The life of an artist: Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and his wild spirit filled with existential dread

Essay by Simoné Esterhuizen

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, the man who predicted his own death in one of his poems. As an excommunicated poet from the surrealist movement the avant-garde poet did not care what the surrealists thought of him. Nor his friends. Nor himself.

As a rebellious and curious teen, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was never meant to spend his whole life in Reims. Which is why after one year of medical school he dropped out, moved to Paris and decided to change his name and persona from the bourgeois Roger Gilbert to the aristocratic Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. He charmed his way through the town and had everyone swooning. He was the heart and soul of the journal called Le Grand Jeu; The Great Game. He was somber yet ecstatic, spiritual yet empty and a great artist; yet a drug addict.

No one person can be defined by a single word, action or trait and nothing is more true than this than for Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. In his teen years he formed The Simplists with five friends. They had special nicknames for one another, shared a common interest in poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud and discovered their absorption with occultism and Indian Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism. After his stint in med school and his move to Paris he formed Le Grand Jeu with two Simplistes alumni and began questioning life all that more. André Breton personally expelled them from the Révolution Surréaliste, yet Le Grand Jeu left an unimaginable mark on poetry.

While he was celebrated and revealed during his first years in Paris and even his first publication outside of Le Grand Jeu, in 1933, things took a turn when he became addicted to opium, morphine and as one person suggests - heroin. Le Grand Jeu was also built on the threat of adulthood. The members of the group were all entranced by metaphysics, occidental mysticism as well as psychology. They did quite a bit of experimenting which included paramnesia, depersonalisation and dissociation from the actual self, and the concept that dreams are a form of transpersonal memory. Some of Gilbert-Lecomte’s poems are violent like “Son of the Bone Speaks”, but some are humorous like “A Girl's Little Secret''. His altered state of mind is in part why he has been such an impactful poet and as he put it himself “there are no two ways of being a visionary: you can see only through asphyxiation and congestion”. His experiments lead to wildly successful poetry, but not while he was here.

In fact, after his first publication in 1933, the second time his works were published was in 1955; 12 years after his death. His friend Arthur Adamov found some of his poems when he passed away from an infected needle and sold it to Gallimard. They published the poems and a second edition was released in 1977. In 2015 Gallimard also published a paperback book with his poems along with other industry leaders Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire. And in 2019 Coma Crossing: Collected Poems by Schism Books was published. He has influenced and continues to influence poetry and writings across the world.

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte was a great artist despite being a drug addict. His existential dread and addiction wasn’t caused by searching for a high but rather as he said himself a 'sudden reminder of the uselessness of the action you are performing, now the symbol of all action, when faced with the scandal of being, and being limited, without any real knowledge of oneself.’ His alignment with surrealism, yet his expulsion from the Révolution Surréaliste is probably one of the reasons why Roger Gilbert-Lecomte as a poet, but also a person, impacted and continues to impact the literary society.