Alice Van Damme and the ‘Flinken’

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 reputation he 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

Leaving Belgium

Gerard Ceunis left Belgium, with his wife Alice and their infant daughter Vanna, in 1914, their departure prompted by the German invasion of their country. They settled in England, eventually making their home in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.

Ghent before the First World War (via https://stamgent.be/en/digi-expos/gent-bezette-stad)

As I noted in earlier post, the Ceunis family had been living in Geraard Mercatorstraat in Ghent since 1912, having moved there from Baudelostraat in 1910.

Geraard Mercatorstraat in Ghent today (photograph via google.co.uk/maps)

Germany invaded Belgium on 4^th August 1914, following the neutral country’s refusal to allow passage across its territory to German troops. According to the website of the Stadsmuseum Gent:

Ghent escaped the worst of the invasion. The city didn’t suffer severe shell damage and, in fact, came out of the conflict relatively unscathed. However, this didn’t mean that the war was without its consequences for the people of Ghent. For them, like the great majority of Belgians, the war years meant four years of occupation, misery, hunger and increasingly difficult living conditions.

What was it that precipitated the Ceunis family’s decision to flee their homeland and to take up residence in England? In my recent conversation with Tessa Cathcart, Gerard Ceunis’ granddaughter, she suggested that their house in Ghent may have been bombed. However, the brief biography of Ceunis included in Raymond Vervliet’s collection of literary manifestos from this period (see this post) points to an alternative, though not necessarily incompatible, explanation. The original Dutch version includes this sentence:

In het begin van de Eerste Wereldoorlog week hij, als afgemonsterd lid van de burgerwacht, uit naar Engeland waar hij fortuin maakte met een confectiezaak.

A literal English translation of this would read as follows: ‘At the beginning of World War I, as a former member of the vigilante, he fled to England where he made a fortune with a clothing store.’ However, burgerwacht, translated here as ‘vigilante,’ might more accurately be construed as militia, or civil guard. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that George Sarton, the founder and leading light of the Reiner Leven or ‘Purer Living’ student movement, to which Gerard Ceunis belonged, was a member of the Civil Guard in Ghent, and that this apparently placed him in great danger following the German invasion. Sarton, who went on to become a leading historian of science, married the English artist and designer Mabel Elwes. They lived in the village of Wondelgem, outside Ghent, where their daughter, the future poet and novelist May Sarton, was born. In her memoir I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography, May Sarton writes about the period leading up to the German invasion:

The Civil Guard, to which my father at one time belonged, drilled now and then on the village green, and took uniforms out of mothballs. Sometime in July they were issued ancient muskets. But no one really believed in that impossible war as a reality. In any case, they reminded each other, Belgium itself was neutral. Nothing could happen here.

On August second, the Germans demanded free passage, were refused, and on August third the Wehrmacht marched in in their spiked helmets. In the little village of Wondelgem church bells rang the tocsin; the postman delivered mobilization orders. My father, though no longer an official member of the Civil Guard got out his heavy Civil Guard coat, took down the old musket, and reported for patrol duty. He was set to guard the railway intersection. There, alone, a lantern in one hand, his gun in the other, he paced up and down all night hoping that the German army would not come hurtling down the track. Fortunately, they did not.

German soldiers in Ghent following the 1914 invasion (via https://stamgent.be/en/digi-expos/gent-bezette-stad)

However, once the invasion finally happened, the Sartons’ house in Wondelgem was commandeered by the Wehrmacht:

Twenty-six officers and men were billeted on the place…One officer, looking over the quarters, walked through while my mother’s heart nearly stopped beating as she suddenly remembered the Civil Guard coat hanging on the back of a door. At this time members of the Civil Guard were treated as spies and shot. But she was able to push the door back and stand against it, and that night the coat was buried in the garden.

The Sartons eventually managed to escape from Belgium, staying for a brief time with Mabel’s relatives in England, before sailing for America, where they finally settled.

May Sarton and her father George Sarton. Photograph taken by Mabel Sarton in 1929 (from I Knew a Phoenix)

Did Gerard Ceunis suffer from similar fears that his previous membership of the Civil Guard (if indeed he was a member) might place him in danger? And did this contribute to his decision to leave Belgium, accompanied, like Sarton, by his wife and small child?

Incidentally, May Sarton’s beautifully-written memoir provides a fascinating insight into the world of her parents’ youth, and includes some interesting information about the network of friends who made up Reiner Leven and their female counterparts, De Flinken. I shall have more to say about the book in a future post.

Johan Daisne, Robert Mussche and Vanna Ceunis

In 1929, when he was eighteen years old, the future poet and novelist Johan Daisne spent the summer with Gerard and Alice Ceunis in Hitchin, where he fell hopelessly in love with their daughter, Vanna, who would then have been about nineteen. Curiously, an almost identical experience befell another young Belgian writer, Robert Mussche, in the following year, the fictionalised account of which includes what must surely be the only reference to Hitchin in Basque literature.

Johan Daisne (Herman Thiery) as a young man 

Born on 2^nd September 1912 in Ghent, Johan Daisne, whose real name was Herman Thiery, was the eldest of the three sons of the influential teacher and populariser of science Leo Michel Thiery (1877 – 1950) and his wife, educationalist and feminist activist Augusta de Taeye. Both were members of the radical Reiner Leven (‘Purer Living’) society begun by the pioneering science historian George Sarton, which advocated pacifism, vegetarianism and feminism, while Augusta was also part of the Ghent feminist group ‘De Flinken’ (the Courageous Ones). It was through these networks that the Thierys befriended Gerard Ceunis and his future wife Alice Vandamme, and the two couples seem to have stayed in contact after the Ceunises moved to England in 1914.

Augusta de Taeye, Leo Michel Thiery and one of their sons (possibly Herman), via http://www.ugentmemorie.be

Herman Thiery attended the Koninklijk Atheneum in Ghent before studying Economics and Slavic languages at Ghent University, receiving his doctorate in 1936. He began writing under the pen-name Johan Daisne in 1935, with the publication of a collection of poetry entitled simply Verzen. This was followed by other poetical works including Het einde van een zomer (1940), Ikonakind (1946), Het kruid-aan-de-balk (1953) and De nacht komt gauw genoeg (1961). He  was one of the pioneers of magic realism in Dutch, his best-known novels being   De trap van steen en wolken (1942), De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (1947) and De trein der traagheid (1953). He also wrote screenplays, radio plays and non-fiction. His 1947 novel was translated into English in 1965 as The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, and in 1966 it was adapted for the cinema by the Belgian director André Delvaux.

Apparently Daisne made a habit of pursuing hopeless and unrequited romantic relationships. In 1944 he dedicated one of the short stories in his collection Zes domino’s voor vrouwen (‘Six dominoes for women’) to Vanna Ceunis, even using her real name for the main character. A few extracts from the book can be found online. In them Daisne writes of the women who are the subjects of the stories, that ‘they were all “Marlenes”, with golden hair and waxy cheeks, endearing figures, haughty and tender at the same time, figures from a different world’. Besides Vanna, the other women in the stories were Marcheta, Claire, Aura, Brigitta and Greta. At one point, the author writes: ‘That was in Marcheta’s time, and in England I still loved Claire and Vanna. Wonders of the boy’s heart!’ (my translations)

Robert Mussche

Robert Mussche, Daisne’s rival for Vanna Ceunis’ affection, was born on 7^th December 1912 in Wondelgem, a village close to Ghent. He was also a student at the Ghent Atheneum, where he met Johan Daisne; the pair became close friends. Coming from an impoverished background, Mussche had to quit his studies early to become the breadwinner for his family. Working by day in a bank, by night he taught himself English and Spanish and read the works of Zola, de Musset, Lamartine and others, at the same time being swayed by the ideas of Karl Marx.

At the age of seventeen Mussche began to write poetry, strongly influenced by the authors he had been studying. In 1936 he published the collection Oasis under the pseudonym Rudo Reyniers, and in the same year his poems were included in a collection of work by fourteen young Belgian poets.

Mussche’s youthful idealism prompted him to travel to Spain during the Civil War, sent there as a reporter by the newspaper Vooruit. While there he adopted Carmen, an eight-year-old Basque girl orphaned in the bombing of Guernica, bringing her back to his home in Ghent, though after the war she returned to Spain. In 2013 the story of Mussche’s life, and especially his time in Spain and his adoption of Carmen, was the subject of Basque novelist Kirmen Uribe’s much-praised ‘docu-fiction’ Mussche, translated into Spanish as Lo que mueve el mundo (‘What moves the world’). I came across references to the book while carrying out a Google search for information about Vanna Ceunis, which led me to a digital copy of the original Basque text. It was something of a shock to find references to Hitchin, and indeed Gosmore Road, in a strange language which at first I failed to recognise.

The cover of Kirmen Uribe’s ‘docu-fiction’ Mussche (2013)

Kirmen Uribe  (via https://commons.wikimedia.org/)

My knowledge of Basque (Euskara) is even more minimal than my understanding of Dutch, which means an even heavier reliance on Google Translate, so I apologise in advance for any inaccuracies in the very loose translation of the extract that follows, in which Johan Daisne is referred to by his real name, Herman:

Herman would travel to England in the summer, spending three or four weeks at the Ceunises’ house. The Ceunis family were originally from Ghent, but some years before they had moved to Hitchin. Gerard Ceunis had been a friend of Michel Thiery in his youth, and they were eager to welcome Herman into their home, at his father’s request, so that he could learn English. During that summer of 1929, Herman could hardly stop talking about his friend Robert, or about the things they had done together, suggesting that he too would like to learn English in Hitchin. The fact is that the boy talked so much about Robert to those in the house, that in the following year, in the summer of 1930, Robert was also invited to Hitchin. He spent fifteen days there in a stylish house called ‘Salve’ on Gosmore Road. 

Vanna was the daughter of the house. She was about Robert’s age. Judging by the photo that she gave to Robert, Vanna was a beautiful girl. She has pale eyes, well drawn lips. Short hair. She was on the verge of becoming an elegant young woman. She is wearing a white shirt and a pearl necklace. A fine woman. A keen, penetrating glance. A girl to fall in love with.[1]

Photograph of Vanna Ceunis

(via Christophe Verbruggen, De kronkelige paden van Gerard Ceunis , 2007)

That’s what happened to Robert. And so he told Herman, on a postcard written on the voyage back from England, that his life had changed, that he was unable to erase the image of Vanna: ‘By the window, her hand laid on the glass, that fine hand. And the rays of the sun in her blue eyes.’ Robert gazed at her, but dared go no further.

Vanna was not as romantic as Robert. They liked each other, especially their conversations about literature. She was a widely read girl and was planning to study literature at college. On the other hand, that wasn’t everything for Vanna: she had other interests. 

One morning, while Robert is asleep in his room, Vanna whistles from the street. Robert goes to the window and sees Vanna sitting outside on a motorcycle.

– Are you coming? 

Robert has never ridden a motorcycle. He hesitates at first, out of shame, but then says yes.

– Hold me around the waist! 

He reaches out for Vanna’s narrow waist and she takes them along the winding lanes of England. The wind blows through the girl’s shirt. Robert can feel her waist in his hand. He hesitates, as if he wasn’t already suffering enough. Vanna, on the other hand, is in control, she takes the bends with certainty, laying her body down and moving the machine to one side and then the other. Her skill impresses Robert and he admires her for it. 

Herman’s response to Robert’s letter was: ‘Don’t think so, Vanna is mine.’ Herman had also fallen in love with the girl the year before and he wanted her as well.

Vanna, however, was not anyone’s. She didn’t give her assent to either of them. She married an English boy. And from a letter sent to Robert in 1940, we know that in the Second World War her husband served in the British army, on the front lines.

Nothing is known about Vanna after that.

At the end of the fifteen days, Vanna gave Robert a book. Written by Matthew Arnold, with the title ‘Essays in Criticism’, Macmillan and Co., New York, it carries the dedication: ‘Just an old book I am very fond of and thought you might enjoy reading. Very Best Wishes. Vanna’. And the following words are underlined: ‘More and more, humanity will realise that we need to turn our attention to poetry in order to interpret, reassure, and make sense of life. Science is without poetry.’ 

Robert was thinking about those lines from Vanna as he took the return boat, staring at the waves. What did Vanna mean by that? Was she really talking about poetry or was she saying that his character was too cold? 

Robert couldn’t make up his mind whether to stay in Hitchin. The boy was so confused about Vanna that he seemed to have a longing to return to England, as if he had never completely left. At least that’s what Herman wrote at the time.

Their rivalry for the affections of Vanna Ceunis led to a temporary rift between Robert Mussche and Herman Thiery/Johan Daisne. A second falling out would occur when Daisne modelled a character in his novel Aurora on Mussche. The latter was unable to come to terms with the pathetic and sickly character in the book and was deeply hurt. However, the breach was eventually healed when Daisne (quoting Goethe) persuaded Mussche that there was a difference between ‘Wahrheit und Dichtung’ – truth and poetry.

Robert Mussche, Johan Daisne and an unnamed friend (unverified)

Robert Mussche eventually married Maria Op de Beeck and when their daughter was born in 1942, she was named Carmen, after the Basque girl the writer had rescued. During the Second World War and the German occupation of Belgium, both Mussche and Daisne joined the resistance, with Mussche playing a particularly active role as part of a communist faction, under the pseudonym ‘Julien’. In 1944 Mussche was arrested by the German authorities and taken as a political prisoner to the Neugamme concentration camp. In April 1945, the entire population of the camp was transferred to Lübeck by ship under SS surveillance. Deceived by the sight of German uniforms, Allied planes bombed the ship, killing most of those on board, including Robert Mussche.

A year after the war ended, when there was no longer any hope that Mussche would return, Johan Daisne published a touching tribute to him: In memoriam Robert Mussche, (Rudo Reyniers, Julien), 1912-1945, which included a number of his late friend’s poems.

In 1945 Johan Daisne/Herman Thiery was appointed chief librarian of the city of Ghent. He would always remember his ‘unforgettable summer’ with the Ceunis family in Hitchin, and his love for Vanna. In his 1964 newspaper obituary of Gerard Ceunis, Daisne wrote: ‘In my youth I walked there [the cemetery in Hitchin], dreaming among the graves. Sometimes I sat in the church tower staring endlessly at the summer opulence of the “commons”. A young and very blonde girl loved my company. Her name was Vanna.’ Johan Daisne died in Ghent on 9^th August 1978 at the age of 65.

Notice in the Surrey Mirror, 6th July 1934

As for Vanna Ceunis, more is known about her life than Uribe’s novel implies. From online records of Bedales, the co-educational boarding school in Steep, Hampshire, I’ve discovered that Vanna was a pupil there in the late 1920s. And a report in the Hampshire Telegraph from 6^th July 1928 lists her among the Steep Shakespeare Players who ‘delighted large audiences’ with their performances of Much Ado About Nothing. Exactly eight years later, on 6^th July 1934, the Surrey Mirror announced the engagement of Henry Colin Reucastle Rutherford, only son of Mr and Mrs Peter Rutherford of Pintmere, Walton-on-the-Hill, and ‘Vanna, only child of M. and Mme. Gerard Ceunis of Salve, Hitchin, Herts’. The couple were married in Chelsea in 1936 and their daughter Teresa was born in Surrey in 1939. It seems that, after her marriage, Vanna often went by the name Jeanne, which I believe was her middle name. Under this name she and Teresa can be found, towards the end of 1939, living with her Rutherford in-laws in Surrey, presumably while husband Henry was serving in the army.

Henry Rutherford died in Surrey in 1980, and Vanna Jeanne Rutherford, née Ceunis, died in Hertfordshire in 1997. She was 86 years old.

Note

1. I assume the reference is to the photograph of Vanna that was included in Christophe Verbruggen’s 2007 article about Gerard Ceunis, which I reproduced in this post.

From Ghent to Gosmore Road

Gerard Ceunis was born in in 1885 in Ghent, Belgium. Situated in the Flemish region of the country, Ghent (Dutch = Gent, French = Gand, medieval English = Gaunt), is the capital and largest city of the province of East Flanders, and the third largest city in the country, after Brussels and Antwerp. A port and university town, in the late Middle Ages Ghent was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe, its prosperity based largely on the textile industry, which revived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of the city’s medieval centre and many of its historic buildings have been preserved. As described in the previous post, Ghent in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries – the Belle Époque – was a hub of literary and artistic activity and innovation, home to writers like Maurice Maeterlinck, and as Christophe Verbruggen notes, the setting for a ‘complex tangle’ of literary and artistic movements, magazines and associations.

Ghent in 1900 (via wikimedia.org)

According to at least one source, Gerard Ceunis’ father was Prosper John Ceunis, who worked (as did his son for a time) in a printing house. I don’t have any other information about Ceunis’ family of origin: for example, his mother’s name, or whether he had any brothers or sisters. The previous post provided a thumbnail sketch of Ceunis’ early life and education. Another source gives a useful list of the addresses at which he lived in Ghent. Apparently he was born in the Dekstraat , but in 1886 the family moved to Baliestraat, then in 1877 to Hertstraat, in 1890 to Bagattenstraat, in 1891 to Zwijnaardsesteenweg and in 1900, when Ceunis was fifteen, to Ottergemsesteenweg. Here he remained until 1909, apart from two short breaks: he was in Lübeck, Germany in 1907 and Liège in 1907-1908.

Old street map of Ghent 

From 1910, when he was twenty-five, Ceunis lived in Baudelostraat and from 1912 in Mercatorstraat. I’m not absolutely sure when Gerard Ceunis married Alice Pauline Vandamme, but it was probably around 1910, since their daughter Vanna was born in 1911.

Gerard, Alice and Vanna Ceunis emigrated to England in 1914, presumably to escape the German occupation of their country, which took place in August of that year. On arriving in England, Ceunis seems to have exchanged his dream of pursuing ‘la vie bohème’ (see the previous post) for bourgeois respectability, making a comfortable living from his clothing shops. Why he took this decision, and how he raised the capital or acquired the knowledge necessary to make a success of the business, is not known. Nor do we know what his wife Alice, a  former member of the radical Reiner Leven association and the feminist ‘Die Flinken’, thought of this move, especially when (as Christophe Verbruggen reports) he later left the running of the shops to her so that he could devote himself to ‘painting and philosophising’.

Hitchin in the 1930s

Neither is it clear why the Ceunises decided to make their home in Hitchin, a small market town in north Hertfordshire, nor whether they settled here immediately on their arrival in the country. The first record I’ve found that places Gerard Ceunis in Hitchin is an electoral register from 1927 which links him to an address in Church Street, Enfield, in north London, but gives his ‘abode’ as 7 Market Place, Hitchin – as noted in an earlier post, this was the address of Maison Gerard, Ceunis’ shop in the centre of the town. From this we learn two things: firstly, that at least initially, the Ceunis family lived ‘over the shop’ in Hitchin. Secondly, that Gerard owned more than one shop, including one in Enfield. He, and in some cases Alice, also feature in electoral registers for Enfield in 1930, 1932 and 1937.  Evidence from electoral registers in 1938 and 1939 also suggest that Ceunis had premises in Green Lanes, Southgate.

Extract from Enfield and Winchmore Hill Directory, 1930, showing Ceunis’ shop at 50 Church Street

From 1932, the London electoral registers begin to give the address of Gerard Ceunis’ main ‘abode’ as ‘Salve’, Gosmore Road, Hitchin. (I assume the house was named for the Latin greeting.) This would remain the family home for the remainder of Gerard’s and Alice’s lives: it is the address on his probate record from 1964 and hers from 1967. When the announcement of their daughter Vanna’s engagement appeared in the newspaper in 1934, her parents’ address was given simply as ‘Salve, Hitchin’.

Gosmore Road is on the southern side of Hitchin, connecting the town with the picturesque hamlet of Gosmore, famous as one of the locations where John Bunyan preached in secret in the seventeenth century. Most of the houses along this road were built since the Second World War, and when the Ceunises arrived here in the 1930s, or perhaps before, it would have been a quiet country road, with the parkland belonging to Hitchin Priory (formerly a Carmelite monastery but by then a grand private house and today a hotel) on one side, with views to the Chiltern Hills beyond.

Map of the southern part of Hitchin in the early twentieth century

Priory Park from Gosmore Road, Hitchin (author’s photograph)

On the other side of the road – the left-hand side as you come from the town – are a small number of large houses built before the War, one of which I assume is (or was) ‘Salve’. Frustratingly, none of the records that I’ve seen give a number for the house, making it harder to identify. The only clue is the description of the house in one account as ‘stylish’. Another is that Jean Watts, in her history of Hitchin Art Club, whose 1956 painting competition Ceunis judged, states (inaccurately) that he lived in London Road, from which Gosmore Road diverges at its northern end, suggesting that his home may have been closer to the ‘town’ end of the road. Whatever its precise location, and as can be seen from the map above, the Ceunis’ would have been within walking distance of the town, with its church tower, where their summer visitor, the young Belgian writer Johan Daisne, sat ‘staring endlessly down at the summer opulence’ and the cemetery where he wandered, ‘dreaming among the graves’.

The character of the area changed dramatically in the mid-1960s, soon after Gerard Ceunis’ death, when a new bypass – Parkway – was cut through the area, requiring, I believe, the demolition of a number of properties. It crossed my mind that ‘Salve’ might have been among them, but then I came across a legal repossession order for 1973 that mentioned the property, which suggests that it is still standing , albeit possibly under a different name.

I’m writing this post during the coronoavirus lockdown, which makes it difficult to pursue the matter further for now. However, once conditions change, I shall take a walk in the direction of Gosmore Road – just five minutes from where I’m writing this, and one of our popular walking routes in normal times – and see if I can determine which of the houses was ‘Salve’, and home to Gerard Ceunis.

A note on pronunciation

I wonder if Gerard Ceunis gave his outfitter’s shop in Hitchin the name ‘Maison Gerard’ (and even, as on a second sign above the shop, the more English ‘Gerard’s’) because he thought his surname would be too difficult to pronounce – or that his customers wouldn’t be sure how to pronounce it? I imagine that most English speakers, on seeing the name ‘Ceunis’ for the first time, are tempted to pronounce it ‘Kyew-nis’. However, if Google Translate is to be trusted, then the Dutch pronunciation should be ‘Keuh-nis’, while the French version would be closer to ‘Seuh-nee‘, with the stress on the second syllable. So which is correct? Does Ceunis’ choice of a French name for his shop, and the fact that he and Alice styled themselves in at least one record ‘M. and Mme. Ceunis’ suggest that, by contrast with his literary hero Maeterlinck, a Dutch/Flemish speaker who wrote in French, Ceunis was a French speaker who wrote in Dutch/Flemish? I’d be interested to hear from anyone who can help to resolve this question.

The winding paths of Gerard Ceunis

As I noted in the previous post, it is very difficult to find reliable information about Gerard Ceunis online, particularly in English. The most informative overview of his life and work that I’ve come across so far was written in 2007 by Christophe Verbruggen of Ghent University. Entitled ‘De kronkelige paden van Gerard Ceunis’ – ‘The winding paths of Gerard Ceunis’ – the article gives a vivid sense of the range of Ceunis’ artistic and literary ventures and associations, and includes some fascinating photographs, which I’ve reproduced in what follows.

The original article is in Dutch/Flemish, a language that I don’t speak, so I’ve had to rely on assistance from Google Translate for this English version. I hope my readers (and Professor Verbruggen) will forgive any mistakes or misunderstandings. The notes at the end are my own.

In 1964 Vooruit [1] was the only Flemish newspaper to pay attention to the fact: Gerard Ceunis had died in Hitchin, England. It was Johan Daisne [2] who wrote the piece in memory of ‘Uncle Gerard’, regretting that Flanders did not know its own history ‘and the men who helped make it what it is today’.

Johan Daisne (1930)

There are several reasons why Gerard Ceunis (1885-1964) fell between the folds of Flemish literary history. Undoubtedly the most important is that he fled his homeland in 1914 to make a fortune in textile sales in England. Out of sight, away from literary history. Other reasons are a lack of originality and not least his contrary nature. He refused to take on the shared habitus of his contemporaries and in doing so sidelined himself several times over.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Ghent kuip (the old city centre) was the setting for a complex tangle of intrigues and friendships that often influenced artistic and literary positions. Gerard Ceunis was central to a number of these conflicts.

Until the age of thirteen Ceunis attended Sint-Lievenscollege in Ghent. He then went to work in the printing house where his father also worked. The family story would have it that the Ceunises lost a great deal of capital and social status in a very short time. He attended German courses at the Van Crombrugghe Society [3] and after working hours devoured the leading artistic and literary magazines in the library of Ghent University. His dream of becoming an artist is described in his diary of 1906, and it only grew stronger: ‘La vie de bohème is outrageously beautiful! An artist’s life – poverty – declarations of love in the attic – dancing at the fair – and in the end the girl dies. Chic! Is it strange that artists who can think so sensitively can sometimes be so dissolute, often leading a life that is not very exemplary.’

Cover of the magazine Iris (1908)

Together with Paul Kenis [4] and others, Ceunis wandered through the Ghent beguinages [5] and abandoned monasteries. He came into contact with students of the Ghent Academy who had moved in there and regularly sought refuge in absinthe. He thought he would like to become a visual artist, but first he would try to make a name for himself as a writer. After a short stay in Germany, he planned to set up a magazine on his own, the fastest way to launch yourself or a new literary programme in the literary field. When Vlaanderen, the successor to Van Nu en Straks, ceased to exist in 1907, Ceunis tried to use his magazine Iris to fill the gap. Nieuw Leven, by his fellow townsman and friend P.G. van Hecke [6], had a similar ambition. However, the carefully edited Iris quickly perished due to a lack of subscribers. Competition with other magazines was brutal and Iris‘ main editors had no financial means of their own to keep the magazine alive.

Paul Kenis (left) and Paul Gustave van Hecke

Ceunis joined the Reiner Leven [7] association in the hope of finding fellow spirits there. Reiner Leven exemplified the synergy between visual artists, writers, scientists and other intellectuals during the Belle Époque. P.G. van Hecke, Raymond Limbosh [8], George Sarton [9], Paul van Oye [10], Paul Kenis, all sought, among other things, through the activities of Reiner Leven, a way to demonstrate their social commitment and to give practical effect to their social criticism. Pretty soon Ceunis distanced himself from Reiner Leven and ‘De Flinken’ [‘The Courageous’], a group of feminists who had joined that society. He placed his fiancée Alice Vandamme in a difficult position, because she was a member of both clubs. Young women, in Ceunis’ opinion, should not be concerned with reading Maeterlinck [11] or with vegetarianism. He was dubbed an anti-feminist, a reputation he himself nurtured with his misogynistic public statements. It earned him the scorn of half of Ghent.

Like many other would-be intellectuals of the period, Ceunis flirted with anarchism. Bouncing back and forth between Max Stirner, [12]  Nietzsche, but also Maeterlinck and Van de Woestijne [13], he developed an individualistic social vision that reflected his ideas about art.

In his essay Individualism, published in 1910, he summarised this as follows: ‘And if, when I say: love yourself, people, instead of proclaiming with hostility and envy, “see, that is the worst egoism, that is society’s rottenness”, would try to understand these words: We try not to love ourselves so deeply that we abhor all our weaknesses and flaws, all our wickedness and insincerity […] and so, good and true to the wonder around us, unconscious of its meaning, equal to the sun’s warmth and light, by this SUN = BEING.’

Many years later, Ceunis told Johan Daisne that this was the only thing he still looked back on with satisfaction. The essay also demonstrates that Ceunis was very talented. Not only does it read as an enlightening document of its time, it also shows a great ability to synthesise.

Unlike many of his contemporaries who embraced the aura of the committed intellectual, Ceunis never demonstrated a desire to commit to society. Nor was the cause of Flemish emancipation for him. Ceunis the individualist grew increasingly isolated. As far as is known. he was active only in the Literary Society, of which many writers were members at that time, hoping to legitimise their authorship. After the demise of Iris, he published two plays: The Captive Princess (1909) and Gothic Fairy Tale (1910). André de Ridder [14] from Antwerp was about the only one who believed in him and he also wrote the foreword to The Captive Princess. The reception of both plays was lukewarm; they were never staged. Not without justification was he accused of a degree of unoriginal imitation of Maurice Maeterlinck. The extent of Ceunis’ admiration for his fellow townsman is also evident from the name he gave to his daughter: Vanna, after the play Monna Vanna written by Maeterlinck in 1902. When André de Ridder took the initiative to set up the magazine De Boomgaard, Ceunis was first in line to act as its representative in Ghent. His former friends Van Hecke and Kenis were against the idea, and as a result de Ridder also dropped Gerard Ceunis.

Ceunis then decided to further develop one of his other talents. He enrolled at the Ghent Art Academy, from which he graduated in 1912. A year later he exhibited for the first time at the Ghent Salon. When he moved to England in 1914, his social network was limited. The numerous etchings in the attic room of his granddaughter’s manor house bear witness to a continuing friendship with the visual artist Jules de Bruycker [15].  In addition, he maintained contact with the parents of Johan Daisne, the ‘Flinke’ Augusta de Taeye [16] and [Leo] Michel Thierry [17].

Vanna Ceunis

When he was eighteen, to improve his English and his health, Johan Daisne spent the summer with Ceunis in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. He fell hopelessly in love with Vanna. She became one of the Six Dominoes for Women, a collection of stories from 1944. In the piece that Daisne wrote as an obituary of Ceunis in Vooruit, he looks back on his stay in England: ‘In my youth I walked there [the cemetery in Hitchin], dreaming among the graves. Sometimes I sat in the church tower staring endlessly at the summer opulence of the “commons”. A young and very blonde girl loved my company. Her name was Vanna.’

Once he had made his fortune, Ceunis left the management of his shops to his wife Alice and spent his days painting and philosophising. After the First World War, he evolved from an impressionism in the luminist style of Emile Claus [18] and Albert Baertsoen [19]  in the direction of the more expressive style of Van Gogh. His work was highly thought of in England. Ceunis was discussed positively in the leading art magazines and national newspapers. A large-scale retrospective at the famous Arlington Gallery in London in 1930 was opened by the Belgian ambassador. The exhibition did not go unnoticed in Belgium either, but the recognition was short-lived. In 1933, despite Jules de Bruycker’s intercession, Ceunis’ paintings were even rejected at the Ghent Salon.

Gerard Ceunis, ‘Flemish Room’ (oil on canvas)

Before he passed away, Ceunis wanted at all costs to donate a painting to a museum in Flanders, so that he too could be ‘a little bit present’. He was unable to do this himself. ‘The “Flemish Room” must be given a place of honour,’ Daisne wrote in 1962, in one of his many letters to Ceunis, after which he once again referred to that ‘unforgettable time in Hitchin’ and his love for Vanna. For him, the painting was also a memory of that time. The AMVC Letterenhuis [20] accepted the gift after Daisne’s insistence. It is still part of the collection.

When Gerard Ceunis and Alice Vandamme fled to England in 1914, they also took with them their diaries and correspondence. In this way, a piece of Flemish heritage has ended up in the attic of an English country house that is currently inhabited by Vanna’s daughter. Between the etchings by Jules de Bruycker and dozens of paintings by Ceunis there are several boxes with items that deserve a place in the Letterenhuis, not so much from a literary-historical perspective, but from a cultural-historical perspective. Then Ceunis’ dream would come true: to be remembered in his native country.

Notes

1. Vooruit: newspaper founded in Ghent in 1884 with links to the Belgian Workers’ Party.

2. Johan Daisne: pseudonym of Herman Thiery (1912 – 1978), Flemish author, pioneer of            Dutch magic realism.

3. Van Crombrugghe Society (Genootschap): social-cultural society in Ghent, founded in             1857

4. Paul Kenis (1885 – 1934): Flemish writer and magazine editor

5. Beguinages: medieval houses for communities of lay religious women

6. Paul-Gustave van Hecke (1887 – 1967): Belgian author, journalist, art collector, patron             and  couturier

7. Reiner Leven (‘Purer Living’): student association founded in Ghent in 1905 by George         Sarton (see note 9). See this article by Christophe Verbruggen.

8. Raymond Limbosch (1884 – 1953): Belgian poet and philosopher

9. George Sarton (1884 – 1956): Belgian-born American historian of science.

10. Paul van Oye (1886 – 1969): Belgian scientist

11. Maurice Maeterlink (1862 – 1949): Belgian playwright, poet and essayist

12. Max Stirner (1806 – 1856): German philosopher

13. Karel van de Woestijne (1878 – 1929: Flemish writer

14. André de Ridder (1888 – 1961): Belgian economist and literary critic

15. Jules de Bruycker (1870 – 1945): Belgian graphic artist, etcher, painter and               draughtsman

16. Augusta de Taeye (1885 – 1976): Belgian nursery teacher and feminist. Wife of Leo-   Michael Thierry and mother of Johan Daisne.

17.Leo-Michel Thierry (1877 – 1950): Flemish teacher and populariser of science.   Husband of Augusta de Taeye and father of Johan Daisne.

18. Emile Claus (1849 – 1924): Belgian painter

19. Albert Baertsoen (1866 – 1922): Belgian painter and graphic artist

20. AMVC Letterenhuis: Belgian ‘House of Literature’ in Antwerp