bout with outward circum–
stance convinced that the bout it–
self was the meaning, not the plea–
sure and not the pain. He looked
eternal, like someone for whom
love and death and truth and
beauty are casual shapes one recog–
nizes on the way but does not allow
to break the heart or unsettle the
mind. Here certainly was the new
writer of a naturalist age, master
of the
gai savoir.
"Do you mind," he asked, "if
we continue in French? I have a
214
certain
pudeur
about speaking
in
your tongue. But I see that you
know the play well, and
I
should
like you to comment on some of my
versions."
He opened the book, placed the
black tortoise-shell glasses on
his
nose, and looked fonnidably at the
text.
"What do you make of Laertes'
words to Ophelia:
An·d keep you
in the rear of your affection .
..
?
This is a military image.
I
could
not render it otherwise than: '...
ne t'aven&>ure pas au bord de ton
amour.'
JJ
"Since the English tells Ophelia
not to advance so far as her affec–
tion would take her,
I
think the
sense has been well rendered.
I
do
not see how the violence of Laer–
tes' image, mixing love and mus–
ketry, can pass without violence
into the French."
"Then," he said, "there's the
curious idea in Hamlet's 'Thus bad
begins and worse remains behind,'
about which
I
have appended a
note in my translation.
I
translate
it as
(Mauvais debut;
la
suite sera
pire.'
What would you say does
it mean?"
"I have always taken this line to
follow the thought of the preced–
ing one:
I must be cruel onVy to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse re–
mains behind.
I should think the
'bad' means that Hamlet has
be–
come an instrument of evil in the
service of good, while the 'worse'
refers to the agents of evil in the
