Willem Frederik Hermans: Writer against the grain

One of the misfortunes of life in a relatively small country, at least as far as the reach of the national language goes, is the lack of international allure to local cultural productions, in particular in the field of literature. It has been said by some Latvian critics that Janis Rainis (1865-1929), that country's greatest playwright, could have been competing in historical fame and fortune with Shakespeare, had he not written in a language that is spoken by not even three million people. Even in countries that traditionally have had more international cultural exchange, such as the Netherlands, this remains an issue that can be sometimes pleasant (allowing for an almost provincial hoarding of national cultural treasures in the "I know something you don't" way), but is more often frustrating and demotivating, not in the least for the authors themselves. Sure, translations are not entirely one-way and the recently increasing popularity of Dutch modern literature in Germany proves that it can depend on moods and fashions in foreign nations as well; but nevertheless, a brilliant book written in Dutch will just never have the same international reputation as a book of equal quality would have when written in English, French or German, or even Russian.

Despite this, moreover since this blog is not read by anyone in the first place and so provides me this opportunity, I shall try to introduce to the Anglo-Saxon world the best Dutch writer of the post-war era (perhaps even of the 20th Century) and one of my personal favorites: Willem Frederik Hermans. He was a novelist, but above all a satirical author, using novels and essays to assail what he considered injustices or irrationalities in Dutch society and politics during all of the post-war period.

Willem Frederik Hermans was born on the first of September, 1921 in Amsterdam, as the youngest of two (he had a sister, Corry). Both his parents were teachers, and he grew up in a mostly academic environment. Having finished his education at the upper class Barlaeus-Gymnasium, where he wrote for the school paper Suum Cuique and won a short story competition in the newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad with his tale Uitvinder ("Inventor"), he started his studies in social geography at the University of Amsterdam. His plans, however, were thrown into disarray when the Germans invaded the country in 1940 and his sister and cousin committed suicide after a failed affair, a theme that would return in his works. He changed course and wanted to start doing geology instead, but his father insisted on him choosing a study that would allow him a teaching job at the university, so Hermans instead went with physical geography, closest to his real interest. He finished this in 1950 without playing any significant role in World War II (not to say that the War played no significant role in his life, though) and assumed a job as an assistant teacher at the University of Groningen in 1952, got his PhD in 1955, and became a university teacher in 1958. From this period on, the post-war period, his real life as a writer also commenced.

His first published work was already in 1944, a collection of his early poetry under the title Kussen door een rag van woorden ("Kissing through a web of words"). This marked his ascent in the Dutch literary scene. In 1946 he became editor of the literary magazine Criterium, in which he pre-published some excerpts of stories which were later to become part of his more famous works. During this period his first novel was published as Conserve ("Preserve"). This work set the trend in what would be his writing philosophy for the books about the War, in describing people who try to create order in the chaos before them but irrevokably fail at doing so, because for Hermans any such attempt is necessarily bound to fail. His War books are cynical-realistic, using the all too human failings of hardly sympathetic protagonists to show the fundamental irrationality of all human political systems and the irrationality above all of the pretense that it is possible for individuals to change society for the better by their own doings. In this Hermans was strongly motivated by his hatred of rightist (fascists of all sorts) and leftist (Marxists, Social-Democrats) progressives alike, whom in his view had an untenably and destructively naive view of the possibility for human improvement and he detested the dogmatic approach to reality both these ideologies followed. His stylistic approach in this period combines the highly personal critique of Multatuli with the general deterministic chaos of Kafka.

Hermans married in 1950 (to Emmy Meurs, a therapist) and having quit his position as editor in 1948, he took up a similar job at the magazine Podium in 1950, soon after publishing his first major work, Tranen der acacia's ("Tears of the acacias"). This work (the second to be prohibited by the Dutch catholic literary board IDIL) was rejected by the first publisher for being uncouth, but when published by the second became an instant success. It describes the young Arthur Muttah and his experiences during the War, where despite all his efforts the chaos of reality seems to block all his movements. His relations with his parents are troubled, his political efforts (resistance and betrayal) seem to lead nowhere, and altogether the opacity of life during the war is displayed with (at the time) unparallelled cynicism. The war here illustrates an extreme form of the general Hermansian truth that politics and ideology, as attempts to change the ways of man, are utterly invalid, and that in the end life is nothing else than the war of all against all. The book received scathing reviews especially from the newspapers of the various Christian denominations, which found it "unbearably vile" and "an assault on civic life". Even more controversial was the inclusion of the character Oscar Ossegal, a failed magician who doubles as a member of the Dutch resistance movement and is as incompetent at the latter as at the former. This attack on the idea directly after the war that the Dutch people had generally done their best at effective resistance against the Germans during the War led to a historical reconsideration of Dutch activities during the period.

His second major work (1952) was Ik heb altijd gelijk ("I am always right"), which was perhaps to be the most controversial of all, at least when measured by its effect on society. The infamous rant of the protagonist against the Catholics of the southern Netherlands caused Hermans to be sued for defamation; the defense however prevailed with the argument that it was the speaker in the novel, not Hermans himself, who did the defaming, and Hermans was acquitted. Ik heb altijd gelijk also combines political War issues with the protagonist's personal struggles, in this case using the Dutch attempt at suppressing the independence movement in Indonesia, the so-called "politional actions", as a background for the main character's attempts to gain personal power. The protagonist, a certain Lodewijk Stegman, is a Sergeant who just returned to the Netherlands after his participation in the politional actions, where he was demoted from Lieutenant because of a shady affair (some sort of "corruption"). He thinks he is always right and knows the truth about all things (and his worldview is close, though not equal, to that of Hermans), but all his efforts to have his superior insight come to fruition lead nowhere. Stegman acts with the drastic, impulsive style of Hermans' early protagonists, which at its best moments can compete with Céline in its expression of the illogicality of "ordened" life and the frustration of the main character at his constant inability to cope with this.

Hermans' only son Ruprecht was born in 1955. Besides those mentioned above, the first half of the 1950s was especially productive for Hermans despite the changes in his family life and his career (it seems the more he had to do, the more he wrote). He published one novella and a short story collection, all following the theme of the impossibility for humans to distinguish between reality and irreality and truth and untruth in life, before embarking on his third in 1957. The third one is the best known of them, dubbed Een landingspoging op Newfoundland ("An attempt to land on Newfoundland"), in which the short stories mostly explore the difficulty of individuals to break through the limitations their life circumstances set to them, especially the limitation of the inevitable loneliness of each individual. From this point on, the predominant theme of Hermans' major works switched from the impossibility to change the world to the impossibility for humans to know their own world and its rules, you might say in fact a deepening of the prior subject by exploring its causes. It is in this context that one should also place his grotesque De God Denkbaar, Denkbaar de God ("The God Thinkable, Thinkable the God"), published in 1956, a bizarre surreal tale of a man by the name of Thinkable who becomes a God, only to lose his divinity to a competitor, an all-powerful baby. The whole story (as well as its later successor, the novel Het Evangelie van O. Dapper Dapper ("The Gospel of O. Dapper Dapper") written almost twenty years later) seems to lack all structure and works mainly by way of associations and playing with words. Its main theme, the relationship between language and human thought, is at once a critique of the non-exact sciences and their claims to knowledge and a parody on religious thought. Hermans himself said of this book in an interview that he removed, on purpose, all explanations; he wanted to present it as a cartoon in the form of a novel.

His next major work however would be another novel, perhaps his most famous of all: De donkere kamer van Damocles ("Damocles' darkroom"). This work combines the issues of the War and its state of exception with the failure of all individual attempts at improving the world or yourself in a highly exciting novel, which at times seems a detective story and at times more a satirical thriller. The main character is a certain Osewoudt, who owns a small-time Tabacceria and feels he is a failure at all things. He longs to be a resistance hero but is too cowardly and naive to actually do it. All this changes when Dorbeck, who looks exactly like him physically but is his opposite psychologically, shows up at his door and orders him to develop some photos for the resistance. Though this fails, Osewoudt is subsequently swept up in a complex intrigue where none of the people he meets seem to really know what they are doing, but all are motivated by their own drive to change simultaneously their personal situation as well as the world. Osewoudt spends most of the book running errands for Dorbeck, who gives him increasingly odd and mysterious orders but never leaves a trace of himself anywhere, to Osewoudt's increasing frustration. This Freudian theme of the superego-doppelganger in the end leads to Osewoudt's downfall, as no one believes that Dorbeck actually exists, something that he never expected and yet can do nothing to avail. Many answers to the questions of what is real and what imagination in the book are left to the reader, though Hermans skilfully closes all avenues for a Deus ex machina or external explanation. Another important facet of the work is the recurring theme of photography, as a means of displaying reality but also its comparison to writing as a way to highlight particular aspects of the perceived reality, as Hermans saw it; this is the theme the title refers to. The work has been interpreted as a psychological story about human identity, a philosophical story about the impossibility of knowing yourself or others, or just a thrilling war mystery; whatever it is, it is one of the best Dutch novels of the past century.

During the 1960s Hermans increasingly changed his theme, as said before, from the question of reality to the question of knowledge and its political and philosophical ramifications. In 1966 he published the famous Nooit meer slapen ("Never sleep again"), which is also considered one of his best works. In it the young geologist (Hermans' own field) Alfred Issendorf is sent on a scientific expedition to the remote area of Norwegian Lappland to surpass his dominating father in his area of study. Searching for meteor impacts in the barren wasteland of northern Norway, he is obstructed and blocked by all kinds of impediments along the way: by the Norwegian academics, by his colleagues in the expedition, by the harsh surroundings, by his own doubts and internal struggles. It has been called a "reversed Bildungsroman", in the sense that it describes a young man who goes on a quest to find a scientific truth, and is forced in the end to admit that the truth is unknowable, and that scientific success and prestige is mostly determined by nepotism and sheer good luck. Hermans tells the tale by way of a tapestry of small and telling details, starting from the one-armed hotel porter at the start of the book to the cynical end, where Issendorf sees a meteor strike on the plane-ride back and is given a pair of manchet buttons with the stone fragments in them as a sort of prize. The book also is infused with Scandinavian mythology from the Edda and the Norse sagas, which had inspired Hermans during his periods in Sweden and Norway (on scientific expedition himself) in the early 1960s.

In this period (roughly 1960 to 1975), Hermans additionally wrote three plays, none of which were well-received, to his great annoyance. His next great novel, Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder ("Memoirs of a guardian angel") followed the set path in describing the way human actions are based on and fail because of human error and general confusion, illustrated by its subtitle "a cloud of not-knowing". It was however less of a smashing success than his former two major works, which was another setback for Hermans. His satirical works, however, as opposed to his literary ones, were much more effective and played a significant role in the politics of those days, although its impact has been largely forgotten now.
The infamous Mandarijnen op zwavelzuur ("Mandarins on sulfuric acid") was a collection of satirical and accusatory essays, aimed at the éminences grises of the Dutch literary criticism, Ter Braak and Du Perron, as well as destroying the falsely created reputation of the Jewish con-man Fryderyk Weinreb, who had built a support and fame for himself in the highest and most powerful cultural circles in the country by pretending to have been a major war hero; Hermans, however, convincingly accused him of having made up almost all his stories and defrauding or slandering the witnesses of this into silence, which included several Holocaust survivors. A 1976 report of the RIOD, the Dutch WWII information service, completely supported Hermans' claims, proving Weinreb to be a liar on a grand scale and thereby greatly embarassing the cultural elite of the Netherlands at the time, many of which had supported Weinreb against Hermans. (It is of interest to note that one of the main Weinreb defenders at the time, Aad Nuis, later became a State Secretary, a Dutch office comparable to a vice-Minister or US undersecretary.) However, this strong polemic against the injustices and undeserved fame Hermans perceived caused him so much effort and constant battles in the public arena that he abandoned his attempts at writing a sequel to the Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder. Instead he did publish a few collections of essays of literary and general content, most importantly Het sadistische universum ("The sadist universe") mostly arguing against naturalist and psychological novels, and in the political field satirizing Marxism and religion and casting doubt on the uses of the democratizations of those years.

It may have been because of this that the conflict he had with the academic establishment at the University of Groningen, still known for its rigid and authoritarian professorial structure, made him decide to give up his professorship (which he had by then achieved) altogether and leave the Netherlands for Paris, a city he had always liked as a true francophile and which provides a good base for an established writer. As a parting shot he then published two novels mocking and denouncing the ways of academia, namely Onder Professoren ("Among Professors") in 1975 and Uit talloos veel miljoenen ("From countless millions") in 1981. Another controversial issue in his life became the famous refusal of the Dutch literary P.C. Hooft prize, granted by the Ministry of Culture. In the letter Hermans received he was awarded 18.000 gulden for the award, but he soon after received another letter saying this had been a typing error and that the real prize was 8.000. Hermans, ever a difficult man to please, felt offended by this and curtly wrote back that he "did not intend to receive anything from a Minister whose signature is so quickly devalued". He had refused several literary prizes before as well: the prize of the Artists' Resistance in 1957 because he disapproved of the literary establishment, and the Vijverbergprize for the novel Nooit meer slapen, where he had the prize money sent to a charity for Africa (in his own words, the first charity that he thought of). This serves as another illustration of Hermans' quarrelsome nature and his constant battle with the Dutch establishment, both cultural and political, fought on all sorts of battlefields.

The 1980s marked the slow descent of Hermans' literary importance. Being in Paris, away from the center of Dutch literary life, surely will not have helped, but the several novellas he wrote during this period where not that succesful either, at least not relatively. He continued his polemic essays but was never as venomous as in the Mandarijnen op zwavelzuur, instead concentrating on, as he himself called it, "warnings and observations". His two novels from this period, Een heilige in de horlogerie ("A saint in the watch-makery") from 1987 and Au Pair in 1989 still described the familiar Hermans themes of incapacity and misunderstanding, but its tone is much more melancholy and rather more sad than cynical, mainly applying a style that rests between realism and his earlier Célinesque pseudo-realism, a rather dream-like world which consists of "constant mirrorings and contradictions", to quote biographers Janssen and Otterspeer. His 1982 trip to South Africa caused some controversy still, among other things leading to the city council of Amsterdam to boycott him, as did the failed attempt to assassinate him by a madman on Sinterklaas day in 1988.

In 1991 Hermans moved from Paris to Bruxelles, having always preferred the Belgian cultural establishment to the Dutch one (he did accept the one Belgian prize he was awarded). Here he started working on publishing some old, unfinished stories as well as some more autobiographical works, where he himself figures as the protagonist Richard Simillion. In 1992 he was given the honor of writing the Literary Week gift, a long-standing Dutch tradition where each year, during a national Literary Week, an established author writes a short story which is then freely distributed with every book purchase in all book stores. For this he reconstituted an old story of his into a modern short story, published as Madelon in de mist van het schimmenrijk ("Madelon in the mist of the realm of spirits"), which harkens back to his war satire days. His last novel (1995) was Ruisend gruis ("Rushing gravel"), which seems to combine elements from his entire oeuvre into one strongly condensed whole. Its main protagonist, Fahrenkrog (though he denied this, Hermans had an odd love for using weird names in his books), is a professor in minerology. He dreams of once being able to use a pin to make a hole in a vacuum-packaged bag of coffee, but as the story develops this turns into a plan to make a "leak" in large buildings as well. When he one day tries to make a hole in his wall to fasten a barometer, an unstoppable stream of gravel pours out. Despite all his attempts, nobody is able to help him with this problem, due to a series of unfortunate coincidences and misunderstandings. The gravel meanwhile threatens to cover all of the land around Groningen and even derails a train, strange vegetation appears in the university buildings and his colleague Birra is killed in a freak volcanic accident. His daughter meanwhile seems to have a solution: the handplant. This is a parasitic plant that grows in people's hands, and only lets go when it feels another handpalm. This plant appears to be able to save him, but it is too late: Fahrenkrog dies and his daughter remains, to be overgrown by the parasitic plant.
In this bizarre story, Hermans makes one last attempt at illustrating the futility of many human pretenses and the incorrect way that human thought perceives reality as being logical and in order, when in reality it is chaos and confusion. He himself considered his works a form of "creative nihilism", a way to show the unreality of order without being destructive, but by means of illustrating it in literary form. His works are inspired by great writers as Céline, Freud, Wittgenstein (whom he greatly admired) and H. Von Kleist, but above all it is his own peculiarity that makes them brilliant: the peculiarity of a pessimistic conservative in a generally optimistic and progressive country, and the peculiarity of a writer with an eye for human weakness and wit to spare.

Willem Frederik Hermans died on April 27, 1995, in Utrecht.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 01:19