A Nobel playwright wrote a termite book about insects he had never seen
Maurice Maeterlinck was hailed across Europe as a sage and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fifteen years later he published a book on termites so close to a South African naturalist's articles that a London zoology professor later called it a classic case of academic plagiarism.
Maeterlinck was born in Ghent on 29 August 1862 to a wealthy French-speaking Flemish family; his father, a notary, loved tending greenhouses. From 1874 he attended a Jesuit school that banned the French Romantics, which left him hostile to organised religion. He earned a law degree in 1885 to please his father, then met the Symbolists in Paris. When the Le Figaro critic Octave Mirbeau praised his first play, Princess Maleine, in August 1890, he became famous overnight. Fatalistic, mystical dramas followed, including The Blind and Pelléas and Mélisande.
From 1895 to 1918 he lived with the singer Georgette Leblanc, whose influence produced heroines with more control over their fates. Renting the Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy spared it from becoming a chemical factory and won him a papal blessing, while he roller-skated around the house. There he conceived The Blue Bird, a fairy play whose 1908 Moscow staging by Stanislavsky still runs in shortened form as a children's matinee. Yet his criticism of the church led it to place all his works on the Index of banned books in 1914.
The First World War dented his image as a thinker above politics, and after 1920 he largely left the stage. Samuel Goldwyn invited him to write films but used none; reading a script based on The Life of the Bee, the producer reportedly burst out that the hero was a bee.
The Life of Termites of 1926 drew on ideas Eugène Marais had published in Afrikaans newspapers from 1923, including the notion of the nest as an organic unit. Marais complained that whole pages had been copied, but a lawsuit proved unaffordable. Maeterlinck became a count in 1932 and died on 6 May 1949.
Source: Maurice Maeterlinck
