In Memoriam Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

It is undoubtedly not by chance that, while I was re-opening, after ten years, Les Chants de Maldoror, the news of the death of Roger-Gilbert Lecomte came to strike me. It was he who, once upon a time, passionately read aloud to me so many of Lautréamont's stanzas and inspired the work I dedicated to this poet: my book was dedicated to him. In returning to the Chants these days, I heard his voice, clear or violent, soft or stormy, come back to life as an accompaniment which gave this poetry its right intonation. My ear, like a record, had recorded it: he spoke before my eyes, which brought back his image. However, he was dead; he is dead. And my loneliness increases further...
In one of his most beautiful Songs, Maldoror, evil genius, sensitive to pity, evokes the image of the closed bourgeoisie, fiercely faithful to its principles. On the roof of an omnibus sit “men... their eyes motionless like those of a dead fish, pressed against each other and who appear to have lost their lives”. Moreover, adds the poet, “the regulatory number is not exceeded”. Behind the omnibus, running after, a small child. — “Stop... I beg you. I have not eaten since yesterday... [Give me] a place... I am a little child of eight years old and I trust in you.” But on the imperial car, everyone nudges their neighbor: one complains about these “Argentinian-toned” moans, the other imperceptibly lowers his head to plunge back into the immobility of his selfishness. The next day, a rag picker picked up the body of the child "with sore little legs" from the dust. This appears to me to be the fate of Roger-Gilbert Lecomte, abandoned by his parents, by his friends, and died in hospital at the age of 35, in pain and distress.
He was indeed, throughout his existence, the one who ran behind the entire omnibus. He had not accepted life; he had always said: — No, to life. He really remained a little child: he adored childhood and his own. Long after his grandmother's death, he still felt like his grandson and retained a veneration for her. He believed in fairies, magicians, angels. Roger-Gilbert Lecomte had light blue eyes, limpid, of harsh purity, a sensual mouth, a very straight nose, an androgynous oval face and a long, thin body. He lived in an inner world, which he had extended beyond birth, supported with his philosophical and occultist notions and which he deepened throughout his adolescence. It was only within this prenatal vision, distant and for him magnificent, that he felt possible happiness. This being, strong in thought, but frail and weak, who was not made for this earth, lived between the two greatest warlike cataclysms in history. In 1914, at the age of 7, he fled haggard, through the streets, clinging to his mother's arm, from Reims being bombed and in flames. In Paris, in 1942, he suddenly found himself in prison, where he also almost died. He believed himself cursed, and also hampered by a hereditary family fate. I knew him, around 1925, through Pierre Minet, then aged fifteen, who had fallen from the sky of Reims, came alone to Paris and who, like illustrious examples, read his poems to the first person who came and then asked, without thanking, ten francs for dinner. Pierre Minet immediately explained to me: “No... I don’t do anything in life, but I have my “brothers”; they are called “the simple ones”. They are enough for me. They are everything to me. Neither would hesitate to die for the other.” These, still high school students in Reims, were called: Roger Vaillant, René Daumal, Roger-Gilbert Lecomte; soon came to them Rolland de Renéville and some others. They formed the team of the magazine Le Grand Jeu, whose issues, published shortly after the surrealist movement, through their intransigence and their revelations on modern poetry, exerted a certain influence on the generation of this time. Lecomte was the animator. His name is part of the literary history of the moment. Among his brothers, he was admired for his beauty, the provocative bad taste of his attire as well as for his exalted love of pain. He felt like he was carrying an extraordinary message. For a few years, at the age of adolescent perfection, he was fully himself. In the midst of the multiple clans following the war, in the confusion of the time, he distinguished, with exceptional clairvoyance, from Villon to the present day, the true poets, the proponents of a lineage on the subject of which there is now almost unanimous agreement among the most opposing minds. He was then the first to publish Arthur Rimbaud's Correspondance littéraire, preceded by a dazzling preface. Few people have lived as intensely as he in poetry. Through his intense mysticism, he contributed, with his friends, to the more complete rupture of literary traditions, to the search for absolute poetic moments, to the belief that these must express a profound transcendent reality, the unconscious impulse of the poet calling him, projecting him beyond life. The image of inspiration was taken literally.
However, Lecomte believed he was demeaning himself by indulging in criticism. He preferred to reign in his group. Some minds are perhaps made to inspire rather than to create, nature not having gifted them with the concentration necessary for expression. The little he wrote remains characteristic and nothing mediocre ever came from his pen. Lecomte leaves two small collections of poems: Life, Death, Love, the Void and the Wind (Cahiers Libres 1927) and a very moving booklet of barely 8 pages (1935), published, under the aegis of Paulhan, already at the time of his suffering, — and above all an unpublished novel: Retour à Tout, imagined from adolescence and which it was brought to live painfully without ever being able to finish writing it. A man, out of disgust with existence and society, patiently strives to reject everything that education and teaching have taught him: he systematically practices forgetting history, proper names, dates, days of the week, numbers. He unlearns to read and the signs of writing are soon nothing more than incomprehensible black spots on a white background, like blurred cinema images for a spectator placed too close to the screen. He takes a further step backward, to sink into the great Whole and no longer knows how to use his arms, nor walk, nor eat; he can no longer leave his miserable room and his body begins to melt... The negative effort pursued with a rage of destructive determination finally results: one day, the cleaning lady, upon entering the room, finds only a small mass of agglutinated gelatin on the floor. But this slow and total disintegration of the individual should ideally return him to some marvelous previous state. The mind never settles in immobility: when it does not admit progress, a future paradise, it imagines a golden age, a lost Eden. Return to Everything corresponded to a general conception, but above all to a negation of current civilization and science: the author saw, like Maldoror, in nature and society only slaughter and catastrophes, love linked to sadism, absurd stupidity to constantly resurgent wickedness...

However, Roger-Gilbert Lecomte really experienced this rejection of the present, this violent contempt of the era. From the moment he left adolescence, he was no longer able to progress. This was his tragedy. The fact of becoming a man, with responsibilities, always seemed inconceivable to him. He did not adapt to any profession; as a writer, could never do press service. He had become disgusted with work, among men, and no longer saw a place to take: “O stupid and idiotic race” he exclaimed with Lautréamont. He preferred the consolation of the humble and “unfortunate toad”. Rarely have I seen a person have so much difficulty acting in daily life. At 18, the simple prospect of entering a store to get a piece of bread or ham seemed so painful and repugnant to him that he would have preferred, like his character, to starve to death. Chatting with a merchant made him blush like a girl and shake like a bell. Faced with such distress, his friends had accustomed him to avoid these worries. He was then loved by them as a child, as a young god and admired as a being made of purer material than the others. But his friends evolved. He remained locked in his revolt. His hatred was expressed in imprecations against society, its laws, its capital, its prisons, its beggars, obligatory military service, obligatory work, obligatory salutes, obligatory bowing. Like a moth lost by the light of a room, he encountered obstacles at every angle and was irritated by obstacles. Absolute revolt can only be the attitude of a moment of paroxysm. Prolonged, it leads to suicide or renunciation. Conscience then became an unbearable weight for him.
“Ah! To think is unworthy since it is pure waste” (Rimbaud). Material life was becoming a dead end. All he had to do was escape, through passion, gambling or drugs. It was the drug. It brought him, at the same time as unconsciousness, torture in his flesh and moral decay. It lost its radiance; his intelligence ruminated. His “brothers”, one by one, left him, with sadness. He never complained and never showed any bitterness. Wasn't his ordeal foreshadowed in Return to Everything? He lived in miserable garrison. Detoxification treatments followed in vain. He got drunk at night; he slept during the day. He no longer worked, but, by sometimes postponing his projects into the future, pitifully sought to delude himself. He was already dead to himself and to his loved ones, to those who loved him most. He then completely disappeared into drugs. Any exclusive passion is an impossible challenge to keep. When you have a fever of 41°, writes Goethe in “Werther”, there is no point in saying to the patient: “You should get better!” » As he had retained his gentleness and goodness, women from the neighborhood had adopted him in recent months and sometimes carried out delicate errands for him. He found a new friend who devoted himself. His agony was a paroxysm of horror. In 48 hours, in the hospital, tetanus won. A few days earlier, he had felt pain, which foreshadowed this end. “O toad, unfortunate toad! ". The octopuses, the sharks, the monsters which cross the Songs of Maldoror could have haunted him in his last moments and justified his hatred of existence.

(in Les Cahiers du Sud, n° 266, June-July 1944)