When Britain's Eighth Army entered Tunis in May 1943, a gaunt, saturnine figure, who looked like an unshaved cardinal, popped out of a hideout in the Italian quarter. He was France's most discussed, most influential man of letters, septuagenarian Novelist Andre Paul Guillaume Gide. German patrols, Gide explained, had captured a copy of his latest, frankest journal of events and he had been in hiding for a month. He soon buttonholed an Eighth Army photographer, plunged into an enthusiastic discussion of pre-Nazi German poetry.
To most Americans Andre Gide's name means little. Only a handful of intellectuals have long enthused over his most famous novel, The Counterfeiters (a complex study of Parisian youth), his unblushing autobiography, If It Die, and his perennial personal Journals. But last week it looked as if 1944 was going to be Gide year in the U.S. Publisher Alfred Knopf planned to publish Gide's Imaginary Interviews (discussions of art and society written while Gide was in Vichy France). French publisher in exile Jacques Schiffrin was preparing a French edition of Gide's latest Journals (1939-1942), a translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, which Gide has been working at intermittently for 20 years.* Little magazines translated snatches of anything Gidean they could get hold of. Dozens of university students announced that Gide would be the subject of their Ph.D. theses. In Manhattan's left-wing New Leader, Novelist Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, TIME, May 26, 1941) deplored a similar outbreak of "French Flu" in England, denounced Gide's "esoteric arrogance [and] arrogant spiritualism."
Bullfighting and Protestantism. Manhattan's pinko New Republic published Gide's most recent opinions on U.S. writing. "No other contemporary literature," said Gide, "arouses my curiosity more. . . ." Gide listed among his favorite U.S. authors: 1) Novelist Ernest Hemingway —"I have none of his love for bullfighting, and yet there is no American author I would rather meet." 2) Novelist John Steinbeck—"some of the stories in ... The Long Valley . . . equal or surpass the best tales of Chekhov." 3) Crimester Dashiell Hammett—"I regard his Red Harvest as a remarkable achievement, the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror." 4) Novelist William Faulkner — "perhaps the most important" U.S. writer, "essentially, powerfully and in the full sense of the word, a Protestant"
Gide fans recognized a familiar Gide signal. For Protestantism has been the driving and pursuing force of Gide's life. "Being at odds with his time," Gide once said, " — that is what gives the artist his reason for being." As a child, Gide was at odds with practically everything. His rich, Huguenot parents were part of France's sternly Protestant minority.
In youth, when he attended intellectual gatherings with Paul Gauguin, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Paul Valery and Stephane Mallarme, Gide wore a romantic cape, but always carried a Bible in his pocket. His greatest gaffe was made when as a publisher's reader he turned down the first volume of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past.