PURGATORY FOR GENGENBACH?
par Martine Monteau
October 20, 2019
Who was Gengenbach? Ernest Gengenbach (1903-1979) – he would add the particle later, Jean Genghen, Jehan Sylvius – was he an impostor, manipulator, abuser? A defrocked priest at 23, torn between flesh and mysticism, sins and repentances, hysteria and deception, between sulfurous liaisons and holy women... He wanted to be a "cursed poet, satanist surrealist, public sinner," desirous of introducing the demonic within the church, of reconciling Surrealism and Christianity 1938 to, along the way, denounce Breton-Lucifer and his band of "possessed," then he attempts to bring together Christianity and communism, constantly hesitating between existentialist cafés and the cloister – before returning to the faith of his childhood...
As a man of letters, he published little (about ten titles). His texts, autobiographical, inextricably mix experiences of debauchery, phantasms and bookish reminiscences. An autofiction 1? There is something of J.-J. Rousseau in these confessions that he rehashes and rewrites from one book to another. He accuses (his mother, the church, priests, surrealists, his lovers), exculpates himself and sometimes tends toward paranoia. In the very sentence, he constantly returns to the past. He tells everything about his turpitudes with candor and complacency – while at the same time giving Breton wrong, in Nadja, "for telling his private life, his appointments. 2" He tells everything except childhood: his father fallen in the war of 14-18, he was the eldest of five children; his widowed mother who devoted him to the priesthood obtained for him a scholarship for the seminary where he was a brilliant student and scholar. He says nothing of his readings. Nothing of surrealist Paris, of the political stakes of the interwar period. We would like to know those (and those) who held out their hand to him, these numerous and influential correspondents. He repeats his escapade from the seminary to go to the theater, his love at first sight for the famous actress Régine Flory, his dismissal from the Jesuit college where he teaches. His return to the Vosges. His encounters in the worldly and cultured salon of Mme Hérisé. The disproportionate sanction when the bishop of Saint-Dié learns of these visits: he is defrocked, his mother chases him away, the actress leaves him. He is tempted by suicide – or the cloister – when he discovers surrealism and contacts André Breton. He publishes the circumstances of their meeting in La Révolution surréaliste; then he will announce there the suicide, in the wings of the theater, in London, of Mlle Flory 3 whom he was seeking to see again. Péret slaps this seducer in a cassock. He solicits Breton to present him during his conference on Satan in Paris, in 1927 4. He distances himself with Artaud when the group becomes politicized. He is excluded from it in 1930. He breaks with these "demons" at Crevel's death in 1935. Between monastic retreats, prison or psychiatric internment, he goes back and forth from well-thinking networks to "bad company," protected in opulent or ruined salons. For Breton – whose sanction Genbach attaches to himself –, the one whose "cassock will never leave him" is met everywhere: "I gave Mr. Jean Genbach a few steps of escort on a road that for him was not wide enough. The taste for external adventure led him where it does not lead me. I attended several scenes of one of the plays I know that respect the least the unity of time and place. A fortune teller's office, a rendezvous house, the abbey of Solesmes, the Cyrano café on Place Blanche, an antechamber of the archbishopric, Mme Blumenthal's gardens, the presbytery of Mont-Saint-Michel have kept traces of the visits, and merge in the strange démarches of Mr. Jean Genbach 5."
A tumultuous life, yes, but the individual is, for repentance and for the pen, neither Léon Bloy 6, nor Joris-Karl Huysmans (whom Breton prefers). His prose is neither decadent nor mystical. His ill, little spleen or inner abyss, is not Baudelairean. He struggles without conviction within religious Modernism. The account of his misfortunes does not know the torment of a Bernanos, nor does his faith have the vehement fervor of a Bloy or the exaltation of a Péguy singing the merits of Joan. Misled in the surrealist milieu, his scandalous eighteenth-century and fin-de-siècle posture is not theirs! Despite the ingredients, his relationship is too muddled to be captivating; his passive character, too hesitant and self-interested, makes the reading insipid. Neither fiction, nor Christian or spiritual testimony, nor intimate writings...
Does he witness a miracle (pretext for this book)? It is only about him, his misfortunes, his hope... His behavior does not evolve, his recurring repentances teach him nothing. The fear of death freezes him: he is so terrified of dying in a state of sin like Crevel, like Artaud whose end precipitates him to the depths of a monastery. There he takes up his texts again, renounces them, keeps a copy. Then retreat, contrition weigh on him. He resumes his back-and-forth from the neon lights of cafés to the shadow of the confessional. Promising not to publish his memories while signing publishing contracts.
Why this book today? In his lifetime, Gengenbach is a malcontemporary. The church has gone through Modernism. At a time when secularism and atheism have won, with Freud and free thought, and those who proclaim "the death of God" bringing about that of the Devil, the ex-abbot's cassock jars in surrealist Paris. Despite his prose the church is there, always ready to help him, shelter him, forgive... As soon as Breton returns, he will solicit the latter – destitute of everything, stripped by "Leclerc's Army," he asks him to welcome and help him. Breton does not respond. While in 1948, the collective text A la niche les glapisseurs de Dieu! "against all kneeling beings" appears, in 1949, Gengenbach sends him his books L'Expérience démoniaque and Judas ou le vampire surréaliste. Close to Belgian surrealists and existentialists, in delicate relations with Breton's friends, as with his publishers, the apparition of Espis given to a four-year-old child comes at the right time; it is a pretext for Gengenbach to talk about himself, to seduce this beautiful woman who will offer him her spiritual help... and material help. To retract again towards the two camps that await his book.
Philippe Didion is intrigued by this curious abbot described by Nadeau in his Histoire du Surréalisme 7 and who, after the war performs "a sincere return to the faith of his childhood." He undertakes research and finds part of his archives in Saint-Dié 8, including a 1949 brochure on a Marian miracle and an Italian student's master's thesis. Espis un nouveau Lourdes? is only the beginning of a work in three parts (unwritten): Des ténèbres sataniques à l'Étoile du matin, histoire d'une conversion. He has the text republished by Marc-Gabriel Malfant, a Lyon bookseller, with preface, photos and letter extract. For his publisher, the man, who said he was cursed, appears "particularly endearing whose life was only hesitation between Christian ideal and disjointed earthly life."
For my part, I do not find this controversial character likeable. More than a sinner and scandalous, he was a renegade to love, freedom, poetry. He betrayed women, the sulfurous seductresses like the "saint" he married and ruined. He betrayed Breton whom he claimed, then denouncing him as Luciferian, he accused him with surrealism of all evils, regretting that exorcism was no longer in practice. He betrayed the church and those who held out their hand to him. His "transparent" confession, constantly taken up again hides large parts of his life – outside surrealist tables and altars. Should he be exhumed?
Accusing, he goes from repentance to relapses. He frequented an influential network of worldly sociability and corresponded with countless personalities. Under the occupation he really rubbed shoulders with the devil, but without knowing it: he was one of the lovers of the one whom Pierre Péan would call "the diabolical of Caluire" 9.
He went to Banneux. He is pushed to Espis to testify to the Marian apparitions (from 1948 to 1952) and little Gilles Bourhours. He delays in writing this 27-page brochure of which 4 evoke the apparition and the child. – Received twice by the pope, dead at fifteen (1944-1960) his visions will not be recognized by the Church. No miracle therefore, no new morning of the world. Gengenbach will not be known as the writer of the Virgin, Our Lady of Espis.
This little book is nevertheless decisive, because with it, Gengenbach gives up writing and meets the one who helps him to expiate and stabilize during his last thirty years. For this self-published edition he will have indebted and ruined his benefactress, this good Christian who held out her hand to him, Élyane Bloch whom he married in 1952. That year, he publishes Adieu à Satan. Retired in the Aude, the couple lives modestly. He performs several missions abroad (Morocco, Italy, Vatican) for the Minister of Foreign Affairs to settle dissensions with Islam, and strengthen Catholicism in Algeria. He approaches neo-Catharism around René Nelli. He engages with the Poujadists. In Brittany, he contacts Jean Markale and neo-Celticism. Finally the couple settles near Dreux. Taking advantage of the protest years, some of his texts reappear at Losfeld. Towards the end of his life, Gengenbach corresponds with an Italian student who wants to do a master's thesis on his writings. He donates his archives to the Saint-Dié library. He dies two years after his wife, in 1979, finally reconciled with his mother.
If the cassock only hid a seducer who feared women, if eroticism was only a literary mask, that the marvelous like mystery moved him little, who then was Genbach the alias of? Like his book, Épis, un nouveau Lourdes?, with this wandering soul, this medieval spirit (he said he was possessed by a cursed monk from the Middle Ages), lost in secular labyrinths, I will end on a question mark.
MM.
1 – Maria Emanuela Raffi, Autobiographie et imaginaire dans l'œuvre d'Ernest de Gengenbach, L'Harmattan (Espace littéraire), 2008.
2 – Manuscript page by Gengenbach inserted in the original copy Satan à Paris, Paris, Meslin, 1927, dedicated to A. Breton. Calmells-Cohen sale catalog, Books 1, notice 589
3 – Jean Guéghen, letter to André Breton, July 10, 1925, (published in la Révolution surréaliste, 5, 1925. La Révolution surréaliste, 8, 1926 [by his Letter of June 19, 1926, he announces the suicide of R. Flory learned at Solesmes through the press: "Artist's neurasthenia"].
4 – André Breton, OC 1, p. 923-927: "Before a conference by Jean Genbach at the Salle Adyar [April 3, 1927]," "Satan à Paris." Notes 1117 sq.
5 – Op. cit., p. 926.
6 – Léon Bloy [1846 -1917], singer of Our Lady of La Salette: Celle qui pleure, 1908. Le Symbolisme de l'apparition, Le Mercier, 1925.
7 – Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme, Paris, Le Seuil [Pierres Vives], 1945, p. 142-145; contains the letter from E. Gengenbach, July 10, 1925, p. 288-289 [published in la Révolution Surréaliste, 5, 1925].
8 – Thanks to the efforts of its curator Albert Ronsin, the Médiathèque Victor Hugo of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges preserves the Maxime Alexandre, Ernest de Gengenbach, Yvan Goll collections.
9 – Pierre Péan, La Diabolique de Caluire, Paris, Fayard, 1994. Lover of Gengenbach and an SS officer, Lydie Bastien [1922-1994] used René Hardy, a resistance fighter, madly in love with her. She delivered Jean Moulin and Charles Delestraint to Klaus Barbie in 1943, fallen during the famous Caluire meeting.