NORGE (Georges MOGIN, known as Géo). - Lot 176

NORGE (Georges MOGIN, known as Géo). Born in Brussels. 1898-1989. French-speaking Belgian poet. Founded the Journal des poètes in 1931 and Les Cahiers blancs in 1937, where he published a tribute to Segalen and Milosz. L.A.S. "Norge" to his friend, the Belgian poet Robert Goffin. S.l. [Saint-Paul de Vence?], August 20, 1954. 2 1/2 pages in-4, cream wove paper. VERY BEAUTIFUL POETIC LETTER: The poet thanks his friend for sending him his work "Les Filles de lOnde" ("The Daughters of the Wave") ...Starting from the medusa and the anodont to reach such graces was a long itinerary. Your daughters have traveled it with the harmony and overflowing vitality that are the least of your gifts. Oh, God! What a breath. The Creator needed it to turn dead clay into a man full of paternal storms. Ah! daughters from where, from the seas, as the excellent Delvaux [Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux] shows us. Over a thousand centuries of rolling mills, with the tenderness of storms and the bite of time... You have succeeded magnificently in making music out of all this, to the point where art forgets itself (it's great art) and remains a memory, a vision of all these floral cataclysms, of all these passionate moults (...) to make a little girl, the sister, the sea, the child (...) the heart of the thinking reed. Norge praises his friend to the end: ...There is in your poetry a taste, a smell, a Goffin noise that alone carries your message. Your great and melodious message, for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart...Attracted early on by literature and modernist currents, Robert Goffin frequented the Dadaist milieu. Curiously, his first poetic collection is surprisingly classicist. Published in 1918, Le Rosaire des soirs is a booklet very much in the spirit of Francis Jammes. The following year, he enrolled in law at the University of Brussels, still located on Rue des Sols, where he rubbed shoulders with Michaux, Odilon Jean Périer and Clément Pansaers. Then came the discovery of jazz, which turned his life upside down. The passion this music aroused in him led him to publish the very first text devoted to the subject in Franz Hellens' Le Disque vert, and to write a collection of poems, Jazz-band (1922). In Paris, he met Max Jacob, Chagall and Blaise Cendrars. After becoming a lawyer at the Brussels Court of Appeal, he set up a jazz band with Ernst Mœrman and Marcel Cuvelier, in which he played trumpet. After founding an anti-Nazi weekly, Alerte, Robert Goffin fled to the United States in May 1940. There, he became a friend to everyone from Hollywood to Harlem, defended Leopold III from the start of hostilities, and founded the pro-Gaullist newspaper La Voix de la France. Returning home in 1945, he returned to his legal activities, becoming president of the Pen Club de Belgique. In this capacity, he traveled the world. He devoted studies to Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and began writing poetry criticism (Fil d'Ariane pour la poésie, 1964), writing spy and adventure novels with disconcerting ease, becoming an intimate of Cocteau and Aragon. His passion for jazz continued (four hundred thousand copies of Histoire du jazz in 1946, a study of New Orleans in the same year and a biography of Louis Armstrong in 1947), he set the world record for the kilometer run in a car, and wrote French subtitles for the film Gone with the Wind. He was truly everywhere. He wrote numerous collections of baroque and abundant poetry, in a luxuriance of words that testify to his outbursts as well as his anger, his controlled pain as well as his presence in the news of art and the world. Le Voleur de feu (1950), Filles de l'onde (1954), Sablier pour une cosmogonie (1965) and Chroniques d'outre-chair (1975) dominate this overabundant poetic output.... He died in Ohain, Belgium, in 1984.