From the Message to the Medium
The Poetic Evolution of Paul van Ostaijen

Along with the disruption of the values and of the very image of the Western world by philosophy, psychology, ethnography, the exact sciences, industrial development and the resulting political-social crises, the years 1910-1920 saw the birth of a vast movement that injected new life into the arts and literature of Europe and America. It sprang up more or less simultaneously in a number of major cities (Paris, Rome, Milan, Munich, Berlin, London, Moscow, Leningrad, then Zurich and New York) and expressed itself in great movements like futurism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism, surrealism, etc.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Belgium and Holland had played a leading role in the creation and spread of art nouveau and of symbolism and it was into these that the avant-gardists sank some of their roots. We think, for example, of Fernand Khnopff or Jan Toorop, of Maurice Maeterlinck or Louis Couperus. In the twentieth century, however, these regions were on the whole more passive and peripheral. If before the 1914-18 War they opened their minds to the ‘new spirit’, including futurism, they themselves were not the birthplace of any major movement - apart from Mondrian's neo-plasticism. In the literary field in particular, the neo-romantic and realistic tendencies of the end of the nineteenth century long continued to put their stamp on a scene that had often remained fairly provincial despite the efforts of magazines like De Nieuwe Gids (The New Guide) in the North or Van Nu en Straks (Of Now and Before Long) in the South. As a result, the emergence of a Paul van Ostaijen, a man of cosmopolitan culture and a city dweller through and through, came as a complete surprise and even shocked most of his compatriots. In a Flanders where the priest-poet Guido Gezelle had celebrated piously - and with considerable lyrical power - the flowers and the seasons, and where people were only just beginning to accept the morose abandon of Karel van de Woestijne to the delights of autumn and of self-reproach, the young Van Ostaijen (born in Antwerp in 1896) set the scene for the modern metropolis. Not the type of city which had tragically bewitched his predecessor, the francophone poet Emile Verhaeren, who had celebrated its ‘tumultuous forces’ in a mixture of hatred and passion which would also be found in the work of numerous German expressionists, but the

familiar city with its many day-to-day aspects that surround the strolls, the loves, the work and the leisure of a city dweller happy with his lot.

The War remains strangely absent from his first collection of poems, Music-Hall (1916), in which through his love affairs and his fleeting impressions the dandy makes an exhibition of himself, unless he happens to merge into some chance group in the street, the café or the music hall.

Even in his very early verses which recall the French unanimisme, we see him beginning to question the traditional poetical language as the refinements and the evanescence of symbolism gradually give way to a more direct language and a free, flowing and concise verse with a dynamism appropriate to its decidedly modern subjects.

An awareness of the political and social realities soon turned Van Ostaijen into a militant in the Flemish Movement and a convinced pacifist. Born during the romantic period of the awakening of European nationalisms and in a Belgium where centuries of foreign occupation and administration had gallicized the upper classes (including those of Flanders), the Flemish Movement had been aiming for almost a century to reestablish the prestige and official use of the Dutch language alongside French. The First World War divided the movement into two camps: those who judged it prudent to await its end before continuing the linguistic battle within the legal framework of a liberated Belgium and those who advocated immediate action, despite - or even sometimes with the aid of - the German occupying forces.

The young Van Ostaijen was one of those ‘activists’ recruited mainly among university students frustrated till then by the absence of higher education in Dutch. This ‘activism’, which for Van Ostaijen - as for others - implied social emancipation, in no way excluded pacifism and openmindedness: it was a question of restoring to the Flemish people their validity and dignity of expression in the chorus of the nations, whose harmony could only temporarily be delayed by an absurd war.

The message of universal brotherhood and the rhetorical speech full of imagery of his second collection of poems, The Signal (Het sienjaal, 1918) reflect the humanitarian tendency of expressionism propagated at that time by German avant-garde magazines such as Die Aktion and Die Weissen Blätter, which somewhat surprisingly perhaps the occupying forces allowed to be imported into Belgium.

The self-taught Van Ostaijen read a great deal and with passion, instantly communicating his feelings about what he read to his friends and, by means of articles, to periodicals in which he very soon began to collaborate. His interest in the art and literature of his time rapidly became the fervour of a proselyte. With an energy all the more combative because the intellectual milieux he addressed - not to mention the others - retained for the most part an unfailingly conservative inertia, Van Ostaijen took up the cudgels for the international avant-garde and for those in Flanders who joined it, sometimes as a result of his influence.

It was with fire that he defended modern art in general and that of his friends in particular: the sculptor Oscar Jespers, the painters Floris Jespers (Oscar's brother) and Paul Joostens, who were soon joined by the German Heinrich Campendonk and others who did not reveal their talent until after the War. Supported by a rapid but selective assimilation of futurist, cubist and expressionist theories, his intransigent yet stimulating criticism soon

extended from painting to literature, especially Dutch literature - Hendrik Marsman, Gaston Burssens, Maurice Gilliams, Marnix Gijsen, Karel van de Woestijne - but also German literature (Werfel, Stramm) and French (Jacob, Cendrars, Cocteau, Claudel, Norge, Seuphor and not least Apollinaire). The poets and artists are numerous - Vincent Van Gogh, James Ensor, Else Lasker-Schüler, Francis Jammes, Walt Whitman (whom he calls his ‘father’) - to whom he pays homage or dedicates verses in The Signal. This collection, the title of which no doubt refers to a poem from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, can be considered as his happiest and most optimistic book: dealing with all that is young, beautiful and generous in the world, it declares his hope of a pacifist revolution which, springing from transfigured consciences, must conquer the whole earth in a spirit of tolerance and love.

His dreams were shattered when, having fled the possible consequences of his ‘activism’ after the armistice, he witnessed the suppression of the Spartakist revolt in Berlin - which had tried to establish a sort of communist-inspired, direct democracy under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg - and the return of bourgeois order. With no means of support, having left his job at Antwerp Town Hall, he could only count on the financial help of the girl who shared his exile and on the precarious support of a few friends. These were the toughest years of his life. They found expression in a sort of lyrical volte-face, for instead of singing of humanity and passion for life, Van Ostaijen now embarked upon a work of selfdestruction and social satire, in a process analogous to the one which replaced humanitarian expressionism with the brutal disenchantment of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Realism) and dadaist derision.

He was to elaborate simultaneously two collections of poems - Feasts of Fear and Agony (Feesten van angst en pijn, published posthumously) and Occupied City (Bezette stad, 1921) - as well as a series of grotesque narrations. The target of the prose works is usually capitalist society, its institutions, its customs, its prejudices and its representatives, which the writer takes pleasure in plunging into the most absurd situations and the wildest intrigues, to the point where more than once the very principle of narrative, writing and communication is called into question. The essay deviates, drifts off, builds up its own logic which no longer has anything in common with actual experience, or makes way for a digression which proliferates and soon wipes out the intrigue. Trick texts indeed, and subversive because of their subject matter and very essence. Van Ostaijen continued to publish them after his return to Belgium.

As for his poetry, it was reduced, not to silence, but to cries. The standard syntax and prosody give way to words thrown higgledy-piggledy onto the page, in all directions and in different dimensions. This is not the constellation of Mallarmé, nor the joyous accumulation of futurist mots en liberté, nor the calligramme of Apollinaire, nor the dadaist montage, nor even the ‘concentration’ so beloved by August Stramm (Van Ostaijen's favourite German poet), but it is all this at once, torn to shreds and carried along by a fury of negation and despair.

In the nightmare atmosphere of Feasts of Fear and Agony, the poet systematically demolishes the illusions, memories and various glad rags that make up his own ego, replacing them with the total, harsh nudity of a beginning that is almost devoid of hope. In a way, Occupied City constitutes

the counterpart of this process of dispossession and deconstruction, but this time in the outside world, extolled only recently with so much ardour.

However, beneath this chaotic exterior of scenes of war and of occupation and self-scourging, interspersed with sacrilegious prayers and barbarian dances that border on suicide, runs a current of asceticism of which the ultimate objective is ‘disindividualization’, both in the psychological sphere - subjective and collective - and in the sphere of poetic expression. From now on, only the rejection of individualism, which Van Ostaijen regards as a form of egoism and as the bourgeois value par excellence, can enable us to catch a remote glimpse of the possibility of a true revolution, when people ‘will have had a bellyful of individualism’. Only disindividualized artistic expression will be capable, by the simplicity and expressive force of its media - form, colours, words - of ensuring a true human communion in the work of art, springing from the subconscious, which the poet regards as the privileged field of intersubjectivity, and therefore the ideal meeting ground. From now on, it would no longer be a question of Van Ostaijen ‘communicating’ individual thoughts or emotions in a discursive manner, but of creating an ‘autonomous’ art stemming directly from an ‘inner necessity’, as required by Kandinsky and most contributors to Der Sturm, a ‘pure’ art, calling only upon its specific means of expression and conceived both as ludic improvisation and as a profound and magic chant, closely related to the mystic ecstasy to which the Abbé Bremond in his turn was soon to liken poetry.

The originality of the poetics of Van Ostaijen, who owed much to the artistic theories of Kandinsky and to the ‘Wortkunst’ (Word Art) of the Der Sturm group, seems to consist mainly of an attempt to reconcile a simple and obvious form with the expression of the subconscious which the surrealists will aim to achieve in quite a different way. While, in principle, the latter give free rein to an automatic way of writing, Van Ostaijen, wanting to endow the word with as much resonance and expressive intensity as possible once it has emerged from the subconscious, calls into play the selective capacity of reason in the composition. In this way, he intends to create a ‘lyrical object’ of which the perfect construction, concentrated and disindividualized, requires of every reader a dynamic recreation, where the revitalized words allow us to take a fresh look at things. It is not by chance that one of his most important theoretical pieces of writing is entitled Lyrical Poetry: Directions for Use (Gebruiksaanwijzing der lyriek).

Van Ostaijen returned to Belgium in 1921, left again for his military service in occupied Germany, and then settled in Antwerp where he worked in a bookshop. In 1926 he went on to open an art gallery in Brussels with Geert van Bruaene which was a failure. In his poetical evolution towards what he called ‘organic’ expressionism, he met with little public understanding, for it was mainly the humanitarian expressionism of his own The Signal which continued to collect a following in Flanders: after Wies Moens, writers like Gaston Burssens, Victor J. Brunclair, Marnix Gijsen, Karel van den Oever, Achilles Mussche and others, too, followed suit for a time. He therefore found himself more or less alone in trying new formal experiments, together with Burssens who had soon joined him again.

The most representative poem in this last creative phase really seems to be ‘Melopee’ which Van Ostaijen himself quoted more than once as an

example in his writing and his lectures. Its starting point is a ‘premise’ which is the subject of a series of musical variations and rhythmical shifts. These are held up at a certain point by a ‘counter chant’, before expanding into an open ending in the form of a question. The personal emotion - in this case a feeling of resigned fatigue in the face of existence - is not expressed directly, but by means of a sonorous and plastic equivalent.

However, at this time Van Ostaijen did not always obey the principle of ‘disindividualization’: love, death, the quiet force of the trees, the fragility of happiness and the spectacle of some human pettiness could wrest from him an intimate confidence, a cry or a sarcastic remark; but these he quickly transmuted by means of melody and rhythm, yet without divesting them of their expressive power - on the contrary!

Conscious of opening the way for a new form of poetry in Flanders in which the ‘sonority’ of the simplest words and their magical and ludic power of suggestion were all important, Van Ostaijen intended to publish his new poems under the title The First Book of Schmoll (Het eerste boek van Schmoll), ironically borrowed from a famous piano method for young beginners. He died of tuberculosis in 1928 in Miavoye-Anthée before he was able to carry out this project.

The honour fell to Burssens of becoming the first to publish these untranslatable gems, his friend's last verses, in the form of an anthology. Moreover, by his own poetic production, he ensured the continuity of the first avantgarde beyond the conservative reaction of the thirties and of the Second World War, until the appearance of the generation of Tijd en Mens (Time and Man) in 1949. Then, in the vicinity of CoBrA and mindful of the surrealist legacy, Claus, Walravens, Van de Kerckhove and other ‘experimentalists’ took over the exploration of the depths of the language.

 

paul hadermann

Translated by Alison Mouthaan.

Further reading

beekman, e.m., Homeopathy of the Absurd: The Grotesque in Paul van Ostaijen's Creative Prose, The Hague, 1970.

bogman, j., De stad als tekst. Over de compositie van Paul van Ostaijens ‘Bezette Stad’ (The City as Text. On the Composition of Paul van Ostaijen's Occupied City), Rotterdam, 1990.

borgers, gerrit, Paul van Ostaijen, een documentatie (Paul van Ostaijen, a documentation), 2 vols., Amsterdam, 1971.

hadermann, paul, De kringen naar binnen. De dichterlijke wereld van Paul van Ostaijen (The Inward Circles. The Poetical World of Paul van Ostaijen), Antwerp, 1965.

hadermann, paul, Het vuur in de verte. Paul van Ostaijens kunstopvattingen in het licht van de Europese avant-garde (Fire in the Distance. Paul van Ostaijen's Views on Art in the Light of the European Avant-Garde), Antwerp, 1970.

vree, p. de & jespers, h.f., Paul van Ostaijen, Bruges / Antwerp, 1967.

Verzameld Werk (Collected Works) (ed. Gerrit Borgers), 4 vols., Amsterdam, 1979.

List of translations

Patriotism, Inc. and Other Tales (Tr. & ed. E.M. Beekman). Amherst, 1971.

Feasts of Fear and Agony (Tr. Hidde van Ameyden van Duym). New York, 1976; Toronto, 1976.

The First Book of Schmoll. Selected Poems, 1920-1928 (Tr. Theo Hermans, James S Holmes, Peter Nijmeijer, with an essay by the author, tr. Theo Hermans & Paul Vincent). With a foreword by E.M. Beekman (Introduction by Gerrit Borgers). Amsterdam, 1982.

Three Poems by Paul van Ostaijen

Song 4

Lullaby no 2

Bersaglieri song

for E. du Perron