Another of the poems by Johan Daisne sent to me by his biographer, Johan Vanhecke (see these posts) bears the title ‘Weduwe’ (or ‘Widow’), though on its original publication in 1966, in Elsiever Weekblad, it was headed ‘Schildersweduwe’ (‘Painter’s Widow’), and in at least one version it bore the dedication ‘Voor Lize Ceunis’ – i.e. for Lize (Alice) Ceunis, the wife of Gerard Ceunis.
Gerard Ceunis died in September 1964. His granddaughter, Tessa Cathcart, tells me that her grandmother was so distraught that she refused to attend the funeral, at the parish church in the nearby village of St Ippolyts. Daisne’s poem suggests that he himself held back from expressing his condolences to Gerard’s widow for some time after the artist’s death. The poem reflects the affectionate relationship that persisted between Daisne and his ‘aunt’ Lize, who had been a close friend of his mother’s: in his obituary for Gerard in the newspaper Vooruit, Daisne mentions ‘all the children’s books I regularly received from Aunt Lize via Santa Claus’.
Gerard and Alice on an outing to Knokke, Belgium, in 1907/8 (see this post)
As with other poems by Daisne, it’s difficult to bring over into English the rhyming and scansion of the Dutch/Flemish original, but I hope the following translation gives some sense of this brief but affecting poem.
In my last post I drew upon Johan Vanhecke’s biography of the Belgian novelist and poet Johan Daisne as a key resource to explore the intriguing connections between Daisne, Gerard Ceunis and the silent film actress Lillian Hall-Davis. The section of Johan’s book from which I quoted in that post occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Marquita’. The paragraphs immediately preceding the discussion of Lillian Hall-Davis provide a detailed account of the summer vacation that Daisne, whose real name was Herman Thiery, spent as a young man at the home of Gerard and Alice Ceunis in Hitchin, in 1929, and of the writer’s unrequited passion for the Ceunisses’ daughter Vanna. Although the account contains a good deal of information that is already familiar from Daisne’s own writings, and indeed occasionally quotes from those texts, it also contains a number of fresh and interesting insights. Vanhecke’s narrative begins on page 79 of the book (as before, all translations from the biography are my own):
With peace of mind he [i.e. Daisne] goes to England for the summer to spend the holiday in Villa Salve on Gosmore Road in Hitchin in Hertfordshire with Uncle Gerard and Aunt Lisa, the painter Gerard Ceunis and his wife Lieze Vandamme, one of the best friends of Augusta de Taeye from the time when they belonged to the group of friends known as the Flinken. Daisne tells the story of that summer at length in Aurora. Herman had got to know their daughter Vanna a year before on the beach at Knokke ‘and immediately found her very sympathetic and no less interesting. She also liked me from the beginning, I saw it, I don’t know how, in the softening of her sea-grey eyes.’
Johan Daisne (Herman Thiery) as a young man
Gerard Ceunis’ wife’s first name was actually Alice, but according to Daisne, she was known to friends and family as ‘Lisa’, ‘Lize’ or ‘Lieze’. Augusta de Taeye was Daisne’s mother: see earlier posts for further information about Augusta, Alice and the ‘Flinken’. The reference to Daisne and Vanna meeting for the first time on the beach at Knokke, presumably on a return visit to Belgium by the Ceunis family, confirms – and provides a specific location for – the story, related by Daisne in Aurora, which was eventually included in his Zes domino’s voor vrouwen of 1944. Knokke, on the Belgian coast near Zeebrugge, had been a favourite location for outings by the ‘Reiner Leven‘ and ‘Flinken’ groups, which included both Daisne’s parents and Gerard and Alice Ceunis, in their youth. In Aurora, Daisne provides further details of this initial encounter with the girl he there calls ‘Vavane’ [my translation]:
Vavane! I had met her by the sea, in a cloud of English cigarette smoke: a beautiful, tall girl, with a blonde pageboy haircut, a spoiled rich kid, wild and lazy, who wasted her time or frittered it away with horseback riding and dancing during the holidays, and during the year, at her ‘college’, with novels and chocolates. At first sight our characters appeared to be two extremes, but at the same time we resembled each other, because of I know not what warm sympathy.
Photograph of Vanna Ceunis, c.1938, in the Johan Daisne archive at the Letterenhuis, Antwerp
Venhecke’s biographical account continues:
Vanna was born in Ghent and named after a character from a play by Maeterlinck. Her father, Gerard Ceunis, had taken some steps in literature himself, with a play that was published in 1909 with a foreword by André de Ridder, The Captive Princess, and previously appeared in Vlaamsche Arbeid, and with The Simple Room. A Gothic Fairy Tale, which appeared in Flandria’s Novellesbibliotheek a year later. At the start of the First World War, he crossed over to England, since he was a member of the Civil Guard, and set up a second-hand fashion store with his wife. Now that it is running well, he has turned to painting.
As I’ve noted before, the young Gerard Ceunis was a great admirer of the plays of MauriceMaeterlinck and named his daughter after the eponymous heroine of Maeterlinck’s 1902 play ‘Monna Vanna’. One of the frequent criticisms of Ceunis’ own youthful dramatic output was that it was a pale imitation of Maeterlinck’s style. I quoted from one hostile contemporary review of The Captive Princess in this post. I’ve yet to see the text of Ceunis’ Gothic fairy tale, and this is the first time that I’ve seen its full title cited. For more information about Flandria’s Novellesbibliotheek, including Ceunis’ illustrations for its covers, see this post.
I’ve mentioned before that Ceunis’ membership of the Civil Guard appears to be one of the main reasons behind his decision to flee to England, after the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. Vanhecke’s account above contains the first suggestion that I’ve come across that Ceunis sold ‘secondhand’ [tweedehands] clothing in his stores: I think this may be a mistake.
Moreover, the suggestion in the next sentence that Ceunis ‘turned to painting’ following his success in business is perhaps slightly misleading. In fact, this ‘turn’ took place when he was still a young man living in Belgium. After his failure to break through as a poet and playwright, Gerard Ceunis began to study art at the Ghent Academy and exhibited in his home country before emigrating. It is, however, accurate to say that his later success in business gave him the leisure to devote himself, as Christophe Verbruggen puts it, to ‘painting and philosophising’.
The next section of Vanhecke’s narrative draws heavily on Daisne’s own accounts, both in Aurora and in his obituary for Gerard Ceunis:
The holiday starts badly, because in London Daisne misses his train connection to Hitchin. He sends a telegram in a combination of French and English, and fortunately finds Vanna on the platform hours later. It will be an adventurous and at times romantic holiday, with all kinds of tours, on foot and by car.
One evening they return so late from a movie (Desert Song, with John Boles) that they hardly dare ring the bell, for fear of Vanna’s mother’s reaction. Seeing a light in the bathroom, they throw pebbles against the window and are let in by Uncle Gerard in his pyjamas. Vanna loves the music of Ravel. In the afternoons they would listen to the Bolero and Daisne decides to translate the Pavane. ‘And on one of the last evenings, alone in the drawing room, we would read on the sofa, both of us wearing plaid. We took turns reading aloud, she English poets, I French, until we wearily let the book rest on our knees, secretly smoked a cigarette together, stared into the fire and finally lost ourselves blushing into each other’s eyes.’ Herman also introduces her to his beloved Les Miserables, which he has of course brought with him, and from Vanna receives Wuthering Heights, which he will not read until two years later.
Herman Thiery is in love and draws positive energy from this. Or as he puts it much later in Lago Maggiore: ‘The air of that summer was so filled with the scents of love that I thought I had found its object in Cousin Vanna’s blonde figure and grey look. And indeed, with the immediate image of that companion in mind, I then began my studies at the [university] with all the power of infatuation.’
But on the morning that he has to leave England, Vanna is sick in bed. He says goodbye to her, but does not dare to kiss her and is quite frustrated about it. Everything else he relates in the story Aurora about Vanna is strictly true (except that she doesn’t have a son but a daughter).
In fact, as well as getting the sex of Vanna’s child wrong, Daisne would (deliberately?) add another fictional detail in Aurora, describing ‘Vavane’s’ husband erroneously as ‘an English earl’.
The next section of the biography includes two stanzas from Daisne’s plaintive poem ‘Vanna’. My attempt at an English translation of the whole poem (which I draw on below) can be found in thispost.
After her marriage in 1936 to a London lawyer, as a result of which he writes the poem ‘Salve’, there is no direct contact between Herman and Vanna, but Herman does maintain a correspondence with Aunt Lisa and Uncle Gerard.
When the latter dies in the 1960s, Vanna begins to write to him again, which inspires him to write the poem ‘Vanna’, of which he sends her a French translation in early 1974. He somewhat reproaches her for never expressing herself clearly but confesses that he has always loved her.
We were eighteen, long ago,
and you so tall and blonde and slim.
Sometimes you still write back with love
when I’ve sent you some nice thing.
.
But neither of us ever dared to say…
Shall I do it here and now?
Know this, by my eyes I swear:
I always loved you, to the end.
‘Salve’ today (via rightmove.co.uk)
I’ve yet to see a copy of Daisne’s poem ‘Salve’: in fact, this is the first reference to it that I’d come across, and I’d be very interested to read it. The next section includes an extract from an early version of Aurora which provides further insight into Daisne’s feelings of regret over his unfulfilled relationship with Vanna Ceunis:
However, he is very clear with himself in Chisinau, the first version of Aurora:
I did not respond, I was the little boy who did not dare, I was never clear, I who thought to lay all future hopes in barely veiled, brilliant words, which should be words of thanks, confessions, words of promise, and were only hopeless and bumbling obscurities. I alone have been dark, I alone am guilty, innocently guilty, because then I didn’t know any better and I couldn’t help it.
How clear were Vavane’s letters, how clear her dedication and her marginal notes in Stevenson’s ‘Virginibus et Puerisque’, my first and last Christmas present from her, after that English summer. How clear, above all, her last letter…
Vanhecke then offers an intriguing insight into Johan Daisne’s mixed feelings about the Ceunisses, and his resentment at having to rely on his friend Robert Mussche as an intermediary with them:
Herman may have had a problem with the general atmosphere at the Ceunis family home. He regularly talks about this with Robert Mussche, who stays in Hitchin in the summer of 1931: ‘I doubt whether you understand my feelings for them correctly […], they are also so difficult: in theory I love them, but in practice I can’t show it, because sometimes it moves me too much & furthermore, mainly, because I’m critical of their behaviour, cold condescension & capricious “grande geste”.’
In August 1933 he even had Robert Mussche provide her with the text of an article he had written about ‘Romanticism & Rationalism’: ‘The thoughts from it will probably best explain my attitude. Tell her above all about the distinction I make between our theoretical all-encompassing feelings of friendship and love & the practical attitude of criticism existing with it and alongside it.’
Robert keeps in regular contact with Vanna, but doesn’t like to talk about this with Herman.
On the weekend of March 10, 1934, this led to an almighty quarrel: ‘I have become accustomed to the fact that I always have to ask you if I want to know anything about the Ceunisses […] but the fact that you did not inform me on your own initiative of Vanna’s engagement, you must have understood that was anything but OK.’
Robert Muscche as a young man (via Johan Vanhecke’s biography of Daisne)
I’ve written elsewhere about Daisne’s friendship with the poet Robert Mussche (which is the main subject of the Basque novelist Kirmen Uribe’s docu-fiction Mussche) and about Mussche’s own visit to Hitchin, at his friend’s suggestion, and their rival affections for Vanna. I knew that the two friends temporarily fell out over this, and also as a result of Daisne’s apparently unflattering depiction of Mussche in Aurora. However, I hadn’t realised that Robert acted as a conduit for information about Vanna, nor was I aware of Daisne’s ambivalent feelings about his ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ in Hitchin. He writes about them elsewhere with such affection, that his use here of terms like ‘cold condescension’ comes as something of a shock.
Vanhecke adds a final detail about Daisne’s stay with the Ceunisses, drawing once again principally on the novelist’s own account in Aurora:
A small detail of the stay in Hitchin should not go unmentioned. One morning at the villa, Herman makes an important discovery. ‘There was no one down yet, the sun rose in the drawing-room and then by inspiration I followed the one ray that fell in that library, on a small item, it was called “La belle que voila” and standing up, strangely moved, I read that little, gripping story of unforgettable childhood love.
Liette, beautiful name!…I was still completely silent at breakfast, people asked what it was, and as I looked at Vavane’s sea-grey eyes, my heart became so soft that I was once again tempted into making a joke of it: I said I had a dream and told a variant of “La belle que voila.”’ Louis Hemon’s book is a real revelation. Herman immediately wants to translate it into Dutch, but after a few pages he gives up, because his Dutch seems too clumsy to him. Only thirty years later does he feel ready for a re-creation: The beauty of never again [De schone van nooit weer]… Whenever he rereads the story, he thinks back to England.
‘The beauty of never again…’ A phrase that nearly encapsulates Johan Daisne’s lifelong feelings of nostalgia and regret when recalling the magical summer he spent with Gerard, Alice, and above all Vanna Ceunis, in Hitchin.
Summer sunset over Priory Park, Hitchin: the view from near ‘Salve’
Elsie De Cuyper, Ceunis’ great niece, has kindly sent me some more photographs and documents relating to Gerard and his family. Among them is a photo of Gerard’s wife Alice and their dog, Jerry, standing in the back garden of their house, ‘Salve’, in Gosmore Road, Hitchin, framed against a view of the house. I suspect that the picture was taken by Gerard: there’s something about the composition that suggests an artist’s eye. I remember their granddaughter, Tessa Cathcart, telling me that she remembers her grandmother as a very fashionable lady, and this is certainly reflected in Alice’s dress and pose here.
I’m not sure when the photograph of Alice and Jerry was taken, but the picture below of Gerard and his dog has an inscription on the back, informing us that it dates from 1961, when the dog was 7 ½ years old and its owner 76. Gerard would live for another three years, dying in 1964. The photo seems to have been taken from the front of ‘Salve’, looking towards Gosmore Road and the trees that border Priory Park.
Since there is still so little information about Gerard Ceunis in the public domain, and so few photographs of him and Alice, particularly in later life, it’s wonderful to have these pictures, and I’m very grateful to Elsie for taking the time and trouble to share them with me.
Update
Gerard Ceunis’ granddaughter, Tessa Cathcart, tells me that she took the photo of her grandfather with his dog, Jerry. Tessa adds: ‘Jerry loved racing around their garden (larger then) but was really too strong for my grandparents to take for a walk, so my arrival was much welcomed by all!’
In a post last year I shared this 1908 photograph of members of the ‘Flinken’, the group of young feminists active in Ghent in the early years of the last century, of which Alice van Damme, the future wife of Gerard Ceunis, was a member. It was through the connection established between the Flinken and the radical group Reiner Leven, led by the future historian of science George Sarton, that Alice and Gerard met.
I came across the photograph in a book chapter by Christophe Verbruggen, who in turn sourced it from Lewis Pyenson’s 2008 biography, The Passion of George Sarton: A Modern Marriage and its Discipline. I found it frustrating that the photograph, as reproduced in Verbruggen’s chapter, was without a caption identifying the young women posing for it.
However, I’ve now acquired a copy of Pyenson’s book, which does include information about the identities of those in the photo. According to Pyenson they are, from the left: Marie Mees, Alice van Damme, Marie Praet, Esther Delahaye and Marthe Patyn. Standing on the right are Victorie Ledewyn and Lucie Boulanger. Seated on the right are Melanie Lorein and Augusta de Taeye.
This means that we now have two photographs of the future Alice Ceunis as a young woman: I recently identified her, alongside Gerard, in a photo from the same period, of Flinken and Reiner Leven members on an outing to Knokke. Melanie Lorein and Augusta de Taeye are also in both photographs and I wrote about them in that recent post.
I don’t know much about the other Flinken members in the posed group picture, apart for the basic information provided by researcher Anne Marie van der Meersch which is reproduced in Professor Verbruggen’s chapter. We know from that list that Marie Mees was born in 1886, the daughter of a labourer or workman, and that in 1910 she herself was working as a shopkeeper. Marie Praet was also born in 1886 and her father was also a labourer, while she was employed as a seamstress. Esther Delahaye, also born in 1886, was the daughter of a servant and she was a governess. The father of Marthe Patyn, was born in 1885, was a cabinet-maker, while she herself was a student nurse. However, other sources state that Patyn worked as a secretary for the Dangotte firm of interior decorators, and that she was responsible for recruiting Céline Dangotte and her family’s English lodger Mabel Elwes, the future wife of George Sarton, to the group. Born in 1875, Victoire Ledewijn was a servant’s daughter and was herself a civil servant. Lucie Boulanger, born in 1884, was also the daughter of a servant, and she worked as a telephonist.
There is only one direct reference to Gerard Ceunis in Pyenson’s biography, which is based largely on George Sarton and Mabel Elwes’ letters to each other. However, from what I’ve read of the book so far, I believe it will prove to be another valuable source, complementing the accounts by their daughter May Sarton, for understanding the fascinating social and cultural networks in which Gerard and Ceunis participated during their early years in Belgium.
Among the Ceunis-related items sent to me recently by the artist’s great niece, Elsie De Cuyper, was this photograph of a painting of flowers in a vase: what I believe is known in Flemish/Dutch as a bloemstilleven, or still life with flowers.
It’s reminiscent of another painting of flowers in a glass vase by Gerard Ceunis that was sold at auction in 2014, an image of which I reproduced in this post, and which may or may not be the painting ‘Chrysanthemums’ that featured in an exhibition of Belgian art in Folkestone in 1916.
The picture sent to me by Elsie has a special poignancy, since it is believed to be the last one that Gerard Ceunis painted. In sending an image of it to the De Cuyper family, his widow Alice added in her own handwriting the words reproduced above: Dit is de laatste schilderij van oom Gerard: ‘This is the last painting by Uncle Gerard’. Especially poignant also, that in both Belgium and Britain, chrysanthemums have traditionally been seen as a symbol of death and mourning.
The photograph above was taken in 1907 or 1908 on an outing from Ghent to Knokke by members of the radical groups Reiner Leven and De Flinken. When I first posted a copy of this photo, nearly a year ago, I was unsure of the identities of the people in the picture. I hadn’t realised – or at least, I hadn’t been able to confirm – that the group included Gerard Ceunis and the woman who would become his wife, Alice Van Damme. However, I’ve now traced the photograph to its source, in the catalogue of the Letterenhuis – the Museum of Flemish Literature, based in Antwerp – which helpfully names those featured in the photo.
From left to right, the photograph shows: Augusta de Taeye, Melanie Lorein, Lisbeth Verwest, Raymond Limbosch, Céline Dangotte, Gerard Ceunis and Alice Van Damme.
Augusta de Taeye (1885 – 1976) was a feminist teacher and educational pioneer. She married the educator and science populariser Leo-Michel Thiery (1877 – 1950). They were the parents of Herman Thiery, who wrote under the name Johan Daisne (see the previous post).
Melanie Lorein (1886 – 1977) was at one time linked romantically with the pioneering historian of science George Sarton (see his daughter May Sarton‘s memoir I Knew a Phoenix, which I wrote about here), though he would eventually marry another Flinken member, Mabel Elwes. Melanie would marry the Polish-born socialist Viktor Alter (1890 – 1941), though she remained in Belgium when he returned home to lead the Jewish socialist Bund. He was executed in one of Stalin’s purges in 1941.
Lisbeth Verwest (1885 – 1921) was a poet. She would marry the painter Robert Aerens. She is the ‘Tantelle’ of Johan Daisne’s novel Lago Maggiore (see this post). Having become ill while her husband was serving at the front in the First World War, she died in a sanatorium in 1921.
Raymond Limbosch (1884 – 1953) was a poet and philosopher. He would marry Céline Dangotte.
Céline Dangotte (1883 – 1975) inherited her mother’s interior design business but in later life also became known as a writer. She was married to Raymond Limbosch. May Sarton wrote a tribute to her in her essay collection A World of Light and fictionalised her life story in the novel The Bridge of Years.
It’s wonderful to have another photograph of Gerard Ceunis, as there are so few of him in the public domain. He’s dressed quite formally here, as I suppose was the style at the time, though his hair looks rather longer and more unruly than in later photographs of him as an established businessman in England. It’s also wonderful to have a picture of him alongside, and smiling at, Alice who, unfortunately, has turned away from the camera at the key moment.
The copy of the photograph in the Letterenhuis collection is from the archives of Johan Daisne. Alice Van Damme is referred to in the catalogue as ‘Lize’, which appears to have been the version of her name by which Daisne knew her: in Lago Maggiore he writes about staying with ‘Aunt Lize and Uncle Gerard’ in Hitchin in the summer of 1929. Daisne seems to have regarded a number of the members of Reiner Leven and De Flinken as his aunts and uncles.
The sheer happiness that these young people felt in each other’s company shines through this photograph from more than a century ago. Less than a decade later, the cataclysm of a world war and the invasion of their country would scatter them to the four winds and utterly change their lives.
A few weeks ago I reported that I had located the grave of Gerard and Alice Ceunis in the churchyard at St Ippolyts, about a mile and a half from their home in Gosmore Road, Hitchin. The inscription relating to Alice was perfectly legible, but the information about Gerard had faded over time and was difficult to make out.
Since then, we’ve been back to the churchyard a couple of times, armed with tracing paper and pencils, and our determined rubbing of the tombstone has finally revealed the whole inscription, which is reproduced below, retaining the exact layout of the lettering on the stone:
When I’m with you I forget all my unhappiness. When I’m there I’m thinking only of you. What good times you have already given me – what great enjoyment you have bestowed on me! Most people, and especially those egotistical bourgeois men, don’t approve of your behaviour. It’s not appropriate for girls to engage with higher culture – well, they don’t understand it, it’s too elevated for ‘girls’. It’s not ladylike to go to meetings on your own. Mum or Dad should go with you.
In this extract from her diary, written in November 1905, Alice Van Damme, the future wife of Gerard Ceunis, expresses her appreciation for her ‘club’, the Flinken [1]. May Sarton, whose mother Mabel Elwes was also a member, describes the Flinken as ‘a group of working girls from a…modest social background, girls who did not attend the university, but instead the École Professionelle of the city of Ghent, a business school that trained them to be secretaries and clerks.’ [2] Sarton explains that the group’s name is ‘an untranslatable Flemish word meaning ‘merry’ or in French, ‘gaillard’ (though the historian Denise De Weerdt translates it as ‘Les Courageuses’ or ‘Women with Spirit’):
Their language was primarily Flemish: their parents were small tradesmen, butchers, grocers: but just like the university students, the children of the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ were in revolt against their background, were fervently committed to plain living and high thinking, though their seriousness was tempered by a good deal of laughter and self-mockery. They were ardent feminists of course, called each other by surname, and believed that wives should support themselves.
It was through a member who already had a job that ‘two young women of the bourgeoisie’ joined the group. Marthe Patyn worked as a secretary for the firm of Dangotte, who were interior decorators, and she recruited Céline Dangotte, who had just joined the family business, and Mabel Elwes, a young English artist who was living with the Dangottes. The table below, reproduced by Christophe Verbruggen from a publication by Anne Marie van der Meersch, provides a useful list of the membership of the Flinken, together with their dates of birth, fathers’ occupations, their own occupations, and an indication of their higher education, where relevant [3]:
From this, we learn that Alice Van Damme, who would have been nineteen years old when she wrote the diary entry quoted above, was the daughter of a tailor (kleermaker) and that in 1910 she herself was working as a bediende, which I understand could mean either a clerk or a domestic servant.
Verbruggen’s chapter also reproduces this photograph of the members of the Flinken in 1906 or 1907, from Lewis Pyenson’s biography of George Sarton [4], but frustratingly it is unlabelled, which makes identifying Alice, or indeed any of the members, rather difficult (though I wonder if Céline Dangotte is the young woman seated third from the right, with Mabel Elwes standing behind her and to the right?):
As May Sarton explains, it was through her membership of the Flinken that her mother, Mabel Elwes, first met her father, the future historian of science, George Sarton, when the group of young women came into contact with Reiner Leven(‘Purer Living’) the association of Ghent university students that George had formed with his friends, medical student Irénée Van der Ghinst and the future poet and philosopher Raymond Limbosch. The purpose of the organisation, according to May Sarton, ‘was to lift the brutalising level of student life and provide a centre for those who did not look to prostitution and liquor as major outlets for their energies.’ The group ‘arranged lectures on history, politics, art, vegetarianism, went on excursions and picnics in the surrounding countryside, or carried on discussions in their ‘local’ which was, significantly enough, the Temperance Café.’
Flinken / Reiner Leven excursion in Knokke, c. 1907-1908. Raymond Limbosch is front and centre, with his future wife Céline Dangotte behind him (AMVC-Letterenhuis, Antwerp, via)
The association brought together young men with a variety of intellectual interests. According to Christophe Verbruggen: ‘Reiner Leven exemplified the synergy between visual artists, writers, scientists and other intellectuals during the Belle Époque.’ Besides Sarton and Limbosch, its members included the writers Paul-Gustave van Hecke and Paul Kenis, scientists Paul van Oye and Leo Michel Thierry – and of course Gerard Ceunis who, in Verbruggen’s words ‘joined the Reiner Leven association in the hope of finding kindred spirits there’. May Sarton tells the story of how the two groups came together:
The Reiner Leven young men were unaware of the existence of a sister organisation until they put an ad in the paper, for the purpose of recruiting new members at the university. The Flinken saw the ad, signed Irenée van Ghinst, and supposed that Irenée (spelled rather eccentrically with two final ‘e’s,) must be a woman. The Flinken despatched a pretty young woman called Mélanie Lorien to go and have a talk with Van der Ghinst. She was delighted, of course, to find that ‘the young woman’ was actually a charming, fanciful young man. Van der Ghinst reported the affair to Sarton and they agreed that nothing could be more appropriate than to include a group of working girls in Reiner Leven. It was a fairly daring departure from the social mores of the period and no doubt this fact added a certain pleasure to the whole affair. They went on regular Sunday expeditions together, walking through the country with their knapsacks on their shoulders, singing the Internationale.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of the young men of Reiner Leven ended up marrying members of the Flinken. George Sarton, after a brief romance with Mélanie Lorien, married Mabel Elwes. Raymond Limbosch married Céline Dangotte. Leo Michel Thierry married Augusta de Taeye. And, of course, Gerard Ceunis married Alice Van Damme. May Sarton quotes a letter from Raymond Limbosch to Mabel Elwes, who was staying with her family in England, bringing her up to date with all the news about Flinken friends, including a report on a conversation over supper ‘where we talked only of conduct between young men and women, with wit, good sense, revolt smallness, and meanness, quite a jumble! All this about Alice who was seen with a young man…but Céline will tell you all about that in detail.’
As there was only one Alice in the Flinken, it must be Alice Van Damme who is being referred to here. But it’s unclear whether the ‘young man’ in question is Gerard Ceunis, or his friend, and rival for Alice’s affections, Paul-Gustave van Hecke.
Christophe Verbruggen claims that Ceunis’ views on women were not quite as progressive as those of his fellow members of Reiner Leven:
Pretty soon Ceunis distanced himself from Reiner Leven and ‘De Flinken’, a group of feminists who had joined that society. He placed his fiancée Alice Van Damme in a difficult position, because she was a member of both clubs. Young women, in Ceunis’ opinion, should not be concerned with reading Maeterlinck or with vegetarianism. He was dubbed an anti-feminist, a reputationhe himself nurtured with his misogynistic public statements. It earned him the scorn of half of Ghent.
Nevertheless, the couple would eventually marry, have a child (Vanna) together, and emigrate to England following the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. And despite Gerard’s apparent anti-feminism, the couple maintained contact with at least some of their friends from Reiner Leven and the Flinken, particularly with Leo Michel Thierry and August de Taeye, whose son Herman, a.k.a the author Johan Daisne, would often stay with the Ceunis family in Hitchin, and after Gerard’s death in 1964, would do his utmost to ensure that the latter was remembered in his home country.
Notes
1. Diary of Alice Van Damme, 1905 (Cathcart collection), quoted in Christophe Verbruggen (2008) ‘”Vrouwelijke” intellectuelen en het Belgische feminisme in de belle époque’. In: Verslagen van het Centrum voor Genderstudies – UGent, (2008)17, p. 7-25. [my translation]
2. May Sarton (1959), I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography, New York: Norton
3. Anne Marie Simon-van der Meersch (1982) De eerste generaties meisjesstudenten aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, Gent: RUG Archief, reproduced in Verbruggen (2008) – see above [1]
4. Lewis Pyenson (2008) The Passion of George Sarton: A Modern Marriage and its Discipline, Philadelphia: Amer Philosophical Society
The Quest for Ceunis 