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FOUR. Battles on the Home Front: Domestic Allegory in the Tunis Journal
- State University of New York Press
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BY THE SPRING of 1942, food shortages and continued attacks in the press convinced Gide to leave the south of France for Tunisia. Tunis bookstore owner Marcel Tournier, whom Gide had befriended during his 1923 visit to North Africa, was instrumental in arranging the move. During a visit to Nice in March 1942, Tournier found the writer thin and anxious: “I no longer feel safe here. The press continues to unleash its fury at me; I am accused of having perverted French youth,” Gide explained. Tournier persuaded his friend Admiral Esteva, the Resident General representing Vichy in the French protectorate , to facilitate Gide’s passage to Tunis. “At least promise me that he will behave himself!”1 Esteva joked. At first, Tournier thought that the admiral was referring to the possibility of subversive political activities on Gide’s part; he soon realized, however, that Esteva had something very different in mind. Given Gide’s advanced age, Tournier assured his friend, there was no cause to worry about sexual dalliances. Later, on reading Gide’s account of his 1942–1943 stay in Tunis, Tournier would realize how much he had been mistaken (466–67). Gide sailed from Marseille aboard the Chanzy on 4 May 1942, arriving in Tunis two days later (J II: 810, 814). He spent three weeks in the city, living at the Tunisia Palace hotel and working on his translation of Hamlet in the upstairs room of Marcel Tournier’s bookstore La Rose de Sable (G/MG 245–46). Though he wrote enthusiastically of the abundance of food, Gide complained of the noise and heat in his letters to friends (CAG 11: 207; G/MG 251). Fortunately, he was soon able to leave his uncomfortable hotel for a pleasant villa in nearby Sidi-Bou-Saïd, where he was the guest of the Reymond de Gentile family: architect Théo Reymond and his ophthalmologist 85 FOUR Battles on the Home Front Domestic Allegory in the Tunis Journal wife, their twenty-year-old daughter Suzy and fifteen-year-old son François. When Dr. Reymond de Gentile was diagnosed with a brain tumor in September 1942, her husband immediately accompanied her to Marseille for a lifesaving operation. In November 1942, while she was convalescing, German forces invaded Tunisia and the formerly unoccupied south of France. Travel between France and North Africa became impossible, and the Reymonds were detained in France until December 1944 (DR 152). Gide would spend the sixmonth Tunisian occupation in the Reymonds’ Tunis apartment with young François Reymond, his grandmother Chacha de Gentile, and the family servant Jeanne. This chapter examines Gide’s diary from the November 1942–May 1943 occupation of Tunis, focusing on the convergence of literature, politics, and sexuality in this portion of the Journal. After analyzing Gide’s attempt to comprehend the war by means of a domestic allegory, discussion turns to François Reymond’s subsequent bid to dislodge that explanation in L’Envers du Journal de Gide: Tunis 1942–43. The chapter then examines the events that forced Gide into hiding in the final months of the siege and concludes with the complex history of “La Délivrance de Tunis,” Gide’s account of the Allied liberation of the Tunisian capital. GIDE’S TUNIS JOURNAL: THE HISTORIC AND THE DOMESTIC Gide’s diary from the six-month occupation of Tunis differs from the rest of the wartime Journal in that the writer made entries on a nearly daily basis and attempted to chronicle the progress of the war. In May 1940, Gide had vowed not to discuss current events in his diary, though this choice meant that his entries were only sporadic (J II: 695). Three years later, as he looked back over his diary for the early months of 1943, Gide observed that his latest notebook “differ[ed] from the preceding ones, which I opened but intermittently and when the spirit moved. This last notebook became for me the buoy to which the shipwrecked man clings. There can be felt in it that daily effort to remain afloat” (J 4: 178).2 Daily writing became one of the author’s few means of sustaining his spirits. Gide experienced the siege of Tunis with a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration . During most air raids, he scorned the relative safety of the cellar: “Three different times from the living-room window I watched at length the strange illuminations in the sky,” he wrote on 14 December. Likening the tracer bullets...