Louis Gonzague Frick dans tous ses états: poète, soldat, courriériste, ami by Stephen Steele, Anne-Françoise Bourreau-Steele

Abstract

 Reviews ‘A eatrophobic Dramatist: J.-J. Rousseau’s Position in eatre Historiography on Today’s Stage’, which touches on anglophone scholarship as part of its survey of Rousseau’s treatment in British, German, and Scandinavian historiographies. M S U W C. N Louis Gonzague Frick dans tous ses états: poète, soldat, courriériste, ami. By S S and A-F B-S. (Études de litt érature des e et e siècles, ) Paris: Classiques Garnier. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. With Louis de Gonzague Frick dans tous ses états Stephen Steele and Anne-Françoise Bourreau-Steele offer the only book-length study of this poet to date. As the back cover notes, Frick’s poetry is ‘relegated’ to the margin owing to its preciosity and obscurity; Frick was an assiduous practitioner of neologisms with elaborate etymologies , as well as forgotten terms. His appeal as an object of study lies principally in his illustrious friends—Robert Desnos, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others. As the book amply demonstrates, Frick was a literary networker, a link between otherwise distant figures, a hub of literary sociability. He therefore appears as an emblem of sociability as such, being oen praised for his loyalty in friendship, his politeness even in the face of regular ridicule and vicious polemic, his reserved tenderness. He also, to his credit, disliked the nationalist propaganda of the Great War—although he too served on the front. While a study of this marginalized figure seems welcome at first blush, one begins to question its fruitfulness aer five hundred pages of minutiae. e authors evidently scoured dozens of obscure literary journals for clues, and one can only admire this great care in scholarship. But a great deal too much space is devoted, for instance, to Louis de Gonzague Frick’s name (his last name is Frick, his first name ‘Louis de Gonzague’, though many contemporaries believed he was feigning nobility with an artificial particule ‘de’, and/or that his last name was ‘de GonzagueFrick ’). is kind of hair-splitting attention to anecdote is typical of the study. While some anecdotes have undeniable entertainment value, their scholarly worth is dubious. And these anecdotes do not, contrary to those concerning Jacob or Apollinaire, constitute material substantial enough to form a mythobiography. Rather than engaging in real demonstration, each chapter appears to meander from one topic to another, oen ending up in areas that appear to have little obvious connection to the chapter’s theme. ‘Douleur et cinéma’, for instance, includes only a dozen or so passing references to Frick’s role in Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (). Sometimes, long excursuses on Roger Allard or Robert Valançay interrupt the main line of enquiry, at times with little justification for these forays into the lives and production of other poets. ere is too much disorganization for a casual reader to make much use of the volume. Perhaps most unfortunately, one gets little sense of Frick’s poetry here. e authors dissolve quotations into their own sentences, slicing up the original lines MLR, .,   oen down to an individual word. ese five hundred pages contain not a single instance of block-quoted verse—an astonishing feat for the in-depth study of a poet. One does come away with an impression of idiosyncratic verbal invention, since the authors quote many neologisms from Frick’s arsenal (and always gloss them, thankfully). But this does not suffice to represent the poet’s substantial œuvre. Nor can the reader easily procure Frick’s poetry elsewhere: none of the collections has been republished, and few to none have remained significant objects of bibliophilic interest. ose curious about the poetic work are better off with a long visit to the Bibliothèque nationale. In short, this study is long on detail and regrettably short on obvious relevance or broader implications. One might hope that the volume will lead to further approaches to Frick’s poetry or to his sociological position, but it is more likely that it will remain simply a work of reference on Frick. Perhaps a selected verse volume might make this publication seem more useful. As it stands...