Michel de Ghelderode
| Michel de Ghelderode | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Adhémar-Adolphe-Louis Martens 3 April 1898 Ixelles, Belgium |
| Died | 1962 (aged 63–64) Brussels, Belgium |
| Nationality | Belgium |
| Other names | Philostene Costenoble Jac Nolan Babylas |
| Occupation | dramatist |
| Spouse(s) | Jeanne-Françoise Gérard (d.1980) |
Michel de Ghelderode (April 3, 1898 – April 1, 1962) was an avant-garde Belgian dramatist, writing in French. His works often deal with the extremes of human experience, from death and degradation to religious exaltation.
Ghelderode's father, Henri-Louis Martens, was employed as a royal archivist, a line of work later to be pursued by young Ghelderode. The author’s mother, née Jeanne-Marie Rans, was a former postulant for holy orders; even after bearing four children, of whom Ghelderode was the youngest, she retained evident traces of her erstwhile vocation that would strongly influence the mature Ghelderode’s dramatic work: One of Mme Martens’s remembered “spiritual tales,” concerning a child mistakenly buried alive who remained strangely marked by death even after her rescue, inspired most of the plot and characters of Ghelderode’s Mademoiselle Jaire (1934) written when the author was in his mid-thirties.
He was in military service from 1919 - 1921 and in 1924 married Jeanne-Françoise Gérard (d. 1980).
Ghelderode became increasingly reclusive from 1930 onwards and was chronically ill with asthma during his late thirties. Frequently suffering from poor health, around the age of sixteen, while pursuing his studies at the Institut St.-Louis in Brussels, he fell gravely ill with typhus. He would retain for the rest of his life the vision of “a Lady” who materialized at his bedside to utter the words, "not now, sixty-three." Ghelderode in fact died two days short of what would have been his sixty-fourth birthday in 1962. He is buried in the Laeken Cemetery, Brussels.
Ghelderode's influences include puppet theater, Italian commedia dell'arte, the medieval world of Flanders, the Flemish painters Bosch, Bruegel, Jacob Jordaens and the Teniers, along with the Belgian artist James Ensor, painter of the macabre, and the novelist Georges Eekhoud.
A prolific writer, Ghelderode wrote more than 60 plays, a hundred stories, a number of articles on art and folklore and more than 20,000 letters.
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