Life
Robert Goffin was born in Ohain, Belgium in 1898. His mother was unmarried, and his pharmacist grandfather supported them. In 1916, Goffin completed his humanities study at the Athenaeum of Saint-Gilles where Paul Delvaux was his classmate. Two years later, he published his first collection of poetry, Rosaire des soirs (Evening Rosary), while he was studying law at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel).
By 1923, he was a lawyer at the Court of Appeal of Brussels, and in 1928, he married Suzanne Lagrange. During this period, his focus shifted to the new American art form, jazz, and in 1932 he published what is considered the first serious book on the new genre, Aux Frontiers du Jazz.
He was active in the Belgian resistance against the nazis, whose invasion of his country he predicted twelve months in advance, creating in 1939 the magazine Alert, in which he advocated the abandonment of the Belgian neutrality for an alliance with France. He had harsh polemics with Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle. He left Belgium for the United States at the outset during World War II, supporting himself through lectures and writing, including essays such as Jazz: from the Congo to the Metropolitan, and novels set in German-occupied Belgium, including La colombe de la Gestapo ("the dove of the Gestapo") and The White Brigade (published in French as Passeports pour l'Audelà).
In 1942, he collaborated with Leonard Feather to teach what is considered the first course ever on jazz history and analysis, held at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
After the war, he returned to Belgium to again take up his legal activities at the Court of Appeal of Brussels. In 1952, he joined the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature, becoming director in 1971, and director of the Belgian Pen Club in 1956. His wife Suzanne died in 1965 and in the late 1970s, Goffin began a life of semi-retirement on the shores of Lake Genval, dying in 1984.
Read more about this topic: Robert Goffin
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play
That, it may be, had danced her life away....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A man in public life expects to be sneered at—it is the fault of his elevated sitiwation, and not of himself.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)