Michel de Ghelderode

• Born: April 3, 1898
• Birthplace: Ixelles, Belgium
• Died: April 12, 1962
• Place of death: Scharbeek, Belgium

Other Literary Forms

Michel de Ghelderode is known and remembered primarily for his singular, often highly unconventional approach to drama. During the course of his career, however, he also produced several volumes of essays and short stories as well as poetry, most of the latter supposedly written by a fictitious undertaker named Philostène Costenoble.

Achievements

Described by one drama critic as “our man in the sixteenth century,” Michel de Ghelderode worked for years in solitude and near-isolation toward the perfection of his intensely personal dramatic art. Only after World War II, with the author approaching fifty years of age, did the assembled corpus of his plays even begin to attract critical attention outside his native Belgium, in part as a result of developments in world drama that had rendered Ghelderode’s work suddenly “fashionable.” The now famous “Ostend Interviews” (1951), broadcast first in Belgium, then in France, and later published, brought belated but well-deserved recognition to a highly original practitioner and theoretician of the drama. Even so, Ghelderode died at the age of sixty-three in relative obscurity, achieving only after death the full measure of esteem that had somehow eluded him in life. A final posthumous irony came with the revelation that, had Ghelderode survived until the fall of 1962, he would in all likelihood have received that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.

More heavily influenced by the plastic arts than by the work of other playwrights past or present, Ghelderode’s dramaturgy nevertheless closely approaches the goal of “total theater” long sought by Antonin Artaud and others. Ghelderode’s plays, set for the most part in late medieval or early Renaissance Flanders, combine evocative poetic language with the scenic powers of Pieter Brueghel, Jan Vermeer, or Ghelderode’s older contemporary James Ensor. Drawing as well on the long and honored tradition of puppetry, Ghelderode bodies forth in his work a resolutely antinaturalistic, often grotesque, yet ultimately realistic personal vision of human nature that has much in common with the later deformations wrought by Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco. It would be misleading, however, to consider Ghelderode as a simple precursor of absurdist drama; his work remains essentially unique, with few visible models and even fewer followers.

Deeply rooted in the folklore and traditions of his native Flanders, Ghelderode’s dramaturgy is both elemental and spectacular, peopled with gross characters and overshadowed by the prospect or proximity of death. Often satiric, with near-caricatures of rulers, bureaucrats, and clergymen, his plays ultimately portray the futility of all human endeavor, meanwhile highlighting humanity’s heroic efforts to prevail against the inevitable. Rich in sound as well as in color, and frequently specifying musical instruments and sound effects, Ghelderode’s better efforts create and sustain a mood that threatens to envelop the spectator within the author’s vision, establishing for the duration of the play a substitute world with its own rules and patterns, postures and masks. Long a devotee of marionette theater, Ghelderode proved quite skillful at adapting the techniques of puppetry to the live stage, thus underscoring the helplessness of his characters’ attitudes.

During some thirty years of sustained dramatic activity, Ghelderode wrote more than fifty plays, some of them little more than fragments and a good number intended for broadcast production rather than for staging. Writing always in French, he authorized Flemish translations for many of his works, thereby lending considerable support to the Flemish Popular Theater (Vlamsche Volkstonneel), which in turn contributed heavily to his early reputation. Scarcely influenced by the requirements of fashion, Ghelderode freely ignored the accepted standards of structure, playability, or length. Few, if any, of his plays last longer than one hour in performance, and fewer still are divided into acts and scenes. His intensely poetic style, often bordering on grandiloquence in his efforts toward characterization, frequently produces soliloquies that suffice to tax the memory of any actor. Still, the best of Ghelderode’s plays have managed to survive him and will doubtless continue to hold interest for audiences.

In English-speaking countries, Ghelderode’s dramatic reputation owes much to the work of David Grossvogel, whose study Twentieth Century French Drama (1967) included a substantial chapter devoted to the previously neglected Belgian playwright. Mindful of Ghelderode’s eccentricities and limitations as a dramatist, Grossvogel nevertheless hailed him as a highly original writer of no mean achievement, worthy of inclusion alongside such major figures as Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, and Jean-Paul Sartre. During the years to follow, both before and after Ghelderode’s death, his work found considerable favor with university drama groups throughout the United States and Canada, aided by two volumes of his collected plays in English translation by George Hauger. Today, Ghelderode’s singular reputation as a valued “playwright’s playwright” remains secure, both in Europe and abroad.

Biography

The reclusive eccentric who would style himself Michel de Ghelderode (a pseudonym eventually legalized by royal decree) was born Adémar-Adolphe-Louis Martens on Palm Sunday, April 3, 1898, in Ixelles, Belgium, a suburb of Brussels frequented by artists and writers. His father, Henri-Louis Martens, was employed as a royal archivist, a line of work later to be pursued by young Ghelderode. The author’s mother, née Jeanne-Marie Rans, was a former postulant for holy orders; even after bearing four children, of whom Ghelderode was the youngest, she retained evident traces of her erstwhile vocation that would strongly influence the mature Ghelderode’s dramatic work: One of Mme Martens’s remembered “spiritual tales,” concerning a child mistakenly buried alive who remained strangely marked by death even after her rescue, inspired most of the plot and characters of Ghelderode’s Miss Jairus, not written until the author was in his mid-thirties.

Throughout his life, Ghelderode, like Jaïre’s daughter Blandine, remained oddly touched by intimations of mortality. Around the age of sixteen, while pursuing his studies at the Institut St.-Louis in Brussels, he fell gravely ill with typhus and would retain for the rest of his life the vision of “a Lady” who materialized at his bedside to utter the words, “not now, sixty-three.” (Chronically ill with asthma from his late thirties onward, Ghelderode in fact died in 1962, two days short of what would have been his sixty-fourth birthday.) Amid the double disruptions of illness and World War I, he drifted increasingly into literary and artistic circles, sharpening his visual perceptions and even—however briefly—trying his hand at music. Thanks in part to his acquaintance with the novelist Georges Eekhoud, whose views helped to shape his developing vision, Ghelderode became actively interested in both regional and marionette theater; it was during his period, moreover, that the first of his writings—already signed Ghelderode—began to appear in the “little” magazines.

In order to support himself, Ghelderode first worked as a clerk in a bookstore and later followed in his father’s bureaucratic footsteps at the Royal Archives. In 1924, already a recognized playwright, Ghelderode married Jeanne-Françoise Gérard, a secretary some three years his senior whom he had met during his employment at the bookstore. They were to remain married, and together, until the author’s death. By the mid-1920’s, Ghelderode, although still employed as an archivist, was well known in literary circles both as a writer and as an editor. His plays, translated into Flemish from their original French, soon became the staple of the Vlamsche Volkstonneel, or Flemish Popular Theater, with new works furnished regularly on demand. The author’s health, meanwhile, remained precarious at best, shading his dramatic work with forebodings of decrepitude and death.

Shortly after World War II, with most of his work already behind him, Ghelderode began at last to attract the critical attention that he had long deserved. The “Ostend Interviews,” recorded in 1951, brought even more widespread interest in his work, and by 1953 the best of his plays were in production all over the world, from Eastern Europe to North and South America. The habits of a lifetime, however, are often difficult to break, and Ghelderode continued to think of himself as an isolated and neglected author. Increasingly ill and infirm, he remained with his wife in the modest apartment that they had shared throughout most of their marriage, surrounded by the “playthings” of his choice—marionettes both whole and disembodied, tailor’s dummies, and wooden horses long since retired from service in carnivals. In life as in art, Ghelderode truly inhabited a world largely of his own invention, overshadowed by the hovering presence of death. When death finally came to the playwright, pretty much in keeping with the feverish dream or vision of his youth, his singular universe remained quite intact, providing the world stage with a permanent and irreplaceable contribution.

Analysis

Aptly described by David Grossvogel as essentially Romantic in spirit, the plays of Michel de Ghelderode are perhaps closer to the nineteenth century ideals of heroism and grotesquerie than are those of any other twentieth century writer. They are very much of their own time, however, in the deliberate irony of their conception and in the author’s careful use of shifting moods and perspectives. The exchange of roles between king and jester in Escurial, for example, bears witness to a distinctly modern sensibility, as does the emotional predicament of Christopher Columbus in the play that bears his name. For Ghelderode, as for many other modern French playwrights, history serves less as context than as pretext, providing the author with a suitable forum for the expression of his personal vision; thus does Columbus undertake his journeys out of sheer boredom, only to finish the play as a statue unveiled by Buffalo Bill. A strong anticlerical streak runs through most of Ghelderode’s plays, somewhat mitigated by a spirituality that nevertheless stops short of true belief; throughout Ghelderode’s theatrical universe, religion is more often honored in the breach than in the observance, as in the emergence of Barabbas as something closely resembling a popular hero. Sensuality, another dominant characteristic, is prominent in nearly all Ghelderode’s plays, most often in its least attractive forms: Gluttony and heavy drinking loom large, as does lust, often incarnated in haglike female characters with such suggestive names as Salivaine, Visquosine, and Vénéranda. Bearing witness to the author’s abiding interest in the plastic arts and in puppetry, the best of his plays are rich both in sound and in spectacle, providing a truly unforgettable experience for actors and spectator alike.

Escurial

Perhaps the best known and most frequently performed of Ghelderode’s early plays, Escurial produces a memorable theatrical experience quite out of proportion to its brevity. Set in early renaissance Spain, Escurial fully exploits the available resources of sight and sound as an unseen Queen lies on her deathbed, mourned by the impotent, decrepit King and his jester, Folial. Only gradually, against a sonorous background of howling guard dogs, does the spectator come to understand that Folial has been the Queen’s lover and that the King has poisoned her himself. In a tour de force of poetic dialogue that both recalls and transcends the best efforts of Luigi Pirandello, Ghelderode reveals each man as the other’s customarily hidden double, a revelation visually realized as they don each other’s costumes in a paroxysm of mourning and attempted gallows humor, observed only by a silent monk and a suitably ominous headsman. Predictably, the jester will pay with his life for his part in the grim charade, leaving behind him a visibly depleted and still frustrated monarch. Distinguished by the economy of its expression as well as by its highly original style, Escurial is widely recognized as one of Ghelderode’s finest achievements.

Pantagleize

Described by its author as “a farce to make you sad in three acts, nine scenes and an epilogue,” Pantagleize differs from most of Ghelderode’s other work not only in its length but also in the author’s unaccustomed choice of modern setting and characters. Of all Ghelderode’s plays, Pantagleize is, moreover, the most unabashedly modern in form as well as in content, recalling German expressionism even as it hovers close to Symbolism.

Written expressly for the Flemish comedian Renaat Verheyen, who died at twenty-six, soon after appearing in the title role, Pantagleize depicts the troubled life and times of a nearly archetypal antihero, a “professional philosopher” whose sustained thought processes have undermined his ability “to understand anything.” Employed as a fashion writer, Pantagleize is also the author—under the pseudonym Machinski—of a well-known anticapitalist pamphlet. In truth, however, Pantagleize cares little about fashion, even less about revolution, and wants more than anything else to be left alone with his increasingly inconsequential thoughts. More or less in self-defense, he has taken to expressing himself in platitudes, of which the most famous—and most characteristic—is “What a lovely day!”

Set “in a city of Europe, on the morrow of one war and the eve of another,” Pantagleize catches and portrays with antic satire the political instability and ferment of Europe in the 1920’s, with both Right and Left held up to ridicule. Pantagleize, anticipating by some twenty years the best efforts of Adamov and Ionesco, is indeed a remarkable and prescient work, marred for modern audiences only by Ghelderode’s use of ethnic stereotypes in the creation of such characters as the jive-talking black manservant Bam-Boulah and the alluring Jewess Rachel Silberschatz. Like Ionesco in Tueur sans gages (pr., pb. 1958; The Killer, 1960) or Adamov in Tous contre tous (pr., pb. 1953), Ghelderode in Pantagleize adamantly refuses to take sides, calling attention instead to the haplessness of the individual caught between political extremes.

Unknown to Pantagleize, the butler Bam-Boulah is a political activist who has identified Pantagleize to his leftist colleagues as the man whose words will set off the coming revolution. No sooner has Pantagleize remarked, as usual, on the lovely day than shots are heard in the streets. Quite unaware of what is going on, he soon thereafter receives a revolutionary hero’s welcome into the arms and bed of Rachel, a charming coconspirator of Bam-Boulah and his cronies at the Objective Bar and Grill. Thereafter, each of Pantagleize’s platitudinous statements will add new ferment and momentum to the revolution, culminating in his own arrest and eventual execution before a firing squad. Still oblivious, he expires after once again remarking, “What a lovely day!”

The Actor Makes His Exit

Following the premature death of Verheyen, Ghelderode severed most of his connections with the Flemish Popular Theater, preferring to work in solitude toward the perfection of his art. Judging from the nature and tone of his work written after that time, Ghelderode turned increasingly inward in his search for inspiration and material, almost completely turning his back on the rich vein of sociopolitical satire that he had mined so successfully in Pantagleize. The Actor Makes His Exit, presumably inspired by Renaat Verheyen’s death, marked a return to the exploration of illusion versus reality exemplified by Escurial; for the most part, Ghelderode’s subsequent efforts shun the social in favor of the psychological, all the while resisting the obvious, fashionable theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and their followers. Returning almost with a vengeance to the timeless and proverbial past, Ghelderode in his later efforts concentrates most of his energies on the evocation of such basic human appetites as avarice, gluttony, and lust, finding even in these a potential affirmation of life against the eventuality of death.

Red Magic

Written for an unspecified audience rather than explicitly for the socially conscious Popular Theater, Red Magic is perhaps the strongest and most characteristic play of Ghelderode’s maturity, combining most of his major themes and concerns in a memorable torrent of images and words. Containing some of the longest soliloquies in contemporary drama, Red Magic nevertheless involves the audience in the grotesquely comic thought processes of the archetypal miser Hieronymus, in whose presence even Molière’s Harpagon would appear pale by comparison. One of the most frequently quoted scenes in all of Ghelderode’s theater is that in which Hieronymus, contemplating his hoard with lip-smacking delight, makes plans to “breed” his male and female coins toward the production of innumerable shiny offspring. Ironically, however, Hieronymus’s lasciviousness extends no further than his treasure; he is so avaricious, in fact, as to have withheld from his nubile wife Sybilla the pleasure of the marriage bed. Given such proclivities, Hieronymus easily falls prey to a conspiracy woven about him by Sybilla, her lover, and the neighborhood beggar Romulus. It is Romulus who persuades Hieronymus to shelter under his roof the lover, Armador, presumably fleeing persecution because of his talents as an alchemist. Blinded by greed at the prospect of a houseguest who can transmute baser metals into gold, Hieronymus gladly offers his wife as the “virgin” whose blood will be needed for the “red magic” of Armador’s experiments. Thanks to Ghelderode’s careful if unobtrusive plotting, matters eventually escalate to the point where Hieronymus is sentenced to death for a murder that he did not commit, unjustly charged also with the offense of counterfeiting. Sybilla, meanwhile, elopes in the company of a corrupt monk with whom Armador has been sharing her affections.

In the view of such critics as Roland Beyen and the novelist-playwright Félicien Marceau, Hieronymus is doomed from the start not by his avarice but by a deeper maladjustment of which his greed is never more than a symptom. For Beyen, Hieronymus’s miserliness is at bottom a refusal to accept his own humanity or to share it with his fellow mortals: Equating money with power, Hieronymus would rather be feared and envied from afar than to accept the responsibilities of love or friendship. Significantly, Hieronymus’s sexual contact is limited only to prostitutes, with intimacy neatly defined within the limits of a simple cash transaction. At a somewhat deeper level, suggests Beyen, Hieronymus’s evident fear of life reflects an even stronger fear of death, from which he irrationally imagines that his riches might protect him: So great has his self-delusion become that as he prepares to meet his executioner, Hieronymus honestly believes himself to be immortal. In Red Magic, the latent pessimism of Pantagleize has grown both sharper and deeper, sparing neither characters nor audience. Whereas the self-delusion of Pantagleize is at first humorous, later pathetic, that of Hieronymus is neither. Although quite innocent of the charges leveled against him, Hieronymus nevertheless is clearly portrayed by the author as richly deserving of his fate. A similar pessimism pervades the subsequent Hop, Signor! in which the resolutely virginal Marguerite Harstein sensually offers her neck to the headsman’s ax after obtaining the murder by torture of her husband Juréal.

Chronicles of Hell

By far the most controversial—indeed, notorious—of all Ghelderode’s plays, Chronicles of Hell created a considerable stir when it was first performed in Paris during the fall of 1949, some twenty years after it was initially conceived and written. Indeed, much of the belated circulation and celebrity that came to Ghelderode in his fifties can be traced directly to the succès de scandale of Chronicles of Hell at the Théâtre Marigny. So little was known about Ghelderode at the time that wild rumors swept through Paris and France concerning the author’s age, occupation, and beliefs. Subsequently, after matters had cooled down, aficionados of the theater began to discover Ghelderode’s other works.

Set, like many other Ghelderode plays, “in bygone Flanders,” Chronicles of Hell evokes the assassination and bizarre “resurrection” of the heretical bishop Jan in Eremo, who rises from his deathbed to seek vengeance on the corrupt clerics who have poisoned him and who are currently celebrating his demise. Diverted from his plan by the sudden apparition of his grotesquely aged mother, Vénéranda, the bishop instead coughs up the poisoned communion wafer that has served his opponents as a weapon; having pardoned his assassins, he is then free to die in peace, watched over by his mother. The feuding monks and priests, meanwhile, create among themselves a riotous spectacle of venality that sufficed, in 1949, to drive a number of otherwise receptive spectators from the theater. Particularly biting is Ghelderode’s portrayal of the auxiliary bishop Simon Laquedeem, who ends the play in a paroxysm of scatology. Laquedeem, moreover, is presented throughout the play as a convert from Judaism, recalling Ghelderode’s earlier questionable portrayal of the radical Rachel Silberschatz in Pantagleize. In form and presentation, however, Chronicles of Hell compares quite favorably with the best of Ghelderode’s earlier efforts, rich in color, sound, and spectacle.

Marie la misérable

Ironically, Ghelderode had in all likelihood exhausted his talent, or at least his inner supply of material, by the time his work began to attract worldwide attention; the last of his efforts, Marie la misérable, is also generally agreed to be among the least. In any case, Ghelderode had already written enough, both in quality and in quantity, to keep actors and directors profitably occupied for several more decades to come. The “Ostend Interviews,” moreover, contain some of the finest observations that a playwright has ever made concerning his own work, extending outward to embrace dramatic art in general.

Bibliography

Cardy, Michael, and Derek Connon, eds. Aspects of Twentieth Century Theatre in French. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Provides background of developments in French language theater in the twentieth century. Bibliography and index.

Drake, Sylvie. “Good-Natured Fun with Columbus: Michel de Ghelderode’s Little-Known Version of the Explorer’s Vision Portrays a Gentle Creature Who Is ‘Haunted by the Horizon.’” Review of Christopher Columbus by Ghelderode. Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1992, p. 21. This review of a performance at Stages Theatre Center in Hollywood, California, directed by Florinel Fatulescu, provides an interesting perspective on this play.

Grossvogel, David. Twentieth Century French Drama. 1958. Reprint. New York: Gordian Press, 1967. Contains a chapter on Ghelderode that served to introduce the dramatist to English-speaking audiences.

Parsell, David B. Michel de Ghelderode. New York: Twayne, 1993. A basic biography of Ghelderode that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.

Willinger, David, and Jeanine Parisier Plottel, eds. Theatrical Gestures: From the Belgium Avant-garde. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1987. This look at avant-garde drama in Belgium contains a discussion of Ghelderode.