Paul Willems

• Born: April 4, 1912
• Birthplace: Edegem, Belgium
• Died: November 29, 1997
• Place of death: Edegem, Belgium

Other Literary Forms

Paul Willems began his literary career with novels that bear the imprint of his family chateau, the Rousseau-like retreat Missembourg. Like his mother, poet Marie Gevers, Willems celebrated intense sensory experiences that open a passage to lost paradise, a recurring theme in his work. Paradise, for Willems, resembled an Edenic garden of childhood innocence, unsullied by modern civilization and humankind’s inhumanity. He also published numerous articles and prefaces, two collections of short stories, and Un Arrière-pays: Rêveries sur la création littéraire (1989), a book of lectures on his creative process that he delivered during his year’s appointment as poetry chair at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve.

Achievements

Because of changing linguistic politics in Belgium, Paul Willems was the last of the great Belgian dramatic poets, such as Maurice Maeterlinck and Fernand Crommelynck, who were Flemings by birth but who conducted their literary life in French. Willems’s plays have been translated into more than twelve languages and performed all over the world. He was particularly popular in Germany, with more than a hundred productions (some plays premiering before their Belgian openings). His musical comedyLe Marché des petites heures was written on commission for the Salzburg Festival. The Sailing City won the international Marzotto Prize for drama in 1966 and (like Willems’s novel Blessures, 1945) was published by the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard.

Willems’s plays were also produced in his home country. The Belgian government awarded the playwright its Triennial Prize for Dramatic Literature in 1963 and 1966, followed by the Quinquennial Prize for the body of his work in 1980. The Rideau de Bruxelles revived It’s Raining in My House eight times over the years following the play’s Belgian premiere (1962), always to sold-out houses.

Perhaps one of Willems’s greatest contributions is the opportunity his plays offer actors, as well as audiences, to experience poetic fantasies that explore deep human truths. Following his death, one actress spoke her appreciation for “the precious gift of Paul Willems’ words [that] allowed me to enter the mystical world of a waking dream which gives voice to the secrets of our souls.”

Biography

Paul Willems was born on April 4, 1912, the son of revered Belgian poet Marie Gevers. He spent his childhood on the family estate, Missembourg, located in Edegem, near the seaside city Antwerp. The old country house had been bought by Willems’s grandfather, a disciple of Rousseau, as a retreat from modern civilization. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of a famous highwayman, forever searching for his lost treasure.

Young Paul did not attend school until the age of twelve. His maternal grandmother gave him lessons in French and Latin in the mornings, and in the afternoons he was sent out into the gardens to learn from the greatest teacher: nature. The estate’s gardener, who claimed to be a wizard, also taught the child respect for the tools of one’s trade. Willems’s novels and plays reflect his childhood love for nature, especially water: lakes, ponds, the sea, and the ever-present Belgian rain. A fatalistic pessimist who rejected religious orthodoxy, Willems nonetheless meditated with both irony and mystical delight on the nameless beauty of the ephemeral.

Willems received his law degree from the Free University of Brussels in 1936 and practiced maritime law in Antwerp from 1937 to 1940. In addition to pursuing an active writing career, Willems entered the Palais des Beaux Arts de Bruxelles in 1946, where he served as director general (1947-1984). He continued to reside at Missembourg, however, with his wife, Elza, and commuted to work. In search of artistic events for the Palais, he traveled all over the world, including the United States, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union.

After having published three novels, Willems was persuaded to write for the theater by Claude Etienne, director of the Rideau de Bruxelles. In 1949, the Rideau produced his first play, Le Bon Vin de Monsieur Nuche, which was also performed in English in New York City the following year. The Rideau continued to be an artistic home for Willems’s drama.

Belgium is a dual-language country which contains two competing language groups, the Germanic (Flemish/Dutch) and Latin (Walloon/French). Literature became a weapon, as the Flemings sought to assert their identity against the dominant French culture. Although ethnically Flemish, in the tradition of the Belgian educated classes, Willems was raised as a French-speaker, and so wrote in French. As the Fleming/Walloon cultural battles heated up, Willems found himself ostracized by the Flemish and only marginally tolerated by the Walloons. Literary friends suggested that, like Belgian predecessors such as Maeterlinck, he should move to Paris to win French acceptance. Willems chose to remain at Missembourg, and his plays were never well received in France. On the other hand, his drama won considerable popularity in Germany, until eclipsed there by the vogue for political theater.

In the 1970’s, Willems found an artistic soul mate in Belgian director Henri Ronse, who eventually staged five of his plays, including revised versions. After his retirement from the Palais, Willems turned full time to writing, publishing a novella, a play, a short-story anthology, and a collection of lectures. When struck by his final illness, he was working on another novel, Le Voleur d’eau (the water thief).

Analysis

Although the intersection of Germanic and Gallic cultures enriched his dramatic imagination, Paul Willems became caught in a cultural no-man’s-land when it became “politically incorrect” for Flemish authors to write in French. Language itself was a recurring preoccupation in his drama, and he depicted numerous characters suffering from mutilated speech. However, Willems also played with language, delighting in rhythms, rhymes, puns, and invented words. His poetic dialogue weaves a magical spell to enchant the audience into entering a dream world that coexists with what is called “reality.”

Willems’s work reveals the allegorical tendencies and blend of earthiness and mysticism characteristic of Belgian literature. Other influences cited by critics include German Romanticism, Surrealism, and Magical Realism. Willems, however, refused to ally himself with any literary movement, citing his belief in freedom of thought.

Turning to the theater with Le Bon Vin de Monsieur Nuche, Willems translated into theatrical terms the rhythmic musicality and sensory imagery of his novels. Like Le Bon Vin de Monsieur Nuche, his third play, Peau d’ours, was adapted from a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Initially misled by the whimsy of Willems’s early plays, critics only later recognized the underlying irony and cruelty characteristic of his mature drama. Underneath the humor and fanciful word-play of Willems’s theatrical fairy tales lurked the darkness of the Brothers Grimm, as Willems sardonically watched the world lurch toward a fate described by the name he gave his feline narrator of Nuit avec ombres en couleurs: Cat Astrophe.

Peau d’ours

For Peau d’ours (bearskin), Willems adapted the Grimm tale of a soldier who must wear a bearskin for seven years as a result of a deal with the devil. In Willems’s version, the devil is transformed into a pair of matchmaking woodpeckers, and the soldier’s goal is no longer wealth but purification through love. Certainly, the allegory of a soldier’s soul healed of war guilt helps to explain the popularity of Peau d’ours in postwar Germany, where it underwent more than nine hundred performances.

It’s Raining in My House

Produced by the Rideau de Bruxelles in 1962, the play became a perennial favorite, with numerous revivals. The actor who played the gardener considered the character the role of his lifetime and slept with the script beside his bed. A musical score performed live by composer Ralph Darbo drew the audience under the spell of nature with enchanting sounds for the buzzing of bees, the falling of rain. With its tree growing in the living room, the old house Grand’Rosière (modeled on Missembourg) sets an image of lost paradise onstage. Those who love the old house try to save it from its new owner, who wants to sell it and buy a condo in town. On one level, then, the play reflects its author’s environmental concerns and his suspicion of modernization

In a lighthearted vein, It’s Raining in My House demonstrates Willems’s preoccupation with language. Man and woman, city dweller and country dweller, seem to speak different languages, making communication problematic. It’s Raining in My House also includes a recurring Willems image: the double. Madeleine, the heir, is the exact double of Aunt Madeleine, the house’s original owner. The reconciliation of the ghost couple, Aunt Madeleine and her fiancé, leads to Madeleine making up with her own fiancé and deciding not to sell Grand’Rosière, thus restoring lost paradise: The world of the living and the world of the dead appear as mirror reflections.

The Sailing City

Through metaphors of mirrors, doubles, and life-sized dolls, Willems’s mature plays reflect a narcissistic world in which the individual is trapped in his own consciousness, unable to love. The sailing city is Antwerp, which in Willems’s fantasy sports sails from its rooftops. Willems traced the image to a day when, looking at Antwerp from the dock, he seemed to see the city gliding away under sails of billowing clouds.

Old and ill but rich, the protagonist of The Sailing City returns to Antwerp to buy happiness, equated with the shop window mannequin he had worshiped as a child. Although his real childhood sweetheart still loves him, he spurns her. Instead, he marries a young woman, the mannequin’s double, but she disappoints him. He realizes that, like the sailing city, the lost past is drifting out of his grasp. Dreams cannot be captured but only adored from afar.

As in so many of Willems’s plays, characters suffer from mutilated language. The shop owner’s sexually repressed wife cannot finish her sentences, and the half-wit servant has been taught to repeat courteous formalities three times. Willems also treats language playfully, as the shop owner invents words to describe the fanciful flotsam and jetsam that crowd his curio shop.

La Vita breve

Willems’s last—and cruelest—play probes the paradoxical intertwining of guilt and innocence, sexuality and violence. The shipboard setting embarks the audience on a voyage into a dark night of the soul. A haunting musical score was composed for the Belgian première by Thanos Mikroutsikos, who later became minister of culture for Greece.

An erotic sailor’s doll (played by an actress), a replica of a Neopolitan courtesan, serves as a focus for a reenactment of her murder. All the characters are unmasked as capable of brutal sexual jealousy, including the deranged young man who made the doll. Wounded language plays a role here, too, as the young man has lost his ability to speak but sings with the voice of an angel. Like the waves of Willems’s beloved sea, the play rocks the audience back and forth between guilt and innocence and between beauty and horror. Refusing any simplistic interpretation, the play calls its audience to confront the mysterious contradictions of the ebb and flow of life, of death.

Bibliography

Burgoyne, Suzanne. “Belgian/American Theatre Exchanges: Reflections and Bridges.” In New Theatre Vistas: Modern Movements in International Theatre, edited by Judy Lee Oliva. New York: Garland, 1996. Author’s description of rehearsals for a revival of It’s Raining in My House at the Rideau de Bruxelles and her own production of the play in the United States.

Burgoyne, Suzanne, and Shirley Huston-Findley. Forward to Paul Willems’ The Drowned Land and La Vita Breve, translated by Donald Flanell Friedman and Suzanne Burgoyne. Belgian Francophone Library 1. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Jungian analysis of La Vita Breve and comparison of the play with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman.” Volume also contains a discussion of Willems’s novella, The Drowned Land.

Burgoyne Dieckman, Suzanne. Introduction to Four Plays of Paul Willems: Dreams and Reflections, edited by Suzanne Burgoyne Dieckman. New York: Garland, 1992. Analysis of the plays in the anthology: It’s Raining in My House, The Weight of the Snow, The Sailing City, and She Confused Sleeping and Dying. Includes production photographs and a bibliography of Willems’s published work, including major articles.

Emond, Paul, Henri Ronse, and Fabrice van de Kerckhove, eds. Le Monde de Paul Willems: Textes, entretiens, études. Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1984. Contains important analyses of Willems’s plays and novels by contributing scholars, as well as excerpts from Willems’s writings and numerous photos. In French.

Friedman, Donald F. “Spaces of Dream, Protection, and Imprisonment in the Theater of Paul Willems.” World Literature Today 65 (1991): 46-48. Analysis of the ambiguous nature of seclusion in The Weight of the Snow, Les Miroirs d’Ostende, and She Confused Sleeping and Dying.

Otten, Michel, and Pierre Halen, eds. “Lectures de Paul Willems.” Textyles; Revue des Lettres Belges de Langue Française 9 (1988). An international array of scholars interpret Willlems’s work. Of particular interest are Michel Otten’s treatment of the role of the reflection in the search for lost paradise and Alberte Spinette’s study of the structural evolution of La Vita breve. In French.

Quaghebeur, Marc. Introduction to Four Belgian Playwrights. Gambit International Theatre Review 11, no. 42-42 (1986): 9-24. Belgian scholar Quaghebeur puts the work of Willems and three other playwrights into the context of the Belgian theater tradition. This special issue also contains a translation of It’s Raining in My House, translator’s notes on Willems, and a bibliography on Belgian theater.