236
PARTISAN REVIEW
NUNC DIMITYIS
THE CORRESFONDENCE BETWEEN PAUL CLAUDEL AND ANDRE'
GIDE. Pontheon. $4.00.
MADELEINE. ET NUNC MANET IN TE. By Andre Gide. Knopf. $3.00.
The bitterness with which French Catholic writers spoke of
Andre Gide at the time of his death shocked the Anglo-Saxon literary
world, which had so long reserved a throne-if already a little dusty–
for him in its literary Valhalla. This surprise was a trifle ingenuous, the
result of a certain cosmopolitan narrowness, a failure to understand the
French background of Gide's writing. To critics abroad, he was the
last of the great debunking giants of the late nineteenth century, the
prophet of a skeptical humanism, whose tenets, if no longer so satisfy–
ing as they had been in 1920, were part of everyone's youth, moments
in everyone's emancipation. For French Catholics, however, Gide was
one of their great failures, the lost sheep that was forever about to
return to the fold, and forever failed to do so. His conversion was to
be one of the great peaks in the spiritual reclamation of what Claudel
called "the cloaca of Renan and the marshlands of the nineteenth
century." After the triumphant re-entries of Huysmans and Rimbaud,
the Church had not despaired of seeing that Greatest Enemy-Emile
Zola-return. Indeed the cordiality of his reception at Lourdes had been
a measure of the Church's hopes. They had been deceived, and when,
in September 1902, Zola was found dead in his bedroom, the Catholic
papers howled God's vengeance. The auguries of a later age were even
more promising. Louys, Jammes and so many more of Gide's early
friends had seen the Light. Again and again, in
La Porte etrvite,
in
Numquid et tu?
and elsewhere, Gide seemed to their hopeful eyes to
be trembling on the edge. And yet, when he died in 1951, peaceful!y and
ful! of years, it was with resolution and fortitude, but unfortified by
the rites of the Church. The bitterness of the Catholic world is not
hard to understand, it was a valiant attempt to dismiss one more major
defeat in the two-centuries-old battle with the
Eclaircissement,
a defeat,
perhaps, in an even older struggle with the Protestant spirit of the
Languedoc which Gide inherited so fuIly from his father's family.
If
there had been a general hope of Gide's conversion among
Catholics, that hope had been for many years an obsession with Paul
Claudel. The volume of correspondence between these two writers
is
the history of that obsession, that constant wooing in which Claudel
was the brutal and ardent pursuer, Gide the coquette, alarmed, at times
