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Lessons from Oscar. Soon Gide's callow orthodoxy was replaced by a fanatical determination to speak and write the truth as he saw it, regardless of consequences. When Oscar Wilde met young Gide, the Irishman exclaimed: "I don't like your lips. They are straight like the lips of those who have never lied. I will teach you the art of lying. . . ." Wilde failed: but he encouraged young Gide's homosexuality.
Gide openly admitted his perversion, was often denounced for the influence which critics believed it exerted through his writing. "There is only one word for such a man," thundered one critic, ". . . that word is demonical. [Gide is] a soul of appalling lucidity whose whole art is to corrupt." Retorted Gide: "I was persuaded that each human being . . . had a role to play on this earth, his only, that resembled none other; so that any attempt to surrender oneself to a common rule seemed to my eyes as treason ... to be likened to that great sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no forgiveness. . . ."
Examining society in clear, frank prose as he traveled restlessly from country to country, Gide became a legendary figure. Would-be disciples were harshly discouraged. "Throw away my book," Gide told them, "say to yourself that [mine] is only one of the thousand possible attitudes towards life. Search out your own."
When France fell, many of Gide's attackers showed up on the Nazi side. Ardently anti-Nazi, Gide continued to needle his enemies in articles for the Paris Figaro. Said Britain's Novelist E. M. Forster (A Passage to India) last year: "He has remained an individualist in an age which imposes discipline. ... It seemed to us, as we listened to Gide, that here was a light which the darkness could not put out."
* Among Gide's 70-odd volumes of prose (mostly essays and novels), poems, plays and prefaces, are translations of poems by William Blake, Rabindranath Tagore, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.