Brussels is, among many other things, a city of imposing neoclassical architecture and sumptuous art déco ornamentation. It was also the city of Herman Teirlinck, an influential figure in Flemish literature of the first half of the twentieth century and a tireless experimenter in both prose and drama. Teirlinck fitted perfectly into the liberal, moneyed, free-thinking, bourgeois milieu of the Belgian capital. So does his fictional alter ego in The Man in the Mirror, Teirlinck’s brilliant last novel, first published in 1955. The alter ego is called Henri M., a bank director approaching his seventieth birthday but still active. The book presents his unflattering self-portrait, centred on a few days in the 1930s during which Henri rather foolishly chases an attractive young secretary who worked for him for a short while but then defected to another firm.


None of this is particularly striking or uplifting in itself. What grabs the attention, though, is the way the material is handled. The Man in the Mirror counts among the very few novels written largely not in the first or the third but in the second person, and using the present tense. It’s as if Henri is constantly talking to himself, glancing at his reflection in every mirror he comes across, commenting not only on what he sees and what others say to him, but also on his own reactions and responses. The effect is unsettling: we feel simultaneously close to Henri and at a distance, for he remains the ‘you’ with which he addresses himself. On two occasions other voices break through Henri’s dialogue with himself. They fill in crucial episodes in Henri’s past, providing assessments by third parties, as it were. An exchange of letters completes the picture.


And what a picture it is! Henri reveals himself as a gentleman of sophisticated tastes and expensive habits, as elegant and affable as he is morally bankrupt. Behind the impeccable manner, superior irony and endearing vanity we see a mean-spirited, self-seeking opportunist who will not let love or friendship inhibit his way to the top. Henri is fully aware of the brute in him, as his remorseless self-examination makes clear. But despite his apparent frankness, he does not tell himself, and us, everything. That is where the other episodes come in. They show Henri as seen by others, first as a wilfully cruel adolescent, then as a duplicitous grown-up. This background prepares us for the real dramas. Henri has a son from an earlier illicit liaison, but as the girl was of low social rank he shunted her and her child off to France while he himself courted the widow of his former business partner. He remains deaf to the poor girl’s pleas for help, and feels satisfaction at the news of her and the child’s death. But his marriage is on the rocks too, as a result of a car accident which killed his (second) son and left his wife horribly disfigured. Henri’s shallow affection died with his son and heir and, rather than comforting his desperate, long-suffering wife, he has made his heart into a stone.


The novel opens with scenes of Henri being manicured at the hairdresser’s, paying a perfunctory visit to the bank and going for a ride on his horse. His skirt-chasing looks pathetic at best but, as the book continues and more and more background is revealed, we come to detest Henri even as we admire his relentless dissection of his own person and motives. In this way, and helped in no small measure by the technical and stylistic sophistication of the writing, the book builds a singularly complex psychological portrait, which is at the same time a portrait of a social class, and of a social world.

As, notwithstanding the dignity of its rider, your horse turns and loafs its way home with you on its back, you decide to put and end to the disgusting affair with Babette. It hasn’t even begun yet. But for the moment you prefer to overlook that. It is so heartening to imagine you have broken things off with that silly creature.

Unfortunately, you are unable to fool your intelligence with such twaddle. The disappointment grieves you so sorely not simply because it has taken you utterly by surprise in your strongest redoubt, but because a period of mourning has now been declared for defeats whose repercussions will be endless. Is the end of your celebrated dominion over yourself approaching? You thought you were maintaining a careful watch on the personality you have to keep patching up, hour after hour. But haven’t you eluded our own watchfulness and haven’t you lost all trace of yourself in the undergrowth of time? (p. 126, tr. James Brockway)