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:
“Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)