In 1925, his family moved to Brussels and he studied at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, then at the Sorbonne.
Mobilized in 1940, he fought in the Belgian army, then in the French army.In 1942, he fled with his family to Manhattan, where he helped edit the Free French magazine Voix de France.He enlisted in the U.S. Army during WWII, and received U.S. Citizenship. He met his wife, Norma Caplan, in Berlin.He was Special Adviser to the mission on behalf of the Allied Control Council Quadripartite Council of Berlin from 1945 to 1951.In 1947, with Alexander Koval and Edouard Roditi founded the German-language literary review, Das Lot ("The Sounding Line"), six numbers from October, 1947 until Juni, 1952, with publisher Karl Heinz Henssel in Berlin.
In 1958, he taught French literature at Brandeis University, then American literature at the University of Lyon from 1959 to 1960.He worked as a freelance critic for Combat, Le Monde, and Le Figaro.
He became a French citizen in 1980.He headed the jury of the Max Jacob Prize, the Académie Mallarmé and was a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium.
