Women's Writing from the Low Countries 1880-2010: An Anthology

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Author: Jacqueline Bel | Thomas Vaessens

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women ’ s writing from the low countries 1880-2010

* WomensWriting 1880-2010.indd 1

25-11-10 10:08

amsterdam anthologies Schrijvende vrouwen. Een kleine literatuurgeschiedenis van de Lage Landen (1880-2010) Eds. Jacqueline Bel and Thomas Vaessens isbn 978 90 8964 216 5 Women’s Writing from the Low Countries 1200-1875. A Bilingual Anthology Chief ed. Lia van Gemert isbn 978 90 8964 129 8 Women’s Writing from the Low Countries 1880-2010. An Anthology Eds. Jacqueline Bel and Thomas Vaessens isbn 978 90 8964 193 9


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Women’s Writing from the Low Countries 1880-2010 An Anthology

jacqueline bel and thomas vaessens

(eds.)

amsterdam university press manchester university press


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The translation of this book was funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams fonds voor de Letteren - www.flemishliterature.be) and the Dutch Foundation for Literature (Nederlands Letterenfonds - www.nlpvf.nl)

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Book design: Kok Korpershoek and Femke Lust [ko] Translation of non-literary texts: Paul Vincent

isbn 978 90 8964 193 9 e-isbn 978 90 4851 187 7 nur 621

© Jacqueline Bel and Thomas Vaessens / Amsterdam University Press, 2010

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.


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with contributions of Manu van der Aa, Agnes Andeweg, Jacqueline Bel, Erica van Boven, Ernst Bruinsma, Luc Daems, Yra van Dijk, Elsbeth Etty, Jaap Goedegebuure, Odile Heynders, Ena Jansen, Michiel van Kempen, Mieke Koenen, Vilan van de Loo, Henriette Louwerse, Maaike Meijer, Aad Meinderts, Annie van den Oever, Pamela Pattynama, Saskia Pieterse, Olf Praamstra, Fleur Speet, Aagje Swinnen, Gitta Timmers, Gé Vaartjes, Thomas Vaessens, Liselotte Vandenbussche, Bart Vervaeck, Ernestine van der Wall and Dietlinde Willockx


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Table of Contents 13

Women Writers in Dutch Introduction Jacqueline Bel and Thomas Vaessens

19

The Struggle for Life Virginie Loveling (1836-1923) Liselotte Vandenbussche

23

A Woman Warrior Mina Kruseman (1839-1922) Olf Praamstra

27

The Singing, Burning and Bleeding Heart Hélène Swarth (1859-1941) Erica van Boven

31

‘The Dutch Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Cécile Goekoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk (1866-1944) Jacqueline Bel

35

39

45

49

Writer, Journalist, Critic Anna de Savornin Lohman (1868-1930) Ernestine van der Wall Symbolism and Visual Art Henriette Roland Holst (1869-1952) Jacqueline Bel Existential Loneliness Ina Boudier-Bakker (1875-1966) Gé Vaartjes Lack of Fulfilment and Irony Top Naeff (1878-1953) Gé Vaartjes


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55

Modernist Philosopher and Questing Opponent of Dogmatism Carry van Bruggen (1881-1932) Jacqueline Bel

59

‘Here, There and Everywhere’ Maria Dermoût (1888-1962) Pamela Pattynama

65

‘I Have Loved Love’ Alice Nahon (1896-1933) Manu van der Aa

69

Success and Scandals Madelon Székely-Lulofs (1899-1958) Erica van Boven

75

79

A Limited but Distinctive Literary Voice Jacoba van Velde (1903-1985) Aagje Swinnen Love on the Dissecting Table Anna Blaman (1905-1960) Aad Meinderts

83

The House Preserved Ida Gerhardt (1905-1997) Mieke Koenen

87

‘An Order with Room for Chaos’ M. Vasalis (1909-1998) Maaike Meijer

93

War, Eroticism and Asceticism Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) Jacqueline Bel

97

Huge, Indomitable Elisabeth Eybers (1915-2007) Ena Jansen

101

Writing between Faith and Doubt Maria Rosseels (1916-2005) Aagje Swinnen


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105

111

115

121

125

The Marginal Figure as Hero Hella S. Haasse (1918) Jaap Goedegebuure The Persecution of the Jews as an Incredible Story Marga Minco (1920) Annie van den Oever and Ernst Bruinsma Crushed by a Malevolent God Hanny Michaelis (1922-2007) Maaike Meijer Reading and Living Christine D’haen (1923-2009) Dietlinde Willockx A ‘Poet’s Poet’ F. (ten) Harmsen van (der) Beek (1927-2009) Annie van den Oever

131

War and Literature Anne Frank (1929-1945) Jacqueline Bel

135

From Man to Woman Dirkje Kuik (1929-2008) Elsbeth Etty

141

The Queen of the Column Renate Rubinstein (1929-1990) Jaap Goedegebuure

143

Uncompromising Honesty Frida Vogels (1930) Jaap Goedegebuure

147

Crusade against the Facile Andreas Burnier (1931-2002) Jaap Goedegebuure

151

Disruptions of the Everyday Judith Herzberg (1934) Maaike Meijer


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157

Confronting One’s Own History Helga Ruebsamen (1934) Elsbeth Etty

161

Composer of a Dangerous Marriage Margriet de Moor (1941) Fleur Speet

165

169

Double Talent in Reverse Charlotte Mutsaers (1942) Bart Vervaeck Obscure, Tortured Poetry Neeltje Maria Min (1944) Maaike Meijer

175

A Political Life Story Anja Meulenbelt (1945) Maaike Meijer

179

Responsible Writing Nelleke Noordervliet (1945) Odile Heynders

183

‘Woman-Friendly’ Writing With a Sharp Pen Monika van Paemel (1945) Aagje Swinnen

187

Everyday Horror Mensje van Keulen (1946) Jaap Goedegebuure

191

Death, Loss, Betrayal Doeschka Meijsing (1947) Jaap Goedegebuure

195

199


All that Makes Us Happy and Unhappy Astrid Roemer (1947) Michiel van Kempen The Vulnerability of Beauty Anneke Brassinga (1948) Odile Heynders

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203

Ironic, but not Frivolous Marja Brouwers (1948) Saskia Pieterse

209

The Writer as Fictional Figure Carl Friedman (1952) Elsbeth Etty

213

Travelling in Order to Write Lieve Joris (1953) Odile Heynders

217

Stories Are Hammer Blows Renate Dorrestein (1954) Agnes Andeweg

223

Commitment with No Illusions Kristien Hemmerechts (1955) Jaap Goedegebuure

227

Philosopher and Novelist Connie Palmen (1955) Saskia Pieterse

231

‘Rather Responsible than an Outlaw’ M. Februari (1963) Yra van Dijk

235

The Novelist as Public Intellectual Désanne van Brederode (1970) Odile Heynders

241

‘I’m Good at Stories’ Naima El Bezaz (1974) Henriette Louwerse

244

Illustrations Acknowledgements

246

Concise list of Works Quoted

250

Secondary Bibliography

263

Index of Authors


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Women Writers in Dutch

Introduction jacqueline bel and thomas vaessens

T

he fifty portraits of writers in this book provide an introduction to the breadth and quality of literature in Dutch. The authors, all of them women, come from disparate areas of that literature: they include canonical and forgotten figures, best-selling authors and ‘poet’s poets’, some who wrote on timeless themes and others who focused more on contemporary political reality, realists and writers whose main inspiration was their imagi nation. Besides well-known names such as Carry van Bruggen, Christine D’haen, Marjolijn Februari, Charlotte Mutsaers, Monika van Paemel, Astrid Roemer, Henriette Roland Holst and M. Vasalis, there are authors who are less familiar (today), like Mina Kruseman, Anna de Savornin Lohman, Alice Nahon, Maria Rosseels and Jacoba van Velde. Women Writers in Dutch can be seen as a concise sequel to the weighty survey Met of zonder Lauwerkrans (With a Laurel Wreath or Without), edited by M.H. Schenkeveldvan der Dussen, which deals with female authors up to about 1860. After that date, too, women’s writing in the Low Countries continues to show great dynamism and diversity. The portraits collected here demonstrate how some writers can be grouped in a sub-narrative of (post-)colonial, war or immigrant literature, how others fit into the narrative of successive movements such as naturalism, modernism or post-modernism, and yet others form part of the discourse on female liberation and (homo)sexuality, or contribute to such concepts as the gothic novel. We have chosen not to make any of these perspectives central to our presentation. On the contrary, our aim was to show the wide variety of roles played by female authors in the last hundred and fifty years, in literature and as public intellectuals, in social debate. The corollary of this approach is that the individual contributions also focus on the cultural-historical background to the literary careers under discussion. In this way we hope to give an impression of the vitality of modern Dutch and Flemish literature as a whole.

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The Portraits Each of the portraits in this book can stand alone as an introduction to a particular writer’s work. There is ample quotation from the oeuvre under discussion, so that even the uniniti ated will be offered a picture of the specific nature of the work in question. The portraits aim to expose the core or underlying motive of the writer’s project, and also highlight the stance taken by the writer outside her work. In addition to this, the contributors to this volume pay attention to the author’s position in the dominant narrative of literary history (the extent to which the writer can be embedded in the customary literary-historical move ments, and especially the extent to which she cannot). Together then, the portraits, arranged in chronological order, constitute a short history of modern Dutch and Flemish literature.

A Short History Like all histories, this short history is selective. We have opted not to foreground the prin cipal selection criterion (that the authors should be women). The crucial question in the experiment we are conducting in this book is what happens when we draw a purely female line through modern Dutch and Flemish literature. This question is not posed explicitly in every portrait, but obviously the gender-related perspective plays a part in many contri butions. How else is one to write about Cécile Goekoop, who in Hilda van Suylenburg, nicknamed ‘the Dutch Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, broached the question of women’s rights and argued that a woman can be happy only in paid employment? Or about Annie Salomons, who in her largely autobiographical first novel, Een meisje-studentje (A Girl Student, 1907) touches on what at the time was the sensitive theme of a girl who chooses university study over love? How else can one deal with Anja Meulenbelt who, borne along on the second wave of feminism, demolishes the male bulwark in which literature by women is dismissed as ‘novelettes for ladies’? However, we have emphatically not confined ourselves to emancipatory themes. Connie Palmen is presented as both a writer and a philosopher, Carry van Bruggen as a literary intellectual (and sparring partner of Menno ter Braak). Hence, the portrait of Maria Rosseels deals, for example, with her (journalistic) work on the oppression of woman down the ages, but also with her film reviews and her novels on questions of faith. Hella Haasse is portrayed as a great original, but also as an author who displays affinities with Borges. Some portraits also highlight the lack of understanding encountered by a particular writer, even in her own country. An example of this is the way in which the adult novels of Top Naeff, unjustly known only as a children’s writer, are invariably to be found in the children’s section in secondhand bookshops. Some of the authors discussed, though by no means all, were read mainly by women. The work of others is strongly linked to the first or second wave of feminism. But that does not apply to all the writers you will find in this book. We wanted to break free of the notion that the history of literature in Dutch is the story of mainly male writers.

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Image In 1992 the Groningen scholar Erica van Boven showed in her doctoral thesis, Een hoofdstuk apart (A Separate Chapter) how in the first decades of the twentieth century the so-called ‘novelette for ladies’ acquired a negative image, and how as a result the idea was perpetuated that female authors formed a separate category, as if they were an alien species. In the official version of twentieth-century literary history, one can still point to numerous examples reinforcing this image, even after the Second World War. As early as 1988, Maaike Meijer had shown in her De lust tot lezen, Nederlandse dichteressen en het literaire systeem (The Love of Reading, Dutch Women Poets and the Literary System) that the focus on the ‘great names’ of post-war Dutch literature, such as the members of the Fifties Movement in poetry and Hermans, Reve and Mulisch in prose, systematically put the work of their female contemporaries in the shade. Marianne Vogel also dealt with these literary-historical exclusion mechanisms in her study Baard boven baard (Beards Rule, 2001). The neglect of female authors in the history of literature is linked to two persistent misunderstandings that follow from and reinforce one another. First, critics and literary historians thought that the fact that women wrote, and what they wrote about could be explained on the basis of women’s liberation. The output of women writers – unlike that of their male colleagues – was viewed from a sociological perspective, as the product of social trends – and occasionally as an offshoot of political commitment. But texts by women writers were seldom viewed as literary achievements, because the second misunderstanding among critics and historians was that women wrote only on topical matters or with a political or liberationist agenda. It was literature with a short shelf life. After all, true literature was universal and timeless, and transcended the context from which it emerged. As a result, women writers tended to be seen in literary history more as part of the political or cultural context of literature than landmarks in the story of literature itself. In this respect a celebrated book like Vrouwenspiegel (Mirror of Women, 1936), the literary-sociological doctoral thesis of the writer and historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, unintentionally contributed to the negative image. It was not Romein-Verschoor’s aim to rehabilitate women writers. From her Marxist perspective, she observed that in their struggle for liberation female authors had failed to engage with that other deprived group, the proletariat. In the course of her argument she made merciless passing judgments on the literary quality of the writers in question, which led the poet Martinus Nijhoff, at the time a leading critic in the Netherlands, to call the book ‘a generally grim indictment’. In the last few decades there have been some changes in image and the attitude of literary history. Such writers as Charlotte Mutsaers, Désanne van Brederode and Marjolein Februari are regarded as important postmodernists. On a number of occasions, though still not that frequently, women have been the recipients of literary prizes. For example, Anneke Brassinga was awarded both the VSB Poetry Prize (2002) and the Constantijn Huygens Prize (2008), Doeschka Meijsing the Ako Literature Prize (2008) and Charlotte Mutsaers the P.C. Hooft Prize (2010) (her predecessors included M. Vasalis, Hella Haasse, Judith Herzberg and Eva Gerlach). In the same period much has been published on the work of women authors writing in Dutch by scholars of both Dutch and general literary




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studies, often from a feminist perspective (in the late 1980s and 1990s one can speak without qualms of a ‘struggle to catch up’: feminist literary studies were particularly productive and successful in that period). Nowadays focusing on female authors seems much more axiomatic than it did twenty or thirty years ago. Women’s literature is no longer a ‘separate chapter’ (Van Boven). Nevertheless it can still be a useful and interesting exercise to turn the old axiom on its head for a change, and imagine Dutch literature minus all its male authors. That is, for instance, what is done every year by the jury of the Anna Bijns Prize, named after the medieval Dutch writer Anna Bijns, the first woman able to make a (partial) living from her poetry. The prize was instituted in  in response to what at the time was the top literary award in the Netherlands, the P.C. Hooft Prize, which up to then had been awarded only four times (out of thirty-five) to a woman. In this book male authors have also been omitted, for though female authors have meanwhile gained a secure place in literature in Dutch, that does not detract from the fact that outside what is after all still a relatively restricted canon there is a great wealth and variety of female voices in literature. It is that rich diversity that we have tried to convey in this book.

Selection We have restricted ourselves to female Dutch-language authors from the Netherlands and Flanders in the last 150 years. We have made a selection from literary authors with a sufficiently large body of work (more than two novels, poetry collections or biographical works). Because we wanted to show the full breadth of the literary spectrum, we have not let ourselves be hamstrung by too strict a definition of literature. All prose and poetry regarded as literature in its own time or later, that is, praised and sometimes panned in literary articles, was eligible for selection. We have highlighted not only canonical writers, but also some now forgotten names whose star blazed only briefly in the literary firmament. In addition we took account in our selection of the chronological spread and of the abovementioned diversity. In a few cases in the following chapters we have included the portrait of an author who does not meet the above-mentioned criteria. Anne Frank is represented, although her oeuvre is not large. However, her diary has become world-famous: it has been translated into many languages and over 35 million copies of the book have been sold. The question whether her work should be seen as belonging to ‘belles lettres’ has prompted much debate. One argument adduced for answering this question in the negative is that by characterizing Frank’s diary as ‘literature’ (or a ‘novel’), it can create the unintended impression that we are dealing with fiction. We have included Anne Frank in this book because her diary fits effortlessly into the wider definition of ‘literature’ that we had in mind. Apart from that, Anne Frank herself had literary aspirations. The same can be said of Etty Hillesum, whose letters and diaries from the Second World War enjoy international renown.

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The limited size of this book necessitated strict selection. Regretfully we have had to omit a number of important, much-loved, interesting or otherwise notable writers: Cornélie Huygens, Jacqueline van der Waals, Marie Koenen, Til Brugman, Eva Gerlach, Lidy van Marissing, Anna Enquist, Esther Jansma, Patricia de Martelaere, Joke Hermsen, Astrid Lampe, Saskia de Coster, Esther Gerritsen... From the end of the nineteenth century, the number of female authors in the Netherlands grew enormously. Since the mid-s, over three hundred Dutch-language literary titles have been published annually, at least half of them by female writers. This scale of production completely rules out an encyclopaedic survey of literary trends with full ‘coverage’, so that we have had to be rigorous in our choice. Choices have also been made from among the works of the writers selected. The authors of the individual contributions to this book have been guided in those choices not only by their feeling for ‘quality’ (if the contributions of forgotten or rehabilitated authors demonstrate anything, it is that our notion of quality is extremely fickle), but also by their cultural-historical significance and the enduring vitality of the various sections of the oeuvres discussed.

Further Reading For the sake of readability, no references to secondary literature have been included in the portraits. Information on the work of writers can be easily found through the invaluable Digital Library of Dutch Literature (www.dbnl.nl/auteurs), which includes a primary bibliography for each author. References for quotations are included in a concise list at the back of the book. For those interested in secondary literature on the authors, there is also a secondary bibliography, giving a short list of studies of authors’ life and work – we have not aimed at completeness. The bibliography also includes a list of general studies in the field of women’s literature in Dutch. A photo of every author discussed has been included, with the exception of Frieda Vogels, who does not wish her likeness to be published.

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The struggle for life

Virginie Loveling 1836-1923 liselotte vandenbussche

O

ddly enough, virginie loveling ’s most modern work is also her least well-known. The Flemish writer is more often associated with the poetry and novels she wrote in the nineteenth century than with the works colored by evolution theory that appeared around . Loveling is known mainly for her first collection Gedichten (Poems), which she published jointly with her sister Rosalie in the Netherlands in , her volumes of novellas, her political novels In onze Vlaamsche Gewesten (In This Flanders of Ours, ) and Sophie (), or the novel Een dure Eed (A Costly Oath, ), for which she was awarded the Five-Yearly Prize for Dutch Literature in . Both Flemish and Dutch critics enthused about the Gedichten because of the way their sober style, acute observation and somber, melancholy content broke with older romantic poetry. The anticlerical Sophie was praised by the Dutch naturalist Frans Netscher in a letter to the poet Albert Verwey as “the best prose work written in the Low Countries in recent years”. Loveling is regarded as an intellectual prodigy because she was able to carve out a literary career for herself at a time when women’s education was fairly rudimentary. Loveling herself lacked a thorough educational grounding, but was able to take full advantage of the fund of knowledge within her liberal, intellectual family, from which her view of men and women issues. For example, she produces a subtle critique of the evolutionary ideas that were in vogue in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Although it is not certain that Loveling had read Darwin’s work in the original, she was undoubtedly familiar with his ideas - not only because they were part of the intellectual baggage of large numbers of nineteenth-century intellectuals, but principally because she was a close friend of many Flemish scientists who had made a thorough study of evolution theory. In the novella Meesterschap (Mastery, ) and the novels Erfelijk belast (A Victim of Heredity, ) and Een revolverschot (A Revolver Shot, ), evolutionary influences in particular, such as heredity and atavism, are apparent, but in Het Lot der Kinderen (Childrens’ Lot, ) and an older work like ‘De kwellende gedachte’ (The Agonising Thought, ) or Een Idylle (An Idyll, ) Darwinian mechanisms also play a part. Loveling speaks of the “great, cruel, gruesome struggle for happiness in life, a life-and-death struggle” (Een revolverschot). In Erfelijk belast she emphasizes the importance of one’s hereditary history and the controlling influence of one’s ancestors:

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She closed her eyes; slumber enveloped her in its downy arms, a slumber in which she remained awake and aware, and gradually a vague memory arose in her, telling her that what she was enduring now, and what had seemed new to her, was not new, that everything came from far, far... from very far away... ; that others before her, to whom she was inescapably linked by natural bonds, had also felt it, and that it was a legacy from them... and that in the mists of the future before her... there might ... be more such blissful numbing thoughts… According to Darwin, men were brave, combative and forceful, and women intrinsically soft, intuitive and maternal, as he wrote in The Descent of Man, in line with the prejudices and Victorian norms of his time. Loveling agreed with Darwin to a considerable extent on the male and female psyche. In her work, men strive for dominance and power and many women are characterized as caring and sensitive. However, in crucial areas she diverges from that traditional role pattern. Men and women are equally susceptible to congenital madness or hysterical fits. When the father and daughter learn in ‘De kwellende gedachte’ that their son-in-law and future husband has been killed, the father falls “into helpless despondency, tearing his hair out”, while “Césarine stood as motionless as a statue in the devastating realization that the ultimate, most dreadful of disasters had befallen her.” Another striking feature is the stress laid by Loveling on men’s ability to assume tasks as carers. In her work, ‘caring’ is represented as a complex learning process instead of an innate female quality. In Een Idylle it is Guido who looks after his father at the end of his life: He sat all night by the bedside. He would not allow the Brother of Charity who had been summoned to touch the patient except to provide supplementary help. He himself lifted him up in his strong arms and brought the refreshing glass to his helpless, twisted lips. There was so much bottled-up and still suppressed tenderness, so much remorse in his sudden, impulsive, rather wild devotion. Moreover, in Een Idylle Loveling calls it a natural female urge to strive for dominance in the household and argues that many men concur with this: Her heart had remained free and the need for command and dominance, which plays such a powerful role in inducing young girls of a certain age to get married, had been satisfied in her even before it had been felt. She was mistress of the house and her father deferred to her wishes. Loveling’s view of women is more complex than Darwin’s. She refuses to see women solely in their role as spouses, daughters or carers. The writer stresses the fascination for science felt by a number of women and argues that they can achieve the same intellectual standard as men. The struggle for life refers not only to the struggle for food, space or power. In Darwin’s view the fight for survival also implies a search for the right partner in order to maximize

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the chance of healthy progeny. He discovered that in many animal species the females select the males. Authors like George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner emphasize that aspect of Darwinian theory in their feminist reworking of traditional romantic plots. Yet all in all that choice is limited. The female partner can either refuse or accept a suitor for her favor, but cannot herself go in search of a partner. As is now generally accepted in evolutionary biology, women also struggle with each other in the process of sexual selection. In Loveling’s Een revolverschot, Marie and her sister Georgine both try to win the heart of Luc Hancq, the man of their dreams, through their appearance, a struggle that in Marie’s case is driven by a primitive, unreasoning force: She was on the point of ripping the bodice open, trampling the lace shawl – which she had pulled from her shoulders – underfoot, in the painful conviction that art is useless if nature will not lend a hand. Why not give up the struggle, concede defeat? Why try to doll up a skeleton, competing with Georgine. The tall, beautiful, hated Georgine! […] And while Marie clearly saw how pathetic and ludicrous her recent behaviour was, a stronger, unreasoning, detestable power drove her to pick up the shawl, tie it in an elegant knot, stick a gold pin in it and put gold bracelets round her skinny wrists. In addition, Darwin writes in the Descent of Man, every female organism will in any case choose a male partner, even if it is the one least to her taste. Een revolverschot highlights the attendant risks if that rule is disobeyed. Marie does not succeed in marrying the man of her dreams and meanwhile rejects other candidates. When she becomes insane at the end of the novel, it seems to be a punishment for her deliberate refusal to choose another candidate as a husband. The novel may have a stereotypical ending, in which there is no chance of selffulfilment for women, but it can also be seen as a covert critique of the social restrictions and demands imposed on women. Although Marie finally realizes the suffering into which ‘the stronger, unreasoning, detestable power’ has led her, that irrational, hereditary, un tamable power and animal passion that leads her to madness calls into question, just as in gothic novels, the stability of the existing order. Loveling’s career did not conclude with the novels that she published around the turn of the century. She published stories in numerous magazines and contributed several articles to Nederland, Het Leeskabinet, De Vlaamsche Gids and Carolus, etc. about her voyage to Australia around . Loveling continued to write during the First World War, and from  onwards kept a diary that was published posthumously and enjoyed consi derable success. In recent decades a few of her stories and novels have been republished, but it is too soon to speak of a real revival.

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A Woman Warrior

Mina Kruseman 1839-1922 olf praamstra

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s a singer she used the stage name Stella Oristorio di Frama and in , under the same pseudonym, she wrote an open letter to Alexandre Dumas responding to his antifeminist book l’Homme-Femme with a passionate plea for women’s rights. The correspond ent’s real name was Mina Kruseman, a Dutchwoman who shortly afterwards embarked on a controversial tour of the Netherlands and Belgium, in which she argued the case for women’s liberation to full houses. She was the most admired and at the same time the most abused feminist of her day. At the end of  her first novel, Een huwelijk in Indië (A Marriage in the Indies) appeared and soon sold out. It was one long indictment of marriage, in which a woman’s position was completely subordinate. The literary historian Jan ten Brink summarized her message strikingly at the time: “Women are angels! Men are scoundrels! Children are horrid!” Kruseman adapted her novel for the stage under the title De echtscheiding (The Divorce) and gave regular readings from it. She even managed to have the play included in the repertoire of a theater company – with herself playing the lead – but it ran for only six performances. She had more success with the production of the drama Vorstenschool (School of Monarchs) by Multatuli (the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker, -), but the production led to an acrimonious dispute with the author that was fought out largely in public. Then, in August , at the peak of her fame, she suddenly left for the Dutch East Indies, the land of her childhood, where she had lived between the ages of four and fifteen, spending the longest period in Semarang. She was tired of devoting her best efforts to a country “that has no affection for its poets and no bread for its artists”: I have done what I can for my homeland. For seven years I toiled to wake it from the deathly slumber into which it had sunk; for a moment I was able to make it start awake, it looked at itself in astonishment, and at me in astonishment. Then it smiled and sighed... and the old greybeard went back to sleep, too enervated to feel, too dazed to think, too worn out to act.

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As a parting gift she left her autobiography Mijn leven (My Life), which was as extensive – nine hundred pages in three volumes – as it was controversial. In Semarang she had been free, and happy. She enjoyed, she writes in Mijn leven, walking through unspoilt nature very early in the morning, at sunrise. Later in the Netherlands she felt like a “child of nature” that on its return “had been squashed between faith and decorum”. By leaving for the Indies she was deliberately drawing a line underneath a period of a turbulent life in the public eye. She was thirty-eight years old, and she wanted to quit public life as suddenly as she had made her first appearance. But things were not as easy as that. On  October , she arrived in Batavia, where she announced that she would be giving lessons in piano, singing and recitation. But people wanted more, they wanted to see her, and Kruseman responded. In Batavia she gave readings from her own work and toured Java. She enjoyed particular success in Surabaya, where the editor of the Soerabaiaasch Handelsblad, J.A. Uilkens, was beside himself with enthusiasm. He loved everything about her: her appearance, her voice, her gestures, her bearing, her ideas. The Indies, he felt, were “too small for her, much too small”. She was one of the most splendid women the Netherlands had ever produced, and hence he found it regrettable she had opted for an anonymous existence as a teacher in Batavia. She should go on a world tour. Back in Batavia, Kruseman began teaching and occasionally performed. However, the press in Batavia was not well disposed towards her. That was largely her own doing, since she refused to give journalists complimentary tickets to her performances and had made disparaging comments in public about “the hacks of Batavia”. The press gave her no respite and in addition the bad reviews led to a reduction in the influx of new students. Kruseman came to dislike Batavia and decided to move to Surabaya. Here she was at last able to live unobtrusively. She had a busy teaching program and also made theatrical costumes and ball gowns. However, in  this quiet life was rudely disturbed. She had organized a “soirée artistique” in the theatre of Surabaya in which her pupils performed music and songs before the interval and afterwards the short play Cendrillon. Kruseman had written this treatment of the tale of Cinderella herself and cast herself as a fairy. There was huge interest, and people thronged to buy tickets, but it turned into a fiasco. One of the principal actresses withdrew just before the performance, and drunken soldiers disrupted the evening. At the moment when Kruseman revealed herself to Cendrillon as a fairy – she did this by dropping her outer garments, leaving her standing on stage in a white robe – one of the soldiers had yelled: “There’s Mina in her flannel nightie!” That was a death blow. The reviews were scathing and her reputation as an actress, and especially as a singing and drama teacher, was publicly questioned. Kruseman could not take this lying down. She hit back hard, and there were violent polemical exchanges. The furious Kruseman explained that she felt obliged to defend herself: ...if all sorts of nobodies join forces and attack me in order to destroy me, I shall leap up and defend myself with all the weapons at my disposal, ten blows to one if I can, and most of them on the head of the strongest one.

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She went into the reviews at length and demonstrated that her opponents had no right to criticize. Kruseman was at her best in such polemics. Her style acquired a lively directness that is sadly lacking in her narrative prose. For Kruseman, victory in this war of words was not enough. In order to demon strate how wrong her opponents were she organized a “second soiree artistique” on  September. This marked the beginning of a whole series of such performances, in which Kruseman’s pupils sang and acted. At the end of , Kruseman rented a large house and greatly expanded her business activities: she now also taught French conversation, sold music for piano and voice, and let rooms. One of her lodgers was her pupil Frits Hoffman who opened a photographic studio in her house. The forty-three-year-old Kruseman began an intimate relationship with the photographer, who was almost twenty years her junior. They were able to keep this well hidden from the outside world, until Kruseman discovered that she was pregnant. The lovers fled Surabaya in great haste. A contemporary remembered this flight as causing quite a stir. “It was said that she had abducted the young man.” They settled first in Naples, and three years later moved to Paris. From that moment on Kruseman seems to have been forgotten. She made the news once more in  on the appearance of Parias (Pariahs), her last novel, based largely on memories of the time she had spent in Surabaya. There are few traces in the novel of any appreciation for the Indies or the indigenous population. Parias creates a picture of the Javanese as lazy, stupid and treacherous: they are poisoners and murderers, and incapable of any form of gratitude. The Europeans in the colony are described no more favorably: the administrative officials are vain and corrupt, the officers stupid and cruel, the entrepreneurs concerned only with the pursuit of gain – and all of them are gossips. There is sympathy only for the marginal groups in Indies society: the Chinese and the Indo-Europeans, the pariahs, who face discrimination on all sides. When Parias appeared, Kruseman and Hoffman were living in straitened circum stances, relying on the sparse income he earned as a photographer and she with singing lessons. The novel brought no change, attracting little interest. After this Kruseman only very occasionally picked up the pen, for the last time during the First World War, in her Appel à toutes les femmes du monde entier, in which she called on all the women in the world to reject the world of men, in which there was never any end to war. Hence she ended her writing career as she had begun it, with a feminist pamphlet written in French.

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The Singing, Burning and Bleeding Heart

Hélène Swarth 1859-1941 erica van boven I gave to the people my burning heart, But they made it bleed and tore it apart.

“T

he singing heart of our literature,” was how the poet Willem Kloos (-) described his contemporary Hélène Swarth in . Ten years earlier she had made her début with poetry in French, since she had moved to Brussels as a child and initially wrote in that language. Her first collections in Dutch, Eenzame bloemen (Lonely Flowers, ), Blauwe bloemen (Blue Flowers, ) and Beelden en stemmen (Images and Voices, ), were received with growing enthusiasm by the critics. Lodewijk van Deyssel reported after reading her very first collection that he felt the urge to leap around cheering like a child and after the third collection Kloos was completely won over, calling her “the sovereign female artist in the country” and maintaining “that the future of Dutch poetry belongs to Hélène Swarth”. The words “the singing heart” – which were to cling to her ever after – were no mean compliment coming from Kloos. The ‘heart’ was central to his view of poetry; he thought that poets without a heart were like lamps that gave no light. Heart, mood, feeling and passion formed the core of the new poetry he was advocating as the spokesman of the Movement of , which was bringing about a revolution in literature in those years. The mood poems of Hélène Swarth, who “gives herself to the world” and who “weeps and moans and trembles”, were completely in tune with what the writers of the Movement of  were striving for. In the magazine of the younger generation, De Nieuwe Gids (The New Guide), her poems were accepted and reviewed from the start. The first of them was the sonnet ‘Passiebloem’ (Passion Flower): If in her heart passion’s flower has bloomed, The woman’s nailed up on the cross of pain, The bitter cup to the dregs she must drain, Her head is bowed and her strength is doomed.

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Yet gall becomes wine and, drunk with the strain, She thinks, once the word of love has boomed, That the crown of thorns where blood gleams like rain Is a diadem on her hair royally groomed. Let the horde of prim, pious women declare, As they fold their hands in devoted prayer: -- “We thank you, Lord, that we’re not like her!” Let the great throng around her flock, Full of base glee her suffering mock! She who hurts for Love to none will defer. This image of the woman suffering for her passionate love, represented as Christ crowned with thorns and crucified, yet standing far above the mocking crowd, contains all the elements of passion, suffering, solitude and self-exaltation that also characterized Kloos’ view of poetry. Hence Swarth became the only woman to penetrate the ranks of the Nieuwe Gids – although she also published in the ‘old’ Gids and her position remained somewhat ambivalent. In later surveys she was often called a representative of the Movement of , or even “the greatest female poet of the Movement of ”. Yet the members of the Movement of  quickly tired of her. The turning point was the collection Rouwviolen (Mourning Violets, ). Van Deyssel, who a few years before had been impressed by Swarth’s frankness and was struck by the fact that “in the Netherlands a woman [...] should give herself to people with such sincerity”, thought now that she had gone too far. He felt that these intimate poems about the love of the now thirty-year-old poet for a young man were not “presentable either socially or aesthetically” and indeed contained an element of “spiteful comedy”. A woman should remain graceful and dignified; Swarth’s honesty had come up against the boundaries of what Van Deyssel considered acceptable for a woman. What he had in mind were lines like these: And when he came, so quick, so blond, so slim, I charged downstairs and stood looking at him. My heartbeat pounded, my cheeks were all white, When I sat at his side my hands trembled with fright. He softly kissed my fingers, one by one, And I felt flames through my bosom run. This was the end of Van Deyssel’s sympathy and Kloos also lost interest. Around  the mood among other critics also changed. While Swarth retained her status as an important poet, critics no longer found many surprises in her work. The unending stream of collections (about thirty appeared up to the s, with titles like Passiebloemen (Passion Flower),

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Bloesem en vrucht (Blossom and Fruit), Blanke duiven (White Doves), Diepe wateren (Deep Waters), Najaarsstemmen (Autumn Voices), Octoberloover (October Leaves), Stille dalen (Silent Valleys) gradually began to grate, and reviews increasingly spoke of repetition, ruts and routine and she was also increasingly accused of sentimentality. The poet J.C. Bloem talked in  of “an unceasing torrent of uniformity”, but on the other side also pointed to the rare phenomenon of a poet maintaining the same high standard for so many years. It was also Bloem who in  pinpointed the source of her enduring importance as “the great voice, singing of the essentials of life and death, of love and suffering and all those few eternal things that have always constituted the reality of human life.” Hélène Swarth retained her popularity much longer with the general public than with critics. She was able to reach and move a huge number of readers (particularly female readers), for example, with the bulky omnibus Poëzie (Poetry), which appeared in  and which was republished several times up until . For many readers she was their first introduction to poetry and they were moved by the melancholy lilt of her lines: The cuckoo calls, the blackbird sings, Chestnuts blossom, white and red... -- Oh birdsong sweet, too loud it rings! My spring is gone, my love is dead. or Once again with you to the woodland green, once again to the silver lakeshore, Once again with you through the corn’s gold sheen. once again, then never more! Poëzie contains many of her best-known poems, such as ‘Sterren’ (Stars), with its opening lines: Oh, holy immortal stars, high above my own mortality, Where faith with its childlike trust had once promised my heaven would be The powerful reader response to Swarth’s work has left many traces in written testimonies and in literature, which highlight the special significance of this much-read poet. Such a trace may be found in the bestselling novel De klop op de deur (The Knock on the Door, ) by Ina Boudier-Bakker. The main character, the housewife Annette Craets, who, though she is uninterested in literature and cannot make head nor tail of modern poetry, does read the poems of Hélène Swarth, “feeling moved and rebellious in turn”: “Good grief!” she said aloud, shaking her head and looking in the mirror,– “to think that a woman can say all those things just like that. For every Tom, Dick and Harry to hear: that a man doesn’t love her and the suffering it causes her. I can’t stand that!

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But... how beautiful it is at the same time, oh how wonderfully felt – and expressed.” And she went on reading. This bourgeois lady (at the end of the s) still finds Swarth’s frankness shocking. Annette Craets finds it harder to accept from a woman than, for example, the poet Jacques Perk (-); “he could simply say whatever he liked about love”. That was to a considerable extent the significance of Hélène Swarth: it was the first time for many years, in fact since Elisabeth Maria Post with her Gezangen der liefde (Songs of Love, ), that a woman in the Netherlands had defied the conventions by expressing herself plainly. In the climate of the times, in which the ladies’ magazine De Hollandsche Lelie warned its readers, “I pray, bar such collections first and foremost from your bookshelf”, that was an important event. Eventually Swarth went out of fashion with readers, too. Around  her emotional world of love, desire, loss and loneliness had little relevance to the contemporary public’s concerns. Those years saw the definitive decline in her reputation. Until her death in  she was scarcely reviewed or read and it was increasingly difficult to find a publisher. Her final years were marked by loneliness and lack of recognition. The poem ‘Vondeling’’ (Foundling, from the collection Avonddauw, Evening Dew, ) expresses her feelings at that time: Since then, because Father said, I sang, first happy, then sad, my unheard song. Now I sink down and gaze at sunset’s red. In recent years one can detect something of a revival of interest in Hélène Swarth, though there is no modern anthology and the poet was not admitted to the ‘Pantheon of Dutch Letters’, to which a hundred authors were recently elected.

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‘The Dutch Uncle Tom’s Cabin’

Cécile Goekoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk 1866-1944 jacqueline bel

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round , novels with a message were in vogue in the Netherlands. Themes included current social movements, such as anarchism, socialism and feminism. Maurits Wagenvoort wrote the anarchistic roman à thèse De droomers (The Dreamers, ) and Cornélie Huygens published the socialist roman à clef Barthold Meryan (), a book that was well received critically. But the roman à thèse that attracted most attention around the turn of the century was the feminist novel Hilda van Suylenburg of , by Cécile Goekoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk. Although the critical response was unenthusiastic, the book, nicknamed “the Dutch Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, was hugely popular. Contemporaries saw Goekoop as playing a comparable role for Dutch women as Elisabeth Beecher Stowe had played years before in America for the black population, with her classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin: for many she was a liberator. In , the sixth edition came off the presses, making Hilda van Suylenburg one of the most reprinted new Dutch novels of its time. In addition the book was translated into German, French and Swedish. The popularity of “the Hilda”, as critics called it, conferring classical status on the book, formed part of the general debate on the women’s question, which was often linked to the National Exhibition of Female Labour of . Based on an American model – the Women’s Building at the  World Exhibition in Chicago – this had been organized in The Hague to commemorate the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina. The author of Hilda van Suylenburg chaired the organizing committee. The novel follows the main character, a young upper-class woman, on her quest for a purpose in life. The emptiness of an existence where everything revolves around parties and the marriage market does not satisfy her. Hilda exchanges the classic pastime of wellto-do ladies, charitable work, for study at university. She wants to become a lawyer in order to do something about the misery she sees around her. She rejects a proposal of marriage from a good match and finally chooses the socialist Maarten, whom she loves devotedly. She eventually sets up as a lawyer and lives on happily with her husband and child. Alongside this main storyline there are various other narrative strands. One of these concerns Corona, a doctor and an emancipated friend of Hilda’s, who has a “respectable” relationship with

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a married man. The latter wants to divorce his wife, but she at first withholds her consent. When the divorce does finally come through after all, her lover suddenly dies of consumption and Corona is left heartbroken. The multiple storylines in Hilda van Suylenburg serve to illuminate feminism from various angles. The main thrust of the book is the conviction that a woman can only be happy when she is in paid employment (a husband is a welcome extra). In addition, Goekoop has her characters conduct endless conversations on matters such as female suffrage, women’s lack of rights within marriage, the emptiness of upper-class women’s lives, the establishment of crèches for the children of working women, modern children’s homes, and equal pay for men and women. Moreover, all kinds of new-fangled causes from the period are paraded around. As one of the characters says: It’s just like an infectious disease these days, all that waffling on about social questions! And now of course you’re up to your ears in surveys, strikes, women’s liberation, suffrage, workers’ housing, anarchism, socialism, community art, alliances for peace, religious conferences, free love, vegetarianism and God knows what! Hilda van Suylenburg obviously fits into an idealistic pattern, with exemplary main charac ters, capricious narrative development and a happy ending. This idealism characterized many nineteenth-century novels until naturalism, which aimed at an objective represen tation of reality, introduced a new paradigm. While the book brought a new message, the packaging belonged to the past. The main characters really are models for the reader. Their handsome appearance reflects their inner purity. Hilda “was one of those rare, perfectly balanced pure personalities, which evil slides off like mud splashes off a swan’s feathers” and Corona is described as “beautiful to look at, with something very noble about her, the tall slim figure in the long black velvet dress, which contrasted severely with the multi-colored sheen of the other ladies’ outfits, but set off beautifully her southern ivory complexion and great grey eyes”. The sudden illness of Corona’s lover also fits into the idealistic pattern, in which unexpected – and sometimes improbable – events govern the plot. Corona has no sooner read in her lover’s letter that there is no longer any obstacle to their marriage, than she hears the fateful news of his death. And as befits an idealistic novel, the story ends happily for the main character: after several hundred pages Hilda has become a lawyer and so can work for the good of the oppressed. What’s more, she has found the man of her dreams, and a child makes their happiness complete. It is true that in the novel no authorial narrator addresses the reader, a further characteristic of the idealistic novel, but that does not mean that the reader is not directed to make certain judgments. Feminists are good; others, particularly men, are represented as beasts and good-for-nothings. For instance, one of the unsympathetic men says: The Russian who sets about his wife with a club [...] was a much better judge of people than the American, who treats her as an equal, because woman is quite simply a born subject […]

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Similarly, the portrait of Eugenie, one of Hilda’s frivolous Hague cousins, leaves little scope for a nuanced appraisal. She is depicted as a typical specimen of a woman of her class who does nothing, but simply waits for Mr. Right to come along. At the end of the book, when this does not happen, she is admitted, half insane, to a clinic, which offers the author’s judgment on such women. Critics felt that the book’s thesis was too dominant, but were sympathetic to what they saw as the author’s aim: to gain a hearing for her message. In magazines there was a furious and protracted debate on the book and in addition at least twenty people were moved to express publicly their opposition to the novel. Anna de Savornin Lohman, for example, in her pamphlet De liefde in de vrouwenquestie (Love in the Women’s Question), argues that women were not preordained to work, but that love for a man was the most important thing. A contemporary element in her conservative views was that she regarded marriage as an institution of little importance. Her criticism issued from the classical image of the woman as a server, a view that was very topical at the time and was actively propagated by large groups of women. Cornélie Huygens opposed this in her brochure Over de liefde in het vrouwen voorheen en thans (On Love in Women’s Lives Then and Now). She was also critical of Goekoop’s novel: it had been written exclusively for the bourgeoisie. She spoke of “embarrassing class myopia”, a problem also identified by a number of critics. The debate on a woman’s role eventually led to polemical exchanges between Lohman and Huygens. Louis Couperus (-), the acclaimed writer of the naturalist novel Eline Vere (), in which he had immortalized the empty life of figures from Hague high society, involved himself in the debate in a different way. In his novel Langs lijnen van geleidelijkheid (Inevitable, ), he created the feminist Cornélie de Retz van Loo, who like Hilda wrote brochures on the women’s question, and who in addition bore a striking resemblance to the noble and now also divorced Goekoop. Cornélie’s feminist plans come to nothing: at the end of the novel she runs back into the arms of her husband, “whom she had in her blood”. This was Couperus’ elegant ‘revenge’ on Goekoop’s novel, which had been an indirect attack on Eline Vere and contained a warning against “the Madame Bovarys, the Eline Veres of the whole world, who are the victims of their sensual romantic egoism”. In fact Goekoop, contrary to what Couperus suggested, did not return to her husband. She moved to Paris and wrote two further novels, Lilia (), about an unmarried mother, and Bij de waskaarsen (By the Wax Candles, ), a novel with a Catholic premise. Neither work received much critical attention. Goekoop was to remain known only as the author of Hilda van Suylenburg, which was republished in  by the feminist publishing house Sara, with an introduction by Tessel Pollmann, in the last days of the second wave of feminism.

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Writer, Journalist, Critic

Anna de Savornin Lohman 1868-1930 ernestine van der wall

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ith her  novel Vragensmoede (Tired of Asking), the Hon. Anna de Savornin Lohman established herself once and for all as a writer, and it was this novel that her name was to be mainly associated with. This was not surprising, since in Vragensmoede she broached themes that came to typify her later work. Situated in the neo-Calvinist milieu of Abraham Kuyper, his political party (the Anti-Revolutionary Party) and the academic institute he founded (the Free University of Amsterdam), the novel contains a scarcely veiled attack on the lack of principle shown in the actions of Calvinist politicians in politics. It became a major motif in Lohman’s literary work: an indictment of genteel Christianity that was all too keen to cling on to its seat in government in The Hague and hence was prepared to make shameless concessions, secretly, but also in public. Directly linked to this was the theme of religious certainty as opposed to religious doubt. She contrasted the cold severity of religious certainty with the doubt to which some, like the female main character of Vragensmoede, fell prey through the bitter experience of life. In Lohman’s eyes, religious certainty was all about hypocrisy. “Religious hypocrisy is the worst thing I know, the hypocrisy of calling oneself after Christ without meaning a word of it,” she wrote in her Herinneringen (Memoirs, ). In her novels, which are mainly set in aristocratic circles, with a smattering of Indies colonial types, the leaders of the Anti-Revolutionary Party and their supporters represent the perfect embodiment of that hypocrisy. Their “excellencies” write their poisonous articles for their “Christian Messengers” and “Banners” in studies where “the cruel, dogmatic face of Calvin”, along side “the superior aristocratic countenance of Groen van Prinsterer and the thick curls of Abraham Kuyper” look down at them from the walls. She was more sympathetic to Roman Catholicism, and completely committed to so-called unbelievers, whose behavior was often more Christian than that of Christians themselves. Lohman felt her own contribution to contemporary literature lay in her cour ageous exposure of Christian political and social machinations. The title of her novel Ik zeg de waarheid (I Tell the Truth, ) can be taken as a program in itself. Although – like most female authors of her time – she laid great emphasis on her individualism, she indicated that she saw herself standing in the tradition of the pessimistic realism of Ibsen and Zola. She was also aware of an affinity with Multatuli. Her novels can be classified

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as romans à thèse, with an unmistakable message. The ‘truth’ that Lohman wished to proclaim included the pillorying of double, or more accurately, threefold moral standards. It was an abomination to her that men were permitted so many more moral liberties than women; that women who were duped by those male liberties were degraded to the status of ‘fallen women’ and that the latter category was morally condemned by so-called ‘respectable’ women (women whose husbands had frequently been the cause of those women’s ‘fall’). In addition, the social elite had laid down different standards for itself than for the workers: the same immoral behavior in the latter was judged much more harshly by the elite. The fact that a woman like Anna Lohman, with an aristocratic background, and unmarried into the bargain, expressed herself so freely on all kinds of moral and social matters, was definitely not appreciated by all her contemporaries. Lohman’s fame during the fin de siècle is equaled by the obscurity into which she fell after her death in . She was not considered worthy of a place in the literary or feminist canon and hence has virtually vanished from sight. From a literary point of view that is understandable, since the literary value of her oeuvre (some thirty novels and novellas) is not particularly great, although a few novels and stories are certainly not without merit: not for nothing was she dubbed the “female Couperus”. She was also considered worthy of membership of the Society of Dutch Literature. If her work is open to criticism from a literary point of view, in cultural-historical terms it is definitely worth examining. That certainly applies also to the opinion-forming weekly De Hollandsche Lelie (The Dutch Lily) of which she was editor-in-chief from  to . The articles and correspondence column of this publication provide an interesting insight into the fin de siècle, and also into the personality of the editor-in-chief, because just as in her books and critical essays, Lohman herself was powerfully present in De Hollandsche Lelie. This inescapable presence was warmly welcomed by her fans, while by others it was deplored, if not ridiculed. Under her direction, the weekly underwent a transformation from a magazine for young girls to a quality paper for adult men and women. In addition, she built a career as a critic for the Soerabaiaasch Handelsblad and other publications. In this genre she was not averse to expressing an independent judgment and some reviews are still very readable. At any rate, in the early twentieth century the “militant Hon. Miss” or “battling beauty”, as Lohman was called, was a well-known personality, who evoked powerful reac tions. She became a household name with her contribution to the debate on the celebrated feminist novel Hilda van Suylenburg () by Cécile Goekoop, in which she expressed a very personal point of view, an odd amalgam of progressive and conservative views that gained her friends and enemies in all camps. On the one hand, for example, she supported equal rights for men and women, and especially a good education for women, but on the other she was deeply convinced that the happiness of the “true woman, who thought and felt in a womanly way” lay not in having employment, but in one thing only: love. Her conservatism, though, was tempered by her conviction that marriage was not abso lutely necessary for a woman to surrender herself to the man she loved. One cannot say that a career in literature had been a burning ambition of Lohman’s. On the contrary, she seemed predestined for the life of a rich, aristocratic woman, doing

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very little worth mentioning. Born in Assen in  as the fifth child and only daughter of the Hon. Maurits Adriaan de Savornin Lohman (elder brother of the politician Alexander Frederik) and the Hon. Florentina Johanna Alberda van Ekestein, she grew up in an environment where the existence of a family fortune was taken for granted. Her childhood was dominated largely by strict Calvinist, ascetic orthodoxy. This religious-political climate was decisive for her intellectual position. Initially a full-blooded follower of Abraham Kuyper, around the age of twenty she turned her back once and for all on everything she regarded Kuyper as standing for, and became an agnostic. Certain experiences played a role in that abandonment of Calvinism: the turbulent years in Surinam, where her father served disastrously as Governor, the simultaneous loss of her parents’ fortune, followed by a very difficult period in Berlin, Scotland and the Dutch East Indies. In Batavia, Lohman decided to try to earn her living by writing from then on. She was fully aware that she would never reach the first rank in literature, as we read in her Herinneringen, but she was equally convinced that she did not write any less well than the majority of her literary brothers and sisters. And so, out of financial necessity, the author Anna Lohman was born. L.J. Veen became her regular publisher. The fact that she was dependent on publication for a living partially explains why some of her work was written in a hurry, and also why she took on the editorship of De Hollandsche Lelie. However, she derived much fulfilment from her task as an opinion leader, especially since she was able, through her correspondence column, to establish a close bond with her readership. The bond with one reader became particularly close: in , at the age of , she married Hendrik Spoor, a faithful subscriber to the Lelie. In accordance with his wishes, she decided to discontinue her public activities, which was made all the easier because her husband was quite wealthy. This marriage also brought to an end her close relationship with Petronella Reyers, her ‘bosom friend’ with whom she had lived for fifteen years. Spoor died in , and Lohman became a collector with the National Lottery, and, as far as we know, wrote one more novel, Levensraadselen (Mysteries of Life, ), in which she expressed her regret for her earlier critical pronouncements. In the years that followed, she lived a reclusive life, occasionally writing articles in the daily and weekly press. Having the courage “to tell the truth”: that was the ideal that Anna Lohman strived for in her literary, critical and journalistic work. In that respect she was a typical representative of the generation around  that was determined to celebrate the cult of daring and honesty with such exuberance.

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Socialism, Symbolism and Visual Art

Henriette Roland Holst 1869-1952 jacqueline bel

“A

rise ye prisoners of starvation! Arise ye wretched of the earth!” These are the opening words of the Internationale, which is still sung in the Netherlands at the beginning of the twenty-first century – albeit less and less often – at commemorations or at socialist events. Henriette Roland Holst translated Eugène Pottier’s battle hymn into Dutch in around . Socialism, communism and literature were all significant elements in the life and work of this talented, hyperactive and well-to-do solicitor’s daughter. Her first collection of poems, Sonnetten en verzen in terzinen geschreven (Sonnets and Poems in Terza Rima) appeared in , and was followed by a long succession of others. In , together with her close friend, the poet Herman Gorter (-), Roland Holst became an active member of the recently founded Marxist-leaning SDAP, the SocialDemocratic Workers’ Party. She lectured throughout the country, wrote many articles, pamphlets and the economic study Kapitaal en arbeid in Nederland (Capital and Labor in the Netherlands). She also edited magazines such as De Nieuwe Tijd (The New Age). From  on she played a leading role in the Dutch communist movement, but in  she rejected the party in favor of a religiously-colored socialism. Roland Holst was well-known in political circles outside the Netherlands. For in stance, she made friends with the celebrated German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, whose biography she wrote in , and with the Russian party ideologue Leo Trotsky, with whom she is even rumored to have had a brief affair. During the First World War, in , Roland Holst took part in the Zimmerwald conference in Switzerland, the first international meeting of socialists, where leaders like Lenin and Trotsky focused on world peace in the name of the class struggle. Roland Holst was a co-author and signatory of the manifesto that called on the ‘proletariat’ of Europe to begin a revolution. In , Roland Holst visited the new Russia and attended a congress of the Communist International. She later recorded her disappointment at the situation in Russia in the collection Tusschen twee werelden (Between Two Worlds, ). Roland Holst also had decided views on feminism. Around , the movement for general female suffrage and woman’s right to work was largely in the hands of bourgeois ladies, which was not approved in SDAP circles, and not by Roland Holst. She was a fierce opponent of the National Exhibition for Female Labour of , in her eyes a plaything for

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bored bourgeois women. What’s more, this bourgeois feminism was seen as an obstacle to ‘proletarian’ revolution. In her poetry, though, she was less anti-feminist than in some brochures and speeches. For example, in her collection Het feest der gedachtenis (The Feast of Commemoration) of , she erected a pantheon for famous women who had paved the way towards a socialist and feminist Utopia: Mary Wollstonecraft, Louise Michel, the heroine of the Paris Commune, and Kartoma Vraskovskaya, a Russian revolutionary heroine. Besides her involvement in politics, Roland Holst was extremely active in literature, as a poet and playwright. Of course her political views left clear traces in her poetry. Her collections can be read perfectly well as autonomous literary products, but also reflect her political development. In De nieuwe geboort (The New Birth), her second collection from , for instance, she describes her embracing of socialism in poems full of expec tations for the future. She imagines the day of the revolution as follows: The day will shine, a watery expanse, the town will fill with golden signs and flares: in midday’s furnace then, a dark expanse, the throng will crowd through streets into the squares. Her play De gebroeders (The Brothers) of  takes as its theme the failed Russian revolution of , and De vrouw in het woud (The Woman in the Wood) of  proclaims: “Socialism’s splendor opened radiantly”. Socialism and later communism, then, were crucial to Roland Holst’s literary work, but in addition she had a good antenna for the artistic and literary fashions of the fin de siècle. That was clear from her very first, mystical poetry, which she published in  under her maiden name of Van der Schalk in De Nieuwe Gids, the Dutch avant-garde magazine whose glory days were in fact over by then. The poems were published in  under the title Sonnetten en verzen in terzinen geschreven. The book is a closely-knit whole, made up of various series that express a vision increasingly colored by mysticism. The title of the first poem is ‘Over het ontwaken mijner ziel’ (On the Awakening of my Soul), while that of the last is ‘Hoe de vergeestelijkingder dongen, die mystiek genaamd wordt, ons vrede geeft en vertroost’ (How the Spiritualisation of Things, which is Called Mysticism, Brings Us Peace and Consoles Us). Mysticism was in vogue among artists and writers around : in these circles people had often abandoned traditional beliefs, but found that perceived reality by itself was not enough. Instead, they enthused about a kind of “new woolliness”. In the second poem from the collection, a statement of poetic principle, with its deliberately tortuous opening lines “Not mine the facile and unconstricted/ welling-up of utterances”, the lyrical “I” takes a powerful stand against the views of the members of the Movement of , including such celebrated poets and prose writers from the previous generation as Kloos and Van Deyssel. In her eyes they were too individualistic and too often led by their emotions. She did not want facile language, “howling, delirious words/ sloganizing display, like flapping strips/ of festive cloth”, but laboriously formulated, introverted poetry.

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Roland Holst’s collection was representative of the renewal of Dutch poetry in the s, as it turned away from individualism and visible reality and went in search of an idea, a unifying thought. The Middle Ages and mysticism were in fashion and at this time the late-Medieval writer Dante was a mystical cult figure, who was to remain a lifelong source of inspiration for Roland Holst. Following the example of Dante’s Divina Commedia, which was translated a number of times around , Holst wrote her first collection in terza rima. Roland Holst’s début was innovatory in content, but also caused a stir as an aesthetic object, with its fashionable ‘medieval’ cover. The book was designed by her husband, the artist Richard (Rik) Roland Holst, whom she had married in . He had been inspired by ideas of community art, as disseminated in England by the socialist designer William Morris and in his footsteps by the artist Jan Veth in the Netherlands. In this collection, the Holsts created a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, involving a collaboration between different art forms, in the tradition of Richard Wagner, also very popular in artistic circles at the time. The titles of the poems and sections had been made very long at the request of the designer, because they had to fit into a certain frame. The imagery is reminiscent of symbolist paintings, such as those of the English painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti on whom Roland Holst wrote an admiring essay (), or of Jan Toorop, a close friend of Roland Holst’s. In the opening lines of her first collection “the ample days” are compared to a “tall, white female band” that seems to have stepped straight out of one of Toorop’s symbolist paintings: Striding with measured steps the ample days draw nearer, like a tall, white female band from fairy tales: they come with flowers in hand and light rings their heads, with gold hair ablaze. Even after the poet has embraced socialism in De nieuwe geboort (The New Birth, ), fin de siècle elements such as mysticism, doom and loss continue to inform her poetry. Sometimes one hears a note of doubt or melancholy at the lost past: Born into decades of ferment, storm-tossed, our eyes still filled with the parting crash of the old worlds that are fading away, our pouting lips salute the world-to-be, and in our hearts are two longings that clash: for dreams of the past that we have now lost, for new ideals’ full burgeoning display – thus we must brave the years’ bitter tides, our life is struggle and dearth every day: all in us moves like a mountainous sea and, just as in death, it sometimes subsides.

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In her fourth collection, De vrouw in het woud, regarded by some as her best work, those feelings of loss return: Roland Holst evokes the emptiness in which she found herself after the party schism in , when Gorter left the SDAP. She herself was to follow suit in . The first sonnet in the collection refers to the title and contains a quotation from Dante’s Divina Commedia: I too around the midpoint of my days Lost my way in life’s shadow-darkened wood. In Media vita – in the midpoint of life – the I-figure, like Dante, is lost in a dark wood full of pain and doubt, without God, without support, without a guide other than her own heart and “the few faithful hands” that bear the I-figure up. Today we would talk of a mid-life crisis, says her biographer Elsbeth Etty. Life has not brought what the I-figure expected of it and her “comrades” have abandoned her. The dark wood functions as an image of crisis and despair. The collection, which consists of four sections, is built around this mid-life crisis. In addition, the collection contains allusions to fairy tales, also a fashionable genre around . There is mention of “the land of the beautiful dream” and the “tree of great sorrow”, of allegorical figures like the pilgrim and the nun. The landscape represents the mood and development of the I-figure. Bright spots in the wood are like “dewdrops” of happiness. One series of poems is devoted to the heart: […] As a thousand calyxes on a flower stem grow When the bottom ones fade, above new ones glow: The heart’s like that, the blooming, bud-rich heart. De vrouw in het woud was very well received. Roland Holst was called the “best living Dutch female poet”. She was fêted by socialists, avant-garde writers and Christian critics alike. Roland Holst died in . She has gone down in literary history as a great political personality who was prominent at home and internationally and as a poet who was once very popular and published a large number of collections but perhaps did not produce literature of the first order. A frequent objection is that both her poems and her collections are careless and lack formal dynamism – perhaps because she often used free verse, a novelty at the time, free meter and frequent enjambements? But many of Roland Holst’s collections are carefully constructed from several interconnecting series. The series of De nieuwe geboort, for example, have the structure of a musical composition, as Thedoor Weevers has shown, with constant variations on a theme. Besides this, her poems, as in De vrouw in het woud, contain many intertextual references to Dante, Wagner operas and fairy tales. The imagery of her poetry refers to contemporary art, evoking echoes of the paintings of Jan Toorop that she so admired and stylized Art Nouveau representations. The poetry of Henriette Roland Holst is worthy of closer study, not only in a political, but also in an intertextual and art-historical context.

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Existential Loneliness

Ina Boudier-Bakker 1875-1966 gé vaartjes

T

he novel Armoede (Poverty, ), with which Ina Boudier-Bakker established her name, is set in well-to-do circles and in that respect the title is misleading: it is not material want that is central, but a deficiency in the field of intellect, emotion and communication. One of the characters thinks: There’s a hidden poverty in every human life. And that poverty divides them in embittered misunderstanding, or drives them towards each other in helpless desire, but all the love cannot fill the emptiness – each of us ultimately remains alone, alongside the one they love best. This notion became the central theme of Boudier-Bakker’s work. Fifty years later, in De eeuwige andere (The Eternal Other, ) she wrote: [...] every human being is alone, even in his or her best moments. What does he or she know about the innermost depths of the other person. It’s an unwritten law. It was a conviction she was aware of from a very young age. As a child she lost two brothers, one of them mentally retarded, and registered the grief and emotional tensions that her parents tried to hide from her. These were formative experiences. Later she wrote about them in a letter: [...] as a child you feel those things, even though they’re not expressed – young as I was at the time, through a few moments when it erupted – it established in me from an early age an understanding of suffering – incurable suffering. And the echo of that naturally manifested itself unintentionally in my later work. What Boudier-Bakker wrote of Ibsen, whom she admired, is equally true of her own charac ters: “Every human being carries a corpse around with them: their past.” The figures that populate her novels and stories are rooted in intense experiences that determine the present. A trifling association is sometimes sufficient for a seemingly trivial aspect of the past to rear its head and assert its influence.

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The story ‘De moeder’ (The Mother) from the collection Altijd elders (Always Somewhere Else, ), describes an old woman’s final hours. Her husband and grown-up children are lovingly united at her deathbed. But Ina-Boudier-Bakker, disrupts the situation. A storm is raging and suddenly a window shutter swings open. The moment takes the dying woman back to a stormy night long ago, when she was driven into the arms of a man who was temporarily lodging in her house; the story suggests that one of the children is his. The woman dies with the name of her lover on her lips – her husband and children have no inkling of this secret, which their mother has carried with her through her otherwise “happy” marriage. In much of Boudier-Bakker’s work we find marriages where the man or the woman have an essential spiritual bond outside the marriage. Even with such triangular relation ships she demonstrates that there is no such thing as an ideal relationship and professes her view of existential loneliness. In Het Spiegeltje (The Little Mirror, ) this is a major motif and in De klop op de deur (The Knock at the Door) Annette Craets-Goldeweyn feels closer to her childhood friend, Karel de Roos, than to her husband. De klop op de deur is an extensive family novel, which Boudier-Bakker wrote after rereading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It spurred her to write a story with a large number of characters, indicating that her main focus in her work was to explore characters and less to expound decided views and opinions. Precisely because of her strong characterization, especially of women and children – in literary manuals her work was generally classified under ‘psychological realism’, she received much praise at the beginning of the last century. Her strength lay more in psychology than in her style, which is sometimes mediocre. De klop op de deur embroiders on the pattern of naturalist family novels, a genre that was in fact already outmoded by the time the book was published in . The press was divided, but the public at large was ecstatic about the novel, which became a publishing sensation. Even The New York Times featured it. The authoritative critic and writer Frans Coenen considered the book’s essential message to be that man is alone, that each new generation is a mystery to the previous one and that misunderstanding is the beginning and end of all human intercourse. The novel also describes over sixty years of Amsterdam’s history and is an ode to the Dutch capital, the writer’s birthplace: When is Amsterdam more beautiful than when there is ice in the canals and the snow, flattened by feet and vehicles gives the old Jordan neighborhoods the melancholy shades from dirty yellow and grey to a mere hint of white – and between the greywhite quays the black of the dark water. The long, severe winter of  had the city in its grip; the snow clung to the ancient towers and house fronts... Breitner and Witsen recorded that symphony of grey and white in their canvases. The city was splendid in the spring with a canopy of tender green over the canals – in the summer beneath the bluish heat haze – in the autumn with the dying colors of its canals and parks. But it was most beautiful of all in the melancholy of a grey winter afternoon with the light fading.

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De klop op de deur is said to have inspired a critic to write the shortest review in Dutch literary history: “Don’t open up”. However, this ingenious bon mot is not a serious piece of literary criticism, but an extract from a magazine column containing ironic commentaries on current titles. The obvious pleasure with which this sentence, intended as a joke, is regularly quoted as an official pronouncement, illustrates the general attitude to BoudierBakker and her work. Many people know her as the author of “thick tomes” or “ladies’ novelettes’’, a very one-sided qualification of an author who, apart from a few admittedly large-scale novels, wrote mostly novellas and short novels. This more compact work, which is not marred by over-lengthy descriptions, is more evocative in content and sober in style. In this respect, De straat (The Street, ) is a high point in her work. This novella describes a group of pillars of the community who are trapped in a straitjacket of con ventional respectability and cowardice. Once a year they are confronted with the meaning lessness of their existence, when the fair takes over their street; then each of them is more intensely aware of his own shortcomings and loneliness. This year there are two additional disturbing factors: the arrival of malnourished Hungarian children – the period is just after the First World War – who need accommodation, and the approaching death of the brick manufacturer, Bogert. And over the heads of the waves of dancing people, they looked at the house where one of them, who had lived for so long in their midst, had met his end. They waited... It was Death passing through the Street. Right through the colorful fair he drew his inexorable line. It was Death, thought the women, it was freedom for one of them... The fair acts as a catalyst and eventually door after door will open to accept a child. Egoism and class prejudice give way to humanity and solidarity. Boudier-Bakker has been accused of writing too much from the perspective of the well-to-do bourgeoisie that she was. This cannot possibly be said of De straat, since in this novella she crosses class boundaries both movingly and convincingly. The story gives a far from flattering portrait of the moneyed bourgeoisie. In  she bit off more than she could chew with a novel on Jacqueline of Wittelsbach, Vrouw Jacob. The critic Menno ter Braak discovered that large fragments had been copied from a source and accused her of plagiarism. In fact, she was guilty mainly of lack of expertise and carelessness, but the ensuing literary polemic badly damaged Boudier-Bakker’s reputation. Ter Braak’s judgment on this book is often used to rubbish the whole of her work; this is not only indiscriminate, but does violence to the literaryhistorical record. In the s, when Boudier-Bakker suffered from crippling depressions – she was melancholy by nature and struggled with unresolved pain from her youth – writing, which was like medicine to her, was more necessary to her than ever. Finale () is the record of her spiritual struggle in that period, represented by the Old Woman – she has no name – who does battle with her past, finally triumphs over herself and to her own surprise finds that life again beckons her. “The days are lengthening”, reads the final sentence. In Finale,

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as she had done in De straat, Boudier-Bakker dismisses prejudices, cold decorum and Christian intolerance. In opposition to the prevailing mores of the time, the s, the Old Woman takes the side of her pregnant, unmarried granddaughter and opts for the unborn child: “This is a birth, not a disaster.” Finale was well received in the press, by among others, the major critic Jan Greshoff; a  reprint was described as “surprisingly modern”. It is this smaller-scale, more delicate work that forms the essential core of BoudierBakker’s oeuvre, more than the expansive novels that won her a wide readership during her lifetime. There should be no question about De straat being worthy of a place in the Dutch literary canon.

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Lack of Fulfilment and Irony

Top Naeff 1878-1953 gé vaartjes

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n Charlotte von Stein (), her essay on Goethe’s companion, Top Naeff noted down some views that can be regarded as the foundation of her writing career: Every thing we write down, be it in the form of art, or as the content of a letter, is a confession, self-betrayal. More or less conscious, more or less controlled, more or less covert.

And: A writer of a certain caliber will avoid facts and events from his immediate milieu, but he will not be able to prevent his soul from showing its true colors. [...] Finding the right form for a work of art means: finding a transformation for experiences in the soul. What is most personal, in an alienated state. In this way she gives the reader, as it were, carte blanche: read my work and find me under the verbal glaze. For Naeff, literature was “autobiography of the soul”, an ingenious twisting of factual events, a masking of the autobiographical elements. Consequently there is little that is concrete about her life in her work, but that work as a whole does provide a psychic and emotional autobiography – what is most personal, in an alienated state. At the beginning of her career in , Top Naeff attracted a great deal of attention with her girls’ book School-Idyllen (School Idylls), inspired by the work of Louisa M. Alcott and Tine van Berken. In the character of the teenager Jet van Marle, an orphan brought up by a loveless aunt and uncle, she exorcised her own childhood. An only child, Naeff was raised with a strict hand by her “generally acceptable parents”. Her fairly unsuccessful secondary school years, during which she played the lazy clown, was also given a prominent role in the book, which was striking for its humor and the absence of pedagogical moralizing. The heroine’s illness and death made an indelible impression on readers: Her condition went up and down for a few more days. She didn’t speak much any more, once she asked what the date was and another time she said she hoped it

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would be nice weather for her funeral. That was all. She died on the nd of December, without pain, fully conscious. The only people there were Huug and Karel van Laer. It was her birthday. For many people, Top Naeff has remained the writer of this one book, an author of “girls’ books”, and in many secondhand bookshops her adult novels and novellas are shelved in the children’s section. Children, however, would find it hard to understand much of her literary work, which returns repeatedly to themes such as desire, deception, lack of fulfilment and loneliness – the themes that life had supplied her with. Naeff had been married for a number of years to a less than sparkling family doctor when she fell passionately in love with the director and actor Willem Royaards (-), who was also married. It was to remain a love at a distance, in which her feelings were not reciprocated in the way she wanted. For years she led a double life, which found an outlet in her work. In her first ‘grown-up’ novel, Voor de poort (At the Gate, ), the main character, Liesbeth van Landschot, comes to grief because of her violent passion for a man who is completely unaware of her feelings. She is desperately frustrated by the fact that as a woman crushed by the conventional decorum of the time she is helpless. Naeff, who was totally opposed to public campaigning for women’s liberation – she disliked all -isms and explicit agendas – implicitly dismisses narrow-mindedness. Later she maintained that she would never again create a fictional character so much “herself” as Liesbeth. She had a similar affinity with Charlotte von Stein, and her decision to write an essay on this figure was understandable. In Charlotte, thwarted in her feelings for the egocentric Goethe, Naeff saw an emotional twin sister. In the book she took stock of her life as a woman in her early forties and admitted: In the long run the whole of life becomes a compromise and whatever refuses to bend, breaks. After Royaards’ death Naeff wrote Offers... (Sacrifices..., ), in which she hides behind a male main character, Lodewijk de Bordes, who is in love with Madeleine, a married woman. Madeleine commits suicide – like Willem Royaards – and her lover is left behind in despair. He sees life as an “incomprehensibly lonely, unequal, powerless assignment”, a “misunder standing between God and humankind, which does not know the explanation of things and searches fruitlessly for order in the chaos of likenesses...”. Again Naeff raises the personal drama to a universal level. Offers... is also a novel about transience: the despair of passing away... To think that a person could disappear from this earth in one second, like a mirage... never to return in their own form and state [...]. De Bordes’ attitude to marriage is called by Top Naeff “a naive belief in a beneficent plan, which has constructed this bulwark for man and woman, with the splendor of lovemaking and being united under one roof”. These were Naeff’s own bitter insights.

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If Offers... was a cry of bereavement and despair, three years later Gustaaf Rippe, the protagonist of Een huis in de rij (The Terraced House) accepts the lack of fulfilment in life: No, his marriage to Toos ten Hope – why deny it – had not been happy, one of those unavoidable youthful aberrations, for which for most people there is no redress. [...] He lived with her the habitual kind of life that is maintained in peace and friendship by many men and women to whom marriage has not brought the highest fufilment; they have gradually become armored against illusions and disappointments beyond the power of their feelings. “What did one person know about another, even after they had shared bed and board for twenty years!”, thinks Rippe. Ultimately his dominant feeling is compassion, basically with all people whom he sees as companions in misfortune, fellow-victims, and with his foolish Toos in particular. His only remaining wish is that they should tolerate each other and adapt. “Wasn’t that the watchword of this tired world?” He acts as a mouthpiece for Naeff. Top Naeff was a witty, sometimes sarcastic woman and this aspect is also recog nizable in her work. School-Idyllen and her other girls’ books (De tweelingen/The Twins, , ’t Veulen/The Foal, , and In den dop/In Embryo, ) are permeated with (adolescent) humor, but her work for adults also often has an ironic tinge. In story ‘Emplettes’ (Purchases, from the collection Oogst/Harvest, ) a narrow-minded vicar and his wife take a day trip into town in search of sales bargains. Finally the couple visit a milk bar where they furtively unpack the sandwiches they have brought with them. They order cocoa to have with them and Naeff concludes as follows: Then the girl came back, she saw the paper, and guessed there were sandwiches underneath: ‘Would you like Van Houten’s or Driessen’s cocoa?’ He thought about it. ‘The price is the same,’ said the girl intuitively. And without consulting his wife about her taste, he placed his dignified order: ‘Van Houten’s cocoa.’ The intonation was worthy of at least oysters and champagne. Some found her irony too sharp, too negative “for a woman”. Her collection of sketches about a girl, Letje (), met with distaste from a few critics, including Martinus Nijhoff. Letje is a settling of scores with the “hypocritical age” in which both the character and her creator had been born and bred. Letje is an only child and is lovingly terrorized by those who bring her up, for fear that she should be spoiled. She grows up into a girl in whom “neither imagination nor common sense” were sufficient “[...] for any original invention, adventure or mutiny”; an “honest” child, “less from ethical principles than because in most cases the complex structure of lies exceeded her intellectual powers.” Letje is not an expression of explicit commitment or a call for women’s liberation, but an implicit plea for woman as an autonomous, proactive being.

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In her short stories particularly, Top Naeff revealed her witty side, and proved that she had an aptitude for writing newspaper columns. This is apparent from the hundreds of influential play reviews she produced, for example, for the renowned weekly De (Groene) Amsterdammer. They are more essays than reviews, intelligent and written with a great knowledge of theater, often with humorous descriptions of what she had seen on stage. Her sharp wit made Top Naeff a welcome member of the Dutch Writers’ Association, the PEN Club and the editorial boards of magazines. After the death of her friend Herman Robbers in  she succeeded him for several years as editor of Elsevier’s Maandschrift. She herself participated avidly in literary and theatrical life, by preference in Amsterdam, which she, who lived all her life in provincial Dordrecht, regarded as her second home. In the s, Menno ter Braak, who had little regard for women writers, saw Top Naeff as a rare exception among her sex. He admired her intelligence and her “superior irony”. It is these qualities that are still undimmed over seventy years later and prove that labeling Naeff as a writer of “girls’ books” or superficial “ladies’ novelettes”, is not only a partial view, but positively unjust.

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Modernist Philosopher and Questing Opponent of Dogmatism

Carry van Bruggen 1881-1932 jacqueline bel

C

arry van bruggen, who today ranks among the great names of Dutch literature, was born, as Caroline de Haan, into a traditional Jewish milieu; her father was a rabbi in a small village. She was soon to reject her faith, but the Jewish world continued to resurface regularly in her novels and stories. From  on she worked initially as a primary school teacher in Amsterdam, but shortly afterwards became a full-time writer and, using the name of her first husband, the journalist Kees van Bruggen, created a rich and diverse body of work. Her brother, the writer and poet Jacob Israël de Haan, introduced her into Amsterdam’s literary and artistic circles. After her marriage in , she lived for four years in the Dutch East Indies, and on her return to Europe made the colony the setting of several novels and collections of shorter fiction: Goenong Djati (), Een badreisje in de tropen (At the Seaside in the Tropics, ) and much later Een Indisch huwelijk (An Indies Marriage, ). In , her first marriage broke down and in  she was divorced, although she retained her pen name of Van Bruggen, even after re-marrying. In Van Bruggen’s work one sees a development from naturalism to modernism. Her early writing is mainly descriptive, with much attention given to the realistic depiction of the environment, and, allowing some latitude, fits into a naturalist framework. But at the same time her very first book also engages with social issues. In De schaduw van kinderleven (The Shadow of Childhood) she focuses attention on the often difficult social position of Jewish children. The story ‘Uitdrijving’ (Expulsion) describes how a village community is so hostile to a newly-arrived Jewish family that the family is forced to leave. The story begins as follows: That afternoon she had been in a fight again. At four o’clock after school. It was in September, a sun-filled day at the beginning of autumn. The girl, aged about eight, wants to gather branches to play with like the other children. But once she has found a nice branch, the other children try to take it from her. She refuses to let them, and there is a fight, in which her dress is torn and her face covered in scratches.

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Alarmed, she appeals to two gardeners watching the scene for assistance, but they decline to help her. One of them, an old-looking, bent-backed chap with a thin prize goatee beard, turned on his heel with a dismissive wave of the hand, and strolled off. He wasn’t going to cross the farmers for the sake of that Jew girl. The other, before following his companion, stood there for a moment, and raising his eyebrows, yelled, slowly, loudly and emphatically over their heads: ‘Your own fault, you should have kept on walking. You had no business here anyway, did you? No, my girl, I can’t help you now!’ The theme of De verlatene (The Abandoned One), her much reprinted novel of , is disengagement from Judaism. The book, which begins and ends with the celebration of Passover Seder, describes the problems of a traditional Jewish family exposed to the influence of the secular metropolis. The children rebel against their Jewish background – and the attendant discrimination they face – but also against the Jewish religion, as embodied by the strict father. Slowly but surely the father is deserted by his children. They marry non-Jews and at the end of the novel the father dies isolated and lonely at Passover Seder, because his children no longer attach any importance to the festival. In her later work, Van Bruggen increasingly abandons naturalism and tends towards intellectual modernism (-). She is an early representative in Dutch literature of this literary movement, which reacted against naturalism and symbolism and whose luminaries in a European context included James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. In the Netherlands, the influential writers E. du Perron and Menno ter Braak are regarded as modernists. Van Bruggen’s autobiographical novel Heleen of  marks a clear shift in her work. In it she describes a protagonist who moves from certainty to skepticism. The characters are no longer described as human beings in action, but mainly in the form of mental processes. In an earlier book, the previously-discussed novel De verlatene, modernism is heralded by the relativism of its tone, the intellectually-colored style and the drastic curtailing of the narrative dimension. Likewise, Het huisje aan de sloot (The House by the Canal, ), once her most popular novel, awarded a prize by the daily newspaper Haagsche Post, and the novel Avontuurtjes (Flings, ) already display modernist features. In her two philosophical works, Prometheus, Een geschiedenis van het individualisme (Prometheus, a History of Individualism, ) and Hedendaagsch fetischisme (Contemporary Fetishism, ), Van Bruggen presents herself as a questing intellectual and an opponent of dogma. In Prometheus she denounces the scientific dogmatism that is replacing ecclesiastical dogma, and also rigidly conformist thinking. For her, Prometheus, the god who stole fire from heaven and as a punishment was chained to a rock by Zeus, symbolizes individual aspiration as opposed to the “power-wielding majority”. She recognizes only one reality, that of contrast: “If we see no contrast we do not differentiate, and hence we see nothing, since we notice things only through the way they contrast with other things.” In her view, concepts like true and untrue, correct and incorrect serve no purpose. For Van Bruggen, doubt is crucial: in her eyes no one who does not doubt can be an individualist. In addition

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she considers humor, tolerance and historical awareness as characteristic of someone who renounces the old dogmatic, authoritarian view of the world. In Hedendaagsch fetischisme she concentrates mainly on the inadequacy of language, placing herself in the tradition of Nietzsche’s Sprachskepsis. Both Prometheus and Hedendaags fetischisme were important sources of modernist inspiration for Menno ter Braak, as is apparent, for example, from his Politicus zonder partij (Politician without a Party, ). He called Prometheus a “sensation of the highest order”. […] I know I shall never cease to be grateful for this book. […] it testifies to a great breadth of reading that has served a purpose. In it I saw a stubborn line drawn through my philosophical ledger, which imposed an individual order on what in my academic brain was a chaotic jumble [...]. There is, though, something tantalizing about Ter Braak’s admiration for Carry van Bruggen, since in the s he was prominent in attacking the often successful prose written by women. Van Bruggen’s novel Eva () can be seen as a fictional elaboration of her philo sophical writings. The book depicts the awakening of self-awareness in the main character, Eva, whose life shows similarities to the author’s biography: in crude terms it deals with the development of a diffident young Jewish primary school teacher into a wiser divorced woman of forty, the mother of two children. The novel concentrates on Eva’s associative mental life, her stream of consciousness. The reader sees everything from her perspective (in the third, second or first person), with the emphasis on reflection. “The only continuity is in the mind of the main character”, was the critical comment leveled by a contemporary reviewer, who in so doing highlighted a modernist element. Yet the main lines of the narrative can be followed, partly because chronological sequence is maintained. However, within those lines there are many leaps from inner to outer world, from present to past and back. For example, the reader only realizes that Eva is married to Ben after she has given birth to a child. That is also the first time she becomes fully aware of her marriage: “And there was Ben and he came and joined me at the window, and that’s why I’m lying here now, and that’s why I have him [...].” Eva cannot be bound by a dogma; she is an individualist, forever searching, and never has anything permanent to hold on to. One of the questions that preoccupies her – following in the footsteps of Frederik van Eeden (-) in his novel Johannes Viator () – is the opposition between spiritual and physical love. She regards sexuality as inferior and base. The novel regularly invokes a “pendulum motion”, as in the following interior mono logue of Eva’s, in which she focuses on the inadequacy of language, a typically modernist premise. And if the pendulum takes you with it to the left, you despise life and yank at your chain [...]. And if the pendulum takes you to the right, you hate death and cling to life, just as animals cling to life, blindly. Together with the animals ... and the stars... you’re caught up in the pendulum motion... and beyond the pendulum motion there’s

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nothing. Nothing. It’ll be hard for you to grasp this, comprehend this ... they remain just words... until one day... just once ... the Word becomes Spirit ... and you know ... for all time, no, for a second .... Word again becomes word, meaninglessness. With the pendulum motion she is referring to two forces: the life urge, focused on the here and now, and the longing for oneness or death, which is on a higher plane. The life urge ensures that human beings give in to instinctive inclinations and believe in immutable truths. The life urge is linked to collective conformism. On the contrary in the individualist, the counterpart of the collective conformist, the longing for oneness and death predominates. As the novel progresses Eva discovers that besides individualists like herself there are also those who embrace collective values and slowly but surely realizes that the latter are only apparently her superiors. To begin with she allows herself to be impressed by them, but in the course of the book she manages to fight free. This is why her marriage to Ben fails; he is a man who is certain of everything and holds to firm truths. For the same reason she breaks with her Jewish background. A further important discovery is that the twin poles of the pendulum motion, the life urge as opposed to the longing for oneness and death, are present in herself too: as a dichotomy, the sense that she is not all of a piece, but two people in one. “[...] It’s as if I’m cleft in two... it’s as if I’ve divided in two... there are two of me... [...]”. Eva was Van Bruggen’s last novel. From  onwards she began to suffer from severe depression, and in  died of an overdose of sleeping pills.

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‘Here, There and Everywhere’

Maria Dermoût 1888-1962 pamela pattynama

“I

t wasn’t a man, but a woman who bought the proa...” The opening of ‘De sirenen’ (The Sirens, ), one of Maria Dermoût’s posthumously published stories, contains many clues, suggesting that the story to come will be set ‘elsewhere’ and its development will be out of the ordinary. Both suggestions prove true: the story is about a woman who does not await her fate, but embarks on a distant quest for a lost unknown country. She takes a handsome young man with her on her voyage. Once they are at sea she invites him to become her lover. The cabin boy is taken aback: Where he lived ... women walked differently, stood differently, held their heads differently. There, women didn’t look straight ahead and say this or that, or that a man could just come and lie next to her on the couch. ‘De sirenen’ is a mysterious narrative. There are references in it to the Dutch East Indies, but there are scarcely any specific names. “Tuanku Such-and-Such or whatever his name was” is the vague designation of the cabin boy. He does, though, put a flower behind his ear in Balinese fashion. The origin of the woman also remains uncertain, although her prehistory suggests the Minangkabau, a population group on Sumatra where daughters inherit the family’s possessions and men are tolerated only as visitors. The woman and her young man sail the coral seas and roam to many islands. Finally she allows him to die gently and heads off with a fiery tiger to “a place they had to go to.” The beautiful proa is left behind, as is the cabin boy: Every night, by the light of the moon, the light of the stars, and perhaps in the dark too, but no one can see, a young man, Tuanku Such-and-Such, or whatever his name is, on a submerged meadow somewhere near Malacca. Maria Dermoût left a small body of work. She was born in the Dutch East Indies, where she lived “here, there and everywhere”, and died in the Netherlands. She traveled back and forth all her life, but the Indies was her home. Memories of the country, particularly the Moluccas, deeply influenced her work. Dermoût began writing early, but did not make her

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début until she was  with Nog pas gisteren (Days Before Yesterday, ). This first book is set on distant Java, but immediately evokes a deep, secure feeling of home: On the island of Java, between the mountains Lawu and Wilis but closer to the Lawu, deep in a walled garden under dark green trees, stood the house. (translated by hans koningsberger)

Nog pas gisteren is about Riek, a girl who is very fond of her adulterous aunt and the servants who tell her wonderful stories. It appeared just after the anticolonial ‘Minnebrief aan onze gemartelde bruid Indonesia’ (Love Letter to Our Tortured Bride Indonesia, ) by the poet Lucebert (ps. L.J. Swaanswijk, -). The book does not contain Lucebert’s brand of strident criticism, yet it definitely refers to the underground tension caused by colonialism. In , Dermoût’s only novel, De tienduizend dingen (The Ten Thousand Things), appeared. It was translated into thirteen languages and became an international hit. In , the American weekly Time declared the English version one of the best books of the year. One striking feature is the number of brave women in Dermoût’s work. Felicia van Kleyntjes, the main character of De tienduizend dingen has also learned from her grandmother how to be “proud”: “You must learn how to be a proud girl, granddaughter, stand straight! And don’t cry over nothing.” The inflexible Felicia is the owner of a “garden” on the inner bay of an island in the Moluccas: Was it quiet? Sometimes the trees rustled in the wind and the dry leaves of the coconut palms around the house made a kind of rattling sound. Sometimes Mrs Van Kleyntjes breathed in the smells of the island: spices lying out to dry – cloves, nutmeg, mace or lemon grass; or the bark of kayuputi trees; or vanilla. De tienduizend dingen seems initially to consist of six separate stories, but on closer inspection they prove to be linked by a tight framework. The first and last chapters, in which Felicia appears, enclose the four central ones in each of which someone is murdered. The unity of setting, as well as the constant repetitions create the sense of a single whole. This masterpiece was followed by five more collections and a few separate stories. Dermoût was able to interweave the various strands of myth, fact and sensory perception in a sophisticated way. The result is seductively vague and at the same time acute. This makes her work without comparison in Dutch literature, not least because of her unique style, which is inspired by the oral narrative tradition, developed among Indonesians and Eurasians. Dermoût grew up with that native Indonesian narrative language. The story-tellers, male and female, that she encountered became the inspiration for her own fictions. From them she learned how tension could be built up, from them she learned how an atmosphere could be made tangible almost without words. By listening to them, she learned how to slow things down and she began introducing dashes, dots and exclamation marks in the middle of a sentence. Similarly, her manifold repetitions and invocatory enumeration, the pauses, concise dialogues and constantly interrupted sentences all suggest a lively oral narrative style:

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Sometimes the lady of the Small Garden listened to the island: how the bays rustled, the inner bay differently from the outer bay, and the open sea beyond still different again... And the familiar sounds: the voices of people and children and animals; music, songs of everyday from the village across the river, from the garden... She herself belonged to the island too – here in her garden at the inner bay, in front of the guest pavilion, under the planes, the little waves of the surf at her feet. (translated by hans koningsberger)

Yet Dermoût was not an uncritical imitator. Nor was she an instinctive narrator, as has sometimes been argued. On the contrary, her approach was conscious and workmanlike. She read a great deal, had a sharp ear, documented herself thoroughly and chose her motifs from all kinds of half-forgotten sources. In this way her stories became collages of charac ters and events taken from here, there and everywhere. She orchestrated meetings between characters that emerged from her imagination and real figures that she unearthed from Ambonese or European history. Exalted or trivial, fact or fiction, Asian or European, every thing was material for her eclectic narrative style. An example of this is the previouslymentioned ‘De sirenen’. Dermoût has the young cabin boy swim among the manatees on inundated land. With their raised torsos, the manatees are like women whose seductive song he finds irresistible: Accompanied, muted, sometimes drowned out by all the sounds of sea and waves and wind, it was as if they were singing, the black women under water, the Sirens. In the midst of the Indonesian world of proas, sarongs and hibiscus flowers, we suddenly glimpse the Classical European hero Odysseus through a native character. Dermoût found another important source of inspiration in the blind nature re searcher Rumphius (-), who was dogged by misfortune. Rumphius’ fame is based on his luminous descriptions of the unsightly mosses, shells and jellyfish that he found on the Moluccan islands and submerged gardens surrounding them. He appears in Dermoût’s stories as “Mr Rumphius”. Their intellectual affinity emerges from what is sometimes called the “intimate vastness” of her work. With the same loving reverence that marked Rumphius, the author placed the most trivial things in a vast and profound context, and in so doing created a mysterious, imaginative world: Yet something seemed to have lingered in those gardens of the old, the past, of the so-very-long-ago. (translated by hans koningsberger)

Dermoût’s narrative art, rooted in the East Indies, recalls a bygone age. She has been accused of “an excess of nostalgia”. Dermoût retorted that she was not in any sense looking back “sentimentally” or “regretfully”. She could not help writing about “back then, over there”,

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because she could still see it all so vividly in front of her, “that strange tissue of a particular time interwoven with a country, the corresponding people, landscapes, animals, things, events and stories”. Moreover, she is one of the few colonial writers who systematically chose a native perspective. Her native characters did not simply serve as couleur locale to highlight the European protagonist. Dermoût gave them a voice, an emotional life and inner conflicts. Two chapters from De tienduizend dingen provide nice examples of this. In ‘Constance en de matroos’ (Constance and the Sailor) the emotions are embodied by Constance the cook, who is like a banished monarch, and by Paulien, the seamstress who worships her, so that the focus is on the Ambonese house servants and not on their European employers. In ‘De professor’ (The Professor) too, Dermoût manages to avoid any stereotyping. Here the central relationship is between a down-at-heel, but charming Scottish professor and Suprapto, a surly, introverted Javanese prince. Both are described in close up, but simply because Dermoût always mentions Suprapto by name, while the Scot is generally called “the professor”, readers are more inclined to identify with the native character. Ultimately, Suprapto’s inner struggle and mental world are more interesting than those of the titular hero, the European professor.

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‘I Have Loved Love’

Alice Nahon 1896-1933 manu van der aa It’s good to look into one’s own heart Just before it’s time for bed, To make sure that from dawn to dusk No heart because of me has bled.

T

here are few people in flanders over sixty who do not know these lines by heart, and since they are quoted at every turn, they sound familiar to even more Flemings. Consequently it is not surprising that in January  readers of the popular daily Het Nieuwsblad should have voted ‘Avondliedeken III’ (Evening Song III), the poem from which the lines come, the best-loved Flemish poem. However, the poem’s author, Alice Nahon, has long since fallen out of favor with the official writers of literary history, who prefer, for instance, her contemporary, the avantgarde poet Paul van Ostaijen (-). But in , when Nahon made her debut with the collection Vondelingskens (Foundlings) and a year later when she published Op zachte vooizekens (To Soft Melodies), things were completely different. Nahon’s ‘arrière-garde’ poetry, heavily influenced by the priest-poet Guido Gezelle (-), was enthusiastically received, both by contemporary critics and by the public at large in Flanders and the Netherlands. Sales of her verse soon reached tens of thousands of copies. Van Ostaijen had to content himself with disparaging criticism and the jeers of ordinary readers, who could not make head nor tail of him. But his poetry was modern, “a game with words rooted in metaphysics”, as he himself called it, while Nahon’s poems were simple and classical in form and appealed to primary emotions (love, grief, desire...). Nahon wrote poems of the kind that the average person imagines a poem should look like when they think of poetry. Besides, the poet was beautiful and suffered from consumption. Van Ostaijen too was consumptive, but obviously that did not compensate for his poetry, which was thought to be ridiculous. “Silly Paul”, as he was sometimes known, did not live to see his star move into the ascendant in the s; until today he is regarded as the most important Dutchlanguage poet of his time.

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In the s, a myth grew up around Alice Nahon that has remained intact among the mass of readers ever since, according to which the beautiful poet, who had trained as a nurse, and had contracted her disease (tubercolosis) while caring for wounded soldiers during the First World War, was pining away in isolation in a sanatorium in the country and could find consolation only in her faith. It must be said that the poems in that first collection did little to contradict that image: The daylight outside wanes – Nameless goodness is there! – I peer through rain-streaked panes And fold my hands in prayer [...] My poor head’s bowed down, My house dims more and more; Dusk falls and my eyes drown, Dusk falls in my heart’s core. The success of that first collection led Nahon, encouraged by her father – who was also her publisher – to produce a second volume with more of the same. An expressive photograph, distributed in large quantities, did the rest. However hard she tried later, Alice Nahon was never to shake off the image of the “melancholy, pining girl”. As is the way with images, it did not correspond fully with reality, though it took a very long time before the cracks appeared in the poet’s carefully cultivated public face. In  Nahon figured unexpectedly in the biography of the bohemian Paul Pée, as a sensual mistress, whose favours he was forced to share with the later well-known avant-garde artist Michel Seuphor. The question of who this woman really was became increasingly pressing. Recent biographical research has shown that Alice Nahon – born in Antwerp as the third of ten children – must have had the feeling during her childhood that she was not really wanted at home. From the age of thirteen she was sent away to Catholic boar ding schools and, after a careless medical examination in  resulted in a diagnosis of tuberculosis, was confined to a number of sanitoriums. In the beginning, Nahon was convinced that she would die young, like so many of those around her, but she became increasingly healthy and early in  it emerged that she did not have tuberculosis at all, but chronic bronchitis. Today, medical researchers believe that the cause of the permanent health problems that beset the poet, and which resulted in her death in , was a heart complaint. The lack of parental affection during her childhood might explain the longing for attention, appreciation and love in Alice Nahon’s adult life. She reveled in the attention she received as a result of the poems she published from  onwards in magazines and newspapers, from both the public and fellow-artists. She enjoyed the company of the latter particularly, establishing in a short space of time a network of artistic contacts and becoming an active member of various literary societies. Moreover, most of her dozen or so (documented) love affairs were with writers or painters. However, none of these

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relationships lasted long, usually because of her own waywardness. In a letter to a girlfriend, she wrote on the subject: “we women often behave so ruthlessly, so carelessly, with the affection others try to give us; we don’t always realize, but when we realize it’s usually too late.” Because the poet had no fixed income – apart from a job at the public library in Mechelen between  and  – she almost always had to rely on the support of third parties. There were patrons and well-known writers who took up her cause and lobbied for government grants. She could not afford a home of her own, so she led a nomadic existence and lodged with whoever would take her in. In Antwerp, for example, she stayed with the family of the writer Gerard Walschap, in Brussels with the Dutch author E. du Perron, and in Amsterdam with the lawyer-poet P.W. de Koning. Almost all these people knew that Alice Nahon was not the person the public at large thought they knew from her poetry or from her many public appearances, but at the time no one went public. She herself naturally preferred to keep her turbulent love life secret, although she did want to correct the commonly held view that she was a melancholy girl who wrote worthy, sentimental lyrics. In magazines she attempted a more outspoken approach, but in compiling her third collection, Schaduw (Shadow, ), her father ensured that the texts concerned were bowdlerized or simply omitted. Nahon did, though, succeed in having Schaduw published with a modernist dust jacket and without a photo of the author – which the publisher had included opposite the title page from the second edition of Vondelingskens onwards. In addition, the poet, influenced by the humanitarian expres sionism of Wies Moens and others, occasionally strikes a more modern note, as in ‘Maskers’ (Masks): People now discard their masks, and, shy, each others’ faces view amazed that they stand side by side like strangers do. And yet they stood there side by side and fought for the same daily bread; did they not all bear the drudge’s load of want and dread? Did not the same complaints and quips Pour from their lips with bitter cheer? Was it not as if all day long their gist was clear? The critical response was lukewarm and Nahon abandoned her futile struggle against her public image. She published no more new poetry and for the rest of her short life she was to continue to play the role that had been imposed on her by her readership.

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Although Alice Nahon’s poetry still appeals to many people, one is bound to admit that its purely literary value – by present-day standards at least – is not particularly great. But conservative as Nahon was as a poet, her lifestyle was anything but conservative.

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Success and Scandals

Madelon Székely-Lulofs 1899-1958 erica van boven

M

adelon szkely-lulofs knew the Indies world that she described in her novels from the inside. As the daughter of a colonial official she spent her childhood on the west coast of Sumatra and on Java, and after her marriage she found herself in Deli on the east coast of Sumatra, where her husband became an assistant with a large rubber company. In her novels she was to offer a vivid evocation of the life of a young assistant manager, a singkeh, and his native housekeeper or his European wife on the newly established rubber plantations with their endless rows of young rubber trees. In the s in Deli, far removed from any literary life, and without literary contacts or models, Székely-Lulofs developed into a writer, initially contributing stories to the weekly Sumatra. Her first three novels, written after her departure for Europe in  with her second husband, the Hungarian László Székely, are all set in Deli. In the first and best-known of these, Rubber (), she describes life on the rubber plantations in the s. At first the rubber industry produced enormous profits, incomes were astronomical and planters threw money around until the Depression put an abrupt end to prosperity. The style of Rubber varies; alongside simple, lucid sections there are evocative descriptions and also passages straight out of girls’ literature. Here and there the writer tries to capture the pace of the looming crisis in a fast-moving, hectic style: Then came the final blow: the collapse of Wall Street. Prices tumbled down. Telephones rang the whole day long. They sold to try to save what was still left to be saved. They lost thousands, and cursed themselves for having gambled. [...] Rubber continued to drop. It was at production price now. Then it dropped below it. Every pint of latex meant a loss. (translated by g.j. renier and irene clephane)

Rising profits and the collapse of the rubber market form a single narrative line in the novel. A second storyline concerns the changes brought about by the arrival of European women in the rough planters’ world, which was preeminently a male domain. When the women came, everything changed, as this novel shows. It brought an end to the uncom

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plicated existence of the planters, with their lives that consisted of “rubber, beer and the housekeeper”; simple comradeship was finished: “And we all had a housekeeper and we all sometimes smacked her in the face, but we drank it off and things were back to normal.” The arrival of the women leads to machinations and disputes, to affairs and “coteries” and the struggle for promotion. The lives of the women themselves on those remote plantations are empty and monotonous. All they have to do during the long days is look out at those dead-straight rows of rubber trees. The only interruptions are the sporadic gala evenings, which increasingly end in dissipation: Marian looked around. Everywhere on the sofas lay men and women. She could not recognize faces... But she did see that the women had hitched up their skirts far above the knee, and that the men were shamelessly stroking their legs. Hotly whispering voices came out with crude words and the women laughed at them with a deep, lewd laugh. When the revelers have left, the clubhouse is left in disarray. The native servant is impassive: A Javanese servant silently swept all the rubbish into a pile and on one of the sofas laid out three lady’s bags, a pair of make-up mirrors, a powder puff and a pair of pink lady’s panties in a neat row. The women on the plantation feel the constant threat of an eruption of violence. It can happen that a coolie murders an assistant-manager for something that in the world of the rubber planters is regarded as a trifle: And then one felt it breaking loose in one, one’s hatred of this life, one’s hatred of these people whom one did not understand and who killed without knowing what they did. They did not understand what death meant to a European. Then one felt a hunger for Europe, for the safe walls of civilization... In Rubber, Székely-Lulofs also described the lot of the coolies, contract laborers recruited in Java and China to work on the plantations, and in her second novel, Koelie (Coolie, ), she took the side of the coolies. From the point of view of the Sundanese indentured labourer, Ruki, lured from Java to Deli to bear “the yoke that white civilization had placed on his shoulders”, she describes the merciless behavior of the planters, the abuse and the violence, including that among the coolies themselves. Opting for a native perspective is unusual in Dutch Indies literature; generally a European viewpoint is central. Yet here, too, the opposition between East and West is a major element. Here, too, Ruki is “the Other”, the unfathomable Oriental, with a “deeply mystical soul” and an “inexplicable nature”. SzékelyLulofs describes the contract coolies as follows: Both of them knew all the implications of the word. But they did not talk about them. They had words only for concrete things. Abstract ideas were communicated

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from one to another by these glances half-hidden behind their downcast eyelids, by that mysterious smile that was yet not a smile which played about their lips. They found expression in that heavy, impenetrable silence which was the essence of those Javanese coolies and made them at the same time the simplest, most complete philosophers and the cruelest, most horrible children. (translated by g.j. renier and irene clephane)

Rubber and Koelie both provoked violent and furious reactions from a section of the Indies press and from the rubber planters themselves. Yet the reality was even worse. If anything, the author had shown restraint in describing the abuses she had seen and heard of; she knew only too well that she would be accused of preconceived opinions, sensationalism and lack of knowledge. The works were warmly received on the left; the magazine Links Richten for example, called it an indictment of colonial exploitation the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Multatuli. The name Multatuli was frequently mentioned with regard to these books, also in a negative sense. The prominent critic Menno ter Braak invoked Multatuli in order to emphasize the differences in ‘level’ and ‘class’. He noted with concern that the writer was threatening to outdo the success of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar () and he accused Székely-Lulofs of assuming “Multatulian airs”, when she belonged on a quite different, lower plane. She herself, though, did not have such aspirations; she wrote to her publisher after Koelie: “Apart from the fact that I can’t be a Multatuli, I have no wish to be one.” All the commotion surrounding these novels did no harm to sales. Rubber and Koelie were bestsellers, at home and abroad. Gummi, the German version of Rubber, was in particular a great hit. The book was adapted for the stage and filmed. The huge success was certainly one reason why Ter Braak’s reaction was so snooty. At this time the group associated with the influential magazine Forum (-) was conducting a witch hunt against bestsellers, fashionable books and ladies’ novelettes, and Székely-Lulofs fell into all those categories; Ter Braak felt that her Indies world was “deceptively like the world of Mrs Boudier-Bakker”, the writer of ‘ladies’ novelettes par excellence. He pigeonholed her with the female bestseller producers and it is typical of him that he advised her to write a book that “lost the publisher a lot of money”. Although other critics had responded positively to her novels, Székely-Lulofs was very upset by the criticisms of Ter Braak, whom she admired. The mixed reception accorded her third novel, De andere wereld (The Other World, ), dented her self-confidence still further. Her next book, which she herself regarded as her best, De hongertocht (The Hunger March, ), based on a report of a military patrol in Aceh in , in which  members of the patrol died of hunger, again provoked violent reactions. The Java-Bode spoke of “a scandal” even before the book went on sale. Reviews were mixed. After this, Székely-Lulofs’ career took a downward turn. After her death she was forgotten until Rob Nieuwenhuys discussed her work in Oost-Indische spiegel (Mirror of the Indies, /). However, he was not particularly positive, calling her depiction of the world of the planters in Deli “real in details, but unreal as a whole”. Nevertheless, as part of the interest in Indies literature that was gathering momentum at

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that time, there was eventually a reappraisal. Rudy Kousbroek was the first to dismiss the “busybody tone” of influential critics like Ter Braak and Rob Nieuwenhuys. In his view, Székely-Lulofs’ observations on and insights into Indies conditions were on the contrary very cogent. There followed reprints with introductions, a novel by Kester Freriks entitled Madelon (), and in  a biography by Frank Okker, Tumult – an elegant summary of the personal and literary life of Madelon Székely-Lulofs.

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A Limited but Distinctive Literary Voice

Jacoba van Velde 1903-1985 aagje swinnen

C

an one, as a female author, gain a lasting place in Dutch postwar literary history with a modestly sized first novel? It seems improbable, yet Jacoba van Velde succeeded in doing just that with De grote zaal (The Big Ward), first published in . Seldom has a Dutch-language novel been so laden with superlatives at home and abroad. The book appeared in thirteen languages and was constantly reprinted – most recently in , published by Querido. The secret of De grote zaal undoubtedly resides in its narrative perspective and stylistic sobriety. The novel tells the story, from the inside, of the main character, Geertruida Van der Veen, or Trui for short, who spends the end of her life in a residential care home, where she has been sent after a stroke. The opening scene immediately involves the reader in Trui’s inner world, which is increasingly characterized by feelings of alienation and fear: Where exactly am I? How did I get here? I simply cannot remember. It looks a bit like a hospital, for I am certain it was a nurse standing at my bedside this morning. I pretended to sleep. She went away again. They are all old people, like me. Old women, not nice to look at. One stood looking at me for a long time. I could not see her as I had my eyes closed, but I felt that she was there. She bent over me. I felt her breath on my face; it did not smell nice. [...] I wonder where I am and how I got here. It is strange that I cannot remember anything. Where was I before I came here. I must certainly have been somewhere else, as everything seems so strange. A nurse has been to see me. Yes, it was a nurse. She said, ‘I am Nurse Van Maarle. I wanted to reply, but I could not, I only managed to utter a few sounds which were unintelligible even to myself. I grew nervous. The nurse said I should remain calm, that I had been ill, but that everything would be all right again. Then she left. (translated by ellen and roy hulbert)

The powerlessness of Trui, who in this excerpt cannot see, speak or move, is heart-rending, but introducing the main character as a first-person narrator does give her a voice – albeit a restricted one. The physical dependence and loneliness weigh heavily on Trui. Because she

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has always served others altruistically as a housewife, wife and mother, the inevitable question arises as to what role is left for her now that she is entirely dependent on others. The answer to that question is less unambiguous than it seems and than literary critics have generally noticed. On the one hand, De grote zaal presents the final phase of life as a period of steady decline and irrevocable futility. Life in the residential care home is pure hell. The residents are disenfranchised and resign themselves to their helplessness. That perceptive sketch of the situation led Simone de Beauvoir to refer to De grote zaal in La vieillesse, the first cultural history of old age. However, feelings of futility in the novel are not only characteristic of old age. Trui’s testimony alternates with passages where the narrative voice is that of Helena, the daughter who is neither able nor willing to assume responsibility for her mother’s care. The individualistic Helena is a child of her time and is tortured by the big questions of life. Now that death looms on the horizon, mother and daughter unexpectedly grow closer together. In this way Van Velde has signaled the absurdity of life, which is not linked to age, as the main theme of her first novel. As a result, De grote zaal has been labeled as an existentialist novel – though with naturalist features, because of the directness with which the ugliness of old age is depicted. One of the principal reasons for Trui’s malaise is to be found in her rather deterministic interest in her earlier life. The main character does not understand how to reinterpret events from the past. She dredges up painful memories solely to reexperience them with full intensity as incontrovertible truths. Since as a result reconciliation and acceptance are out of reach, her fear of death mounts. Finally Trui’s voice has to give way to that of her daughter. The end of the book corresponds with the end of the protagonist’s life story: She no longer recognized me. Her hands began to move restlessly. They went from her heart to her throat and from her throat to her heart. They moved incessantly. I took her hands in mine but they were cold as ice, I was not allowed to hold them. This struggle, the last struggle, was hers alone. [...] She was passing through the black tunnel. She was alone! What happens in these last terrible moments where we belong neither to the living, nor yet to the dead? Her breathing grew stumbling and intermittent. Her hands twitched involuntarily. All at once she lurched forward and then dropped back again. Perhaps she was trying to escape? She took one more quick, deep breath and then lay motionless. Her face was strange and stiff. She had come to her end; the tunnel was behind her. On the other hand there are glimmers of hope that make the book easier to swallow and still give food for thought. Although Van Velde did not believe that her novel could be inter preted as a social indictment – and contemporary readers like the novelist F. Bordewijk (-) definitely agreed with her – author intention does not have a monopoly of meaning. The novel not only paints a picture of how dependence on care often equals objectification of the other, but offers an alternative – albeit in a nutshell. Because Trui is an unexpected and implicit advocate of what today is called “nurturing care”. She encourages her fellow residents to entrust her with their little stories and so offers the listening ear that she herself lacks.

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Who was the person behind this remarkable novel? The life of Jacoba van Velde is fairly unconventional and is typical of her independent spirit. At the age of seventeen she went to Paris to train as a ballet dancer. With her first husband, Harry Polah, she settled in Berlin, after which she toured Europe as a dancer. Parallels are often drawn between Van Velde’s biography and Een blad in de wind (A Leaf in the Wind, ), her second and last book, since its plot is driven by the literal and figurative vagaries of a dancer, again called Helena. Moreover, Helena has nightmares, an affliction that is supposed to have plagued the author: I sit up. The terrible... What was it again? I know. I was looking over the wall at the beach again. These dreadful nightmares. I had them even as a child. What is it they say? Remains of the day? With me it’s the other way round. I started with nightmares and during the day I could digest the remains of the night. Een blad in de wind was less well received than De grote zaal, because the protagonist’s lack of any initiative was widely criticized. Van Velde’s dancing career came to an end when she met her second husband, Arnold Clerx, a Paris-based journalist and writer of Dutch origin. Through him and her brothers, the painters Bram and Geer van Velde, who were important representatives of the Ecole de Paris, Jacoba came into contact with leading contemporary intellectuals and artists. Under the pseudonym Tonny Clerx she acted as Samuel Beckett’s literary agent and succeeded in getting him taken on by a French publisher. She gave up the job when her own writing began to require more and more of her time. Van Velde published her first prose in the magazine Les temps modernes, founded by Sartre, De Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Besides her small body of original work, she also produced many significant translations of plays, not least those of Beckett, whom she introduced into the Netherlands. Together with her third important partner, Frits Kuipers, she translated Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable. In , Karlijn Stoffels wrote the play Beckett en Jacoba (Beckett and Jacoba), on the friendship between the two writers, which was nominated for the Taalunie Drama Prize. Contrary to what is often claimed, Van Velde’s work has only limited formal and substantive links with the plays she translated by Beckett and avant-garde playwrights like Ionesco and Arrabal. Her modest literary legacy testifies to a completely unique voice.

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Love on the Dissecting Table

Anna Blaman 1905-1960 aad meinderts

“N

othing is so immoral in its effects as narrow-minded moral surveillance.” This was the aphoristic response of Anna Blaman (the pseudonym of Johanna Petronella Vrugt) when a number of nudes by the painter Kees van Dongen were removed from the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in . This aphorism is something of an oratio pro domo by a writer whose best-known novel Eenzaam avontuur (Solitary Adventure, ), was decried by religious critics because of its all-powerful eroticism and the sympa thetic evocation of the lesbian girl, Berthe. Jeanne Brondag, the main character of the novella Ontmoeting met Selma (Meeting with Selma), an underground publication from , finally comes to the following reali zation: “If your love isn’t accepted, store it deep in your heart as an illusion of greatness and perfection.” This survival strategy must be seen in relation to the central themes of Anna Blaman’s work: the complicated (erotic) relationships between people, who long in vain for real contact. Blaman’s “basic theme is human loneliness”. Within these relationships she emphasizes “erotically charged human relationships”, which (as she wrote in the maga zine Maatstaf in ) she cannot help seeing “as a basis for living that all too often has a devastating impact on human lives”. In Anna Blaman’s work, the lack of real contact, the sense of loneliness, “that worm gnawing away deep in my soul” – as George Blanka puts it in Blaman’s first novel Vrouw en vriend (Woman and Friend, ) – is colored by the fact that her novels and stories are largely situated in boarding houses, bars and other settings for fleeting contacts. Eenzaam avontuur is the passionate quest of Bart Kosta, desperately in love, for the infathomable, unattainable Alide. This novel is dominated by the conflict between idealized and real love. In her mysteriousness Alide is related to Sara Obreen from Vrouw en vriend, the “woman with the ten faces”. If Eenzaam avontuur is the acute analysis of a romantic love, in which jealousy drives Kosta to the edge of madness, Op leven en dood (A Matter of Life and Death, ) describes “love within the confines of the blood, within human limitations, yet perfectly fulfilling”. De verliezers (The Losers, ) – the title refers to Camus’ phrase “être avec les victimes” – is to an even greater extent a novel of a realistic love relationship: “here the human condition (ignorance, misunderstanding) […], ruins a human life, and yet humanity (in the sense of a talent for love) remains intact” – as Blaman wrote in a letter to her publisher.

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Anna Blaman was a respected author, which accounts for the award of the P.C. Hooft Prize for her whole oeuvre in , although some people had moral and ethical misgivings. However, quite soon after her death Anna Blaman fell into obscurity, although she experi enced a revival partly inspired by feminism. The fact that she was openly lesbian and that both gay and lesbian characters figure in her work – albeit oddly enough always as minor characters – was probably a contributing factor. At present, almost fifty years since her death, not one of Blaman’s books is still in print. In the s, Blaman was written off by the world of literary studies, with Ton Anbeek and Jaap Goedegebuure as the principal counsels for the prosecution. She stood accused of being a defective stylist, of not being in control of the complicated structure of her novels and of weighing down her books with ponderous earnestness. In his  study of the Dutch postwar novel, Anbeek quotes a number of ugly sentences that prevent him from becoming emotionally involved in Blaman’s work. Admittedly, a sentence like: “Whereas youth was enjoying itself on all sides, my own was constantly running the gauntlet” is not elegant. But it can be countered with so many successful sentences. For example: “Behind a blank wall, there is always a secret pleasure pavilion or an unspeakably dark morass or simply a store for domestic rubbish.” Another striking example is: “Being happy is playing along driven by your own animal vitality or losing your self in the warm surface of another person.” A good deal of critical ink has been spilt on the supposedly defective composition of Blaman’s novels. Eenzaam avontuur particularly has had a hard time of it. The doubling patterns, the countless major and minor story lines and the colorful, anarchic switching of the narrative perspective in which Blaman’s principal work is so rich, have in their view led to a chaotic, non-transparent book. Even if that is the case, one may adduce as a mitigating factor that in Eenzaam avontuur Blaman was writing an experimental book – specifically in the unconventional way she used narrative perspective. That experiment may or may not have been successful, but it should be judged within the right historical framework. Apart from that, negative criticism of the composition of Eenzaam avontuur in my view pays too little attention to the fact that the book’s complex structure serves the central theme. The author used the so-called “Droste cocoa tin effect”, after the illustration used on the containers of a well-known Dutch brand of cocoa, in which a figure holds a tin of cocoa with a depiction of a figure holding a tin of cocoa, etc, etc.: Anna Blaman writes a book, Eenzaam avontuur, in which one of the main characters, Bart Kosta, is writing a book about the detective King, who in turn is also writing a book, entitled Uit het leven van een speurder (From the Life of a Detective). The psychological problem that Eenzaam avontuur focuses on is that of appearance and reality. On one of the book’s first pages one finds the intriguing question: “is there a real distinction between appearance and reality, a secret life behind what is presented as perceivable?” The form of Eenzaam avontuur gives an implicit answer to this question, which is given explicitly by the content of the novel. In this novel behind every door there is another door. Brooding. Ponderous earnestness. Pseudo-existentialist philosophizing to the detriment of literature. These are the labels attached to Blaman’s work since the s.

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Deservedly? In the final chapter of Vrouw en vriend, Blaman describes a conversation between the main characters, Sara and George. George looks at Sara. Blaman has him think: “she had fallen out of a tree, a female ape that had had an accident” and gives Sara the following words to say: “You know that my forebears were Catholic. I don’t go in for any of that, as you know, yet there’s a bit of it still in my blood, the sense of sin against the Holy Ghost.” Blaman follows this nice insight immediately with: “that was quite something, for a female ape that was a great realization.” Eenzaam avontuur also has various humorous moments. For example, Blaman introduces a pub landlord who claims to know nothing about God. “The only thing I know about God is that his surname is Damn.” In Blaman’s last novel, De verliezers from , Driekje, one of the main characters, looks at her friend’s bookcase and calls out: ‘Hey, Bertha, I see you’ve got Anna Blaman’s De verliezers. It’s just out, I read some where. Is it any good?‘ Bertha yelled back: ‘Take it with you, if you want to read it.’ ‘Well,’ said Driekje hesitantly. ‘What’s it about?’ Bertha replied: ‘About losers, of course.’ Driekje asked, ‘Who are they then?’ And Bertha replied, ‘People... especially people of good will, who always lose out in the game of life, from the cradle to the grave.’ Driekje put the book back. ‘I know that,’ she said, ‘I don’t need Anna Blaman to teach me.’ Do these quotes confirm the current image of Blaman’s work as ponderous, earnest, brooding, and without self-irony? It is fascinating that Blaman seemed on the one hand to be wedded to Rotterdam and on the other hand was very international in outlook, with a particular preference for France. She had studied French and gained a secondary school teaching certificate, she taught French to private pupils, translated Sartre and gave many lectures on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. She loved traveling in France, paid frequent visits to Paris, and most of her literary friends, male and female, were based in Amsterdam. Nevertheless she always returned to Rotterdam, under the wing of her mother, sister and brother-in-law, with whom she shared a house. She was far from bourgeois, if only because she was openly gay, and yet she spent much of her time in that petit-bourgeois milieu. Op leven en dood, which appeared in English in  as A Matter of Life and Death, published by Twayne in the translation of Adrienne Dixon, is perhaps her most intriguing novel. It testifies to her affinity with literary existentialism and gives a sharply drawn picture of her artistic and philosophical views. Anna Blaman demonstrates that the individual is inclined, as a panacea against the “incomplete relationship between man and life”, to seek salvation in an ideology of a Christian, Communist or some other kind. Right at the outset the literary critic Stefan reflects: “Nothing is ever passé that concerns human beings, who have only extremely rarely been discussed in literature in unadulterated form, and certainly as regards their archetypal human problems, their sexuality and their relationship to others.” These words can serve as a characterization and a justification of Blaman’s writing.

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The House Preserved

Ida Gerhardt 1905-1997 mieke koenen

I

n his Georgics, the Roman poet Virgil, describing the labor of successive generations of bees in a beehive, writes: multosque per annos/ stat fortuna domus et avi numerantur avorum. Ida Gerhardt, a poet and Classicist, translated this as: “the state of the house lasts years/ upon years and one can count forefathers of forefathers”. Virgil’s words also apply to her own poetry: it seeks to make a connection with a series of forefathers. Authors from classical antiquity, like Homer and Sappho, are prominent among them. In the poem ‘Krater van Kyrtos’ (‘Crater of Kyrtos’) from De slechtvalk (The Peregrine Falcon), the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops serves to represent a central theme in her work: the recluse who feels beleaguered. Odysseus is introduced as a successful adventurer and is quickly removed from the stage. The focus falls on the poignant situation of the Cyclops: Round the island roams the one with the blinded eye, stick-stumbling; the giant stunned with pain, his bleat a child’s cry. This excerpt also testifies to Gerhardt’s close link with the Classicist poet who is repeatedly evoked in her work and who had taught her Greek at high school: J.H. Leopold (-). Her lines contain a direct borrowing from Leopold’s translation of the Cyclops story. The Greek poet Sappho was a shining example for Gerhardt: a woman who devoted her life to poetry and with great musicality was able to give striking expression to what moved her. In ‘Vergeef mij dat de schoonste nachten...’ (‘Forgive me that the finest nights...’), one of Gerhardt’s oldest Sappho poems, the lyrical ‘I’ addresses her beloved. A core theme in Gerhardt’s poetic universe, the necessity of complete isolation, permeates the poem: […] Allow me – in solitude – the hours, When I accept my deepest laws. Their splendor, like unfading flowers: all I gather will be yours.

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In the early s, the period when her first collections of poetry appeared, Gerhardt published translations of the didactic poems of Virgil and Lucretius. These authors also left traces in her poetry. For example, Virgil’s words labor improbus, which she translated as “stubborn work” underline another aspect of her poetics: poetry is hard work. The notion that a poet must keep apart from the world is expressed in her poem ‘Bij dag en nacht’ (‘By Day and Night’) from De zomen van het licht (The Edges of Light ) with the final words of the Georgics: “rich in my work, withdrawn in silence”. Gerhardt liked nothing better than to ensconce herself in a remote cottage in Ireland or in a convent in her own country. Only in this way could she find the concentration and receptivity that she considered indispensable for her work. Beyond that, Gerhardt regarded dialogue with “the other” as an essential element in her work. There must be real contact and mutual respect between teacher and pupil, but also between the translator and the author he is translating, between the poet and his readers. It is therefore no wonder that Socrates and Plato are well represented in her oeuvre. They appear in poems incorporating Gerhardt’s experiences as a teacher reading Socratic dialogues with her pupils. In ‘Anamnesis’ (from De slechtvalk), Socrates’ method of retrieving hidden knowledge by asking the right questions appears in another form: the glimpsing of unknown distances through sensory stimuli: Returning home before he was expected, over the mountains, up from the southlands with their strips of tilled soil and rippling Nile: the bird with the russet legs, redshank. Yonder when the river reeds rose above the wheeling crying, in his round boat of willow ribs and skin the Nile fisherman sensing the changing season was aware and not aware of colors of a land that he never saw: a green watermeadow, the plants on a blue basalt groyne, the rainclouds that the light breaks through. By having Pegasus kneel down in a school classroom in Overijssel and bringing Plato to life in the polder, Gerhardt gave form to her ideal of a timeless world in which Hellas and Holland are not separate. Gerhardt’s faithfulness to tradition also emerges from the form of her poems. She uses Classical verse forms such as the quatrain, the sonnet and the Sapphic ode. Often there are rhyme schemes and clear rhythmic patterns; word order and usage (including an ample use of present participles and nominal constructions) are regularly far from contemporary. She also occasionally becomes didactic or warns against imminent disaster, as in this quatrain:

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Late in the year, same waterways again, the pounding light in gusts of fog and rain. The whistling buoy accuses from the reach. Holland’s own peril now voices its pain. This style put her more in the tradition of the vates, the Classical poet-seer, rather than that of the poets who set the tone from the mid-twentieth century on, the Movement of the s. These kinds of idiosyncrasies provoked negative reactions from some critics. They also make it difficult to place Gerhardt in a particular literary movement. But her collections of poetry eventually reached a wide readership after she was awarded two im portant literary prizes in : the Prize for Mastery and the P.C. Hooft Prize. Her Collected Works is now in its twelfth edition. After her death Gerhardt was honored in the press as one of our great poets. This is undoubtedly due not only to her poetic craftsmanship, but also the way in which she is able time and time again to move her readers; for instance, her nature poetry and pithy, evocative poems like ‘De Japanse visser’ (‘The Japanese Fisherman’) from De slechtvalk: Across the thin bridge I’ll go before the stars fade away I’ll leave you, go on my way, the nets on my back I’ll throw. Bringing my baskets’ array on bamboo, home I’ll go, when the stars conclude the day. Back to you I’ll make my way Across the thin bridge I’ll go. Among Gerhardt’s best work is the strongly autobiographically-colored section “In memoriam matris” from Het levend monogram (The Living Monogram). Central to this is her “family history”, particularly the tense relationship with her mother, who suffered from depres sion. The poem ‘De ratten’ (‘The Rats’) describes how her mother tries to drive the rats out of the house. She succeeds in expelling the “the dun rabble”, but struggles in vain to fight the vermin in herself. The last line is a merciless observation: “the rats were in yourself”. The collection also contains poems that present her mother’s mental suffering as a family curse, like ‘Het gebed’ (‘The Prayer’), a portrait of her ancestors: Three times a day, as fixed by law, they take their place by their own plate, and round the table they now draw; the family are one in hate.

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The father has keenly whetted the knife, the children await, white and hushed, the mother clutches her dish for dear life as if she’d like to see it crushed. A growl: they fold their hands to Him, the house’s table company: grouped round the table from rim to rim into a cross that one can’t see. Lack of emotional security and the feeling of not being accepted are the driving forces behind Gerhardt’s poetry. For her, poetry was a place of sanctuary, where the family she had been born into could undergo a metamorphosis. In ‘De herschepping’ (‘The Recreation’) from De ravenveer (The Raven’s Feather) that metamorphosis is brought about in a dream issuing from the myth of Orpheus. The power of the myth extends so far that the mother begins walking light-footedly through the stairwell: When Orpheus with lyre sang and played stones moved, branches of great oak stands tried to reach out to each other’s hands, wild creatures appeared in the forest glade, and, listening, settled down near him and trees on tiptoe their entrance made. A cloud just floated down, white and pale. My elder sister had told me this tale; she said: ‘He sings, but you can’t hear a word.’ And that night I dreamed of a roaring sound, and that, while Orpheus’ tunes’ I heard, my parents in the stairwell walked around. A distillation of Gerhardt’s poetry is to be found at the end of her poem ‘Archaïsche grafsteen’ (‘Archaic Gravestone’). It is a translation of a line from an inscription on a Roman tomb: “the house preserved,/ the house preserved”.

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‘An Order with Room for Chaos’

M. Vasalis 1909-1998 maaike meijer

M.

vasalis is the pseudonym of Margaretha Leenmans, who was born in The Hague in  into a liberal socialist environment. She studied medicine and for a number of years anthropology, before becoming a child psychiatrist. During her lifetime she pub lished three volumes of poetry, a total of only a hundred poems. After that she was almost completely silent until a further fifty poems appeared posthumously in . Her work achieved unprecedented popularity. She was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize () and the P.C. Hooft Prize (). Vasalis’ first collection, Parken en woestijnen (Parks and Deserts, ) contains what for their time were modern, accessible poems in a confessional tone. The themes that Vasalis broaches in them will constantly recur in her later work: love, tragedy and mental illness, abnormal children. Many poems are set in nature. However, with Vasalis the experience of nature always leads to an inner experience, which is the real subject of the poem: the natural description is in fact a Natureingang, a gateway to an inner world. This is what happens in ‘Voorjaar’ (‘Spring’), which first describes a windy, blustery spring: [...] Two lambs beside a stiff grey sheep stand white, stricken with youth in the grass... I’d forgotten how things came to pass and that spring is not quiet blooming, soft dreams, but growth’s fierce booming, a clean and passionate start from nought, leaping from the depths of sleep dancing off without a thought. Here nature gives access to a forgotten dimension of one’s own existence: the passionate spring-like quality, the youthful impetuosity of the soul. Death, transience and alldevouring time already preoccupy the young poet she then was. Central to many poems is an experience of crossing of mental boundaries. Drunkenness is one such crossing of boundaries, but so are dream and vision. In her poems Vasalis almost always describes

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the dynamics of a sudden change in inner experience. That experience may assume visionary proportions, as in the poems ‘Afsluitdijk’ (‘Enclosing Dam’) and ‘Onweer in het moeras’ (‘Storm in the Bog’). At first sight her work seems conventional in its themes, but in its passionate boldness it completely escapes cliché. The description of drunkenness, in ‘Drank, de onberekenbare’ (‘Drink, the Unreliable One’), or thoughts of suicide, in ‘De dood’ (‘Death’), were definitely not regarded as fitting subjects for a young woman in the s. Because of her modern form and transparent, almost non-existent technique, Vasilis’ work has withstood the ravages of time better that much of the output of most of her contemporaries. In reviewing Parken en woestijnen in /, the critics were almost unanimous in admitting that they had difficulty in finding an appropriate frame of reference for Vasalis’ poetry. If they made comparisons, it was with the decidedly non-contemporary mediaeval mystic Hadewych. That association of Vasalis with Hadewych was not gratuitous. In De lust tot lezen (The Love of Reading, ), I showed how sections of Vasalis’ work can indeed be read as mysticism. In ‘Afsluitdijk’, ‘De krekels’ (‘The Crickets’), ‘Tijd’ (‘Time’), ‘Onweer in het moeras’ (all from Parken en woestijnen) space, time and gravity seem to have disap peared, as do the everyday consciousness of self and the distinction between mind and matter. The experiences described are blissful or horrifying. The lyrical I is suddenly struck by them and the reversion to ordinary reality is painful. Often it is an experience of emptiness, which by necessity must be described with negations, because the experience is noncommunicable. The experience has an epistemological aspect and the subject is profoundly changed by it. Another of these mystical poems is ‘Ster’ (‘Star’) from Vergezichten en gezichten (Vistas and Faces, ): Tonight I spotted my first star. It stood alone, did not vibrate. At once it penetrated me, I saw a star, it stood alone, Light-built, so young it seemed to be: A pre-grief state. Besides a number of classically mystical poems Vasalis wrote many poems with an affinity to mysticism, which either revolve around moments of sudden enlightenment, or – the other extreme – express despair because the I feels trapped in a dark Diesseits in which access to ‘the other’ is completely barred. The higher reality that can sometimes be approached or ‘viewed’ is – paradoxically enough – earthly. The other dimension may, for example, manifest itself in the stars, in the trees or in a certain kind of light. The tradition of visionary literature can also illuminate Vasalis’ work. In Vergezichten en gezichten there is a series of terrifying vistas of another world. They relate to the cycle of death and rebirth or raise the issue of extra-human time. The world order is presented by Vasalis as a temporary curbing of swirling chaos. Numerous poems testify to a fascination with “the not yet and no longer being”, that is, pre-birth existence and life after death. Vasalis is constantly trying to look over the edge, to leave the realm of the familiar, however

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alarming that may be. The I returns purified from those forays into the underworld to the ordinary world, as in the conclusion of the poem ‘Herfst’ (‘Autumn’) in Vergezichten en gezichten: [...] Thus, on the brink of not yet and no longer being and of unbridled life, I feel for the first time its completeness at first hand, being complete(ly empty): an order with room for chaos in it, and feel the freedom of a great love, with room for despair and doubt and loss. Vasalis’ work shows a shift in emphasis from personal to more mythological themes, especially in De vogel Phoenix (The Phoenix) of . Vergezichten en gezichten, her third collection, is the most modernistic. The visionary ‘underworld’ poems in particular are mysterious, because in them the vision is not given a natural form and is not ‘explained’ in the poem itself, for instance, as a dream. But the poems ‘Uittocht’ (‘Exodus’) and the cycle ‘Fragmenten’ (‘Fragments’) are decidedly complex and obscure, forming a striking contrast with the transparent earlier work. On Vasalis’ own testimony the war had far-reaching consequences for her poetry. Her speech of thanks for the Constantijn Huygens Prize makes it clear that after the war years she had to fundamentally reorientate herself. What gave meaning to her life at that time was her work as a child psychiatrist, while her poetry seemed to her increasingly inadequate in the light of the great global disasters. Writing poetry gave her the feeling of “striking a match in an inferno”. That was the reason why after the appearance of Vergezichten en gezichten in  Vasalis (virtually) stopped publishing. Vasalis’ posthumously published poems are often concerned with old age and approaching death, but also with a timeless and irrepressible joie de vivre, as in this untitled poem from De oude kustlijn (The Old Coastline, ): The oriole time after time its polished lassos slings. So smooth, clear, loud it rings just like a whistling boy it sings and I look up, another chime! It seems as if I just now was a mate on the bough.

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In the much shorter poem ‘Ouderdom’ (‘Old Age’) she compares dying very strikingly to a fledgling taking wing: I practise like a young bird on the edge of the nest that I must leave in short and hesitant flights and open my beak wide Vasalis’ work shows similarities with that of the South African confessional poet Elisabeth Eybers and with that of Gerrit Achterberg (-), whose poems, like hers, sometimes resemble lucid reports of dreams. She also has poetic affinities with Emily Dickinson and Edna St Vincent Millay (a personal friend). With Dickinson, Vasalis has brusqueness and the intensity of expression and emotion in common. In turn, Vasalis had a profound influence on many Dutch poets, partly because of her popularity and the frequent occurrence of her poems in anthologies and schoolbooks. Poets like Hanny Michaelis, Rutger Kopland, Judith Herzberg, Chr. J. Van Geel, and after them Neeltje Maria Min, Eva Gerlach and Anna Enquist, are closest to her.

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War, Eroticism and Asceticism

Etty Hillesum 1914-1943 jacqueline bel

O

n  march  the -year-old Jewish lawyer Etty Hillesum begins a diary. Her life is dominated by the twin poles of eroticism and intellect, as she writes on the first page: I am accomplished in bed, just about seasoned enough to be counted among the better lovers, and love does indeed suit me to perfection, and yet it remains a mere trifle, set apart from what is truly essential, and deep inside me something is still locked away. [...] I am blessed enough intellectually to be able to fathom most subjects, to express myself clearly on most things [...] and yet deep down something like a tightly wound ball of twine binds me relentlessly, and at times I am nothing more or less than a miserable, frightened creature, despite the clarity with which I can express myself. (translated by arnold pomerans)

Hillesum is forced to write, as she notes in her diary, to find a balance between mind and body and bring some order to the chaos. She is helped in this not only by her therapist, the German palmist and Jungian specialist Julius Spier, with whom she soon begins an affair, but also by literature. She reads a lot, is full of “the urge to create”, and would like to write a novella, ‘The Girl Who Would Not Kneel’, an image that is applicable to her. Leo Tolstoy, Fydor Dostoyevsky and especially Rainer Maria Rilke, who constantly appears in her diary with his Stundenbuch and Über Gott, but also the Bible, are her sources of inspiration. Hillesum continued her diary until  October . From July of that year at her own request she spent various periods in Westerbork transit camp as a volunteer for the Jewish Council, working in the section responsible for ‘Social Welfare for Detainees in Transit’. On  July  this protected status came to an end, and like thousands of other Jewish citizens of the Netherlands she was imprisoned in Westerbork. From there, crowded trains left every week for the concentration and extermination camps. Hillesum was transported to Auschwitz with her family in September , where they were soon killed. Hillesum also kept a diary in Westerbork, but that has been lost. The letters she wrote from the camp have been preserved. Two long epistles were published clandestinely

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before the war ended under the pseudonym of Jean Baptiste van der Pluym, who accor ding to the introduction was a “deceased artist”. The other letters and her diary, Het verstoorde leven (An Interrupted Life) were not to be published until years after the war, when they were reprinted many times and translated into various languages. In , a critical edition was published of Nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum (Posthumous Writings of Etty Hillesum), and in  the Etty Hillesum Research Centre (EHOC) was set up in Ghent. Initially the war plays only a background role in the diary, but becomes increasingly obtrusive. On  October , Hillesum writes: Tonight new measures against the Jews. I allowed myself to be upset and depressed about it for half an hour. And in March : We are not allowed to walk along the Promenade any longer, and every miserable little clump of trees has been pronounced a wood with a board nailed up: No Admit tance to Jews. More and more of these boards are appearing all over the place. Meanwhile the sensual Hillesum records in her diary a growing inwardness – she regularly compares herself to a nun shutting herself off from reality, withdraws into herself and shows mystical tendencies. She uses her diary as an instrument to gain self-knowledge, an inward, spiritual quest, but in addition she wants to be the chronicler of her age. A long letter from Westerbork from December , while she was still there as a volunteer, gives a penetrating picture of the camp – an area of just over half a square kilometer populated by some , people – in winter: the wooden huts, the barbed wire, the suffering and the weekly transports to Germany and Eastern Europe. She also looks back at her first visit, in the summer of , to Westerbork (at the time still a camp for Jewish refugees): Up till then, all I’d known about Drenthe was that it had a lot of megalithic tombs. And then suddenly there was a village of wooden barracks, set between heath and sky, with a glaringly yellow lupin field in the middle and barbed wire all around. And there were human lives as well, thick as flies. […] During the first few days I walked around as if through the pages of a history book. I met people who had been in Buchenwald and Dachau at a time when to us these were only distant, threatening sounds. […] In short, one had the feeling of seeing tangible form a small part of the Jewish predicament of the last ten years. And we had thought that there was nothing at Drenthe except megalithic tombs. It was enough to take your breath away. In  – by now the deportations are in full swing – Hillesum notes regularly in her letters that it is scarcely possible to write in the camp any longer. Not because of lack of time, but because there are too many impressions.

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No, it is impossible to write from here; it would take the better part of a lifetime to digest it all. Nevertheless she sketches a picture of Westerbork, with its orphanage, hospital, synagogue, mortuary and small wooden huts. I share one of these huts with five room-mates. Two double bunks, so unsteady on their legs that when the fat Viennese woman above me turns over at night, the bed shakes like a ship in a storm. She describes the large wooden huts as follows: […] those jam-packed hangars of draughty slats where under a lowering sky made up of hundreds of people’s drying laundry, the iron bunks are stacked in triple decks. VIPS from cultural and political life also find their way to Westerbork: With one mighty convulsion all their scenery has collapsed around them, and now they stand around a little hesitantly and awkwardly on this draughty, open stage called Westerbork [...] Their silhouettes move, life-size and exposed, across the great stretch of sky. [...] Their armour of position, esteem and property has collapsed, and now they stand in their last shreds of their humanity [...] One suddenly realises that it is not enough to be an able politician or a talented artist. In the most extreme cases, life demands quite other things. During the weekly deportations on the ‘Boulevard des Misères’, from where the trains leave – the gruesome low point of the week, she notes how a guard picks flowers against the background of the train about to leave, “which comes to collect its cargo with an almost mathematical regularity” – a stark contrast. A guard with an enraptured expression is picking purple lupins. His gun dangling on his back. When I look to the left I see billowing white smoke and hear the puffing of an engine. The people have already been loaded onto the freight cars; the doors are closed. Like her diary, the letters contain ethical reflections. She observes that people in the camp say they do not wish to feel or think, but forget. She sees that as a great moral danger. She wants to be the “thinking heart” of the barracks, a “plaster on many wounds”. Suffering must have or be given a meaning. If we were to save only our bodies and nothing more from the camps all over the world, that would not be enough. What matters is not whether we preserve our lives at any cost, but how we preserve them. I sometimes think that every new situation, good or bad, can enrich us with new insights.

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Hillesum refused to go into hiding during the war, because, as she wrote in her letters, she did not want to shirk the fate that all Jews had to endure. P.H. Schrijvers placed her work in the tradition of crisis literature inspired by Stoic philosophy, in particular by Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. While Nero was terrorizing Rome in the first century A.D., Seneca gradually withdrew from public life and after a period of imprisonment was forced to commit suicide. In his last writings Seneca reflects on the state of crisis, investigates the nature of the reclusive life, the attitude to suffering, death and fate, themes that recur in Hillesum’s work. Both Seneca and Hillseum are focused on the inner world and aspire to an ascetic view of life. The acceptance of fate and the anticipation of suffering as a means of alleviating actual suffering, are also Stoic traits. Hillesum saw writing as a mission: she wanted to be the chronicler of her age, not only of its horrors. Ultimately it is her diary from - and her letters from the camp at Westerbork that later readers have regarded not only as poignant documents humains, but also as literature.

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‘Huge, Indomitable’

Elisabeth Eybers 1915-2007 ena jansen

O

n  july , the idiosyncratic and respected Amsterdam publisher G.A. van Oorschot sent a telegram to Elisabeth Eybers in Johannesburg: “Your collection just appeared”. At his request she had made a selection from her previous book in November . Versamelde gedigte (Collected Poems) was to become one of the bestsellers in his list and moreover was to radically alter the life of the South African poet. Eybers was forty-two at the time and had already published six very successful volumes of poetry in Afrikaans. She was, in fact, the first woman ever to have published a collection of poetry in the young African language, Belydenis in die skemering (Confession in the Dusk, ). She was also the first female poet to win the prestigious Hertzog Prize. In May , less than four years after the publication of Van Oorschot’s anthology and her next book, Neerslag (Sediment), Eybers moved to Amsterdam after her divorce. Almost thirty years later, in , Eybers said in an interview with Tomas Lieske and Willem Jan Otten: “Looking back, leaving South Africa was crazy. (short silence) If I hadn’t written the poems, I don’t know if I would have gone to the Netherlands.” She was to spend the second half of her life in Amsterdam, publish a further fourteen books of poetry and receive both the Constantijn Huygens Prize () and the P.C. Hooft Prize (). The poems she wrote in Amsterdam never alienated her from her South African readers. On the contrary, her collections always appeared simultaneously in Cape Town and Amster dam. She was read and praised in South Africa, too. In today’s jargon she easily qualifies as a ‘transnational’ writer. On the appearance of Versamelde gedigte in , it was immediately striking how naturally Eybers’ work was incorporated by reviewers into the corpus of Dutch poetry. The omnibus was received exceptionally favourably by all regular poetry critics in influen tial newspapers and magazines. They had no particular difficulties with the Afrikaans, and everyone was at pains to put the linguistic affinity with Dutch in as positive a light as possible. The accessibility of Eybers’ themes was also constantly stressed. An extra encouragement for Dutch readers was the praise lavished on her as one of the greatest poets in the Dutch language-area – “still largely undiscovered by the Dutch”. C. Bittremieux (NRC,  September ) compared her to M. Vasalis, with whom in his view she shared the “sense of the magic and danger of everyday life”. He appreciated the fact that she

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“preferred to write about a number of facts at once ordinary and overpowering: birth and death, sex, motherhood, the divine, hope, fear, memory”. Thanks to “increasing formal mastery” she was able, he felt, to root the emotion more and more deeply in experience. Pierre H. Dubois was one of the few critics to ask himself what exactly it was about Eybers’ work that made it so acceptable in the Netherlands. He considered the publishing history of her collections to be very significant: the introduction of her work by Van Oorschot and the fact that the publishers, Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij in Amsterdam, invariably put her all her books from Balans onwards directly on the Dutch market in its ‘luxury’ series. The fact that they were in Afrikaans was no obstacle, since they were recognizably Dutch words, with only minor spelling differences, such as in Dryfsand (Quicksand), Teëspraak (Contradiction), Nuweling (Novice) or Respyt (Respite). But the main reason was surely the “recognizability of her poetry”, as Dubois said when Eybers was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize in : “This recognizability, of form, tone and general human content, was what first established her reputation with the Dutch poetry-loving public; paradoxically enough more because it sounded familiar than because it sounded new. (...) Her strong sense of form was so compatible with the Dutch poetic tradition that the reader almost lost sight of the fact that he was reading a different, foreign idiom, as unusual and not always easily comprehensible words reminded him from time to time.” In its report, the P.C. Hooft Prize jury also pointed out that Eybers belonged in the Dutch literary tradition. Jury member Remco Ekkers summarized it – in a highly simplified form – as follows: “She is actually very Dutch. Her work is rooted in our poetry. Poets here point to her influence, and she has pointed to the influences of Dutch poets on her work. Our conclusion was: she’s one of us.” While many critics have stressed the ease with which Dutch readers can penetrate her work, in  Kees Fens emphasized the effort readers have to make to grasp the meaning of her poems: “For thirty years a poet has been concerned to both affirm and deny her alien status […] in poetry in a language that is not our own. That process of alienness which has become a true identity without denying oneself, is unique. And it cannot have happened very frequently before that we have found ourselves and our country described and recognized ourselves in what for us is mirror writing.” Remarkably enough, Eybers became increasingly well-known and popular, even after the Netherlands rescinded its Cultural Accord with South Africa. That accord, concluded in , had been frozen in  by the Den Uyl cabinet in response to the Soweto uprising (), the death of Steve Biko ( September ), and the banning of organizations actively opposed to apartheid, and in , under pressure from numerous Dutch activist organizations, was unilaterally and officially terminated. Despite increasingly negative public attitudes to white Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, especially during the s and s, Eybers continued to write in Afrikaans, the language prized by Adriaan van Dis and later by Tom Lanoye and Gerrit Komrij. The simultaneous presence of both Africa and Europe, there and here, had become a feature of her work. Her “mighty fatherland” as opposed to a neatly tended “land of tables” represents in particular space versus con striction, the indomitable versus the regulated, the past versus the present. In ‘Opgawe’ (‘Mission’) from uit Noodluik (Escape Hatch, ) these contrasts are expressed as follows:

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The space, the mystery, the tragedy, commotion of a huge, indomitable continent were in my every fiber, how could I shrink, display environmentally correct emotion. After the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections in , South Africa returned to favor with a vengeance. In his anthology De Afrikaanse poëzie in  en enige gedichten (Afrikaans Poetry in a Thousand and One Poems, ) Komrij praised “that ether eal, monosyllabic quality, that poignancy of Afrikaans”, as he had once heard his mother sing the song ‘Sarie Marais’, and he had recognized that in Eybers. “That sparseness yet suppleness, that cross between fear and sarcasm, it seems a language made for poetry.” For half a century Elisabeth Eybers was the Afrikaans poetic voice par excellence in the Low Countries. For years, it was the only Afrikaans poetic voice - joined later by that of Breyten Breytenbach – in the Dutch domain, a domain where other poets like Wilma Stockenström, Antjie Krog, Henning Pieterse, Charl-Pierre Naudé and Gert Vlok Nel were only welcome after . Now South Africans regularly appear at Poetry International, Winternachten and other events in the Netherlands. Even though Eybers never performed in public, she kept a place open for them. A striking feature of her last four collections is that they are bilingual: all the Afrikaans poems have English versions. As a young girl she had written in English, her mother’s language, but the fact that she also started to do this at the end of her life was all about the language game with which the old poet whiled away the time (see the title Tydverdryf/ Pastime from ). On  December , Elisabeth Eybers died in her house on Stadionkade in Amsterdam. She had lived exactly half her ninety-two years in South Africa and the other half in Amsterdam: an exceptionally well-balanced life. Her last collection was Valreep/ Stirrup-cup, published in February  when she turned . She wrote her last poem a year later; it was printed in her obituary: Theology may claim the soul survives through grace but personally I wish to vanish without trace.

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Writing between Faith and Doubt

Maria Rosseels 1916-2005 aagje swinnen

I

n postwar catholic flanders, Maria Rosseels played a key role in public debate as a journalist and writer. From , after joining the editorial board of De Standaard – at the time a small publication with a pro-Flemish stance, today Flanders’ leading daily – she com mented on social and cultural trends. Her view of the significance of the Catholic faith for the modern man and woman’s place in the family and community struck a chord again and again with readers. Rosseels covered a wide range of areas in De Standaard. She wrote film reviews, a selection of which were collected in Liefde is een zeldzaam kruid (Love is a Rare Herb, ). In addition her services were called on for the women’s section, where she set out her views on the equality of men and women and advocated complementarity in marriage. In the ‘Advice Sought’ series, which appeared in -, she adopted bold positions on family planning and the narrow-minded marital morality of the church. Every one of her articles is incisively and fervently written. For example, in the preface to Het woord te voeren past den man (It’s Man’s Job to Do the Talking), a collection of her articles on the suppression of women over the centuries, she puts the case as follows: We have men to thank for the invention of the wheel, the ingenious syllogism, the certainty that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points – although they personally often zigzag; for the alphabet, perspective – in painting, at least – atonal music, the electric oven and the inestimable diet for achieving or maintaining a good figure. In brief, our life on this earth is a paradise, notwith standing the fix that Eva got us into back then. Not forgetting of course the wars and the treaties that issue from them, guaranteeing peace until the next war. Finally we would be doing men an injustice if we didn’t recognize their two most recent gifts: the nuclear bomb and women’s liberation. And now I’m not sure which of the two will be the first to blow our planet to kingdom come. Unless... In the childrens’s supplement of De Standaard Rosseels achieved success with a weekly episode from Spieghelken’s fictitious diary. Previously she had published the young people’s novel Sterren in de poolnacht (Stars in the Polar Night, ) under the pseudonym Emma

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Vervliet – her mother’s name. The intention of the editors was to hold up an example to young female readers through the character of a growing, vital girl. The various episodes resulted in two volumes, Spieghelken () en Nieuw dagboek van Spieghelken (Spieghelken’s New Diary, ). One of the minor characters from the series gave her name to the separate volume O Marolleke (). Spieghelken was the first in a remarkable line of female figures that were to popu late Rosseels’ work and make it popular with the public at large. In the women’s section of the paper, episodes soon appeared on the life of Elisabeth, which grew into a three-part novel (Elisabeth, -). This is fairly traditional in structure and reminiscent of the regional novel. At the center are the tribulations of the main character, who seeks doggedly for a compromise between her personal aspirations and the religious dogmas with which she has grown up. These themes return in Dood van een non (Death of a Nun, ), a frame narrative in which the vicar-general Nicolas Arnaud overcomes a crisis of faith through the posthumously discovered writings of his sister Sabine: they testify to Sabine’s laborious struggle to find a place in the world and in faith. She is played off against her pious sister Gertrude, who dies from self-flagellation in the convent of the Sisters of Penance: Gertrude was embodiment of the ideal of perfection that is so often mentioned in the second nocturne of matins. Gertrude too, from her earliest youth, gave evidence of her future sanctity. As a baby she probably did not refuse the breast on Friday, as did, to judge by the writings of hagiographers as imaginative as they were pious, Stanislaus Kostka and St Nicholas; but for as long as I can remember she did do penance in all kinds of ways. For others’ sins, since in Gertrude’s heart there wasn’t a trace of evil. The authentic belief in a merciful God for which Gertrude stands and which in Rosseels’ eyes is encouraged in an all too destructive way in the convent, is linked with the image of God held by the excommunicated bishop Lin Yat-sen, whom Sabine meets in Tokyo and who leads her to salvation. Rosseels drew inspiration for Sabine’s encounter with Japanese culture from her own journey to the Far East, of which she wrote an account Oosters cocktail (Oriental Cocktail, ), illustrated by Willy Vandersteen. Dood van een non proved an unexpected riposte to the Belgian primate Cardinal Van Roey. The cardinal had caused her series of articles ‘Modern nuns required’ (), in which she decried the archaic nature of female congregations, to be suspended after eight episodes. In a letter, published in full in De Standaard, he accused her of frivolity and lack of knowledge of the subject. The success of Dood van een non showed that the public at large was taking the side of the writer on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Over a decade later the novel had lost scarcely any of its popularity, as evidenced by the film version by Paul Collet and Pierre Drouot in . Rosseels produced two bulky historical novels, though the genre label needs some qualification, since the author uses striking figures from the past to interpret contemporary religious matters. She illustrates how history is marked by continuity and invites her readers look inward and reflect. For this reason, the books in question might be better characterized

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as novels of ideas in a historical setting. The starting point of Ik was een kristen (I Was a Christian, ) is the assassination of the emperor Julian the Apostate in the fourth century A.D. Rosseels attributes the murder to the fictional character Alexander Marcus Aurelius, one of the emperor’s confidants, who feels compelled to intervene drastically when the freedom of the Christians is restricted. Alexander’s life story testifies to his constant doubt about his fate and his longing for a church that makes not power but love supreme. Wacht niet op de morgen (Don’t Wait for Morning, ) takes place in the twelfth century, at the time of the Second Crusade to the Holy Land in order to protect the crusader states in Outremer against Muslims. Rosseels puts her plea for tolerance in the mouth of the main character, Gilles de Malle, who wrestles with the question of how he can best put faith into practice and comes to the following conclusion: There are many ways leading to the same end: the faith of Islam, the hope of Israel, the love of Jesus. Everything I have learned, desired, honored and loved, I recognize in the faith of the lepers of Aïn Sha’ir. What I am doing here is but little, but that little I do with great love. Man comes and goes: a flash in eternity. My soul is like the sparrow of which the Venerable Bede speaks: it flies into the brightly lit banqueting hall out of the dark – just for a moment: then it plunges back into the cold and darkness of the night. This fragment shows how the cerebral tone of Rosseels’ writing can strike the modern reader as dated. Besides which the religious questions that are always paramount have become less urgent in our secularized society. In her last novel, Het oordeel of Vrijdag zingt de nachtegaal (The Judgement, or the Nightingale Sings on Friday, ), Rosseels tried to take a new literary direction. The novel does not depict a past period, but offers a psychological portrait of the contemporary writer Andreas Nyland. In the course of an oppressive train journey, which unavoidably recalls the magic realism of such contemporaries as Johan Daisne (-), the main character is forced to confront himself. The choice of a flashback structure soon makes it clear that the book is set on the cusp of life and death. Nyland draws up an inventory of his life and has to face painful truths. Unlike Rosseels’ previous work, Het oordeel did not meet with a wholly positive reaction. There was a great deal of speculation whether the negative criticism was the reason she published no further literary prose. Rosseels certainly did not lack recognition later in life. In the s she received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Leuven (), was the first woman to be honored with the triennial Life’s Work Prize of the Flemish Community () and was elevated to the nobility ().

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The Marginal Figure as Hero

Hella S. Haasse 1918 jaap goedegebuure

J

ohan huizinga once spoke of the “historical sensation”: the moment at which the past reveals itself in a single detail. A nice example of this is to be found in the essay in which Hella Haasse describes the archival research she undertook in preparation for her novels Mevrouw Bentinck of Onverenigbaarheid van karakter (Mdme Bentinck of Incompatibility of Character, ) and De groten der aarde of Bentinck tegen Bentinck (The Great and the Good or Bentinck v. Bentinck, ). I was beyond help once I found a most curious collection of written portraits of that in-crowd of Northwest-German Calvinist aristocrats; in addition a pack of awkward but moving love letters from the young Willem Bentinck to his obviously reluctant bride Sophie; and finally, on half-disintegrating paper, a drawn rebus of allegorical representations of a turbulent love story. When some letters were unfolded grains of sand, which the writer had dried the ink, fell into the palm of my hand. The quotation shows that with Haasse and her preferred historical characters it is almost always love at first sight. The political reformer Joan Derk van de Capellen (-), the protagonist of Schaduwbeeld of Het geheim van Appeltern (Silhouette or The Secret of Appeltern, ), was no more than a ghost when she first encountered him on paper, but the moment she nestled in the grass opposite his house, he became a physical presence. Charles d’Orléans (-), the hero of Het woud der verwachting () (translated into English as In a Dark Wood Wandering, ), won her heart because much of his life of imprisonment had the same atmosphere as the dark Hunger Winter of , the year when the above-mentioned novel was written. Even fictional characters come to life in Haasse’s imagination. Walking through a suburb of The Hague the author suddenly sees the Marquise de Merteuil from Choderlos de Laclos’ celebrated epistolary novel () appear from nowhere. Haasse’s best work always originates from a tiny flame that suddenly ignites and stays warm until she had successfully completed her hunt through the archives and her own imagination. Her receptivity to a story that, like Sleeping Beauty lies slumbering until

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someone wakes it with a kiss, is rooted in spontaneity and curiosity, but also in the need to do justice to the past. For that reason Haasse quite often singles out marginal figures whose role has never merited more than a footnote in official historiography. For what did we know all things considered of Claudius Claudianus, a relatively unknown poet from the latter days of the Roman Empire, who became the main character of Haasse’s novel Een nieuwer testament (A Newer Testament, )? Or of Giovanni Borgia, the anti-hero without illusions of De scharlaken stad (The Scarlet City, )? De scharlaken stad is one of Haase’s most characteristic novels, and mostly be cause of the search for identity that is its theme. The book’s construction is like a mosaic. That form is precisely well suited to Haasse, particularly when we witness her autobio graphical essay Zelfportret als legkaart (Self Portrait as a Jigsaw, ) and the Bentinck novels, structured like a collage. In terms of content, De scharlaken stad resembles a labyrinth. Haasse, the author of a play on Ariadne and a penetrating essay on the sixteenthcentury gardens of Bomarzo, has a special predilection for that phenomenon too. The protagonist Giovanni Borgia is searching for the mystery of his birth. Was he sired by the poisoner pope Alexander? Is the commander Cesare his father? Or is he not descended from the Borgias, but from that other family of monarchs, the Farneses? There are no answers, and what is left is a gnawing uncertainty about who he is: This is poisoning my life: the knowledge that I am not myself. Those who made me are stronger in myself than I am. For that reason for that reason alone I want to know them. I want to know what they were guilty of, for their guilt lives on in me. (translated by peter king)

In Haasse’s work the I always appears as another, and there is never any reconciliation between the two. The more her characters immerse themselves in their backgrounds, the more they lose themselves. Again and again their life proves a maze without a center or a way out. For some the wandering proves fatal. That, for instance, is the case with Jenny, one of the characters in the novel Heren van de thee (Lords of Tea, ) – again based on authentic documents – one of the novels that give Haasse a place in post-colonial literature. Unlike the tough planters and planters’ wives around her, Jenny is not someone who is all of a piece. She suffers from melancholy and anxiety and is only too aware of the cavernous and dangerous recesses of her psyche. Jenny sees her demons embodied in the path that winds its way from the garden of her house on Java into the forest towards an unknown and threatening darkness. It is a motif that occurs with striking frequency in Haasse’s work. At the heart of her well-considered and well-organized novels there is quite often a black hole. Often it manifests itself from the very beginning. For example, in the opening scene of in De verborgen bron (The Hidden Spring, ) the protagonist comes face to face with a deserted, mysterious house. Berichten van het Blauwe Huis (Reports from the Blue House, ) begins in exactly the same way. The prologue of the latter novel is put into the mouth of an anonymous group of local residents, who wonder whatever can be going on within the walls of the villa that appears to be boarded up.

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In De meermin (The Mermaid, ), it is not an impenetrable wood, closed garden or inaccessible house in which obsessions assume a form, but a suitcase in a basement. The suitcase belongs to the main character Sera, who has stored mementoes from her former life in it. Since the cellar was flooded, the contents of the case have turned into a shapeless wad of paper. Sometimes Sera goes down there to have a look. A stench of mould and decay rose from the unrecognizable mass, which crumbled and flaked the moment she touched it. With her hands full of dry wodges of paper and material, the remains of what was irrevocably over, she thought of a dream that often tormented her. Leonard and herself and their children were walking across a cemetery and suddenly she lost sight of them. She looked for them among lines of gravestones, gripped by terror. Crosses stuck out of the ground at all angles, old tombs lay open, dusty black or green hedges and bushes hid endless as yet unexplored areas of the necropolis from view. At a certain moment she was wading up to her ankles through a layer of what she first took to be leaves, but which turned out to be something else, lumps of ash, flimsy, lugubrious flakes. Like the motif of the dark opening in the jungle in Heren van de thee, the passage just quoted is quite isolated. But a reader with an eye for symbolism will understand quickly enough that the case refers to a Pandora’s box crammed full of frustrations. Haasse is well aware of the subconscious, but prefers to describe a cautious arc around it rather than invoke Freud. The example confirms that Haasse, besides her fascinations and obsessions also has her blind spots. She always deals with love and sex with the greatest possible circumspection. It is no accident that in Zwanen schieten (Shooting Swans, ) the white bird, interpreted by the author herself as a symbol of lust and desire, is the victim of the bow and arrow, traditionally the symbols of the Apollonian virtue of restraint, moderation and reasonableness. And she also observes evil from a safe distance, the great exception being the two-part novella De Meester van de Neerdaling (The Master of the Descent, ). In that context it is worth quoting a passage from Zwanen schieten: Greatly stimulated by the romantic piano music that our house was always filled with, I experienced in my imagination a foretaste of erotic experiences. In reality nothing has ever come close to that earlier ecstasy. The intense joy afforded by the beauty of sounds, became the yardstick for what I expected from physical love. Music and literature have proved fatal to me in the sense that the imaginary, the abstract representation, the enthusiasm that language and tone can communicate, get in the way of direct experience. Here, Haasse is putting her finger on the core of her writing. What sets her imagination in motion is not so much rancor, religious fervor or prophetic pretension (as with her male contemporaries Hermans, Reve and Mulisch), but a reading history that has gradually taken the place of a life history.

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Some authors shun other literature, if only to protect themselves from impressions that will distract them from their own core. Hella Haasse on the other hand is an author of the Borges type, who goes on assiduously reading and incorporates old books in order to make new ones. What Haasse, who was born in the colonial Dutch East Indies and spent her childhood there, certainly avoided was the bustle of literary life, that is, the polemics, the hectic world of magazines, and so on. Perhaps that is why for many decades, as regards reputation and image she remained on the second tier, until in the s she was recognized once and for all as one of the Netherlands’ greatest authors.

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The Persecution of the Jews as an Incredible Story

Marga Minco 1920

annie van den oever and ernst bruinsma

M

arga minco, the pseudonym of Sara Menco, grew up in Ginneken, in Catholic Noord-Brabant, in the South of the country. Her father Salomon as parnas (warden of the synagogue) occupied a prominent position in the Jewish community. He gave his children an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, but, as the writer later stated: “We children wanted to be just like all the others. I started to dislike the rites and laws of Judaism.” From , Minco worked in her home town as a trainee-journalist at the Bredasche Courant, where she did editorial work and wrote theater and film reviews. Under the pseu donym ‘Hus’ she also wrote short sketches for the paper. In May , after the German invasion, she was immediately dismissed at the insistence of pro-German directors. She went underground and managed to survive, but her parents, sister, brother and sister-in-law disappeared into the camps of Nazi Germany. Only gradually did it become clear how final their disappearance actually was. In August  Minco married the writer and journalist Bert Voeten, whom she had met before the war. They had been in hiding in Amsterdam and for years after the war they lived in the ‘De Kloof’ building (now a second-hand bookshop) on Kloveniersburgwal in the center of the old city of Amsterdam. Avant-garde poets and painters they knew, such as Gerrit Kouwenaar, Lucebert, Bert Schierbeek, Karel Appel and Corneille, either lodged with Minco and her husband Voeten (in those years involved in such magazines as Ad interim, Proloog and Het Woord), or else dropped by on an almost daily basis. She was surrounded by the post-war avant-garde, but was not writing herself at that time. In , Voeten published his war diary Doortocht (Passing Through), but Minco did not start writing until the early s. She published in the daily Het Parool and in Critisch Bulletin. She was now also writing (like her peers Simon Carmiggelt and Annie M.G. Schmidt) her characteristic, mostly very short, bittersweet stories, which were published in the legendary magazine Mandril, the Dutch New Yorker. Journalists with a sharp pen and writers like Hans Andreus, Til Brugman, Remco Campert and Lucebert, with a good feel for the grotesque and the absurd, discovered each other as kindred spirits. She made her literary debut in  with Het bittere kruid (translated into English as Bitter Herbs in ), which immediately became her best-known work. This collection of

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interconnected, very short stories on the war and the persecution of the Jews immediately provoked a tremendous response with critics and the public alike. In , the book was adapted to film by Kees van Oostrum. For many decades Het bittere kruid was a fixture on secondary school reading lists and for a long time Minco was one of the Netherlands’ most popular authors. She toured the country discussing her work and the war with school pupils. After her debut, Minco continued work on her powerful, penetrating oeuvre, which may be modest in size, but in other respects can only be called impressive. She wrote many stories, novellas, novels and television plays, with the high points being De andere kant (The Other Side, ), Een leeg huis (An Empty House, ), De val (The Trap, ) and the novel Nagelaten dagen (Posthumous Days, ). In , Minco received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for her life’s work. Het bittere kruid is about the war and the Holocaust. Her “little chronicle”, as she calls it in the subtitle, consists of short chapters, which in their nature and scope are strongly reminiscent of the ostensibly innocent, slightly fantastic stories she had previously written for Mandril. These are also (extremely) short, absurd, witty, a tad treacherous, with a sharp eye for the distressing and the incongruous. A characteristic of this kind of Mandril story is that it makes a grotesque impression and that its deeper meaning is easily overlooked. Consequently, critics have often erroneously labeled her style “modest”. The truth is that she has a decidedly lucid and sardonic style, and we know that when she read her stories to the family it provoked roars of laughter (Johan Snapper, De wegen van Marga Minco, ). That leads us to the following question: how many Dutch readers, apart from her writer friends at the time, immediately understood the slightly grotesque stories she wrote for Mandril and how many linked them to Het bittere kruid? ‘Een voetbad’ (‘A Footbath’) from  is a typical Minco story from Mandril, which appears to have very little substance to it. Two characters, of the kind we also know from the work of Helga Ruebsamen, are introduced: a pushy, well-dressed commercial traveler, who, using a business card, forces his way into the home of a defenseless housewife, who has no idea how to refuse entry to such a polite gentleman. She pointed him to a chair and walked over to an open wall cabinet, stepping cautiously over clusters of crockery (...) The man had sat down and was studying her bottom with dull eyes. She was a short, puffy woman in a green dressing gown with white and black flowers on it. She had put up her ginger hair carelessly. ‘I’ll be finished in a moment,’ she said, bending down to get a meat dish. Her stockings were twisted. The pompom was missing from her right slipper. The reader feels: this is a woman for whom there is never going to be a silver lining. She is  and at her wits’ end, married but childless, unhappy but not poor, and alone all day long in a continually messy house that she fills with her aimless pottering. Her drawing room looks as if it has “been hit by spring cleaning or the preparations for a removal”. Where is she supposed to start clearing up, putting things in order and rebuilding a life that in some elusive way has gone completely off the rails? “A footbath” says the man,

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and puts an end to her nervous pottering by fixing her feet in a basin of plaster. Now she is trapped once and for all. Helpless, nervous, gullible, abandoned by everyone. Without being explicit, Minco gives a penetrating description of the depressing aspects of the postwar reconstruction era for women, who at that time were only allowed to show the world their most cheerful face. How much courage does a writer need to describe the persecution of the Jews in an absurd, grotesque, and sardonic way? And how much skill? In Het bittere kruid, Marga Minco describes the persecution, not explicitly as a tragedy, but as an incredible story, without heroes, without catharsis, without explanation, full of incongruities, full of dissonance. The high point in the collection is the story ‘Kampeerbekers’ (‘Camping Mugs’), an autobiographical story based on the disappearance of her brother and his fiancée. Minco describes him as a sensible and sober adult Jewish liberal who, before his departure for what he thinks will be a more or less ordinary ‘camp,’ purchases two red camping mugs. He is in an almost festive state of excitement, as if it were an adventurous holiday trip: “I’ve never been further than Belgium”. The next moment, he disappears forever into an extermination camp with his red camping mug. The camping mugs, in all their absurd simplicity, symbolize the massive collision between ordinary, everyday life and the totally out-of-the-ordinary and incomprehensible nature of the persecution of the Jews, the nature and full scope of which no one could grasp. And it is precisely that incomprehensibility that, in the writer’s view, explains the “general denial of the actual facts by the Jews, which has continued to astonish historians” (Johan Snapper, De wegen van Marga Minco, ). Minco wrote ‘Kampeerbekers’ as a Mandril story. Her radical irony has not always been well understood. Her (war) stories have been dubbed “modest” and “sober” ad nauseam. It is a misunderstanding to call her style of narration “lucid and uncomplicated”; that statement fails to do justice to the perfidious element so typical of her stories and of Mandril. Equally, to state that her central theme is the “loneliness of human beings isolated by an evil power”, fails to do justice to her real subject: the complete incomprehensibility of the Holocaust. There is generally a large measure of agreement about how Minco’s work can best be read. Over the years, that has led to a certain stereotypical interpretation of her oeuvre. Her work is supposedly largely factually based on actual events and testifies to an authentic need to record them. In this way her work has been assigned a niche in a specifically Jewish-Dutch tradition that contains many autobiographical works. One thinks of such authors as Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, Abel Herzberg, Joseph Mendels, Andreas Burnier and G.J. Durlacher and also of the writing of later generations, e.g., Franz Point, Jessica Durlacher, Leon de Winter, Miriam Rotenstreich, Carl Friedman. Within the context of Jewish literature, Marga Minco occupies a unique place, by being the first, as far as we know, to use a slightly grotesque style for evoking the tragedy of the persecution of the Jews; graphic novel writer Art Spiegelman would later follow the same path. This grotesque approach has its roots in the work of Franz Kafka and in the historical avant-garde movement. In the post-war years, Mandril gave ample scope to the grotesque and absurd short story.

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There is little if any literature in Dutch by victims of the Holocaust in Flanders. Jews in Belgium, even after Belgian independence, joined the bourgeoisie, which then and for a large part of the twentieth century was mainly French in orientation. Yet it is meaningful, particularly in Flanders, to point to the tradition in which Minco’s work is at least partly rooted, namely that of the historical avant-garde movement around Paul van Ostaijen, the writer of grotesques who was admired by the post-war circle of Dutch avant-garde poets by whom Minco was surrounded after the war. And in her “little chronicle” Het bittere kruid, Marga Minco tried to show the incomprehensible, devastating impact of the war on private life, just as Louis Paul Boon (-)) had done in Mijn kleine oorlog (My Little War, ), a book she may well have discovered at an early date through her avant-garde friends.

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Crushed by a Malevolent God

Hanny Michaelis 1922-2007 maaike meijer

H

anny michaelis was the only child of liberal Jewish parents and grew up in Amsterdam. She had a happy childhood, until war broke out and – aged twenty – she was helped to go into hiding by her employer. Her parents did not receive such help: “They were poor, malnourished and over fifty, which is why no one wanted to give them shelter,” notes Michaelis in her memoirs, which appeared in . Her parents were transported in , though it was not until  that their daughter received confirmation that they had been gassed immediately on arrival in Sobibor. In a late poem she sketches a portrait of her former life with her parents and realises that her image of them is fading, just as she herself will soon be forgotten: […] The sound of their voices has virtually faded. Soon I too won’t be there any more. Then it will be as if we three had never existed. On reading this, one is overcome by the feeling of futility. It is soberly expressed, just as the whole of Michaelis’ work is simple and direct. As if grief, which cannot be expressed, is nevertheless given form, but almost reluctantly. Michaelis called her own work “small talk” (as opposed to grandiloquent “big talk”). Her poetics are the poetics of loss. Her work is singing “into the wind”, as in the title of her third collection. […] The dark wide-open eye of a puddle. The bird that sings into the wind, wobbling on the last moment of light.

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“The last moment/of light” suggests “leaving things until it is too late”, in this case until it is dark. Michaelis seems to be drawing a poetic self-portrait here. Hanny Michaelis started writing poetry in the war and and published her first collection, Klein voorspel (Little Prelude) in . Although it was reprinted several times up to the s, her début is not really that powerful, certainly not for modern readers. The form is still fairly pre-classical, pre-s, and in that same decade rhyme was to go completely out of fashion. Yet here and there the later Michaelis is already fully present, as in the melancholy poem ‘Sand Slurry’: A cold and precarious light shaves the houses’ edge across a grey wasteland of endless sand slurry. Fine sand blows through the empty streets. Hundreds of windows stare blindly and vacantly across this panorama. Aloof and godforsaken It extends. Only the wind blows past, malevolently swirling. [...] A dominant form of imagery in the poem is personification: the inanimate is presented as animate. The light “shaves” (like a bird), windows “stare blindly and vacantly” (like people) and even the wind is “malevolent” (as if it had evil intentions). This grey landscape, in which all the elements actively cooperate to create a miserable world, can be read as a somber, historically determined image of post-war restoration and reconstruction. Houses will be built on the sand slurry, but the voice in the poems looks forward to the new life anything but expectantly. It can be read just as well as the image of a mournful inner landscape. The ‘I’ feels totally abandoned in an inhospitable, cold world. In the four volumes that followed this début and with which Hanny Michaelis made her name, this tone of loneliness and despair remains a constant. The collections were regularly reprinted: Water uit de rots (Water from the Rock, ), Tegen de wind in (Into the Wind, ), Onvoorzien (Unforeseen, ) and De rots van Gibraltar (The Rock of Gibraltar, ). In Water uit de rots there is a beloved, who is intensely admired and almost worshipped. Later volumes feature a lost love whose death the ‘I’ cannot get over. This theme makes Michaelis’ poetry an almost exemplary expression of mourning too deep to come to terms with, in which the loss of a loved one leads to an insurmountable depression. She records this in a spare, functional style, which always seems to ride on a single breath:

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Blindly living in the continuation of your death I move imperceptibly from your grave, en route to my own. I have previously suggested that Michaelis’ work shows links with that of Ellen Warmond, Mischa de Vreede and Lizzy Sara May. All these poets made their début in the s, with poetry so sober and somber that in writing on the period I grouped them together under the common denominator of “the Great Melancholy” – the female pendant of the male Movement of the s. Not until Michaelis’ last collection to date, Wegdraven naar een nieuw utopia (Trotting Off to a New Utopia, ) does the tone become lighter, angrier, more vital and here and there even happy. But Michaelis published no more poetry after . She fell silent, like other well-known female poets, including M. Vasalis and Neeltje Maria Min. That silence might be connected with a contemporary literary climate that was not very woman-friendly. Men’s work set the tone and served as a reference point for predominantly male critics and fellow-authors, which may have given women a feeling of homelessness. The suggestion that the literary climate was responsible for her silence is confirmed by the fact that she began tentatively writing poetry again in , after winning the Anna Bijns Prize for female authors for her life’s work. After the end of the war, Michaelis worked for a long time for the Artistic Affairs department of the Municipality of Amsterdam. She also served on the board of the Authors’ Association and as vice-Chair of the Federation of Artists. She translated, among other things, work in English by Gerard (van het) Reve, the writer to whom she was married between  and  and with whom she remained on friendly terms throughout her life. In interviews she was extremely modest about her poetry, pleasant, impractical and both pleased with and embarrassed at the public interest her work continued to enjoy, although little scholarly attention has been paid to it. I suspect that the popularity of Michaelis’ work is connected with its overt somberness. The reader can feel consoled by being made sad: this is the homeopathy of sorrow. Sometimes a poem reveals the deeper source of the fundamental feeling of total abandonment, as here: A hilltop beneath imposing clouds. The vista friendly enough. Red rooftiles among summer trees, dark-blue water splashed with sunlight on the way to woods on the horizon. There was someone beside me too. All conditions for an idyllic tête-à-tête seemed to have been met when suddenly, seized by a feeling

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from the war years (no home, shelter, though, fair game in the polder) I was brought back to my true proportions: a helpless creature with no name or importance that at any moment could be snatched from the earth and crushed. Of course of the sort happened. Unscathed and in the best of moods we descended from the hill. Only the feeling could not be explained, let alone understood. The war years, living in hiding, are where it all began. In Verst verleden. Jeugdherinneringen (Dim and Distant Past. Childhood Memories, ), Michaelis tells the story of life with her colorful parents and how she lost that familiar world and struggled to survive the war moving from one safe house to another. Afterwards she felt cast out forever from a hostile world. The book ends as follows: Immediately after the war I began to suffer from depressions, which recurred with increasing frequency. I couldn’t understand where that terrible melancholy came from. In  when I met Gerard [Reve], I thought I had put the old pain from the war years behind me. Up till now that has proved a mistake. Yet Michaelis’ poems can act as interpreters of the melancholy of her readers, who while they may not have had the same traumatic experiences, can still recognize their own sadness in them. It is not only the poet who can feel like a helpless creature that can be snatched from the earth at any moment and crushed by the great hand of a malevolent God – so can readers, and these feelings can be experienced as part of the reading process. Identification is made even easier by Michaelis’ use of such an over-determined image, and the situation of this epiphany of abandonement on a hilltop: in the Bible, the mountaintop is the place where the encounter with God takes place. Hence the whole Biblical tradition adds to the poem’s resonance. Michaelis reworks this Biblical topos into the encounter with a destructive God, not a loving or just one, and the ‘I’ is totally at His mercy. That is made all the more poignant by the contrast with the idyllic Natureingang of the opening and the fact that the experience cannot subsequently be put into words. But the reader can recognize that too. Such disorientating feelings are hidden away. You simply feel utterly miserable, supposedly sharing in the excellent mood of the gathering. But not really.

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Reading and Living

Christine D’haen 1923-2009 dietlinde willockx

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enerally, the prize for dutch literature is awarded to an oeuvre that is largely complete. Christine D’haen continued writing after receiving the prize in . Even the collection Miroirs. Gedichten vanaf  (Miroirs. Poems from , ) was not a full stop. D’haen supplemented it with Mirabilia () and Innisfree (). And Uitgespaard zelfportret (Self-Portrait with Blank Spaces), in which she collected her prose in , contained four previously unpublished titles. Her increasing productivity links to the view of writing held by Christine D’haen from the beginning of her career: one can’t write without studying. And later in life, retired and without small children, there was more time for study. D’haen’s very first official publication, in the literary magazine Dietsche Warande & Belfort, demonstrated her thirst for knowledge. She turned an adaptation of an existing love story into the small epic ‘Abaillard en Heloys’ (Abelard and Heloïse, ). Working with ready-made material gave the poet the opportunity to learn her craft – in the collected poetry the early verse is included in a section called ‘Vingeroefeningen’ (‘Five-Finger Exercises’). Gradually D’haen’s studious approach came also to influence the content of her poems. The poems no longer retold stories, but they did retain literary tradition as a source of inspiration. This evolution can be traced from the growing importance of end notes. While they were absent in her first collection Gedichten (Poems, ), in Onyx (), which was a selection from D’haens work up to then and also contains poems from that début, they are abundantly present. They comprise mainly glosses on words and summary information on the literary works referred to. Gradually the notes assume the scope of commentaries. The poet not only explains terms or references, but also comments on the structure of series of poems or states the main theme or starting point of the poem. Of ‘Out of Key’ from the collection Innisfree, for instance, she has the following to say: “Ezra Pound wrote the Mauberley cycle about a poet ‘out of key with his time’. In this series I describe four kinds of poem that are now ostensibly ‘against the spirit of the age’.” Then each poem is given a separate commentary, of which I shall quote the first: “Poetry about flowers: passé.” This method creates a special effect. Readers no longer have to pinpoint the many references to art and literature for themselves, but can devote themselves entirely to what the poet has done with the sources. In the light of D’haen’s intensive involvement with the European literary tradition it need

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not surprise us that she regularly published translations. For example, she translated poetry by Guido Gezelle into English (The Evening and the Rose, ) and included in Innisfree a poem by John Donne in Dutch translation. The bookish nature of D’haen’s poetry has provoked both admiration and irritation among critics. No one can argue with the technical skill of these poems, but some people thought them too far removed from the spirit of the age, while others found them too cerebral. Yet D’haen’s work is not at all impersonal, since she does more than incorporate texts. She mixes her ‘learned’ sources with themes such as love between man and woman or children’s play. One of her best known poems is based on a passage from Plato’s Symposium, but at the same time can be read as an extremely personal struggle with love: My demon saddened my blood at night: The head in my arms, the head of a man, is nothing. And your days and nights are nothing but a shadow of shadows; all that you do is nothing: and the meat that you eat, and the blood that you drink is nothing. Abhor the spirit too! For the soul that you eat, the vision you drink Is nothing. All that you seek, what you do Is nothing. It’s less than the ash and the foam. And the mouth on your heart is nothing. Like the sand by the sea Is everything to you, and less than ash from the fire, and your dreams are less than rubble. For all that you drink and digest, will all feed only me, and the power is mine, but you, you’re naught but a shadow, and it’s I who make some live in death’s throes and some have a living death. Only I hush you up. – My demon at night saddened me bitterly. – And the head in my arm, the head of a man, is nothing. It’s nothing but a face, dozing, slumbering, full of coolness and soft. This poem combines the abstract and the concrete, the all-consuming and the pragmatic. The man’s face, for example, is pleasantly concrete compared with the demon’s shadows. ‘Daimoon Megas’ can also serve as a demonstration of what makes D’haen’s poetry truly personal and unique: her style that combines a strict formal pattern with inventiveness. She had an unsurpassed mastery of classical forms, exploring the boundaries and investigating sound colours. She was able to bring to life a balanced structure with her sensual

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choice of words, measured repetitions and enjambements. In this poem, for example, the word “nothing” is prominent but is constantly given a new dimension, from “it is nothing” via “you are nothing’”returning to “it is nothing” followed surprisingly, partly because of the enjambement, by “but”. Besides the style, the precise choice of sources of inspiration makes D’haen’s work personal. From an almost infinite mountain of texts and works of art, she chose a few that fuelled her works and reflected her poetic activities. In that sense her collected poems could not have had a better title than Miroirs. D’haen applied the same filter principle in De wonde in ’t hert (The Wound in the Heart), the biography of the Flemish poet Guido Gezelle which she published in , after working for many years as a teacher on secondment at the Gezelle Archive in Bruges. She did not tell a romanticized life story, but as it were deconstructed that story by ordering data and documents in lists. Many items are directly related to Gezelle’s life, such as his school reports or assessments by his superiors, others sketch a literary-historical context, such as the surveys of contemporary poems pub lished in other European languages. The personal element resides in the offbeat approach, the selection of information and the incidental commentaries. The prose texts that Christine D’haen published from  onwards are also frag mentary. Unlike the poems they present themselves frankly as autobiographical, though here too D’haen ventured off the beaten track. She did not work in a strictly chronological way, but as it were constantly began anew. Scraps of memories and thoughts of her student years in Ghent and Edinburgh, of her marriage, of the upbringing of her children and of many friends were constantly reordered in different ways, now chronologically, according to place of theme (Zwarte sneeuw/Black Snow, Kalkmarkt , Het huwelijk/Marriage), or on the basis of works of art (Ars longa) or quotations (Sirens), or by means of fragments of letters addressed to her (Schreef in de aarde/Line in the Earth). One book (Een brokaten brief/A Brocade Letter) is constructed as the autobiographical memoir of Li Ching Chao, a female Chinese poet of the twelfth century, but D’haen herself pops up in the very first sentence: “I, Li Ching Chao, poet, wish to write down these things from her life, so that later, after ten thousand moons and suns, they may be useful for that other woman, who is a poet […]” The attentive reader in addition regularly recognizes anecdotes or ideas that appeared in previous volumes. D’haens prose also offers interesting glimpses of her poems. This is what the poet had to say almost fifty years after the first publication of ‘Daimoon Megas’: For me, however, the daimon was my clear mind, the intellect that irrevocably revealed the truth to me (…) The intellect says: that’s how it is, and it is nothing. Everything that is not eternal does not exist (it has gone before it has been mentioned). In order not to be destroyed, the soul must counter it with something: the life urge. The daimon is therefore the intermediary between myself and being: it torments me with my inadequacy and forces the will to transcend. For the truth is double and paradoxical. The subconscious shows a different truth: everything is eternal, there is no death, the here and now of experience is a certain and eternal experience. Experience shows us the other. The other is, therefore I am too.

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D’haens prose makes a more transparent impression than her poetry, and its direct style borders on spoken language. The abundant punctuation evokes an analytical train of thought and a penchant for completeness. Paragraphs are short and forceful so that the page looks fragmentary. That style corresponds to the occasionally mercilessly sharp content. As mild as she is to others, she writes unflinchingly about herself, as in Het huwelijk: Lessons: prose, poetry, grammar, intonation, pronunciation, idioms, history, everyday life, magazine: the children feel that their mother has no room in her head for them. Her husband feels it too: she has no time for me. Such quotations not only show the difficulty of combining profession, vocation and family, but also demonstrate the continuing importance of learning and studying. For Christine D’haen reading and living turned out to be inextricably bound together: her poetry merged the two poles, while her prose exposed the tension between them.

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A ‘Poet’s Poet’

F. (ten) Harmsen van (der) Beek 1927-2009 annie van den oever

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ritzi ten harmsen van der beek was an admired writer and in every respect a “poet’s poet”, though for herself it was an open question whether she was really a writer. She maintained that attitude to the business of writing throughout her life. All things considered, it expresses her subversive relationship with the literary world, to which she refused to belong. She did not want a position in it (“I don’t really have ambition, the way others do”) and for as long as she lived was averse to the labels the critics reserved for her, even to seemingly neutral terms like ‘poet’ and ‘poem’. She even chose to not call herself a ‘writer’. She found this kind of self-labeling presumptuous, a form of hubris, as she wrote in the programmatic title story ‘Neerbraak’ (‘Staple Shaft’). In this story she describes a very modest little creature, the millipede, which “spreads its already negligible weight over all those tiny feet”. In these creatures there is proportional weightiness. How surprising then that “almost everyone finds millipedes repulsive” (though not writers). Neerbraak (), which established her as a brilliant writer of prose (in the words of the eminent Dutch critic Kees Fens) opens with a programmic story. For if she did write, after all, to earn her living or for her pleasure, she wrote only “neerbraken”. The term neerbraak, besides its (under)mining connotations of a shaft that does not start from the surface, contains the crucial elements of ‘setting down’ or recording (neer), and ‘breaking down’ (braak) the reader’s prejudices. With these stories she placed herself in an inter national tradition of grotesque story telling, which in the Low Countries flourished mainly in Flanders in the avant-garde circle around Paul van Ostaijen. Ten Harmsen van der Beek refused to be solemn about writing. Her father, Eelco ten Harmsen van der Beek, was the well-known creator of the figure of Flipje, the mascot of jam manufacturer De Betuwe (which at the height of its popularity enjoyed an almost % recognition factor in the Netherlands). Fritzi was allowed to help her father with his work (drawing and making children’s verses) from about the age of four. Besides Flipje, he also created the much-loved Noddy for the English children’s writer Enid Blyton. Fritzi’s mother, Freddy Langeler, was the creator of many famous illustrated children’s books (Sterrekindertjes and Wortelkindertjes) and she too collaborated on the Flipje books (she is credited as joint

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author). At home, poems and drawings were made non-stop. It was the most normal thing in the world, Harmsen van Beek said later. Of her parents she commented: “They were actually a couple of teenagers who found themselves by accident with two children to bring up.” Following in their footsteps, she was also someone who possessed many skills. She sporadically attended Amsterdam Art Academy, drew and provided drawings for some of her work: the stories Wat knaagt? (What’s Gnawing?), the tiny ‘Easter story’, Gewone Piet en Andere Piet (Ordinary Piet and the Other Piet), and the gigantic illustrated book Hoenderlust (Chicken Lust) from . She also illustrated books by Remco Campert and Gerrit Komrij. Ten Harmsen van der Beek made her debut in  with Geachte Muizenpoot en achttien andere gedichten (Dear Mouse Paw and Eighteen Other Poems). This collection was euphorically received by the critics and became a bestseller. The poem to her “down hearted puss, to console her for the loss of her litter” gained a place in the nation’s collective memory. It opens with the lines: Good Morning, heavenly Mrs. Ping did the balmy night agree with you, did the mischievous, enigmatic plants smell according to your whim and hopefully none of the rest of your litter has fallen prey to the plague? The title poem, in which she addresses an ex-lover, also enjoys national celebrity: Dear Mouse-Paw, How are things with you, I’m fine. Everything’s very dull, though, when I lie face-down embedded in my thoughts of you and I’m very lonely too. And I undergo spring like a swoon. Both in her poems and in her stories Harmsen van Beek uses direct forms of address. She writes in an instantly appealing, witty and intimate style, full of jokes and puns, and many of her readers have often actually felt personally addressed. Although on her debut she tried to keep a discreet distance from the press, omitted her pet name from the cover of the book and abbreviated her family name almost unrecognizably as FtHvdBeek, her entry into Dutch letters was very personalized and involved lavish use of “Fritzi”. In the last analysis few other writers have seen their privacy encroached on so indiscreetly, intimately and blatantly by the press. It gave her a lifelong aversion to being approached too closely or admired too intensely. As a reaction she tried to convince her readers of the limited weight of her work sub specie aeternitatis. In it, she compared art to drawing on a frozen windowpane in winter: “When the sun shines on it - gone!” When the prominent

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critic and scholar H.A. Gomperts argued in  that her work really did have lasting value, she countered: “Well, I’d actually like to be able to tell myself and believe passionately that it’s nonsense and that I do it anyway, just for the nonsense!” However, there was no way she could ward off admiration, and stubborn attempts to make contact with her pursued her to the end, people even followed her to the tiny village of Garnwerd, on the edge of the Groningen uplands, to where she had retreated in the early s. F. Harmsen van Beek (as she came gradually to write her name) was a misfit and impossible to pigeonhole. That the critics – despite all their enthusiasm – found it difficult to understand her and place her in a tradition, is clear from all the attempts to make comparisons. There cannot be many writers who have been compared to the avant-garde poet Lucebert (though he did also write grotesque poems) and to the children’s writer Annie M.G. Schmidt, to Gerard Reve and Louise Labé, to Lautréamont and to Leo Vroman, to Carlo Collodi (the author of Pinocchio) and Jean Dulieu (the creator of Paulus the Wood Gnome). These are writers whose coordinates in the literary domain are so far apart that it is hard to imagine a writing career at the intersection of the lines joining them. After publication of Neerbraak she was compared to Van Ostaijen, Kafka, Gogol, Gombrowicz, to the supposedly “grotesque” children’s writers Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne, and finally to Henri Michaux, whose grotesque Un certain Plume she translated. She was now also called “a writer of the grotesque” by Dutch scholars like Jan Fontijn, Kees Fens and Wam de Moor. This label, which created a fruitful framework for approaching both her stories and her poems and also left lasting traces on the reception of her work, was prompted by Wolfgang Kayser’s international standard work on the grotesque, which heralded a break through in thinking on the subject. In Dutch literature, however, it first mainly conceptually shaped research on the Flemish avant-garde writer of grotesque stories, Paul van Ostaijen and the Flemish innovator of the novel, Louis Paul Boon. Only later would research on two female writers of the grotesque, F. Harmsen van Beek and Til Brugman (life partner of the German Dada artist Hannah Höch) follow. F. Harmsen van Beek’s oeuvre contains much grotesque “occasional writing”. Rather than a “poet’s poet”, she posed as a minor poet, a kind of Sunday dilettante who only very occasionally took up the pen. A whole series of stories and poems is dedicated to her son, Gilles. They are about domestic and family-related events, of which the average reader has very little knowledge. She made a habit in her grotesque work of playing off the private against the public, the singular against the universal, the known against the unknown. Consequently her work abounds with place names, dates (of birthdays), (familiar) names or addresses and varying author signatures (Flederike or Oofi, Ofiti, Hoendervoogt, FtH van der Beek, F. Harmsen van Beek). She presents the work ostentatiously as instantaneous, private, singular. A typical feature of this work – and of grotesque literature in general – is the clash between private experiences and generally accepted, school-learned knowledge. She shows that the historically concrete cannot be reconciled with the universal and the abstract or the singular fact with conceptual thought. Anyone who realizes that Harmsen van Beek never uses the word “knowledge” other than in a subversive way will also ac knowledge that the aim of her grotesque stories was the neerbraak (in the sense of decon

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struction or Abbau) of all forms of knowledge that present themselves in the guise of fixed ideas and what she called “(pre)conceptions”. Nowhere does she awaken the suspicion that her passion for knowledge is not great. On the contrary, it seems rather on the basis of this passion that, like Nietzsche, she doubts everything in principle and accepts nothing on trust – nothing, except what is generally despised and neglected and excluded. In her work she devoted her love to the inconsequential, the neglected, everything that everyone finds repulsive (the millipede), and to her little son Gilles.

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War and Literature

Anne Frank 1929-1945 jacqueline bel

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n one of the first pages of the diary that Anne Frank was given on her birthday in , she writes: […] it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. (translated by susan massotty)

As is well known, things turned out differently. In , after being turned down by various publishers, the diary was published by Contact under the title Het achterhuis (The Secret Annexe). It was quickly translated into many languages and partly due to a graceful stage adaptation in , which conquered first Broadway and subsequently the whole of America, actually became world famous. The fact that Anne was being persecuted as a Jewish girl was pushed into the background. Later there were a number of film versions. Initially the diary was seen mainly as a moving human testimony, a chronicle of life in hiding. In recent years the literary aspects of the texts have become central and there is interest not only from Holocaust studies, but also from psychoanalytical quarters and gender studies. By , more than  million copies of the book had been sold worldwide, making Het achterhuis one of the best-selling books in Dutch. Anne Frank has meanwhile become more than the author of a famous diary: she has grown into a symbol of Jewish persecution, a cultural icon. The continuing large numbers of visitors to the Anne Frank House – the “secret annexe” in Amsterdam that in  was turned into a museum – are a confirmation of this. To mark the eightieth anniversary of her birth in , a new edition of Het achterhuis appeared. The Frank family had moved from Germany to Amsterdam in , because conditions there were no longer safe after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. After the outbreak of World War Two, the situation in the Netherlands also became life-threatening for Jews. On  July  the Franks, father and mother and their daughters Anne and Margo, together with four other people, went into hiding in the so-called secret annexe at Prinsengracht . For two years things went well, but on  August  those in hiding were arrested and

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subsequently deported, probably after an anonymous tip-off. At the beginning of , Anne and her sister perished in Bergen-Belsen. Her father was the family’s sole survivor of the war, and published what some people regarded as a very bowdlerised version of the diary. In Het achterhuis Anne Frank gives an account of the period from  June  up to  August , just before the family were arrested. As time goes on the entries become more frequent: half of the diary covers the last seven months. Entries are written in letter form, in Dutch, the language that the Frank sisters had learned at school. Since Anne has no girlfriend in whom she can confide, she invents the imaginary “Kitty”, a kind of alter ego, to whom she writes letters in which she notes very frankly her innermost thoughts and emotions. The use of this device makes the diary very accessible to the reader. The narrator explains everything clearly to “Kitty”: what the secret annexe looks like, who the fellow-residents are, how the daily routine operates, the kinds of things that happen, and how she feels about the isolation. The description of everyday life in the annexe alternates with reflections by Anne, which adds to the liveliness of the whole and some times provides sharp contrasts. The reader is given a picture of a group of people in hiding who are condemned to each other, completely shut off from the outside world. It is reminiscent of Sartre’s play Huis clos (In Camera), although alongside the many tensions and irritations, moments of beauty and jollity are described. Anne changes in the course of the two years, physically and mentally, so that the diary can also be characterized as a Bildungsroman. She describes the physical changes and examines her bourgeoning sexual feelings. From an adolescent who feels criticized by everyone, she grows into a self-confident young girl, aware of moral, intellectual and emotional problems, who comes to realize that she has a multi-facetted personality. In the course of time her self-reflection becomes more serious. Even while still in hiding Anne knows that she wants to become a journalist or writer. In , after an appeal on the radio to all Dutch people to record their war experiences, she starts rewriting her diary with a view to publishing it after the war. She changes names and gives a commentary on previous passages. Anne Frank took the name Kitty from the Joop ter Heul books of Cissy van Marxveldt, a Dutch writer immensely popular with girls in the s, whom she admired. She reads those books in the annexe and notes: […] I’m enthusiastic about the Joop ter Heul series. I’ve enjoyed all of Cissy van Marxveldt’s books very much. I’ve read The Zaniest Summer four times, and the ludicrous situations still make me laugh. And again: “Cissy van Marxveldt is a terrific writer.” Anne’s casual, sometimes humorous tone is also reminiscent of Van Marxveldt: “anyone who wants to lose weight should come to the Secret Annexe.” Anne reads much more besides these books, and also writes short stories. Reading, writing and studying are her principal activities while “underground”. The outside world penetrates the annexe through radio broadcasts, the stories of a few trusted friends who bring food or clothes, or images of the street that Anne glimpses through a chink in the curtains. The bell of the Westerkerk tower that sounds each quarter

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of an hour provides a different kind of contact with the outside world and ensures a sense of time. The diary is often light-hearted in tone and has humorous passages, but in the light of the dramatic conclusion of the writer’s life it is definitely also a heart-rending account of a wartime experience. In her diary, Anne regularly focuses on the situation of the Jews. For example, on  June , she notes: After May  the good times were few and far between: first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use trams; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between . and . p.m. and only in Jewish shops bearing the sign ‘Jewish Premises’; [...] Jews were required to attend Jewish schools, etc. You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on. Jacque always said to me, ‘I don’t dare do anything any more, ‘cause I’m afraid it’s not allowed.’ Later in  she writes: Our thoughts are as subject to as little change as we are. They’re like a merry-go-round, turning from the Jews to food, from food to politics. Sometimes living in hiding evokes feelings of guilt; for example, when following on from the previous remark she tells us what she has seen through the chink in the curtain: By the way, speaking of Jews, I saw two yesterday when I was peeking through the curtains. [...] It gave me such a funny feeling, as if I’d denounced them to the authorities and was now spying on their misfortune. The question whether diaries relating to the Holocaust can be included among ‘belles lettres’, has been posed by many people, for example by S. Dresden in his book Vervolging, ver nietiging, literatuur (Persecution, Extermination, Literature, ). He observes that many people object to the notion. He does not, although he recognizes that the question is pro blematic. He makes the point that a great deal of literature is about war and that the subject is therefore less unusual than it appears and that books, especially war books, have not only an aesthetic side but also pose a moral problem. He considers attention to literary form typical of Jewish war diaries, as well as their fragmentary nature: after all, many diaries had to be ended abruptly. In Anne Frank’s diary, which nowadays is considered as literature by many people, but obviously does not for that reason forfeit its documentary power, attention to literary form emerges, for example, in the repeated rewriting of the text and in the fictional characters. The fragmentariness is also characteristic of her diary. Because Anne rewrote her texts, several versions of the diary emerged besides those edited by her father and the publisher, which were not gathered together in a critical edition until ,

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partly also to demonstrate the authenticity of the diary, since that had been regularly called into question. This edition gave new impetus to scholarly research into the diaries. Various versions are printed in parallel in the critical edition, creating a fascinating picture of a literary text in the making, and of the rewriting of a text which has thereby acquired an open structure and again and again challenges one to read and interpret. In this way the writing activity of Anne Frank, which was cut short far too early, seems after all to have acquired a sequel in the activities of the reader.

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From Man to Woman

Dirkje Kuik 1929-2008 elsbeth etty

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ow difficult it is in judging literature to take account of whether the work is mas culine or feminine in origin is illustrated by the oeuvre of Dirkje Kuik, who in  was transformed from a man into a woman. Anyone trying to demonstrate that the nature of her poetry and narrative prose was fundamentally affected by her sex change will have to engage in some strange intellectual gymnastics. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia bibliography of Dirkje Kuik is in two parts: “up to ” and “from  onwards”. This introduces a totally artificial caesura, since neither Kuik’s character, nor that of his/her work ever radically changed. In a literary lecture six years after her “adjustment”, as Kuik called her sex-change operation, she distinguished three types of intersexuality or transsexuality: chromosomal, hormonal and psychological. She put herself in the third category, defined by her as involving “severe gender identity disturbances, which were visible in very early childhood”: In retrospect I was able to observe that before the age of three I exhibited behavior patterns that today would without question be seen as indicators of the abovementioned disturbances. It would have been obvious that my primary feelings of sexual identity opted for the female side, despite my male genital configuration. But back in the s no attention at all was paid to such things, quite apart from the fact that no child psychologist or psychiatrist in the Netherlands could have made head or tail of them. Ian Ramsay calls these psychologically intersexual patients adults and children - using a widely accepted term - transsexual. This is unobjectionable, but is a somewhat ponderous term to apply to children. For that reason with pre-adolescent children some doctors prefer to speak of gender dysphoria, sexual discomfort. William Diederich Kuik, the name given to Dirkje by her parents, was doubly gifted. William made a name as a graphic artist, having learned drawing and painting in his father’s business. Later he followed a course at the National Academy of Fine Art in Amsterdam, became the art reviewer of the daily Het Parool and drew for the weekly Vrij Nederland. In  he was a co-founder of the graphic company De Luis.

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As a poet, Kuik made his début at the age of forty with the collection  Gedichten ( Poems), greeted by the critics as a fine specimen of the Dutch neo-romantic movement. Five years later he followed this with his prose début De held van het potspel (The Billiards Hero), which was awarded the Vijverberg Prize. The book is a kaleidoscopic album in various styles, illustrated with strange, sometime ominous drawings. The work has been called “an ode to decomposition and decay”, perhaps because of Kuik’s predilection for old towns and buildings, as well as historical stories and figures: Ghosts of some class, as is known, like to live under a stone. And not only in the tea house do they think so beloved, the scorpion, the grey woodlouse, the dun-minded mouse can tell you. Funny folk, friendly to friends, fearsome to their foes… Kuik lived all her life in mediaeval Utrecht, which she immortalized in an original way in numerous poems, prose texts, drawings and combinations. For the early Utrechtse Notities (Utrecht Notes; collected in  and ) William Kuik was awarded the Municipality of Amsterdam Prose Prize. Kuik did not attract any wide public interest until the sex change operation in a London hospital. In a diary kept for the daily Utrechts Nieuwsblad, she wrote shortly after the operation: “I’m proud of my new status of old bag.” She was just over fifty at the time, with a further  productive years ahead of her in which, as Dirkje Kuik, she wrote about her experiences as a “gender diaspora patient” and her subsequent life, which remained influenced by her interest in history, especially the Napoleonic wars. In De nachtcactus bloeit (The Night Cactus Flowers, ), the first novel to appear under the name of Dirkje Kuik, the female character Diederika meets her long-dead parents. They have no problem at all with her metamorphosis. Indeed her mother is excited that now, instead of an unhappy son with “a woman’s soul” she has “a beautiful daughter”. Huishoudboekje met rozijnen (Housekeeping Book with Raisins, ) contains memories dating back to the Depression of the s. There are moving portraits of her parents, besides personal views of historical figures like the Duke of Parma, Casanova and Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second wife. In this collection she testifies explicitly to the metamorphosis that was intended to bring her outward self into harmony with her inner self. A process that was not always triumphant: [... ] I weighed forty-five kilos, was as thin as a rake, you could count my ribs, had ugly stick-like arms, thin bony legs, and had the physical development of a boy of about fourteen... My age was estimated at about seventy [...] But also: I am a vain woman, and will remain one to my dying day.

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Dirkje Kuik believed in miracles as a way of transcending life, “that cage of death and futility”. Her work is a constant effort to broaden her horizons, to give life a wider meaning. She sought her metaphysics not in religion, but in aesthetic pleasure. An important source of inspiration in this was Johann Amos Comenius, author of Labyrinth of the World, a work that Kuik characterized as “a cynical, ironic, metaphysical treatise in prose that searches for beauty and goodness, though not in this world; which good humouredly despises the redundant greed of the prospector.” Her own transformation from failed son into beautiful daughter she regarded as the greatest miracle of her life, as a happiness she had never dared to believe in. She formulated her perception of this miracle – again with her own illustrations – in the collection of stories Piranesi & zijn dochter (Piranesi & His Daughter), in which Kuik played ingeniously with her biography. The opening story, ‘Herinneringen aan de Oudekamp en omstreken’ (‘Memories of the Oudekamp and Surroundings’), is about the childhood of a boy who grew up before the Second World War in the old Utrecht quarter where the author lived to the end of her days. There is not much substance to those memories of the parental home. However, when Kuik starts playing with these memoirs, as in the story ‘Klein Arcadië’ (Little Arcadia), and retells the childhood memories, but now from the perspective of a talented girl, everything falls into place. Then it becomes clear that it is not so much the insignificant facts that are important, as the way in which, with the help of those fact she “adjusts” her self-portrait: You are reborn with a whole life on your hands, irrespective of whether it is short or long. At most it can be reinforced by those around you. And if it happens to fall on stony ground it will produce a difficult, meager existence, which isn’t too bad. But your character remains, just as you held it in your hands after your birth, visible, if you want to look back, dare to look round. She knew there were a few events that had determined her life, a handful of people, most of them dead, who had had a certain influence. And then there was that little environment where her life began developing. The house where she was born, which, having become an adult, she still inhabited. The narrow district, one of the oldest quarters of the town, pretty run down. Much that had to do with her childhood had already been demolished. Much that had to do with her childhood had indeed been demolished, but Kuik went on cheerfully reconstructing. In the title story of Piranesi & His Daughter, Diederika tells her eccentric friends about the eighteenth-centurty draughtsman Giovanni Piranesi. A number of the friends suspect that Piranesi is Diederika’s great model, which she firmly denies. She is more interested in Piranesi’s life than his work: in it his forgotten daughter occupies a much more important place than his famous sons. The latter took over his work, flaunted them selves in borrowed feathers, without adding anything new of their own, while the daughter always stood by her father and made an actual contribution to his world-renowned engravings. It is mainly in these kinds of stories in which Diederika talks of her sources of inspiration and at the same time displays her knowledge of history, literature and the visual arts, which make her work so fascinating.

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Kuik once again demonstrated her versatility in  when she brought out the detective novel De firma Dopliflex (Dopliflex Ltd), in which her alter ego Diederika reappears and for which she was nominated for The Golden Noose, the annual prize for the best Dutch thriller. Kuik continued to apply her usual procedure, a colorful collage of genres, topics and styles successfully to the very end, both in her tragi-comic historical novel De patriot (The Patriot) about an insane ex-soldier in Napoleon’s army, and in her posthumously published novella München ’. In this grim tapestry, Kuik’s childhood memories and portraits of her deceased parents are interwoven with her personal vision of the bloody downfall of a series of European states at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century with as the ominous nadir the surrender of Chechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. Dirkje Kuik illustrated this collection with the series of washed drawings ‘Fighting Hedgehogs’. München ’ was the last book that this eccentric double talent was able to complete. After her death in  a museum was set up in her former home at Oudekamp  in Utrecht in honor of her extensive oeuvre.

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Queen of the Column

Renate Rubinstein 1929-1990 jaap goedegebuure It took a while before Renate Rubinstein got round to becoming a full-time writer, but once she took the step, it was as if she had never done anything else. In  after some tenuous engagements in publishing and journalism, she found her way to the weekly Vrij Nederland, where she was allowed to start a weekly column under the pseudonym Tamar. It gave her the chance to get things off her chest at regular intervals about everything that concerned, surprised, moved, irritated and angered her. At the time, the term “column” had scarcely any currency; people preferred the name cursiefje (lit. a short piece printed in italics) referring to a light-hearted, half-narrative, half-reflective daily newspaper genre, in which authors like Herman Heijermans and Louis Couperus had led the way and of which Simon Carmiggelt had meanwhile become champion. Tamar was one of the first to turn the cursiefje into the modern column, that is, an essay of between six hundred and seven hundred words, a handful of highly personal notes on the most disparate subjects, in a style that appears natural but is of course full of rhetorical devices. Like every columnist, Tamar had a message, often a whole bagful. However powerful her use of irony, she would never use it to dodge the consequences of her often stronglyheld opinions. On the contrary, she had the terrier-like doggedness to sink her teeth into a question and to come back to it week-in week-out. Such questions were, for example, the unbridled admiration among left-wing intellectuals for Mao’s China (Klein Chinees woorden boek; Little Chinese Dictionary, ), feminism (Hedendaags feminisme; Contemporary Feminism, ), the nuclear weapons debate (Met gepast wantrouwen; With Appropriate Distrust, ) or the gruesome ugliness of modern architecture and design (Twee eendjes en wat brood; Two Ducks and Some Bread, ). Tamar was generally averse to opinions that threatened to petrify into an ideology or a faith which one had to embrace uncritically. Individuality, an item deeply treasured by columnists, was more important than anything else to her. Besides which, her family history had taught her to beware of all mass movements and their supporters. In , together with her Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, both German citizens, Renate Rubinstein had fled to Amsterdam to escape the increasingly rabid anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. Immediately after the German invasion of the Netherlands her father was arrested and died in a concentration camp.

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Tamar’s Jewish identity therefore had an important share in her political and social views. Yet she was by no means uncritical of Israel and Zionism. She summarized her position on this question in the title of an account of a journey through the Middle East: Jood in Arabië / Goi in Israël (Jew in Arabia, Goy in Israel, ). Again, there was a certain degree of contrariness in her decision, ultimately against her better judgment, to take the side of Friedrich Weinreb, a Jew who maintained that during the occupation he had been able to save many people from the gas chambers by collaborating with the Germans and at the same time manipulating them for his own ends. Rubinstein edited Weinreb’s memoirs and defended him in her columns, even when it became abundantly clear that the man was a charlatan, a fraud and a sex offender. In so doing she incurred the enmity and coruscating scorn of the universally-feared polemicist Willem Frederik Hermans, who was able to inflate the Weinreb affair into a matter of international importance. Tamar also regularly made her private life into a public issue. When her husband left her, she wrote for a whole year about nothing except her unhappiness, on her own testimony in the hope of winning him back through her writing. The volume in which she collected these columns, Niets te verliezen en toch bang (Nothing to Lose and Still Scared, ), became a great success, as did Nee heb je (Don’t Take No for an Answer, ) the product of her reactions to the multiple sclerosis from which she suffered for the last ten years of her life. On one matter she was far from frank. A year after her death Mijn beter ik (My Better Half, ) appeared, in which she revealed posthumously that she had had a long-term affair with Simon Carmiggelt, who for the many hundreds of thousands of fans who knew him from his weekly television appearances was “the nicest Grandad in the Netherlands”. The love story of the king and queen of the column came as a complete bombshell. Reactions varied from astonishment and indignation to emotional solidarity. Rubinstein quoted freely from Carmiggelt’s love letters and had made no effort at all to protect the identity and privacy of those most closely involved, all in the name of honesty and sincerity, which infuriated the Carmiggelt family. In this she went significantly further than in Niets te verliezen en toch bang, where her ex remained shrouded in anonymity.

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Uncompromising Honesty

Frida Vogels 1930 jaap goedegebuure

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ut of the blue, between  and , Frida Vogels became a highly-regarded and commercially successfully author. In those years she published, under the title De harde kern (The Hard Core), an autobiographical triptych of just under two thousand pages, two volumes of prose and one of poetry. The first two volumes, of which the second was awarded the prestigious Libris Literature Prize in , contain the stand-alone novel Kanker (Cancer), and the account of her childhood, student years, marriage and stay in Italy. The third volume was devoted to a broad selection from her poetry. Frida Vogels, unknown as she was, was introduced by her publishers Van Oorschot as the model for the character of Henriëtte in J.J. Voskuil’s novel Bij nader inzien (On Second Thoughts, ). The latter book, initially only popular among a small group of readers, was rediscovered a quarter of a century after its publication and adapted as a television drama. Moreover, it led to a seven-volume sequel, under the title Het Bureau (The Office, -). Probably the rapidly growing throng of Voskuil admirers is one reason why Frida Vogel’s star is in the ascendant. Like her friend and confidant Voskuil, Vogels plumbs the deeper motives for the behavior displayed by herself and those closest to her. And like Voskuil she makes no secret of her view that fictionalizing reality is actually immoral. You may, since there is no alternative, arrange, shift facts and information and insert an incident here and there that in reality did not happen like that, but ultimately all those machinations must be subordinated to the requirement for strict honesty and authenticity. Characteristic of the tenor of the De harde kern are the discussions reproduced at length between Vogels’ alter ego Berta, her husband Stefano, and their Amsterdam friends Jacob and Wiesje (alias the somewhat older, but no less firmly-principled Maarten and Nicolien from Bij nader inzien and Het Bureau). Often the conversations are about the great political questions of the s and s: the Cultural Revolution in Mao-Ze-Dong’s China, the American intervention in the Vietnamese civil war, the armed conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbor states. They are all topics that serve as a moral litmus test: where do you stand, how do you vote, what is your truth, what is justice, good, evil? The degree of loyalty as a friend is calculated from the answer to the question whether someone is prepared to sign a petition or join a demonstration outside a cinema where a supposedly racist film is being shown.

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However, most conversations relate to the much more essential subject of Berta’s writing. When Jacob, at Berta’s request, has read the manuscript of her narrative Kanker, he accuses her of having made herself virtually invisible. But Berta is not so much invisible as excluded. She herself experiences this in the months when the terminal disease of Stefano’s favorite uncle Mario intensifies family relationships. Although she does her utmost to show her sorrow, she realizes perfectly well that she is an alien cell in the tightly-knit clan organism. Afterwards Stefano is unable to grasp that Berta’s aim in writing Kanker was precisely to bring him closer. He accuses her of having driven a wedge into their relationship by writing down his family history. That misunderstanding leads Berta in turn to analyze the basis of her relationship with Stefano, which, however, does not mean that she can save her marriage in this way. De harde kern is hard to understand if one abstracts from the personal interest that Frida Vogels had in this bulky quasi-autobiography. Apart from a self-justification, this book must be seen as a way of salvaging something from the chaos that the I-figure sees her life as having turned into. Digging obsessively in her past she seeks an answer to the question why she is the half-brilliant, half-failed personality that she herself and her intimates see in her. How are her parents’ dreadful marriage, her father’s deficient sense of responsibility, her mother’s fear of life and impractical attitude, her half-incestuous relationship with her younger brother, and her own bloody-mindedness and destructiveness intertwined? In her autobiographical project, Vogels is driven by two opposing motives: the need to be understood and accepted, and the recalcitrant urge to ensconce herself in the trench she herself has dug and lob the occasional grenade in the direction of unwanted intruders. This ambivalence is accompanied by a certain indifference to possible readers. Beneath it lurk disgust and shame. For while uncompromising honesty may be writ large on Vogels’ banner, that does not mean that she surrenders herself to the public like any exhibitionistic autobiographer. Moreover – and that is clear mainly from the diaries that she has published since  – she does not really believe in such a thing as the inalienable and unique personality. She values sincerity and authenticity, but admits freely that neither is attainable. Precisely because of her insight into her own failures, she rejects virtually everything she writes and has written. This makes it all the more sensational that she was prepared after forty years to publish De harde kern and went on to make public seven thousand pages of private notes giving a minute account of the laborious “business of living”, to quote the title of the diaries of Cesare Pavese, which Vogels translated into Dutch.

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Crusade against the Facile

Andreas Burnier 1931-2002 jaap goedegebuure

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here is no better incentive to take up a struggle than having suffered personal injury. If anyone realized that, it was Catharina Irma Dessaur, better known under her pseudonym of Andreas Burnier. Her life was struggle, combativeness her principle quality. In addition she sought confrontation on two fronts. She fought against the facile thinking that pigeonholed her as a woman and a homosexual and reduced her to a stereotype. And right up to her death she remained anxious about possible facile aspects in her own position. By fighting on these two fronts, Burnier managed time and time again to open new perspectives. The conflict she faced through having been born in a female body, seemed naturally to evoke a male identity in her. She signed the first fruits of her pen with a male pseudonym and even posed with a stuck-on beard and moustache. After having been a wife and mother for ten years, she left her marriage and completed a philosophy course that she had dropped out of. She gained a doctorate, began an academic career, embraced feminism but abandoned it the moment she discovered dogmatic and conformist tendencies, and, subsequently, became increasingly irritated by the orthodoxy of the “Church of Reason”, which, following the retreat of Christianity, fascism and Marxism became the new inquisition for the conscience of the average intellectual. She drank in the teachings of anthroposophy, Platonism and Buddhism and acknowledged that life must be respected at all times and for that reason turned against the advocates of euthanasia come what may. The so-called “good death” reminded her of the practices of the Nazis, from whom she had had to hide as a child during the German occupation. Finally she became aware of her Jewish roots and the rich tradition connected with them. Her novels, invariably with a contemplative cast, and her stimulating essays show a personality constantly determining her attitude in and towards her time and in that way gave a shape to her existence that was so striking and so distinct. Thanks to her candid eye, her curiosity and her dislike of conventions and taboos, Burnier was way ahead of her time. Her unmasking of so-called value-free rationalism as just another ideology is one of her most important achievements. Her courage in opposing it was all the more remarkable, since in so doing she brought down the hatred of the right-thinking Netherlands on her head. But she remains firm in her diagnosis: those

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who were committed to reason alone, were throttling the spirit and running the risk of becoming the victim of delusions and projections. “There is an intimate connection,” she argued in , “between the mentality of a rationalist, techno-bureaucratic culture and the need to have enemies and with the bombs that the culture produces in order to murder children, women and, to the extent that they are defenceless and unarmed, also men from the hostile group.” The quotation dates from the last days of the Cold War, but it has lost none of its validity. Burnier never restricted her cultural-critical concerns to her non-fiction. In her novels she analyzed and argued at least as emphatically. At the same time she was constantly taking society’s measure. And by doing all this she marked the stages of her own develop ment, without tying herself to a particular position. Her first novel, Een tevreden lach (A Contented Smile, ), broaches a theme that continues to run through her work: spiritual metamorphosis, which in her case was guided by teachers like Plato, Plotinus and Rudolf Steiner. The main character of De huilende libertijn (The Weeping Libertine, ) abandons the feminist march through society’s institutions that she herself has enthu siastically helped prepare and decides to devote herself to writing the book Beyond Reduc tionism, in which connoisseurs will recognize the study De droom der rede (The Dream of Reason, ), published under the name Dessaur. The I-figure from De reis naar Kithira (The Journey to Kithira, ), after realizing that she cannot contribute to basic political and social changes, finally opts for silence. And we bid farewell to Radha Altman, the protagonist of De litteraire salon (The Literary Salon, ), after she expresses her aversion to the decadent Western world by boarding a ship to Hyperborea, the mythical island of the Greek sun god Apollo. Previously, during a stay in Hawaii, the island in the Pacific that Burnier once pointed to as the cradle of a synthesis between Western rationalism and Oriental mysticism, Radha experienced a liberating vision. Suddenly I felt absorbed in a great cosmic light. The palm-trees on the beach behind me, the mountains at my back, the rock formations, the few people and some dogs at play, everything was eclipsed. All that remained was light, in the sky and in the water. I was approached from the future and absorbed into a cosmic plane in which, at a higher level than in this life, would contribute to the human development of myself and others. I felt a great, complete safety and certainty. This light was wisdom and love at the same time and I was a component of it. Small and insignificant, but also shining out across the heavens, stroking and sparkling in the water, shining from the periphery of the bay to where my body stood: at the edge of the water, at the edge of eternity. It was as if I had stood here in the distant past, tens of thousands of years ago, and as if I was already present here in a future, somewhat more liberated incarnation, less guilt-laden, less tormented, more open to others. Burnier has repeatedly stressed that the history of mankind can be read as an individual biography. Both describe an oscillating motion between materialism and spirituality. Ultimately these opposites must merge, and that also applies to good and evil. In De droom der rede she argues that Western rationalism leads to an affective and spiritual amputation,

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resulting in a situation where one no longer wishes to acknowledge evil as something within oneself and on the contrary projects it onto the other, anonymous structures or biological or physical circumstances. If Radha Altman felt herself to be the spiritual twin of Vincent van Gogh, in De trein naar Tarascon (The Train to Tarascon, ) this “simple worshipper of the eternal Buddha” is even more emphatically present. The title and the mottos are taken from Van Gogh’s letters and his tragic biography is the model for the hero’s life. This William Baston fights against oppression for possible ways of achieving spiritual growth. But like the unhappy painter he decides, weary of searching and fighting, to cut off a large part of the distance to the stars by taking his own life. Burnier’s strength lay not in the telling of a story that can be enjoyed in its own right, not in the creation of characters whom you can see before you with your eyes closed like living people, but in indicating and explaining. She was a born teacher, with all the attendant qualities and limitations. Much could be learned from her, but unfortunately teaching occasionally became a little too much like preaching. That does not detract from the fact that she occupies a notable position in the intellectual life of the Netherlands in the late twentieth century.

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Disruptions of the Everyday

Judith Herzberg 1934 maaike meijer

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udith herzberg is a productive author, of plays, television dramas, travel letters and film scripts. She began publishing poems in . Herzberg’s poetic project makes a deceptively modest impression. She never talks about “poetry”, “life”, “love” or “death”. All pathos and suggestions of a Great Vision are alien to her. In that respect, from a literaryhistorical point of view, she belongs to a distinctly different generation than predecessors like Ida Gerhardt, M. Vasalis and Elisabeth Eybers, who as poets with an all-embracing vision (Meijer ) have a certain affinity with each other. Herzberg, like her contemporary Fritzi Harmsen van Beek, and like most male poets of the Movement of the s, withdrew into the everyday and the concrete. She picks up her language and subjects from the humdrum environment of the street, the garden and the kitchen: from the family circle, from conversations, from daily contact with herself, with loved ones, friends, animals, things, nature, parents, children. She has a preference for things and events that are at first sight perfectly ordinary. Of course trained poetry readers often generalize Herzberg’s tableaux into Great Thoughts on life, love, death and time, but those generalizations are entirely their own responsibility. Herzberg herself does not formulate any great Existential Truths. The “small” in Herzberg’s work always becomes so complicated that the big is no longer manageable at all. Everything is important, everything proves stranger, more confusing and more dubious than it seemed. As a result what is small and ostensibly self-explanatory acquires a different status in the Herzbergian world: Song Don’t lie to me please about anything big, about anything else. I’d rather know what was destroyed than have you lie because that’s more destructive. (translated by shirley kaufman with judith herzberg)

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The syntax and the logic of oppositions in which we are accustomed to think leads us to expect: “[not] about anything big, about anything/small”.But obviously there is no such thing as “something small”. Whatever is to be set beside and over and against “something big” is avoided, rethought as “anything else”. ”Else/different” can be read in two ways. As a post ponement of the opposite of big: something other than something big – and the reader must imagine for himself what that else is. In that case it is undefined, and linked to what it differs from: everything that is other than big. But “else” can also be read as defined. “Big” in the meaning intended here of “important” belongs to the category of meaning of “adjectives which name an imputed quality or a quality derived by reasoning (e.g. comparison, etc)” (Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst/General Dutch Grammar :), as in “a difficult book”, “a great innovator”, “a nice guy”. Now the adjective “else/different” is suddenly included in that category of meaning, as if it can also name a certain quality. In this way “different” is detached from its indeterminacy and the link to what it differs from (“different from...”) and used independently in a unique, new way. This destabilizes our internalized dictionary meaning and word-class equilibrium. After all, “else” also stands apart, at the start of a new line, as something else. The isolated position heightens the effect. Thus, in Herzberg’s poem the familiar opposition big/small has become the confusing big/different. It continues in the same way: “I’d rather know what was destroyed/than have you lie/because that’s more destructive” is actually impossible, since nothing can be “more destructive” than what caused destruction. It is another case of poetic logic winning out over grammatical logic, defying and undermining the former. Herzberg’s poetry seems to aim at combating the calcification of language, at the dismantling of established thought and perception. To that end the poet uses totally ungrammatical spoken language, direct speech that – in the words of Frida Balk (:) – “has undergone an almost imperceptible change”, unexpected meanings in words (by means of neologisms, switching word classes, puns), ambiguity and the musical element in language. Herzberg’s poems are suited to a very specific poetic effect: they de-automate the reader in his/her perception of what is ostensibly quite above suspicion. They open readers’ eyes to what is forgotten, hidden, unexpected, the shadow side and incompatible nature of the things that the poem mentions, and in that way they disrupt the readers’ vision of reality, which previously was accepted as axiomatic. Herzberg causes “complifications”. This neo logism means the opposite of simplifications. A complification is the making complicated of what at first sight seems simple. Reading Herzberg is sharing her view of very small things, which turn out to be not small at all. It is being carried along in hesitation, fundamental doubt, complication, unsuspected nuances. The poems rarely dissolve into harmony and satisfying unity, but rather drive a wedge through unity, harmony and the temporary solu tions with which the reader (in his/her language, thought, life) makes do. A few examples of poems that produce this Herzbergian effect:

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Every Morning Every morning between putting on his left and right shoe his whole life flashes past. Sometimes the right shoe is almost forgotten. You see a man sitting there, an elderly man, given “his whole life”, with his left shoe on and his right shoe in his hand. The contrast between something as everyday and simple as putting on shoes and something heavy and far from everyday as the passing of a whole life, has a derailing effect. No two activities could be further from each other; yet here they are related. Through the link with the passing by of the images of a life, the poem complifies the reader’s notion that the putting on of shoes is simple. You never give it a second thought. Language speaks of ‘putting your shoes on’. In the expression the two shoes are locked together in an almost complete collective plural. In the composite “putting one’s shoes on” there is no room between the left and right shoe. Herzberg creates a space in that set expression and the accompanying awareness of “putting on shoes”. She drives a wedge between them. Indeed, she places a whole life between them. Because “his whole life” is not explained further, it comes to operate as a vast open space. A mystery: what kind of life? What is that man thinking of? What is so great and absorbing that simple, everyday actions like putting one’s shoes on are paralyzed by it, and sometimes cannot even be completed? And not just once, but every morning. How is the man to get through the rest of his life – because if the right shoe is sometimes forgotten, how on earth is he supposed to manage with cooking, eating, human contact? He sits there in front of me. What para lyzes him remains impenetrable. Are they happy memories or, more likely, sad, tormenting, unresolved? What procession of images passes before him? The poem itself is an imitation of insolubility, by saying nothing about that. The axiomatic nature of an everyday action has been undermined by something unspecified, something that is big, tragic and incom prehensible, which the reader is left with. A crucial factor in Herzberg’s work is often what is not said. As a result it obtrudes inexorably, as in this poem on the annual Remembrance of the Dead on  May. May Fourth Just when he was about to say: but everyone provides himself with problems not so large he can’t see past them to an unattainable, better life, it was time for the two minutes’ silence. Engines were turned off churchbells stopped ringing and birds, swarms of starlings,

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whizzed over the square. Wind scraped the corners awnings flapped hinges squeaked. And in the empty air flags cracked like whips.

We arrive in the middle of a conversation between “he” and “I”. What “he” had wanted to express is a pseudocertainty: the manageability of problems. A previous contribution to the conversation from “I” is implied in the word “but”. He wants to object to something that “I” has just said, for example, about insolubility, about problems that are too great to bear. Obviously the “I” already knows what he wanted to say in response. She felt it coming, the way you feel a commonplace coming in a conversation. What he had wanted to say is one of those clichés with which we keep insoluble things at bay. Nothing is really too big to see beyond. What is said, arrogantly, is: everyone provides himself with problems. That “provide” suggests that you can provide yourself with problems at will, just as you provide yourself with clothing, furniture or activities; as if you can choose problems, made to measure. Then come the two minutes’ silence, which shut him up. In the two minutes’ silence the poem presents the opposite of this facile view of the manageability of problems: a massive insolubility. May Fourth is a commemoration of the dead, the victims of the war, the six million, a symbol of precisely not being able to choose your fate. The response of the “I”, the reply to what he had meant to say, is now taken over by the two minutes’ silence. An eloquent silence, which concludes the conversation once and for all. In the silence, though, inaudible sounds suddenly become audible. Those sounds are listed in a six-part enumeration, in mounting desolation. First there is the wind, which scrapes the corners: the wind wears away, hollows out greedily, erodes. The awnings that flap and the squeaking of hinges also bring associations with decay, dilapidation, unin habitable places. In the final lines the desolation is pushed to the point of gruesomeness: the sound of flapping flags, as a symbol of the fatherland, the House of Orange, official state ceremony, is compared to the cracking of whips. In this context the image evokes associations with the historical practices of German fascism: intimidation, herding, beating up. In the comparison the historical meaning is transferred to the contemporaneous flags cracking in the wind. In this way the cracking whips from the past are introduced into this present. The past is not over. It is still audible, and hence made present. It is no accident that it is audible in the flags. These are stripped of their positive associations and given negative ones: the fatherland, the House of Orange and official state ceremony can also be formulated as nationalism, the fatherland “free of taint”, as one of our national anthems has it, the same nationalism that in the Nazi period led to the murder of the Jews. The poem disrupts a facile picture of the world, the comfortable idea of providable problems. It takes us to the heart of insolubility. Moreover, the poem ends before the minutes’ silence have ended. For the reader therefore the minutes’ silence continue, like a gigantic open space: a place to think about unspeakable evil, since this is not openly expressed by the poem, but with which it surrounds us, the readers.

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Judith Herzberg is Jewish and survived the war in hiding, separated from her parents, who by some miracle returned from the concentration camp. She taught poetry and scriptwriting and lives alternately in Amsterdam and Jerusalem. Her influential plays – including Leedvermaak (Schadenfreude, ), En/of (And/Or, ), Kras (Scratch, ), Rijgdraad (Tacking Thread, ), Simon () – often centre on the after-effects of war experiences in Jewish children, and grandchildren. Leedvermaak, Rijgdraad and Simon form a trilogy, a Jewish family history spanning twenty years, in which the same characters constantly return years later. No one has an easy life, relationships are complicated and painful and the past is never over. Yet Herzberg’s plays are at the same time light in tone, even comic. Herzberg’s succinct definition of her view of drama is: “As long as it’s amusing, the depth will come of its own accord.” Herzberg is the Low Countries’ most important playwright since . She has won numerous awards, including the Dutch-Flemish Playwriting Prize for Kras (), the  Constantijn Huygens Prize and the P.C. Hooft Prize in .

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Confronting One’s Own History

Helga Ruebsamen 1934 elsbeth etty

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ventually you have to confront your own history, map everything out, take stock of what you’ve been through,” said Helga Ruebsamen in  of Het lied en de waarheid (The Song and the Truth), the novel she had just started. Up till then she had avoided raking up her past. She did not want to become known as “the Anne Frank who survived it all” and so she hid herself in weird characters who are living in a world of vanished pomp, alcohol abuse and other forms of self-destruction. Before Het lied en de waarheid appeared in , Ruebsamen had excelled at the short story, a genre that is not particularly popular in the Dutch-speaking world. For that reason she remained for a long time a “writer’s writer”. She spent her early childhood in the Dutch East Indies. Just before the Second World War she found herself with her family in The Hague, where after completing secondary school she became a reporter on the daily Het Vaderland. In  she made her début with the collection De Kameleon (The Chameleon, ), after a number stories from it had already been awarded the Reina Prinsen Geerlig Prize for promising work by new writers. Critics could not praise her too highly. “She has come on the scene with work written so personally, and pertinently, so different in subject matter and treatment, that we find it hard to believe it is the début of a young writer,” wrote the writer and critic Jan Greshoff. This was because Ruebsamen had enough experience of life on which to base her portraits of the typically Hague circles of ex-colonial types and ex-oligarchs in their faded glory. Polly in the story ‘Danger’ from De kameleon could have been a granddaughter of Louis Couperus’ heroine Eline Vere, and many of her other characters are modern versions of figures from Couperus’ Boeken der kleine zielen (Books of the Small Souls). ‘You’re like your grandmother, Polly,’ and it was true, even though grandmother was gnarled with age. ‘Grandmother used to be very beautiful, Polly,’ said her mother and added impatiently: ‘When are we going to see a bit of personality coming out in you?’ Personality, did that mean constantly escaping yourself and constantly popping up in another guise, constantly confusing everyone with those changing manifestations, changing characters and voices? Her mother had at least seventeen different voices, couldn’t she hear that herself?

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Ruebsamen’ following books are novels, De heksenvriend (The Witches’ Friend) and Wonderolie (Wonder Oil), again populated by deranged characters. Willem G. van Maanen, a fellowwriter and critic classified Ruebsamen as “fundamentally romantic”, but added: “at the same time she shows the decay of romanticism, she sticks the needle in her own flesh and does it dried-eyed.” Sticking the needle in her own flesh seemed to be most successful in short stories, such as De ondergang van Makarov (The Downfall of Makarov, ): When, since the usual unpleasantness with my mother had exceeded all bounds, I spent the night with Michael (Makarov) for the first time, I heard a rustling in the night, some sort of creature and a soft thud. We had drunk quite a lot. ‘Can you hear that t?’ I whispered, and then, raising my voice: ‘Hey, did you hear that?’ ‘Oh for God’s sake go to sleep, woman,’ said Michael chestily, ‘a corpse, that’s all. The funeral’s tomorrow.’ He turned over. I gathered up my courage, turned a light on, hunted through the room and suddenly came across a soft, limp body, the body of a bat that was lying in a small patch of grey dust under the chimney. It was like a monk, overwhelmed in pious prayer by a more powerful truth and in its death agony had pulled its lips into a disillusioned grimace. It made me feel ill, but the next day Michael wrapped the corpse tenderly in a newspaper and drew a cross on the whitewashed wall with an indelible pencil. There were already a dozen crosses, with accompanying documentation. This collection appeared a year after Ruebsamen’s ex-husband, the jazz trumpeter Serein Pfeiffer, was murdered by the ex-wife of the Netherlands’ greatest short-story writer, the later P.C. Hooft rize winner F.B. Hotz. After this, Ruebsamen fell silent. Not until seventeen years later did she re-emerge with the collection Op Scheveningen (In Scheveingen, ), five masterly stories about the seamy side of The Hague, the temptations of a Wassenaar brothel for a nice young girl and the life story of two old drunks in the posh quarter of Marlot. There the once worshipped, always drunk sisters Cateau and Emilie eke out their final days with sick buckets round their necks, as an aid for “getting on with life”. Getting on with life meant after being wiped out by sleep or some other loss of consciousness, no more or less than renewed tippling and it was only possible to do that undisturbed, as everyone was aware who knew by experience, from the fourth drink on. The first three are inevitably vomited up, although they obviously have their use in preparing the way. The buckets, which were intended for these trailblazers, so that they did not land blindly on clothes or furniture, must preferably be fitted with comfortable handles that did not squeeze the neck too painfully.

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This volume was followed by two more in the same vein,Olijfje en andere verhalen (Little Olive and Other Stories, ) and De dansende kater (The Dancing Tomcat,), for which this masterly exponent of the short story did not receive the recognition she deserved. That happened only when at the age of sixty-three she surprised the reading public with the novel Het lied en de waarheid, almost four hundred pages long, about the experiences of a child growing up in the Dutch East Indies. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War the family moves to the Netherlands. There the girl finds herself, after a kind of purgatory, in hell. That hell is a farm where she lives in hiding with her Jewish father during the German occupation. But before it gets to that point the child has incurred such damage and her trust has been so disappointed, that she seems hopelessly lost anyway. Ruebsamen tells her story in the first person and although the ‘I’ is called Louise Benda, she leaves us in no doubt that the child is her alter ego. Unlike many other postcolonial Dutch novels, Het lied en de waarheid is not a romanticizing or rancorous ‘Indies’ book. Nor is it a war story about survival. Ruebsamen describes her childhood memories, but at the same time she elevates the private experiences to the level of universal themes such as loss and mourning. Het lied en de waarheid is, more over, a Bildungsroman and a personal voyage of discovery into the operation of memory. The protagonist herself derives no pleasure from constantly dredging up the same fragment from the pond of her memory. “In this ooze nothing moves but doubt and pain,” she writes. But also: “Still, I can’t evade it.” This latter remark is typical of the whole novel, whose theme, coming to terms with decolonisation and Nazi occupation, is extremely compelling. Not overemphasized but certainly present is the struggle for liberation of a girl doggedly fighting for her independence and dispensing at an early age with traditional role patterns. Het lied en de waarheid, partly because of its nomination for prestigious literary prizes and the award of the F. Bordewijk Prize, became a huge success. Prizes for her life’s work followed, including the Annie Romein Prize of the feminist monthly Opzij and the Anna Bijns Prize for “the female voice in literature”. The by now elderly Ruebsamen appeared on much-discussed television programmes and published columns in the daily de Volkskrant, which generated interest in her work. People eagerly awaited the sequel to Het lied en de waarheid, which ends in  with the liberation of the eleven-year-old girl who has been living in hiding: In the far distance I could see something moving that looked to my eyes like a tangled ball of cats that was quickly rolling closer. They seemed to be black-and-white cats, playing with sticks and balls, but it might well be a real band. A marching band, with hooters and banners, ahead of our liberators. When would they get here? I would go to meet them right away. Then I could continue on to The Hague in one go. I didn’t look round anymore. I looked ahead. My journey back began. The account of that journey back and what followed, or the second part of the fictional autobiography, has still not appeared. Ruebsamen did, however, give a foretaste in the New

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Year’s gift she wrote in  under the title De bevrijding (The Liberation) for her publisher, Contact. In it, Louise Benda is a -year-old writer, who is talking to her psychiatrist about her mother. ‘Drieluik met Dora’ (‘Triptych with Dora’) from the story collection Beer is terug (Bear is Back, ) also seems to be a preliminary study for the sequel to Het lied en de waarheid. But in fact that can be said of her whole work, in which the author reviews her adolescent adventures in all kinds of disguises. Het lied en de waarheid can be called Ruebsamen’s magnum opus, but it is not her best work. That can be found in her sublime collections of stories, a selection of which has been published in two volumes. This original writer of vibrant stories is represented by two gems in the anthology De Nederlandse en Vlaamse literatuur van  in  verhalen (Dutch and Flemish Literature since  in  Stories) of , with which Joost Zwagerman made a successful attempt to bring the short story in Dutch in from the cold.

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Composer of a Dangerous Marriage

Margriet de Moor 1941 fleur speet

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argriet de moor doesn ’t find her own life particularly absorbing, or at least not absorbing enough to incorporate it into her prose. “If there is anything in which I have absolutely no interest,” said the writer in an interview, “it’s myself. You spend the whole day in your own company, you can never switch yourself off. Why in heaven’s name should I want to know even more about myself?” She repeats this question almost verbatim in her novel Hertog van Egypte (Duke of Egypt, ), in which the main character, Lucie, thinks: “Why should she be in search of herself? Wasn’t she the thing whose taste she had known all her life?” Autobiographical writing, then, is not for De Moor. For example, in  De virtuoos (The Virtuoso) appeared: a sparkling historical novel about love, though during the writing of the book both her husband and her father had died. There is no trace of the resultant shock and disillusion. De Moor is consequently present in her books in only one sense, “not as a personality, although some characters are burdened with my views and behavior, but as a manipulator”. Authenticity is her point of departure, states De Moor in the essay collection Als een hond zijn blinde baas (Like a Dog’s Blind Master, ). For this reason she spends a lot of time collecting background material: everything that happens in her novels should after all be plausible, should be possible. De Moor visited gypsy encampments for Hertog van Egypte (), studied air crashes for Kreutzersonate (Kreutzer Sonata, ), read countless books on eighteenth-century castrati for De virtuoos and consulted meteorologists for De verdronkene (The Drowned Woman, ). Research is of great importance, but De Moor does not go in for interpreting inner motivation. There is no psychologizing in her novels. Rather, her characters are in search of the other, who always proves unknowable. In Hertog van Egypte Lucie observes of her husband Joseph: “She was in love with a stranger.” Most characters communicate indirectly. Lucie and Joseph have complete empathy with each other in their actions, without really knowing each other. No in-depth conversations are needed. Silent empathy provides the implicit intimacy on which De Moor focuses. Hence silent people play a part in virtually every book. Sometimes because they are dead, like Lidy in De verdronkene, sometimes because they are autistic, like Gaby in Eerst grijs dan wit dan blauw (First Grey, then White, then Blue, ), sometimes because they don’t find it necessary to speak.

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The married couple in Zee-Binnen (Inland Sea, ) study each other “with great imagi nation, but few words”. Sometimes silence is the basis for a tender, loving relationship. Talking is not always necessary for a good marriage. Yet there is only a sight difference between being silent and being absent. Perhaps that is why so many characters in De Moor’s novels and stories disappear for good, like Lidy in De verdronkene, who drowns in the great floods of ; or temporarily, like Magda in Eerst grijs dan wit dan blauw, who suddenly packs her weekend bag and leaves her husband Robert for two years; or repeatedly, like Joseph in Hertog van Egypte. Lucie continues their life during his absence; when he returns he can fit back in effortlessly, and nothing needs to be explained. Married couples have a right to their secrets, De Moor seems to be saying. The desire to fathom the other person completely leads to madness, or even to murder, as in Eerst grijs dan wit dan blauw, when Robert can no longer stand his wife’s silence about the two years she has been away. People cannot know each other, however much they may want or try to, is the message. The other is basically unfathomable. Besides using disappearances, De Moor likes to raise the tension in marriages by having one of the couple commit adultery or come under suspicion. In Zee-Binnen Vincent acquires a mistress just after his wife Noor has promised not to be unfaithful. The fact that Noor knows nothing about the adultery probably saves their marriage. In Kreutzersonate, music, with its irresistible high notes, provokes such overwhelming jealousy in the blind music critic Marius van Vlooten, that he accuses his wife of adultery, although he is not absolutely sure. In De verdronkene, Armanda dances intimately for a moment at a party with Sjoerd, the husband of her sister Lidy, because she is slightly jealous that he did not choose her in the past. The following day the news arrives that Lidy has gone missing in the floods. A few years later Armanda marries Sjoerd. It is not adultery, but it feels like it to her. There are no divorces in De Moor’s work, the characters are too loyal for that, but there is a great strain on married life. The danger that the marriage will not survive is always lying in wait. Love can slip from your grasp for reasons you cannot control. De Moor ’s characters often step aside from their life’s path for a moment and in doing so bring fate down on their heads. They do not do so consciously; it overtakes them. They are manipulated by forces greater than themselves. Vincent from Zee-Binnen finds a diary that “had gone astray from a handbag” in the street. When he sees an appointment with himself noted in it, he becomes obsessed. That small step towards the diary changes the course of his life. “We put only a small bit of ourselves into practice,” he realizes and subsequently tries out a new bit of himself. In De verdronkene, Lidy takes Armanda’s place by leaving Amsterdam for Zeeland. Actually Armanda was supposed to go to her godchild’s birthday in Zeeland, but she wasn’t very keen and was secretly brooding on other plans, namely stealing a kiss from her sister’s husband at a party. So Lidy steps sideways, and takes over a piece of Armanda’s life. She has only thirty-six hours to live from the point where she exchanges identities, during which time she is confronted with the essential questions of human life. Armanda lives another eighty years. So is a short and intense life not as important as a long-drawn-out one? In every one of De Moor’s books the short step aside leads to this kind of great existential question.

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Perhaps because her characters have to be so much on their guard in this dangerous world, their senses are primed. The title story of Ik droom dus (So I’m Dreaming, ) begins with the past presence “I was”, after which we run through the list of senses with “I heard”, “I smelled”, “I tasted”, “I felt”, “I looked”, and the story ends with the sense of the imagination “I imagined”. References to eyes and ears are most frequent in De Moor’s work. In Eerst grijs dan wit dan blauw, for example, one of the charaters is an eye surgeon, while in Kruetzersonate Marius is blind and has to see with his ears. The references to hearing of course issue from the great importance of music in De Moor’s work. With a music critic and a violinist as the main characters, Kreutzersonate is permeated with musical references, especially to Janácˇek’s string quartet, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s novella Kreutzer Sonata. Stories like ‘Matthäus-Passion’ about a choral singer (from Ik droom dus) and ‘Variations pathétiques’ about a piano teacher (from her début Op de rug gezien/Seen from Behind, ) refer directly to pieces of music. And in De kegel werper (The Club Thrower, ), about a juggler and a club thrower in a boarding-house in the s, music plays a principal part: “Music, invisible and with a power all of its own, seizes in passing on your most deeply-rooted desires and consoles you with the fury of its own crazy heart.” Even a novel that is not about music, Zee-Binnen, still refers with its  chapters to the  preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach’s Das Wohltempierte Klavier. Music is the most important source of inspiration for De Moor, who trained as a solo singer and a pianist at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, specializing in modern song for her degree. Experiment fascinates her in writing, too. She likes to mix the tradi tional with the modern, for example, by combining lofty nineteenth-century words with very modern ones. She finds sounds more important than the subject, as she put it in an interview: “what I’m after is the intoxication within which other laws than the normal ones apply.” The style in De kegelwerper, for example, skips about and is fragmentary, analo gous to the clubs that have to be kept in the air. The tone also reflects the relationship between the club thrower and the juggler, which is rather sticky. De Moor plays equally with new and old in the choice of narrative perspective. She regularly alternates the third person singular with an omniscient narrator who comments, as was customary in the nineteenth century. For example, in De kegelwerper: “But we are anticipating”; or in ZeeBinnen, when the omniscient narrator zooms in on a diary in the road. “Yes, he picks it up”, notes the narrator with a bird’s-eye view. All this makes the author a true manipulator. Anyone who starts analyzing Margriet de Moor’s work finds no end of conundrums. Literary critics do not always appreciate this, but this by no means detracts from the high regard in which her work is held, at home and abroad.

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Double Talent in Reverse

Charlotte Mutsaers 1942 bart vervaeck

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f everything they tried to teach to you/ The opposite’s every bit as true.” This text appears in mirror writing under a drawing in Het circus van de geest (The Circus of the Mind, ), the collection of emblems with which writer and painter Charlotte Mutsaers made her literary début. The drawing shows a man pulling a cart. In the cart sits a horse using the whip. According to the popular saying you mustn’t put the cart before the horse; what happens here is much worse. But Mutsaers couldn’t care less about conventional commonsense, and besides, she has a weakness for horses, dogs and other animals. Her emblem shows the reversal of our clichéd understanding and goes in search of a symbolic form of comprehension, that is, a wisdom that is shown rather than explained. A wisdom that is also concrete and tangible instead of abstract. In all her books, Mutsaers strives for the concrete and tangible. Often she has to search far afield, since our world has buried the tangible and the sensory under conventional patterns like political correctness, simple slogans, self-satisfied morality. Such templates make direct experience impossible. The antidote to this insidious disease of the well-behaved society is the untrammelled look at everything that has not yet been contaminated by the disease: children not yet brought up to be well-behaved, animals and things. For example, the I-figure in Paardejam (Horse Jam, ), examines a dog’s backside – for the average person a dirty and uninteresting thing. But anyone who looks closely will see that there is a pair of spectacles on the backside: “Under the tail on each buttock was a perfect round crown. One turning to the right and the other to the left, in perfect harmony.” Those crowns form a pair of spectacles. Since the narrator’s discovery of that detail, she knows “simple and concrete observations generally enrich your life more than science, feminism, sport or mysticism”. That doesn’t mean that Mutsaers is averse to reflection. Her stories are often rather like essays and conversely her exciting and graceful essays – about a fellow-writer, about Ostend, about animals and fir trees, canaries and cubism, goldfinches and horses – contain all kinds of unforeseen turns, sudden side-paths and capricious associations. That applies to such books as Hazepeper (Jugged Hare, ), Kersebloed (Cherry Blood, ), Paardejam, Zeepijn (Sea Pain, ) and Bont (Fur, ). Mutsaers avoids linear argumentation, since she has a preference for fantasy, which never works in a linear way.

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Just as Mutsaers’ essays are stories, her drawings are narratives, and her narratives are easy to visualize. The combination of drawing and writing is linked to the writer’s background. Charlotte Mutsaers studied Dutch at the University of Amsterdam (-), after which she worked as a teacher of Dutch until . Meanwhile, she was also involved in painting, following an evening course at the Rietveldacademie in Amsterdam, where she was to lecture from  to . Her painting, which is regularly exhibited and can also be admired in the form of birthday calendars, is present in all kinds of ways in her literary work: as illustrations on covers and in books, but also as a stylistic principle in language itself. For Mutsaers, language is visual, painterly and vivid. Not that the writer indulges in long, picturesque descriptions: what she aims for is the short, evocative formulation. The relationship between painting and literature has evolved in Mutsaers’ work. At the beginning the two art forms preserved their individuality and were juxtaposed. That applies to her début, which contains drawings with poems, to the comic strip Meneer Donselaer zoekt een vrouw (Mr Donselaer Seeks a Wife) – which raised a fair amount of dust because of its none too respectable sensuality – and to Hanengeschrei (Crowing of Roosters, ). Between these came Hazepeper (), a collection of exuberantly illustrated narrative essays on hares and rabbits, Napoleon and cucumbers. In Hazepeper, Mutsaers’ literary quest is explicitly formulated, and it is imme diately noticeable how serious the underlying tone is beneath the lightness of the form. The author describes how as a growing child she was in danger of losing touch with the world: That rift which ever since I have been repairing with all my might, with the sacred conviction in my heart that neither first love, nor the first violent tidal wave of sex have been able to equal what I had almost lost at one fell swoop: the contact with Things, the deep absorption in games. In Cheese! (), a monologue of a twelve-year-old girl, the origin of that rift is shown. The strange children’s world of toy animals, dreams and direct contact with reality begins to lose its splendor with the onset of puberty. The “inspired lightness” that is so characteristic of Mutsaers’ work, and on which she comments in the essay ‘Dubbelgeroofde veren’ (‘Doubly Borrowed Feathers’) from Paardejam, is therefore not without some weight. The author speaks in light and poetic terms about dark and prosaic things: the disenchantment of the world, the one-dimensional society. In that sense her work is a form of cultural criticism: it contains many statements that may be shocking for the politically correct reader. She describes religion as pure fiction and she considers consensus something monstrous: Rage arises when your opinion is at odds with the consensus. If you got angry about South Africa in the past things weren’t too difficult. I didn’t say a word about it. I was talking about other things. Take the war in Kosovo. I think I was the first person in Amsterdam who said: and what about the animals then?

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In her work, Mutsaers tries to rehabilitate the innocent eye of the child and the status of neglected beings such as animals. She calls her first novel, Rachels rokje (Rachel’s Skirt, ) “one great process of animalization”, not only because the main character tries to become one with her favorite teacher Goldfinch, but also because in the tenth chapter a horse lays “the leaden weight of its head” in the main character’s lap. That consensus does not carry much weight with Mutsaers is also clear from her second novel Koetsier Herfst (Coachman Autumn, ), in which Osama bin Laden appears as a poetic soul and gentle-natured fellow. The female main character, Do, has a photo of him on her bedsde table: “He’s comfortable in his body, can write poetry, can think, is just and at least has sex appeal. I’ve never heard a crude word from his mouth.” This contrariness has not prevented Mutsaers from becoming one of the major authors of her generation. In  she received the prestigious Constantijn Huygens Prize for her life’s work and in  the P.C. Hooft Prize for her narrative prose. Her double talent, as a painter and a writer, was recognized in  with the award of the Jacobus van Looy Prize. On that occasion a book appeared on her literary and visual work, under the title Fik & Snik (Flame & Sob). So, however unique and idiosyncratic Mutsaers may be, she has certainly been accorded a place in Dutch literature. In her essays, Mutsaers has described her place in the literary world with reference to the authors she regards as kindred spirits. In her literary family she includes Francis Ponge, the poet of things, whom she praises for his “phenomenal poetic prose”, in which children, animals and melancholy are accorded a place of honor. Mutsaers links her literary lightness of touch which gives form to melancholy with the work of Italo Calvino. Her predilection for the neglected and the playful makes her a literary relation of Julio Cortázar, who in his work introduces the homo ludens and in addition uses “marginality as a principle for living”. Kafka’s marginal figures and his terse, pointed style excite Mutsaers’ admiration. She also writes appreciatively about Nabokov. In Dutch literature she expresses a preference for Jan Hanlo, who like Ponge gives things a face, and Gerrit Krol, whose brilliant observations intertwine “experience and imagination”. She further counts Armando – like her a double talent – among those with whom she feels an affinity, partly because in his work he makes horror tangible in a laid-back and sometimes even humorous style. The link with authors like Calvino and Krol brings Mutsaers close to postmodern ism, a closeness that is further reinforced by her repeatedly expressed admiration for the work of the French post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze. But Mutsaers remains in all respects unclassifiable. Besides postmodernists she also embraces modernists like Dora Carrington, Daniil Charms, and Robert Walser. Anyone wanting to pigeonhole this author will have to admit that every position can be immediately turned on its head: “Of everything they tried to teach to you/ The opposite’s every bit as true.”

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Obscure, Tormented Poetry

Neeltje Maria Min 1944 maaike meijer

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eeltje maria min first published at the age of twenty-one in the magazine Maatstaf, and immediately attracted the attention of the sensationalist literary press, which was excessively interested in the person of the poet. Her work was seen as girlish and simple. That image is askew. Min’s first volume Voor wie ik lief heb wil ik heten (For Those I Love I Want a Name, ) contains somber, tormented poetry, about the imprisonment of a daughter in the nuclear family, about hatred for the mother, about a love that in some unspecified way is doomed. Her début proved a striking commercial success, but it was  before Min’s second collection, Een vrouw bezoeken (Visiting a Woman) appeared. A number of poems deal unmistakably with sexual violence. In my view this mysterious work gains meaning if read in the context of incest, more specifically the abuse of a daughter by a father. A crucial example is poem VII, from the series of poems in Een vrouw bezoeken. Every poem from this series tries describes a visit by a man to a woman. The woman is asleep (I), is dead (II), makes herself up joylessly as he watches (III), is tied up (IV). In (V) the woman is a skeleton in a well. In (VI) she is a child “crucified” by him at bedtime. In (VII) she is a child shot down by him. VII A dress with satin strips Covers the bed from head to foot Like a truncated fairy. A veiled chair stands by. Her whole presence seems like porcelain. Her forehead’s just been rubbed and gleams. A little wrinkle flashes past. Deep in her throat a hum begins Of laughter that does not escape.

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Her hands are playing with her braid. Each time she ties the ribbon round. She thinks, but nothing’s yet been said. What’s he waiting for? His question crumbles in the air. Her thoughts that fly far from his care betray the answer he can’t bear. The room spins round, and in her face fear gives way to disbelief: he aims the weapon at her space. After the muffled shot shock demolishes his rage and he’s surprised the look of her can compensate. Her silent beauty now consoles. Thus: in her white underwear, clutched like roses to her heart a stream of blood on which her hand is spread wide, she’s still his bride. Initially we see the events from outside, as if through a movie camera. The camera registers a dress spread out on a bed and a “shrouded chair”, or a veil hanging over a chair. It’s like a wedding dress, lying ready to be put on or just taken off. It could also be a dress for a First Communion, which is supported by the fact that a small girl is involved. The comparison of the dress to a “truncated fairy” is striking. The strange thing is that the dress is first brought to life in the personification “fairy”, but that fairy is immediately killed off again. For a moment you are forced to see a beheaded fairy in that dress. The author of the comparison introduces a sweet, fairytale creature that has been mutilated – a will-less fairy’s body, on a bed. The scene also evokes a momentary image – via the bed and death – of a laid-out corpse. The reading of wedding dress refers to a marriage. The fact that the dress – the headless body – is in this case lying on a bed, implies a more specific reference to defloration. If one jumps ahead to the last line of the poem. “[Thus] she is still his bride”, the wedding dress interpretation seems obvious. In the second verse, “Her whole presence seems like porcelain”, the camera pans to a girl who looks like a china doll. Porcelain is fragile and lifeless. It is also delicate and sweet, like the fairy. The comparison to porcelain transfers the semantic element “lifeless” to the girl. The girl appears dead, which links with the truncated fairy. The “objective”

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quality of the girl is further reinforced by ‘‘her forehead’s just been rubbed”, recalling the porcelain forehead of a precious antique doll. Yet there is life in the doll. “A little wrinkle flashes past”, across the porcelain forehead. A second sign of life is that “Deep in her throat a hum begins”. There is actually exuberant life (laughter) in the doll, but it is very deep down. It is just the beginning of mirth, which never turns into real laughter. In the third verse the girl has finally come to life. The tying of the ribbon “each time” is unnecessary and points to nervousness. Something is going to happen, but she doesn’t yet know what. The isolated line “What’s he waiting for?” introduces the presence of a male figure. The line transports us into the point of view of the girl, who has seen the man before the “camera” saw him. She is obviously expecting him to do something. She is nervous. “His question crumbles in the air,” evokes the expression “[The] question hangs in the air”. A question that hangs in the air is one of great importance, of which all those present are aware and to which no answer has been given. The girl doesn’t want hear the question. She looks away “far from his care”, and her thoughts become hazy. “Flies” also implies that her attention is taking flight from the question, which inspires fear within her. “The room spins round”: the whole situation becomes confused and unmanage able. Then once more we see, with the camera, “fear” giving way to “disbelief” on the girl’s face. Something happens that she cannot believe: he points the “weapon” at her. A little later there is mention of “after the […] shot”. The actual moment of shooting has been skipped, just as previously the question was skipped. The last two verses can be read in two ways. . There is a literal weapon, with which the man shoots the girl. The bridegroom is a murderer. . The weapon is a penis and the act of violence is a rape. I shall explain the reasons that lead me to this conclusion: “clutched like roses to her heart/ a stream of blood” is a simile that presents a bloody bullet wound as a (charming) bunch of roses. That is the reverse of the image of the “lopped-off fairy”, which made us see a charming dress as a mutilated body. The first image refers to red roses as an erotic symbol. That links to all those other references to sexuality: the dress on the bed, the fairy who is only a trunk, the girl in her white underwear. On this basis “the weapon” could also be seen as a sexual metaphor, namely as the man’s penis. “Muffled shot”, extending the metaphor, can be read as ejaculation. The shot is “muffled” because he shoots inside her. The blood could refer to the blood of the deflowering. The man is satifisfied with his deed. In this way (admittedly not in a wedding dress, but deflowered), she is still his bride. These two readings – the literal weapon and the weapon as penis – are not mutually exclusive. Because of the link between sexuality and shooting to death and through the metaphor “weapon”, this sexual act is presented as a murder. In the last two verses the girl has also returned to her initial lifeless state. The way in which the man looks at her (“her silent beauty now consoles”) reactivates the image from the beginning: a laid-out corpse. In the poem the girl has passed from one death to the other. In the second verse she is still a china doll. She comes to life only to be killed once more, by sex.

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The focus in the poem is crucial to the presentation of this sexual murder. First we see events though a camera, which as it were “witnesses the crime”. But that camera disappears. In the last two verses we have been transported into the man’s changes of mood. His rage turns into shock and that shock turns into contentment. “Thus [...] she is still his bride.” It doesn’t matter that she is dead. We as readers are forced to go along with that repulsive train of thought: the man has the last word. There is no witness, no other perspective than that of the culprit. In this way the crime is completed in the presentation of events. I cannot read this in any other way than as the rape of a daughter. That inter pretation explains the contradiction that this bride is a girl instead of a woman, explains the huge weight attached to the request for sex and makes it clear why the girl does not reply, but that “her thoughts fly far”. Min presents the whole event as a mock wedding, the consummation of this “marriage” is a murder, the bridal flowers are not white but red. At the end the “camera” witness has disappeared. Only the vision of “the bridegroom” still counts. He is the final truth. Such is the totalitarianism of situations in which fathers sexually abuse daughters. This interpretation offers a key to other obscure poems by Min. Sadly, she stopped writing poetry after  and the two collections mentioned here remain her most important work.

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A Political Life Story

Anja Meulenbelt 1945 maaike meijer

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nja meulenbelt remains principally the author of one book, De schaamte voorbij (The Shame is Over, ). Its appearance was a major social and political as well as a literary event. It was read by tens of thousands of Dutch women, and became the cult book of neofeminism, with Meulenbelt as the Jack Kerouac of this female counterculture. Politically the book represented an important step towards the visibility and legitimization of feminism as a social movement. De schaamte voorbij presented in narrative form the political program developed in the radical-feminist women’s groups of the early s. The feminist revolution was also an inner change: “The personal is political” was the slogan. Consistent with that slogan, De schaamte voorbij has (in the English version) the subtitle “a political life story”. In the book, ‘Anja’ tells us how she learned to live. At the same time we follow in close-up how she learned to write down that life, which underlines the autodidactic character of feminist Bildung. Feminism is the art of inventing oneself, both in life and in writing. There is as yet no language for the new view of reality: Language, my problem is language, this is not my language. I could write in colors or wordless sounds. The scraps I find among shopping lists and notes are remote from me, or so close that I am embarrassed. Emotions that appear too sentimental or too dramatic if they are spelled on paper. Love. Pain. Words that become too shallow, or businesslike, or hard. Cunt. Vagina. Orgasm. Not my language, but as yet I have no other. We experience Anja’s fear of writing along with her, her problems of selection and com position, the exercise books and where they are bought, and all the impossible places – café’s, the campsite, the car – where the book comes into being. Despite the appearance of naturalness and anti-literariness, De schaamte voorbij displays interesting manipulations with time: the narrative moves back and forth between Gordes (the village in France where the book was partly written) and the chronological account of Anja’s life. At the end, the narrative present and the chronologically remembered past converge. In the present we witness the relationship and the break with her lover Hans: the relationship is described in all its ups and downs, in accordance with Meulenbelt’s theory of literature: “I don’t want to

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make it prettier than it is.” So we get the fights, the moods, the misunderstandings, Hans’ constant demands for approval, his feeling of guilt, the peaceable separation, the attempt to stay friends. Ultimately Anja does not want to live with a man who is less independent than she is. In addition, De schaamte voorbij, in a long series of flashbacks, gives an unfor gettable picture of the teenage mother that Anja was. In the s she had the misfortune to marry a wild young German who hit her and gave her insufficient housekeeping money. She was trapped with a baby in a working-class flat in Hamburg. Later the family lives in a miserable room in the Jordaan in Amsterdam, “divided from a furniture shop by a thin hardboard wall”: I become more and more frightened, but I don’t know what of. Of people. I go less and less into the street, only if I have to shop. I don’t dare go to the laundrette because there I need to ask how to work the machines. I wash by hand, hang the washing up in the room. I only go to supermarkets, where I don’t have to say anything. If I need to go to a shop where I need to ask anything I rehearse it beforehand for fear that I will forget what I came for when I am there. If I can see who is at the door, Jehovah’s Witnesses, I don’t open it, stand with beating heart behind it. Then I no longer dare to cross the busy street nearby. I finally stay only on the street where we live. (translated by ann oosthuizen)

With the courage of despair, Anja, aged twenty, insists on a divorce. She goes to the Academy for Social Studies and slowly picks up the threads of her life. Her social awareness is awakened by her reading of Marxist literature. She plunges into an almost endless series of affairs in which she learns about the needs of her mind and body. She shows us every form of male egocentricity without ever caricaturing it. We experience the drug scene, the Paradiso nightclub, the hippies and especially the sexual revolution along with Anja and her eager, inexhaustible thirst for life. The first feminist texts (like those of Shulamith Firestone) are a revelation to her: Strange, an action group that writes about love. Our weak point, Shulamith calls it, the soft underbelly of politics, hidden away in what we call private life. I read, fascinated. She is writing about me. About all hangovers after the end of affairs with men. About the sexual revolution that is indeed sexual, but not revolutionary. About how we let ourselves be used, played off against each other. [...] Love between unequals is impossible, she says. [...] I cry. For the tough way that it is expressed. There is no prince on a white horse. There is no solution. But I am not the only one who struggles with the same dilemmas. I am not alone. I am not alone. I am not alone.

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De schaamte voorbij gives an interesting picture of the early years of the Amsterdam women’s movement, showing the great wave of solidarity between women, the impossible love triangles, the lesbian euphoria, the demonstrations, the debates and the political schisms. Sometimes Anja, by now independent and famous, meets her former self in the supermarket, “the young woman with the inward-looking gaze”: She blushes as she drops her money. I smile encouragingly at her when she has picked up her purse and stands fumbling at the cash desk. [...] As long as her face is closed and mistrustful, I am not free. As long as she is ashamed and bends her shoulders instead of drawing herself up to her full height, I am not free. As long as she accepts her life as it is, the daily walk to the supermarket, the accounting to make sure she will balance her housekeeping allowance, the chops cost more than last week and her husband doesn’t like mince the way she makes it, I am not free. I need her just as much as she needs me, but she doesn’t know it yet. Meulenbelt presents her character Anja quite deliberately as a figure to identify with. De schaamte voorbij is without doubt the Dutch roman à thèse of the second wave of feminism. The author revived the “fictional autobiography”: the life story offered in literary form. The book had a great social impact, both in the Netherlands and abroad: it was translated into ten languages, including Slovenian () and Finnish (). In literature, Meulenbelt had no direct successors or imitators, though her book did make it easier for other women writers, like Hannes Meinkema and Renate Dorrestein, to broach explicit women’s issues. At any rate, Meulenbelt became her own school: her novels after De schaamte voorbij, Alba () and Een kleine moeite (No Trouble, ), retain the fictional autobiographical form, but De bewondering (Admiration, ) is written in the third person. Besides fiction, she has written essays on literature, on the women’s movement, on work and care, “the economy of the nurturing function”, and on sexuality. Her later books – Het beroofde land (The Stolen Land, ), De tweede intifada (The Second Intifada, ) and Een spiegel liegt niet (A Mirror Doesn’t Lie, ) – testify to her commitment to the Palestinian cause. Anja Meulenbelt has also worked extensively with war victims in the Balkans. She now sits in the Upper Chamber of the Dutch Parliament for the Socialist Party. If in a Dutch context De schaamte voorbij is an exceptional book, internationally it belongs to a literary movement that gathered momentum in the United States and Western Europe in the s. At that same time such fictional autobiographies appeared, in which the female life was described and politicized using realistic codes; in the US these include Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, in Germany Häutungen by Verena Stefan, in France Les Mots pour le dire by Marie Cardinal, in England the works of Doris Lessing and Fay Weldon. Since , Turkish literature has also had its own Anja Meulenbelt: Duygy Asena wrote Kadinin adi Yok (Women Have No Name), which was banned after being reprinted  times. This stream of feminist romans à thèse put into writing the consciousnessraising work of the women’s groups, and enabled tens of thousands of women to change their lives.

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Responsible Writing

Nelleke Noordervliet 1945 odile heynders

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y definition, the genres of novel, essay and historiography have, deliberately or not, blurred boundaries. In the preamble to the biographical essay Altijd roomboter (Always Butter, ), Nelleke Noordervliet not only validates her account of her great-grandmother’s arduous life as a servant, but also expresses her view of writing. Novels are constructed from imagination and facts, founded on the examination of documents and ideas from the past in relation to an issue in the present. The writer directs, but allows the characters in the text the chance of developing, changing and growing wiser. Whether it be Tine van Wijnbergen from her first novel or Robert Andersen from her last, whether the action is located in crowded Venice or in the imposing emptiness of North-West Canada, the charac ters in Noordervliet’s novels invent themselves or recover themselves and always achieve a moment of deeper insight, acceptance and even purgation. Noordervliet is an author for whom self-consciousness is a central focus. She does this less from a psychological than from a philosophical perspective. Why does someone act as she or he does, what were the preconditions for this action, and can you judge those actions as right or wrong from a moral point of view? The characters are ordinary people who find themselves placed in situations of confrontation. The great social themes that Noordervliet broaches (colonialism, multi-culturalism, feminism), ultimately lead back to interpersonal relationships on a microlevel of the text. How does one person behave with another, what does surrender to another mean and what is the relationship between that surrender and sober self-reflection in the end? The novel Snijpunt (Intersection, 2008) is a high point in Noordervliet’s work. The book tackles a topical issue: the main character, Nora, a teacher and deputy head at a secondary school is stabbed with a knife by a Moroccan pupil. The resulting conflict turns Nora into a double victim, because the school management shows clemency to the young culprit. Nora is relieved of her management position and returns to her previous post as a history teacher. A second storyline is the spiritual quest of Nora’s ex-husband Guido for a sup posedly lost cult writer of the s. The author in question turns out to be living idyllically in Umbria, which enables the narrator to make all kinds of intertextual references to Classical European culture. In the third storyline we see Franca, Nora and Guido’s daughter, following her father to Italy. She is raped by a young traveling companion, but manages to emerge

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“unscathed”. All three characters undergo a process of purgation: they are in search of them selves and eventually find arguments to give their lives value. Yet the most powerful motif in Snijpunt is not the conflict between the Dutch teacher and the immigrant pupil, not Nora’s gradual acceptance of the humiliation inflicted on her by the politically correct managers of her school, but the explicit discussion of and philosophizing about humanism. The word is used with striking frequency in the novel. It is attributed to the European intellectual tradition and linked to the enlightened bourgeoisie. Humanism is the foundation of Western thought, but is also felt by the protagonist as a corset. Noordervliet expresses this dichotomy strikingly. By way of illustration I will quote a passage from the beginning of the novel in which Nora visits her attacker at home: Ali lived in a neighborhood full of satellite dishes. Immigrant areas are supposed to be bleak, but Nora could find nothing bleak about the neat s buildings put up during a period of housing shortages. It was unimaginative, that’s true. [...] More comfortable than clay huts in the Rif Mountains and roomier than the corner of a workshop in Bozburun, partitioned off with a cloth. She scarcely allowed herself to think that thought. She had simply grown up with the view that everyone who lived over there was deprived and needed help or encouragement, and was in any case a ‘good’ person, since all people were essentially good, certainly if they were poor. That is what her parents believed, however many proofs of the opposite they were presented with. On the contrary, that was when they ensconced themselves even more deeply in their protective humanism. Nora is the focalizer and shows how we, the well-to-do bourgeois, are inclined to think in oppositions: we from the West as opposed to they from North Africa, rich as opposed to poor, happy as opposed to pathetic. Paradoxically, beneath this oppositional thinking there is an implicit belief in human nature, which is by definition good. A second illustrative passage is from a dialogue between Nora and her boyfriend Paul – Paul is talking. The direct speech conveys the dynamism of the discussion: ‘And that high-and-mighty humanism of yours isn’t a jot better than all the other anxious religions. I mean: it’s possible to convert to a religion, but not to humanism.’ ‘What kind of nonsense is that? Of course you can become a humanist, just as you can become a Catholic or a Muslim or a Communist.’ ‘Not true. There is no community of humanists with a hierachy and a space for prayer, there is no house of humanism, there are no predecessors, there is no initiation, there is no party, there is no group protection.’ ‘Suppose you’re right, then that same humanism isn’t capable of accepting or expelling anyone and your superiority argument falls flat.’ ‘That humanism of yours is definitely elitist. The man in the street is unlikely to become a humanist. He’s “nothing” or he believes there’s “something”. For humanism you have to have gone to university.’

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In this dialogue the narrator is raising the issue of the effectiveness of humanism. Neither Paul nor Nora find an answer to the question whether or not humanism offers a solution to problems posed by contemporary multicultural society. The intention of the narrative position is of course that we should recognize, continue and relativize the well-worn arguments. The reader is invited to take his or her own point of view. The novel deliberately refers to debates that have still not been resolved in Dutch society today. Noordervliet raises challenging moral questions, uses symbols and creates prota gonists that can function as allegorical figures (the culprit, the victim, the artist, the thinker, etcetera). Her style is restrained and always lucid, which fits in with the novel as idea, as a philosophical experiment and an exhortation to reflect on one’s own responsibility. Her most recently published novel, Zonder noorden komt niemand thuis (Without a North No One Gets Home, ), is again a salient example of a novel as an exercise in thinking. Robert, the main character, flees to Canada to avoid encountering his wife’s murderer, who has been released after completing his sentence. Robert is afraid of his own anger. Various moral questions are raised: the tragedy of the North American Indians ousted by white Europeans and the disppearance (or expulsion) of a woman from a closed village community (a reflection of the motif of the murdered lover). At the end of the novel there is a symbolic apotheosis, when Robert runs over a deer and afterwards is urged by a girlfriend to kill the animal. The release of the deer from its suffering is twofold: not only is the creature released from pain, but Robert is also liberated: from the fear of his anger, from his responsibility as a surviving parent, from his feeling of guilt. In this scene, which is strongly reminiscent of the final scene from J.M.Coetzee’s Disgrace (in which David Lurie finally has his beloved crippled dog put down with an injection), the main point is the decision to deprive the living Other of his/her death. Taking responsibility for the other also means being prepared to sacrifice. Noordervliet is raising an important idea here that has both humanist and Christian roots. Only a novelist with a strong sense of involvement and responsibility will dare to broach such a theme in current literature.

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‘Woman-Friendly’ Writing With a Sharp Pen

Monika van Paemel 1945 aagje swinnen

M

onika van paemel was born on  May  in the East Flanders village of Poesele. Neither her mother nor her father, who had been pro-German in the war, were able to care for her, and so she spent her childhood alternately at her maternal grandparents’ home in the country and with her paternal grandparents in town. After a long stay in hospital, were she was sent for a brain disorder – a result of birth complications – she was housed with a foster family in Essen on the Belgian-Dutch border. These facts about Van Paemel’s life, at first sight trivial, have proved an inexhaustible source of inspiration for her literary work. Without exception this personal history is retold in Van Paemel’s novels through different, but clearly related female figures. Those narratives are far from being faithful records of her childhood experiences, but rather poeticize reality. In Het wedervaren (Experience, ), Van Paemel’s only large publication presented not in novel form but as a record, the author admits: There is only one word that I pronounce with a certain embarrassment: ‘I’ of all things, bcause what is it without ‘you’ and how many ‘I’s’ is it made up of? ‘I live with myself and myself lives with me.’ Apart from that I exist in the world and belong to time, which will consume me. If I write the word ‘I’ I inevitably become my own character. Writing has taught me that I can only put what is intimate into words by keeping a certain distance from the ‘I’. Writing is the means par excellence of overcoming the past. The recurring elements from the past that determine the thematic content of Van Paemel’s work are the inescapable influence of one’s genetic origins, the painful absence of the biological parents, the unselfish love of foster mothers and the aftermath of the Second World War in Flanders. At least four novels by Van Paemel can be read as parts of the chronicle of the Van Puynbroeckx dynasty: Marguerite (), De vermaledijde vaders (The Accursed Fathers, ), Celestien () and De koningin van Sheba (The Queen of Sheba, ). The first three of these titles were collected in the bulky tome Het gezin Van Puynbroeckx (The Van Puynbroeckx Family, ). In Marguerite the first-person narrator tries to break free of

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the close bond with her domineering grandmother, by whom she has been brought up. In Celestien it is the turn of the maid who has lived with the Van Puynbroeckx family for years as a kind of shadow mother, to reveal her view of the family history. In De koningin van Sheba the central figure is the precocious girl Ciska Van Puynbroeckx, who grows up with her uncle and aunt. However, the masterpiece in the series is the unsurpassed De vermaledijde vaders, which won Van Paemel the Triennial State Prize for Prose in . For that matter, the writer has never lacked recognition. Her first book, Amazone met het blauwe voorhoofd (Amazon with the Red Forehead, ) was awarded a prize for the year’s best début, and in  she was raised to the nobility. In De vermaledijde vaders the main character, Pamela, gives an account of her first years of life as an unwanted child up to her exile as an elderly writer in an unspecified country. That story, however, is not limited to an individual history, as is generally the case in the previously-mentioned books, but gradually assumes the form of both a novel of a generation, in which the downfall of a dynasty is depicted, and a historical novel about the meaning of the two World Wars in Flanders. For that reason the novel is often mentioned in the same breath as Hugo Claus’ Het verdriet van België of  (translated into English as The Sorrow of Belgium by Arnold Pomerans, ). Pam writes in order to exorcize the legacy of violence left to her by her collaborator father. At the same time she establishes her truth in a testament of words for later generations: Has it struck you that I immediately start talking about war? Not a theme you choose, you more or less imposed it on me. But I know that I’d do anything not to have to do what I have to do. Sit in an igloo and write that sodding book… Because otherwise I’ll never have another chance to put a blessed word down on paper. And in that way I’ll have to take measures against oblivion. Prove urgently that I exist. Because life as such was never an acquired right, let alone something obvious, but something I have to fight for. Conquer day by day. Break out of the cordon surrounding me. I order my existence between memoirs and testament. Between demolishing and constructing. Against the “accursed fathers” Van Paemel sets the “blessed mothers”, to which there is an explicit reference in the subitle of Celestien. This why her work is often characterized as feminist, and is even labeled as a Flemish variant on the French écriture féminine. The striking staccato rhythm, the explicit attention to the female body, the associative style in which subjective experiences and the linguistic abilities of the main characters predominate, and the resolute choice of a form of femininity that is synonymous with love and life, give Van Paemel as an author a unique place in the the Flemish literary landscape. Already in one of her earliest novels, De confrontatie (The Confrontations, ), the writer plays the traditional Zoë off against the rebellious Mirjam in order to gain an insight into the identitity of modern woman. For anyone who adheres to the philosophy that women are the guarantors of life, the suicide of a daughter is bound to be a severe blow. Van Paemel integrated that traumatic event into the novel De eerste steen (The First Stone, ), an expanded version of the

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novella of the same name that was the  Book Week gift. The main character, May, hides in Jerusalem after her daughter has thrown herself under a train. There she stays in the basement flat of Hagar, a Dutch woman of Jewish origin, with whom she begins a relationship. May is consumed by grief and feelings of guilt: Mothers had long arms. May’s had been hacked off. From now on there would be a shield between her and things. As if she were the carrier of a dreadful secret. She hadn’t been able to keep her child alive. Distrusted herself when she laughed. If she went on living, she did so to deny that her child was right. Beyond death she went on showing her how to live. She went on believing that it could have been different. The pain that it might of been a lack of love. Impotence. Those who live triumph over death. That rule had been drummed into May. Whoever holds out longest deserves respect. Friend and foe may depend upon the last honors. Jerusalem – etymologically the city of peace – can offer no respite, since it is riven by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. May moves back to Flanders and then back again to Israel, but the past continues to dog her steps. In two other novels published after De vermaledijde vaders, the pacifist tone is continued, but is no longer limited to the Flemish context. In Rozen op ijs (Roses on Ice, ) Perla goes to the North Pole as a member of a group of environmental activists. While pre- tending to carry out scientific research into whale populations, she is to pinpoint clandestine nuclear submarines. However, that mission seems little more than a pretext for binding the great diversity of action into a coherent plot structure. The central element is the inner quest of the main character, who focuses on the higher aim of nurturing nature, now that her child has grown away from her. Het verschil (The Difference, ) is a partially fic tionalized account of Van Paemel’s journey to Sarajevo as chair of the Balkans Campaign, which provides humanitarian aid to war victims in former Yugoslavia. The title refers to the differences – in language, religion, skin color – that lead to violent conflicts. Van Paemel introduces the speaking Lippizaner horse, Siglavy, who takes the main character to the imaginary land of Kungary, once again a kind of evocation of Flanders ravaged by the Second World War. The parallels between the Balkans and Kungary are intended to highlight the universal nature of war. In Het kind met de alwetende ogen (The Child with the Omniscient Eyes, ), Van Paemel wrote texts to accompany photographs of children in war situations. In the pamphlet Te zot of te bot (Too Thick or Too Thick-Skinned, ) the author expresses her personal opinion on the debate raging in the Dutch-speaking world on the bankruptcy of the multi-cultural society. Her sparring partner is Katrijn from Utrecht, a variant of Punch’s nagging wife Judy from the puppet show, who makes shockingly recognizable black-and-white pronouncements. Although this device invites a dialogue, the pamphlet mainly has the tone of a rhetorical monologue, in which Van Paemel not only lashes out at intolerant and culturally relativist citizens, but also leaves us in no doubt that a writer cannot afford to sit on the sidelines:

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Then it becomes clear that writing is not a non-committal activity and that literature gives shape to culture. And peaceful co-existence will depend on the evolution of culture. The word liberates, but it brings its own obligations. The writer need not be a hero, but he (or she) does give a clarion call. And Van Paemel’s “clarion call” is given with unrivaled panache.

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Everyday Horror

Mensje van Keulen 1946 jaap goedegebuure

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ensje van keulen’s early work was regularly labeled as “parlour realism” by critics, and linked to late-nineteenth-century writers like Frans Coenen, Arnold Aletrino and Johan de Meester. Like the anti-heroes of her predecessors, Van Keulen’s characters are trapped in circumstances to which their origin and character have condemned them. When they try to escape, they realize only too quickly that the effort is futile. Willem Bleeker, the well-behaved clerk from Bleekers zomer (Bleeker’s Summer, ), returns after just a few days to his family and his colleagues, on whom in a fit of resolution he thought he had turned his back. Hanna, the main character of Van lieverlede (Little by Little, ), who has stayed at home and undertaken the care of a sick and tyrannical mother, doesn’t even try to take her life into her own hands. She waits passively for the patient to die and then refuses to answer the door. The same grey sphere permeates Engelbert (). Here the story turns on two sisters and their husbands. One sister has withdrawn from the carnal side of marriage from pure Catholic bigotry, the other is a resentful witness of the atrophy of her husband’s libido. What makes this novel especially oppressive is the petit-bourgeois atmosphere of the s, which is graphically evoked not only through the prevailing taboo on sexuality, but is also embodied by a chaplain who excels in pious homilies and penitential sermons. Engelbert features the everyday horror by which Mensje van Keulen has said she was obsessed even as a child. The title figure of this novel is a butcher and his bloody occu pation evokes an immense dread in at least one of the characters. This is a foretaste of the horrific effects which were to play a large part in the murder story De rode strik (The Red Bow Tie, ) and the children’s novel Vrienden van de maan (Friends of the Moon, ). In the collection of travel stories De lach van Schreck (Schreck’s Laugh,), Van Keulen reports on her attendance at a meeting of the Dracula Society and her search for the grave of Bram Stoker, the spiritual father of Dracula. Prompted by the death of Van Keulen’s mother, the autobiographically structured book Olifanten op een web (Elephants in a Web, ) appeared. Besides a passionate in memoriam it is also a defense of her writing and views on literature, which have fre quently been attacked. She lashes out fiercely at her critics, in her perception a class of people “who rant against the bourgeoisie, while they themselves are stuffed full of

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respectability and prejudice. Intellectuals understand nothing about other people, all their frustrations leave no room for that. They don’t cry, because that ‘lacks class’ and because such sentiments are the province of the simple-minded.” Mensje van Keulen’s main forte is the short story. She once admitted that all her novels actually originate in five-finger exercises on a small scale. It does not require great literary insight to recognize that this is precisely where she has gained a certain virtuosity. A typical example of her narrative gift is ‘De sleep’ (The Tow), included in the collection De ketting (The Chain, ). With a minimum number of words Van Keulen is able to evoke a maximum degree of tension. The story concerns a son visiting his old mother who lacks the courage to tell her that his marriage is on the rocks. ‘Het huis’ (‘The House’, also in De ketting) shows the impact a divorce can have on children through apparently irrelevant details. Marital misery also dominates the novels Overspel (Adultery, ) and De gelukkige (The Happy One, ). Although Van Keulen always tends to stress that her work has very few points of contact with her personal life, she occasionally does draw on her own experiences. The months spent in the exclusive artists’ boarding house De Pauwhof in Wassenaar provided her with the material for the satirical novel De laatste gasten (The Last Guests, ). The greater part of this amusing book consists of table conversations, which are recorded as observed by the maid, Florrie. She gathers enough information to be able to construct a complete network of relationships and track down a number of deceits, machinations and intrigues. Florrie soon realizes that most guests are not what they pretend to be. They have little or nothing to do with the pursuit of art, and with the aid of varying names and identities they are able to extend their stay much longer than they are allowed. Semblance and reality are constantly changing places, particularly in the person of Emile Waterman, a charlatan who presents himself as an eminent art connoisseur. After he has been unmasked and has to beat a retreat, the conflicts he has sparked continue to rage so violently that it results in the closure of the boarding house. Besides novels and stories for adults and children and a book on the changing sexual identity of her friend and fellow-writer Maarten ’t Hart (Geheime dame/Secret Lady, ), Mensje van Keulen has also written narrative poetry. Lotgevallen (Adventures, ), a collection of ballads, is thematically related to the novel Van lieverlede; De avonturen van Anna Molino (The Advntures of Anna Molino, ) is a picaresque novel in verse about an indomitable and utterly bad woman, who gives even the devil a hard time.

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Death, Loss, Betrayal

Doeschka Meijsing 1947 jaap goedegebuure

T

he ancient greeks knew enough about drama not to show the worst. Death and horror were narrated in retrospect or thought about aloud; the bodies remained out of sight. Classical views on drama and decorum have remained in force to this day as a proof of good taste. Tragedy is not necessarily manifested in blood and tears; a pair of clogs that indicate where the little child has fallen in the water can be just as powerful. Those who find this example (taken from Johan de Meester’s story ‘De klompjes’/’The Clogs’) too much of a tear jerker may be referred to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In the years that pass between the first and third part of this novel, three members of the ten-strong Ramsay family die, but the reader of this is informed only in passing. The bridging intermezzo is more a lyrical evocation of the passing of time than a chronicle of actual events. In De weg naar Caviano (The Road to Caviano, ), Doeschka Meijsing deals with death in the same way. The novel’s action takes place in two episodes. A group of five male friends (Philippus, Mourits, Jona, Tijl and an unnamed writer), three women (Mar, Elisa and Kate) and a dog (Joep) are spending three weeks in spring in a house on Lago Maggiore. During a hike through the mountains, Kate disappears without trace, but we learn of this only five years later, when the writer, now the owner of the house, summons the friends to celebrate Kate’s fiftieth birthday. The drama of her death is mentioned only indirectly, via the memories of the eight survivors – the dog is emphatically one of them. As in To the Lighthouse, the focus is not on an individual death, but on its effect on the group. Without Woolf or Meijsing telling us in so many words, the equilibrium is lost both among the Ramsays after the loss of Mrs Ramsay, and among the group of Dutch friends after the loss of Kate. But whereas in To the Lighthouse the father and his children are tacitly reconciled just before the end of the novel, as their house guest Lily Briscoe, very symbolically, adds the decisive brushstrokes to a painting begun years earlier, in De weg naar Caviano the group of friends disintegrates and even Mar’s willingness to make sacrifices cannot prevent this. “She thinks she can record everything with her watercolours, thought Tijl, as he took in in the few dark lines on the sheet of paper that Mar smuggled out of his sight.’”

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Doeschka Meijsing has always been intensely preoccupied with death and loss. The death of loved ones and the loss of love dominate her work, alone and in combination. Tijger, Tijger! (Tiger, Tiger! ) follows these themes, as does Utopia (), De beproeving (The Ordeal, ), Vuur en zijde (Fire and Silk, ) and Over de liefde (On Love, ). Wherever Meijsing combines death and loss, betrayal, already prominent in her first two novels, Robinson () and De kat achterna (In Pursuit of the Cat, ), is never far away; because whether you die or leave, you leave those left behind in the lurch. A second constant in Meijsing’s work is her love for the world’s most ancient stories. In De beproeving she plays with the story of the recalcitrant prophet, Jonah. In Utopia, Thomas and Doesjka alternately work on the Dictionary of the Dutch Language and read out newspaper reports and tell each other fairy tales, anecdotes and personal experiences. They are all petites histoires, but as such they are drops of water in which a whole universe is reflected. Thomas, with his exact and rational intelligence, stands for precise memory; Doesjka in her turn represents imagination, which transforms memories into emblematic images and is able to incorporate past history into the here and now. Typical of her attitude is her comment on the craftsman who struck an antique coin that Thomas has brought back with him from one of his journeys. What I see through the magnifying glass is what cannot be seen without it: in the striking of the coin an expression has been created in the boy’s profile, so that the bronze radiates something approaching reality. What a surprise – under the hammer the boy’s face has acquired an expression of surprise. And for that sole reason there is something alive under the magnifying glass that opens a chink in my mind. What Doesjka experiences here was described by Huizinga as “the historical sensation”: across a span of many centuries we are sometimes able to close the gap between ourselves and people from a distant past, thanks to an object that bridges the distance. In De tweede man (The Second Man, ), that is a papyrus scroll preserved in brick fom the third century B.C. Robert, the protagonist in this novel, has inherited it from his brother Alexander. It is the text on the scroll that fires his imagination. It appears to be a letter from Aristotle to Hephaiston. Both figures are closely linked to the person of Alexander the Great, one of them as a pedagogue, the other as his bosom friend. Robert’s attention focuses on Hephaistion, “the second man” behind the great conqueror. History has little to say about him, but precisely because his character is a blank slate, he requires some flesh on his bones. Robert, a professional Classicist, starts work on a novel about Hephaiston, but identifies so strongly with his character and starts concentrating increasingly on Alexander the Great and via him on his own brother Alexander. In this way he becomes entangled in a web of stories, from the Classical past and the personal present. In addition the historical imagination manages to penetrate so deeply into autographical experiences and memories that the two Alexanders merge and the narrator himself becomes the second man. And then there is Plato. We know that the philosopher became a permanent element in Doeschka Meijsing’s intellectual baggage at secondary school, since we are told so by the narrator who appears in the story ‘Temporis acti’ from her first collection De hanen (The

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Cockerels, ). Meijsing is fascinated by the combination and clash of the Platonic pair Appearance and Reality. It is no accident that she also has a great affinity with Simon Vestdijk (-), the author of the classic novel Terug tot Ina Damman (Back to Ina Damman, ), who led the way in evoking a dreamed love embodied by the fourteen-year-old Ina Damman (I.D. or IDea). The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges also contributes to Meijsing’s awareness of time and oblivion. A counterweight to Borges’ skepticism is found in Augustine’s view that memory houses palaces and treasure chambers full of recollections. In her début, then, Doeschka Meijsing compiled her own canon from three millennia of literature. Strikingly, all the writers in that canon sing to the tune of semblance and reality. A playful adaptation of Plato’s theory of Ideas can be found in Meijsing’s book Beste vriend (Dear Friend, ). The thrust of the argument is based on a phenomenon with which every dog lover is familiar: the sobbing sound that escapes a dog’s throat while it is asleep and is accompanied by uncontrollable tremors of the body and head. Behind its eyelids there must be something to see that strikes fear and fascinates, but what it is we shall never know. Our idea of the “dog’s dream” is no more than a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave: it suggests another world, but we shall never know exactly what it is like. Doeschka Meijsing links the dog’s dream to the elusive reality that some dub “higher spheres”, while for others it is a delusion. But even delusions have a right to exist, if only because they constantly permeate sober reality. They belong to an area that usually manifests itself in the most ordinary and at the same time in the most incomprehensible things, grief at simple and completely undramatic childhood memories, wild longings that are triggered by a minute and a half’s piano music, or the recognition implied in the look of a chance passer-by. What drives the narrator of Beste vriend also motivates the heroes and heroines of Meijsing’s other work. They want the impossible and to that end desire a Utopia. But because they know that their dreams can only be realized if they remain dreams, they live in accordance with “the laws of imagination” which teach us that the secret of Utopia lies in a well-rounded story.

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All that Makes Us Happy and Unhappy

Astrid Roemer 1947 michiel van kempen

U

p until about  women played only a very modest role in Dutch Caribbean literature – the literature of Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. That has changed, indeed to such an extent that the Dutch Caribbean literature of the twenty-first century is dominated by female authors. Many of the new female prose writers modeled themselves on the woman who like none other set her seal on the last quarter of the twentieth century: Astrid Roemer. Astrid Roemer, born in  in the Surinamese capital Paramaribo, made her début with a volume of poetry in , but gained wider recognition mainly after she had settled permanently in the Netherlands in . She took sides emphatically in numerous social debates. She gave readings and lectures and sat on panels on such subjects as black culture, immigrants, racism, the Third World and the position of women. She presented political and cultural programs, was a frequent guest on radio and TV and had a short (and not very successful) career as a council member in The Hague. However, above all she was a writer. She published stories, novellas and novels, plays and collections of poetry, song lyrics and columns, essays and reviews. Of course Roemer was controversial, with her idiosyncratic, polemical and sometimes extremely vicious views, but she was also controversial because she was able to create a completely unique literary universe. “I’m married to Surinam, the Netherlands is my lover, I have a homosexual relationship with Africa and I’m inclined to have flings with every other country”, is a pronounce ment of Roemer’s that can be found on the blurb of many of her novels. She does more than define the position of a Surinamese woman who from the status of a migrant has assumed a cosmopolitan attitude. Roemer tries to track down people’s essence. She positions human beings according to how they manifest themselves in experiences in different environments: the individual in relation to the uniquely personal, in relation to his imme diate environment (family, relations, friends), to the social institutions and finally to the world and humanity in the wide sense. The same factors play a part on all these levels, albeit in different ways: race, racial awareness and racism; sex, sexual determination and sexism; history, colonialism and anti-colonialism; nationality, nationalism and universalism; origin, class, class consciousnes and class struggle; traditionalism, emancipation, freedom, feminism.

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The early novel Neem mij terug Suriname (Take Me Back, Surinam, ) – rewritten as Nergens ergens (Nowhere Somewhere, ) – is a typical immigrant novel, told in a tradition ally chronological way. The narrative revolves around Benny, a Surinamer who comes to the Netherlands, is unable to find work because of his dark skin and tries to keep afloat materially and emotionally on the wrong side of the tracks. All the well-known immigrant motifs are incorporated into the work: racism, discrimination, loss of one’s roots, the coldness of the Dutch, the addictive effect of prosperity, the way people change. But ultimately the story is about the search for love and happiness. Benny knows that he will only find his happiness with his sweetheart in Surinam. The people in Roemer’s books often have various relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual, and they associate as frequently with black people as with white. Noenka, in the novel Over de gekte van een vrouw (On a Woman’s Madness, ), seems to be the first, large-scale realization of this view of life: she is a young woman who comes into conflict with the traditional values of society, family and religion. In relationships – with her parents, with her husband Louis, her childhood friend Ramses and later with the Dutch-Asian woman Gabriëlle – she looks for stability and freedom, moving towards a constantly new balance of power. Torn between the Christian world and that of winti (the Afro-Surinamese religion), between emancipation and tradition, and lost amid various relationships, Noenka eventually winds up in a psychiatric institution, while her husband is the victim of a disastrous combination of circumstances. Over de gekte van een vrouw can be regarded as one of the first postmodern novels in Caribbean literature. Poetry, a diary, letters, historical documents and narrative passages are strung together achronologically and in different typefaces into a book that both expresses the confusion of Noenka’s psyche and the conviction that stories narrated in a linear way can never adequately represent reality. In this she is related to such authors as Toni Morrison (Jazz), Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow) and Alice Walker (Meridian and The Color Purple – which Roemer adapted as a solo theater piece entitled The Purple Blues). The dialogues also contribute to the dislocation of language. They consist of short, alternating speeches, without it being clear who is speaking. In the novella Alles wat gelukkig maakt (All that Makes You Happy, ), about a woman confronted with AIDS, there is a dialogue eight pages long, without any indication of who is saying what. Roemer deliberately flouts conventions on style, imagery, character development, plot, structure and hence also the traditional notions of epic, lyric and drama. With its multiple ambiguities Roemer’s work can be said to belong to the écriture féminine; she dismisses linearity, unambiguousness and chronlogy as masculine. In her work post- immigrant problems are at most one component of a generalhuman set of problems, though immigrant motifs are still present. A development of Roemer’s vision of life and death is given in the novel Levenslang gedicht (Lifelong Poem, ), which when reprinted in  was renamed Een naam voor de liefde (and which was translated into English as A Name for Love by Rita Gircour, but unfortunately never found a British or American publisher). The novel is written as an account written by a Surinamese woman and addressed to a dead woman friend. Living in the Netherlands, she knows she has freed herself from the stifling family ties of the past. At the same time she reflects constantly on

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her past in Surinam and on the bonds linking her to the people around her: she sees her marriage in a different light when a Jamaican woman X. comes to stay. In Part Two we see her childhood and adolescence in pre-independence Surinam, and in the third part she visits the country after the  coup to bury her friend, who has died in a car crash. In her confessions the woman constantly tries to take account of the paradox that death is a part of life. The two women are diametrically opposed: I against you, static against dynamic, one is searching for stability, the other rebels against her parents’ milieu and, as a lesbian, against the heterosexual life. In order to seek out the essence of what it is to be human, Roemer uses metaphor. She is not concerned about a realistic representation of actions and dialogues, but wants a reordering of empirical experiences. Because metaphor transcends the concrete, it is better suited to expressing the universal human, even though that metaphor is personally colored. Symbols representing female strength, fertility, self-fulfilment and consolation (blood, water, mirrors, flowers) are particularly frequent. The trilogy of novels that Astrid Roemer published in the final years of the twentieth century – which were published in a single volume in  under the blanket title Roemers drieling (Roemer’s Triplets) – is generally recognized as the author’s magnum opus. The three novels Gewaagd leven (Daring Life, ; an excerpt in English translation appeared in the magazine Callaloo, , no. ), Lijken op Liefde (Looks Like Love, ) and Was Getekend (Signed, ) describe the genesis and decay of the modern nation of Surinam. Together they form an extremely complex tissue of characters and relationships. The backdrop is the nationalist s, the s (independence) and s (military dictatorship, civil war, economic malaise). Roemer exposes the roots of the whole tragic period: the colonial traumas, the incapsulated relationships in a small society, the Creole male who corrupts his ideals. In this complex narrative Roemer wanted make it clear that no-one is free of guilt in a young, non-viable country. The failure of the Republic of Surinam has its roots in the past. Three historical events play an important role: of course the military coup of  up to and including the December killings of ; the Killinger plot, the coup d’état planned by the Hungarian Vaclav Killinger in , which showed the same spirit of change as the military coup of ; and finally the conspiracy in the s to assassinate the charismatic popular leader, Jopie Pengel. Actual names, however, are not mentioned, since Roemer’s aim is to create archetypes in her fictional story and not portraits of historical figures. The final part of the trilogy takes place partly at an earlier period than the other two novels: from the s to the s. Since her trilogy, Roemer has published only a novella and a purely autobio graphical book. A number of her stories and poems have appeared in English-language anthologies, though of her novels only Lijken op Liefde has been translated into German, and won her the LiBeratur Prize, awarded since  by the Christuskirche Ecumenical Centre in Frankfurt to focus attention on literature from other cultures.

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The Vulnerability of Beauty

Anneke Brassinga 1948 odile heynders

I

n  the poet, essayist and translator Anneke Brassinga published a Dutch version of Sylvia Plath’s celebrated poetry collection Ariel. It was a subtle and accurate translation, which conveyed both the power of Plath’s poems and Brassinga’s own distinctive voice. Brassinga chose word combinations, rhythms, constructions and sounds that were all her own, and yet she wrote later in an essay included in the collection Bloeiend puin (Blossoming Ruins, ) of how in the first instance she had lost herself in Plath’s work: Full of symbiotic certainty, my wandering spirit ventured into Plath’s verses, filled with a death urge as they were, as if the long-yearned for homecoming awaited me there, the realization of suffering as the most sublime form of vitality. […] The pleasure of translating played a trick on me. […] Much too late I came to the conclusion that one must use cool-headed reason and at any rate must be constantly aware that everyone else is another person. Brassinga stresses the necessary distance between poet and poem, and between translator and poet. The language (words and images), the technique, and the diction must be liberated and objectified. Writer and reader should free themselves from the text. More than many other Dutch poets, Anneke Brassinga is able to analyze and fathom other people’s styles. She is a typical example of the writer as reader, as were Joseph Brodsky and Jorge Luis Borges. Moreover, her work testifies to a profound insight into the operation of language, and she tries to activate that language in a way that maximizes its potential. Demonstrating in words and images the fragility of beauty is fundamental to Brassinga’s work. In poems, in essays, and in various comments on other writers, she describes aesthetic experiences. She dissects what beauty is and how it suddenly appears and just as suddenly vanishes again. Beauty can be found in nature, chance observations, forgotten texts, and in the kind of thought that is triggered by literature. By definition, beauty is connected with the question of “how to live”. If you knew the answer, according to Brassinga, you could banish all ugliness. And, finally, poetry is linked to experiment, as the poet unambiguously puts it in Timiditeiten (Timidities, ):

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And we just go on puzzling about beauty that’s as if unmade but has to be seduced into entering our chicken coop. Brassinga’s career began in the s, when she translated work by Vladimir Nabokov and Herman Broch. From  onwards she published eight volumes of verse, as well as four books of prose: essays, diary fragments and reader’s notes. Jointly with the photographer Freddy Rikken, she produced a volume of photos and poems and a book of letters. Brassinga is hard to pigeonhole, although she has often been grouped with the postmodernists because of the experimental and intertextual form of her work. It is significant that the various genres she practises are closely linked and often merge. Ideas from prose texts return as images in the poems; the process of writing poetry is commented on in essays. The reading of predecessors’ texts leads to rewriting. Brassinga has a preference for forgotten texts, by, for example Mandelstam, Diderot or Forster. Her work exudes a passion for literature, which the author needs in her daily life, in order to survive its often depressing complications. Painful memories constantly resurface from the daily round, as here in a description of her mother’s shopping bag: Shopping bags, belonging to a woman who has departed on her last journey. In every zipped compartment of her many bags large and small a change of underwear – as if something might befall you en route. Having shed all she now rests in the earth, in a warm grey vest. The message my mother left behind: ‘forgive me’. Change of underwear: old expression, old woman. Sometimes the bottom falls out of your bag, for good. Pain is bearable if words can be found for it, which is why literature is a survival mechanism. Brassinga writes personal poetry without exposing feelings that are all too intimate. Irony is never far away, and tragic memories are written about in veiled terms, as, for example, her experience of anorexia (“fasting to the point where it becomes a passion”). She makes fun of the self, and one feverish self-portrait is entitled ‘Decomposition’: People are startled when they see me: so am I. That fixed, peering, burning look, and the hasty gait of someone driven only by the desire to be another kilometer further on, so they can empty another panorama like a tin of apple puree. […] You never become anything more or less than a tuft of sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire or temporarily carried on the wind. God’s breath: it sounds wonderfully luxuriant, but it’s merciless and blind. Wit and pain are interwoven; the self must remain hidden. Irony suits Brassinga well because it is coincidental and both heightens and relativizes personal existence. Conscious writing keeps feeling at a distance, though emotion lurks from the outset in the observations of details and trivialities. Writing is also a way of achieving alienation, the blossoming of language freed from syntactic and semantic conventions. The result is a cheerful and almost unrestrainable scattering of images and fragments. As we see in the poem ‘Vleermuis’ (‘Bat’):

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Snapshears, you never look round while you snip ever smaller clothes for Emperor Sun; where does all that pink swirl to, fluffier ends of severed ribbons with which night has been opened? I shall see it, when I see the light by way of mutilation, still tied to the Lord’s hat I may sing along with those who’ve been robbed, humbled – mayn’t I?

There is scarcely any coherent meaning in this poem. The notions of snapshears, clothes, severed ribbons, mutilate, humbling can, it’s true, be located in the same semantic field – something is divided into pieces by an action – but in the second part of the poem we see another semantic field superimposed on it: the archaic image of the Lord’s hat, being allowed to sing along, “seeing the light”. What the possible reference to Dutch religious culture – the distinguished gentlemen in their hats who on Sundays go to church, where there is singing? – has to do with snipping, is not clear. But in Brassinga’s work a poem does not stand alone. Four years after the publication of this poem in Zeemeeuw in boomvork (Seagull in Fork in Tree, ), in her essay collection Hapschaar (Snapshears), she describes this originally French word, derived from happer (to grab) and chair (flesh). This description itself goes in all directions. Brassinga quotes Van Dale’s standard Dutch dictionary as giving the meaning law officer, a pinchpenny, some one who talks nonsense, someone anxious to assert himself or a treasurer. In addition, she quotes some lines of Sylvia Plath: “They buzz like blue children/in nets of the infinite,/ Roped in at the end by the same/Death with its many sticks” (‘Totem’). If we link the essay ‘Hapschaar’ back to the poem ‘Vleermuis’, we might imagine that a gentleman dressed in black is being described, who has power over others (he can humble them). Perhaps he is Death itself. The ‘I’ is allowed to sing along, but he has the last word. Words in Brassinga’s works must be looked up in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Sometimes they are neologisms or contain complex intertextual references. This poetry is not intended as relaxation, but as “labor”, getting down to work. Some critics call the poems hermetic, but they are not. There is more on the surface than one thinks, there is no existential truth hidden in the depths. Brassinga is a poet of the look, of consciously looking. But perception is complicated: an individual can never free himself from reality and contemplate it objectively from a distance. Critics praise Brassinga for the diversity of her work, for the poetry that plays on various registers and switches from seriousness to humor. Yet from the beginning it has been clear that the author subscribes to a view of literature that is fairly constant. Everything is usable as the raw material for writing, but ultimately literature must touch on beauty, which embraces both coherence and disintegration. Language is the foundation of literature, but language has to be activated by a consciousness that knows that several ‘I’s’ dwell in different layers of being and time. The inner self is a closed universe where pain and love are located, writes Brassinga in relation to her reading of Proust. The writer,

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poet, reader tries to open her universe and to keep disillusion at bay by believing in the power of literature. Ultimately this creates an “intellectual movement in which the fairly gruesome outside world that we know from the facts, a world of extremely pathetic but sometimes splendidly decked-out puppets and ventriloquists, is seen in a different light.”

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Ironic, but not Frivolous

Marja Brouwers 1948 saskia pieterse

M

arja brouwers’ writing testifies to great familiarity with the history of Western literature, and in particular with the history of the novel. In the essay ‘Anatomie van een stamboom’ (‘Anatomy of a Family Tree’, ), Brouwers argues that the novels of Fielding, Sterne and Cervantes “were inspired by the laughter of the clown”: The myth of the novel is that of comedy. Comedy undermines. Inevitably we are confronted in the novel with an ironic structure. […] The irony of Cervantes has nothing to do with not taking things seriously. On the contrary, both his characters fully earn the right to demand serious attention for their point of view. The attitude based on such irony, but without any intention of taking sides, is determined purely by technical narrative considerations. We have no need to pass any moral or philosophical judgment on it. In her novels, Brouwers makes use of the ironic structure that she here attributes to Cervantes. Her main characters – all cultured, highly educated men – have the traits of Don Quixote. They believe stubbornly in the correctness of their view of the world, in a desperate attempt not to lose their grip on reality. These men are opposed by lovers, friends and enemies, who of course try to convince the Don Quixotes of their unreasonable attitude. Yet this never leads to a simple unmasking of the main characters. Brouwers remains faithful to the idea that it is not the responsibility of the novel to take sides, but to present incom patible worlds and points of view. Despite this ironic structure, Brouwers’ novels are anything but frivolous. Havinck () has a motto taken from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ and ends with a reference to La Città Dolente, the front porch of hell where, according to Dante, the insignificant must languish, the “empty silhouettes” too colorless for either praise or blame. The main character, Robert Havinck is such an empty silhouette. The novel begins on the day of the cremation of his wife Lydia, who has committed suicide. Havinck, a lawyer, is seemingly unmoved by her death, and goes straight back to work. Marriage to the narcissistic Lydia has given him plenty of practice in such indifference:

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In short, for the last three or four years he had gone round his own house in an armor of icy indifference, only physically present, in order to survive undamaged under all the assaults on his self-respect. In the long run she’d come to dislike him. The most important adversary of the petrified lawyer is the elusive visual artist Rafael Payaso. Havinck doesn’t take Rafael seriously, let alone his art. Yet this Payaso (Spanish for clown) is the only one who is able to shock Havinck momentarily by constructing a commissioned work of art that for a second creates the impression that Lydia has come back to life. The brief second in which the lawyer experiences a direct emotion not tempered by irony, is an effect of a work of art produced by the malicious humor of the artist-clown. In her novels De lichtjager (The Light-Hunter, ) and Casino (), Brouwers uses, in addition to the ironic structure, the technique of “anatomy” previously applied by Laurence Sterne in his Tristram Shandy, where he dissects the structure of the novel. In ‘Anatomie van een stamboom’ Brouwers argues that in so doing Stern achieves a satirical effect: The satirical aim is to stifle one’s pedantic targets under avalanches of their own jargon. In anatomy this theme can be extended into an encyclopaedic prose work in which a whole society or way of thinking is examined in terms of a securely established intellectual pattern. Brouwers applies this principle in De lichtjager, which describes the disintegration of the personality of the art historian Paul de Braak. Like the eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, De Braak starts writing letters to close friends and celebrities. However, De Braak is not capable of shaping even one epistle into a coherent whole. Instead, his reasoning becomes increasingly circuitous and his computer fills up with files that testify to the disintegration of his intellect. In Casino, which has the form of an “encyclopaedic prose work”, Brouwers goes a step further in dissecting the novel form. She places two men opposite each other: the journalist Rink de Vilder and shipbuilder-cum-criminal Philip van Heemskerk. De Vilder meets Van Heemskerk by chance and becomes fascinated by his world, the world of big money. Rink considers himself immune to the blandishments of the charismatic but totally manipulative Van Heemskerk. But he overestimates himself, and in the novel Rink’s corruption is mercilessly recorded. For a start, he accepts, without much protest, a “present” from Van Heemskerk: a flat in the center of Amsterdam. The journalist knowingly signs for a fictitious mortgage, aware that Van Heemskerk can use it to launder drug money. At the same time De Vilder, in his capacity as an investigative journalist, tries to expose criminal networks. The story of the two men is interwoven with reflections on the seven deadly sins, astrology, pornography, and the development of the Netherlands since the s. Casino shows the operation of a world where fictional constructions have finally replaced the production of concrete goods. This trade in fictional constructions does admittedly provide great wealth, but it also creates systems that increasingly run out of control and are increasingly difficult to monitor. This trend is evident first and foremost in the financial markets:

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Although natural wealth declined, prosperity increased everywhere, mainly because of the continued decoupling of money and gold – or any other concrete equivalent, a financial evolution that created quantities of capital that Karl Marx had never dreamed of. Together with this increasing prosperity comes the rise of the Internet, which in turn leads to large-scale reorganizations in politics, the media and business: Offices were being cleared, services privatized, service counters replaced by automated telephone information systems, responsibilities were being delegated, spread, trans ferred, or simply disappeared as if by magic. Letters began to write themselves, bills to dispatch themselves, and one policy decision after another began to take itself, without anyone having to agree personally with them or even to know anything about it. And this atrophy of responsibilities allows scope for the growth of worldwide criminal net works, which deftly exploit the absence of a political structure that might have controlled them: In this kind of dust cloud of disorientation financial circuits arise that are not subject to the influence of national governments or to the effective control of any qualified agency. This dust cloud of disorientation is the natural habitat of Van Heemskerk, who seems beyond the reach of judicial or journalistic control, not the least because his money has infiltrated all these domains. The Dutch reception of Casino was very mixed. The discussion centered on the discursive passages that constantly interrupt the narrative: had the writer become entangled in her own pretentiousness, or did these passages on the contrary ensure that the novel could be read as an intriguing exercise in cultural criticism? The critic Michaël Zeeman in de Volkskrant opted for the latter and enthused: “… in short, a novel for grown-ups, which takes the world seriously and deals with it accordingly.” Fellow-critic Pieter Steinz (NRC/ Handelsblad), however, complained about the digressions: The flow of the novel […] is seriously held up by them, and the writer emerges not only as a sourpuss […] but also as a kind of imitation Tom Wolfe, determined to ridicule the craziness of the Netherlands during the most recent fin de siècle, including the IRT police corruption scandal and (very topically) the untouchable status of the Hell’s Angels. Brouwers disagreed with the negative criticism, but also had reservations about the positive interpretation. She stressed that her novel is an autonomous work of art, not a vehicle for cultural criticism. The book is set in the s quite simply because topicality is an inherent feature of the genre:

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The fact that the story is set in the here and now, is in the nature of novel-writing, I think. Prose grows between the paving stones, like grass. As long ago as , Brouwers had made a plea for the autonomy of the work of art, and criticized the postmodern habit of subsuming literary art under the common denominator of “text”. In ‘De Herculesformule’ (‘The Hercules Formula’), a polemic with philosopher Piet Meeuse, she argues: The creative imagination in art cannot be defined as following this or that rule, or acting in accordance with this or that philosophy. It is an independent intellectual force […] Under the influence of Derrida, she claims, a type of literary study has emerged that all too easily approaches literature from a purely ontological perspective. Brouwers argues that the “epistemological engagement” of Joyce is more relevant to much modern prose than Heidegger’s ontology. At any rate her incisive prose shows that, despite all post modern skepticism, it is worthwhile giving serious consideration to the existence of an “independent intellectual force”.

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The Writer as Fictional Figure

Carl Friedman 1952 elsbeth etty

T

he fascinating thing about the Jewish writer Carl Friedman is that she doesn’t exist. She is a fictional character, created by Carla (Carolina) Klop, born and raised in Eindhoven, in a Catholic family. After her divorce from her American husband she used his Jewish surname as a pseudonym for her universally praised literary début Tralievader (; translated into English as Nightfather), a novella displaying considerable literary talent, in which a father passes his concentration camp syndrome on to his children. After the success of Tralievader, which was widely translated, Friedman not only gave her literary alter egos a Jewish background, but began presenting herself as a secondgeneration Jewish victim. As a columnist for the quality weekly Vrij Nederland and the daily Trouw, she inveighed against any suggestion of anti-Semitism and showed great interest in Jewish problems. Thus arose the myth that Friedman was a Jewish author, a myth that was extremely profitable for both her and her publishers, Van Oorschot. Until the bubble burst. When Friedman was “unmasked” by journalists in , it amounted to character assassination, not of her person, but of her writing. Her work was branded as inauthentic (which fiction quite often is). She had, it was claimed, played fast and loose with the inde scribable suffering of others and subsequently turned it into “Holocaust kitsch”. Friedman refused to comment and stopped publishing books and columns. Quite independently of her a discussion arose about whether her work, initially so highly regarded, could still be taken seriously. Meanwhile Tralievader and her second novel, Twee koffers vol (translated into English by Jeanette Ringold as The Shovel and the Loom) had been filmed, and together with a later volume of stories her work had been awarded the  E. du Perron Prize of the Municipality of Tilburg and the Arts Faculty of Tilburg University. However, for connoisseurs it had been clear from the outset that the novel Twee koffers vol () and the volume of stories De grauwe minnaar (The Grey Lover, ) lacked authenticity. The power of Tralievader lay in the very fact that it was left unclear why the narrator’s father had been in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Whether he had been arrested as a Jew, a Communist, a gypsy or a resistance fighter, is of as little relevance in this novella as the name of the camp where he suffered his traumas. It may be Auschwitz, Sobibor, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Neuengamme or one of the other gruesome locations, but for the little girl from whose mouth we learn of her father’s agony the word “camp” is clear enough.

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And that was precisely the source of the power of Friedman’s story, since terror is not tied to a single name. If someone says Auschwitz, they are also talking about Mauthausen, Treblinka and so on, and all the people slaughtered there. In Tralievader, Friedman claimed the Second World War not as an exclusively Jewish tragedy, so that virtually everyone who has been shaped by the concentration camp syndromes of parents and other loved ones, whether their camps were situated in the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, France or the Dutch East Indies, can recognize themselves in the book. In fifty chapters, Friedman describes how the ten-year-old main character and her older brothers Max and Simon grow up in the postwar Netherlands. Outside it is peacetime, but at home the war continues, because father Jochel is compelled to talk endlessly about his camp experiences. The children do their best to empathize with their father, but he treats them like strangers who will never understand him: ‘Why don’t you hit me then?’ Max yells at my father. ‘Just like the SS!’ My mother pulls him off his chair and starts pushing him toward the door. ‘Kick me to death, why don’t you!’ Max shouts over his shoulder. ‘Why don’t you gas me!’ Simon is pinching my arm. He’s doing his best not to burst into tears. My father gasps for air. ‘Come now, Ephraim,’ says my mother. She lays her hand on his, but he shakes it off and rubs his face. ‘What do you all want from me?’ he says. ‘It’s hard enough as it is.’ ‘I could easily eat a whole pound of cherries, I’m so hungry.’ ‘You, hungry?’ My father laughs. ‘You don’t even know the meaning of the word.’ ‘Yes, I do,’ says Max indignantly. ‘It’s when your stomach growls.’ My father shakes his head. ‘When you’re really hungry, it doesn’t growl, it gnaws. You’re completely empty inside and as limp as a punctured balloon.’ His eyes grow distant. ‘You can’t even begin to understand,’ he says. (translated by arnold and erica pomerans)

In Twee koffers vol, the philosophy student Chaja, the daughter of secular Jewish parents who have survived Auschwitz, is still struggling half a century after the Second World War with the Jewish identity imposed upon her by the Holocaust and present-day anti-Semitism: ‘Sometimes I think it’s my fault,’ I said glumly. ‘What is your fault?’ ‘That everywhere I run into people who are prejudiced against Jews. Sometimes they are just ignorant, but they all happen to cross my path. I meet them among the students, on the street, or when I go to a café. As though I attract them like a magnet.’

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The person speaking is obviously someone wallowing in the role of victim. Authors born after the war have quite frequently assumed that role, appropriately and inappropriately. Mostly inappropriately: one such emerged as the unsung hero of the so-called “nappy resistance” against the Nazis (by those too young to have taken an active part in the war), while another identified all too strongly with suffering not inflicted on them but their family, group or “people”. This led to a growing, and to begin with internalized, irritation which emerged in the s. In , the film director, columnist and provocateur Theo van Gogh, later murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist, who also ridiculed the “victimism” of Muslim immigrants, opened the attack on what in his view was parasitic literature. The film magazine Moviola published his polemical pamphlet ‘Een Messias Zonder Kruis’ (A Messiah without a Cross), in which the writer accused writer/film-maker Leon de Winter of using the six million dead to advertize his work and hence of exploiting his Jewishness. Van Gogh was not indicted for anti-Semitism. Eight years later another row blew up around Leon de Winter, when, in a dinner jacket and sporting miniature stars of David, he appeared in a TV commercial promoting his novel De ruimte van Sokolov (Sokolov’s Space). The student magazine Propria Cures responded by including a photo of De Winter in evening dress with a human bone in his hand in a montage of a mass grave from the Second World War. De Winter sued and won. These were distasteful and painful episodes. But nevertheless, Van Gogh and his followers expressed a widely held uneasy feeling that the war was being turned into show business and the Holocaust was being commercialized. The irritation at the literary exploitation of wartime suffering was never, though, directed at the autobiographically inspired work of first-generation war victims such as Gerhard Durlacher and Marga Minco. What began to niggle in the country where Anne Frank wrote her world-famous diary, were pathos-filled novels by authors born after the war. A distrust of such books arose, but debate about them was stifled as a result of discordant anti-Semitic overtones. In , when a brother of Carl Friedman’s confirmed that his sister had dreamt up her Jewish background, but revealed that their father had actually been in a concen tration camp because of resistance activities, it caused very little stir, although there were a few second-generation victims, including the writer Jessica Durlacher, who pilloried Friedman. In literary circles the debate on the question of whether a writer, Jewish or not, had the right to appropriate the tragedy of others, whether in fiction or otherwise, had more or less petered out. Carl Friedman’s “unmasking” provoked strikingly little compassion for the author, but rather vicarious shame: with her imagined Jewish tragedy she had held up a mirror to all those who in whatever way had capitalized on victimhood. Dutch literature of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is permeated with the discussion on the exploitation of the Holocaust. In his novel De verering van Quirina T. (The Honouring of Quirina T., ), the writer L.H. Wiener, himself marked by Jewish suffering, has his alter ego Van Gigch debate with actually existing people irrelevant to his narrative in order to sneer at fellow-writers like Jessica Durlacher, who in his view exploits her Jewish suffering for gain. In so doing, Wiener denies Durlacher, like himself the child of a Jewish war victim, what he permits himself with the suffering of his characters.

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Fortunately, neither Durlacher nor any other writer has allowed themselves to be silenced by such polemics. Meanwhile, Carl Friedman has also taken up the pen again. Recently she started publishing book reviews on Jewish issues in Trouw, as in the past. Her son, the DJ Aron Friedman, revealed in an interview with the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad how greatly his mother had suffered by being “dragged through the mire”. So ultimately she became a true victim. Of what exactly? If Friedman, or whatever she decides to call herself, is able to put that into words with her undeniable literary talent, she may yet grow into a great writer who with an expertise based on personal experience can give definition to the identity crisis of the postwar generation.

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Travelling in Order to Write

Lieve Joris 1953 odile heynders

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he work of the belgian writer Lieve Joris can be classified on the basis of two genre features: it is travel literature in which an account is given of distant and foreign places and it contains microstoria, stories of the day-to-day experiences of “ordinary” people. From her first publication, De Golf (The Gulf), a journalistic report of journeys in the area around the Persian Gulf, to her later books on Africa, Syria and Eastern Europe, Joris combines the personal stories of people she meets with observations on the political and social systems in the regions she visits. Although she seldom formulates an explicit opinion, Joris nevertheless positions herself as a typically postcolonial writer, who is interested in contemporary traces of imperial history, in the poignant differences between poverty and wealth, and in the self-confidence and self-denial of people in situations with no prospects. Joris is able to portray people in their daily surroundings without condemning them. She carries her own apolitical village background with her on her visits to communities in conflict zones elsewhere. “I grew up sheltered from great political dramas in a Flemish village in Belgium”, she writes in the foreword to the English translation of Het uur van de rebellen (The Rebels’ Hour, ), “but over the years I’ve grown familiar with the complex reality of this heart of Africa.” In everything she writes Joris makes it clear that she is neither able nor inclined to give an objective picture of complicated relationships; but nor does she wish to articulate her personal opinions on political issues. Her main aim is rather to travel, observe and tell stories. The strength of her work lies in the exact, detailed, and yet subtle descriptions of people and situations and in the preserving of a certain distance. She remains the outsider who is always moving on. With this style of writing she is following in the footsteps of her admired predecessor, the Polish writer, poet and journalist Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski (-). He wrote many travel books expressing his fascination with people rather than with places: “I would like to sketch […] not a portrait of the Other in general, in abstraction, but a picture of my Other […]. What is his world outlook, his view of the world, his view of Others – his view of me […]? After all, not only is he an Other for me, I am an Other for him too.” In her first book, De Golf, Joris makes a four-month journey through the rich oil states of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. In the s this was a world of oil, money, veiled women in fast cars, extreme luxury – falcons in air-conditioned

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cages – and intense boredom. In these surroundings Joris is able to meet scarcely any of the “ordinary” people that make her later work so fascinating, yet already we can see what will later give it such a unique flavor: the interest in absurd details and strange dialogues, the urge to make quick, short, precise characterizations. In Joris’ subsequent writing, especially on Africa, in the Congo of the dictator Mobutu and the rebel leader Kabila, the focus is on political conflicts impossible to disentangle that are accompanied by violence and fear. Initially, travelling through the Congo is suffused with nostalgia, as in Terug naar Congo (; translated into English as Back to the Congo), where she goes in search of traces of her missionary uncle who worked in this former private colony of the Belgian king Leopold II. But in Dans van de luipaard (; translated into English by Liz Waters as The Leopard’s Dance) and Het uur van de rebellen (; English translationThe Rebels’ Hour), there is no longer room for nostalgia. Joris becomes increasingly involved politically, so much so that in Het uur van de rebellen she suppresses her personal voice and centers the narrative perspective on the character of Assani, a young shepherd from the Banyamulenge tribe, who leaves his village and discovers he is a Tutsi. Although he is not interested in politics, he is forced to take sides in the bloody conflict on the border between Congo and Rwanda. Joris inhabits this victim who is also a culprit in a novel that is at the same time a poignant documentary. Joris’ style is direct and unadorned. Often the narrative voice picks out touching details. The author is particularly effective in dialogues that characterize the atmosphere and those talking; There’s José again. ‘Your girlfriend,’ he says to Floribert, ‘must never wear that T-shirt again in my presence.’ ‘What’s wrong with my T-shirt?’ ‘I worked for the Red Cross,’ he says, ‘I can’t stand pathetic children.’ ‘Pathetic? I’ve never looked at the boy like that. ‘It’s a shot by a famous Dutch photographer who travelled through the Congo just before independence,’ I say in annoyance. ‘You whites only see ugly things in Africa. It hurts me to look at it, it hurts me as much…’ he tries to find the words ‘… as the death of Dana.’ ‘Dana?’ ‘Lady Dana?’ A better description of Joris’ travelogues would be “travel writing”, a literary genre that can be linked to investigative journalism (what in the USA is known as “New Journalism”, anthropology and history). Her work is in the tradition of such travel writers as Bruce Chatwin on Patagonia and Australia (In Patagonia and The Songlines) and R. Kapu´sci´nski on his journeys through Africa. Joris started her career with the Dutch weekly Haagse Post. The journalistic blending of historical research, in-depth interviews, careful observation and lively descriptions are still obvious elements in her work. That also applies to the Orientalist focus associated with much travel writing: Joris is always interested in traces of colonial history that still color contemporary Africa. Origin, by definition, says something about your identity, even if you deny it:

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I notice that Bako becomes slightly irritated whenever his family’s Moorish back ground is mentioned. He considers himself one hundred percent Malian, and doesn’t think he has a single Moorish habit. That doesn’t go for Mariem and the children, though. When Kady comes back from visiting Nouakchott, she sometimes walks around for months in a melahfa, a translucent Moorish veil. ‘She has different faces,’ he says. (translated by sam garrett)

The cultural dimension of travel writing, the fathoming of different traditions and codes, is always visible in Joris’ work. An interesting aspect is that she exposes cultural differences by literary means such as composition, narrative structure and psychological plotting. Joris’ travelogues can be characterized as novels, because she gives the people she meets the same scope as fictional characters. Imagination is added to observation. The combination of journalistic and literary elements, of reportage and the add ition of imagination, is particularly successful in De poorten van Damascus (; English translation The Gates of Damascus), in which Joris, from an autobiographical perspective, describes a six-month stay in the Syrian capital. She lodges with a friend, a sociologist at the university, whose husband is in prison. Joris informs us about the political repression under the Assad government, daily life in Damascus, the role of Syria in the Arab world, fundamentalism and the position of women intellectuals in such a context. The firstperson narrator also gives details of her own background in a Belgian village, where she was brought up by her bonma. She has left her own family behind, and probably as result has a more acute view of her friend Hala and her domineering mother, brothers and daughter. The family is stifling, but motherhood helps you see things in perspective. East and West meet in the friendship between two women who have made disparate choices and for that very reason develop an emotional bond. The novel also offers a portrait of a marriage. Under difficult circumstances Hala keeps up appearances, although she realizes she is no longer in love with her husband. He is a prisoner of the government, she of a marriage in which she no longer believes. De poorten van Damascus has been reprinted many times (the th edition appeared in ) and that is undoubtedly partly due to the tone of friendship that informs the journalistic report. The book is a travel novel and personal document that tells us more about Syria than a great deal of reportage. At the end of the book we realize how Joris pulls the strings and at the same time plays with the conventions of a novel: If this were a novel, don’t you think this would be the moment when something dramatic would happen to the main characters, something which would draw all the threads of the narrative together? They’d die, or their lives would take some drastic turn. But here, everything just stays the same. (translated by sam garrett)

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Stories Are Hammer Blows

Renate Dorrestein 1954 agnes andeweg

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enate dorrestein’s fifth book, Het perpetuum mobile van de liefde (Love’s Perpetuum Mobile, ), is a crucial turning point in her steadily expanding body of work. Her first four novels are obscure, gruesome stories with supernatural elements, inspired by the tradition of the gothic novel. So the motto of Topaas, the protagonist of Noorderzon (Northern Sun, ), nicely summarizes Dorrestein’s view of the novel at the time: “Reality? Spare me that. Give me a good story any time.” Although even in later works Dorrestein retains a predilection for powerful (exciting) stories with gothic influences, after Het perpetuum mobile van de liefde they become increasingly realistic. Het perpetuum mobile van de liefde itself is a hybrid, a mixture of autobiography, feminist pamphlet and fiction, in which the narrator, Renate, who seems largely to coincide with her author, tries to come to terms with the link between her sister’s suicide and her own writing. Now that she is successful and her sister – who also wanted to be a writer – is dead, Renate is obsessed by the thought that she has profited of her sister’s death, and is feeding on her talent: Oh, a part of my […] head knows quite well that that thought is irrational, but the other part presses against my sister’s dead head, just like the teeth of a vampire slice into a white neck. I am drawn irresistibly by the content: the missing half of her talent. How I suck! And that crowns my feeling of guilt: I don’t lie there all night whispering to my dead sister for nothing […]. What I’m really doing is keeping her awake, […] As long as my bloodthirsty longing for recognition is not quenched, she must not rest. I’ll keep her undead. The book contains a childhood memory, which for various reasons can be seen as a key scene in Dorrestein’s work. Renate thinks back to the friendly man from the tobacconist’s who every Sunday afternoon took a bunch of kids to the woods in his car. She, aged nine, was one of his favourites, and was often allowed to sit on his lap:

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He says that when the sun shines on my hair, it’s just as if I have a crown on my head, with lots of lights in it. Just like St Lucia, he says, while his big warm hand fondles its way down my belly. I let my legs dangle on either side of his knees and curl my toes outwards with happiness. When one day she is too late to go to the woods, because her two-year-old sister walked too slowly, Renate is furious with her: If I hadn’t had to look after my disgusting sister this afternoon – miserable child, fatso, stuffed, stupid, lazy pig – then this afternoon I would have had a lap to sit on […]. I want to kick her and hit her, that blob of jelly […]. As far as I’m concerned my little sister can bloody well drop dead! The grown-up Renate hastens to dismiss this memory as false. Could she, who wanted the best for her sister, have even thought such a thing? Moreover, it is an unbearable thought that her secret wishes may have come true. Many characters in Dorrestein’s work are subject to a belief in magical thinking. In this childhood memory the germ of Renate’s guilt at surviving is sown: did she really love her sister enough? At the same time it is a recollection of an instant of rapture. What the reader will probably interpret as an assault, is for the young Renate a moment of happiness and closeness. While the grown-up Renate, as a feminist, fulminates against the romantic ideology that imprisons women, as a child she can allow herself to be desired without a care in the world. In other words, Dorrestein here sketches a pre-feminist paradise, a paradise to which her sister denied her entry. In this memory, Renate’s personal version of Man’s Fall, she loses her innocent relationship with her sister and the way to guilt-free enjoyment is cut off. We have now touched on a number of Dorrestein’s principal themes: evil, which often manifests itself in the shape of a fateful coincidence, survivor’s guilt, the battle of the sexes and the oppressiveness of the nuclear family. In later novels, too, like Het hemelse gerecht (The Heavenly Court of Law, but also The Heavenly Dish, ) and Een sterke man (A Strong Man, ), one can find sisters who have trouble breaking free of each other. The title of Dorrestein’s début – Buitenstaanders (Outsiders, ) – has proved programmatic. In her novels she consistently chooses the perspective of the outsider, the impotent figure who clashes with the prevailing norms and is confronted with the violence of fate. Often these characters are women, but even more often they are children. For example, Lucy in Het duister dat ons scheidt (The Dark that Divides Us, ) realizes: I was helpless and at their mercy, as you quite simply were as a child. You had no other option but to rely on your parents, the children before me had done the same, and those before them, right back to the first child on earth, at the very beginning of human history: a chain of children as far as the eye could see who simply had to wait in good faith for whatever decisions were taken, whatever deals were concocted and whatever blunders were made over their heads and behind their backs.

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The topic of child dependency is developed most powerfully in Een hart van steen (; English translation by Hester Velmans, A Heart of Stone, ). Mothers seldom come off well in Dorrestein’s work – they run off, as in Ontaarde moeders (; English translation by Wanda Boeke, Unnatural Mothers, ), or keep essential information from their child, as in Het duister dat ons scheidt – but mother Margje from Een hart van steen surpasses them all: she kills four of her children. The surviving daughter, Ellen, tries to reconstruct how the family, once so happy, went off the rails. In interviews Dorrestein said that newspapers reports on family murders were her inspiration for Een hart van steen. She frequently takes the subjects of her novels from current affairs. Zonder genade (; English translation by Hester Velmans, Without Mercy, ), has as its starting point an incident of so-called “senseless violence”. After the mixed reception of Echt sexy (Really Sexy, ), a novel about “loverboys” and the sexualization of society, Dorrestein responded to the reviews in a newspaper article – a fairly unusual step. She accused the critics, particularly those of the “serious” dailies, of lacking worldly wisdom. The reviewer who had dismissed her novel as “too absurd for words” couldn’t possibly have watched MTV yet. Besides being a novel on a topical theme, Echt sexy is also an homage to J.D. Salinger, one of Dorrestein’s literary models, which also include Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five). Fiebie, the main character of Echt sexy, is inspired by the sister of the world-famous adolescent Holden Caulfield from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The idea of a novel about Phoebe Caulfield had been germinating for a long time: in Vóór alles een dame (Above All a Lady, ) we find a reference to a still unwritten chapter on “Phoebe Caulfield and the Use of Sisters”. Vóór alles een dame is another high point in Dorrestein’s work. It is an ode to the power of imagination in the form of a tear-off calendar, a collage of hilarious and crazy stories. The many-layered “story of the girl” is told in daily episodes. In addition, each day includes an aphorism by a famous woman, the birthdays of countless female authors are celebrated, to whom a cake recipe is invariably dedicated, and many (female) saints are given a mention. In so doing the book gives form to a female literary tradition, as was advocated in the second feminist wave. Thanks to Dorrestein’s humorous style and idio syncratic female genealogy (Enid Blyton’s Darrell Rivers, from the Malory Towers books, features in sisterly proximity to the medieval hermit Suster Bertken), Vóór alles een dame never becomes dogmatic. Outside her novels, too, Dorrestein presents herself as a feminist. In the s she was notorious for her sharp-edged columns in the feminist monthly Opzij, which were collected in Korte metten (Short Shrift, ). With the poet Elly de Waard and others she was one of the instigators of the Anna Bijns Prize for the “female voice in literature”, which was set up in . Although various of Dorrestein’s novels have been nominated for literary prizes, she has been the recipient of only one award, the feminist Annie Romein Prize in recognition of her life’s work. Her reputation as an accessible author of exciting stories has not benefited her status as a literary writer. Many of Dorrestein’s novels, though, have been translated into various languages, including English.

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Dorrestein spent several periods as a writer in residence in the United States. She collected her writing tips and her own experiences as an author and creative writing teacher in Het geheim van de schrijver (The Writer’s Secret, ), where she again summarizes what stories mean to her: Stories are the hammer blows with which the cosmos tries to make us come to terms with our mortality – and to reconcile our will with the equally astonishing knowledge that after us the world will go on rotating unperturbed, that the birds will go on laying eggs without us and the bees making honey, and we ourselves will one day be forgotten.

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Commitment with No Illusions

Kristien Hemmerechts 1955 jaap goedegebuure

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nyone having to sum up Kristien Hemmerechts’ attitude to her characters in a single catchphrase would not be far off the mark with the tag “commitment without illusions”. If she does sympathize with them, she does not project that openly – quite the reverse. She views the characters in her novels with a mixture of clinical aloofness, slight mockery and a dash of pity. At the same time she suggests that they are definitely worthy of her compassion, impotent and inclined to failure as they are. In fact, as Hemmerechts shows time and time again, no one is capable of understanding others or making themselves understood; no one comes to terms completely with the past, no one manages to take their life and destiny into their own hands and make the best of it. Hemmerechts’ writing career began in Britain, in English. She found herself on the other side of the North Sea after her marriage to an Englishman she had met during a course on literary studies. The stories that she published at this time in Faber and Faber’s First Fictions series did not appear in Dutch until , in the collection Weerberichten (Weather Reports). That was a year after she had made her début in Flanders with Een zuil van zout (A Pillar of Salt). The latter novel, dealing with a young woman who during her pregnancy becomes fixated on the past and is hopelessly enmeshed in her feelings, established her at a stroke as an important author. Kristien Hemmerechts is aware of the world beyond the safe confines of living rooms, neatly-raked gardens and well-lit streets. There are people who are attracted to that world like moths to a flame. It applies, for instance, to the characters in Zonder grenzen (Without Limits, ). A key role in this novel is reserved for an intruder from the other side, a female thief and religious maniac who turns the head of the man of the house so completely that he plunges quite irrationally into a destructive, dead-end affair. In so doing he destroys his already precarious marriage and subsequently sees his family disintegrate. Quite appropriately, the character’s stories are told in disjointed, non-chronological fragments. Thematically Zonder grenzen is reprised in Margot en de engelen (Margot and the Angels, ). Here too the world of order and normality collides with that of chaos and anarchy. This time it is the daughter who breaks the safe bonds and crosses over to the other side, which is much less safe. Though her parents have separated, they believe that

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as sensible and responsible people they have taken every possible step to ensure the care of their offspring. Alas, it doesn’t help. After an affair with an autistic goatherder, whose animal magnetism she feels attracted to, Margot leaves home and joins a group of young people living on the fringes of society who, following the example of the medieval Cathar sect, regard material reality as the work of the devil and desire to be released from it as soon as possible. Margot, who as a child had been afflicted with anorexia and hosophobia (a pathological fear of infection), is so under the spell of this faith, that she voluntarily puts an end to her own life. If the underbelly of society is itself a dark continent, then the same is true of the mental world of those we call our nearest and dearest – only more so. The protagonist from Hemmerechts’ story ‘Een huwelijk’ (‘A Marriage’), included in Kort kort lang (Short, Short, Long, ), is still looking, years after her divorce, for an explanation for the behavior and motivation of her ex-husband. The fact that she never really knew him means of course that she had an insufficient understanding of herself, which brings a feeling of embitterment. The urge to merge with another person, even if only temporarily, is played out most intensely in sex. Unsurprisingly, purely physical passion and the addiction to it is a recurring motif in Hemmerechts’ work. In ‘Je bent mooi’ (‘You’re Beautiful’), also from Kort kort lang, there is a passage that shows how the desire to know and control the other is a derivative of lust. The female main character in this story muses on how her lover sees her; as she does so her fantasies move unstoppably in the direction of the childhood obsessions she suspects in him: He had wanted to see. See her. What she was like when she ate. Or was drunk. Or laughed. Was concentrating. Was sad. Was asleep. Woke up. Came. What do her armpits look like? Does she have hair in them? Lots. And what’s her hair like? What’s her belly like after all those pregnancies? And between her legs? What’s it like there? He can see it all. There’s nothing to see anyway. A worn-out, battered body, the kind you can see by the thousand at swimming pools or on the beach. She doesn’t know what he sees. Or why he wants to see what she thinks there is to see. He calls it ‘queen’. She calls him crazy. He probably spied on his mother through the keyhole as a boy of ten. With one of her feet on an upturned iron bucket as she slowly dabs one leg with a sponge. Her leg and the rest. The place he came from. Can never disappear back into. Her calm surprises him. Does he expect her to cover herself up? Lay down limits? To say: You can see this, but not that? But how can she find out what there is to see if she doesn’t let him see it? Because he always gives a report. On the pink of her gums; on the nail on her little toe, which he suspects she picks at; on the beads of sweat around her navel when she comes. She doesn’t know if she wants to hear what he sees. She herself sees a little boy pressing his eye to a keyhole, spying on the woman who knows she is being spied on. Who, with a smile, soaps the sponge in an enamel bowl.

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All things considered stories like ‘Een huwelijk’ and ‘Je bent mooi’ are about the creative way of seeing that is characteristic of the author, who finds herself confronted with people who absorb her just as she absorbs them. As a result the author closely resembles people in love, whose heads are constantly buzzing with other people’s thoughts. In Lang geleden (Long Ago, ), Hemmerecht creates a visual equivalent for that vision in the Russian matrushka: just as the wooden doll conceals various smaller dolls, so, depending on the circumstances, now one, now another personality will emerge from a human being. The precise extent of the family relationship between Hemmerechts and her characters usually remains hidden. As if to put an end once and for all to the questions of interviewers and readers, curious about the possible autobiographical content of her work, Kort kort lang opens with a story about a woman writer who disguises herself as a man and at public appearances plays a tape of a funeral oration she herself has recorded. Persistent inquirers are told that an author is unknowable. “Writers aren’t interesting or nice people,” he tells his audience. “You’re wrong. You like my words. Or my characters, not me.” This is painful and most of all lonely for the writer; who in the hollow chamber of himself listens to the echoing voices of his characters. They don’t keep him company, full of themselves as they are, of their unique personality, their irresistible attraction. They will be read, they will be written about, they will live forever.

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Philosopher and Novelist

Connie Palmen 1955 saskia pieterse

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onnie palmen is a philosopher and a novelist. In an article in the weekly Vrij Nederland she characterized her position as a female writer as follows: I’m a woman and I don’t mind that. It’s just that I don’t feel like obeying uncritically all the laws governing this physical genre or the laws governing this character. To a certain extent I can be what I make of myself. What they call a genre in literature and scholarship is actually the genre of a text. They use it to prescribe how a text must behave, as if it had a destiny and a body and had to obey immutable natural laws. It need not. You can change genres by writing different texts for a change. And that possi bility is what concerns me.

The double movement she makes in this quotation is typical of Palmen. Philosophy has traditionally been the preserve of men. Apparently passively she embraces the literary genre that is accessible to women, but only because this enables her to give added force to a philosophical argument, namely that the rules imposed on sex and genre do not have universal validity. Palmen made her début in  with De wetten (The Laws). The novel enjoyed great popular success and Palmen became a media personality. The problems dealt with in the novel are strongly reminiscent of Richard’s Rorty’s analysis of the postmodern condition in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (). Rorty argues that every person has a certain acquired vocabulary. One person is content with it and believes that the traditional voca bulary is sufficient for expressing “the self” and “the truth” adequately. The ironic thinker, however, distrusts tradition, without believing in the simple option of replacing the traditional concepts with new, better concepts: The ironist worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness. So, the more she is driven to articulate her situation in philosophical terms, the more she reminds herself of her rootlessness […]

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In De wetten, this abstract problem facing Rory’s “ironist” is translated into the concrete love life of the first-person narrator. She enters into relationships with various men – including a scientist, a philosopher, an astrologer and a priest – who initiate her into the rules of their systems of thought. Ultimately she does not accept any of these systems, because she is aware that the personal quality of her story was lost precisely when she surrendered to the “vocabulary” of her lovers: I want to become a person, someone with her own life and with eyes which them selves see things, in my own proper way, not someone else’s. And I should also wish to hear words well up in me, entirely my own. The filth of others is everywhere, like a crust encasing language, like a mist before my eyes, eyes that look like they’ve been made from soiled glass. [...] The words, ideas and opinions of others, their laws, their morality, their science, have intoxicated me. My spirit has been raped in fact. And I just let it happen, invited it: I was giving the glad-eye like blazes. (translated by richard huijing)

At the same time she does not believe that it is possible to cleanse language of “other people’s dirt”, in order to express an extremely personal truth: The nuisance is only that I don’t really believe in it, in the truth of my tale, in an ultimate meaning, not even now [...]. Palmen’s second novel, De vriendschap (Friendship, ) turns on the course of the friend ship between two women, Catharina Buts (‘Kit’) and Barbara Callenbach (‘Ara’). Kit is small, thin and highly gifted. She is capable of surrendering herself ruthlessly to people, lives with her nose stuck in a book and suffers from alcohol addiction. Ara is tall, heavily-built and dyslexic. Ara is difficult to approach, enjoys mainly nature walks and dog training, and suffers from bulimia. Ostensibly the two women complement each other perfectly: what one has a deficiency of, the other has in abundance. How little symbiosis there actually is in the relationship becomes clear when Kit begins studying philosophy and the relationship comes under severe pressure. Kit finally decides to make her problematical relationship with Ara the subject of her writing and thinking. As she writes, Kit realizes that the structure of their friendship is that of the “double bind”: they need each other in order to gain an insight into themselves, and at the same time their friendship is an obstacle to that insight. Kit realizes that her opting for a writing career is opting for distance, but she stresses at the same time that every text has a body, so that at the same time writing expresses a longing for intimacy: Writing is giving your mind a different body. The body I have to make do with, the one of flesh and blood, I am not obviously not

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keen to expose to other people’s gaze and so I make a body of words made of paper for myself. I dispatch it, off into the world, and other people can judge that body. That doesn’t bother me or trouble me. I like having myself tested out, but not while I’m there. Like De wetten, De vriendschap can be read as a concrete dramatization of abstract philoso phical issues. In this case the main crux is the ambiguous message that according to Derrida is contained in every act of writing, which he summarizes as follows in De la grammatologie (): “One cannot help wishing to master absence and yet we must always let go.” Both novels were well received by the Dutch critics, and foreign translations soon followed. The reception accorded the books that followed De vriendschap was mixed. That is mainly because these later works tried to destabilize not only the boundary between philosophy and literature, but also the strict distinction between literary fictionalization and journalistic truth-telling. Palmen began a relationship with the journalist and television presenter Ischa Meijer, and after Meijer’s unexpected death from a heart attack in , she wrote two novels about their time together, I.M. () and Geheel de uwe (Yours Completely, ). In the former, the characters Palmen and Meijer constantly talk about themselves and their need for media attention, which annoyed many reviewers, who accused her of narcissism and exhibitionism. Yet in these two books Palmen is not writing straight confessional literature. There is the same reflective pattern as in her earlier work: we read of writers who are reflecting on books they are writing. In I.M. she explores the rules of the road novel: Palmen and Meijer take long trips through America. In the Netherlands, American television and mass culture are generally written about disparagingly, but this tone is entirely absent from I.M. While they eat two eggs “sunny side up” in a roadside café, the lovers discuss the parallels and differences and between journalism and literature, America and Europe, popular amusement and radical philosophy. Just as in De vriendschap, the opposition between body and mind is ultimately sabotaged; I.M. questions the opposition between vulgar entertainment and profundity: The moment he arrives somewhere it’s party time. He makes people cheerful, happy and wiser. He releases something in them and by watching him at work, I suddenly see the goodness, cordiality and intelligence of entertainment. Palmen’s most recently published novel, Lucifer () examines processes of inclusion and exclusion with reference to the theme of the fallen angel. At the center of the narrative is “the Table”, an exclusive society of Amsterdam artists and intellectuals, which only men are allowed to join. Dutch critics identified this fictional society with the existing Amsterdam society, ‘the Gentlemen’s Club’, and Lucifer was read as a roman à clef. The hub of the action is the homosexual composer Lucas Loos. He is a member of “the Table”, but is blackballed by the group in the s when he demands that his friends publicly abjure their earlier Communist sympathies. The symbolic expulsion of Loos is mirrored in the literal fall of his wife – Loos is married – who plunges to her death in a

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ravine in Greece. The words of her obituary notice read: “Our angel has fallen”, and indeed this dead woman manages (like a Lucifer) to sow dissension among the men of “the Circle” and to tempt them into suspicion and gossip. All Palmen’s characters try to free themselves from inner conflict through thought, in the firm conviction that thought has a salutary effect. In I.M. the first-person narrator makes the following comment: The moment you encounter a paradox, thought has yet to start. […] After all, you think in order to cancel out a state of inner division, to find a solution to the conflict that arises from wanting and not wanting something. At the same time Palmen seems to be making an opposite movement, and with diabolical relish to be sowing confusion about her intentions as a writer. Lucifer opens with the wellknown quote from the Rolling Stones’ number Sympathy for the Devil, “but what’s con fusing you is just the nature of my game”. On the back cover there is a photo of the author, in a severe black-and-white checked blouse. The blouse is open, and we glimpse the edge of a red bra.

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‘Rather Responsible than an Outlaw’

M. Februari 1963 yra van dijk

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t is immediately clear from the title of this portrait that Februari is an elusive author, since she might just as well have been called something quite different: Marjolijn Februari, or Marjolijn Drenth von Februar. Milou Februari was also a possibility, or even Matthias Februari. It is not only the name of the writer that is legion: anyone trying to pin down Februari’s profession encounters the same problem: is she a lawyer, an art historian, philosopher, writer, business economist, columnist or all of these at once? She escapes all fixed categories, and the same applies to her work. Even her doctoral thesis, Een pruik van paardenhaar & Over het lezen van een boek (A Horsehair Wig & On the Reading of a Book, ) was halfway between fiction and scholarship. And anyone labelling Februari’s first novel, De zonen van het licht (The Sons of Light, ) as “typically postmodern” could be sure of a violent protest from the writer. She is convinced that the originality of a work is damaged by such labels, and moreover resisted the non-committal impression of the book given by the postmodern label. This does not detract from the fact that most features of postmodernist prose can be found in it: genre boundaries are transgressed (it is a novel in letters that on occasion can also be a pamphlet or diary), the structure is fragmented and the story incomplete, the narrative perspective changes constantly, the identity and even the sex of the characters are not fixed and occasionally they seem to be made more of text than of flesh and blood – for example, many have the initials L.S. (lectori salutem, greetings to the reader), while others are called L.B. (lectori benevolo, “I wish the reader well”). Although the book is full of myths and stories, it never begins to look like a Classical tale. It is a plea for absence rather than perfection, for art that is alive rather than hanging in the museum. Ironically, the book is so difficult that Februari was in fact accused of elitism after the novel appeared. Perhaps that is the reason why her second novel, which appeared eight years later, was in contrast aimed at a much larger audience. Here a straightforward story is told with strong moral overtones – so that this time critics were able to call it “post-postmodern”. This of course again provoked the displeasure of M. Februari, who argued that her previous work had the same ethical dimension. In De literaire kring (English translation The Book Club, ) the central issue is again the relationship between art and society. “What can and should literature mean for people’s actions in the world?” is the question that Februari

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repeatedly asks herself. In this case it revolves around a book club of dignitaries who read in order to affirm their traditional humanist values. When you hear their opinions, it is sometimes difficult not to agree with them: “There is only one way of understanding people’s lives, their coincidental, impermanent and unemphatic nature, and that is by telling separate stories outside history.” However, it soon becomes apparent that this elite culture does not necessarily imply a sense of responsibility. On the contrary: the dignitaries believe that their position exempts them from that responsibility, and protect a friend who has triggered a scandal involving the poisoning of innocent children: “It’s all right, it’s bloody well all right as long as you’re very fond of novels.” Opposed to this group are a couple of individuals who try to discover what “responsibility” actually means. A journalist and a woman he was at school with try to bring the facts to light, only to be forced to conclude that they cannot do much more than bear witness, express their sympathy and make sure the poison scandal does not go unnoticed. All in all, an unedifying task. Finally, there is a young female writer who has written a lightweight, autobiographical book that has of course become a huge bestseller. It is typical of Februari that nowhere in De literaire kring is a judgment expressed on such popular fiction. As the author wrote in a column: “There’s nothing wrong with high culture, and there’s nothing wrong with low culture. The only thing that is wrong is poor quality.” Similarly, no firm position is taken in the moral field. The ethical and literary questions raised remain unanswered. Almost every character at times expresses an idea behind which we can suspect Februari’s own opinion – for example her attempt to stress the complex and contradictory interests everyone has. In her dissertation she made a plea that human beings should be regarded as multiple personalities, in order to do justice to the opposition between morality and egoism in each person. Everyone, then, is alternately Marjolein, Milou or Mortimer. This shows that Februari’s second novel has quite a lot in common with the first. Not only because of the question as to the relationship between art and life, but also because of the fact that both are essentially novels of ideas. Although the characters in De literaire kring are no longer all called “L.S.”, neither are they exactly psychologically rounded portraits. Rather, they seem to be appearing in a novel as if in a moral laboratory. Moreover, the second book is is a certain sense a hybrid in terms of genre: the text of the novel is interrupted by journalistic digressions in which pressing political and social issues are raised. That is also the writer’s task, M. Februari argued in an essay in : it is time for writers to start raising “concrete social, moral and religious problems”. That the two books have more in common than you might think, does not in itself mean that the first was not “postmodern”. What it does mean is that we need to adjust our view of literary postmodernism. The very lack of unity, the uncertainty of identity and gender and the absence of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, can have an ethical meaning. The way this situation is to be understood is clear from a column that M. Februari wrote after  September, . Initially, she feels an impulse to take a stand at last, but that resolution comes to nought:

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Well, as you can see, I just can’t agree with myself, because on the one hand I don’t think we can stay hanging in an ‘on the one hand-one the other hand’ situation, which on the other hand I’m actually so fond of. It’s a devilish dilemma. I’m afraid that finally it can only be resolved by opting rigorously for the value of carefully weighing things up. Anyone who reads Februari’s intelligent columns, which were collected in Park welgelegen (Well-Appointed Park, ), discovers that anything can be a moral issue, from the freedom of Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren’s children’s book heroine, to fiddling with your scooter. With such examples she constantly roots her philosophical and theoretical premises in practice. Not only on paper, but also in her activities. It should therefore cause us no surprise when on the author’s website we find not only fiction and essays, but also recom mendations to the “Advisory Board on Civil Aviation Safety”. How closely the activities of all the different people called M. Februari are interlinked, emerges from the title of one of those recommendations: “Rather responsible than an outlaw” could serve as a motto for her writing – albeit followed by a question mark.

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The Novelist as Public Intellectual

Désanne van Brederode 1970 odile heynders

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n march , Susan Sontag delivered the Nadime Gordimer Lecture in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. In her speech, the American critic and philosopher stressed the responsibility of the writer. She pointed to the fact that South African Nobel Prize winner Gordimer is a typical example of a writer as a “moral agent, who without cynicism tries to describe the world with precise, responsible concentration”. But Sontag also warned her audience: “Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature – the matchless storyteller” (At the Same Time, ). It is often not easy to strike a balance between commitment, psychological plot and aesthetic creation, between moral action, writing and thinking. It is precisely this balance that is both sought and challenged in the work of the writer Désanne van Brederode. Trained as a philosopher and often writing from an auto biographical point of view, the author explores the limits of morality and rationality, ima gination and reality. Van Brederode is concerned with social issues and personal dilemmas, showing a tendency towards religion and spirituality, and tries constantly to draw up a balance as a writer. She made her début in  with a Bildungsroman, Ave verum Corpus (Hail, True Body), in which, in a dynamic style full of dialogue, she describes the love life of a female philosophy student. The protagonist, Lucia, has sex with a number of boyfriends. Love turns out to be a mix of passion, surrender and servitude. Physical feelings become intertwined with spiritual feelings. Lucia discovers where the body ends, how an orgasm leads to “becoming flesh without identity” and how sex can merge into mysticism. The climax of the story is a pornographic scene of surrender; the female partner, Betty, sacrifices a goat on her girlfriend’s bound body. This scene is an introduction to Bataille-like hallucinations of pain and fantasies about the nearness of Jesus Christ. The novel is a hybrid: disillusioning love scenes are juxtaposed with reflective letters, memories and hallucinations, and the narrator orchestrates the whole by using different stylistic registers. The versatile dynamism of her début is held in check in the second novel, Mensen met een hobby (People with a Hobby, ). Here we see for the first time the author’s growing interest in social dilemmas. The realistic thrust of the work becomes more explicit. In her subsequent novels, Van Brederode continues this trend. In Het opstaan (Getting Up, ) she describes the position of immigrants in prosperous Dutch urban consumer society and ponders the

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taboos of contemporary Dutch society. As can be read in a letter from the ex-girlfriend of the novel’s protagonist, Rudolf de Wolf: The subconscious borrows from collective myths to express the deepest pain, the most unbearable absence, I read somewhere and yes, the Holocaust had become a myth too for our generation, despite Primo Levi’s books (read three pages of them) and Claude Lanzmann’s documentary (saw seven minutes of it). But wasn’t there also an ethics for the subconscious? The reflections on the decline in the mythical status of the Holocaust do not stand alone. In the novel the narrator discusses various moral themes in relation to the present-day Dutch context: the fire in a bar in Volendam (why we don’t dare to look at the young men and women in their burned and disfigured faces) alongside “extreme makeovers” on tele vision, anti-Semitism and obesity, and Muslim women shut away in their flats. All these topics relate to discussions in the media and particularly on television. They make Van Brederode’s novels disturbing, since she confronts readers with strongly held opinions and challenges them to empathize, oppose or at any rate react. She asks her audience to act like “militant readers” (in Susan Sontag’s terminology). Between September and November , Van Brederode kept a diary, which ap peared as Barsten (Cracks) in a diary series published by L.J. Veen. In it she noted and commented on everyday life and political news. Again, involvement and feeling, respon sibility and religion proved to be the foundation of her writing. From frank statements about her life with her son and husband, Van Brederode switches to complex subjects like a Chechen terrorist attack in Beslan, the biography of Joseph Goebbels, the humiliation of prisoners by a group of American servicemen in Abu Graib prison, the funeral of singer Andre Hazes and the murder of Theo van Gogh in Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam. The author asks questions, shows disappointment and shares intimate information. Private and public life are linked and are analyzed in the same self-questioning style: “Why can’t I make my emotions fit the scope and seriousness of certain news reports?” and “Does this mean that I will now be brave enough to present myself as pro-Muslim through thick and thin?” Some of these questions are urgent, others are personal and almost embarrassingly frank, and it is precisely that combination that keeps the reader enthralled. We become involved, are invited to think along with the author and respond. Together with contemporary British authors like Ian McEwan (Saturday, ) or Martin Amis (The Second Plane, ), and the German writer Ingo Schulze (Neue Leben, ), Van Brederode the novelist claims a place on the stage as a public intellectual. She wants to project a moral voice and provoke responses. That is evident not only from her novels but also from her published essays: in , ‘Stiller Leven’ (‘Quieter Life’), an essay on communication; in , ‘Modern dédain’ (Modern Disdain), on the overkill of the deluge of popular culture; and in , ‘Brief aan een gelukzoeker’ (‘Letter to Someone in Search of Happiness’), on immigration. Some critics accuse Van Brederode of hypocrisy and naivety and find her reasoning too facile. But it cannot be denied that this author feels socially involved and is hence prepared to venture forth from the hideaway of “high” literature.

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It is significant that Van Brederode has positioned herself not only as a literary writer and philosopher, but has also assumed a role as a television commentator. Since  she has appeared on the discussion programme Buitenhof, broadcast on Sundays, which raises political issues. Van Brederode’s role is that of a “media intellectual”, who in three-anda-half minutes gives her view of what is happening in Dutch society. The topics of her pieces are mostly political decisions and their repercussions on everyday life. I will quote from her comments on ‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali’, broadcast on  January, . Hirsi Ali, formerly a refugee from Somalia, became a member of the Dutch parliament and took up firmly anti-Islamic positions. She made the film Submission with Theo van Gogh, and moved to the USA after being accused of giving a false surname in her application for asylum in the Netherlands. Van Brederode notes that Hirsi has vanished completely from the public eye: Why is so little of her influence noticeable? Did she actually have any influence? When the balance of the past, first Ayaan-less year was drawn up, no one even asked these questions. Pim Fortuyn is still regularly quoted. So is Theo van Gogh. Understandably. They were murdered for their opinions. The singer Herman Brood has never been murdered for his opinions, but he has popped up regularly in the last few weeks, as a symbol of the wild Netherlands from before everything got tame and bourgeois. Even the veteran TV presenter Mies Bouwman had a whole programme devoted to her, in which to my great astonishment she was suddenly sanctified as a revolutionary, liberated television pioneer… but Ayaan? Is Ayaan being deliberately shrouded in silence? Are the media and all those intimate friends of Ayaan being inhumanly cold and disloyal? No. Perhaps they were just wrong. Wrong about someone’s talents. And that is all too human. But if so, admit it. That is also part of freedom of speech: occasionally taking your hand from someone else’s bosom and putting it in your own. The writer not only asks herself questions about the popularity of Hirsi Ali, but she criticizes the intellectuals who initially saw her as a pioneer in the debate on Islam and are now leaving her to her fate in the US. Moreover, Van Brederode makes no secret of her antipathy to Hirsi Ali’s critical attitude to Islam. And that is not only the opinion of the writer as a columnist or medial intellectual – Van Brederode also ascribes such views to characters in her novels, as the following passage shows: I skipped the articles because I think it’s too easy to formulate an opinion, out of sheer poverty of invention, on one of those issues that everyone as usual has an opinion about. That’s what happed after /. After the murder of Fortuyn. ‘Where are the intellectuals?’ And wham, the intellectuals are raring to go. Column here, discussion forum there. Behind their mushy, ever-frowning faces you can see a ghostly figure: the Idea of the Intellectual.

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There is not much distance between what Van Brederode maintains as a commentator and what she puts into the mouths of the characters in the world of the novel. And precisely in that way she meets Susan Sontag’s requirement of the writer at the end of her Gordimer lecture: “The novelists prophetic and critical, even subversive, task [is] to oppose the common understandings of our fate. Long live the novelist’s task.” For all literature’s autonomy, the venting of a political opinion is a part of the subversive task of the writer.

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‘I’m Good at Stories’

Naima El Bezaz 1974 henriette louwerse

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ince her début, Naima El Bezaz has enjoyed high sales figures, extensive attention on radio and television, numerous interviews in newspapers and magazines and invi tations for public appearances, particularly in secondary schools. On the first page of her fourth novel, Het gelukssyndroom (The Happiness Syndrome, ), her alter ego suggests an explanation: “I’m good at stories, but have no stylistic talent.” However, the significance of El Bezaz far transcends strictly literary-aesthetic values. Her importance consists in the interplay of three narratives that are inextricably bound up together: the story of her work, that of the personal history of the writer, and that of the multicultural society in the Netherlands. Naima El Bezaz made her début in  at the age of twenty-one with the novel De weg naar het noorden (The Road Northwards). It was not only her age that attracted attention: the most striking thing about her was her background as a Dutchwoman of Moroccan origin. True, in prose Halil Gür and Kader Abdolah had preceded her, but Gür wrote in his native language, Turkish, and Abdolah had come to the Netherlands later in life from Iran and so could not be claimed as a homegrown author. However, that was true of El Bezaz, who was born in Morocco (Meknès, ) but has lived in the Netherlands since the age of four. De weg naar het noorden and subsequent publications by so-called secondgeneration immigrant writers gave rise to optimism: this new literature, it was claimed, would throw open the borders of the Netherlands and free our culture from “the smell of sprouts”; it would give us an insight into the world of the non-native Dutch person, which might shed new light on our norms and values. The underlying assumption, however, is that the literature produced by these authors is different from homegrown literature, which, at least so it feels, is not “marked” by a rift between present and past, or between the surrounding culture and that of one’s forefathers. Encouraged by the exotic name and the author photo on the back cover, the reader is reinforced in the expectation that the author makes her own background the driving force behind her writing, or even that the writer is acting as a spokesperson for her own cultural group. But most authors resented being forced into a pigeonhole with all the accompanying expectations. In , El Bezaz wrote this on the subject:

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There is no immigrant literature. It’s nonsense. I come from Morocco and my book’s about a Moroccan, but I’m a Dutch writer, I write in Dutch. I represent the peak of integration and so don’t want to be pushed back into the immigrant corner. Nevertheless, El Bezaz’s whole work is dominated by her personal background and her personal aspiration: above all, she wants to make a difference. De weg naar het noorden is a classic guest worker story: the young Moroccan Ghadi is unemployed, sees no future in Morocco and escapes via France to the Netherlands, where he becomes part of the illegal immigrant world. Ghadi’s journey is not only a physical one but more specifically a transcultural journey into the unknown, the incomprehensible and, as becomes clear, the hostile. El Bezaz’s strategy is reminiscent of colonial literature in which the native population is also often depicted as threatening, corrupting and even bestial: They say nothing. They slowly come towards us. I look at them. Hate radiates from their eyes. The bald guy’s hand disappears into his inside pocket and reemerges with small black object. My heart is in my mouth. A stiletto. The blade gleams in the light of the street lamp. I shuffle backwards and shake my head. For them I’m not a human being but a prey that has to be slaughtered after the hunt. The Moroccans are the prey, but it is the natives who exhibit bestial features. De weg naar het noorden won the  Jenny Smelik IBBY Prize, awarded to books for young people that give a picture of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. Almost seven years later, in , El Bezaz brought out her volume of stories, Minnares van de duivel (The Devil’s Mistress), where she again plays on her readers’ expec tations. This time it is the mysticism of the Arabian world, jinns and black magic, the sultry, corrupt atmosphere of the Arabian Nights. El Bezaz has become older and more militant and in Minnares van de duivel she does not shy away from controversy. Most men in the stories are depicted as unfaithful, lazy and useless, and Moroccan society as distrustful and superstitious. In addition the author includes a number of sex scenes. Again, the book sold well, but the judgement of the critics was unchanged: El Bezaz was praised for her courage, but the literary content of the collection failed to convince everyone. Meanwhile, since the s the debate on the multicultural society has polarized. We are now living in a “period of malaise”, there is talk of a crisis, the Netherlands is “desperately in search of a morality”, and the failure of the multicultural society is seen as the great culprit. Guest workers have long since ceased to be welcome guests, but instead are immigrants or juvenile delinquents. Authors with a multicultural background also join in the social debate. In , El Bezaz published an article in the daily NRC Handelsblad attacking the cult of virginity, indicting the suffocating social control and tribal sense of honor in the Muslim community, and pleading for more individualism. Unlike Ayaan Hirsi, El Bezaz has not turned against Islam (she calls herself a liberal Muslim woman), but against interpretations which limit women’s freedoms and in her views fail to do justice to the basic rights laid down in Islamic teaching.

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De verstotene (The Outcast, ) was in part an indictment, but mainly an expression of political and social commitment. It is an ambitious social novel about a young MoroccanDutch woman caught between her strictly religious family and her struggle for freedom and independence. When Mina Boughari dares to ask critical questions about Islam, she is cast out by her family. She reinvents herself as Amelie and keeps her background secret out of fear of prejudice and incomprehension. After her Dutch boyfriend breaks off their relationship, she sinks into an emotional crisis. Subsequently she throws herself into dissi pated life full of drink and sex, falls out with her only female friend over Theo van Gogh’s murder and becomes pregnant by a Jewish man. Finally she falls – accidentally – to her death from her balcony. De verstotene was dismissed by the critics as “yesterday’s leftovers reheated”, a regurgitation of the standard problems of the second generation; in the eyes of some younger conservative Muslims, however, it is an abusive broadside that soils her own community. This resulted in calls on the Internet for the writer to be stoned. The person responsible was condemned, but that gave rise to new threats. El Bezaz decided to withdraw from public life. Disturbingly, this only confirms in reality the picture pained by the novel – ingrained prejudices, religious fanaticism, ostracism by the community. El Bezaz broke her silence with the confessional novel Het gelukssyndroom (The Happiness Syndrome, ), the account of the depression of the young woman Layla, which runs parallel with the last months of life of her best friend who is terminally ill. In a postscript, the author makes it clear that in this novel she drew on her own struggle with depression, to which she succumbed after the threats and once more she indicates that in her writing she is striving for an explicit aim: she wants to break the taboo that exists, especially in her own community, on depression. Naima El Bezaz is by far the best-known female writer of Moroccan extraction in the Netherlands. Undoubtedly she owes her success in part to the timing of her début. She came on the scene at a time when publishers were eagerly looking for immigrant writers who could express the change in Dutch society. Unlike her male counterparts, El Bezaz has put her writing at the service of social aims. She holds the conviction that literature must not withdraw from the spirit of the age, which is dominated by issues relating to intercultural encounters. El Bezaz takes the social challenge seriously and shares her empirical truth with her readers. That is the secret of her success, and to it she owes her place in Dutch literature.

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Illustration – Acknowledgements Naima el Bezaz © Wout Jan Balhuizen

Ida Gerhardt Letterkundig Museum Collection

Ina Boudier-Bakker Paul Huf

Cecile Goekoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk Letterkundig Museum Collection

Carry van Bruggen Letterkundig Museum Collection

Hella Haasse Letterkundig Museum Collection

Andreas Burnier Letterkundig Museum Collection

Fritzi Harmsen van der Beek © Chris van Houts

Christine d’Haen © photography Gerrit Serné

Kristien Hemmerechts © Chris van Houts

Maria Dermoût Letterkundig Museum Collection

Lieve Joris Letterkundig Museum Collection

Renate Dorrestein © Ronald Hoeben Elisabeth Eybers © Bert Nienhuis

Mensje van Keulen Atlas Uitgevers

Marjolijn Februari © Wouter Vandenbrink

Anja Meulenbelt © Chris van Houts

Anne Frank Letterkundig Museum Collection

Hanny Michaelis Letterkundig Museum Collection

Carl Friedman © Bert Nienhuis

Neeltje Maria Min © Madeleen Ladee

Virginie Loveling AMVC Collection, Antwerp

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Marga Minco Letterkundig Museum Collection

Maria Rosseels AMVC Collection, Antwerp

Margriet de Moor Letterkundig Museum Collection

Helga Ruebsamen © Chris van Houts

Top Naef ©Jacob Merkelbach

Anna de Savornin Lohman © Madeleen Ladee

Monika van Paemel © Van Maitrise

Hélène Swarth Letterkundig Museum Collection

Connie Palmen © Annaleen Louwes

Madelon Székeley-Lulofs © Klaas Koppe

Astrid Roemer © Chris van Houts

Jacoba van Velde ©Maria Neefjes

Henriette Roland-Holst © Klaas Koppe

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Concise List of Works Quoted References are given in the order in which they appear in the text. Unless otherwise indicated, titles are by the author featured in the chapter concerned.

Loveling (1836) Erfelijk Belast. Rotterdam , ; Een Idylle. Antwerpen ,  & ; Een revolverschot. Antwerpen , .

Boudier-Bakker (1875) Armoede. Amsterdam [no date], th ed., ; De eeuwige andere. Amsterdam [no date], nd ed., ; Cahier ‘Leven en werk’  [Collection of G. Vaartjes, unpublished manuscript]; De klop op de deur Amsterdam [no date] st ed., ; De straat. Soesterberg , .

Kruseman (1839) ‘Antwoord aan Dr. De Cock’. In: Soerabaiaasch Handelsblad,  August ; Cendrillon en de moord aan Cendrillon gepleegd gewroken, Pasoeroean , .

Naeff (1878) Charlotte von Stein. Een episode. Amsterdam , , -; School-Idyllen. Haarlem , th ed., ; Charlotte von Stein. Een episode, ; Offers… Amsterdam , ; Een huis in de rij. Amsterdam , -; Oogst. Amsterdam , nd ed., -.

Swarth (1859) De Nieuwe Gids  (-), vol. , ; Poëzie, Amsterdam [no date], rd ed., , , /, , /; Avonddauw. Kampen , . Goekoop (1866) Hilda van Suylenburg. Amsterdam , nd ed., , , , .

Van Bruggen (1881) In de schaduw (van kinderleven). Amsterdam , , ; Prometheus. Amsterdam , ; M. ter Braak: Verzameld werk, vol. . Amsterdam , ; Van Bruggen: Verhalend proza. De verlatene, Het huisje aan de sloot, Eva. Amsterdam , , , .

Roland Holst (1869) De nieuwe geboort. Rotterdam [] , ; Sonnetten en verzen in terzinen geschreven. Rotterdam [] , , ; De nieuwe geboort, ; De vrouw in het woud. Rotterdam [] , , .

Dermoût (1888) De sirenen. Amsterdam , , ; Nog pas gisteren. Amsterdam , ;

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Vasalis (1909) Parken en woestijnen. Amsterdam , ; Vergezichten en gezichten. Amsterdam , , ; De oude kustlijn. Amsterdam  , .

Verzameld werk. Amsterdam/Antwerpen , , , , ; De sirenen. Amsterdam , ; Verzameld werk. Amsterdam/Antwerpen , . Nahon (1896) Op zachte vooizekens. Antwerpen , ; Vondelingskens. Antwerpen , ; Wij vrouwen gaan soms zoo... Alice Nahon to M.A. Theunissen, undated (probably spring )[Letterenhuis, Antwerpen]; Schaduw. Antwerpen , .

Hillesum (1914) Etty. De nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum -. Amsterdam , th revised ed., , , , , , , -, . Eybers (1915) Versamelde gedigte. Amsterdam , ; ‘Naamloos’ [unpublished poem].

Székely-Lulofs (1899) Rubber. Amsterdam , /, , , ; Koelie. Amsterdam , nd ed., -.

Rosseels () Het woord te voeren past den man. Tielt , ; Dood van een non. Leuven ,  (vol. ); Wacht niet op de morgen. Leuven [] , .

Van Velde () De grote zaal. Amsterdam [] , , ; Een blad in de wind. Amsterdam , .

Haasse (1918) Bladspiegel. Amsterdam , ; De meermin. Amsterdam , -; Zwanen schieten. Amsterdam , .

Blaman (1905) Rotterdamsch Parool,  juni ; Ontmoeting met Selma. In: De verhalen. Amsterdam [], ; Anna Blaman over zichzelf en anderen. Amsterdam [], ; Vrouw en vriend. In: Drie romans. Amsterdam [], , ; Letter from Anna Blaman to Uitgeverij J.M. Meulenhoff,  April ; De Kruisvaarder. In: Drie romans. Amsterdam [], ; Eenzaam avontuur. In: idem, , , ; Vrouw en vriend. In: idem, ; Eenzaam avontuur. In: idem, ; De verliezers. In: De late romans. Amsterdam [], ; Op leven en dood. In: idem, , .

Minco (1920) Verzamelde verhalen. Amsterdam , ; Het bittere kruid: Een kleine kroniek. Amsterdam , . Michaelis (1922) Verst verleden. Jeugdherinneringen verteld aan Nop Maas. Amsterdam ; Nagelaten gedichten. Haarlem ; Tegen de wind in. Amsterdam , ; Klein Voorspel. Amsterdam , ; Tegen de wind in, ; De rots van Gibraltar. Amsterdam ; Verst verleden. Jeugdherinneringen. Amsterdam , .

Gerhardt (1905) Virgil: Georgics , -; Ida Gerhardt: Verzamelde Gedichten. Amsterdam , th ed., , ,  , , , , , .

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D’haen (1923) Innisfree. Amsterdam , ; Miroirs. Gedichten vanaf . Amsterdam, ; Uitgespaard zelfportret. Verzameld proza. Amsterdam , , , .

Ruebsamen (1934) ‘Danger’, in: Jonge liefde en oud zeer. De verhalen deel I. Amsterdam , -; ‘De ondergang van Marakov’. In: idem, ; Op Scheveningen. Amsterdam , -; Het lied en de waarheid, Amsterdam , .

Harmsen van Beek (1927) Kus of ik schrijf. Amsterdam , ; Neerbraak. Amsterdam [] , , -; Geachte Muizenpoot en achttien andere gedichten. Amsterdam , , ; Annie van den Oever: ‘Fritzi’ en het groteske. Amsterdam , .

De Moor () Elisabeth Lockhorn: Geletterde vrouwen. Amsterdam , -; Jessica Durlacher: ‘Dingen die veelbetekend zijn, moet je heel laten’. In: Vrij Nederland,  februari .

Frank (1929) D. Barnouw en G. van der Stroom e.a. (red.): De dagboeken van Anne Frank. Amsterdam , th ed.,  c,  c,  c,  c,  c,  c.

Mutsaers (1942) Paardejam. Amsterdam , ; Hazepeper gevolgd door Napoleon, Sunt pueri pueri… en Varia. Amsterdam , ; Bont: Uit de zoo van Charlotte Mutsaers. Amsterdam , , ; Paardejam, ; Rachels rokje, Amsterdam , ; Koetsier Herfst. Amsterdam , ; Kersebloed. Amsterdam , ; Bont, ; Zeepijn. Amsterdam , .

Kuik () Dirkje Kuik: Naatje op de Dam. Een beetje zedelijkheid. In: Vrij Nederland,  November ; William D. Kuik: De held van het potspel, Amsterdam , ; Dirkje Kuik: Huishoudboekje met rozijnen, Utrecht , ; Piranesi & zijn dochter, Amsterdam , -.

Min (1944) Een vrouw bezoeken. Amsterdam , ; Voor wie ik liefheb wil ik heten. Amsterdam , .

Burnier (1931) Andreas Burnier: Een gevaar dat de ziel in wil. Essays, brieven en interviews -. Amsterdam , ; Het jongensuur, De litteraire salon, De trein naar Tarascon. Amsterdam , .

Meulenbelt (1945) De schaamte voorbij. Amsterdam , , , -, . Noordervliet (1945) Snijpunt. Amsterdam/Antwerpen , nd ed., , .

Herzberg (1934) Dagrest. Amsterdam , ; Frida BalkSmit Duyzentkunst: ‘Getransformeerde directe rede en toch geen indirecte rede: over de grammatica en poetica van Judith Herzberg’. In: Forum der letteren  () , ; Dagrest, ; Beemdgras. Amsterdam , .

Van Paemel (1945) Het wedervaren. Amsterdam , -; De vermaledijde vaders. Amsterdam [] , ; De eerste steen. Amsterdam [] , ; Te zot of te bot. Amsterdam , .

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Meijsing (1947) De weg naar Caviano. Amsterdam , ; Utopia of De geschiedenissen van Thomas. Amsterdam , .

Amsterdam , ; Het perpetuum mobile van de liefde. Amsterdam [] , -,; Het duister dat ons scheidt. Amsterdam , .

Brassinga (1948) Bloeiend puin. Essays en ander proza. Amsterdam , ; Wachtwoorden. Verzamelde gedichten. Amsterdam , ; Hapschaar. Amsterdam , ; Bloeiend puin, ; Wachtwoorden, .

Hemmerechts (1955) Kort kort lang. Amsterdam , , . Palmen (1955) ‘C. Palmen verklaart zichzelf’. In: Vrij Nederland,  juni ; R. Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge , ; C. Palmen: De Wetten. Amsterdam , , , , ; De vriendschap. Amsterdam , ; I.M. Amsterdam , , , .

Brouwers () ‘Anatomie van een stamboom’, ; Havinck. Amsterdam , ; ‘Anatomie van een stamboom’, ; Casino. Amsterdam , , , ; M. Zeeman: ‘Lezen om terug te praten’. In: de Volkskrant,  March ; P. Steinz: ‘Verpletterd door eigen blufpoker. De langverwachte vierde roman van Marja Brouwers’. In: NRC Handelsblad,  March ; M. Pruis: ‘Ik ben alleen maar een schrijver’ (interview). De Groene Amsterdammer, no. ,  July ; M. Brouwers: ‘De Herculesformule’. In: De Revisor  () , .

Februari (1963) De literaire kring. Amsterdam , , ; De Groene Amsterdammer  October , -; De Volkskrant  September ; De Volkskrant  February ; Liever verantwoordelijk dan vogelvrij. Amsterdam . Van Brederode (1970) Het opstaan. Amsterdam , ; www.vpro.nl/programma/buitenhof/ dossiers/; Het opstaan, .

Friedman () Tralievader. Amsterdam , , , ; Twee koffers vol. Amsterdam , .

El Bezaz (1974) Joost van den Hooff: ‘Alles wat ik gewild heb is uitgekomen’. In: Amersfoortse Courant,  March ; Naima El Bezaz: De weg naar het noorden. Amsterdam , ; ‘Laat moslimmannen hoofddoek dragen’. In: NRC Handelsblad,  January .

Joris (1953) Dans van de luipaard. Amsterdam/ Antwerpen [] , ; Mali blues. Amsterdam/Antwerpen [] , ; De poorten van Damascus. Amsterdam/ Antwerpen [] , . Dorrestein (1954) Vóór alles een dame. Amsterdam , [ oktober, s.l.]; Noorderzon. Amsterdam [] , ; Het geheim van de schrijver.

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Secondary Bibliography General Erica van Boven: Een hoofdstuk apart. ‘Vrouwenromans’ in de literaire kritiek, -. Amsterdam . Rosemarie Buikema and Lies Wesseling: Het heilige huis. De gotieke vertelling in de Nederlandse literatuur. Amsterdam . Suzan van Dijk, Lia van Gemert and Sheila Ottway (eds): Writing the History of Women’s Writing. Toward an International Approach. Amsterdam . Maaike Meijer et al. (eds): The Defiant Muse. Dutch and Flemish Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present. A Bilingual Anthology. New York . Maaike Meijer: De lust tot lezen. Nederlandse dichteressen en het literaire systeem. Amsterdam . Maaike Meijer and Jetty Schaap (eds): Historiography of Women’s Cultural Traditions. Dordrecht [etc.] . Margriet Prinssen en Lucie Th. Vermij (red.): Schrijfsters in de jaren vijftig. Amsterdam . A. Romein-Verschoor: Vrouwenspiegel. Een literair-sociologische studie over de Nederlandse romanschrijfster. Diss. Leiden, . Amsterdam  (nd ed.). Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen et al. (eds): Met en zonder lauwerkrans: schrijvende vrouwen uit de vroegmoderne tijd -. Van Anna Bijns tot Elise van Calcar. Amsterdam . Aagje Swinnen: Het slot ontvlucht. De ‘vrouwelijke’ Bildungsroman in de Nederlandse literatuur. Amsterdam . Liselotte Vandenbussche: Het veld der verbeelding. Vrijzinnige vrouwen in Vlaamse literaire en algemeen-culturele tijdschriften (-). Gent . Marianne Vogel: ‘Baard boven baard’. Over het Nederlandse literaire en maatschappelijke leven -. Amsterdam . Loveling (1836) Antonin van Elslander (red.): ‘De ‘Biografie’ van Virginie Loveling.’ In: Studia Germanica Gandensia  (), -. Ger Schmook (d.): ‘Virginie Loveling. Herinneringen aan Frans Rens.’ In: Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde (), -, -.

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Frans Deschoemaeker: ‘Christine D’haen. “Alles in de wereld heeft verklarende voetnoten nodig”’. In: Poëziekrant  () , -. Dirk de Schutter: ‘“Weerhoud uw ziel”: Eros en Thanatos bij Christine D’haen’. In: Dietsche Warande & Belfort  () , -. Hans Vandevoorde: ‘“A short name on a small stone”. The poetry of Christine D’haen’. In: The Low Countries. Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands  (-), -. Dietlinde Willockx: ‘“Verander uzelf tot eeuwigheid”. Het autobiografisch pact van Christine D’haen’. In: Spiegel der letteren  () , -. Harmsen van Beek (1927) A. van den Oever: ‘Gerard Reve en Fritzi Harmsen van Beek.’ In: Bzzlletin / (), -. A.M.A. van den Oever: ‘F. Harmsen van Beek.’ In: Kritisch Literatuur Lexicon . Annie van den Oever: ‘F. Harmsen van Beek, Geachte Muizenpoot.’ In: Lexicon van literaire werken . Annie van den Oever: ‘Fritzi’ en het groteske. Amsterdam . Frank (1929) D. Barnouw, G. van der Stroom et al. (eds): De dagboeken van Anne Frank. Amsterdam/Den Haag . Ton Brouwers: ‘Anne Frank’. In: Kritisch Literatuur Lexicon . S. Dresden: Vervolging, vernietiging, literatuur. Amsterdam . G. van der Stroom (ed.): De vele gezichten van Anne Frank. Amsterdam . www.annefrank.org www.annefrank.com Dirkje Kuik (1929) Leonie Uittenboogaard: Feestelijk verval. Dirkje Kuik  jaar. Amsterdam . Rubinstein (1929) Joop Goudsblom (ed.): Renate. Herinneringen van vrienden. Amsterdam . Aad Nuis: ‘Over Renate Rubinstein.’ In: Ons erfdeel  () , -. Carel Peeters: ‘Een zeurderig verlangen’. In: Hollandse pretenties. Amsterdam , -. Vogels (1930) Elsbeth Etty: ‘Egotistisch geschrijf. Het dagboekproject van Frida Vogels’. In: Armada  () , -. Arjan Peters: ‘Een gezien is eens voor al gezien’. In: De ongeneeslijke lezer. Amsterdam , -. G.F.H. Raat: ‘Het levenswerk van Frida Vogels’. In: Ons erfdeel  () , -.

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Burnier (1931) Pascale Bos: ‘“Tegendraads”, against the grain. Andreas Burnier’s radical rethinking of gender’. In: Dutch Crossing  () , -. Ute Langner: ‘Aspecten van autobiografisch schrijven in het prozawerk van Andreas Burnier’. In: De Nieuwe Taalgids  () , -. Carel Peeters: ‘De harde taal van de hoge sferen’. In: Hollandse pretenties. Amsterdam , -. Chris Rutenfrans: ‘Andreas Burnier. Bewoner van twee werelden’. In: Andreas Burnier, Een gevaar dat de ziel in wil. Amsterdam , III-XXV. Herzberg (1934) Frida Balk-Smit Duyzentkunst: ‘Getransformeerde directe rede en toch geen indirecte rede. Over de grammatica en poëtica van Judith Herzberg.’ In: Forum der letteren  () , -. Ruebsamen (1934) Ton Brouwers: ‘Helga Ruebsamen: Het lied en de waarheid.’ In: Lexicon van literaire werken . Kester Freriks: ‘Of zijn deze herinneringen vals?’ In: Harry Bekkering and Ad Zuiderent (eds): Jan Campertprijzen . Nijmegen , -. Pamela Pattynama: ‘Postkolonialisme: Helga Ruebsamen en het heimwee van de verdrevenen.’ In: Lover  () , -. G.F.H. Raet: ‘Literatuur als levenselixer: het proza van Helga Ruebsamen.’ In: Ons erfdeel  () , -. Margriet de Moor (1941) Kees ’t Hart: De kunst van het schrijven. Amsterdam , -. Emmanuel Overbeeke: ‘Eerst de muziek dan de literatuur.’ In: De Gids () , -. Fleur Speet: Leesinformatie Margriet de Moor Kreutzersonate. Amsterdam . Fleur Speet: Leesinformatie Margriet de Moor De verdronkene. Amsterdam . Mutsaers (1942) Bart Vervaeck: ‘Essay en verhaal in postmoderne tijden.’ In: Nederlandse Letterkunde  () . Bart Vervaeck: Het postmodernisme in de Nederlandse en Vlaamse roman. Nijmegen . Min (1944) Maaike Meijer: De lust tot lezen. Amsterdam . N. Draijer: De omgekeerde wereld. Seksueel misbruik van kinderen in het gezin. Den Haag . M. van Staa and H. Woelinga: Als je vader je bezit. Amsterdam, BA dissertation VU .

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Meulenbelt (1945) ‘Dutch and Flemish Novelists’. In: Stanley H. Barkan (ed.): Writing in Holland and Flanders ()  (Spring), -. Maaike Meijer: ‘ oktober : Anja Meulenbelt publiceert De schaamte voorbij De tweede feministische golf en de literatuur’. In: Nederlandse literatuur, Een geschiedenis. Amsterdam , -. Anja Meulenbelt (ed.): Wie weegt de woorden. De auteur en haar werk. Amsterdam . ‘Literatuuropvattingen van feministische auteurs en critici. Een tussentijdse balans.’ In: Spektator  (). Nelleke Noordervliet (1945) Kees ’t Hart: ‘De rancune van de boekbespreker’. In: De Groene Amsterdammer, --. Rob Schouten: ‘Mondig zijn. Driewerf hoera’. In: Trouw, --. Van Paemel (1945) Hugo Brems en Paul van Aken: ‘Monika van Paemel’. Oostvlaamse literare monografieën  (). Annelies Passchier: ‘Weerwoord als wapen, als schild. Monika van Paemels “schrijfsterpersona”’. In: Lisette Keustermans and Brigitte Raskin (eds): Als een wilde tuin: schrijfsters over schrijfsters . Amsterdam , -. Trude Schmidt: ‘Monika van Paemel’. In: Uitgelezen  (), -. Aagje Swinnen: ‘Evocatie van mogelijke vrouwenwerelden’. In: Het slot ontvlucht. De ‘vrouwelijke’ Bildungsroman in de Nederlandse literatuur. Amsterdam , -. Paul de Wispelaere: ‘Writing as an Act of Revolt and Emancipation. The Work of Monika van Paemel.’ In: The Low Countries  (), -. Van Keulen (1946) Lisa Kuitert and Mirjam Rotenstreich (eds): Mensje van Keulen. De schriften wachten. Amsterdam . Thijs van Nimwegen: ‘Mensje van Keulen. De gruwelijk hopeloos kleine wereld’. In: J.A. Dautzenberg (ed.): Beschouwingen over Remco Campert, Mensje van Keulen, Tomas Lieske, Doeschka Meijsing, Manon Uphoff en Joost Zwagerman. Leidschendam , -. Meijsing (1947) Sander Bax: ‘Op deze plaats geef ik je vrede’. In: Jan Campertprijzen. Nijmegen , -. Jaap Goedegebuure: ‘Jona of De hoogmoed’. In: De Schrift herschreven. De bijbel in de moderne literatuur. Amsterdam , -. Carel Peeters: ‘Doeschka Meijsing. De mooie Florentijn en het verlangen’. In: Houdbare illusies. Amsterdam , -.

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Roemer (1947) August Hans den Boef: ‘Astrid Roemers trilogie van het verscheurde Suriname’. In: Bzzlletin  () , -. A.H. den Boef: ‘Het schuldige Suriname van Astrid Roemer.’ In: Ons Erfdeel  () , -. Michiel van Kempen: ‘De onuitwisbare kenmerken van de zwarte stem: over de stijl van Astrid H. Roemer.’ In: Tydskrif vir Nederlands en Afrikaans  () , -. Michiel van Kempen: Een geschiedenis van de Surinaamse literatuur, vol. II. Breda , , , -Els Moor: ‘“Je bent wat je wil zijn”: sporen van hoop in de trilogie van Astrid Roemer’. In: Armada  () , -. Ineke Phaf: ‘Women Writers of the Dutch-Speaking Caribbean: Life Long Poem in the Tradition of Surinamese Granmorgu (New Dawn).’ In: Selwyn R. Cudjoe (red.): Caribbean Women Writers. Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, Massachusetts , -. Roline Redmond: Taal, macht en cultuur; machtsverhoudingen in een Afro-Caribische roman. Utrecht . Brassinga (1948) Secondary bibliography on Anneke Brassinga. In: Yra van Dijk and Koen Hilberdink (eds): Jan Campertprijzen . Nijmegen , -. Odile Heynders: ‘Iets te zeggen hebben in onnavolgbare woorden, Postmodern modernisme in werk van Anneke Brassinga?’ In: Koen Vergeer and Yves T’sjoen (eds): De volksverheffing, Jaarboek voor poëzie. Amsterdam/Antwerpen , -. Aleid Truijens: ‘Kunst is geen liefde, maar vuiligheid. Interview met Anneke Brassinga.’ In: De Volkskrant, --. Brouwers (1948) Pieter Steinz: ‘Verpletterd door eigen blufpoker. De langverwachte vierde roman van Marja Brouwers’. In: NRC Handelsblad, --. E.M. Woertman: ‘Versteende gewaarwording, verstarde beelden: notities over identiteit in de romans van Marja Brouwers’. In: Lust en gratie: Lesbisch cultureel tijdschrift () , p. -. Michael Zeeman: ‘Lezen om terug te praten’. In: De Volkskrant, --. Friedman (1952) Elsbeth Etty: ‘Carl Friedman over de dilemma’s van de niet-gelovige jood.’ In: NRC/Handelsblad, --. Joris (1953) Ruud Goossens: ‘Ik wil niet veroordelen. Ik wil begrijpen.’ In: Humo, --. Margot Dijkgraaf: ‘Steeds verder met de rivier mee: Lieve Joris reist door de chaos van Congo.’ In: NRC/Handelsblad, --.

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Dorrestein (1954) Agnes Andeweg: ‘Gothic Sisterhood and Finding a Voice: Metaphorizing the Second Feminist Wave.’ Paper for the th Feminist Research Conference, Utrecht University . Margriet Bruijn-Lacy: ‘Perceptions of reality in Renate Dorrestein’s novels’. In: Johan P. Snapper, Thomas F. Shannon (red.): The Berkeley Conference on Dutch Literature . Lanham, MD [etc.] , -. R.L. Buikema, E. Wesseling: ‘Gothic engineerings in childrearing manuals and feminist novels: Benjamin Spock meets Renate Dorrestein.’ In: I. van Elferen (ed.): Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day. Newcastle . Renate Dorrestein: ‘How I became a writer.’ In: Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies  () , -. Renate Dorrestein: Interview with the author. In: Lynne Huffer et al. (red.): Dutch-American Correspondences in Feminism. Ann Arbor , -. www.renatedorrestein.nl Hemmerechts (1955) Ton Anbeek: ‘Liefde (?)’. In: Neerlandica extra muros  () , -. Mark Kloosterman: Bloot zijn en beginnen. Het oeuvre van Kristien Hemmerechts. Amsterdam . Palmen (1955) Hans Goedkoop: ‘Het drama van de afhankelijkheid: Connie Palmen en de mechanismen van de openbaarheid’. In: Hans Goedkoop Een verhaal dat het leven moet veranderen. Amsterdam , -. Henk Harbers: ‘Adam en Eva als soap - Over het banale en het sacrale in I.M. en ander werk van Connie Palmen’. In: Literatuur: tijdschrift over Nederlandse letterkunde  () , -. Daan Roovers: ‘Persoonlijkheid is een mythe: I.Q. van Connie Palmen’. In: Filosofie magazine  () , -. Aagje Swinnen: ‘Gevormd door een wereld van woorden’. In: Het slot ontvlucht. De ‘vrouwelijke’ Bildungsroman in de Nederlandse literatuur. Amsterdam , -. Februari (1963) Sofie Gielis: ‘Knipoog in het land der blinden. Het lachen van M. Februari.’ In: Dietsche Warande & Belfort  (), -. Anthony Mertens: ‘M. Februari/Marjolein Drenth.’ In: De Revisor  (), -. Daniël Rovers: ‘M.Februari.’ In: De figuur in het tapijt. Op zoek naar zes auteurs. Brussel . Bart Vervaeck: ‘Het gemis als panorama. Een blik op het werk van M. Februari.’ In: Ons erfdeel  (), -.

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Van Brederode (1970) Hugo Camps: ‘Mozart zou nu meteen worden doodgeknuffeld.’ In: Elsevier, --. Hans Hoenjet: ‘Hoe God terugkeerde in de literatuur.’ In: HP/De Tijd, --. Television commentaries: www.vpro.nl/programma/buitenhof/dossiers. El Bezaz (1974) Henriette Louwerse: ‘The Way to the North or the Emergence of Turkish and Moroccan Migrant Writers in the Dutch Literary Landscape’. In: Dutch Crossing  (), -. Henriette Louwerse: Homeless Entertainment. On Hafid Bouazza’s Literary Writing. Oxford , -.

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Index of Authors

Bezaz, Naima El (1974), 241 Blaman, Anna (1905-1960), 79 Brederode, Désanne van (1970), 235 Brassinga, Anneke (1948), 199 Brouwers, Marja (1948), 203 Bruggen, Carry van (1881-1932), 55 Boudier-Bakker, Ina (1875-1966), 45 Burnier, Andreas (1931-2002), 147 Dermoût, Maria (1888-1962), 59 D’haen, Christine (1923-2009), 121 Dorrestein, Renate (1954), 217 Eybers, Elisabeth (1915-2007), 97 Frank, Anne (1929-1945), 131 Friedman, Carl (1952), 209 Gerhardt, Ida (1905-1997), 83 Goedkoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk, Cécile (1866-1944), 31 Haasse, Hella S. (1918), 105 Harmsen van (der) Beek, F. (ten) (1927-2009), 125 Hemmerechts, Kristien (1955), 223 Herzberg, Judith (1934), 151 Hillesum, Etty (1914-1943), 93 Joris, Lieve (1953), 213 Keulen, Mensje van (1946), 187 Kruseman, Mina (1839-1922), 23

Kuik, Dirkje (1929-2008), 135 Loveling, Virginie (1836-1923), 19 Meijsing, Doeschka (1947), 191 Meulenbelt, Anja (1945), 175 Michaelis, Hanny (1922-2007), 115 Min, Neeltje Maria (1944), 169 Minco, Marga (1920), 111 Moor, Margriet de (1941), 161 Mutsaers, Charlotte (1942), 165 Naeff, Top (1878-1953), 49 Nahon, Alice (1896-1933), 65 Noordervliet, Nelleke (1945), 179 Paemel, Monika van (1945), 183 Palmen, Connie (1955), 227 Roemer, Astrid (1947), 195 Roland Holst, Henriette (1869-1952), 39 Rosseels, Maria (1916-2005), 101 Rubinstein, Renate (1929-1990), 141 Ruebsamen, Helga (1934), 157 Savornin Lohman, Anna de (1868-1930), 35 Swarth, Hélène (1859-1941), 27 Székely-Lulofs, Madelon (1899-1958), 69 Vasalis, M. (1909-1998), 87 Velde, Jacoba van (1903-1985), 75 Vogels, Frida (1930), 143

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