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Rémy de Gourmont (1858-1915) |
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French essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher, a
prominent figure of the French Symbolist movement. Rémy de Gourmont's some 50
published volumes are mainly collections of essays. During his lifetime
Gourmount enjoyed considerable fame both in France and in
English-speaking countries. His views on literature affected such
writers as Ezra Pound, John
Middleton Murray, and T.S. Eliot, who
praised him as "the perfect critic" in The Sacred Wood (1920). "A writer's capital crime is conformity, imitativeness, submission to rules and precepts. A writer's work should be not only the reflection, but the magnified reflection of his personality. The only excuse a man has for writing is to express himself, to reveal to others the world reflected in his individual mirror; his only excuse is to be original. He should say things not yet said, and say them in a form not yet formulated. He should create his own aesthetics, and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, judging them acording to what they are not." (Rémy de Gourmont in his preface to Book of Masks, translated by Jack Lewis, introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn, Boston: John W. Luce and Company, MCMXXI, p. 15; original title: Le livre des masques: portraits symbolistes, gloses et documents sur les écrivains d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, 1896-98) Rémy
de Gourmont was born in Normany in the Château de la Motte at
Bazoches-en-Houlmey into an old aristocratic family. His mother Marie, née
de Montfort (1836-1899), was a descendant of the poet François de
Malherbe
(1555-1628). Count Auguste-Marie de Gourmont (1829-1912), his father,
did not like living in the countryside. In 1866 the family took up
residence in the manor of Mesnil Villeman near Villedieu. After studies at a lycée in Coutances from 1868 to 1876, Gourmont entered the University of Caen, where he studied law. From 1881 to 1891 he worked as an assistant librarian at Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Although Gourmont detested his job, the endless rows of books provided him means to devote himself to his esoteric studies and multidisciplinary interests, such as writing a text for an illustrated book on the eruption of a volcano. His first book of criticism, Le Latin mystique (1892), was about medieval hymnology. From the early 1880s Gourmont contributed to many periodicals. In 1887 he started a liaison with Berthe de Courrière, six years his senior. She had been a model for the sculptor Auguste Clésinger. Berthe became his sole beneficiary and inspired the novels Sixtine (1890, Very Woman) and Le Fantôme (1893, The Phantom), in which the heroine says to her lover: "Damase, your perverse lips sicken my sight, when I see them – afterwards!" Gourmont's literary friends included Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Richard Aldington argued that Huysman's Là-Bas (1891, Down There) was built on their friendship; Durtal is Huysmans, Des Hermies is modeled after Gourmont: "He was methodic, guarded, and very cold in the presence of strangers. His superior and somewhat bored attitude, not exactly relieved by his curt, dry laugh, awakened, at a first meeting, a serious antipathy which he sometimes justified by venomous words, by meaningful silences, by unspoken innuendoes." Gourmont cofounded Mercure de France, a highly influential magazine, with Alfred Vallette, also an aristocratic fallen on hard times, and other symbolists, and was its major contributor from 1890. With Alfred Jarry, whom he met in the offices of the paper, he collaborated in L'Ymagier (1894-95), an art magazine. He was also cofounder of La Revue des Idées in 1904. Gourmont was dismissed from his post at the Bibliothèque
Nationale in 1891 for publishing in the Mercure de France
an "unpatriotic" article, 'Le joujou patriotisme' (Patriotism, a toy), which attacked
French chauvinism and criticized government's policy toward Germany. Due to a tubercular skin disease (lupus erythrematosus) which
disfigured his face, Gourmont retreated into a semi-recluse in his Paris
apartment on the fourth floor of a house in the Rue de
Saints-Péres. It was not a fatal
desease, but there was no effective treatment for
it. According to his friend Paul Leautaud, Gourmont
looked like something between a gnone and an old man. He dared to go
out only in the evening. Those he wished to meet he greeted dressed in
a monk's
robe and a grey felt cap. "Of all sexual aberrations,
perhaps the most peculiar is chastity," he once said. Perhaps the nature of the illnes was a reason why his erotic poems have been characterized as cold and distant. A misogynist with a broken heart, he wrote in Un cœur virginal (1907): "Women are ruminants: they can live for months, for years it may be, on a voluptuous memory. That is what explains the apparent virtue of certain women; one lovely sin, like a beautiful flower with an immortal perfume, is enough to bless the days of their life." In Physique de l'amour (1903, The Natural Philosophy of Love) Gourmont claimed that "love" is no more than a primitive instinct. "There is no abyss between man and animal; the two domains are separated by a tiny rivulet which a baby could step over. We are animals, we live on animals, and animals live on us. We both have and are parasites. We are predatory, and we are the living prey of the predatory. And when we follow the love act, it is truly, in the idiom of theologians, more bestiarum. Love is profoundly animal; therein is its beauty." Gourmont's work became first known in the United States through the essays of James Huneker. "De Gourmont was incomparable," Huneker said in Unicorns
(1917). "Thought, not action, was his chosen sphere, but ranging up and
down the vague and vast territory of ideas he encountered countless
cerebral adventures; the most dangerous of all." E. E. Cummings discovered Gourmont's work in 1917 when he first went to France. Aldous Huxley published A Virgin Heart, his translation of Un cœur virginal (1907) and Ezra Pound translated the essay Physique de l'amour as The Natural Philosophy of Love (1922: 1926). The poet Amy Lowell said that she read Sixtine "in a sort of breathless interest." In spite of having a profound influence on English and American writers, in his own country Gourmont did not enjoy a similar stature. André Gide attacked in Corydon (1924) Gourmont's sexual theories – he said in a letter that Gourmont was "one of the spirits I detest most." Against all expectations, the tanslation of Une nuit au Luxembourg (1906, A Night in the Luxembourg) did not give rise to charges of incecency; the book went unnoticed, even by readers of "naughty French novels." Gourmont's fame started to decline after Le Problème du style (1902) which was marked the peak of his career and was widely commented. In this work he emphasized image – an idea that influenced the literary movement known as Imaginism. Poetry makes us see the world in the literal sense, not just realize. Gourmont defined style mainly in terms of its visual qualities and notes that Flaubert understood that the art of description is the art of seeing. During
the last years of his life, Gourmont was often visited
by the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney, a pioneer of lesbian
writing, whom he called l'Amazone (the Amazon). "Too invalid of body to
practice pleasure, to lucid to be ambitious, it was good for him to
stand out to sea on the arm of an Amazon," Barney wrote in Adventures d e l'esprit
(1929, Adventures of the Mind). "Devasted in his flesh, in revolt
against God, having resisted all belief, he finally found in
friendship—that worship of intimacy—a compromise between love and
religion." Gourmont was deeply moved by her poems
she had written on the death of Renée Vivien, and published them in Mercure de France. His letters to
Barney were collected in Lettres à l'Amazone (1914) and Lettres
intimes à l'Amazone (1926). Rémy de Gourmount died in Paris, on September 27, 1915. He had a stroke while he was writing an article condemning the Germans for shelling of Rheims Cathedral. He was buried in the Cemetery of Père Lachaise. Gourmont's younger brother Jean (1877-1928), who was also a writer, took charge of his estate. The Book of Masks (1896-98) portrayed a number of leading writers of the time. It was one of the first studies to define symbolist aesthetics. Gourmont was a strong opponent of Naturalism and its major representative, Emile Zola. "His "slices of life" are heavy poems of a miry, tumultuous lyricism, popular romanticism, democratic symbolism, but ever full of an idea, always pregnant with allegoric meaning," he said of Zola. As an essayist Gourmont wrote on a wide range of subjects,
although in his
fiction his attention was mostly focused on sex. Gourmont's collections of essays are mostly drawn from
articles originally published in Mercure de France.
Like
Montaigne, he argued with personal, conversationalist tone. Gourmont
believed that critical writing has a special importance. He did not
offer definitive answers, but preferred "dissociation of ideas" to
fixed truths. It was the style that mattered, the most important
thing in the craft of writing: "the criticism of style would suffice as
literary criticism; it contains all the others." Often Gourmont
crystallized his ideas aphoristically and ironically: "By Kultur, the
Germans mean what we mean by 'state education." "Posterity is
like a schoolchild condemned to learn by heart a hundred lines of
verse. He remembers ten, and stammers a few syllables of the rest. Ten
lines are the fame; the rest is literary history." ". . . the beauty of
the human body is an ideological creation. Take away the egoistic
sentiment of the race, and the sexual delirium, and man would appear
very inferior in harmonic plentitude to most of the mammifers; his
brother, the monkey, is frankly inaesthetic." Epilogues (1903-1913) was a commentary on contemporary events and persons, Promenades littéraires (1904-27) and Promenades philosophiques (1905-09) were literary and philosophical essays. In addition, Gourmont published works on style, language, and aesthetics. His intellectual attitude and aesthetic appreciation for language itself marked his novels, which include Sixtine, a "novel of cerebral life," as Gourmont himself described, Les Chevaux de Diomède (1897), Le Songe d'une femme (1899), and Un cœur virginal (1907). From his love for the rhythm and sounds of words also originated L'Esthétique de la langue française (1899). For further reading: Aspects and Impressions by Edmund Gosse (1922); Rémy de Gourmont son œuvre by André Legrand and Marcel Chabrier (1925); Rémy de Gourmont: A Modern Man of Letters by Richard Aldrington (1928); Rémy de Gourmont by Paul Emile Jacob (1931); Rémy de Gourmont: essai da biographie intellectuelle by Garnet Rees (1940); Rémy de Gourmont, Literary Critic by Glenn S. Burne (1956); Rémy de Gourmont, His Ideas and Influence in England and America by Gelnn S. Burne (1963); Instigations: Ezra Pound and Rémy de Gourmont by Richard Sieburth (1978); Remy de Gourmont: cher vieux Daim! by Charles Dantzig (1990); 'Rémy de Gourmont: How I Became His Amazon' by Natalie Clifford Barney, in A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney, ed. by Anna Livia (1992); A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950: Volume 8: French, Italian, and Spanish Criticism, 1900-1950 by René Wellek (1992); Remy de Gourmont, ed. by Thierry Gillyboeuf and Bernard Bois (2003); Rémy de Gourmont: un écrivain dans la tourmente by Mamadou Abdoulaye Ly (2021) - Note: the American writer Ben Hecht selected Gourmont's Natural Philosophy of Love for his list of 50 books he would keep in his library. Selected works:
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