Remy de Gourmont

Normandy, the law, and the library

Remy de Gourmont was born on 4 April 1858 at Bazoches-au-Houlme, in the Orne, in Normandy. He read law at Caen, and in November 1881 took a post as an attaché at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, where he stayed for ten years.

In April 1891 the Mercure de France published his essay Le Joujou patriotisme. It argued that France and Germany belonged to one aesthetic culture, that the loss of Alsace and Lorraine twenty years earlier was not worth another war, and that patriotism was a toy adults had refused to put away. Nationalist opinion was not in the mood. He was dismissed from the library and never held a salaried post again.

The lupus

In 1891, the same year he lost the library post, Gourmont developed lupus vulgaris. It is not the autoimmune disease that carries the name today: lupus vulgaris is tuberculosis of the skin, which spreads across the face in raised brown-red patches and destroys the tissue underneath. Before antibiotics the only way to stop it was to burn it out. The cauterisations were repeated and extremely painful, and they did not restore the face.

He stopped going out. For most of the remaining twenty-four years he worked at home and walked to the Mercure's offices, with a summer at Coutances. He was thirty-three when it started, and he had until then been a sociable man in a sociable trade.

Berthe de Courrière had become his companion in late 1886 and stayed until he died. She was the model for Sixtine, the novel he published in 1890, and she inherited everything, including a quantity of unpublished manuscript that she passed to his brother Jean de Gourmont. She died within a year of him.

The biography needs one caution here. Because Gourmont wrote about desire more frankly than almost anyone else of his generation, and because he was disfigured, later writers have been quick to read the books as compensation for the face. What is documented is the diagnosis, its date, the treatment and the withdrawal. What the illness did to him inwardly is not on the record, and he did not put it there.

The Mercure de France

The Mercure de France was got together in the autumn of 1889 by eleven men with no money and no connections, and the first issue came out on 1 January 1890. Gourmont was one of them; Alfred Vallette directed it from the first issue until he died at his desk in 1935; his wife Rachilde reviewed its novels and held the Tuesday receptions in its offices. The first year brought eleven subscriptions. Within a decade it was the review the Symbolists published in and the house that printed their books.

Gourmont wrote for it for twenty-five years, and he said afterwards that its freedom was what had let his own personality develop. He put the same thought to Ezra Pound in a letter in June 1915, three months before his death, when Pound wrote asking him to support a review that would connect Paris, London and New York.

The aim of the Mercure has been to permit any man, who is worth it, to write down his thought frankly — this is a writer's sole pleasure.

Le but du Mercure a été de permettre à ceux qui en valent la peine d'écrire franchement ce qu'il pense — seul plaisir d'un écrivain.

The criticism

Le Livre des masques appeared in 1896, with a second volume in 1898. It is a set of short portraits of the Symbolist writers, one each, with a woodcut by Félix Vallotton, and for most readers it was the introduction to the movement. The preface is the part that is still quoted, because it states a position rather than describing one.

A writer's capital crime is conformity, imitativeness, submission to rules and precepts.

Le crime capital pour un écrivain c'est le conformisme, l'imitativité, la soumission aux règles et aux enseignements.

Le Problème du style (1902) was written against a book by Antoine Albalat called L'Art d'écrire enseigné en vingt leçons, which promised to teach writing in twenty lessons by imitation of the masters. Gourmont's answer was that style is physiology rather than technique, that a writer sees in a particular way and the sentences follow from it, and that the exercises Albalat recommended could only produce a good pastiche.

His portrait of Rachilde in Le Livre des masques is a strange document, and worth naming plainly, because he was her colleague at the Mercure for twenty-five years and her friend. Most of it argues that women cannot take proper cognisance of themselves, so that "the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them". He then reverses at the end, calls Le Démon de l'absurde her best book, and says that pages like La Panthère show "that a woman can have phases of virility". Both quotations are from Jack Lewis's 1921 translation.

Physique de l'amour: essai sur l'instinct sexuel (1903) is the odd one out. It surveys sexual behaviour across the animal kingdom, from the hermaphroditism of oysters to the cannibalism of spiders, and argues that human love is continuous with the rest of it and not a separate order of thing. Une nuit au Luxembourg (1906) is a short novel presented as the manuscript of a dead newspaper correspondent, who spends a night in the Luxembourg gardens with a stranger who turns out to be a god, and argues with him about women and religion until morning.

Natalie Clifford Barney and the Lettres à l'Amazone

By 1910 Gourmont had been out of society for nineteen years. Natalie Clifford Barney, an American writer thirty-four years old who had been running a Friday salon at 20 rue Jacob since the previous autumn, went and got him. She visited, sent flowers, took him driving and out on the river, and eventually got him to her masked ball and to the salon itself.

Out of the friendship he wrote a series of open letters, published fortnightly in the Mercure through 1912 and 1913 and collected by Georges Crès in 1914 as Lettres à l'Amazone. He called her the Amazon after the way she rode in the Bois de Boulogne in the mornings: to ride side-saddle in French is monter en amazone. The book made her a public literary figure. He died the following year, and she carried the name until her own death in 1972; her headstone at Passy identifies her as the Amazon of Remy de Gourmont.

The letters themselves are not love letters and not quite essays. They are addressed to a real correspondent who answers back inside them, and they move between erotic theory, reading, ageing and the difference between the sexes. One sentence from them has had a longer life than the book.

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Ezra Pound read Gourmont as the model of what an intelligence in literature should look like, and set about moving him into English. He wrote him into A Study in French Poets, then gave him a chapter of his own, Remy de Gourmont: A Distinction, in Instigations (1920). He translated Un cœur virginal as A Virgin Heart in 1921, and Physique de l'amour as The Natural Philosophy of Love for Boni and Liveright in 1922.

Pound's postscript to that translation is his own, not Gourmont's, and it is worth separating from the book it is attached to. Pound proposes there that the brain is in origin a reserve of seminal fluid, and builds a theory of male invention on it. Gourmont was seven years dead and had proposed nothing of the kind.

T. S. Eliot's debt is on the surface of The Sacred Wood (1920). Its opening essay, The Perfect Critic, carries an epigraph from Lettres à l'Amazone. In the same essay Eliot writes that "Of all modern critics, perhaps Remy de Gourmont had most of the general intelligence of Aristotle", and a few pages later he calls him "the critical consciousness of a generation", a man who "could supply the conscious formulas of a sensibility in process of formation". In the essay on Philip Massinger he quotes Le Problème du style on Flaubert and introduces Gourmont as "the great critic". Eliot's argument about the poet's impersonality, made in Tradition and the Individual Talent in the same volume, rests on those Gourmont pages.

To erect one's personal impressions into laws is the great effort of a man, if he is sincere.

Eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c'est le grand effort d'un homme s'il est sincère.

Death

Gourmont died on 27 September 1915, aged fifty-seven, of a cerebral haemorrhage, shortly after being brought to the Hôpital Boucicaut in the fifteenth arrondissement. He had gone on writing through the first year of the war, and had been corresponding with Pound about the transatlantic review that Pound never managed to fund in that form. He is buried at Père-Lachaise, with Berthe de Courrière, who died the following year.