In Memoriam Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

As long as he appeared alive, Roger Gilbert-The Count only had friends. At 25, he still looked like a child prodigy. We looked at him, we listened to him with the amazed astonishment felt by what is prematurely perfect. But as soon as he occupied his true place and stood decidedly on the verge of death, he remained alone. He was scary. Especially since he seemed to have chosen to remain silent, and kept the horror of what he was enduring to himself. His smile resembled the glass eye which only makes the emptiness of the orbit more hideous to the imagination. We turned away from him. Already he was no longer: he was beginning to be. We couldn't stand the presence of this absence. In recent times, he only kept 2 or 3 men in his wake whose strength was decreasing. I had given up a long time ago... Those who believed they could explain everything by its physical deterioration did not understand this. Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's responsibility for his own death is complete; but other.
He was from the race of seers. The use of the eye makes men blind; what they see takes the place of what is. After a few others whose names it is better not to mention, Gilbert-Lecomte set about ruining reality, which for him was shrinking every day, like a skin of sorrow. This phenomenon did not impoverish him but made him suffer intolerably. It was because his body, greedily tortured by the drug, was thwarting the transformation of his mind. No doubt, if he had been able to renounce the poison that was devouring him, he would have taken another step towards the goal he had foreseen, or, to put it more accurately, towards this indescribable explanation, this forever inaccessible temple of the Absolute to which he knew moreover that death would bring him closer. Consider, however, the terrible destiny of those like him, of those who wanted to find out for themselves, who managed to approach the truth in the wild, without a compass, guided imperiously by this inner flair, this furious gift of vision for which religions cannot replace and which burns and eats away those who possess it as surely as radium.
These are not words: Gilbert-Lecomte was affected. I was 15 when we met. O you, his brothers at this time, you Daumal, Meyrat, Vaillant, do you see again this face that Vaurore. of agony appears with its faded colors? His beauty was that of a god darkened by exile. He began in this martyrdom to which he had invited us, which with him we agreed to endure, but to the end of which he reached alone. He then looked at everything with the tender and cruel, modestly disenchanted look of the young lords of spleen. Approaching the outside world without anger, he did not emit those howls which characterize intellectual riots, and which he listened to me utter with the friendly commiseration of a man for a child. Because he was not a rebel but an objector. He knew, moreover, that the path he was embarking on would lead him to places that were much more hostile, and that it would have been unreasonable to maintain for long this hallucinatory struggle against a state of things to which he was already turning his back... He could not hate humanity, whose profound incoherence, whose almost total decadence resulted for him from the sacrilegious oblivion into which it had fallen of the metaphysical laws which lead to Knowledge.

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I then felt for him the affection of a disciple for his master. Of this religious feeling which often went without words and which, when we were together, gave to the smallest things an inestimable value, it seems to me that at the moment I cannot speak. How can we describe this plenary union, this solemn advancement in a world that we created and which covered us with its poetry? The night especially was favorable to us: she wore our livery. For hours we walked, attentive to note the progress of the transfiguration of which we were the promoters and witnesses. We headed deeper into the town, which I see today, sunken in the rain, rendered opaque, dappled with lights, and deserted. We knew that from this adventurous journey we would bring back a large supply of sweet sadness which at the moment of parting we would share and take with us to then spread throughout the day... We belonged to this carefree generation, passed to despair like the deserter to the enemy, and who only wanted to commit to living wisely. We turned the word happiness back and forth in all directions, like one of those objects whose use an archaeologist vainly tries to guess. So strangely alive, stuck in a torturous dream, that we were nevertheless far from dementia! Setting out in our own search, we endeavored to bring to light an image of ourselves which could disaccustom us to the one we carried with us, and which was for us what the jailer is for the prisoner: an obstacle to his freedom. We tried, with painful obstinacy, with haggard seriousness, to separate ourselves from the world of appearances like the insect from its chrysalis, in order to access authenticity. Between what we felt we could be and what life claimed we were, the gap always grew. In order not to lose anything of what we had acquired and not to give in to the demands coming from everywhere, from ambition, from the desire to enjoy, we practiced contempt: of the entire reality, we had managed to make a museum of horrors. I know many of us saw this behavior as nothing more than a game, or an easy way to stand out. Their existence was not changed: ours resembled a march to torture. I will not dwell on the brilliant period of Gilbert-Lecomte's life, because it was only a stopover for him. Coming after surrealism, the literary movement, or more precisely the movement of thought of which the magazine Le Grand Jeu was the organ, offered only very external similarities with that which had preceded it. If, as I have just written, we mistreated reality, we nonetheless made light of the surrealist attitude, an elegant way of not being, of elucidating everything, a worldly solution to the most essential of problems, and which never went beyond words. All things considered, it is fair to say that we were to the Surrealists what the German Romantics were to the French Romantics. For us it was about something other than maintaining more or less comfortable positions; or to eternally assume the role of denouncers. This game of massacre, this profession of fake executioners only tempted us poorly. Moreover, the pages of the Grand Jeu would not have been enough to contain the message that Gilbert-Lecomte believed he was bringing; they only constituted for him a momentarily suitable place, only a point in the interior panorama which was his, from which to raise the ground conquered before moving forward again. He was acutely aware of this. At 16 he already foresaw his rise and, if I dare say so, his fall towards the summits. I want to emphasize this, which constituted my friend's tragedy, in which he got bogged down to the point of being bogged down. There came a time when his companions abandoned him; some to follow a different path which seemed to them to be truer; others simply out of weariness, out of an imperative need to retrace their steps. It's not my place to judge them. But let them please refrain from doubting what I am going to write now; for of him who until then had led them they knew nothing more from that day. With singular temerity, they now considered him dead. The being who continued to bear his name did not interest them. The Roger they had known only existed in their memory. And, in the long run, this turned out to be very true. As he advanced in this domain of solitude where the warning signs of his Passion were increasingly numerous, Gilbert-Lecomte changed until he only secondarily resembled the man he had been. But far from impoverishing him, frequent exposure to suffering in all its forms fully enriched him. His decline endowed him with new virtues. Those who knew him then and who were fascinated by his strength of soul, doubted whether he could ever have been this boy who had previously been described to them, capricious, quite naively in love with glory, and whose vanity sometimes contradicted his profound excellence. Nothing youthful anymore showed through in him. His humility, his tolerance, his humor which remained benevolent were overwhelming. He who had, in a way, resigned as a man, now provided striking proof of his humanity. We thus knew that he would reach the denouement without even stiffening, and that, relaxed, he would let himself slide into the arms of death.
But this serenity was excruciating. The evil to which he succumbed and of which his death was only going to be the symbol, that the transposition onto the physical plane, was equivalent to a nameless torture, which we could not consider without fear. Gilbert-Lecomte's fidelity to the faith which had first inspired him and which was necessarily to crush him needed no expression. She was a fire that only consumed him. Harassed by the duty to fulfill, by the task that motivated him, he remained incapable of coping with it. Of this interior exploration so resolutely conducted, he would leave only hasty notes, only a brief testimony. Instead of having a barrier to the dramatic flowering of his thoughts, he suffered it, like the patient the different phases of his illness. Where others had escaped the grip of their devouring meditation by falling into madness, he remained entirely but uselessly lucid. It wasn't laziness that was holding him back; nor helplessness. The bitter tyranny of what he felt, obviously joined to this need which gnawed at his flesh and vitiated his blood, left him no respite. Sometimes, miraculously, he emerged from himself, and recorded his vision in a poem. These few cries, these verses in a frenzied accent give an account of his ordeal. He looked a little like those mystics whose contemplation abolishes them; but his only united him with himself: it identified him ever more closely with this night which hope and doubt inhabited in turn and which tirelessly but with diminishing energy, he persisted in wanting to break through. Brought together, his various writings will form a work. This will not have the universal character that he had dreamed of giving it. In this sense, its disappearance is comparable to the destruction of an extremely rare manuscript of which there is no copy. Entering the Broussais hospital on Christmas Day, Gilbert-Lecomte died there on December 31, at a quarter to 6 in the evening, overcome by tetanus, from which more than 15 years previously he had predicted that he would die. He was the first to detect the nature of his illness. Without showing astonishment or showing the slightest apprehension, he accepted this invitation which he had so often imagined, and which in fact now he knew by heart; at this meeting from which he was going to obtain his redemption. Those who, after having left him on the threshold of delirium, saw him for the last time before he was taken to Reims where he rests, were unanimously struck by his resemblance to Christ. I note this, which perhaps was not meant to be said, with particular emotion. (1).

(1) I cannot do less to finish than mention the name of Mrs. Georges Firmat, who watched over the last years of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte with absolute dedication and disinterestedness. May she please find here the expression of the gratitude of the poet's friends.

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