Books: Things Remembered

IF IT DIE — André Gide — Random House ($5).

TIME PAST — Marie Scheikévitch — Houghton Mifflin ($3).

Last week two volumes of reminiscences, one by a famed French novelist, one by a friend of most of the French literary great of her day, strongly illuminated pre-War Parisian intellectual society. The memoirs of André Gide were published in Europe in 1920, never translated into English because of their “uncompromising pages” in which Author Gide discusses his homosexuality and his relations to Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and others. The present translation, issued in an edition limited to 1,500 copies, strongly suggests that such circumspection was unnecessary, for If It Die is the most tedious and least sensational book that André Gide has written, filled with turgid analyses of adolescent, religious and philosophical confusions. Impressionable readers must search through descriptions of life in a colorless, puritaniucal household, accounts of deaths among his many kinfolk, of early literary efforts, in order to reach the passages in which André Gide summons up the whiff of brimstone and pictures the yawning abyss of sin.

For literary historians the value of If It Die lies in its record of the young Gide, “more obstinate than faithful,” entering the brilliant group that revolved around the poet Mallarmé, including Whistler, gauguin, Pierre Louys, Henri de Régnier. Mallarmé prepared his witty talks beforehand, but delivered them to his guests as if they were extemporaneous. Still little more than a schoolboy, Gide became a critic of the revue Blanche, planning his literary career as carefully as a U.S. graduate of the same age might prepare himself to be a doctor. Threatened with tuberculosis, Gide went to Algiers, where, in a situation similar to that he afterwards recounted in The Immoralist, and under the influence of Wilde and Lord Douglas, his abnormality became the dominant problem of his life. If It Die ends with his mother’s death and his engagement to his cousin.

Marie Scheikévitch is the daughter of a wealty Russian art collectorwho settled in Paris nea the end of the 19th Century. Time Past begins with a memory of the great catastrophe at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, when thousands of the common people were trampled to death, includes a brief account of Marie Scheikévitch’s marriage and divorce, but is memorable for its portraits of celebrities, particularly that of Marcel Proust. Marie Scheikévitch knew Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, was on intimate terms with Jules Lemaître and other are eminant, but her friendship with Proust was particularly close. She presents him as warm, readily animated, generous, possesing a gift for mimcry. She says that after he had been malicious about some mutual acquaintance he would return the next day and compensate for his malice by reviewing the individual’s good qualities. The idiosyncracies that others have ascribed to Proust— his practice of attending parties bundled in heavy overcoats, his flowery and affected speech—seem not to have bothered Marie Scheikévitch in the least. She describes the heavy log-rolling that went on before Swann’s Way appeared, in order to insure it a good press, Proust’s anxiety about the reception of his work. Proust died in agony almost as soon as his masterpiece was finished, and in his delirium imagined that a hideous fat woman, dressed in black, had appeared in his room.

Marie Scheikévitch does not touch on the mysteries of his personality, hbut the individual she portrays, unlink the one who figures in most reminiscences of Proust, might conceivably have been written Remembrance of Things Past.