TOMB FOR TOM GUTT

Untamed, untamable

par Alain Delaunois

February 13, 2023

Read the original text in Le Carnet et les Instants

In his professional life, Jean Wallenborn is essentially known as a professor and researcher in physical sciences at ULB, where he himself completed his studies. In a parallel life, he participated essentially, from 1960-61, in the manifestations of a small circle of surrealist activists, grouped around the Brussels poet, writer, publisher, lawyer and polemicist Tom Gutt (1941-2002). Of this small, restless and virulent nucleus, particularly through its tracts, Louis Scutenaire said: "His gang and he (Tom Gutt), it's by far the best thing in the wake of the surrealist ship". Wallenborn was already the author, in 2016, of a monograph that truly revealed the journey of a little-known Antwerp surrealist painter: Roger Van de Wouwer, the incorruptible.

Jean Wallenborn repeats today, twenty years after the death of the one who was his friend from adolescence, by publishing Avec Tom Gutt. A collection of memories about the young mystifying student who became an engaged surrealist poet, accompanied by a very good selection of poems and texts that are hardly found in bookstores. Tom Gutt, if he indeed wrote and published a lot – very early, just out of adolescence, at the beginning of his law studies at ULB – only voluntarily disseminated his texts in a confidential manner, within the restricted circle of this friendly, and sometimes conflictual, nucleus that he had aggregated around him or in his vicinity.

Wallenborn's work is remarkable in this regard for what it gives to read – as for Van de Wouwer in painting – of Gutt's poetic activity: teeming, seizing the real, escaping soft romanticism, but surrealist to the flesh of the female body-blazon, always sensual. Wallenborn thus offers the reader sequences of texts, rather than a poem from here or there. However, let us dare to highlight this one:

Where the seasons hardly venture
load your hands with lilacs
go like a dawn that splits
(in a murmur of rotting branches)
like a dawn that turns back
[in La désertion permanente, 1973]

and almost three decades later:

The song prisoner of the lips
the beginning of a word without sequel
a gaze as long as memory
and heavy
you will carry this to her like a bouquet of grass
she will never recognize you
the hour was falling
[in L'avenir du charbon, 2001]

Tom Gutt poet, reader of Nougé as much as Breton, main actor in Marcel Mariën's pamphlet film L'imitation du cinéma, became the faithful intimate of the Scutenaire-Hamoir couple, is also the founder of the Après Dieu editions 1961, the journals Vendonah 1963, Une passerelle en papier 1967, Le vocatif (1972-1992), and, in the 1990s, La vie dure (with Wallenborn) or L'écho du Var et de l'Aveyron réunis (with Gilles Brenta and Christine Wendelen). With his wife, the illustrator and object creator Claudine Jamagne, Gutt was also the animator of the La marée gallery, located on the ground floor of an old fish shop in Watermael-Boitsfort. For more than two decades, he welcomed there (signing multiple prefaces always fine, subtly withdrawn but with unfailing enthusiasm) surrealist or close artists, Robert Willems, Armand Simon, Max Servais, Colette Deblé, Rachel Baes, Claude Galand, Adrien Dax, André Stas, Van de Wouwer or even Brenta.

Gutt the writer also succeeded in the delectable feat of giving a sequel and ending to the adventures of the Count of Monte-Cristo, Cette mémoire du cœur, a work published under the pseudonym (disdainful towards him) of Thomas Rien, constituted in part of collages from other authors (such as Scutenaire in Les jours dangereux, les nuits noires) which received, in 1988, the triennial novel prize of the French Community. And we cannot pass over in silence that he is at the origin, with the logistical help of the gallery owner Isy Brachot, of the publication of three volumes of Mes inscriptions and the collection of poems La citerne by Louis Scutenaire, as well as those of Irène Hamoir.

Wallenborn does not excessively pour out on the man himself, his friendships and enmities, as faithful and inflexible as each other. He evokes modestly an insurmountable childhood scar, tragically disappeared parents. Emphasizes the talent of gathering of the one who, like Mariën, endeavored to better make known the different generations of surrealism in Belgium. Nor does he evade the whole, hurtful, aggressive or even insulting character of Gutt, towards those who did not adopt his rigor, his revolt against injustice, or those who had disappointed him. But he recalls how much Gutt could practice with generosity on a daily basis "this memory of the heart", to which Wallenborn, through this fraternal and unvarnished salute, also contributes, in all fidelity.

*Tom Gutt, leader until his death twenty years ago, in 2002, of the last active generation of surrealism in Belgium. Writer, polemicist and above all unrecognized poet.