[In the following review, Draper presents a personal portrait of Ghelderode to gain greater understanding of his work.]

The masks Ghelderode wore for the world were in many ways unfortunate because they alienated him from his contemporaries. His weird poses frightened many admirers away, denying them the happiness of knowing Ghelderode personally. That Ghelderode's art has a secure place in modern dramatic literature is almost universally agreed. That he was an affectionate, exemplary friend, a lovable man, that he possessed a droll sense of humor, incarnated hard work and literary discipline à la Voltaire and Balzac without being spoiled by worldly success, and that he was a pauper most of his life—all this is known only to a small group of friends. They include several Belgians, a few Frenchmen, one or two Englishmen, and a couple of Americans. I, one of the Americans, had the privilege of knowing Ghelderode during 1959 and 1960 when I spent a year in Brussels expressly to study his life and drama. After six months there, twenty-five interviews at his home, and dozens of letters exchanged in regard to our work, Ghelderode confirmed our friendship with a long, strong hand-clasp, a startling and incongruous gesture sharply contrasted to his ghostly emaciation, ephemeral countenance, and the legend of his “other-worldliness.”

Ghelderode knew about friendship—what its responsibilities mean and what its joy engenders. “I ask only some measure of understanding from my friends,” Ghelderode told me. “They can give me the one thing any human being can offer another: understanding. To the remark, ‘That is not much,’ I reply, ‘It is everything.’”

Here are some of Ghelderode's thoughts about l'amitié, written to friends who range from an unknown French actor to a revered Queen: “Friendship is life's greatest treasure …” “… a mystical force lighted by a perpetual lamp held up before us by an invisible hand …” “… the golden chain of friendship cannot be broken, not even tarnished. It links us together forever …” “… your friendship is life's breath, a kind of last sacrament, a holy bell tolling outside the realm of my world of shadows …” “… your friendship is a beacon, a light which touches me, reassures me, tells me that our universe doesn't stop with the walls of my house.”

Ghelderode's love of friends was boundless, ecstatic, and profound, even bewildering to those less ardent and responsive than he. His detractors mocked his written expressions of friendship as “romantic nonsense,” but those he befriended found them elegant, sincere, and moving. Ghelderode scarcely concerned himself with his critics, with those he called “small men,” “limited souls,” for he was convinced that any mystic like himself could appeal only to the elect, to “âmes bien nées”—“souls well-born.” Like his friend Maeterlinck, Ghelderode thought that at times the soul seemed to rise to the surface of humanity, revealing itself there in its full life and power.

To illustrate what he meant about the revelation of the soul, Ghelderode told me a story about his childhood. It concerned an old coal miner and a lost child on a cold winter's afternoon. Ghelderode was only five years old at the time. He had strayed a short distance from his home in Ixelles (a district of Brussels). He was lost, confused, and he began to cry. He sobbed loudly, but none of the well-dressed women passing by stopped to help. Suddenly, an aged coal miner stumbled across the street and took Michel in his arms, comforting him. Muttering Flemish, the old peasant could hardly make himself understood to the boy who was schooled only in French. But Ghelderode comprehended the tenderness, understanding, and sympathy in the old man's eyes. “That day I saw the essence of love in that man's face, although his appearance was coarse, his filthy clothes smelled foul, and his big boots and strange helmet frightened me. I wasn't deceived by the black soot which had permeated the hundreds of crevices in his wrinkled hands and which covered his face with a black mask. He treated me more tenderly, more protectively than my father ever had. I wasn't afraid—in fact I felt secure and warm as we walked back hand in hand to my neighborhood where he located my home. Most children would have screamed with fright at the sight of that old bogey man, but I saw him differently. Even then I had an educated heart.”

Another unknown side of Ghelderode was his aggressive sense of humor, which usually expressed itself in practical jokes. During the period when he was a civil servant at the town hall office of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, in Brussels, Ghelderode was constantly the target of his co-workers' jibes. Performing few if any of his clerical duties, he preferred to—and did—write his plays. His colleagues, solid enough, but with little respect or understanding for the bizarre poet in their midst, took pride in upsetting Ghelderode's manuscripts after he had left the office. Each morning Ghelderode found his papers in disarray, some sheets folded into paper dolls, some ripped in two, others tied in toilet tissue. Finally, in retaliation, Ghelderode rubbed a few of the rough drafts with human excrement which stuck to the intruders' hands once they began their nightly jest. “After all,” Ghelderode laughed, “they introduced the bathroom odor in their joke, so I gave them the real thing!”

When fame came suddenly in the late forties (“la gloire,” Ghelderode called it) bearing his name across Europe, he did not turn his head, nor could he substantially change his standard of living. (His fame never brought much money.) Too many years of obscurity, illness (incurable chronic asthma made him an invalid for more than twenty-five years¹) and despair that his dramas might do harm rather than good (“I always hoped that my plays would elevate mankind, not the opposite”) had gone by for him to change with his renown. Performances in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, Oslo, Krakow, and Cairo brought reputation and a little cash—but success, always spiritually dangerous for the artist, did not cause Ghelderode to put on airs. Worldly success meant little to him. “Fame and immortality are meaningless, empty words. I live to write and for the joy of being alive.”

Many writers would have been tempted to come before their public playing a glamorous role, responding ceremoniously to the honors which had come so late. But Ghelderode only withdrew further into his own small universe, locking his huge sixteen-foot door to celebrity seekers, journalists, and the curious, refusing to appear on television or attend the theatre, fabricating those thousand stories which have emblazoned his all-too-infernal legend. He invented tales that he was the terror of his publishers, that he was a Don Juan who changed his women as often as he wrote a story, that he was rich but hoarded his money like Hieronymus in Red Magic, and most ironically of all, that he was indolent and wrote only occasionally when inspiration flashed across his brain.

But one of Ghelderode's editors at Gallimard in Paris admitted that the Belgian playwright was a gentleman, co-operative, responsible, and a pleasure to work with. Unlike the legend, Ghelderode told his confidants many times that he had lived in harmony with his wife Jeanne for over forty years, a perfect soulmate of whom Ghelderode wrote he owed “everything.” As his stories had it, he was lazy. Yet the strange recluse and grotesque visionary worked longer hours and harder than most modern executives or ambitious businessmen. Despite being a natural “dreamer”—that was Ghelderode's name for himself, wanting always to escape from work like his Christopher Columbus—the dramatist taught himself how to write long hours.

During the Second World War, he and his wife scarcely had enough to eat; but little bread, tattered clothing, and no coal did not stop Ghelderode from working. Then as before—since 1915—he wrote night after night, year after year, decade after decade—finally nearly a half century of filling thousands of sheets with that even, fine, curlicue handwriting reminiscent of times past. Indeed, Ghelderode possessed one of the most disciplined intelligences of our age. The effect of all Ghelderode's invented legend was that the world at large regarded him as an eccentric, not the genius his work shows him to be.

The scene of his industry was his small living room-museum filled with Ensor masks, theatrical posters, medieval wooden statues of saints, puppets, large marionette dolls, cheap department store mannequins, some nude, some dressed for various roles of the stage (Hamlet and Isolde side by side); a photo of a Venus, sumptuous in her nakedness next to a portrait of the Blessed Virgin, humble in her Gothic pose; sea shells, stuffed fish, and many unknown paintings as well as reproductions of Bosch, Breughel, El Greco, and Rouault. There, surrounded by his objects (of little intrinsic value)—“I am a collectioneur and each piece has special significance”—Ghelderode sat at an oval table, in an eighteenth century armchair covered with a scarlet chasuble. There he gave life to his colorful throng: an entire school of clowns, torturers, misers, lecherous and pious women, devils, angels, dwarfs, and midgets, characters who return from the dead, Christopher Columbus and Don Juan, Pantagleize, Barabbas and Folial—the possessed, the ecstatic, the bewildered, the frightened, the courageous—all full of the joy and juice of life.

At that table Ghelderode suffered his nights of pain, kept his hand to paper, and finally wrote himself to death.² Most of his work is difficult to classify: it is not exactly symbolist or poetic drama; neither is it romantic, naturalistic, epic, or “absurd” theatre. Ghelderode echoes ideas, perhaps, from many of these movements, but he has invented a unique school—his own. In a large sense, most of his work is religious because he saw good and evil first as metaphysical categories, and then in the second instance as moral ones. Do not many of his plays deal with God and the Devil and with the choices man must make between good or evil? These ultimate moral questions concerned Ghelderode. In a narrow sense, Ghelderode's work is also religious, that is, his writing is mystical, supernatural, and fantastic. “I believe in the mysteries of life and death,” Ghelderode has written, “I am a poet just for that reason.”

I never received a letter from Ghelderode in which he did not mention both God and death as well as describe the appropriate season of the Church calendar, whether Christmas time, Lent, or Advent. He referred to death as a “beautiful woman,” “a faithful companion,” as “red roses in the snow,” “innocent violets in the eyes of Christ,” “blue sunlight,” as fulfillment, peace, destiny … as life itself. He called God and death by the same names. And now, after years of toil, suffering and pain, Ghelderode rests—if one believes him—“in the tender arms of God, comforted as well by my beautiful lady,” whom he often crowned with flowers.

Notes

1. At the beginning of my interview of January 20, 1960, Mme. Ghelderode announced that Ghelderode would have to come into his bedroom for his medicine. He shuffled out. From the next room I heard wheezing, coughing, and throat-clearing. He breathed with great difficulty, heaving asthmatically. He looked particularly thin that day, old, worn, and frightened. His lips were blue, his skin a sickroom pale, fingernails bluer than his lips.

2. A careful inventory would show that Ghelderode's complete oeuvre—plays (over a hundred), short stories, poetry, letters, art criticism, and miscellaneous prose—would fill thirty or so substantial volumes.