Gide

more anecdota.


Gide, whose name is ALWAYS coming up -- who he?  Gide was a paederast, but he ditched his longtime boy-toy Marc Allegret, married a woman forty years his junior, and conceived upon this spouse, a daughter.  Then the couple separated, all this taking place in a matter of weeks -- actual daughter following in due course.

Marc Allegret's younger brother Yves (both brothers made movies in France in the Thirties) married Simone Signoret neé Kaminker:  father a Jewish French Army officer of Polish extraction, mother a shiksa.  That made Gide Signoret's brother-in-law.  Signoret is, in my book, all right:  one, she was sublime as La Casque d'Or; two, she married Yves Montand, nato Ivo Montano, whose father was (roughly speaking) Communist mayor of Nice before WWI, and who told off Khrushchev at a dinner in the Kremlin in the Fifties -- he Montand having become the crooner-heartthrob of les bobby-soxers after WWII, in part due to a pompadour of prodigious elevation and declivity.

Gide, the very type of the French intellectual, was the reader at Giraud who received Proust's manuscript of A La Temps Perdu.  He rejected it without even opening the package, saying, more or less, "The author is a flighty mondaine who cannot possibly have the gravitas necessary to produce true art."  The French just ADORE these guys -- the crankier the better.  No one except graduate students reads Gide anymore, although, through simple longevity and a fine eye for aesthetic politics, he was a major force in French lit for half a century.

Seeing as many French movies as I can get, the moral of which movies I take as, We are all total utter flaming assholes, and we might just as well forgive all the way around and get on with the business.

[Signoret's memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be, are fun, if you're me.]