I’ve written before about the Belgian poet and novelist Johan Daisne (1912 – 1978), who as a young man, in 1929, spent the summer with Gerard and Alice Ceunis at ‘Salve’, their house in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where the future writer fell hopelessly in love with the Ceunises’ daughter Vanna. Johan Daisne was the pen name of Herman Thiery, and he was the son of Leo Michel Thiery and Augusta de Taeye, both members as students in Ghent of the radical groups Reiner Leven and De Flinken, which was how they befriended Gerard and Alice.
Johan Daisne (via http://literairgent.be)
As a child, Daisne got to know not only Gerard Ceunis and his future wife Alice Van Damme, but many other members of their network of artists, writers and scientists in Ghent, whom he came to regard as his uncles and aunts. They feature in his 1957 novel Lago Maggiore: De roman van een man; de roman van een vrouw, which appears to mix fact and fiction in a magic realist style. As far as I can ascertain, the novel, which was written in Dutch/Flemish, has not been translated into English. I’ve purchased a secondhand copy of a German translation, partly because my knowledge of German is better than my understanding of Dutch, and also for the simple reason that it was much cheaper.
So far, I’ve come across two references in the book to Gerard and Alice Ceunis. The first occurs in a long section in which the novelist writes admiringly about his ‘aunt’ Lisbeth Verwest , a member of ‘De Flinken’ and a poet in her own right, who would go on to marry the painter Robert Aerens. In the novel her name is shortened to ‘Tante L’, which then becomes ‘Tantelle’. Daisne writes [my translation]:
Tantelle had started out as a simple seamstress, but she had wanted to work her way up and had been noticed by the ‘Reiner Leven’ group, in which rich and poor young people came together in their idealism. There she had met my aunts and uncles who were a little older than her; the poet Raymond Limbosch, who died a few years ago; the future American professor George Sarton, the father of the History of Science, and the playmate of my childhood vacations, the novelist Mary Sarton. There Tante L had also met the painters Gerard Ceunis, who now lives in Hertfordshire, and Robert Aerens. And shortly before the war broke out, Elisa Verwest had become Lisbeth Aerens-Verwest. At that time she lived alone in her little villa in Afsnee while Robert was at the front; and you can still read her daydreams in the posthumous book of poems and prose published by De La Croix at Van Melle, of which I gave my copy to our city library to preserve her memory a little.
Portrait of Lisbeth Verwest by her husband Robert Aerens, c. 1921
Later in the novel, Daisne refers to his stay with the Ceunises in Hitchin, ‘Aunt Lize’ presumably being his name for Alice Ceunis:
But the summer vacation in Hertfordshire, with Aunt Lize and Uncle Gerard Ceunis, got me back in shape.
In a country house nearby lived a film star that I loved to watch, the delicate Lilian Hall-Davis. I didn’t find this out until much later, when she had long since met her tragic end. But I must have sensed something of their proximity. The air was so full of the scents of love that summer, that I thought I had found its source in the blonde shape and grey eyes of my cousin Vanna. And indeed, with the image of this companion firmly in front of my eyes, I began my studies at the academy with the zeal of a lover.
In fact, the former silent film star Lilian Hall-Davis, who would take her own life in 1933, lived in the village of Great Amwell, near Ware, which is twenty miles or so from Hitchin.
This was the second time that Johan Daisne had managed to work Vanna Ceunis’ name into his fiction (the first being in his 1944 short story collection Zes domino’s voor vrouwen, or ‘Six dominoes for women’), which gives a sense of the intensity of his unrequited love. And, of course, Lago Maggiore is not the only postmodern novel to feature Daisne’s lovelorn summer in Hitchin, the other being Basque writer Kirmen Uribe’s 2013 book Mussche.
The Quest for Ceunis 