ESSAY: Young Belgium

On the Eternal Urge to Start a Literary Magazine

PARIS GARE DU NORD

I park my vélib outside and run into the station. Quai 18. Voiture 8. The Eurostar can take you from Paris to Brussels in around ninety minutes, but if you’re willing to take the slow train, like I am this morning, it only costs nineteen euros and double the time on the Ouigo. I sit down and get my breath back, a couple of minutes before the whistle. I’ve just had the surreal experience of cycling along the Seine before the boats wake up, and the water looked like glass. It’s two days after daylight savings and time is stretching, as is the light. I’m seated in the quiet car of the train and above my seat there’s a sign in Dutch that says, Stil bellen kan tellen. So true, I think, not really knowing what it means. Stil bellen... kan tellen.

GEORGES RODENBACH, b. Tournai, Belgium, 1855

When I decided to go to Belgium, I simultaneously decided to write something about it for Zona Motel. But what did I know about Belgian literature? I remembered that after my last visit to the Low Countries I had read the symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach. It was published in 1892 and had a profound effect on the way I think about cities. I wanted to talk about it all the time. I wanted to write about it, but Zona Motel didn’t exist then, so I never did. Bruges-la-Morte is a story about a man who moves to Bruges after his wife dies and he skulks around the canals in the mist being lonely until one day he sees a woman walking by who looks just like his dead wife. I won’t tell you the whole plot, just in case. But essentially Bruges-la-Morte is a book about Bruges. The city is the main character. And at the time, Bruges was a depressing, crumbling medieval town. The widower wanted to live in a place that reflected his deep mourning. It’s difficult to imagine now because Bruges has become a beautiful, restored, photogenic and touristic city, and supposedly the success of the novel contributed to its regeneration. Readers in France, especially, were so entranced by the moody atmosphere of the novel that they began travelling to Belgium to see it for themselves. When I started researching Rodenbach again, a few days before this trip, I learned that he had been a contributor to a magazine called La Jeune Belgique (The Young Belgium). And I instantly knew this was my in.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD, b. 1854, Charleville, France

Rimbaud was sort of Belgian, wasn’t he? I mean, not technically, but he was born in Charleville, which is only ten kilometres from the border. And he was famously shot in Brussels, so one always associates the two. I am married to one of those poets who read Rimbaud when he was fifteen and let it define him. (We all know people like this, if we’re lucky.) When was Rimbaud active as a poet? I asked him, knowing it would be quicker than consulting Wikipedia. Early 1870s. So La Jeune Belgique started about ten years later. It was published from 1881 to 1897. And its objective was to try to define a national Belgian literature. Belgium had only been a country since 1830 and it has always had this complicated situation when it comes to languages. I spend a lot of the train ride refamiliarising myself with Rimbaud and Verlaine’s tumultuous love affair and feel surprised by the extent to which it has been romanticised.

GARE DE BRUXELLES MIDI / STATION BRUSSEL-ZUID

I arrive at the station where Verlaine was arrested after shooting Rimbaud twice during a drunken fight, and use my phone to orient myself and walk out of the station in the direction of my hotel. The first street I walk on is called Rue d’Angleterre/Straat Engeland. I take a photo and send it to my family’s group chat, which has been popping off about football throughout the morning. Why am I in Belgium? I keep thinking to myself, amused. All the street names are bilingual, French and Dutch, and it feels refreshing to have taken a three hour train ride and found myself in a different reality. Belgium has three official languages: Flemish-Dutch in the north, French in the south, and German in a very small region to the east. Brussels itself, the capital, is actually north of the Roman road which has defined the language border for a couple of thousand years, but it’s a French language enclave. Officially bilingual, practically everything all at once.

ANGÈLE, b.1995, Uccle, Belgium

To situate myself, I listen to ‘Bruxelles je t’aime’ by the Belgian popstar Angèle as I walk. The pop song, which directly addresses her fear of a potential future Belgian separation based on language, also compares the city to the kind of places a popstar inevitably has to travel to, admitting that Brussels isn’t the city of love, it doesn’t have the skyscrapers of New York, or the river Seine, or the Pompidou. In fact, it doesn’t even really have sunlight for six months of the year, but, she sings:

Et sûrement que dès ce soir le ciel couvrira une tempête / Mais après l’orage avec des bières, les gens feront la fête

And while a storm may be brewing in the sky tonight / Afterwards, people will drink beer and party

CITYBOX

I’m staying in a hotel where everything is supposed to be self-service. There’s a machine with a screen where you can scan your passport and it spits out a card to your room, but I don’t understand this when I arrive and so I approach a human sitting behind a desk in a small room. I say Bonjour at the exact same moment that she says Hello, and so she immediately switches to French, which I accept. I ask if it’s possible to déposer mes bagages, and she says yes and asks for my passport, which is British. I hand it over, feeling a little silly, and she prints out a key to the luggage room.

VOLTAIRE, b. 1694, Paris, France

For the first year or so, La Jeune Belgique was titled La Jeune Revue Littéraire, but in 1881 they decided to change the name to make it an explicitly Belgian publication. The Brussels-based, Francophone literary community were desperate to distinguish themselves from their counterparts across the border. The editor’s note to their first collected anthology after the name change explains:

From now on, we will call ourselves Young Belgium and we will publish twice a month. We will focus on literature and art above all. Young Belgium will not belong to any school. We think all forms are legitimate, as long as they are practised with restraint and with real talent. We prefer Daudet’s naturalism to Zola’s. The latter’s may sometimes shock – the former’s never. We invite young people, that is to say, the vigorous and faithful, to help us in our work. Let us demonstrate that there is a Young Belgium, just as there is a Young France, and take this as our motto: Let’s be ourselves.

But what was the literature of La Jeune Belgique? One of the few good things about living in this moment is that it’s much easier to research obscure 19th-century Belgian literary magazines than ever before. I quickly found scans of old issues of La Jeune Belgique online. A couple of nights before the trip, I was sitting up in bed close to midnight scrolling through their first anthology when my Rimbaud-inspired husband, who just happens to be a French translator, came to join me. Initially he wanted to ‘watch something stupid on YouTube’ but I asked him enough translation questions in rapid succession that he became involved, and soon we were sitting side-by-side, drinking red wine, live-translating sonnets, literary criticism, and stories, trying to get a sense of what they were going for with their magazine. There was an awkward, orientalist story by one of the editors, Max Waller. A creepy poem about lurking outside of someone’s window by Georges Rodenbach. A satirical essay that we didn’t really understand called The Demands of Women by Louis Haversin. But the piece that really intrigued us most was, as far as we could tell, the only part of the book written by a woman, Une Lettre Curieuse. A weird letter, basically, written by Voltaire’s aunt over a hundred years earlier, and with a short introduction by Max Marc. Voltaire’s aunt had been a nun in Belgium and she wrote this letter to her nephew in Paris disparaging him for being an entitled brat who disrespected the church. It was a really spiteful and personal, proto-feminist letter that we derived much enjoyment from while reading out loud in bed. It seemed like such a strange choice to publish this hundred-year-old private letter to a famous French writer, while actively trying to establish a new Belgian voice. Although on the other hand, it still slaps.

I leave my bag at the hotel and walk from Saint-Gilles to the centre of town.

CAFE SÉSINO

I would normally be working now. It’s Tuesday lunchtime and a rare luxury for me to be outside at noon. I have taken the day off and come to Belgium because my friend texted a couple of weeks earlier and said she was going to be in Brussels for a few days, if I wanted to come. And I’ve been saying yes to invitations like this. I find it helps. The café where the editors and writers of La Jeune Belgique convened was called Café Sesino and it no longer exists. I can only find one photograph taken outside on Boulevard Anspach / Anspachlaan, but I also found a description of it written in Mercure de France, a French literary magazine, in 1901. George Eekhoud, a semi-covertly queer member of La Jeune Belgique, who grew up in a Flemish-speaking family but wrote in French, explained:

For about ten years, from 1883 to 1893, Sésino was the place to be for the young literati of Brussels, where an inner circle of Parisian poets and novelists who were passing through the city would come to reinvigorate their Belgian brothers-in-arms. The list of regulars at Sésino’s “Five O’clocks” would also come to be many of the same people who, after boldly fighting for it, and without neglecting their actual work of creating fine poems and vivid prose, would come to occupy a place of honour in the intellectual history of this country.

Café Sésino was located, I later learn, a four-minute walk from where I’m going to meet my friends for lunch.

LUNA MIGUEL, b.1990, Alcalá de Henares, Spain

I open the door of the restaurant and look around until I find her, smiling to the staff in multilingual as I make my way to the table. I have been repeating this bemusing refrain for the past hour, asking myself at regular intervals, Why am I in Belgium? But now I know the answer. I take my seat at the table beside my friend (who I have written about at length here already). We laugh. We embrace. And she introduces me to the person across the table.

ALEXIS ALVAREZ, b.1980, Namur, Belgium

Alexis Alvarez is a Belgian-Spanish poet, novelist and traducteur. Luna tells me he translated her book: Poésie Masculine, and I say, Wow! Felicitations. I have wondered before why the French translation of her work was first published in Belgium rather than France, but now it makes sense. It just takes the right person to make these kinds of things happen. And then I finally look to the fourth person sitting at the table only to realise it’s someone I already know and wasn’t expecting to see.

ERNESTO CASTRO, b.1990, Madrid, Spain

I instinctively get up and move around the table to greet him too. What could be better than going to Belgium and seeing a friend you weren’t even anticipating? Ernesto is a writer, philosopher, professor and YouTubador and he’s also married to Luna. As the conversation starts flowing in French, Spanish and English, I interrupt at one point to say, I just realised I haven’t seen you since we were all leaving your wedding! Fond memories start flooding back. We’re in a well-lit, stylish restaurant with an Instagrammable aesthetic straight out of Latronico’s Perfection, and we joke that we have come to Brussels to hold a European conference. Stories start in one language and finish in another. We talk about—what else—Belgium, translation, and literature. At one point, Alexis asks what brings me to Brussels and I gesture around the table and say, just this.

LUCY K SHAW b. 1987, York, England

A few days later, I read an interview with Luna in a Brazilian magazine. I can’t read Portuguese so I ask the computer to translate. The question is about her first poetry book, Estar Enfermo, published when she was a teenager. She says she can’t regret those early poems because they are the basis for everything she’s still interested in writing about today: Somatic reading, palimpsestic intention, and escrita auto-bio-bibliográfica, or auto-bio-bibliographical writing. When I see those words translated from Spanish into Portuguese and then to English, it feels like a light turns on. That’s what we’ve been doing this whole time.

MAISON CFC

We leave the restaurant and walk for a few minutes to Maison CFC, a publishing house and bookshop that specialises in Francophone Belgian literature, and as we move I ask Alexis if he’s familiar with La Jeune Belgique. Oui! he says, seeming surprised that someone would bring it up. Tu connais La Jeune Belgique? he asks the others. And something in the way they say no fills me with joy, their faces conveying delight at the prospect of incoming knowledge, their eyes saying, Tell me more. French and Spanish have a grammatical distinction we don’t quite have in English. There are two different kinds of knowing. You can know a fact, or you can know of something, have it somewhere in your mental landscape. We ask each other a lot of connais-tu and conoces questions, which translate to something like: does this already exist for you? I recount what I’ve learned about La Jeune Belgique so far and ask Alexis if he knows of any women writers who might have been involved in the magazine.

MARIE NIZET, b. 1859, Brussels, Belgium

Inside the store, Alexis hands me a copy of Le Capitaine vampire, an 1879 novel by Marie Nizet. We check her birth date on the back cover and suppose she must have been around at the same time as La Jeune Belgique. Maybe she was present? I take a photo of the book for reference and later learn that Nizet came from a family of writers. Her father published books of patriotic poetry, and her brother was also a journalist and novelist, although he is seemingly unknown today. For some reason, their family took in many students from Romania as lodgers and as a result, Marie developed a strong interest in Romanian culture. Much of her work is inspired by Romanian folklore and The Vampire Captain was supposedly an influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Despite early success, Marie Nizet’s writing faded into obscurity after she got married in 1879. She didn’t publish in La Jeune Belgique, which started two years later.

JEAN DOMINIQUE, b.1873, Brussels, Belgium

Alexis passes me a copy of Le Don silencieux by Jean Dominique, whose real name was Marie Closset. She used a male pseudonym, and she was too young for Young Belgium but I look her up later anyway. She was a poet and pioneer of autofiction, and with her two best friends, part of a secret literary society called The Peacocks. They founded an alternative school to help girls pursue artistic careers, and mentored other female poets. If I had found out about them first, this essay might have been about them. I take a photo of Poésie Masculine by Luna Miguel, translated by Alexis Alvarez, on display, and soon we’re outside again. Alexis says goodbye and disappears into the Brussels afternoon.

THE MARCH OF THE PEACOCKS, 1901

There’s a pointillist painting of Marie Closset and friends by the Belgian painter Théo Van Rysselberghe. The three members of the secret Peacock literary society, along with the artist’s wife Maria, walk into the wind on a beach somewhere. Their long white dresses sweeping through the sand. Wandering through the city, we become our own secret literary society for the afternoon. Lucy, Luna and Ernesto, meandering between bookshops and museums.

NADIA DE VRIES, b. 1991, Amsterdam, Netherlands

In Passa Porta, the international house of literature, I find books by my friend Nadia de Vries in both Dutch and English. Connais-tu Nadia? She writes poetry in English, which is how I came to know her and her work. And she writes prose in Dutch, having published several novels over the past few years in the Netherlands. I know she often comes to Brussels for readings, etc., and presumably she does them in Dutch. Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, shares a common book market (with a combined readership of 23.5 million people), with the Netherlands, I learn. I was under the impression that it’s difficult for people in the Netherlands to understand Flemish people from Belgium when they speak, I think the accents are really different, but apparently it’s not an issue once things are written down. Until I met Alexis, I didn’t know of any contemporary Belgian authors in either language, though I often notice writers from Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin passing through here to do events. Nadia’s novel Thistle was translated into English in 2024, but as far as I know, her work hasn’t yet been translated into French. Though I don’t know how much that says about cross-cultural-pollination. Relationships between writers and translators are often circumstantial and extremely personal.

LIEKE MARSMAN, b. 1990, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands

Another Dutch writer we know, Lieke Marsman, is also on the shelves at Passa Porta. Her work has often been translated into English by the British writer Sophie Collins who grew up in Holland. Lieke’s novel, On Another Planet They Can Save Me, will be published in English in a few months. And the collaboration between Lieke and Sophie has always seemed like a perfect match. We marvel at the cover on the Dutch edition, unable to read a single sentence, just a vague idea of what’s inside. We’ll have to wait a little longer to be able to read it.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, b. 1908, Paris, France

Luna guides us to a museum she has visited before but when we get there, it no longer exists. No problem, I didn’t even realise that’s what we were trying to do. I was just walking along the canal and talking about whatever. We discuss Viking conquests and laugh a lot. I try to explain the Voltaire thing from La Jeune Belgique. We pass a public artwork called Mo(nu)ment Melancholia outside what appears to be an abandoned apartment building and take a photo of Ernesto smiling beside it. Luna asks if I have read Los detectives salvajes by Roberto Bolaño and when I say no, they both insist that I must. They laugh and tell me, It’s just like us. We pass a small, urban park named after Simone de Beauvoir and decide to walk through it as a tribute. There’s one of those spiderweb climbing frames for children and Ernesto suggests we climb it, but something holds me back.

NUIT DE CHINE

We pass an old-fashioned erotic bookshop and go inside. It’s more magazines and DVDs than literature but they do have a couple of shelves of old books. Cash only. I mentioned earlier about Marie Nizet, the writer who disappeared after she got married. But I didn’t tell you that after her marriage ended acrimoniously in divorce and she was left to raise her son alone, and after she fell off the map for a few years, possibly going to Portugal during the First World War, that eventually she would go on to have a passionate love affair with a naval officer named Cecil Axel-Veneglia, and she would write her final poetic work about their romance. Pour Axel was a text so explicitly sexual, describing orgasm, masturbation and even necrophiliac longing after his death, that Nizet insisted the work could not be shared until after she had also died. It was published in 1923 to critical acclaim, its debts to the Parnassian poetics of La Jeune Belgique clearly visible.

ARCHIVES ET MUSÉE DE LA LITTÉRATURE

Our final attempt at an official museum. We wander over to the Royal Library of Belgium, which I had read housed something called Les Archives et Musée de la Littérature. I thought potentially they might have some information about La Jeune Belgique. Perhaps an issue behind glass. We enter the large Royal Library building and ask someone behind a desk if she knows where it is. She says no, it’s her first day. We say we’ll find it, wander down a long corridor towards an elevator, consult a map, go up a few floors, and emerge in another silent corridor –are we supposed to be here? We walk towards a closed door that says Archives et Musée de la Littérature, nervously open it, and walk into a small, silent library room where half a dozen people are poring over old books. They all look up at us. A woman behind a desk whispers in French to ask if we have an appointment. We say no, is there anything we can see without one? She says we can look at their mural, which is painted on a wall across the room. A map of Belgium with the names of writers who have passed through painted over the relevant locations. I am trying not to laugh. We have no choice but to show great interest in the mural. Lord Byron was once here. Alexandre Dumas. Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Baudelaire. Victor Hugo. Our old friend, Voltaire. We stand and look at it for a few minutes until it feels appropriate to leave.

CARREFOUR

We arrange to meet again later and I head back to the hotel, stopping at a supermarket along the way to buy some intensely sparkling water. There are few things I find more interesting than visiting a grocery store in a different country. You’d think French and Belgian shops would be more or less the same, but it is immediately clear to me that, in this area at least, Belgian culture steers more in the direction of the Netherlands and the UK than France. There’s a large selection of freshly made, refrigerated, wrapped-in-plastic baguette sandwiches. A culture of convenience. You could live for a hundred years and never see this in Paris. People go to the bakery. There are also a lot of salads that include ingredients like sweetcorn and potatoes, which look extremely German. There’s even a sweet potato and carrot dip among the hummuses. Very exotic. As I walk back to the hotel, I notice that cafés often offer counter service, things are designed just to move a little bit more quickly. Their culture just ever so slightly more northern.

MAX WALLER, b.1860, Brussels

Back at the hotel, I lie on the bed and start scrolling through La Jeune Belgique again. I feel that perhaps I can learn more about Belgian literature by staring into my computer than by being outside in Belgium. I don’t know what I think about La Jeune Belgique. When I first found out about it, it was my only touchstone in late 19th-century Belgian literary culture, but the more I read, and the more avenues I explore, the more it’s possible for me to see a whole ecosystem. There were other magazines, of course, like La Basoche, which ran for sixteen issues from November 1884 to April 1886, and was considered a sort of younger sibling. I only learned of it because when I was reading the memoranda section of an issue of La Jeune Belgique, I found an obituary for its founding editor.

As we go to press, we learn of the death of Charles-Henry de Tombeur, our brother in letters, who has been taken from us at the age of twenty-three. Without ever having been part of La Jeune Belgique, De Tombeur was a friend to most of our editors. He also experienced the struggle that literature can be when he founded and directed La Basoche. He poured his heart and soul into it, showing unusual tenacity, and thanks to him, the journal deserves to be preserved and remembered. De Tombeur wrote extensively. His style was lively and refined. He sought out picturesque and choice words in a truly modern way that will make him one to be remembered. This is a painful death; its irreparable reality a difficult burden – we send our departed friend the condolences of the many who loved him.

The memoranda section, which seems like the closest thing they had to Zona Motel’s gossip column, is filled with book announcements, in-jokes, and short obituaries, acknowledging the deaths of contributors and their family members. In almost every issue, everyone at La Jeune Belgique expresses their deepest sorrow on behalf of someone or other. Often insulting their work in the process. For example they’ll say that Louise Ackermann, a French poet who had her moment of fame, due to her awkwardly rhymed poems, died in Nice at the beginning of August.

Or Francis Pittié died last month in Paris. He was the author of several volumes of poetry, the most important of which ‘Through Life’ was published recently and contains his best work. The poetry is simple, sometimes touching but never rises above a modest average. General Pittié was more of a soldier than a poet and distinguished himself by his bravery in the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Absolutely savage. But what I love most about researching La Jeune Belgique is how alive and familiar it still feels. There’s something illuminating to me about all these people working together to edit their publication inspired by their specific cause. A lot of the work they published doesn’t hold up, of course. Most of the work we all publish won’t make it into the next century, let alone the ones after that. But the idea of these writers —Max Waller, Iwan Gilkin, Valère Gille, Albert Giraud, Georges Eekhoud, Georges Rodenbach, et al.— working in collaboration to make something for their moment, I can understand it and relate.

In the weeks I spent writing this piece, I enjoyed some portion of most evenings sifting through issues of La Jeune Belgique. I realise that at some point in 1886, their office, once located at 80 Rue Bosquet, was just around the corner from where the Citybox hotel is now. Although the address of their office seemed to change often. I noticed their motto evolved from Soyons nous / Let’s be ourselves to Ne Crains / Fear Not. I watched as the editors gained in confidence, as a Belgian literary voice did come to exist, as my initial introduction to the magazine, Georges Rodenbach, turned his back on the publication, as new voices appeared, as a style emerged that wasn’t there from the beginning. I watched as Young Belgium grew up. And then, one night as I was flicking through an 1890 edition of La Jeune Belgique, there was an In Memoriam, as there so often are. But this time I read the first few words, Voici un an que Max Waller est mort, and I was stunned. Sorry. Max Waller? One of the fucking founding editors has been dead for a year??? And it’s only 1890?! I felt something akin to genuine grief when I realised that Max Waller had died at the age of twenty-nine, most likely from tuberculosis, while the publication was at its peak. I mean, of course all of these people are dead. I’m reading a magazine that stopped publishing a hundred and thirty years ago. But they don’t feel dead. They feel like a bunch of sassy Belgian bitches, and I just, I don’t know. I think their kind of organisational literary energy will keep on flowing forever, and currently it’s running its way through me.

OSCAR D’ARTOIS, b. 1989, Paris, France

He takes the fast train after work and walks over to the hotel. He’s all new in Belgium but I’m used to it by now. I’ve been here six hours. He’s tired and curious about the plan for the evening and I don’t know. We just said we’d meet up again later, maybe have some Iranian food. We both take a shower. We both love the hotel. We’ve usually got all these other things we need to think about and plan, but tonight we’re just here in Brussels. I play Angèle on my phone and dance around the room as we get ready to go out. Sunset time, 8:21pm all of a sudden. Spring opening up in front of us.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO, b. 1953, Santiago, Chile

We walk back into the centre of town, pause in the Grand Place, and eventually find a bar that we feel reflects our sensibilities. Somewhere simple, full of locals, all wood panels and mirrors. We try to blend in, try to act Belgian, order one of their famous beers. I share my location with Luna, and she and Ernesto soon join us too. Somehow, in the interim, they have acquired a copy of The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño in English, which they present to me as a gift across the table. I am so lucky to have friends like this. I open the book and instantly know I’m going to like it. The first two sentences read:

‘I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course.’

Merci to Oscar d'Artois for his translation assistance.