6: Renewal and Reaction, 1880–1940

I. Literary Renewal, 1880–1893

Ton Anbeek

The Movement of 1880

At the end of the nineteenth century Dutch literature in the Netherlands was radically transformed by the appearance of the so-called Generation of 1880. Of course, even radical transformations never come completely out of the blue. Impulses toward change had been discernible before, but they remained isolated and lacked wider resonance; one example is Busken Huet’s novel Lidewyde, which was discussed in the previous chapter. The strength of the men of 1880 (women played virtually no role in the movement) was that they formed a united front in breaking with the literary conventions that had dominated Dutch literary life until then.

Significantly, they called the magazine that was to be their mouthpiece The New Guide (De nieuwe gids). Just as in 1837 The Guide (De gids) had asserted itself in opposition to an older periodical, so this new generation wanted to inject new life into literature — and not only into literature, for the magazine’s subtitle was “Magazine for Literature, Art, Politics, and Science.” The first year’s issues devoted more pages to political commentary than to all its poetry and creative prose combined. Their politics soon became radicalized, with socialists and anarchists campaigning against the heartless liberalism that dominated the political stage. The prosperous middle classes became the target of the left-wing contributors to the new magazine, just as poets and prose-writers pilloried the sedate literary taste of the liberal bourgeoisie. For the first few years of the periodical’s existence, artistic and political reformism seemed to be in unison — until both sides realized that while they might be fighting the same enemy, they were striving for very different ideals.

The Movement of 1880, with its two-pronged program of artistic and political renewal, may be seen as symptomatic of the rapid change that Dutch society was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth century. Later, one member of the Generation of 1880, the greatest poet among them, Herman Gorter, looked back at that change, having in the meantime converted to Marxism. After 1870, Gorter observed, the Netherlands saw the development of large-scale capitalism and the growth of an “industrial proletariat.” Amsterdam changed from an eighteenth-century town with a craft-based economy into an industrialized capitalist metropolis:

That transformation of things was a transformation of people! New powers were harnessed, new beings were forged, and we were those new beings. Society was to be changed utterly, new and greater forces emerged, a new and greater happiness was on its way. . . . Not a moment passed without something of those new forces being implanted in us. They were social forces, forces that affect society and hence each individual, and so we were constantly surrounded by them. All our senses, our heart, our head, our hands, our sex were touched by them.60

Many of the changes from this tumultuous period had a direct impact on literary history. In 1863 a new type of secondary school, the Higher Public School (Hoogere Burger School or HBS), was introduced alongside the traditional gymnasium. The new school was far more practically oriented than the gymnasium, which with its classics-based program prepared pupils for university. New sections of the population were now given the chance of further and higher education. It is striking that a number of members of the Generation of 1880 should have attended the HBS, suggesting a link between the emergence of a new literature and the emancipation of the bourgeoisie.

Yet however much political revolutionaries rubbed shoulders with their literary counterparts in the pages of The New Guide, the magazine owes its fame largely to the new poetry that emerged from it. The central figure in this trend was the former HBS pupil Willem Kloos (1859–1938). Kloos first caused a stir when he wrote an introduction to the posthumous poems of his friend Jacques Perk (1859–81) after the latter’s untimely death. In fact, Kloos did not simply publish the poems; he arranged and “improved” them as he saw fit. In this way he refashioned Perk to fit the desired image: that of a trailblazer for the new poetry and thus in effect for Kloos’s own work. Kloos’s “Introduction” (1882) amounted to a manifesto proclaiming the principles of a new poetry.

Willem Kloos. The Hague, Literary Museum.

In his preface Kloos explicitly states which poets served as his models; he names Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth — in short, the English Romantic poets of over half a century before. Kloos’s stress on “emotion” is entirely in accord with the Romantic creed, as in Words­worth’s celebrated definition: “Poetry is the spontaneous over­flow of powerful feelings.” Poets, Kloos maintains, can be recognized by the intensity of their emotions. He constantly alludes to traditional poets who mistook “sentimentality for feeling, conventional commonplaces for imagination, and an unruffled flow for deeper melodies.” He does not name names at this point, not wishing to make the introduction to the work of his late friend into a polemical pamphlet. His appeal to the English Romantics was meant to illustrate sufficiently what true poets were. This brings him to the following lyrical formulation:

Poetry is not some doe-eyed maiden who, lending us a hand along life’s path, teaches us with a smile how to tie a bouquet of flowers . . .: but a woman, proud and magnificent, . . . who turns the highest joy into the deepest suffering, but at the same time turns deepest suffering into the ecstasy of pain, presses the thorns into our forehead till we bleed, in order that the unique crown of immortality may blossom from it.

The poet who has the crown of thorns forced onto his head: the parallel with the figure of Christ is unmistakable. It reveals a characteristic trait of the kind of Romanticism that the Generation of 1880 embraced. During the early era of Romanticism, the period 1780–1830, we find various European adherents, including writers like Willem Bilderdijk, for whom religion and art are in fact one. But at a later stage a shift in emphasis takes place. Poetry is now no longer identical to religion: it replaces religion. In the Netherlands this new interpretation can be explained by the fact that Kloos and his followers were vehemently opposed to work that served the traditional bourgeois ideals of religion, virtue, and patriotism — the type of verse that had been churned out for decades by clergymen who were simply continuing their ministry in rhyme. To the Generation of 1880 such pious doggerel was anathema, and they worked hard to neutralize it.

The offensive gathered force with the appearance of The New Guide in 1885. That same year saw the publication of the collection Blades of Grass or Songs on Virtue, Religion and Patriotism (Grassprietjes of Liederen op het gebied van Deugd, Godsvrucht en Vaderland). The writer used the name Cornelis Paradijs (his real name was Frederik van Eeden). A “friend” of the author’s, writing as P. A. Saai­je Azn. [saai = dreary], contributed an “Open Letter to the Writer,” which contains such paeans as “Your blades of grass will be as balm poured on the sore wounds inflicted on us by Naturalism, Socialism, and other such godless things.” Using the name Sebastiaan Slaap [slaap = sleep] Willem Kloos wrote a preface praising “the many excellent, first-rate poets in our country” whose lyre is ever at the ready to celebrate “religion, hearth and home, our native land, and the unforgettable House of Orange.” The collection is one long parody of the interminable offerings of the self-important clergymen poets, who are mocked in turn in “The Clergyman’s Song.” It is a classic example of a younger generation settling scores with a way of writing poetry that has become irrelevant.

Still in the same year, 1885, Kloos and Albert Verwey published a long poem, Julia, a Sicilian Tale (Julia, een verhaal van Sicilië), a verse epic cobbled together to fool the critics. Sure enough, some reviewers responded enthusiastically to the string of clichés. The authors claimed victory, having demonstrated that the critics had no understanding of poetry and were hence unfit to judge, as indeed the two practical jokers explained for good measure in a venomous brochure. These successful stunts brought the young revolutionaries the publicity they needed, and showed that their appearance on the scene was meant as a radical break with the dominant poetic tradition. As late as 1884 one of the principal representatives of that tradition, Nicolaas Beets, had been fêted nationwide on his seventieth birthday.

The new-style poet was not a clergyman; generally he had no profession at all. He was not even a practicing Christian. The Generation of 1880 put an end once and for all to the hitherto axiomatic relationship between religion and art. After 1885 art and religion were to be continually at loggerheads: Christian literature — that is, literature based on traditional Christianity — was marginalized and virtually disappeared. When Christian motifs do appear in the work of such later poets as P. C. Boutens, Martinus Nijhoff, and Gerrit Achterberg, they are used in entirely unorthodox ways. Hence secularization began much earlier in literature than in Dutch society as a whole, where the process only really gathered momentum in the course of the twentieth century.

Religion disappears from literature; or perhaps one should say that Christianity is ousted by a private religion? Jacques Perk’s poem “Deinè Theos” illustrates the point:

Beauty, o thou whose name shall hallowed be,

Thy will be done; thy kingdom let us see;

No other god but thou shall be adored on earth!

 

Beholding thee, a man’s life is complete:

If death’s power now brings him to defeat . . .

What matter? His joy’s of highest worth.

Keatsian worship of beauty, but on the model of the Lord’s Prayer. In a poem that comes close to blasphemy, Perk, the son of a clergyman, professed his new religion. It was Kloos who would most forcefully advocate the art-for-art’s-sake argument against the clergymen who wrote poetry for the sake of the edifying message. Another celebrated thesis of the Generation of 1880 — “form and content are one” — may also be seen in this light, as it offered an implicit challenge to the clergymen poets, for whom form remained secondary. In practice the slogan “form and content are one” meant that the poets paid great attention to sound effects that heightened the mood being evoked.

In one of his columns in the The New Guide Kloos arrived at a definition of art that found its way into all Dutch textbooks: art, he claimed, was “the supremely individual expression of the supremely individual emotion.” This definition, too, can be seen as a reaction to clergymen’s poetry. The traditional poets proclaimed generally recognized ideals; their individuality was mainly expressed through the presence or absence of technical ability, not through any exceptional, utterly personal feelings. Utilitarian art is by definition not art that strives after the personal.

This hostility to the socially oriented art of their predecessors may explain why Kloos and his fellow poets adopted only part of the legacy of English Romanticism. The rebelliousness of Shelley, who challenged the powers that be, found no echo among them — that would have brought them much closer to those contributors to The New Guide who supported social reform, like Frank van der Goes. Instead the new poet shut himself off from society, which anyway was incapable of understanding his unique sensibility. But even if he had jettisoned Christianity, he still cherished the illusion that his loneliness and suffering had only one parallel in human history: the passion of Christ. As such, he derived his grandeur indirectly from Christianity.

The social isolation of the new artists associated with the Generation of 1880 had far-reaching consequences, and not only for the fortunes of The New Guide, which witnessed an increasing antagonism between art-for-art’s-sake devotees and social reformers. Kloos and his associates turned their backs on bourgeois society. A comparison with the feeble flicker of Dutch Romanticism around 1830 is instructive here. At that time a number of young students in Leiden enthused over English and French Romanticism. But they were preparing to become clergymen and were to assume a respected position in society; Byronic attitudes were not conducive to such a calling. Nicolaas Beets, the most important of them, soon realized this and foreswore his “black period.” Kloos and his circle, who lived in a much more dynamic world, dared to defy social norms. The resulting tension between the new artist and the bourgeois world created a kind of bohemian class, with artists living from hand to mouth on the fringes of society. Both the break with Christianity and the break with the bourgeoisie represent radical changes in the history of Dutch literature — changes that in other European countries had taken place earlier.

The poetry of Kloos is one long lament for the loneliness of the sensitive heart. “The Man must die before the Artist can live,” he wrote. Pride in his own art alternates with pessimism at the great suffering from which art must spring. The artist stands alone and misunderstood in the world, as he pursues his cult of Beauty. Megalomania and humility are strikingly expressed in this sonnet:

Deep in my inmost thoughts a God I tower,

And in my inmost soul enthroned I sit,

King of myself, the world, by royal writ

Of my own strife and triumphs, my own power, —

 

And when the hosts of wild dark faces lower,

Advance and jeer, then fly, defeat admit

At my raised hand and crown so brightly lit:

Deep in my inmost thoughts a God I tower.

 

And yet, sometimes so endlessly I yearn

To put an arm around your limbs so dear

And sob out loud, with glowing heart displayed,

 

With pride and glorious calm to disappear,

Swamped at your lips beneath a wild cascade

Of kisses, where words would serve no turn.

The poem appears to sing the praises of the poet’s own autonomy, but in the sextet this sense of superiority gives way to the longing to submit to a higher power (the beloved). However a Kloos poem opens, it usually ends in a lament at the loneliness of the sensitive poetic soul. Suffering is the key word in his oeuvre. For his own and many later generations Kloos became the symbol of the tortured poet. And that is what he must have looked like: photos show us a somewhat disheveled appearance with strikingly pale eyes. He may have later become a respectable citizen (after a mediocre female novelist “saved him from drink and poetry”), but he retained the aura of a Dutch Verlaine, a doomed poet who found it hard to survive the brutal realities of life.

Although Kloos was the most prominent representative of the new poetry and poetics and so became the representative of the Movement of 1880, he was not the most important poet of his generation. That honor belonged — as Kloos himself recognized — to a man five years his junior, Herman Gorter (1864–1927). In many ways Gorter’s development is symptomatic of the evolution of literary life in general at the turn of the century. His debut marked him as both an original and a highly accomplished poet. He began not with sonnets but with a long epic poem that has since become a classic, May (Mei, 1889). His contemporaries were immediately captivated by the grandeur of the poem, with its seemingly effortless opening:

A newborn springtime and a newborn sound:

I want this song like piping to resound

that oft I heard at summer eventide

in an old township, by the waterside —

the house was dark, but down the silent road

dusk gathered and above the sky still glowed,

and a late golden, incandescent flame

shone over gables through my window-frame.

A boy blew music like an organ pipe,

the sounds all trembled in the air as ripe

as new-grown cherries, when a springtime breeze

rises and then journeys through the trees.

The same contemporaries were confused when a year later Gorter published his collection Verses (Verzen). If one of the main aims of the Movement of 1880 was an “emancipation of the senses,” the expression of an original sensory view of the outside world, Gorter’s collection showed that emancipation in its most extreme form.

Herman Gorter. The Hague, Literary Museum.

Verses (1890) is a key volume in the history of Dutch poetry. Together with the work of Guido Gezelle in Flanders, it signals the beginning of modern poetry. Whereas Kloos retained the strict form of the sonnet to shape his poetic suffering, Gorter set aside all the existing rules, marshaling rhyme, meter, and imagery to record his extraordinary sensations. It is no accident that it was precisely this collection that inspired Kloos’s celebrated slogan about poetry being the supremely individual expression of the supremely individual emotion. In Gorter’s Verses all the traditional constraints yield to the need to give voice to exceptional, highly subjective perceptions.

The collection contains a number of poems that are easily accessible and whose distinctive feature is their charming simplicity, as well as several wonderful love poems. But alongside these are lyric poems that attempt to express what had never before been put into words. “The trees undulate on the hills,” begins one poem, and who can help but be reminded of that other obsessive, Vincent van Gogh, who, like Gorter, colors nature with his own feelings? Compared with lines like these, Kloos’s imagery looks conventional and predictable, like his sentiments, forever revolving around the torments of an exalted ego. Gorter goes much further, and his emotions sometimes border on madness:

The tower’s face aloft

in the midst still grandly shows the hours,

imagine hours, hours, hours —

they suffocate,

these moments that grate,

laughter itching there

is too much to bear,

I suffocate

under this demented light grand momentary weight.

To convey this extreme sensation all the conventional rules of versification are thrown overboard. Line length is arbitrary, with occasional rhyme, and the meter is halting: prosody is being mocked. This poetry is so individual that it is difficult to characterize. Is it impressionist, since Gorter is attempting to express unique impressions in language? Or does it prefigure expressionism, since the landscape is infused with the poet’s soul? Literary historians call these poems “sensitivist,” following the term coined by the critic Lode­wijk van Deyssel, who wrote of Verses that it was “a book to sob over.” For Van Deyssel, “sensitivism” meant impressionism taken to its furthest extreme. For later readers the affinity with expressionism is unmistakable.

Gorter’s language is as daring as his treatment of the rules of prosody is idiosyncratic. As a result, contemporary readers of Verses faced a novel problem that has become familiar to today’s poetry lovers, in that a rational approach to the language used is virtually impossible. Associations and guesswork are needed to divine a meaning apparently in flux. Here a late-nineteenth-century audience was given a taste of what would not erupt with full force until over a half a century later: poetry in which the reader was expected to make sense of the supremely personal associations of the idiosyncratic poem. Not surprisingly, most readers in 1890 were at a loss as to what to make of this lyricism.

In these poems Gorter evokes extreme sensations. He sometimes even seems to be on the verge of madness — here too a comparison with Van Gogh suggests itself. However, realizing the danger of abandoning himself to these frenzied sensations, he took a step back and chose the stable form of the sonnet for the poems he published in the following year, which have gone down in history as the “turning-point sonnets.” The turning-point referred not only to the verse form. Gorter had come to the conclusion that the truly great poets such as Homer and Dante owed their superiority to their coherent worldview. It meant the beginning of his search for a comparable intellectual foundation for his own poetry.

Lodewijk van Deyssel. The Hague, Literary Museum.

For a while he found a philosophical anchor in the work of Spinoza, a philosopher who had a great appeal for some of his contemporaries, such as Albert Verwey and Frederik van Eeden, who had turned their backs on Christianity but had not yet found a replacement. Unfortunately Gorter’s philosophical study did not produce any compelling poetry. He eventually concluded that he was “on the wrong side,” that is, on the side of capitalism. In 1897 he joined the newly founded Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), the party that was to represent constitutional socialism in Dutch politics. This, however, soon proved too tame for Gorter. He began to advocate what he saw as a purer Marxism, which led to his joining smaller and smaller splinter groups. In his view even Lenin was not far enough to the left. Eventually his party became so small that it could no longer exercise any concrete influence on Dutch political life, whereas the socialists were increasingly inclined to participate in government.

Gorter’s conversion to “scientific” Marxism meant that henceforth his poetry, too, was harnessed to the class struggle, so that the Netherlands’ greatest poet subordinated his unmistakably sublime talent to politics. The step of course provoked widespread debate. Supporters and opponents judged Gorter’s transition according to their own political leanings, and Gorter’s reputation as a poet dipped sharply. Few critics or readers put the later epic poetry of the convert on the same plane as his debut May. Nevertheless the later work, particularly the shorter lyric poems, contains some superb lines.

The incomprehension with which Gorter’s defection was met in literary circles is not hard to understand. Just when poetry had finally freed itself from the yoke imposed by Christianity, it bowed to the dogma of Marxism! But although Gorter’s radical volte-face remained unique, his attempt to find a philosophical anchor was not uncharacteristic of the spirit of the 1890s. The short period of the uninhibited celebration of the senses was followed by a period of introspection. Submersion in the world of the senses is obviously not satisfying in the long run, at least not for Dutch poets. They lacked the foundation that Christianity had once offered, became disoriented in their intoxication, looked madness in the face and hastily took a step back. A need “for more style and certainty, a firmer direction and belief” (as the historian Johan Huizinga characterized the period), became apparent everywhere in the 1890s. Individualism proved a dead end, art for art’s sake no longer an adequate premise. The result was a series of great tensions within The New Guide, which never fully recovered from the crisis.

Quite early on there had been clashes between the five founding editors: Frederik van Eeden, Frank van der Goes, Willem Kloos, Albert Verwey, and Willem Paap. The last of these bowed out after only a year. The talented Albert Verwey (1865–1937) also departed fairly quickly, following a conflict with Kloos. An ideological confrontation with Frank van der Goes (1859–1939) proved equally inevitable. Van der Goes was a political activist who advocated progressive policies; later he became one of the founders of the SDAP, to which Gorter briefly belonged. Sooner or later a showdown with the advocates of art for art’s sake was inevitable.

The crisis was triggered by an article by Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) in which his dislike of Van der Goes’s rationalism became evident. One of Van Eeden’s targets was a popular book by the American author Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888), in which this utopian thinker sketched a vision of a future society where equality ruled. As it happened, it was Van der Goes who had translated it (under the title In het jaar 2000). The rifts in the editorial board soon widened as a result of this vision of the future.

The great propagandist of the new prose, Lodewijk van Deyssel (1864–1952), adopted an extreme, Wilde-like position. Art, he claimed, being a luxury, cannot exist in an egalitarian society. When all incomes are the same there will be no room left for the luxury that is art. Consequently universal suffrage will be the death knell of “Personality and Intellect, Thought, Art, every exalted achievement of mankind up to now.” Van der Goes opposed the view of the gifted polemicist Van Deyssel with supreme sobriety and objectivity. But a full-scale conflict could no longer be avoided when Kloos joined the debate and stated bluntly: “Social reformers, in the nature of things, in the core of their being, are anti-artistic.” Kloos saw the notion of equality as an offshoot of “that accursed nuisance Christianity! We thought we had been freed from it for ever.” This outburst also stung the religiously inclined Van Eeden. From that moment the rift between the ivory-tower writers and those with more social awareness at The New Guide became unbridgeable.

By the end of the magazine’s seventh year, in 1892, each of the editors stood alone: Van Eeden with his religious humanism, Van der Goes as a Marxist theoretician, and Kloos with his anti-Christian elitism, supported by the polemical power of Van Deyssel. It is an irony of history that at the very moment that The New Guide had won the battle for literary power its editorial board disintegrated. The discussion on the place of art in society would continue to preoccupy young artists in subsequent years. Increasingly they abandoned the art-for-art’s-sake thesis of Kloos and Van Deyssel and searched for new anchors. Some found it in socialism or anarchism; others in Spinoza, in theosophy, which enjoyed great popularity at the time, or in Oriental religions. A few returned to that “accursed nuisance Christianity.” Gorter’s development from unbridled abandonment to the senses to doctrinaire Marxism is symptomatic of the artists’ search for a new ideology in the 1890s.

Naturalism in the Netherlands

In the late nineteenth century two questions determined whether or not one was a progressive artist. Do you like Wagner? And what about Zola? The latter enjoyed an unprecedented reputation in the Netherlands. Gorter put him on a par with Homer and Shakespeare — borrowing this ranking from Lodewijk van Deyssel, the propagandist of the new prose. No doubt Emile Zola played a decisive role in the development of Dutch literary prose. He was very widely read. In 1885 Busken Huet mentions in passing that each new novel by Zola attracted two thousand advance orders in the Netherlands. “Germinal is already among our compatriots’ favorite books.”

All the same, Zola owed a large part of his reputation to the controversial nature of his work. His novels seemed to offer everything that the Dutch most abhorred and hence devoured. They were raw, unrelenting, and intensely realistic — and that when far into the 1880s virtually all Dutch novels followed the virtuous, idealistic pattern, with noble heroes, a complicated plot with an edifying denouement, and preferably a deathbed reconciliation. Those narratives had little to do with realism, and of course the authors knew that perfectly well: realism was coarse. Realists flouted the constitution of nineteenth-century Dutch literature, which stipulated that art must offer the prospect of a better world. Critics toiled to safeguard the high moral level of Dutch prose.

Zola’s naturalism seemed to make a mockery of all these noble principles. Accordingly, critics responded with manifestos like this one (from 1880):

Much has been said for and against the modern way of writing and it will be quite some time before the last word is spoken on the subject, but for ourselves we shall always maintain that the ordinary reader, who is already surrounded by mundane and ugly things, must wish, at least when reading, to inhabit for a moment a different kind of environment; one may occasionally read out of curiosity a work in which a great literary talent gives us a photographic impression of real life, but we prefer to return as quickly as possible to something that really enthralls us and transports us to a more beautiful imaginary world.

One finds comparable statements of principle even in the writing of the first serious critics of Zola’s work. Yet gradually new ideas started to percolate into the practice of prose writing. Reviewers objected more frequently to improbable plots. Narrative convolutions became less acceptable. Instead books appeared with characters that were no longer extremely good or extremely bad. From action to greater character analysis — this would be one way of characterizing the development that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and subsequently accelerated under French influence.

This shift has been of great importance to the development of the Dutch novel down to our own day. What it meant in practice was that novels driven primarily by action and plot became marginalized. Suspenseful books were no longer seen as literature but as reading matter, like detective fiction or thrillers. Serious literature experienced a marked introspective turn, with every appeal to outward suspense dismissed as trivial.

Around 1880 the first Dutch advocates of naturalism appeared. Marcellus Emants (1848–1923), for example, in a preface to Three Novellas (Een drietal novellen, 1879), took a clear stand against the idealizing prose of his age. He condemned the wrong-headed criticism with which “sterile little idealists dare to dismiss even a masterpiece like L’Assommoir.” In 1879 it required some courage to call an offensive novel like Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) unreservedly a masterpiece. Still, Emants’s great model was not Zola but the Russian realist Ivan Turgenev, on whom he published an admiring essay in 1880, calling Turgenev a pioneer “of that new movement in literature that aims, with science as a scalpel in its hand, to penetrate as deeply as possible into human nature, and in recording nature to keep more closely to truth than was the case with the moribund school of entertaining narrators.”

Emants’s comments show how at the end of the nineteenth century writers all over Europe began defending a new point of view, which stressed the need for truth in art. The writer was no longer to act as a Sunday school teacher but as an anatomist. Zola empathized with the new tendency and exploited it by presenting himself as its embodiment. He established a close link between literature and science. The analogy proved highly effective, because science, especially medical science, was making great strides during this period through Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and others. Hence Zola became the champion, and the most vociferous advocate, of a movement that was in fact much broader than he would have us believe. From the point of view of literary history Emants’s perspective on these developments may be more accurate. Nevertheless, Zola successfully claimed the leading role for himself, so that in the Netherlands and Flanders too he was seen — and denounced — as the prophet of the new literature, the devil incarnate.

Around 1885 a number of articles appeared in the Dutch press explaining and defending naturalism. In that year Frans Netscher publi­shed “What Does Naturalism Want?” a not very imaginative compilation of Zola’s ideas, hailing naturalism as “the literature of our scientific age.” At the same time the young Cooplandt (pseudonym of Arij Prins, 1860–1922) published a series called “The Young Naturalists.” Cooplandt was also the first to publish a collection of naturalist sketches with the significant title From Life (Uit het leven, 1885), sparingly told stories, sad to the point of bitterness. More interesting is another collection, which appeared a year later, again with a telling title: Life Studies (Studies naar het naakt model). Its author was Frans Netscher (1864–1923), Zola’s spokesman in the Netherlands, who had previously published some remarkable sketches under a pseudonym. Netscher’s work is less bleak than that of Cooplandt, its extensive evocations of atmosphere reminiscent of impressionist painting. That both pleased and annoyed a man anxious to play a decisive role in Dutch literary history: Lodewijk van Deyssel (1864–1952).

Lodewijk van Deyssel (pseudonym of K. J. L. Alberdingk Thijm), the son of a well-known Catholic writer and art critic, encountered modern French literature at a young age. As early as 1883, when he was nineteen, he stated jauntily that naturalism would be the art of the future: “Our generation recognizes only physics, so our Dante will have to be Mr. Zola.” Not long afterward, however, he deployed his considerable polemical talent against the man who had so loyally defended Zola. His article was given the terse title “On Literature (Mr. F. Netscher).”

In it Van Deyssel summed up his main objection in one of his inimitable turns of phrase: “Zola is the chicken that came and laid the egg called Netscher in the lee of the Dutch dunes.” Everything about Netscher seems to annoy Van Deyssel, who rejects the notion that naturalism is a body of teaching, a doctrine. On the contrary, Van Deyssel argues, naturalism is “anti-school, anti-teacher, anti-regimentation.” It has only one principle: “The artist should confront real nature and record the impression nature makes on him, that is to say on his own, unique, individual temperament, his artistic consciousness.” In this formulation the accent has shifted from objectivity to subjectivity, from science to temperament. Van Deyssel is unequivocal on this point: science must lead to art and art is always superior to science. Zola’s positivist pretensions are relegated to the background. Van Deyssel also refuses to take Zola’s supposed objectivity seriously. Beneath that so-called objectivity, he (quite rightly) hears the artist “lamenting and weeping.”

Van Deyssel’s real motives become clear in a passage in which he once again strongly qualifies Zola’s aims and in fact bids them farewell. Naturalism, he claims, will be succeeded by a new current. Indeed, anyone really wanting to raise the literature of his country to a higher level should not slavishly imitate an existing movement imported from abroad but strike out on a new path. Van Deyssel provisionally calls it “sensitivism.”

Van Deyssel’s ultimate aim, then, is a nationalistic one: to launch a Dutch art that, succeeding or following on from naturalism, will contribute something new to world literature — no more and no less. One could also put it less kindly. Van Deyssel had nothing to gain as a propagandist of naturalism after the pioneering work of Netscher, “that rehasher of Zola’s used ideas,” and hence he sought a new direction. But in so doing he again encountered Netscher, because some of Netscher’s stories undeniably prefigured sensitivism — and indeed had been lavishly praised by Van Deyssel before he knew that their author was Netscher writing under a pseudonym. Van Deyssel’s polemic against Netscher really served a different purpose: it cleared the way for his own prose, the novel A Love (Een liefde, 1887).

A Love appeared in the bookshops in January 1888. In the same year, between 17 June and 4 December, Eline Vere, the first novel by the young Louis Couperus (1863–1923) was published in installments in a Hague newspaper. Also in 1888 Marcellus Emants brought out his Mistress Lina (Juffrouw Lina). The breakthrough of the naturalist novel was a fait accompli.

For all their differences in setting and style these books display a number of striking similarities. In all three novels the main character is a hypersensitive woman, or as it was termed at the time, a woman of nervous temperament. In the first chapter of A Love we read of the periodic bursts of feverish excitement that sweep the protagonist Mathilde along. In Couperus’s novel the eponymous heroine is first mentioned as follows:

“What is the matter with her?”

“I don’t quite know. Nerves, I think.”

“She really ought not to give herself up to these fits. With a little energy she could easily get over that nervousness.”

“Well, you see, aunt, this nervousness is the modern bane of young women, it is the fin de siècle epidemic,” said Betsy, with a faint smile.61

Mistress Lina’s husband, a farmer, says of his wife: “That woman is eaten up with nerves and everything she does comes from stress.” Van Deyssel saw this portrayal of a nervous temperament as a typically naturalist trait. He wrote of Emants’s novel: “He has become more of a pure naturalist in the careful observation and recording of the neurosis in Lina’s system.”

These three over-sensitive women live among more level-headed characters who fail to understand them. In all three cases the protagonist’s high-flown expectations end in disillusion. Both Eline and Mathilde feel an intense longing for love, a feeling that is frustrated; Lina is convinced that she is highly esteemed by those around her, but this turns out to be an illusion. In two of the three novels the disillusion leads to a more or less voluntary death. Eline takes an overdose, Lina contrives to have her daughter throw her under an oncoming train and on the last page of A Love Ma­thilde becomes “just another respectable lady” — not an enviable fate.

Louis Couperus. The Hague, Literary Museum.

In terms of both content and narrative technique all three novels contrast sharply with the traditional kind of idealizing prose. The old-fashioned novel often featured an omniscient narrator, who inspired confidence, took the readers (“dear lady readers”) by the hand, and guided them through the story. With the new prose there is no such guide. The narrator’s comments tend to be covert; they never use the inclusive “we.” Narratorial judgments on the moral value of individual characters are rare. Instead of standing outside or above the fictional world, the narrator rather inhabits the characters. There is consequently a marked increase in the number of passages using free indirect discourse. Van Deyssel, for instance, experiments with a stream of consciousness technique that was later to be fully exploited by James Joyce in Ulysses:

He read the Foreign News. That Emily Hartse, Mrs Berlage, was an attractive woman! He put the paper flat on the table and smoothed out the creases to be able to read it better. She was so lively, and had nice breasts too, he liked her. He read about the unpleasant business pending between the French and German governments . . . How on earth could she have chosen that fool Berlage!

A final similarity: in all three novels the laws of heredity have a disruptive effect. It is least marked in A Love. The wife looks like her mother, the husband takes after his father. It is more serious in the case of Mistress Lina. Upon hearing that her father died “in a madhouse,” the reader fears the worst. The weight of heredity is presented most subtly in Eline Vere. In the third chapter of Couperus’s novel we are already told that the heroine has the same “fine-strung temperament” as her father. Later a doctor, always the man of science in a naturalist novel and hence authoritative, arrives at this diagnosis:

But apart from that he saw something in Eline that might be called the fate of her family. Eline’s father had had it. Vincent [her cousin] had it. It was a psychic imbalance caused by her nerves, which were like the tangled strings of a broken and smashed harp.

Of course there are also differences between the three books, which can be traced back to the individual concerns of the separate authors. The story of Eline Vere — by far the best novel of the three — is that of an over-sensitive girl growing up in high social circles, a world of exquisite superficiality. In his first novel Couperus underlines the impact of hereditary factors, as was mentioned above. But there is more. There is also a mysterious force nudging Eline with invisible hands toward her doom, a force she cannot withstand. It is fate that drives her.

In Couperus’s second novel, which is indeed called Fate (Noodlot, 1890), heredity plays a much smaller part. The story exudes an oppressive atmosphere and culminates in a double suicide. It contains passionate scenes that recall Zola, including a realistically described murder, but despite these obvious naturalist features, the metaphysical destructive force of fate remains paramount. That force was to retain its devastating impact throughout Couperus’s work. Time after time he evokes characters who resist their destiny, in vain. His novels sometimes read like relentless chronicles of doom. In the course of the 1890s, influenced by the prevailing climate, the author tried to embrace a more optimistic view of life, the theosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of the few positive forces in Eline Vere is embodied by an American character, but typically his influence comes too late. Despite flirting with all kinds of fairly whimsical philosophies Couperus remained generally a fatalist.

Not only does Couperus follow individual characters closely in their hopeless struggle with the forces of fate, but in some of his best novels he focuses on the downfall of a whole family. In The Books of the Small Souls (De boeken der kleine zielen, 1901–3), he describes “The Decline of a Family” — to quote the subtitle of Thomas Mann’s Bud­denbrooks (1901), with which Couperus’s work bears comparison. We are again in The Hague, among the higher echelons of society, whose financial, moral, and physical decline is closely chronicled. In this masterpiece Couperus showed himself much more critical of these circles, with which he was intimately acquainted, than in his first novel, Eline Vere. Hypocrisy is a particular target: everything is subordinated to one’s good name, and empty conventions are supposed to give meaning to life.

The Hague has long been one of the most traditional cities in the Netherlands, partly because, as the seat of government, it houses foreign embassies and their diplomatic corps. There is another aspect of the city that is relevant to Couperus’s oeuvre. Many Dutch people returning from the East Indies and others with a colonial past settled in The Hague. Couperus, who spent part of his childhood in the colonial Dutch Indies (now Indonesia) — his father was a senior civil servant in the colonial administration — seems to have believed that an exotic origin pointed to a passionate temperament. In this respect he remained a naturalist: hereditary characteristics are a crucial part of one’s pedigree. It is therefore no accident that the crime of passion central to his best-known novel, Old People and the Things That Pass (Van oude menschen, de dingen die voorbijgaan, 1906), takes place in the colonies. The story again traces the disintegration of a well-to-do family, in this case through the fateful repercussions of a murder from the past. Although a naturalistic novel, Old People also highlights another theme that fascinated Couperus: decadence. Whereas in the Indies his characters appear highly emotional, the gray Dutch climate transforms them into indolent figures incapable of resisting the course of fate. It is precisely in the dissection of these unstable characters that Couperus shows his mastery, and herein resides the lasting value of a number of his novels.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Couperus’s work became well-known in the English-speaking world, thanks in no small part to his translator and former school friend Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, a naturalized Englishman who was completely bilingual. Teixeira de Mattos accompanied Couperus on his trip to England in 1921, where the writer was feted in literary circles.

Such success was not to be the lot of Couperus’s fellow-townsman Marcellus Emants. Emants’s most acclaimed novel, A Posthumous Confession (Een nagelaten bekentenis, 1894), departs from the usual naturalist pattern in that it is written not in the third but in the first person. It describes the life history of a man, Willem Termeer, who presents himself explicitly as a degenerate. In the usual naturalist way, Termeer sees his life as determined by the sins and shortcomings of his ancestors:

In those crystal-clear, sober moments when I discerned my past stretching out behind me like a series of links forged together by necessity, and saw this chain run onward to the furthest horizon of my future, I began to understand that my awkwardness, my lack of courage and perseverance, my want of feeling, my bent toward the forbidden, were nothing but the poisonous blossoms of seeds germinating in my ancestors. The roots stretched behind me into closed-off lives, therefore I would never be able to eradicate them.62

In other words, the heredity thesis serves him as an alibi for all the negative qualities he discerns in himself. As the son of a father who late in life, after “his passion has subsided,” married a loveless woman, Termeer cannot help being an emotional cripple. His gaucheness and timidity constantly thwart his attempts to relate to women, and so he resorts to paying for sex. His half-hearted attempts to find a role in life are equally unsuccessful. Being wealthy, he is free to devote himself to daydreaming and dissipation, but that brings no satisfaction. But then the tone changes. Like his father, Termeer finally marries a woman he cannot handle. She finds consolation of sorts with a neighbor, a former clergyman. Termeer looks on sardonically as this defender of morality and self-control tries to seduce his wife, and draws his own conclusion, which is that so-called normal people are in fact the worst hypocrites. They bandy fine words about but scarcely believe in them. Society is based on an absurd comedy. Termeer may be degenerate but he regards himself as no worse than the “so-called normal people,” just more honest. Emants’s choice of a marginal figure as a protagonist may have been inspired by Russian fiction, which he knew well; Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (1835) and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) may have been his models.

Marcellus Emants. The Hague, Literary Museum.

In Emants’s work a disappointment in love often leads to a disenchanted view of society in general. This is what happens to a young lawyer in the novel Initiation (Inwij­ding, 1901). Under the influence of his love for the woman he keeps, he briefly toys with militant ideas quite alien to his deeply conservative environment and goes so far as to defend a socialist. But eventually he opts for the security of his class. He lacks the strength to continue thinking and acting for himself. Like Couperus’s Books of the Small Souls Emants’s novel, subtitled “Hague Life,” paints an unforgiving picture of the upper middle classes. Both books are imbued with a sharply critical view of existing social relations, and in this respect both Couperus and Emants are followers of Zola’s, whose comment “What blackguards gentlemen are” (Quels gredins que les honnêtes hommes) recurs several times in Initiation.

As a novelist Lodewijk van Deyssel pales beside Couperus and Emants. His work consists mainly of embryonic sketches and ideas; he realized only a tiny proportion of his innumerable plans. Nevertheless, his influence on Dutch prose was considerable — though not always in a positive sense, at least in the view of later observers. Van Deyssel’s A Love was the first Dutch naturalist novel to be published, but, as was mentioned above, while the youthful writer was working on his first work he was already distancing himself from naturalism — with an ambivalent book as a result.

Three-quarters of the novel is devoted to describing the meeting and subsequent collision of two temperaments. Mathilde, whose solicitous father has given her a protected upbringing, is a hypersensitive girl who imbues reality with Romantic ideas acquired from her reading. One day Joseph enters her life, an eligible suitor who gains her father’s consent. Joseph, an otherwise unremarkable businessman, feels the time has come to end his bachelor existence and make a good match. He puts an end to his unrestrained womanizing, but on the evening of the day of his proposal he is so aroused that he meets up with an old girlfriend. The relationship between the two disparate main characters is bound to end in disappointment. Joseph thought he was marrying a spirited wife who would bring him prestige, but finds himself with a sickly stay-at-home. Because Mathilde’s expectations were unrealistically high, the down-to-earth Joseph is soon toppled from the lofty pedestal on which she had placed him. Each had seen the other as a fantasy figure, and the sober truth leaves both of them disillusioned. Joseph consoles himself with the maid, Mathilde with another child.

All in all A Love tells a banal story. Van Deyssel simply recorded the “physio-psychological process” of the clash between two temperaments in a naturalist manner, as Kloos put it. But the outline of the story does not do justice to the novel. In the controversial thirteenth chapter the factual record recedes into the background and a new kind of writing suddenly erupts. For page after page we are privy to Mathilde’s perceptions and sensations. Her fevered vision is rendered in such sentences as: “The purple turned blue-black in the sky, the purple and violet went browny-black, greeny-black, gray-black.” What Van Deyssel was trying to do here was paint in words. The chapter represents impressionism in language, always rather tiring to read since the writer has to evoke with a series of adjectives what a painter can show at a stroke. This long chapter is totally out of proportion to the rest of the book, as Van Deyssel later admitted. It is as though once he had found his new style he did not know how to stop.

A Love shocked and delighted its readers. Critics were irritated by certain risqué expressions and offended by the — in fact fairly veiled — treatment of female sexuality. “Brothel literature,” one reviewer declared. But prurient readers must have been seriously disappointed by the interminable descriptions of the thirteenth chapter, which was precisely the part that the avant-garde greatly admired.

Van Deyssel developed his experiments in various prose pieces, to the point of incomprehensibility. He was putting into practice the view of art that he had previously dubbed “sensitivism.” He found this art in Gorter’s Verses of 1890 and consequently acclaimed them (Gorter, in turn, had carefully read Van Deyssel’s critical prose.) He devised a system in which he distinguished a series of graduated stages: from observation to sensation. This sensation, “the supreme existential moment,” he defined in mystical terms: it takes us “into the reality of the higher life.” By the mid-1890s Van Deyssel was trying to develop a personal form of mysticism based on increasingly intense sensual experience. As early as 1891 he described his own evolution as “From Zola to Maeterlinck.” It is no accident that his quest for a new certainty should have brought him to the Francophone Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, the writer who seemed to personify the quest for a higher dimension.

Though Van Deyssel was the first Dutch naturalist to leave naturalism behind, his contemporaries continued to see him as the movement’s champion. As the most acute critic of his generation Van Deyssel remained influential, and his prose experiments had a great impact — perhaps an inhibiting one, since almost all Dutch naturalists, following the thirteenth chapter of A Love, indulged in écriture artiste, or “fine writing,” succumbing collectively to the misconception that a writer can paint with words and use the dictionary as his palette (in the words of the historian Johan Huizinga). The result is not the colorful image that impressionist paintings present but a plethora of adjectives that obscure rather than illuminate.

One naturalist who remained unaffected by the vogue for écriture artiste was P. A. Daum (1850–98), who worked as a journalist in the Dutch East Indies throughout the 1880s. Dissatisfied with the kind of fiction that appeared in newspapers (“boarding-school reading,” he called it), he wrote a story in installments for his own paper. It met with a warm reception, and by the end of the century Daum had published ten or so novels that still fascinate with their unerringly exact descriptions of colonial society. Van Deyssel praised his first books but later rejected them as insufficiently artistic and too journalistic — a capital crime in the eyes of Dutch literary critics, then and now.

Although Daum’s sober prose differs from the aesthetic style the naturalists in his homeland strove for, he is still a naturalist. He learned much from Zola, whose novels he often praised in reviews. What annoyed Daum about colonial literature as it existed at the time was the lack of realism, particularly in the stilted dialogues and stark characterization. A person is never either completely good or completely bad, he said, echoing Zola. In his novels he aimed to give a lifelike portrait of Dutch East Indies society. The protagonists of his novels display weaknesses that eventually prove their undoing: addiction to gambling, dissipation, or religious fanaticism; in this respect his last novel, Aboe Bakar (1894), is very topical.

The novel Ups and Downs in Indies Life (“Ups” en “Downs” in het Indische leven, 1892), which paints a splendid picture of colonists who amass quick profits and subsequently meet disaster, features the only figure in Daum’s fiction whose behavior is determined by hereditary factors. He is a suicide, whose poignant death is one of the most powerful scenes in the first part of the novel. The second part is less strong, tending in parts toward old-fashioned idealizing prose. This literary hesitancy is one of the ambiguities of this intriguing author — both a exponent and a merciless chronicler of the colonial society he described.

The most striking feature of Dutch naturalism, apart from écriture artiste, is a predilection for nervous temperaments. Avant-garde writers had the whole of reality to choose from for their subject matter, yet they concentrated stubbornly on the neuroses of upper-class men or (more often) women. The fact that the upper middle classes were targeted by Dutch naturalists may have contributed to the emergence of a rift in reading patterns at the end of the nineteenth century. Just as clergymen poets wrote for and were in turn read by their parishioners, male and female novelists before 1888 produced literature that was read mainly by middle-class women — the higher orders read French and the men were too busy. These ladies found little appeal in prose that no longer offered them model characters or edifying endings. What good were the sordid lives of marginal neurotics to them? What is more, the increased openness in sexual matters made such novels “unsuitable” for respectable lady readers. The result was that the new prose initially had almost no readership; Eline Vere, a chaste book, is an exception. Readers continued to prefer the old historical novels of Jacob van Lennep and Geertruida Bosboom-Toussaint. Only when the rough edges of naturalism had worn away did the new novel find a popular audience.

Flemish Naturalism

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of change in Flanders too, mainly because of the rapid pace of industrialization. However, literary renewal was a long time coming. Indeed, up to 1875 there was general apathy, causing one literary historian to speak of a “golden age of genial narrow-mindedness.” An inhibiting factor was undoubtedly the continuing use of French by large parts of the middle classes and certainly the grande bourgeoisie and the nobility.

Unsurprisingly, French-speaking Belgium was much quicker to respond to naturalism. Signs of innovation were visible from an early date in journals such as Current Affairs (L’Actualité, 1876–77), which in 1877 merged with The Artist (L’Artiste, 1875–80), and especially the highly influential Young Belgium (La Jeune Belgique, 1881–97). Not only did these magazines publish essays on innovative French prose, but Zola himself was a regular contributor. What is more, since 1881 Wallonia had had a full-blooded representative of naturalism in the shape of Camille Lemon­nier (1844–1913), characterized by a hostile Flemish critic as “Zola’s Belgian monkey.” Lemonnier’s literary followers referred to him more flatteringly as “the field-marshal of Belgian letters.” With the novel A Male (Un mâle, 1881), which deals with the love affair between a poacher and a farmer’s daughter and provoked controversy, Lemonnier introduced harsh, raw naturalism into Belgian letters. He went on to produce a number of naturalist novels, the best known of which is Ne’er-Do-Well (Happe-chair, 1886), about the wretched lot of workers in the steel industry.

Besides Lemonnier there were others, such as Georges Eekhoud (1854–1927). His Kees Doorik (1883) was set in a rural environment, which Eekhoud exchanged for the industrial docklands of Antwerp in his best-known novel, The New Carthage (La nouvelle Carthage, 1893). Lemonnier’s Ne’er-Do-Well, which depicts the survival of the fittest, may well have influenced the Flemish author Cyriel Buysse in his later novel Might Is Right (Het recht van den sterkste, 1893). However a direct connection is difficult to prove since both authors are indebted to Zola and his Germinal (1885).

Cyriel Buysse. Antwerp, AMVC House of Literature.

Initially, at least, the revival of French-language Belgian literature seemed to have little impact in conservative, agricultural Flanders, where the Catholic church played a key role. There are a number of reasons for the delay. In prose the idealizing tendency was still dominant, and art had been assigned a didactic function by clericals and liberals alike, its aim being to edify the backward Flemish people. The aversion to French and hence also to “French literary fashions” was a contributing factor. It deprived Flemings of the connection with Parisian culture that was so much easier for Belgium’s French-speakers. In addition Flemish cultural life was in the hands of schoolmasters and junior civil servants, for whom literature was a hobby and who could scarcely afford the leisure required for profound reflection. All this changed only very gradually as the end of the nineteenth century approached.

The Flemish public received their first taste of Zola’s work in their own language when a stage adaptation of L’Assom­moir was produced with the emphatic title Drink!!! A Drama of the Common People in Nine Scenes (Drank!!! Volksdra­ma in negen tafereelen). The production was not reviewed by a single newspaper. Similarly, Zola’s individual novels received no critical attention. The appropriate response to the new fashion of dubious French origin seemed to be to ignore it. The most innocuous stories were torn to shreds if the reviewer detected even the slightest trace of Parisian degeneracy. “The [narrative under stricture] is a sample of the kind of work of which modern French literature produces a plethora, but which we sincerely wish to be spared,” wrote the critic Max Rooses — who, it is fair to add, revised his opinion after he had read Zola properly.

The first person to defend naturalism in a Flemish magazine was the Dutchman Frans Netscher. His article was one of the few indications that the mood was beginning to change. Gradually it became no longer possible simply to sweep Zola’s work under the carpet. Nevertheless, its influence was resisted tooth and nail, as something alien to the Flemish character. In 1888 a critic wrote: “Chasteness is the most splendid quality of our Flemish literature. Let us not rob it of that pearl. Let us never start rooting about on the dunghill of Zola and his ilk.” Another quote from the same period: “The Flemish novel, to its great credit, can in no way be compared with those rotten and pestilential growths that are today germinating and springing up in vast numbers on French soil. With us virtue and morality are the first prerequisite for the success of a writer of fiction.”

The first Flemish naturalist novel, Cyriel Buysse’s Might is Right (Het recht van de sterkste), did not appear until 1893, and it was a further two years before the more progressive periodical The Dutch Literary and Artistic Gallery (De Nederlandsche Dicht- en Kunst­halle) published the first full survey of Zola’s life and writings. This marks the end of the period of critical silence and mudslinging. Ironically, by that time Zola was regarded as passé in Paris, while in the Netherlands Van Deyssel, ever sensitive to the latest trends, had pronounced naturalism dead.

Cyriel Buysse (1859–1932) published his first naturalist novella, The Rush Weaver (De biezenstekker), in the Dutch magazine The New Guide in 1890; the mere fact that he published it in Holland says a great deal about the cultural situation in Flanders at the time. Three years later Buysse offered his novel Might is Right to the same magazine, but editor Willem Kloos felt that it contained too much of a sexual nature, which rendered it “unacceptable as a whole.” The magazine did, though, feature a prepublication, including a number of hard-hitting scenes that must have shocked contemporary readers.

In this first Flemish naturalist novel Buysse depicts the bleak life of Maria, a sensitive girl growing up in a rough slum populated mainly by poachers, drunks, and criminals. “For years she had cherished an ideal, a dream. Nature had fashioned her in startling contrast to her environment. Surrounded by thieves and villains, real scoundrels with appalling morals, she herself had remained honest and pure, the purer and more honest the lower the level to which she saw the others around her descending.” She wants to escape this pernicious environment and marry “a good honest fellow.” But this flower on the dunghill is cruelly snapped off. After visiting the fair, she is flung down in a cornfield like an animal and raped by the brutal Reus [Giant]. Reus asserts the right of might and she, as the weaker, must submit to his male strength. Although he subsequently tries, for a time at least, to mend his rough ways and treat her with more consideration, soon after their wedding he reverts to the merciless beast he was before. When he loses his job, he seeks out his old friends and resumes his criminal activities. Only when he is detained in prison for a while does Maria find some rest. After giving birth to her second child she falls gravely ill. Reus sexually assaults her sister before her eyes, and Maria finally dies a martyr’s death.

This heart-rending tale shocked readers with its realistic depiction of the lowest rungs of society. In a world of degenerates and criminals, Maria is seen as an unblemished exception. In portraying his heroine Buysse clearly gave in to his Romantic side, which comes to the fore particularly in his depiction of women — generally as the victims of brutal men. The figure of Maria is an idealistic remnant in the story, which, as Buysse himself indicated, was heavily influenced by Zola’s novels, especially Earth (La terre, 1887). What fascinated Buysse in Zola’s work was “the colossal movement of the masses.” The ability to create scenes involving a number of characters was also Buysse’s great strength as a storyteller. Like no other writer in Dutch he was able to depict the movement and turmoil of a wedding imploding, a poaching expedition, or a scene in a pub.

One of the most striking features of Buysse’s prose is the constantly recurring figure of the brute who acknowledges no law but the survival of the fittest. Time after time female figures longing for a better future fall victim to such bestial types. In his second great naturalist work, Jack of Spades (Schoppenboer, 1898), such an unreasoning individual is the book’s central character. Jan, the youngest of three unmarried farmer’s sons, is annoyed by the laziness of a cousin whom they have had to take into their home. His irritation mounts when this good-for-nothing marries a rich woman, who also comes to live with them. Dislike of his cousin and powerful desire for the beautiful Rosa unhinge the primitive mind of the young farmer, for whom possession of the girl would mean the ultimate revenge on his cousin. He tries no fewer than three times to rape her. When he at last succeeds, it proves fatal, as his cousin responds to the violation by murdering him.

Buysse tells this dramatic tale with a perfect sense of pace, and carefully records Jan’s moods as he is torn by hatred and desire. There are deceptive periods of calm, which lead the reader to think that the protagonist will be able to keep himself under control. The narrator only rarely distances himself from his characters, as in this passage, describing a fire on a farm: “And the people, not otherwise handsome, acquired, through this drama that affected them all so deeply, a picturesque and almost noble quality.” The passage comes at the beginning of the book; in the rest of the story the narrator is not a detached observer but writes from the perspective of the unruly main character. After Jack of Spades Buysse’s work changed. The intense, violent, Zola-like scenes were replaced by an ironic tone that softened the bleakness.

The pessimism in the work of Gustaaf Vermeersch (1877–1924) is all-pervading. He is one of those authors with a gloomy vision, whose life and work seem equally sad. A railway man who suffered from epilepsy — a disastrous combination of occupation and constitution — Vermeersch left a number of naturalist novels, of which his debut, The Burden (De last, 1904), is best known. The book’s cover shows a naked man struggling to carry a heavy cross. The content of The Burden makes it abundantly clear that the image represents the sexual desire that weighs on the main character. In a pub this shy young man plucks up the courage to speak to a girl, who despite other people’s warnings becomes his wife. The wedding degenerates into an orgy, in which the bridegroom sexually assaults his niece. It is an appropriate prelude to a thoroughly miserable marriage. At first the young couple live with the girl’s parents, a dreadful period for the protagonist, who again takes to drink. For a while he manages to resist the interference of his malevolent mother-in-law, but when, after an absence, she reappears, things go rapidly downhill. His wife neglects and abuses their child. When he is finally told that he is not the father, he drowns himself.

The following passage from the opening, where the protagonist reflects on his hopeless life after a bout of heavy drinking, sums up the book’s unrelenting grayness of mood:

He got up lazily, stretching repeatedly. Then he wandered aimlessly over the floorboards, flopped into his chair, and sat there at length without moving a muscle. He rubbed his forehead, which was pounding and full of stabbing pains, and his skull, which was burning hot. Slowly he began putting on his shoes, sometimes pausing to contemplate the thoughts that surfaced.

These were all gloomy and sad, the melancholy memories of lonely, bored wandering, with the occasional smudge of shame at humiliations he had undergone at hearing an unpleasant comment, at the sight of a hostile person. Immediately regret at the money he had frittered away welled up; he groped in his pocket and counted the ever-diminishing remainder. This was never accompanied by any satisfaction at pleasures he had enjoyed; they remained there in the twilight, where they could be just made out, though always in the distance. The aspirations and the longings never came to anything, and nor did any firm resolution. . . .

So his days passed in the silent town.

In a later work, Life on the Tracks (Het rollend leven, 1910), Vermeersch describes the wretched life of train guards, a life that he knew at first hand. His last novel was never completed, a fitting end to this naturalist life story.

Naturalism in North and South

There are striking differences in emphasis between naturalism in Flanders and in the Netherlands. In his great series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, Zola had juxtaposed two families, one, the Rougons, sanguine in temperament, the other, the Macquarts, of a more nervous disposition. Interestingly, the Flemish naturalists showed a preference for the sanguine types, violent and often rural, the Dutch for highly-strung individuals and refined city-dwellers. The differences are relative rather than absolute. For example, Buysse’s works also feature the kind of languid neurotic so well represented in the North. But in contrast Buysse’s great novels are full of larger-than-life primitive types, whose strength lies in their unrestrained passions. Northern novelists on the other hand liked to focus on unraveling weak, neurotic temperaments, while southern writers saw things in a broader social perspective. One could argue that Dutch naturalism was more psychologically oriented, while Flemish novelists painted a sociological panorama. In that respect the Flemish variant remained closer to Zola, who saw himself as something of an amateur sociologist.

Of course, the novelists were describing very different social strata. In Holland the upper and wealthy middle classes were scrutinized in novels that were virtually always set in towns — The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotter­dam. Emants’s Juffrouw Lina, about a farming community, is an exception. Van Deyssel once moved to the country in order to write “a novel of the land,” but as usual he never got beyond the planning stage. Flemish naturalist literature almost invariably opted for the countryside as its setting, and indeed that was where the majority of Flemish speakers lived.

One thing that North and South have in common is that the element of social criticism, so prominent in Zola, is very muted. The novel rarely functions as an explicit social indictment. Interestingly, in both North and South social messages were more likely to be aired on the stage. Herman Heijermans’s play The Good Hope (Op hoop van zegen, 1900), an attack on the unscrupulous ship owners who pocketed fat insurance payments after the loss of their unseaworthy ships, and Buys­se’s The Van Paemel Family (Het gezin Van Paemel, 1903), in which a family is torn apart by social divisions, both enjoyed huge popular success. Nevertheless, social activism is far less developed in Dutch-language naturalism than, for example, in its German counterpart.

A second parallel between North and South is the lack of response to Zola’s theories. In the North the scientific aspects of naturalism were questioned at an early date by the sharp-witted Van Deyssel. There are, admittedly, occasional traces of the theory of heredity, but the emphasis on the blind power of the genes often seems perfunctory and unconvincing. One novel, for instance, features a hunchback whose deformity stems from his father’s “somewhat debauched” sex life, while in another a girl in a dysfunctional lower-class family speaks upper-class Dutch due to the genetic influence of her father, a minor aristocrat she has never seen. In Flanders the scientific dimension was never very prominent, as Zola’s theories were largely ignored. It is symptomatic that in his later work Buysse played down the theory of heredity even further. In the second edition of Might is Right he scrapped a passage in which a criminal environment had been characterized as “degenerate.” One might ask, of course, what is left of naturalism without the theory? Would “realistic” not be a more accurate description for Buysse’s prose or the average Dutch naturalist? Though there is something to be said for this view, Zola remains the first great model. As Louis Couperus put it, Zola taught young writers “how to see Life as it was, without sentimentality, without romanticism, cruel and fatal.”

Whatever epithet one uses, there is one idiosyncrasy in the development of Dutch-language literature that distinguishes it from other literatures. The first stirrings of realism date from well before before 1885, but they are smothered by the conciliatory, idealizing context in which they invariably appear. In other words, literature in Dutch has almost no pre-naturalist realism. There was no Stendhal or Balzac, no Jane Austen or George Eliot. The realist novel emerged only after Zola’s sledgehammer had demolished the edifice of idealism. In that respect it is hard to overestimate his significance for the Low Countries.

One last question remains: why did naturalism persist for so long in Holland, in a watered-down form until 1930, while in Flanders it produced no more than a handful of novels? A possible explanation for this discrepancy is the fact that naturalism is scarcely compatible with a positive view of religion. This would explain why Buysse’s work, which showed little sympathy for the church, long met with such resistance in Flanders. By 1910 the naturalist impulse, which from the outset had been weak, had run its course there. The raw presentation of reality was replaced by a mythologizing or an idealizing depiction of country life in the work of Stijn Streuvels and Felix Timmermans respectively. Only around 1930, with the generation of Gerard Walschap, does realism make a strong comeback in the Flemish novel.

II. A New “Spiritual” Art, 1893–1916

Anne Marie Musschoot

Spiritual Art or the Rise of a New Mysticism

Albert Verwey and Willem Kloos had been the leading lights of The New Guide in its early days. However, Verwey left the journal’s editorial board as early as 1889 because of a personal rift with Kloos. Shortly afterward he also distanced himself from the hyper-individualism and aestheticism of the Generation of 1880 and went his own way. In 1894, with Lodewijk van Deyssel, he founded the Bi-Monthly Magazine (Twee­maandelijksch tijd­schrift), which from 1902 onwards appeared as The Twentieth Century (De XXe eeuw). But it is mainly in the journal The Movement (De beweging, 1905–19), of which he remained the driving force throughout, that he corrected the course plotted by The New Guide. This gained Verwey a dominant position in Dutch literature that he was able to maintain into the 1920s.

Verwey took the view that the artist’s first task was not to express his individual emotions or record his sensual impressions. On the contrary, he should strive for an art that expresses an idea, a spiritual power that embraces the individual and the collective, that unites dream and reality and achieves a synthesis between artist and society. As mentioned in the previous section, Van Deyssel had prefigured this change of direction in 1891, when he described his own evolution from naturalism to mysticism in the essay “From Zola to Maeterlinck.”

The movement away from materialism and positivism was a phenomenon on a European scale. In the Netherlands there was talk of a “new mysticism” as early as 1900. A monograph on the subject called mysticism “the whole complex of approaches . . . used by our contemporaries to make contact with the world beyond the reach of our sensory perception.” This broad metaphysical orientation manifested itself in diverse forms, including theosophy, Buddhism, Neo-Platonism, spiritualism, occultism, magic, cabala, anthroposophism, and Satanism. Jules Huret’s Inquiry into Literary Trends (Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, 1891), which showed that in France naturalism was on the wane and giving way to a whole variety of literary currents, was hailed by Dutch critics; the evolution observed by Huret corresponded with their own findings. The term “neo-mysticism” has since disappeared from literary histories, leaving only the designations “spiritual art” (or, in the case of Verwey, the “art of the idea”) and “symbolism,” while “neo-Romanticism” is used to designate a third variant of the same approach.

The Francophone Flemish author Maurice Maeterlinck, who was a passionate admirer of the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec as well as of Thomas à Kempis and Plotinus, played a major part in the spread of the fashion. Added to this there was the rapidly growing popularity of the dramas of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, in which critics identified mystical elements, while Leo Tolstoy, the prophetic advocate of a spiritual reawakening, also attracted a great deal of attention. Another telling indication is the great ceremony with which Sâr Peladan, the founder of the Rosicrucians and catalyst of the occult movement in France, was received on his visit to Holland in 1892. He made a particularly strong impact on a number of visual artists. In upper-class circles in The Hague people flocked to join the theosophical movement. Many of the ideas in a book like Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine (1888), the bible of theosophy, found their way into in the work of Louis Couperus, including androgyny, spiritism, and various other occult phenomena. Frederik van Eeden, though a trained doctor, also experimented with spiritism.

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) was born in the Flemish city of Ghent but received his education in French, as did most of his upper-class contemporaries. He was in contact with the younger French symbolist poets, including Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and from 1895 he settled permanently in France. His early poetry, collected in Hothouses (Serres chaudes, 1889), is characterized by a decadent, oppressive atmosphere. However, it was his drama Princess Maleine (La princesse Maleine, also 1889) that marked his sudden breakthrough and quickly brought him international acclaim; in England he was heralded as “a new Shakespeare.” The poetical essay Wisdom and Destiny (La sagesse et la destinée, 1898) appeared simultaneously in Paris, London, and New York and was followed by a long series of influential philosophical treatises.

The Dutch public discovered Maeterlinck in 1891; when his play Pelléas et Mélisande was performed he was loudly acclaimed as the “apostle of mysticism.” A “genuine” new trend was immediately identified: cutting-edge literature was turning away from observable reality and focusing on the spirit, the higher life of the soul. Maeterlinck presented his readers with an amalgam of Christian, theosophical, Neo-Platonic, and occult ingredients and introduced a view of man dominated by a mysterious fate. Louis Couperus, with his novel Ecstasy (Extaze, 1892), Frederik van Eeden, with his Johannes Viator (1892), and Lodewijk van Deyssel followed him. Maeterlinck was also the principal inspiration for yet another new fin-de-siècle fashion, namely the return to the Middle Ages. His French translation of Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals (Geestelicke brulocht), accompanied by a long, admiring introduction, is only one example of the new source of inspiration. Maeterlinck also inspired widespread enthusiasm for Thomas à Kempis, while the visual arts, taking their cue from the English Pre-Raphaelites, rediscovered medieval painting. The so-called Flemish primitives, for example, including the Van Eyck brothers and Rogier van der Weyden, became extremely popular.

Maurice Maeterlinck. Antwerp, AMVC House of Literature.

Maeterlinck was not the only French-speaking Flemish writer to contribute to the changing literary climate around 1900. Each in their own way, Emile Verhaeren and Georges Rodenbach represented the “Nordic spirit” in French literature because of their clear affinity with the Germanic world. Verhaeren (1855–1916) was closely involved in social events and established his reputation as a poet with a number of collections with a socialist flavor. He was in contact with Parisian writers and painters and his fame spread through Europe as far as Russia. At the outbreak of the First World War he fled to England, where his poems began to appear in literary magazines, and he gained a reputation as a public speaker. Possibly even more influential is the work of Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), whose best-known novel, Bruges-la-morte (1892), exudes an atmosphere of morbidity. In it the town of Bruges symbolizes the gloom that has descended on the main character after the death of his wife. Nowhere else in the literature of the Low Countries has the atmosphere of a town been more oppressively captured than here.

In the Netherlands the search for higher connections and ideals was authoritatively articulated by Albert Verwey (1865–1937). Because of his striving for a synthetic, “spiritual” art he could be ranked with the symbolists, like the Fleming August Vermeylen, though this was not apparent to their contemporaries; there is certainly a clear affinity between their views on poetry. Not surprisingly then, a large part of Verwey’s collection Earth (Aarde, 1896) was pre-published in the Flemish magazine Of Now and Tomorrow (Van nu en stra­ks), whose innovations extended across a broad cultural spectrum. Verwey’s style was characterized not by a suggestive, atmospheric lyricism of moods or a Verlaine-like melancholy, but by the use of images that point to a higher reality or evoke an underlying mystery. In his view the basis of poetry is not the sensory impression, the perception of outward reality, but the expression of an inwardly distilled idea. In a programmatic text of 1894 he had already advocated a “spiritual” art underpinned by an objectifying vision, fueled mainly by his reading of Spinoza and Hegel.

Verwey’s work as a whole can be characterized as an indirect presentation of personal feelings in the form of images and poetic dreams. For Verwey poetry is always the fruit of the imagination: “What in creation is called God in man is called imagination.” We could even speak of abstract symbolism, as with the late Karel van de Woestijne, who will be discussed below. However, Verwey’s views on art owe less to French symbolism than to the German poet Stefan George, a close friend.

The reflective component in Verwey’s work is prominent not only in his poetry but also in his poetic dramas, which for that very reason have proved inaccessible. His lyric poetry is characterized by tightness of composition, and, besides the tendency to abstraction, a keen eye for the natural beauty of the Dutch landscape, which he reads, like man himself, as a manifestation of the all-embracing principle he called “life.” The collection The Path of Light (De weg van het licht, 1922), in which the imagination creates a vast harmonious network and in which he develops a cosmic pantheism, represents a peak in his work.

Besides his poetry, which served mainly as a vehicle for ideas, Verwey established his reputation also, and perhaps principally, with his criticism and essays, which developed almost completely in parallel with his poetry and which won him, a self-educated man, a chair in Dutch literature at Leiden University. After 1893 he was to concentrate mainly on literary tradition. He immersed himself in the work of Vondel and Pot­gieter but also produced very influential analyses of contemporary literature, which he always judged in the light of his views on spiritual art and the role of imagination as an expression of the idea.

Verwey, then, owed his position in Dutch literature mainly to his intellectual leadership. He became the mentor of a whole generation that reacted against the poetical views of the Movement of 1880. He himself stated that he had founded his own journal The Movement in 1905 from a need to reconcile and unite the forces that had scattered in all directions. Poetry, he declared, was “in danger of being smothered by socially oriented prose.” So the issue was to oppose “socially-oriented,” that is, naturalist, prose and defend poetry, the poetic vocation. When Verwey wanted to provide the younger generation of poets with a forum, he championed the recognition of the poetic calling, but emphatically placed that defense in a post-1880 context. The manifesto that opened The Movement, however, stressed not only the spiritual life force but also the cohesive element in society, and in so doing it rejected the individualism of the Movement of 1880.

There is a striking affinity between Verwey’s ideas and those of the contributors to Of Now and Tomorrow, among whom one can find similar statements as early as 1894. Verwey reformulated his views even more pointedly in 1913, in an essay, “The Direction of Contemporary Poetry,” where he defined the poet as “one who expresses in words the life force, that is, rhythm; not thought, but his interpretation of the life force, is his defining characteristic.” What triggered this essay was a reflection on the poetry of the time, in which he detected a “deviation” from the course hitherto followed in the “movement.” Verwey’s diagnosis played a key role in what came to be known as the “Movement debate” of 1913 or the discussion on “inspired rhetoric.” At the heart of this debate was a plea by Geerten Gossaert for the re-evaluation of classical rhetoric, followed by similar utterances from another young poet, J. C. Bloem, who will be discussed in the next section.

In an essay on Swinburne, whom he greatly admired, Geerten Gossaert (pseudonym of F. C. Gerretson, 1884–1958) advocated an “inspired rhetoric.” The term contained a whole program. Gossaert wanted a return to the classicist tradition, within which poets feel both constrained and protected and are not forced to be forever searching for new images and words. In his collection Experiments (Experimenten, 1911) he put his ideas into practice, showing his affinity with seventeenth-century writers such as Jodocus van Lodensteyn and Jacobus Revius and Romantics like Willem Bilderdijk and Isaac da Costa. P. N. van Eyck (1887–1945) was another advocate of neoclassical discipline. His early poetry was characterized by a tragic sense of the dichotomy between soul and senses. The collection Vistas (Uitzichten, 1913) presented a Verwey-inspired synthesis: everything that exists, from the material to the spiritual, is ordered in a single divine hierarchy. In the 1920s Van Eyck was to distinguish himself as an acute and independent critic whose judgment led to controversies and conflicts on more than one occasion. Gossaert and Van Eyck were conservative not only in literary matters but also in a wider cultural context. Both were convinced nationalists, and Gossaert even flirted with Fascism.

The statements of these young poets led Verwey to speak, cautiously, of a new direction, which implied a further move away from the “dangerous” individualism of the Movement of 1880. His starting point was the observation that during the last decade of the previous century a link had been created in poetry “between particular impression and general idea, a certain unity, whether or not expressly formulated, within a group, a nation, or the whole of humanity, of which the poet feels part.” Here Verwey was describing the transition to an abstract or transcendental symbolism, which he explained further as “the distillation of impression into representation, and subsequently the clear dominance of the spirit.” The dominance of this “spiritual principle” was, he felt, henceforth “assured” in Dutch poetry. The “new” or further “deviation” that he observed, still within the same movement, was a return to “the sentence” and the “grand poetic style” on the French model.

Seen from an international perspective The Movement did indeed reveal itself as a late exponent of what in France was the countermovement to symbolism. Related forms of neoclassicism were manifested in English Imagism, among the representatives of neoclassicism in Germany, and in Acmeism in Russia. Ver­wey undoubtedly owed his authority as an intellectual leader to his striking adaptability or openness to new currents.

Frederik van Eeden. The Hague, Literary Museum.

Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) was essentially a Romantic, attracted by the aura of fairy tales, mystery, hypnosis (with which he experimented as a clinical psychologist), spiritualism, dreams, demons, and insanity. The German Romantics, especially E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the Christmas Books of Charles Dickens helped to shape Little Johannes (De kleine Johannes, published in book form in 1887), a fairy-tale-like account of an individual’s development, in which the young protagonist undertakes an allegorical quest, overcoming rationalism and materialism to opt for an emotional life beyond the grasp of reason. This development can be seen as a veiled autobiography. The description of Johannes’s childhood and achievement of maturity, and his ultimate commitment to “humanity,” are largely based on Van Eeden’s own life experiences, but at the same time generations of readers at home and abroad have identified with the evolution of his protagonist. Also present in Little Johannes are the element of Christian belief and the explicit ethical and social motifs so characteristic of Van Eeden. He gave his novel a religious and ethically colored conclusion, which partly underlay his differences of opinion with his contemporaries in The New Guide. His alter ego Johan­nes is shown the way by a Jesus-like figure and chooses the East, “where humanity and its suffering are.” Van Eeden focuses on the discussion of good and evil rather than on the pleas for independent art or the worship of beauty. Little Johannes was translated into German and English at an early date, and British readers saw a link with the Victorian cult of the little girl as exemplified by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863).

In 1892 Van Eeden’s work took a new direction. That year saw the publication of Johannes Viator: The Book of Love (Johannes Viator: Het boek van de liefde), which together with Ecstasy (Extaze) by Louis Coupe­rus introduced the new mysticism into Dutch prose. At least, such was the perception of their contemporaries. The critics of the time identified the new trend as a turning away from realism and toward “the mystical and symbolical.” Written in the first person and in lyrical prose, Johannes Viator reads like a confessional novel about the inner life of the eponymous hero in his quest for a higher, pure love. As in Little Johannes the inner search is given concrete form in an actual journey and a confrontation with various figures, here mainly women. Van Eeden foregrounds in his alter ego Johan­nes the theme of sexuality as problematical: earthly love is only acceptable if united with a love of heavenly or divine origin.

From 1897 onwards Van Eeden’s attention began to extend to society as a whole, which he diagnosed as sick. His diagnosis was accompanied by a therapy: he set out his proposals for social reform in a series of socioeconomic works and followed his desire to break with his “bourgeois” existence through to its logical conclusion, opting for a new, more sober lifestyle, without modern comforts. With the help of a number of friends he founded a colony of wooden cabins near Bussum, which he called Walden, following the example of Henry David Thoreau, who had lived alone for almost two years in a cabin in the woods on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau’s account of his experience, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), had made him famous overnight and inspired numerous imitations. Van Eeden greatly admired Thoreau’s courage and honesty, in which he may have recognized his own ideal of a pristine life close to nature as described in the opening pages of Little Johannes. However, unlike Thoreau, he did not flee society but sought to reform it by experimenting with a form of communal living in which members strove for maximum self-sufficiency. The method of cooperation that Van Eeden envisaged was to be defined in a later essay as a production cooperative of workers making their living from communally owned land, which, in contrast to capitalist cooperation, did not pay out a portion of the profits to its members but assigned all profit to the creation of reserves, the purchase of land, and new means of production. This “higher” or “cooperative” form of production should finally result in a communistic colony to which all could contribute according to their own abilities.

Walden proved very successful initially, attracting a broad spectrum of colonists. Its rapidly growing population was heterogeneous: besides a number of artists and intellectuals there were workers and a contingent of Van Eeden’s patients. The experiment alienated him even further from his original circle of friends, but for the first few years it brought him a more peaceful life, in which he could devote himself to writing. The poem “The Water Lily,” which opens the collection A Few Verses (Enkele verzen, 1898), probably dates from this period.

I love the water lily most of all,

as it glows so white and its crown so still

unfolds in the light.

Rising from the pond’s dark, cool bed,

it has found the light and revealed

in joy its golden heart.

Now on the surface it ponders and rests

and wants no more . . .

The flower can be interpreted as a symbol of the soul in search of the light; when it can unfold in this (divine) light, it reaches perfect happiness. The striving for a peace free of passion is a theme that links this poem, like much of Van Eeden’s other work, with mysticism, both Eastern (peace, the absence of desire) and Western (a life contemplating God).

Van Eeden’s years in Walden also produced his second great novel, The Deeps of Deliverance (Van de koele meren des doods, 1900). In the words of its opening sentence, the book presents: “The history of a woman’s life. How she sought the cool depths wherein is deliverance, and how she found it.” The novel was not universally appreciated by readers at the time; the treatment of the main theme, the death wish of a mentally ill woman, was taken as a pseudo-scientific report, an account of a case history by the psychiatrist Van Eeden. With its analysis of a pathological case The Deeps of Deliverance can be called naturalist, but its happy ending — Hedwig converts to a religious life — departs dramatically from the naturalist depiction of reality, pointing instead to the rise of Christian mysticism and growing social consciousness. The book unites Van Eeden the psychologist with Van Eeden the mystic and moralist. Hedwig’s life, like that of Johannes before it, embodies the essence of the author’s own philosophical quest. Through moments of reflection and sacred literature the main character’s individualistic attitude is turned toward greater spirituality and greater social awareness. Van Eeden’s work contains virtually all the — often contradictory — currents of his age.

The Walden experiment lasted until 1907, when the colony disintegrated through internal squabbling and a lack of sound business management. In Van Eeden’s view the downfall of the new form of society was due partly to people’s “fanatical and idealistic” adherence to what was “not yet possible” and their failure to strive exclusively for an anti-capitalist way of life. The experiment and its collapse typify Van Eeden the man. He was daring but hesitant, had high ideals but was also capricious and unbalanced. His quest for a higher and better life took him along very disparate paths: utopianism, socialism, Buddhism, theosophy, spiritualism, and finally Catholicism. After the death of his son Paul in 1913 Van Eeden sought out mediums who could put him in direct contact with his son and with other great departed spirits. In his séances he had conversations with Multatuli and Nietzsche, Michelangelo and Victor Hugo. His plans became increasingly grandiose; his vision eventually bordered on megalomania and finally descended into dementia. His astonishing versatility and the social and ethical engagement of his work, which remains imbued with a spiritual dimension, make Van Eeden perhaps the most typical representative of the changing times in which he lived.

Van Eeden had many friends in England, with whom he regularly stayed and who undoubtedly stimulated his interest in English literature; he was a great admirer of Shelley. His contacts included John Gray, friend of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and the poet and critic Edmund Gosse, whom he supplied with information on Dutch literature. He was also a cosmopolitan figure, who maintained relations with the principal social reformers of his time but also, in a professional capacity, with prominent parapsychologists and psychoanalysts such as the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.

Nothing illustrates better the abandonment of naturalism than the step that Lodewijk van Deyssel took in 1891 when, after a period of exaltation, a new truth, in the form of a mystical or neo-mystical experience, was revealed to him. In Scenes from Frank Rozelaar’s Life (Uit het leven van Frank Rozelaar, 1911) he wrote: “In this way I became a man of the inner and not the outer Life, a man of Thought and Imagination rather than a man of Action.” Frank Rozelaar is a journal recording Van Deyssel’s inner experiences in the years 1897 and 1898. What “happens” to him is the timeless experience of “Spiritual Lucidity,” in which heaven, “Eternal Life,” and God manifest themselves in light and beauty. The divine reveals itself everywhere, in nature and most of all in the beloved and in the child. Van Deyssel himself described the “strange journal” as “a constant tracing back of personal spiritual experiences to experiences of eternity.”

As a prose writer and an authoritative critic Van Deyssel played a significant part in introducing the new mysticism into the Netherlands. Like many of his contemporaries he was also a cultural mediator, translating Maeterlinck’s The Intruder (L’intr­use, 1890) and adapting Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Akëdys­séril (1885). His interest in Maeterlinck focused exclusively on the early plays, of which he gave penetrating and enthusiastic analyses. He started from the premise that the development leading from Balzac and Stendhal via Zola and Maeterlinck (and thence back to the “mystical” Middle Ages) was an uninterrupted line, not a rupture or a leap. Maeterlinck created an art form that simply went one step further and transcended naturalism.

In Frank Rozelaar and again in A Child’s Life (Kind-leven), also known as the Tales of Little Adriaan (Adriaantjes, 1903), Van Deyssel had tried to capture the higher and more refined regions of human experience that Maeterlinck evoked so exquisitely. However, the impact of his own “symbolist” writings remained very limited. After about 1890 Van Deyssel’s role as a critic far exceeded that of his creative prose writing. As early as in the 1880s he had set himself the critical task of resisting “the decay of our literature”; his pointedly phrased, merciless, and aggressive reviews earned him a reputation as a robust and much feared reviewer. He delighted in sentences “that gleam like bayonets in the sun and scythe down like steel on the skulls [of the readers].” He was regarded as a polemical genius, but he also developed his talents as an enthusiastic admirer, and his influence often proved inspirational.

Linked with the late prose of Van Deyssel is the work of a number of writers sometimes described as neo-Romantics. The concept of neo-Romanticism is an established term only in German literary history, where it denotes the artistic movement that emerged between 1890 and 1920 in reaction to naturalism. In the Dutch-speaking world the term is controversial, because the reaction to impressionism and naturalism took many different forms; neo-Romanticism in the Low Countries is usually reserved for the turn toward an unreal, hazily drawn, exotic historical setting. That choice ties in with the central theme of such literature: longing and the rejection of bourgeois existence, the flight from the here and now into another, distant, reality, that of the imagination. Hand in hand with the new choice of material goes a new style, as historical, utopian, or occult times and spaces are vaguely evoked rather than minutely registered. This stylistic trait links neo-Romanticism to symbolism. Neo-Romanticism shares with all “spiritual” or anti-naturalist movements around the turn of the century the urge toward spirituality or the metaphysical. Initially neo-Romanticism, like Romanticism itself, was not a movement in any strict sense at all; there was no group formation or statement of principles. Nevertheless a number of authors more or less simultaneously opted for subjects distant in time and space and for a dreamy atmosphere, for silent melancholy and intimacy. With some writers, like Louis Cou­perus and Arthur van Schendel, neo-Romanticism was no more than a passing phase in their work; others, like Aart van der Leeuw and Nico van Suchtelen, remained primarily neo-Romantics.

The earliest fiction of Arthur van Schen­del (1874–1946) contains all the ingredients of neo-Romanticism. Van Schendel made his debut in 1896 with the novel Drogon, a work introduced not coincidentally by the composer Alfons Diepenbrock, one of the leading advocates of the new view of art. Drogon gave him a welcome pretext to clarify his criticism of the Movement of 1880. For Diepenbrock the book demonstrated that “the idea is higher than the sensation” (in the sense of impression), and Van Schendel had distanced himself from the “painterly writing” of his predecessors. The work received a great deal of critical attention, and Van Schendel was subsequently accepted into the circle of the writers of 1880, which made his position still more ambiguous — or, perhaps for that very reason, unique. He gave a wide berth to the debate between the “socialists” and “aesthetes” and pointed out that Drogon was “independent of the currents of the age.” The story is set in 1246, the year — though this is never mentioned — in which King Louis the Pious of France called for a crusade. The main character is an introverted, lonely, and restless knight errant, born with “the mark of doom” upon him, capable of both cruelty and love. He is also imbued with a sense of mission: to search for the Ring of Jesus, about which his mother had told him. The ring supposedly “gives eternal life to those illuminated by its light.” However, Drogon falls in love with and wins the heart of Ermgarde, the wife of his brother, who has left on a crusade. Before he is able to make the pilgrimage to Rome, Ermgarde commits suicide and Drogon himself is killed. It is a sober and evocative tale with exotic and satanic elements, which give it — though this is not universally accepted — a neo-Romantic cachet.

Van Schendel himself presented his next work, A Wanderer in Love (Een zwerver verliefd, 1904), as a book about “a born nomad, who actually feels very happy, and after much experience falls in love; people have never cared about him, and of course the girl wants nothing to with him, either.” The action takes place in the first half of the thirteenth century, but the chronology is kept vague. Tamalone, the protagonist, spends his childhood in France and afterward wanders through Italy. He cares little for people and their concerns. However, this changes when he is confronted with his desire for the girl Mevena, whom he originally abducted for the army commander Rogier but with whom he himself falls in love. This puts an abrupt end to the wanderer’s carefree indifference and non-committal dreaminess. Eventually Tamalone kills Rogier for deserting his Mevena, after which the girl herself is killed by Rogier’s soldiers. The story’s ethereal vagueness results from an oblique, evocative use of language, but also from the liberal use of free indirect discourse, which often leaves the reader uncertain as to exactly who is speaking. In A Wanderer Lost (Een zwerver ver­dwaald, 1907), the sequel to A Wanderer in Love, Van Schen­del gives primacy to reality over the dream. Tamalone becomes fascinated by the poor and social outcasts but finally opts for freedom and an absence of ties. By the end of the novel the distinction between dream and reality has been erased: “His mind was heavy with seriousness, for reality was becoming beautiful as a dream.”

Contemporary readers praised the two wanderer books especially for their stylistic simplicity, which contrasted with the over-crafted écriture artiste, the impressionistic, painterly style of both naturalism and symbolism. Van Schendel’s work remained popular for decades, though increasingly interest has focused on the great novels from his later realistic period, to which we will return in the next section.

The initial success of Nico van Suchte­len (1878–1949), whose Quia absurdum (1906) was seen as “the book of a generation,” proved shorter-lived. Here too a character opts to pursue a dream, to the point where he is destroyed by the rifts between his ideals and reality, which he experiences as absurd. More striking is the enduring popularity of The Silent Laugh (De stille lach, 1916), a novel in letters (written jointly with Annie Salomons) in which Van Suchte­len has his protagonist die serenely as a Red Cross volunteer at the front in the Great War, after an intimate exchange of letters with a childhood sweetheart; he has known “spiritual” love and his ideal has therefore been realized. Van Suchtelen worked for a while in Van Eeden’s Walden colony and like Van Eeden himself found a platform in Verwey’s periodical The Movement. His work expresses the decidedly anti-materialistic, ethically committed view of life that characterizes the “spiritual” art of the time.

The historical novel is an obvious choice for the writer who wants to deal in (day)dreams and an idealization of reality, but the return to the historical novel is also symptomatic of the same anti-naturalist and anti-realist tendencies so prevalent around the turn of the century. In the historical genre the action was not so much set against a romantically blurred backdrop as radically transposed to the past, to an alien reality onto which the feelings and imagination of the present were projected. Typical of this trend are not only the early novels of Van Schendel but also the historical novels of Louis Couperus, who especially in The Mountain of Light (De berg van licht, 1905–6), The Comedians (De komedianten, 1917), Arrogance: The Conquests of Xerxes (Xerxes, of de hoogmoed, 1919), and Iskander (1920) sought inspiration in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Although Couperus’s reputation rests mainly on successful contemporary psychological novels such as Eline Vere and Old People and the Things that Pass (which were discussed in the previous section), by 1919 the writer himself regarded the “psychological bourgeois novel” as an exhausted genre that had begun with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or earlier but to which there was now nothing more to add. Critics associated Couperus’s choice of the historical novel with the Great War. However, his was not simply a flight from his own oppressive age but also a different kind of liberation. From as early as 1902 he had regarded antiquity as synonymous with freedom and joie de vivre, a world in which he could openly integrate his androgynous nature. His new preoccupation undoubtedly represented a flight into beauty at a moment when the horror of the war was devouring Europe, but first and foremost it was a surrender to a full, uninhibited life. As he put it in an interview in 1916: “For me antiquity is a vague period many centuries long during which the ancient gods still rule and the heroes perform their great deeds and the ideal of Beauty and Love of Life radiates towards us from Hellas, and I feel the strange afterglow of all those dreams, all that Classical Beauty.”

In The Mountain of Light, Couperus originally intended to describe the dance of the young Roman emperor Heliogabalus (or Helegabalus, as he is called in the book), a figure he may have first come across in Ariadne, the Story of a Dream (1877) by the English novelist Ouida. However, he became so fascinated that he immersed himself in the available documents. This was not particularly unusual: the androgynous boy, the incarnation of superior beauty, had been a prominent decadent motif. The theme of the decline of Roman civilization dates back to Théophile Gautier and Flaubert, but Helioga­balus had also been evoked by Stefan George and by Jean Lombard, whose L’agonie (1889) served as a direct source for Couperus. However shocking or offensive The Mountain of Light may have been for many contemporary readers, it is unmistakably part of the Romantic-decadent tradition.

In Couperus’s vision the sixteen-year-old Syrian high priest Bassianus has such “womanly beauty” that the soldiers who saw him dancing in the temple and the people proclaim him emperor of Rome. As high priest and incarnation of the sun god Helegabalus he adopts the god’s name and embodies the wish to establish the sun cult on earth, a desire that also expresses the yearning for the unattainable. The mystical union with the sexless and androgynous god represents — as it frequently had in symbolist literature and painting: for example, in the sphinx-like figures of Gustave Moureau or Fernand Khnopff — a superior, superhuman form of love. But in a Rome beset with intrigues the young emperor is unable to realize his ideal. He falls in love with the charioteer Hierocles and thus seals his fate — a constantly recurring motif in Couperus. Sensual feminine feelings for his lover are a betrayal of the androgynous ideal of beauty. Bisexuality, the status of man-maiden, was a precondition of striving for the origin of all, the sexless light. The young emperor is abandoned by everyone and murdered by the army in the slave latrines of his magnificent palace.

Couperus gives a strongly erotic interpretation of the historical facts and of his sources. This makes The Mountain of Light not only a historical novel but a psychological one and a study of androgyny and homosexuality that offers a very personal treatment of the theme of fate. The book was and continues to be read in different ways. Contemporary critics largely rejected it because of its sexual morality — openly described love between men. But there was also an ecstatic review by Lodewijk van Deyssel, who felt overwhelmed by the impressionistic descriptions and who commented that the book was not so much sensual as “festive and triumphant.” Opinions will probably always be divided about this stylistically and thematically unique work.

Of Now and Tomorrow

The Flemish magazine Of Now and Tomorrow (1893–94; new series 1896–1901) brought about a literary renewal that formed part of the general revival of artistic life in Belgium during the fin de siècle. In terms of content the magazine, and the movement that derived its name from it, were closely related to the leading journal of the 1890s in the Netherlands, The Chronicle (De kroniek, 1895–1907), edited by P. L. Tak (1848–1907), which included intense debates on the position of art in the community. In the South there was a similar polarization between engagement and disengagement, but without an internal debate and without schisms. Unlike in the North, a symbiosis was achieved both between mystical and materialist tendencies (Romanticism, symbolism, and naturalism) and between the individualistic and social positioning of the artist.

Of Now and Tomorrow’s intellectual and practical leader was August Vermeylen, born in Brussels and a bilingual speaker of both Dutch and French. He heralded Of Now and Tomorrow in a prospectus as “the long-awaited journal of the younger generation in the southern Netherlands, an expression of the desires and thoughts of the youth of Flanders — without aesthetic dogmatism, without the desire to create a school — an independent avant-garde publication devoted to the art of today and curious about art-still-in-the-making — that of Tomorrow — here and abroad.”

The immediate model for Of Now and Tomorrow was francophone Belgian literature, especially a trio of non-conformist magazines: Young Belgium (La jeune Belgique, 1881–97), which took an art-for-art’s-sake line and defended moderate naturalism, Modern Art (L’art moderne, 1881–1914), which advocated a more socially committed art, and the revolutionary, pro-anarchist New Society (La société nouvelle, 1884–1914). Meanwhile the dominant influence on the literary sensibilities of the younger Flemish generation was the Dutch periodical The New Guide. Ver­meylen himself also pointed to the role of Les Vingt, a group of Belgian artists who organized salons in Brussels, at which the various members invited congenial Belgian and foreign talents to exhibit. These salons became a focal point for the international avant-garde of the time. Fin-de-siècle Brussels also had a concert scene that contributed greatly to the spread of the Wagner cult in French-speaking Belgium.

The innovative impetus generated by Of Now and Tomorrow was therefore not confined to literature. The artist and architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957), who had numerous contacts with the francophone writers of his native Antwerp, produced the logo for the title page — an example of floral art nouveau graphics — and continued to oversee the design of the magazine. As a member of Les Vingt he was able to call on the help of fellow artists, including James Ensor, George Minne, and Jan Toorop, who in turn contacted Dutch figures such as Jan Thorn Prikker, Jan Veth, and Richard N. Roland Holst. Thanks to them the illustrations and typography of the luxuriously produced first series became representative of the internationally expanding art nouveau style, of which Brussels, with such architects as Victor Horta, was the cradle. The new series may have been much more soberly produced, but through its emphasis on intellectual issues it triggered a demand for emancipation that heralded a new phase in the Flemish Movement. For most of the nineteenth century the Flemish Movement had concentrated its efforts on gaining official recognition for the Dutch language in Flanders; now, thanks to the impetus given by Vermeylen, it broadened its scope to become a campaign for socioeconomic and intellectual liberation.

The link with the tradition of the Flemish Movement held the group of writers around Of Now and Tomorrow together. Vermeylen’s fellow editors — Cyriel Buysse, Emmanuel de Bom, and Prosper van Langendonck — were very different individuals, with conflicting political views. But they were united by what Vermeylen called “the same Messianic spirit,” a hope for the future that found expression in several related essays: “The Revival of Flemish Poetry” by Prosper van Langen­donck, “Art in a Free Society” by Vermeylen, and “Rhythm” by Alfred Hegenscheidt. All three proclaim a great “tide of life,” in which “the existing order will vanish and new synthesis emerge.” The fact that in the vision of the older Van Langendonck that synthesis would be a Christian one briefly disturbed good relations with the younger, anarchistic reformers, but it had no further consequences. Van Langendonck was the elder statesman who cemented the link with old, Catholic, Flanders and with the tradition of Guido Gezelle, Hugo Verriest, and Albrecht Rodenbach, whose line they were consciously continuing. Their explicit individualism was squared with a sense of community, a legacy imposed by the Flemish Movement.

The basis of their reflections was, as Vermeylen formulated it, “the all-embracing idea of Life (with a capital letter!) as an immanent movement of self-organization,” and art, as the expression of this all-embracing life, was informed by the organizing principle of “Rhythm,” understood as the ultimate Mystery, or God. The artistic views expressed in these essays reveal a symbolist aesthetic. According to the writers of Of Now and Tomorrow — with the possible exception of Buysse, whose early work was steeped in naturalism— art referred to a higher, deeper, that is, metaphysical reality. It was a view they shared with those writers in the North who advocated a spiritual and ethical art, especially Albert Verwey and Frederik van Eeden, in addition to a number of visual artists. It was also a view that could be seen as an extension of the Arts and Crafts Movement of Walter Crane and William Morris, which was introduced into Brussels by Les Vingt. Vermeylen’s “Art in a Free Society” may be read as an extended reaction to Crane’s The Claims of Decorative Art (1892), which had been translated into Dutch by Jan Veth.

Typical of the attention to intellectual issues and to “the assertion of our Flemish national character” in the second series of Of Now and Tomorrow was August Vermeylen’s bold and controversial essay “Critique of the Flemish Movement” (1896), a settling of accounts along anarchist lines. Basing himself on individualist thinkers like Nietzsche and Max Stirner, especially Stirner’s The Individual and his Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1844), Vermeylen heaped scorn on the old, Romantic language-lovers who formed the core of the Flemish Movement. Vermeylen now rejected all existing authority as an impediment to the free development of the individual and attacked the Flemish Movement’s activists for their faith in parliamentary action. In his view the Flemish cause must not be limited to a language question: socioeconomic reforms were the precondition for the intellectual development that would lead to emancipation and liberation.

Much of the considerable anarchist input in the second series of Of Now and Tomorrow can be credited to Vermeylen’s French-speaking friend Jacques Mesnil (pseudonym of J. Dwels­hauvers), but contributions also came from the “father of Dutch anarchism,” Ferdinand Dome­la Nieuwenhuis, and others. Vermeylen himself soon outgrew his anarchist phase; in 1905 he publicly repudiated his provocative and anti-parliamentary statements in the “Critique.” He turned against the dogmatism of the anarchists and presented a synthesis of his broader humanitarian views in the robust and pithy essay “Flemish and European Movement” (1900), a plea for the right to a separate Flemish identity as part of Dutch and European culture. The essay, with its high-flown concluding words “we want to be Flemings in order to become Europeans,” has lost none of its topicality.

The literary renewal generated by Of Now and Tomorrow was achieved not only by these critical writings but above all by the lyrics of Prosper van Langendonck and Karel van de Woestijne, the prose of Cyriel Buysse, Stijn Streuvels, and Emmanuel de Bom, and the dramatic work of Alfred Hegenscheidt.

The most representative of the first generation of poets associated with Of Now and Tomorrow was Prosper van Langendonck (1862–1920), a theorist and defender of a classic universal art but himself the author of tormented late-Romantic, somber, inwardly-torn Baudelairian lyrics, the immediate precursor of the symbolism of Van de Woestijne. Like Pol de Mont (1857–1931), who experimented with new poetic forms in the 1880s, Van Langendonck was a transitional figure, but thanks to his introverted nature and his thirsting for the eternal and universally human, he — unlike De Mont — enjoyed the trust and admiration of the younger generation. His traditional political views and his deeply Christian outlook were utterly incompatible with the anarchist ideas voiced in the new series of Of Now and Tomorrow, but that did not prevent him from continuing to contribute to the magazine.

As a poet Van Langendonck left a very small body of work, collected in Poems (Verzen, 1900). He modeled himself on Romantic poets like Alfred de Musset, Giacomo Leopardi, and August von Platen, but also idolized such classics as Virgil, Dante, and Vondel. In his first important poem, “Truth and Ideal” (1883), he introduced decadent, fin-de-siècle poetry in Baudelairian vein. Although predominantly cast in the classic sonnet form reintroduced by the Movement of 1880, his poetry gave voice to inner restlessness, pain, and emotional turmoil. Both his predisposition and the tragic circumstances of his life caused mental tensions that finally resulted in madness, tensions that in his work are expressed in poignant, direct confession of impotence and rejection, alternating with heroic rebelliousness and self-aggrandizement. His tragic life and poetic sensibility mark him out as the first poète maudit in Flemish literature.

August Vermeylen (1872–1945), who as late as 1927, in a phrase borrowed from George Meredith, was to ask for “more brains” in Flemish literature, was himself the author of typically symbolist prose, the kind that first and foremost expresses an idea, preferably in allegorical form. His short symbolic novel The Wandering Jew (De wande­lende Jood, 1906) is an adaptation of the medieval legend of Ahasverus, the cobbler from Jerusalem who taunted Christ on the way to Golgotha and was condemned to wander the earth. Vermeylen projected his own skepticism and quest for the absolute into the story, and in so doing he gave shape to the Of Now and Tomorrow ideal of a synthesis embracing the whole of life. Ahasverus seeks truth first in hell, but finally he heads back to the world: it is “among people,” in living with others, that the earthly and the divine, the material and the absolute, can combine in harmony. In his second novel, Two Friends (Twee vrienden), which was conceived in 1897 like The Wandering Jew, but was not completed until 1941–42, Vermeylen sketched his own intellectual growth. The discussions between the two friends revisit the differences of opinion around 1897 when the young Vermeylen forsook anarchism and became estranged from his friend Jacques Mesnil.

Closely related to the early prose sketches of Vermeylen is the work of Emmanuel de Bom (1868–1953). De Bom also wrote lyrical reflective pieces, in which he plumbed the depths for Truth and Mystery, sketching a portrait of the despair and introversion of the younger generation of the time. His atmospheric and introspective novel Wrecks (Wrakken, 1898) remained completely unknown in the North, but in Flanders it marked an important moment as not only one of the first psychological novels but also the first urban novel in Flemish literature. Its direct impact was initially restricted to the circle of Of Now and Tomorrow, and its wider significance only became apparent decades later. The main characters in the novel bob about like “wrecks” on the sea of life, to which they submit with helpless apathy. The characterization of these passive, depressive types, without hope or zest or pleasure, gives the book an affinity with the analytical, psychological approach of Marcellus Emants in the Netherlands.

The most important prose writer of the generation of Of Now and Tomorrow was Stijn Streuvels (pseudonym of Frank Lateur, 1871–1969). This wayward nephew of Guido Gezelle never left his native West Flemish countryside and described human life purely in terms of its bond with the soil and with the inexorable cycle of the seasons. However, within this very limited geographical orbit he developed a grandiose and broad vision, influenced by his reading of German, Scandinavian (B. M. Björnson, Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun), Russian (Tolstoy), and later also English and French authors. Central to Streuvels’s view of mankind is the overwhelming power of nature, the cosmos, in which man is only a speck, a tiny, insignificant, and transient being.

Streuvels’s earliest collections of naturalist novellas and sketches, The Path of Life (Lenteleven, 1899), Summer Land (Zomerland, 1900), Solar Tide (Zonnetij, 1900), and Dance of Death (Dodendans, 1901), contain virtually all the themes and motifs of his later prose. Man, even when a young child, is doomed to decay, predestined by the inexorability of fate and death. In one of the stories in The Path of Life the innocent and pure little girl Horieneke is confronted suddenly and frighteningly with the fact of sexual maturity, which in her case means falling into the clutches of her master, the farmer. Work is experienced by the country people as a curse that deadens them and turns them into animals but is endured with great stoicism. In the story “The Harvest” (“De oogst”) the seasonal worker Rik is brought low, not only by the burning sun but because he too is the helpless victim of his working conditions.

The whole of Streuvels’s creative work expresses a predominantly grim, fatalistic, and disconsolate vision of mankind. His admission that he is unable to find an explanation for the course of life and the laws of nature and the universe often reads like an agnostic view of life. Although naturalist in origin and consistently realistic, Streuvels’s view of art clearly linked in with the new “spiritualizing” tradition. Consequently it was his work, more than any other, that achieved the literary synthesis envisaged by Of Now and Tomorrow. The descriptive art of this mercilessly realistic observer was not solely pictorial but also visionary; his perception of nature and his vision of man are markedly internalized and transcend the temporal. Streuvels’s later prose will be dealt with at the end of this section.

The writers of Of Now and Tomorrow, however, saw drama as the ideal genre in which to achieve their ideal of a synthetic art, despite the fact that drama occupied only a subordinate position in their creative work and critical essays. The one signal exception was Starkadd by Alfred Hegen­sche­idt (1866–1964), which was published in its entirety in Of Now and Tomorrow in 1897. No work, wrote Vermeylen, “embodied so clearly the spirit of the age.” The play is a monumental lyrical Wagnerian historic drama in blank verse, in which Hegenscheidt interprets the story of the Danish bard (skald) Starkadd as a psychological conflict. Its core is Starkadd’s inner development as he achieves purification “through the operation and resistance of all the contradictions of outward chance and individual fate,” as Vermeylen put it. In Starkadd Hegenscheidt, like Ibsen in his symbolic dramas, created characters that are incarnations of ideas, yet resemble people of flesh and blood. In Holland the work was fairly harshly judged, by Verwey among others, who criticized its symbolism and polar oppositions. But in Flanders, after its premiere in 1899, it was regarded as radically innovative and enjoyed considerable success.

As a symbolist drama Starkadd certainly fitted in with the spirit of the age. It represented the anti-positivist, neo-mystical tradition introduced by Maurice Maeterlinck, which in Flanders was taken further after the First World War in the expressionist drama of Herman Teirlinck. It was no accident that Teirlinck’s debut was as a poet in Of Now and Tomorrow. The symbolist drama produced around the turn of the century embodied the opposite extreme to the realistic naturalist approach in which a crude “slice of life” was portrayed, as in Cyriel Buysse’s The Van Paemel Family (Het gezin Van Paemel, 1902). No synthesis of these two forms of drama was ever achieved.

The Symbolist Poets

Just as naturalism is a heightened form of realism, so symbolism can be seen as an extension of Romanticism. The Romantic poets sought a channel for the expression of their overflowing inner life in the nature that surrounded them, into which they projected their feelings. This expansion or broadening of the lyrical subject into space was now taken to a higher level in the work of symbolist poets. The poet sought, via images and symbols, access to a transcendental, metaphysical reality. Art, mainly through sensory impressions of often mysterious natural images, revealed the infinite. Poetry was no longer the expression of personal, individual feelings as it was for the Romantics, but rather, via sensory perception, that of a general, heightened experience of life. The individual was meant to lead to the general; symbolism gave a glimpse of the universal, expressed “the idea.” In the Low Countries the representatives of this preeminently “spiritual” art were, besides Verwey, three important poets: Jan Hendrik Leopold, Pieter Cornelis Boutens, and the Fleming Karel van de Woestijne.

Jan Hendrik Leopold (1865–1925) made his debut in The New Guide in 1893, just before the rift in the editorial board. He was an eccentric, solitary, and introverted figure, who published very irregularly. It was not he himself but P. C. Boutens who took the initiative of printing his first volume, Poems (Verzen, 1912); not until two years later did he publish an extended edition of the collection under the same title himself. As a classics teacher at a high school in Rotterdam, Leopold was highly regarded by his pupils and colleagues, some of whom recorded moving testimonies. But this “dreamy ascetic” remained elusive even for those who knew him personally, and he became increasingly reclusive, preferring a “life turned inward” and the “retreat into the self.” His withdrawal and solitariness may have been triggered by his progressive deafness, but in his poetry they acquire the depth of a universal, existential solitude.

Jan Hendrik Leopold. The Hague, Literary Museum.

The urge to disappear had been cultivated by Leopold from the very beginning. Typical examples of this are the two in memoriam poems written for Paul Verlaine in January 1896, which express admiration for the French poet but can also be read as veiled self-portraits or self-projections. Leopold saw in Verlaine

a man who lived his introverted

life quietly for himself

and who

had arrived at the only meaning

of life: that we should be

hidden.

In another early poem he defined his own attitude as

desolation and a haughty striving

to be lonelier than lonely.

Here was a poet who resolved to remain evasive, even in his most directly confessional poetry.

Loneliness or the inability — or unwillingness? — to transcend one’s own limits remained the central theme of Leopold’s work. Human intercourse is painful; the poet can find equilibrium only through immediate oneness, via communication with nature. The poem “Staring out of the Window” evokes a state of mind and betrays the influence of Gorter’s sensitivist Poems of 1890:

There is a life in things that stir,

the branches tremble and confer

together. The hint of a beginning shakes

each tree: introspection wakes,

 

giving a glimmer of thought and doubt,

with languid fingers they wave about

waving, waving, they express

precisely their own inward stress.

 

And memories, things inessential

they lisp with manner confidential,

they would like, would like — then they’re

dead in the sky, the trees are bare.

 

The sky’s a soulless, empty round,

whence the wind tumbled to the ground.

In his introduction to the first edition of Poems Boutens characterized Leopold’s poetry as “audible thought” and “near-silence.” Its unique quality is indeed connected with the highly evocative, searching, and tentative use of words, a feature that allies him with the symbolist credo of Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé. In Leopold’s poems the physical, tangible elements of the external world always appear as a function of and symbol for a mental state. The imagery usually testifies to the intense emotional involvement of the poet, but it also evokes further, deeper dimensions: psychological, philosophical, and even literary-theoretical. Like Mal­larmé, Leopold tends to objectify; in this he heralds the autonomous poetics of modernism, according to which the poem becomes an autonomous “language object,” a closed world that evokes a reality of its own.

In later work Leopold achieved a measure of resigned acceptance inspired by a Stoic view of life. Early on he had published the popularizing anthology Stoic Wisdom (Stoïsche wij­sheid, 1904), with a translation of the so-called Handbook of Epictetus and three books of Marcus Aurelius’s meditations, although he also explored Epicureanism in From Epicurus’s Garden (Uit den tuin van Epicurus, 1910). He finally achieved a harmonious view of life thanks to an intensive study of Spinoza, a preference he shared with most of the Generation of 1880, especially Verwey and Gorter.

Leopold incorporated a synthesis of his philosophical insights in a long narrative poem, Cheops (1915­), an evocation of the mighty Egyptian pharaoh who ordered the building of ­the largest pyramid. The poem describes in a very dense form the experiences of the despot after his death, namely how he is received into the train of the immortals:

After his welcome, after being received

into the illustrious throngs and the train

of the immaculately risen, floating

all through the heavens, the great retinue,

accompanying yet always at a distance

never approaching the undefiled

Openers, the High Rulers, They . . .

The sentence continues for twenty lines before it finally identifies its subject: “Cheops the king.” The very syntax is a reflection of what follows. Cheops, after his wanderings through the cosmos, through the metaphysical and the absolute, retreats and returns to earth, his mummy in the Great Pyramid. The “stubborn despot” rejects absolute eternity or immortality because there, among the rulers, he must suppress his own “urgent will,” because he is the equal of the many and must accommodate the others. He opts therefore for personal immortality on earth where he enjoys the “exalted fame / of the god’s son”: he is absorbed into the “symbols of the past,” that is, into the images of the mural in which his own illustrious life as pharaoh has been recorded.

Because of the density of its vocabulary and its semantic richness, the poetry is difficult to interpret unambiguously and accordingly a whole series of contradictory or complementary interpretations have been proposed. All that can be said for certain is that Leopold projected some of his own solitude into Pharaoh Cheops, and that this exalted evocation of transience and extreme introversion has a poetic stature that has fascinated and intrigued generations of readers.

Spinoza was not the only determining influence on Leopold. Like so many of his generation he was attracted by Oriental poetry. He regarded the Persian philosopher-poet Omar Khayyám as comparable to Spinoza. Leopold had already translated a series of quatrains from Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyat via German and English versions (by E. H. Whinfield and Edward FitzGerald). After the completion of Cheops he was to concentrate increasingly on the adaptation of Persian and Arabic poetry that he read in French, German, and English prose and verse renderings. Some of these adaptations were collected as Oriental (Oos­ter­sch, 1924), while others remained unpublished and unfinished. Often they are more recreations than translations, with only the essence of the original texts remaining.

After the Stoical poem Cheops this immersion in things Oriental, with its meditations on the enjoyment of life and beauty but also on the transience and vanity of all earthly things, brought him a new equilibrium, just as previously the absorption in Stoic wisdom had been tempered by reading Epicurus. The collection Oriental of 1924 also contains a number of hard, bitter poems, particularly striking for their fatalism. Still, for the “late” Leopold the highest wisdom lies in serenity, in turning away from the “outward show of immortality,” in the knowledge that all is “naught” and is only transient in nature:

To have seen the world or not, what matter: it is naught.

What you have heard or said or written: it is naught.

To have traveled through all seven climates: it is naught.

To have stayed at home to study and reflect: it is naught.

Pieter Cornelis Boutens. The Hague, Literary Museum.

P. C. Boutens (1870–1943), like Leopold, was a classicist. After the publication of XXV Poems (XXV Verzen, 1894), which was intended for friends, he made his official debut in 1898 with Poems (Verzen), a collection still very indebted to contemporary French poetry. The tradition of 1880, and more specifically the sensual sensitivism of Herman Gorter, was another decisive influence. Poems is full of the typical fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Verlainian melancholy, with its fractured emotions and changing individual moods. But shortly afterward this symbolism of mood evolved into a spiritualized or abstract vision. As it was for Albert Verwey and Karel van de Woestijne, poetry for Boutens became, a “cognitive tool,” a medium in which general or absolute ideas could reveal themselves. The Platonic idea of “eternal beauty” was to be of crucial importance to Boutens.

Boutens gave a Platonic twist to the ideal of beauty as the Generation of 1880 had developed it. In Plato’s teachings, ideal beauty is beauty that cannot be directly viewed; it is inherent to the world of ideas, of which what we perceive is only an imperfect shadow. Ideas are unearthly, immanent, and universal; the world of ideas therefore calms the soul. Typical of Boutens’s worldview is his belief that man can achieve a knowledge of beauty through love. This metaphysical view underlies his Collected Sonnets (Ver­zamelde son­net­ten, 1907) and the volumes Voices (Stemmen, 1907) and Carmina (1912). The latter, the best-known of his collections, is inspired by the classics and by the English Pre-Raphaelite Dante Ga­briel Rosset­ti. However, it also contains translations from the German Romantic Novalis, and the first edition featured a translation of Baudelaire’s sonnet “Beauty” (“La beauté”). Boutens’s late-nineteenth-century preferences, including his obvious attraction to the East, are also reflected in his extensive translations of classical writers. He made versions of Omar Khayyám’s then extremely popular Rubáiyat, using, like Leopold before him, the well-known Englishing by FitzGerald. He was also to become increasingly involved with ancient Persian mystical Sufi poetry, which he translated from a French prose version. However, his most widely read translation was his reworking of the Middle Dutch Beatrijs.

The singular quality of Boutens’s poetics, and his uncompromising vocabulary — obscure and inaccessible in the view of some — arose from this unique combination of international late-Romantic and symbolist influences with a Platonic theory of beauty, the longing for an exalted and timeless absolute beauty and goodness removed from the temporal realm. An attraction to Platonic thought, incidentally, was not considered in any way outlandish at the time: indeed, it was popular among symbolists and certainly influenced Maeterlinck. In the case of Boutens the focus on the supernatural world of ideas led to a soothing longing for death, as he put it in the very well-known poem “Good Death”:

Good death whose pure harmony

Pierces life’s silent cloak,

Who charms a smile of empathy

From all young and lovely folk,

which in the final stanza culminates in this paradoxical glorification of death:

All beauty that earth can give,

Is a road that to you departs,

And life we only really live

When like death it moves our hearts.

In the Platonic vision of an absolute and abstract longing for beauty Boutens also found a justification for his own homoerotic sexuality. According to Plato homosexual desire was superior to all others, not just because the homosexual relationship is the only one between equals, but also, as explained in the Symposium and Phaidros, because it is a prerequisite in striving for knowledge of absolute beauty. The homosexual concept of love is removed from the “earthly” urge to procreate and is hence of a fundamentally higher order. This view led Boutens to believe in the possibility of achieving knowledge of God on earth through the love relationship.

Boutens’s sexuality was initially expressed only in veiled terms, since at the time there was still a taboo against the explicit admission of homosexuality. However, the true nature of his eroticism became apparent even to uninitiated contemporaries with the publication of Stanzas from the Posthumous Papers of Andries de Hoghe (Strofen uit de nala­tenschap van Andries de Hoghe, 1919), in which homoeroticism is described as a superior form of love between chosen beings. The collection purported to have been merely edited by Boutens but is in fact his own work. The presentational device enabled him to skirt the question of an open admission of his homosexuality, which here emerged clearly, for example in the lines:

There’s no one else as solitary as I,

No other has to hide his secret heart —

this dark seed case that swells to flower in light,

this silent pain that pants for joy cried loud —

in such a vise of silence absolute.

However, the explicit confession of loneliness also implied awareness of an exceptional destiny, a chosen status. This attitude was clear from the poet’s social strategy. He surrounded himself with a host of intimate friends and admirers, and his exceptional position conferred an almost priestly status on him. From 1909 on Boutens could devote himself exclusively to literature thanks to a subsistence fund his friends set up for the purpose. He also acquired a reputation as a host and became an acclaimed after-dinner speaker, lecturer, and organizer. This fundamentally lonely but elitist poet therefore played a considerable social role. In 1905 he was one of the founders of the Society of Authors (Vereniging van Let­terkundigen), which he chaired from 1918 to 1943, and in 1923 he took the initiative of founding a Dutch branch of the PEN club. At the end of his life he found himself increasingly isolated, however, partly because he chose to join the Chamber of Culture (Kultuurkamer) instituted by the Nazis during the Second World War. For a while this decision had a negative impact on the discussion of Boutens’s lyric poetry, but the aestheticism of his Christian-Platonic thinking has stood the test of time.

Karel van de Woestijne (1878–1929) is a typical representative of the kind of poetry associated with French symbolism, in which he was extremely well read. He found spiritual sustenance for his work in Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, but also in Jules Laforgue and Barbey d’Aurevilly. The latter two profoundly influenced his prose. His lyric poetry also shows clear affinities with the refined, elegiac, and atmospheric art of his fellow-townsmen Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles van Lerberghe, and Grégoire Le Roy, who unlike Van de Woestijne had enjoyed a French-language education in their native Ghent and wrote exclusively in French. Van de Woestijne gave a particularly insightful portrait of his generation and his literary models in his 1906 essay on Emile Verhaeren, another francophone Flemish writer, in which he characterizes the younger generation of his time as the Generation of Doubt. Intellectually formed by French culture, these Flemings writing in French were rootless, he noted: French “has grafted a Latinate culture onto our original Flemish essence, our Flemish tongue and our Flemish ways of thinking, which turned us into hesitant dual-natured creatures.”

Karel van de Woestijne with his wife Mariette van Hende. Antwerp, AMVC House of Literature.

In Van de Woestijne’s early poems decadent motifs like satiety, weariness, and emotional ambiguity are especially prominent, as are doom-laden motifs such as evening and autumn. His early lyrics, like those of Leopold and Boutens, are subjective and sensitivist. They are less lucid or descriptive than evocative and atmospheric, with the poet making use of impressionistic blurring techniques to evoke an undefined melancholy and soften any sharp edges. Important ingredients include a spectrum of new compounds and the synesthesia beloved of Baudelaire, which suggests analogies between different fields of sensory perceptions. Van de Woestijne repeatedly evoked Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances,” a hymn to synesthesia and a testament to the harmony of emotion and nature. A serene snapshot like the following can serve as an example of a symbolist, emotion-laden impression of nature:

At frail yellow sunset alone and sad my soul . . .

Through open panes I hear the downy fall

of dampened petals in a crystal bowl . . .

— I don’t know if I shall love her at all,

in the quiet light movements of her limbs through air

and her goodness filling my strange life so . . .

I’m sad, and hear her quiet footsteps go,

and her gentle hum from the garden down there.

The sense of alienation from one’s own surroundings, the feeling of being different, and the preoccupation with communication form symbolist motifs that link Van de Woestijne with Leopold.

Between 1915 and 1920 Van de Woestijne’s work underwent a transition from sensory precision to a greater spirituality and abstraction; his final two collections, God at the Seaside (God aan zee, 1926) and The Mountain Lake (Het berg-meer, 1928), mainly embody these mystical aspirations. The concept of the divine finds expression, as with many symbolists, in abstract terms such as “the universe,” “the ether” or simply God. An abstract or transcendental symbolism corresponds to this longing for the eternal. The orientation of the human soul toward the divine or absolute was already present in Van de Woestijne’s earliest poetry, but the emphasis on a purely cerebral pursuit of divine eternal values has become central to the lyrical vision of the final collections.

Van de Woestijne’s problematic attitude to women accords with this development. Fin-de-siècle art in general is characterized by an ambivalent or even flatly negative attitude to women: they are present as enigmatic sphinxes, as femmes fatales, as belles dames sans merci by whom men are possessed. In Van de Woestijne’s case this motif had its origin in a personal internal conflict. Early in his career he had been torn by the dualism of body and spirit, soul and senses. In his earliest work the attitude of the lyrical subject to the woman was ambivalent. Later collections, particularly the transitional The Man of Mud (De modderen man; the image stands for “sinful man”), published in 1920, contain poems that express tortured and total contempt:

When I shall die . . .

take then this painful book; read these verses, do

in which I disown you, O woman.

Another link with symbolism is Van de Woestijne’s predilection for allegory. He published three collections of epic poetry, which he called “interludes” or “intermezzos.” They comprise ten long narrative poems, mostly recreations of mythological figures, but in fact all self-portraits. The figures are vehicles for ideas and embody a spiritual movement or development. For example, in “The Bull Thief” the rising motion, symbolizing the attainment of the transcendental, spiritual principle, is opposed to the sinking motion, the descent into the underworld, in the “The Journey Back.” The latter lament by Orpheus for his lost, all-embracing, absolute love is a very personal interpretation of the myth. It should be said that this mythologizing and interest in Greek antiquity is not at all exceptional at this period.

Van de Woestijne’s prose is equally allegorical. His stories, like his epic poetry, are first and foremost self-portraits. Emotional ambivalence is already indicated in the title of the first collection, Janus with the Double Forehead (Janus met het dubbele voor-hoofd, 1908). A typical story is “Romeo or the Lover of Love,” inspired by Shakespeare, though here Romeo is not in love with a woman but with the feeling of being in love. In other words, he is incapable of transcending the bounds of his narcissistic personality; sensual, physical love is outdone by a higher, purely cerebral love. Even Bluebeard, in Van de Woestijne’s adaptation of the folk story, is not searching for an earthly love but for a spiritual, sublimated one. His “pure insight” into love is avenged by his killing of seven women who bear the names of the seven Deadly Sins.

After Diversions (Afwijkingen, 1910), a collection of short prose pieces, “strange” stories or fantasies in the manner of Mallarmé’s Divagations, Van de Woestijne returned to pure narrative with The Constant Presence (De bestendige aanwezigheid) and Divine Imaginings (Goddelijke verbeeldingen), both published in 1918. The former collection is composed as a diptych and through its structure expresses the duality of the two poles: sensuousness in the panel “The Five Senses” as opposed to detachment in the panel “Three Saints.” The story “The Peasant, Dying,” in the first panel, is widely regarded as a minor masterpiece, which in an astonishingly rich and nuanced style records a multitude of sensory impressions with great simplicity, directness, and concreteness. The story recounts the final hours of a peasant who knows he is about to die and lies grumbling:

An old peasant lay dying. His bed stood in the dank air of the upstairs room. Dusk was falling, and the peasant lay peering out from the depths of his straw-tick under the dingy grey blanket. His dark bony fingers caught in the blanket, and he watched them for a moment, thinking: “Look here, I’m getting ready for the journey.” But he just peered, with his dull glazed eyes above the taut yellow skin of his cheekbones, and there was no movement of his forehead or his black, sunken mouth.63

The farmer complains about not having enjoyed his life, but in his last hours he remembers not only moments of pain but also love and joy. Death appears as a farewell to life, which, represented by five women embodying the five senses, proves to have been a riot of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Dying is a process of withering and mortification, of distancing oneself from one’s sensory powers, followed by a new vision, through entry into the world of pure spirit. This “peasant novella” has become a classic of Dutch literature.

Socialist and Anarchist Ideas

The end of the nineteenth century was a period of social turmoil and radical political reforms, which fostered not only a rapid expansion of socialism but also a burgeoning anarchist movement. The impact of anarchism was less marked in the Netherlands and Belgium than in France, but it still attracted a remarkable amount of support among younger intellectuals. In the Netherlands the anti-parliamentary actions of Fer­di­nand Domela Nieuwenhuis caught the public eye. They can be traced in Of Now and Tomorrow, which reported regularly on Dutch and international anarchism, including the ideas of such figures as Bakunin and Kropotkin. Artists like Jan Toorop, and Johan Thorn Prikker in the Netherlands, and Henry van de Velde, August Vermeylen, and Karel van de Woes­tijne in Belgium were attracted — albeit briefly — by anarchism. In Louis Couperus’s autobio­graphical novel Metamorphosis (Metamorfoze, 1894) anarchism plays a prominent­ role.

Far more important, and far more profound, however, was the influence of socialism on Dutch literature. By around 1900 socialism had already grown into a broadly based movement in the Low Countries, attracting artists who not only initiated a discussion on art and society but also argued for a socialist, even proletarian art — an art created by and for the new working class. The differences of opinion about the social involvement of artists had already emerged in The New Guide, when the “asocial” members of the Movement of 1880, those who acknowledged only the cult of beauty (Willem Kloos, Lodewijk van Deyssel), opposed the reformist ideas of Frank van der Goes and the social and ethical commitment of Frederik van Eeden. Van Deyssel, supported by Kloos, argued that social reformers were fundamentally anti-artistic.

However, it still seemed possible at the time to build bridges across what today appear unbridgeable divides. When in 1896–97 Herman Gorter immersed himself in reading Marx’s Das Kapital, this did not imply that he was turning his back on his favorite philosopher Spinoza. On the contrary, he sought to combine Spinoza’s God with an ordering principle concerning social organization. From the clash of ideas and ideologies grew new ideas, new possible syntheses. This latter goal — the search for a synthesis, the all-embracing idea, and the concept of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) — was perhaps the most characteristic feature among all the divergent developments at the end of the nineteenth century.

Socialism had a profound influence on literary life. In 1897 Herman Heijermans (1864–1924) launched his own Social Democratic magazine The Young Guide (De jonge gids) in Amsterdam, which covered a whole range of social problems. In his extensive body of work Heijermans portrayed man as dominated by oppressive and divisive socio­­economic forces. His later plays also satirized capitalist society, as in the “malevolent fairy-tale” The Wise Tomcat (De wijze kater, 1918, an adaptation of Puss-in-Boots), but also showed that poverty and deprivation have taught man a measure of saving humor (as in Eva Bonheur, 1917).

Herman Gorter’s conversion to “scientific Marxism,” the record of which can be found in the “turning-point sonnets” of 1891–93 and in his “Critique of the Literary Movement of 1880 in Holland” (1898–99), was dealt with in the previous section. Looking back, Gorter himself characterized his encounter with socialism as a shipwreck from which he emerged as a “powerful survivor from the ship of the bourgeoisie” who had now arrived “in the land of the workers.” In 1897, together with Henriëtte Roland Holst-Van der Schalk and her husband Richard N. Roland Holst, Gorter joined the Social Democratic SDAP, but as a left-wing radical and defender of the “hard” Marxist theoretical line he soon clashed with the party’s leader, Pieter J. Troelstra. Henceforth all his literary work would serve the social struggle. In his view art was inextricably bound up with the new society; poetry grew out of society, expressed a social concept, and served this idea.

The intellectual development of Henriëtte Roland Holst-Van der Schalk (1869–1952) shows a marked parallel with that of Gorter, of whom she was a close friend. She and her husband belonged to the avant-garde artistic circle that since the 1890s had largely determined the artistic climate. Initially there was nothing to suggest she would take this ideological direction. She hailed from a prosperous, conservative-liberal family of notaries and made her debut in The New Guide in 1893 as a protégée of Albert Verwey. In her first collection, Sonnets and Poems Written in Terza Rima (Sonnetten en verzen in terzinen geschreven, 1895), she presented herself as a gifted but somewhat conventional poet, if already displaying great passion and emotional conviction. Her early poetry contained personally and philosophically flavored confessional lyrics, which were clearly distinct from the individualism of 1880. Hers was a poetic voice seeking a higher, deeper truth, which was driven by the grandiose, ethical ideas of Spinoza, Dante, and Plato, writers in whom she had immersed herself on Gorter’s advice. The symbolic and mystical character of these poems was both prominent and explicit; one of them bore the title “How the Spiritualization of Things, called Mysticism, Brings Us Peace and Consoles” (“Hoe de vergeestelijking der dingen, die mystiek genaamd wordt, ons vrede geeft en vertroost”).

As a militant socialist she became an influential figure in the new movement. She gave lectures and speeches in every corner of the country and penned a vast number of propaganda publications as well as scholarly studies. It is telling, and typical of the complexity of her ideas, that her first socialist publication should have been a series of articles on Maeterlinck, Ibsen, and Tolstoy; it was an attempt, based on newly acquired historical-materialist insights, to fathom the life founded on mystical religiosity. Gorter, too, had made such attempts.

Roland Holst traced the various phases of her intellectual development with great frankness, passion, and conviction in successive volumes of poetry. In The New Birth (De nieuwe geboort, 1907) she described her inner life in the first years of her conversion to socialism. Besides the concern for her fellow-man that had already been present in her debut collection, we find broader dualistic themes: the poet felt that she had been born “on the cusp of the ages” and was pulled “between past and future, between tradition and new life forces,” but in the third volume, Ways Upwards (Opwaartsche wegen, 1907), dualism gives way to a compelling declaration of confidence in the workers’ movement. The rift in the socialist party in 1909 was for her, in a way that it was not for Gorter, a traumatic, existential experience that had a great impact on her work. The verse tragedy Thomas More (1912), which was well received and hugely successful in its time, dramatized her own inner conflict between loyalty to conscience and loyalty to friends. Her ability to project also emerges from a long series of biographies, including studies of Rousseau (1912) and Garibaldi (1920), and later also of Tol­stoy, Gorter, Rosa Luxemburg, and Romain Rolland.

A few years after the schism in the socialist party Roland Holst, following in Gorter’s footsteps, joined the Communist party. But in 1927 she lost confidence in Soviet-style Communism. She resigned her party membership and resorted to Christian socialism. This new transition was recorded in her poetry in The Achievements (De verworvenheden, 1927), in which the poet looked back on her life and what she called her “heresies”; service to the proletarian community was now seen as divergence from the “pure essence.” However, even the new confession —

I search no more, I have abandoned calling

and what I sing is for myself alone

— was only transitional. The world she had dreamed of had shattered, but after a period of introspection the poet was again ready to devote herself to the good of mankind on the basis of her new Christian conviction.

Contemporary reactions to the work of Henriëtte Roland Holst testify to a virtually universal unmitigated admiration for her poetry. Nevertheless she also provoked puzzlement and revulsion in some contemporary critics; her political commitment was not taken seriously and her Marxism was interpreted as typically female compassion or, in retrospect, Christian neighborly love. Still, in the huge body of work she left, one hears a voice that is more than a testimony to a tumultuous age; it is a deeply human, passionate voice, always in search of profound truths, sounding alongside that of the late Gorter.

The Rise of the Psychological Novel

Although in the 1890s the new mystical movement was in the ascendant in Dutch literature, naturalism was far from dead, and the realist undercurrent continued for several more decades as well, thanks to the work of such authors as Israel Querido (1872–1932) and especially J. van Ouds­hoorn (1876–1951), whose Mirror of Willem Mertens’s Life (Willem Mertens’ levensspiegel) appeared only in 1914. Even so, naturalism had lost some of its virulence, and a milder form of psychological realism had emerged, which from around 1890 on became dominant in both Holland and Flanders.

Herman Robbers (1868–1937) and Carel Scharten (1878–1950) became the major representatives of the new genre of the bourgeois family novel. As an editor of the monthly Elsevier, Robbers was also an influential critic. It is striking that in this period a large number of female authors came to the fore, focusing on the life of the petty bourgeoisie or writing with great compassion on a range of working-class types. Top Naeff (1878–1953), whose lasting popularity was ensured by a number of classic girls’ books like School Idylls (Schoolidyllen, 1900), was also widely appreciated by contemporaries for her stylish theatrical reviews. Other practitioners of the subsequently much-disparaged “ladies’ novel” included Ina Boudier-Bakker, Jo van Ammers-Küller, Anna de Savornin-Lohman, and Annie Salomons. They were the butt of the sarcasm of the editors of Forum (who will be discussed in the next section). The most frequently reprinted book around the turn of the century was the feminist propaganda novel Hilda van Suylenburg (1898) by Cecile Goekoop-De Jong van Beek en Donk (1866–1944). This impassioned plea for female emancipation triggered a debate that still reverberates over a century later.

In every respect the work of Nescio (pseudonym of J. H. F. Grönloh, 1882–1961) represents an exception to the calm, bourgeois realism of the early twentieth century. His pseudonym — Latin for “I do not know” — marks him as an odd man out who distances himself from everything. He was arguably the most non-conformist writer of his time.

Nescio’s oeuvre is very small, comprising only a few collections of stories, of which Little Poet. The Mooch. Little Titans (Dichtertje. De uitvreter. Titaantjes, 1918) is the best known. It has virtually no points of contact with contemporary literature and its value was only fully appreciated by the public at large after his death. His work is usually associated with realism, although it is too empathetic, inspirational, and untraditional for that. Nescio is best compared with Willem Elsschot (see the next section), with whom he shares an artless, idiosyncratic style and a deadpan, cynical tone. Elsschot’s first novel, Villa des Roses, dates from 1913. He, too, did not fit into the expectation patterns of the contemporary readership, and like Nescio he had to await a different literary climate for recognition of his unique style and personality.

In his stories Nescio created a number of extraordinary characters, who have become legendary in Dutch culture, like Japi from his first work, The Mooch (De uitvreter, 1911), a story told by one Koekebakker, a ironically distanced narrator who turns out to be an alter ego of the writer. The book opens with the memorable sentence: “Aside from the man who considered the Sarphatistraat the most beautiful spot in Europe, I’ve never known anyone as strange as the mooch.” Japi is part of the narrator’s circle of friends, a bunch of artists and idealistic social reformers. He is characterized as follows:

The mooch, who might be sleeping in your bed with his dirty shoes on when you came home late at night. The mooch, who smoked all your cigars and helped himself to your tobacco and burnt up all your firewood and went through your cupboards and borrowed your money and wore out your shoes and put on your coat when he had to walk home through the rain. The mooch, who was always ordering something in somebody else’s name; who sat like royalty on the terrace of “Café Hollandais,” drinking genever at other people’s expense; who took umbrellas and never returned them; who stoked Bavink’s second-hand stove so hard it cracked; who wore his brother’s best collars and lent out Appi’s books, and went on trips abroad when he’d wheedled another handout from his old man, and dressed up in suits he never paid for.64

The main reason for the enduring interest in Nescio’s work lies in the direct but sophisticated conversational tone and the anecdotal irony of the narrative style, but his central theme, the opposition between the asocial artist and a complacent bourgeois world, also has a continuing appeal. The posthumous publications Above the Valley (Boven het dal, 1961) and Nature Diary (Natuurdagboek, 1996) found a wide readership.

Nescio greatly admired Frederik van Eeden and with a number of friends even founded a colony modeled on Van Eeden’s Walden. Little Titans (Titaantjes, 1915) is another story about a group of young idealists, would-be world reformers. They too turn out to be titans — but only “little titans” — who fall to earth, asocial obsessives doomed to failure, who can never realize their ideals and finally settle for a bourgeois existence. All this is observed by a narrator who, like Elsschot’s alter ego, punctures all high-flown rhetoric with a throwaway ironic quip. Nescio’s stories possess a dimension lacking in Elsschot, however: a boundless admiration for nature. The inspirational quality of his work derives from the way in which the characters interact with the natural environment. This produced a number of highly evocative poetic landscapes that exude a cosmic vision in which the writhing of the millions on earth seems even more insignificant and futile compared with the eternal cycles of nature. Nescio’s vision of nature is imbued with a sense of the divine; it is diametrically opposed to, and compensates for, the relentless demands of social reality.

In Flanders two authors who had previously played a part in the breakthrough of naturalism, Cyriel Buysse and Stijn Streu­vels, were largely responsible for the flourishing of psychological realism in the early twentieth century. Streuvels’s prose is traditionally compared to that of Thomas Hardy; the same comparison could be made for Buysse, though he distanced himself more fully than Streuvels from the regionalism of nineteenth-century realism.

The way for this realist prose was prepared by Virginie Loveling (1836–1923), an aunt of Cyriel Buysse’s, who initially made her mark together with her sister Rosalie (1834–75) with poetry and novellas. Following Rosalie’s premature death Virginie enjoyed a long career as one of the foremost representatives of Flemish realism. Some of her early novels are remarkable — not only in the context of their time, but also because they are the work of a female author — in that they tackled an overtly political topic, the clash between Liberals and Catholics over the control of education. In Sophie (1885) she took a stand against the influence of the clergy in rural Flanders. She also introduced into her prose a number of naturalist motifs, such as heredity and fate, and wrote psychological novels that have achieved classic status and which excel in their character analysis of their mainly female protagonists. In her last full-length novel, A Revolver Shot (Een revolverschot, 1911), she has two sisters plot the murder of the man with whom they have both fallen in love. Loveling’s urge to describe life “as it is” inspired her in her old age to write a secret account of the country’s occupation by German troops in the First World War. This War Journal (Oorlogsdagboek) was not published until the end of the twentieth century.

Cyriel Buysse has gone down in literary history as a committed naturalist. However, this tag is only partly accurate, since his naturalist work forms only a minor part of his extensive oeuvre. The large-scale novel The Life of Rozeke van Dalen (Het leven van Rozeke van Dalen, 1906) marks the transition from naturalism to a gentler mode: harsh naturalist elements such as descriptions of rapes and brawls alternate with Romantic components, and we are given a highly idealized portrait of the main character. Rozeke, a country girl, marries a young farmer, but her husband falls ill and dies. Later she succumbs to the brute force of a stable lad, Smul. Through all this Rozeke remains the embodiment of inner purity and beauty, and she dies amid serene piety and spirituality. She had been on good terms with a noblewoman whose confidante she became and who protected her, a relationship that questions social distinctions as well as the cliché of the suppression of the peasant class by the powerful local gentry. With The Ball (’t Bolleken, 1906) the development from somber naturalism to a more detached realism leavened with mild humor is complete. The novel portrays the kind of village dignitary who goes through life as a bon vivant; the narrow-mindedness and conformism of the bourgeoisie are both targeted. The satire is never malicious, and beneath the sarcasm one senses the author’s sympathy for his characters.

After The Life of Rozeke van Dalen Buysse focused on fresh, idyllic descriptions of nature, as in the novella Spring (Lente, 1907­), and on creating recognizable, colorful social types. This latter activity was not always appreciated by critics and reviewers. The portrait of a village worthy in The Ass (Het Ezelken, 1910), for instance, caused a stir among the Catholic clergy in Flanders by implying that a village priest had an affair with his young housemaid. For many, Buysse’s portraits amounted to “human caricatures” and continued to spark controversy. As a result, the reception of his work in the Flanders of the time was predominantly negative. The novel Aunts (Tantes, 192­4), which was hailed virtually universally by the critics as an important, indeed masterly book, marked a change, but not for long, as shortly afterward an anonymous article condemned Buysse as a “perverse decadent.”

Aunts was the first in a series of three novels that belong together, although they do not form a trilogy. In Uleken (1926) and The Pillory (De schandpaal, 1928), as in Aunts, two generations are opposed and the plot is constructed around contrasts and parallels. Another motif is the fatal suppression of love: the listlessness of the three embittered, sanctimonious aunts is contrasted with the longing and zest for life of their three nieces. The stories demonstrate how suppressing the yearning for passion leads to turmoil and insanity. The psychological analysis remains sober and restrained, giving this realism, more than the early work, a classic, timeless character that makes it accessible for later generations.

Much more somber, and more hopeless, than Buysse’s is the view of mankind that emerges from the work of Stijn Streu­vels. Naturalism in Streu­vels was limited to his earliest stories of 1899–1901, but even his later realistic work, which like Buysse’s contains idealized or Romantic elements, is imbued with an emphatic fatalism that affects even the grim psychological portraits. After Dance of Death (Dodendans, 1901) death no longer appeared in the form of murder, suicide, or accident — typically naturalist motifs — but only as integral to the course of life. Such a “normal” if no less miserable end is the fate of the farmhand Jan Vindeveughel, the main character of The Long Road (Langs de wegen, 1902). At the end of this cyclically structured novel Jan returns to the farm that had been his starting point; his end coincides with his beginning, he has undergone the fateful course of life in utter helplessness.

Stijn Streuvels. The Hague, Literary Museum.

Streuvels’s masterpiece, The Flax Field (De vlaschaard, 1907), a monumental novel with a tight epic construction, is conceived as four connecting panels corresponding to the four phases of the flax-growing cycle. Here Streuvels has broadened his psychological portrayal of individuals in rural communities into a generational conflict, a power struggle between father and son. Father Vermeulen views his son Louis, like himself a taciturn, stubborn, and domineering type, as a rival and an enemy, to whom he refuses to hand over the reins. In an upsurge of rage he strikes him down and in so doing brings about his own tragic downfall, since he has broken the natural law of continuity of the generations. He comes to the insight typical of Streuvels that “that mastery that he had so anxiously striven after was transient and worthless,” while he himself is “an insignificant being caught up in the onward surge of the ages.”

Streuvels also used his descriptive gifts to branch out into reflective memoirs, but in his novels and stories the razor-sharp realistic analysis remained a constant. He gave a brilliantly succinct synthesis of his view of mankind in the novella Life and Death in the Drying Kiln (Het leven en de dood in den ast), from the collection Working People (Werkmensen, 1926), which for all its brevity reveals a broad, grandiose vision. The confrontation with the notion of death is set in the narrow confines of a kiln for drying chicory, described with cinematic precision as a “stage without an audience.” The actual action, the “performance,” takes place in the minds of the dryers, “between waking and sleeping, between thinking and dreaming.” If anything, Streuvels’s fatalism is even stronger here than in his previous work, since the characters live with the tragic awareness of their limitations. They profess not only their insignificance and smallness, but also their loneliness as men among men. In the grand scheme of things they are nothing but worms, as is indicated in the motto: ego autem sum vermis (Psalms 22:7); they are only instruments: their opinions remain unexpressed, and the work they perform is senseless. The minimal external action is raised onto a universal plane and becomes timeless in “the immeasurable open space where past and future merge.”

A striking contrast to the dark pessimism of this novella is provided by the virtually contemporaneous novel The Loss of the Waterhoek (De teleurgang van de Waterhoek, 1927). Whereas in The Flax Field the action is dominated by the universal laws of nature, Streuvels here describes a victory of modern technology and of the younger generation. The closed agricultural community of the Waterhoek is opened up by progressive industrialization and literally connected to the outside world by a bridge across the River Scheldt. The disruption of the existing order, partly due to the rare independent actions of the femme fatale Mira, remains an exception in Streuvels’s work, dominated as it is by natural laws. Unlike Buysse’s work, which in Flanders was denigrated and banned for its reputed anti-clericalism, Streuvels’s books were translated into most European languages.

In the wake of Streuvels’s success regional fiction flourished in Flanders. Lode Baekel­mans (1879–1965) made his debut with naturalist sketches of life in the Antwerp docks, but like Buysse he developed toward a milder, more ironic vision. In others, such as Ernest Claes (1885–1968) and Felix Timmermans (1886–1947), this grew into a full-blown Heimat literature, celebrating the uniqueness of Flemish country life. Timmer­mans’s Pallieter (1916), however, with its expression of a joie de vivre experienced with all the senses, can be seen as foreshadowing the vitalism that emerged in the interwar years. In his major work, Peasant Psalm (Boeren­psalm, 1935), he abandoned external description and moved toward an internalization of narrative, a feature characteristic of the modern vitalist prose that will be discussed in the next section.

The 1890s transformed the literary writing of the Low Countries. A decade of radical political and social change, it accordingly produced a literature in flux. One striking feature is the direct orientation of literature toward developments abroad. Besides the English inspiration already demonstrable with the Generation of 1880, Franco-Belgian impulses (in Flanders) and French influences became increasingly prominent. It was also a literature of conflicting views. The repudiation of the hyper-individualism of the Movement of 1880 and its art-for-art’s sake aesthetics gave rise to social commitment and a growing involvement in world events. Yet this social engagement, although inspired by dialectical materialism, did not exclude a spiritualized, metaphysically rooted art.

III. Between Two World Wars: 1916–1940

Jaap Goedegebuure

War, Revolution, Avant-Garde: Paul van Ostaijen

In spring 1918 the main combatants on the Western front — German, French, British, and American — were gearing up for the final battle. After the treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and the young Soviet Union, the German high command hoped to be able to use the newly available manpower to defeat the Allies. Field-Marshal Erich Ludendorff’s offensive appeared to be achieving this aim, but fortunes soon shifted and found the Emperor Wilhelm II’s forces in retreat. On 11 November an armistice was declared. Simultaneously a revolution erupted in Berlin which brought down the Second German Empire.

Between 15 March and 15 May of that last year of the war, the twenty-two-year-old Paul van Ostaijen (1896–1928) wrote his long, hymn-like poem The Signal (Het sienjaal), a prophetic, psalm-like call for brotherhood and universal love, on the model of Walt Whitman and Emile Verhaeren. The young poet was not alone in his idealism. At the same moment, the German critic Kurt Pinthus was preparing an anthology of the work of such humanitarian-expressionist poets as Franz Werfel, Ludwig Rubiner, Johan­nes Becher, and others. The anthology eventually appeared a few months after the armistice as Twilight of Mankind (Mensch­heitsdämmerung), a title implying that a new generation would have to arise from the apocalypse of the war.

Unlike his models and other writers of similar views, Van Ostaijen does not present himself as a cosmopolitan spirit for whom the contrasts between the warring nations melt away beneath the radiant sun of high-flown ideals. His aim is to ask for understanding for the individual qualities of the adversaries and to plead for the raison d’être of national identities. He argues with fervor:

Sing the glorious song of the Internationale, but do this not by denying everyone’s own ethos,

but rather by understanding it, that is true love.

Judge the Germans according to their ethos and the French according to theirs;

in every poet there’s a ball of love or material for it; you must find or shape that ball.

The fragment illustrates the dilemma of a young poet trying to find his way through the complex and confusing situation of the First World War. Since the summer of 1914 nine-tenths of Belgium’s national territory had been occupied by the German army. Although the country had emphatically chosen to remain neutral, at the outbreak of hostilities it became the target of German aggression; control of Belgium allowed the Germans to attack France from both the east and the north. As so many times before, Belgium became the battlefield of Europe.

Although during the course of the invasion the Germans committed outrages, caused countless civilian casualties, and turned thousands into refugees, not everyone harbored resentment for four years. The Flemish section of the population included many who welcomed the Germans as an ethnically related nation capable of offering protection against the French-speaking elite. The occupying power exploited cultural and social differences by conducting a sophisticated divide-and-rule policy, which included the conversion of the University of Ghent into a Dutch-language institution in 1916.

Those Flemings who with German help worked for the goal of cultural, social, and political emancipation called themselves “a­ctivists”; Van Ostaijen was one of them. In his debut collection, Music Hall (1916), he had explicitly stated his choice. It was therefore not unusual for him to side with Germany in The Signal. His sympathy for France must have been inspired partly by his immense debt to French art and literature. His aesthetic insights and literary practice had been shaped with the help of Cézan­ne, Mallarmé, Apol­linai­re, Picasso, and Jean Coc­teau. At the same time he was strongly influenced by German expressionism, even more so when at the end of 1918, a few weeks before the armistice, he fled to Berlin, for fear of prosecution for activism after the restoration of the Belgian legal system. That fear was well-founded: fellow-poets like Wies Moens (1898–1982) and Gas­ton Burssens (1896–1965) received varying terms of imprisonment. Moens even acquired martyr status and achieved enormous popularity with his Letters from the Cell (Celbrie­ven, 1920).

In Berlin, Van Ostaijen evolved from a humanitarian expressionist into an avant-garde aesthete keen to forget the lessons of Whitman and Verhaeren as soon as possible. His ear was now more attuned to the directives of the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti, published in Germany in the journal The Storm (Der Sturm). Van Ostai­jen must have read The Storm with exceptional interest and have been particularly fascinated by the essays of Herwarth Walden, the poetry of August Stramm, modeled on Marinetti’s views, and the grotesque and socially critical prose of Mynona and Paul Scheerbart, which he was to imitate in Patriotism, Inc. (De trust der vaderlandsliefde) and Ika Loch’s Brothel (Het bordeel van Ika Loch). Only after his return from his Berlin exile did Van Ostaijen himself publish in The Storm; the 1924 volume includes two poems by him.

Futurism and expressionism were two closely related currents in the great crucible of the artistic avant-garde that totally transformed European art and literature between 1910 and 1920. The same melting-pot produced Dada, a movement that emerged in 1916 among artistic émigrés who preferred neutral Switzerland to a fatherland involved in organized mass slaughter. Dada had its roots in protest against authority of all kinds: politicians, the military, and captains of industry, as well as scholars and art critics. Dada aimed to be an impulsive and spontaneous revolt against laws, conventions, and norms. It opted for complete demolition of the existing order and sought to replace it only with the chaos that precedes every kind of disciplined structure.

Van Ostaijen had an intense encounter with Dada during his stay in Berlin, which after the war had become a hotbed for the avant-garde in all its diversity. Expressionism had passed its peak, but Dada was thriving, as indeed Van Ostaijen’s work from this period shows. In the cycle The Feasts of Fear and Agony (De feesten van angst en pijn, written in 1920 but published only after Van Ostaijen’s death) he experimented with typography, his manuscript featuring not only different typefaces but also different colors. A Dadaist trait is the explicit denial of everything normally accorded value and meaning, sexuality as well as religion and culture. At the same time, though, there is a powerful longing to clear the decks, “to be naked and begin.”

In the summer of 1920 Van Ostaijen wrote Occupied City, his distillation of the war years he spent in Antwerp and at the same time his way of positioning himself in relation to the international avant-garde. The 1921 printed version of this poetic sequence uses varied typography. It gives visible form to crucial aspects of the content, but also emphasizes the disparateness of the textual elements that have been incorporated into it. Montage, which would become a prominent feature in modernist prose and poetry, is frequently used. Van Ostaijen must have spotted it in the collages of cubists he admired, such as Picasso and Georges Braque, and in the visual art of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. However, Occupied City offends against the principles of original Dadaism: its nihilism is not implicit in a tendency toward chaos, but on the contrary is a theme expressed in more or less coherent statements:

tried everything

we’re at the end of all the isms

of all cathedrals

of all prophets

of all lecterns

In the poetry of his Berlin years a painful crisis of faith manifested itself beneath the mask of nihilism. The carefree trust that the young Van Ostaijen had placed in mankind had given way to the awareness that evil ruled the world. At the same time he became convinced that anyone wishing to reach the divine must take a detour via the devil and hell. That is why in The Feasts of Pain and Agony he proclaimed himself “the last catholic, the last gnostic, the last heresiarch.” His contrary tendency toward mysticism, the reverse side of his loudly proclaimed nihilism, brought him close to the Dadaist painter and poet Hans Arp. In this way his Berlin work supplied the link between the humanitarian lyrics of his early years and the poetry purged of ideology that Van Ostaijen himself designated as “organic expressionism.” He wrote a defense of that later work in his essay “Lyric Poetry: Directions for Use” (1927), in which he calls poetry “the lowest plane of ecstasy,” adding that poetry expresses “being overwhelmed by the ineffable.”

On his return to Flanders — he took advantage of a general amnesty — Van Ostaijen was immediately at the forefront of literary and artistic renewal. However, the mainstream of Flemish poetry remained dominated by a tendency to humanitarianism, so that Van Ostaijen soon became isolated and had no allies at all apart from Gaston Burssens. He found few outlets for his work, and after Occupied City no further collections appeared in print, despite the fact that in his own view (and that of posterity) the poems of the last five years of his short life represent an absolute peak.

Passage from Paul van Ostaijen’s poem “Occupied City.” Antwerp, AMVC House of Literature.

In his posthumously published poetry, for which he had chosen the title — taken from a piano manual — The First Book of Schmoll (Het eerste boek van Schmoll), Van Ostaijen went in search of what he saw as the harmony of sense and sound. He believed he found that harmony in “the resonance of the word in the unconscious,” a phrase that took him into the territory of the surrealists, the French avant-gardistes who after 1923 took over the baton from Dada. A good example of the way in which Van Ostaijen incorporates this interest in his poetic practice is the poem “Baroque Account”:

Sometimes

— when the boats of their senses beat

against the ever swelling cliff

of a fragrance that’s still open

to fantastic beasts

and plants that

shot through with fear

between the sea’s blue and the blue of the sky

are a sheer metaphor —

sometimes desire flames up in people so high

that they tackle the flimsy boat

and take to sea

the wind plays a delusion in the sails

an old delusion that lies

in a slump beyond the horizon

till the wind has blown the hull to bits

and from the pieces wafts the wine of the delusion

this old delusion

None knows the SOS beyond the senses’ horizon

and that at the bottoms of our souls there are antennae

that pick up only the vibrations

from beyond

Sometimes the urge will force the dream into a shape

and the body turns to dream65

This is a programmatic poem. Poetry can only be created, Van Ostaijen seems to be saying, if the poet is ready to abandon the compass of fixed meanings and give himself over to playing with words, which affords a glimpse of the mythical world we left behind as we parted from the unspoiled child in ourselves, a world of “fantastic beasts / and plants that . . . are a sheer metaphor.”

“Baroque Account” shows signs of the surrealist preoccupation with the subconscious, such as the reference to the antennae on the bottom of the soul which act as a radar to pick up the vibrations from beyond. At the same time it directs attention to the fairytale world we inhabited as children. Among Van Ostaijen’s painting contemporaries, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and Marc Chagall proved most sensitive to the “fragrance that’s still open / to fantastic beasts.” After the Second World War it was Cobra painters such as Karel Appel and Lucebert who succumbed to the lure of that world; the latter also represents a link between Van Ostaijen and the poets of the 1950s, a connection first made by the critic Paul Rodenko. In keeping with his predilection for the child’s experience in his posthumously published work, Van Ostaijen drew his inspiration from lullabies, counting rhymes, and other forms of popular poetry.

Martinus Nijhoff and the Ordinary Word

The Netherlands managed to preserve its neutrality during the Great War, though at the cost of a general mobilization lasting four years and four months that kept hundreds of thousands of men in a permanent state of military readiness. One of those conscripts was Martinus Nij­hoff (1894–1953). In the years when Van Ostaijen, partly under the impetus of the compelling events of the war, was dreaming of a new society, Nijhoff was prey to the boredom that is the lot of a mobilized but inactive soldier. The poem “Singing Soldiers” hints at this:

The cobbles are so sharp along the highway:

Blond soldiers if your feet cause pain,

Smother your hurt with a naive refrain:

“Marie, Marie, I’m leaving, going my way.”

 

We look ahead to distant towers there

And march to our goal four abreast.

By strange, sad thoughts we’re possessed:

“The devil has of hooves and horns a pair.”

 

Where is the side drum, where music’s trill?

God’s left us as we march along,

Our body’s collapsing, our heart is ill —

 

Sing of a ring and of love torn apart,

Sing of grenades a contemptuous song!

A soldier who’s brave has a great infant’s heart.

There are striking differences between this and the dithyrambic, visionary poetry of Paul van Ostaijen. While the Flemish poet shows an acute awareness of the historical moment, Nijhoff concentrates on the everyday concerns and experiences of the ordinary soldier, who for want of a real war is kept busy with long-distance marches and sings of love and desire. The discrepancy, of course, derives mainly from the fact that Flanders experienced the war at first hand, while in the North the only reminders were the influx of Belgian refugees and the gradual shortage of imported goods.

Between 1914 and 1918 Holland was a walled garden, where life seemed to stand still, in society as well as in art and literature. For years afterward the difference in circumstances and their consequences emerged in various pronouncements. There is a patent contrast between the free verse used by Van Ostaijen and the classic sonnet form preferred by Nijhoff. Nijhoff’s own assessment of what separated him from Van Ostaijen emerges from an essay written in 1929, a year after the Flemish poet’s death. His appreciation for the Dada-colored collections The Feasts of Fear and Agony and Occupied City is much less than that for the elegant malaise of Music Hall and The Signal with its obvious debt to Whitman and Verhaeren. Nijhoff is unimpressed by the dislocation of syntax, and he did not accept even the poems from Van Ostaijen’s final period, now regarded as the high point of his work, unconditionally.

Yet in the usual view of Dutch literary history Nijhoff counts as an innovator, whose importance in Holland is comparable that of Van Ostaijen in Flanders. He is seen as the principal Dutch representative of modernism, however unspectacular a form that may have taken both in him and in other Dutch authors in the 1920s and 1930s. His regularly structured, classically flavored poetry expresses the sense that modern man lives in a fragmented and unknowable world, bereft of a metaphysical roof now that faith and ideology have been exposed as false certainties. Because of these themes, and because of the allusions to literary tradition from antiquity down to the twentieth century, Nijhoff’s narrative poem Awater (1934) is akin to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Certainly Nijhoff was well-informed about the Anglo-Saxon modernists, especially Eliot and James Joyce, and in conceiving Awater he took his cue from them. This is clear from the eclectic, consciously fragmentary way in which he takes up ancient myths, places them in a contemporary context, plays with quotations, and creates a referential horizon in which tradition and modernity interpenetrate. As regards content, Awater shows affinities with The Waste Land and Ulysses in the quest for meaning and coherence in a world experienced as chaotic.

But Nijhoff was also deeply influenced by the French symbolists, principally Baudelaire and Mal­larmé. Like them, Nijhoff takes the view that in art life is purified and lifted to a transcendental plane. Quite often this purification, which also sublimates the one-to-one relationships that link language and material reality, is represented in the image of the freezing cold of snow and ice, as in “Two Kinds of Death”:

Strangely joy rushes past eternal keenings.

Blizzard of snow, o song! — I pant, am inhaling

An icy air; my words, new heights scaling,

Sing themselves free of their meanings.

To the contingency, chaos, and transience of everyday existence Nijhoff opposes the self-contained, unchanging work of art, from which, ideally, even the references to the personal circumstances of the maker have been filtered out. Nijhoff’s aversion to self-expression eventually went so far that he ran out of subject matter. After The Wanderer (De wandelaar, 1924) and Forms (Vormen, 1924) he struggled to compile the collection New Poems (Nieuwe gedichten) in 1934. This was followed by the narrative poem H Hour (Het uur U, 1940). After this the poet channeled his energy into a dramatic triptych on the Christian festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, and into a number of translations, including that of Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party.

Typical of Nijhoff’s New Poems is their idiom, formed after the spoken language. Words and expressions traditionally considered unpoetic by critics and fellow poets add force to Nijhoff’s advocacy of a poetry attuned to the concrete, material world. That reorientation is the theme of the well-known poem “The Song of the Mad Bees,” where the bees forfeit their lives by flying up to the rarefied, chilly heights, and the narrative poem “The Ferry,” in which Saint Sebastian, having died a martyr’s death, finds himself in the Dutch polder landscape for a while. Equally characteristic are the poems where Nijhoff rhapsodizes on a new bridge or sings the praises of urban expansion.

Other poets who made their debut in about 1918 also did their utmost to write literature using everyday words, in opposition to their symbolist predecessors, whose poems had been studded with archaisms and neologisms, creating an artistic idiom far removed from ordinary reality. Nijhoff and others of his generation were joined on this point by the much older poet Johan Andreas Dèr Mouw (1862–1919). Although his metaphysical preoccupations link him with writers like P. N. van Eyck and Adriaan Roland Holst, Dèr Mouw stands quite outside movements and generations. A classicist and philosopher, he wrote poems that testify to years of struggle with the traditional dualistic system of thinking that dominates Western culture. He found a way out — like Schopenhauer before him — by immersing himself in the ancient Sanskrit Upanishads. In the ancient Indian mystics he encountered the liberating insight that Brahman (the all-embracing divine Being) and Atman (the Self) are one and indivisible. The pseudonym he chose for himself, Adwaita (meaning “transcending duality”), is at the same time a program.

In Dèr Mouw’s poetry, a genre into which he ventured only late in life, with the collections Brahman I and II (1919) as the result, the unity and harmony of all that exists is made manifest in the equation of the elevated and the apparently banal, as in this sonnet:

I said all the Parthenon meant to me,

how it floated on the springy hill, like a white

stringed instrument with its columns, slim and upright,

making the sky as far as I could see

 

into one chord of marble notes —

when a barrel organ burst suddenly

through the open doors across the balcony,

spewing out howls from slavering throats.

 

And I thought: Brahman’s the Artist, I know:

Like Shakespeare, he juxtaposes low

comedy with the sublime antique.

 

And what in Cyrano de Bergerac

the baker said, seeing his glassware crack,

I thought: Il casse tout, c’est magnifique.

Dèr Mouw belonged to the generation of introverted symbolists that included Leopold, Boutens, and Van de Woestijne, and he was only fully appreciated after his death. In 1925 the young critic Menno ter Braak voiced his admiration for Adwaita’s “fruitful, familiar naturalness,” up till then an unknown phenomenon in poetry in Dutch. Ter Braak was anticipating what later, in the 1930s, was to become one of the cornerstones of the poetics he was propounding: spontaneity, authenticity, and a personal signature that reveal themselves in the use of everyday language.

The poetry that appeared in the Flemish magazine The Fountain (’t Fonteintje, 1921–24) was supremely simple. Contributors rejected the high-flown pathos of the humanitarian expressionists. They also ignored free verse, which had come into fashion with Whitman, Verhaeren, and the many of the French symbolists. They remained true to the tradition of regular versification and in that respect owed a debt to Karel van de Woestijne, whom they greatly admired. But unlike their predecessor, their work entirely lacked the spleen that marked Van de Woestijne’s themes, and the mannered language that marked his style. If boredom, melancholy, and passion had to be expressed, they were softened by a scarcely perceptible irony.

The master of this low-key type of poetry was the professional journalist Richard Minne (1891–1965), the author of such a modest oeuvre and so unassuming that he has often been overlooked. Among his small poetic and fictional output the collection Good Company (In den zoeten inval, 1927) occupies a special place. Most of the forty poems that make up the volume are miniatures, sometimes epigrams in which Minne frames his skeptical wisdom, sometimes vignettes displaying capricious imagination and sardonic humor. The language is both lucid and concise, and very musical. Minne was not discovered and fully appreciated until the 1930s when, like the other contributors to The Fountain, he found a home in the joint Dutch-Flemish magazine Forum, which will be discussed below. The same applied to Jan van Nijlen (1884–1965), whose poetry is often mentioned in the same breath as that of J. C. Bloem because of their shared elegiac tendency and attention to the everyday. However, Van Nijlen was much less inclined to lose himself in metaphysical speculation. Whereas Bloem’s longing generally remained indefinite and vague, in Van Nijlen’s work the longing is always focused on concrete objects. His poems are also strongly colored by the spoken language, so it is only natural that he received an enthusiastic welcome from the editors of Forum.

Van Ostaijen, Dèr Mouw, and Theo van Doesburg (about whom more below) were not the only poets for whom the move toward the ordinary and everyday had become programmatic. Herman van den Bergh (1897–1967), the key figure in the periodical The Tide (Het getij), founded in 1916, also played a role of some significance. Like Van Ostaijen he looked to poets of prophetic stature writing in free verse, such as Whitman and Verhaeren, to symbolists like Jules Faforgue, Henri de Régnier, and Francis Jam­mes, and particularly also to Arthur Rimbaud, the radical innovator and pioneer of expressionism (which, being a German movement, held no interest for the exclusively French-oriented Van den Bergh). Van den Bergh’s non-mimetic presentation of the outside world in the poem, a legacy of Rimbaud, invites comparison with the paintings of Van Gogh and with expressionist and Fauvist painters, as in the opening lines of “Nocturn”:

The moon rows burning

past the cloud reef,

and the wood is purple:

poisoned. —

Although the poet Hendrik de Vries (1896–1989) had a much lower profile than his colleague Herman van den Bergh, he wrote a number of poems that are among the most innovative published in The Tide, and, like “Fever,” entered the canon of Dutch poetry:

Hear! Never have such songs been sung! Hear!

Wallpaper stirred,

And the lashes with thick hair furred.

What bird

Flew through space clear?

Morning it will be

If last night the whips

Had not cracked loud. —

Through the curtain see

The ghosts in their cold ships!

 

The branches chafe the edges

Of the pane. Far trills from lands without,

Clear and constant calls.

The beasts upon the walls

Then vanish. The light goes out.

The New Man in a New World

From its third year onwards The Tide began orienting itself expressly toward the international literary and artistic avant-garde. It was not Herman van den Bergh who acted as scout and intermediary, but Theo van Doesburg (pseudonym of C. E. M. Küp­per, 1883–1931). From 1921 onwards Van Doesburg actually compiled the monthly “Review of the Avant-Garde” section, which contained extracts from foreign magazines. The fact that Van Doesburg himself was the driving force behind and sole editor of a magazine that to this day remains known as the figurehead of the Dutch branch of international modernism (and exceptionally, by its Dutch title), escaped the notice of almost everyone at the time. In 1917 he had founded De Stijl and secured the collaboration of his fellow painter Piet Mondri­aan.

Although De Stijl acquired almost no readers during the years of its publication (1917–31), the magazine played a crucial role in establishing a link between the relatively isolated Netherlands and the international avant-garde. Thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Van Doesburg, who traveled all over Europe as the inspired propagandist and commercial traveler of the new art, the Dutch wing of the artistic vanguard was able to claim a leading position. The contribution of the constructivism of De Stijl — which besides painting covered architecture and applied art — to the Bauhaus was enormous. In a literary-historical context Van Doesburg’s literary experiments are also important. In his “X-ray Images,” written under a second pseudonym, I. K. Bonset, he tried to produce poetry that was a pendant to abstract painting, and which through the non-referential use of words and the rejection of logical syntax aimed to undermine the traditional worldview.

The anti-mimetic aesthetics of De Stijl derived from a theosophically inspired outlook that had “universality” as its the key word. Mondriaan and Van Does­burg advocated an art in which they, unlike nineteenth-century realists and impressionists, wanted to see depicted not the individual and typical but the general and timeless. Abstraction in style offered a way toward this, as both of them realized from Wassily Kandinsky’s treatise On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1912) and Wilhelm Wor­ringer’s essay Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfüh­lung, 1908). The editorial statement of intent, formulated by Van Doesburg on 16 June 1917, is imbued with this spirit:

As soon as the artists in the various branches of visual art recognize that they are in principle alike, that they should speak a general language, they will no longer cling fearfully to their individuality. They will serve the general principle beyond a confining individuality. Serving the general principle they will be automatically bound to produce an organic style. The dissemination of the beautiful requires not a social but an intellectual community. However, an intellectual community cannot be created without the sacrifice of an ambitious individuality. Only if this principle is carried through consistently can, based on a new relationship between artist and society, the new visualizing beauty reveal itself in all objects as style.

Judging by the mentality implicit in this manifesto, not that much had changed since William Morris and Walter Crane some thirty years before. The latter two also presented themselves as spokesmen of a movement that wanted to bring art down from its ivory tower and make it serve society. Art existed not for its own sake but as a means of elevating mankind. Still, we may assume that Van Doesburg had quite a few objections to the synthesis of arts and crafts as advocated by Morris and Crane, to which he in his formal purism would probably have applied the damning label “modern baroque.”

Particularly interesting in the program of De Stijl was its association with the anti-individualism so characteristic of the international avant-garde. There were, however, differences of emphasis and nuance concerning the relationship between the purely artistic on the one hand and social commitment on the other. Those who stressed humanity, brotherhood, and world peace saw their artistic work as a kind of service. Wies Moens, for instance, took this line, as did the poets and essayists who like him contributed to the Flemish magazine Space (Ruimte, 1920–21). Paul van Ostaijen was initially among them, but he soon moved on. Those who, like Apollinai­re and Mondriaan, held that the universal could be found only by abstracting from the visible opted for a formal-aesthetic position. Van Doesburg spelled this out clearly when he defined the concept of the avant-garde as “an Inter­nationale of the mind,” adding that “this Internationale has no other rules except the inner urge to give life a conceptually realistic expression and to interpret art purely aesthetically.”

Besides those avant-garde artists whose spiritual ideals led them to place the universal far above the individual human being, there were also innovators who spoke out forcefully in favor of the personal. In the Netherlands it was Herman van den Bergh who felt a strong need to qualify the tendency toward the universal:

The individual can expect no spiritual benefit from a simplistic human universality or from a community of states, however perfect, apart from a worthless, unrecognizable scrap of what he himself surrendered to that society. But he is harmed by both. Not in his inward worth, which — whatever all too loyal Marxists maintain — is completely free of any social organization, but in his opportunities for expression, which are being undermined by the roar of an increasingly coarse, increasingly intrusive and ill-mannered uniformity, by ever-increasing globalization and dumbing down.

The tone here is clearly different than that of Van Ostaijen’s pronouncements. The antidemocratic sentiment is particularly striking. Van den Bergh was not alone in this. In The Signal even Van Ostaijen, whom we have seen as a philanthropist and cosmopolitan, associated “democracy” with “deceit.” Various writers and artists from the interwar years sympathized for a shorter or longer period with Fascism and National Socialism, including a number of Flemish activists, Wies Moens foremost among them, and in Holland Herman van den Bergh and Hendrik Marsman.

Antidemocratic, hyper-individualist, as a literary innovator primarily a formalist, and in both capacities a declared opponent of humanitarian expressionism, which — typically — he accused of formlessness: these are the features that make up the picture of the young poet Hendrik Marsman (1899–1940). Although initially he found it difficult to emerge from Herman van den Bergh’s shadow, after a few years he far surpassed his predecessor and admired model. In the 1920s Marsman became the central figure of his generation, and he remained so until long after his death. He owed his reputation largely to his belligerence as a critic and magazine editor, and if he had not written the thirty poems with which he made his poetic debut in Poems (Verzen, 1923), he might have suffered the same fate as Van den Bergh.

More than anything, Marsman embodied the élan and enthusiasm of the younger generation, which despite the demoralizing aftermath of the First World War had grasped new opportunities. His poetry testified to a toughness and resilience that reveled in a climate of rain and storms and a landscape of polders, dunes, rivers, and the sea. In the 1920s that mentality was new. Gorter had led the way, and it is not surprising that the younger poet worshipped him.

The heroism of the “grand and compelling life,” as Marsman called it, complete with piracy, crusading, and the Romanticism of the wanderer, can also be found in the work of authors popular at the time, such as Blaise Cendrars, Henri de Mont­herlant, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as that of the Dutch novelist and poet J. J. Slauerhoff (1897–1936). In his poems, frequently inspired by poètes mau­dits such as Rimbaud and Tristan Cor­bière, Slauerhoff idealized explorers, conquerors, buccaneers, and desperados. His narrative prose is governed by the same themes. Foam and Ash (Schuim en asch, 1930) contains a number of stories centering on apparently aimless wanderings across the oceans. The novel The Forbidden Kingdom (Het verboden rijk, 1932) is set in Macao, and its main character is an anonymous radio operator whose psyche merges with the ghost of the Portuguese writer and traveler Camões, in Slauerhoff’s vision also a doomed poet.

J. J. Slauerhoff wearing a kimono. The Hague, Literary Museum.

It was not only in his work that Slauerhoff identified with marginal figures and rebels; in his personal life too he chose to follow in their footsteps. He spent years at sea as a ship’s doctor, visiting the Far East and various countries in Central and South America. His work shows traces of his contacts with China in particular. This applies to The Forbidden Kingdom and its sequel, Life on Earth (Het leven op aarde, 1934), but mainly to his adaptations and reworkings of Chinese poems. Like many other nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets who were fascinated by exotic literature, he used French, German, and English translations. Po Chu-i, an eighth-century poet in whom Slauerhoff recognized himself, has a special place in the author’s chinoiseries; he is the main character of a number of stories from the collection The Island of Spring (Het lente-eiland, 1933).

In the context of international modernism The Forbidden Kingdom bears comparison with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Two characters appear in successive episodes in the story that historically are centuries apart. Eventually these characters, Camões and the radio operator, coalesce, just as the various time levels merge. The whole is dominated by typically modernist themes such as identity and depersonalization.

In 1913 Carry van Bruggen (1881–1932) published Heleen. The novel is concerned mainly with the spiritual development of the main character, who is described not in relation to external factors like social environment and material circumstances but as a self-assured individual who tries to determine her attitude toward life’s great existential questions and problems. This philosophical, reflective, meditative, and also ethical approach was indebted, as the writer herself admitted, to such predecessors as Frederik van Eeden and Arthur van Schendel. Carry van Bruggen’s affinity with the intellectual climate of the turn of the century led to a search for a single principle capable of ordering and uniting life in its diversity.

Carry van Bruggen. The Hague, Literary Museum.

Van Bruggen turned not only against naturalism, with its exclusive focus on visible reality, which had gained popularity through the Movement of 1880, but also against écriture artiste and the cult of artistic genius, popularized by Kloos and Van Deyssel in particular. But she did not follow the advocates of the new mysticism, who considered the individual subordinate to society. She tended to view the wide variety of visible phenomena as an illusion that obscures our vision of the One, and she was minded to opt for the individual personality rather than the collective.

In her great essay Prometheus (1919) and the novel Eva (1927) — like Hel­een, autobiographically colored — Carry van Bruggen narrowed the opposition between the individual and the collective to the dialectic between “life urge” and “death urge.” The life urge manifests itself in the tendency to self-preservation. Driven by their instincts and despite their innate egoism, people seek help and support from each other. Their herd mentality leads to conservatism, conformism, and dogmatism, things that a freethinking individual is bound to question. Skepticism about collective ideologies leads the skeptic to regard all boundaries as relative. What matters is to learn to see unity in diversity. But at bottom the desire for unity is nothing other than the death urge; for the sake of unity the individual is willing to submerge in the whole. In the mid-1920s Van Bruggen’s defense of the individual was to awaken a response in Menno ter Braak, who will be discussed below.

The number of female novelists active in the period 1900–1940 was strikingly large. Nevertheless their work was held in low esteem, which was not due solely to the fact that poetry still retained its position as the most prestigious genre. A much more important factor was that the “spiritualization” of literature, which men like Verwey and Van Eeden had brought about, had rendered naturalism obsolescent in the eyes of the leading critics. Carry van Brug­gen was an exponent of that new trend, but, unlike her, most female novelists clung to traditional narratives with detailed descriptions of the characters’ social environment, explanatory psychology, and a preference for the family novel and the broad social panorama that this genre afforded. True, such authors as Ina Boudier-Bakker (1875–1966), Jo van Ammers-Küller (1884–1966), and Annie Salomons (1885–1980) had toned down naturalism to a kind of realism with idealistic or at least ethical traits, but in a formal sense the traditional storytelling mold was still too easily recognizable. Due to the large share taken by women in the production of conventional realistic fiction, the genre came to be dubbed the “ladies’ novel.” The fall in the stock of this type of novel in general, however, resulted in female fiction writers being condemned virtually en masse. Even when a woman flouted convention and chose a subject in the taboo sphere, she could expect not praise for breaking bounds but criticism for un-feminine boldness.

Carry van Bruggen was the great exception among women writers. She cut free from naturalism and realism at an early date. Although her philosophically tinged essays failed to appeal to the public at large (the first edition of Prometheus was pulped only a year after its publication), she won the respect of reputed writers such as Frans Coenen, a member of the Movement of 1880 who was active as a critic well into the 1930s and did much to establish and maintain Van Bruggen’s reputation.

The critical reactions to Van Bruggen’s novel Eva show that she was subject to very different criteria than other female writers. The reviewers — virtually all men, and with Ter Braak at their head — perceived a substantial qualitative difference between Eva and the general run of “ladies’ novels,” but this did not lead them to see Van Bruggen as an author in her own right. On the contrary, she continued to be discussed with reference to her fellow women writers. While she was praised for combining female sensuality and emotionality with reflection, she had to content herself with being condescendingly labeled a “woman of humanity.”

However, she may not have minded that much. In fact, like so many women of her time, she seems to have largely agreed with the critics. She believed that women, given their level of intellectual development, were not yet ready for reflective and abstract thought extending beyond emotion and fantasy. She had scant regard for feminism, which in view of her dislike of dogmatic collectivism is perhaps not that odd. Yet as a writer she went further than any other woman before her. She not only wrote as a novelist and philosophical essayist about the desirability of intellectual freedom for the individual but also argued for that freedom in scores of articles and lectures on such topics as childrearing, schooling, and sex education.

Expressionist Drama, Modernist Prose, New Objectivity

While German expressionism, with the work of Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and others created the climate for a radical renewal of drama, in the Low Countries expressionism remained largely confined to lyric poetry. Paul van Ostaijen experimented with grotesque prose pieces inspired by Paul Scheerbart and Mynona, and occasionally stories or novels were advertised as “expressionist,” but most were second-rate. With regard to drama the yield of the new movement was even lower. In the Netherlands expressionism affected the practice of stage production but little else; in Flanders the only important author to commit himself to the renewal of drama in the interwar period was Herman Teirlinck (1897–1967), an extremely versatile figure who was active as a novelist and as a playwright and stage director.

Herman Teirlinck. Antwerp, AMVC House of Literature.

In 1920 Teirlinck had been invited to help reform the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels. He was not only able to make shrewd use of his contacts to obtain financial support; he also contributed to a new repertoire by writing three plays in quick succession: The Slow-Motion Film (De vertraagde film, 192­2), I Serve (Ik dien, 1923) and The Man without a Body (De man zonder lijf, 1924). All three broke with the realistic convention that had been the norm since Henrik Ibsen and Herman Heijermans. Contemporaries called them “expressionist,” but later critics have interpreted them as adaptations of the symbolist tradition going back to Maeterlinck. In The Slow-Motion Film Teirlinck exploits the illusory character of theatre (act 2 is an underwater scene!) to create an effective blend of imagination and reality in a way reminiscent of Luigi Pirandello. I Serve, an update of the medieval legend of Beatrijs, is a highly allegorical play that addresses specifically twentieth-century problems. The Man without a Body is a similar dramatization of an abstract idea. A grotesque element found its way into this play, an element that would be further exploited in The Magpie on the Gallows (De ekster op de galg, 1937).

Teirlinck did not confine himself to providing a new repertoire but also collaborated with directors in staging old and new plays by other authors. Averse to the psychological drama of realists like Ibsen, he often chose medieval Dutch plays from the traditional canon. All this made him a key figure in the history of modern Flemish theatre. Even after 1945, when his attention turned back to narrative prose, he remained actively engaged with the theatre and produced a contemporary adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia.

The prose poems that Constant van Wessem (1891–1954) penned under the pseudonym Frederik Chasalle were striking specimens of modernist prose. They belonged to a genre that harked back to Romantic authors and to Aloysi­us Ber­trand’s Gaspard de la nuit (1843) and was continued by symbolists and expressionists. Van Wessem fully exploited the potential for concentration offered by the prose poem:

Line after line they approach across the field. What shapes, what faces! A cap decked with flowers and a walking stick of willow. — They turn toward the moon that starts to rise beyond the firmament. They stream down the narrow country road, to where round about there is the dark scent of pinewood. Lights flicker: the wicks of torches, and a silly rumor arises like the ring of a jester’s cord. Who calls out a name?

As we know, around this time, the beginning of the 1920s, Paul van Ostaijen, too, was experimenting with short fiction and the grotesque. Both Van Wessem and Van Ostaijen were in turn surpassed by Theo van Does­burg, who in 1919 published some “expressionist literary compositions.” The strongly pictorial quality of their language corresponded with the paintings he was making in these years, work that like Mondriaan’s was to be characterized as “neo-plasticism.” A sample by way of illustration:

The yelling yellow light lamp stood impudently between them. Revealed the clutter of the round white shapes on the round black tea plane tray.

All of this was sprinkled with small spots.

Now and then a head bent over toward the window from the left-hand corner and her hair could be seen as a quantity of cigar ash.

Outside below light and dark circles had been pressed against the new opening and cut off by the vertical black curtain planes. Circles — and here and there red dots and green planes, horizontal and vertical lines without meaning.

Outside above hung the darkness — a huge black balloon.

Inside upstairs: a grey-and-white square borne by velvet black darkness and deep-black vertical shadow pillars.

Here Van Does­burg put into practice what he had previously formulated as requirements: “No chatter, no talk about something, no description of something, and absolutely no pseudo-psychological analysis, but depiction of reality through the relation of word and sentence. Linguistic depiction of action.” Language must be exploited as a material in its own right and no longer be just an arbitrary means. Later Van Wessem and Marsman were to express themselves in comparable terms, but this was long after they had published their first, expressionistically colored, samples of narrative prose. At that point they sought to link up with a German variant of international modernism: New Objectivity (Nieuwe Zakelijkheid, German Neue Sachlichkeit).

A number of years after New Objectivity had replaced expressionism as the dominant artistic current in Germany, Constant van Wessem published a series of articles entitled “Modern Prose,” in which he declared, among other things:

We have managed to “distance” ourselves from our feelings. This is a manifestation of our age with its sense of reality, its consciousness of modern life, its sobriety in dealing with the factual, its symptomatic features that in art have been called “new objectivity.” It is a way of looking objectively at the object again.

Van Wessem readily squared the poetics of New Objectivity, as he conceived of them, with his own views. Indeed, his own position turned out to be perfectly compatible with the aesthetics of New Objectivity that emerged in Germany around 1925. The term itself derived from painting, but outside the artistic domain too the term Sachlichkeit was ubiquitous. The cinema and journalism were held up as examples for the arts because of their fast pace, their rapid changes of point of view and theme, their lack of psychological motivation, and, last but not least, their attachment to current affairs; quite frequently sport and technology too served as models. All these contemporary phenomena also provided the writers with their material, which they could present directly, without too many formalist scruples.

Van Wessem’s variant of modernism may not have been wholly his own invention, but his appearance was of great importance to Dutch literature. With Van Doesburg he was the most significant importer of avant-garde ideas. Yet, like Marsman, he went only so far in his imitation of Marinetti and other avant-garde writers. He interpreted objectivity primarily as a matter of succinctness and concentration on essentials: “Stop beating about the bush, tell it like it is.” He was not after specifically “modern” themes but urged would-be authors to take a sober, object-oriented approach:

What determines the difference between the past and the present in “modern” prose is not the subject (modern life) or the kind of interest in the subject (its modern components: flying machines, races, telephones, etcetera), nor is it the way of approaching this subject profoundly or less profoundly. It is our personal relationship — the relationship of our emotional life to the form of expression — that makes the expression of this subject into art.

Economic Crisis and the Totalitarian Avant-Garde

The opposition between the political left and right in the 1920s and 1930s was much more complicated than one might think. An illustration of that complexity is offered by the different ways in which two particular writers reacted to the economic crisis known as the Great Depression. Albert Kuyle (1904–58) was a member of the fascist Black Front (Zwart Front), and because of his anti-Semitic pamphlets he was banned from publication for a considerable period after the war. Jef Last (1898–1972), who initially belonged to the Communist Party of Holland, was a representative of the workers’ and writers’ collective Bearing Left (Links Richten).

In his novella “Job Creation” (1931) and his novel Hearts and Bread (Harten en brood, 1933) Albert Kuyle leveled severe criticism at the free market, which reigned supreme under liberal capitalism but in periods of economic downturn left workers and the self-employed scrambling to earn a living for themselves and their families. The criticism was wrapped in a narrative style focused on facts and meta-textual asides, both concessions to the principles of the New Objectivity. Hearts and Bread opens with a lyrical evocation of dew and woodcutting but suddenly interrupts this peaceful tableau and asks whether it is still worthwhile writing a novel:

Books are almost superfluous. There is no longer any need for a story of years and lives to be compressed onto a handful of paper; now life itself has gained a new momentum, and misfortune descends and strikes faster than the word, which can only tag along behind.

In every newspaper life is laid bare, down to its muscles weary with toil and shattered nerves. Open, gutted, bent apart. What remains hidden? What can the writer tell the reader that he has not experienced deeper at first hand?

I’ll write a novel anyway. A novel about hearts and bread. About ordinary, countless human hearts, and about ordinary, aimless and manifold bread. About hearts that long for rest and pity, about bread that, once sacred, has become soiled and been trampled underfoot, till it is no different from money and shame.

And so I’ve abandoned the dew and woodcutting has ceased to interest me. Dew, dew, dew goes with roses and roses go with happy people.

Hearts and Bread will not be an idyllic story but harsh reality itself, depicted in a way that meets the requirements of the age. Kuyle seems to be obeying Van Wessem’s appeal to novelists, while adding a marked degree of social involvement. That involvement was opposed to the demands of industrial efficiency and profitability and the economies of scale and automation that flowed from them. The ideology that Kuyle is propounding emerges precisely in the clash between the narrator’s position in the novel and the reality he is describing. He takes the part of the proletarian workers against both bosses and unions. The editor in chief of a regional newspaper, who has put his pen at the service of the factory owners and writes an article about “the dreadful danger lurking in the proposed dividend tax,” is presented as a “spineless, gutless fool” whose prose is cut up for toilet paper.

Of course, anti-capitalist opinions like these can also be found in left-wing circles. The greatest enemy of industrial modernization was not the bourgeoisie but the working class, which saw this type of rationalization as merely intensifying existing forms of exploitation. Kuyle’s attacks on the capitalist system do not translate into sympathy for the socialist parties and workers’ organizations. Trade union leaders have at least as much scorn poured over them as the bosses. They are portrayed as careerists who sacrifice the interests of the workers to their desire for plush seats on the board. In Kuyle’s eyes the great evil is the process of modernization that has led to industrialization, urbanization, the ever-widening gap between capital and labor, and the division between proletarian laborers and the moneyed aristocracy. This view of society is implicit in the prologue quoted above: honestly earned bread is “soiled and trampled underfoot” because it is perceived exclusively from a materialistic perspective (“money”). The reproach is aimed both at manufacturers and at Marxists who have made materialism into a philosophy. Kuyle’s picture of social relations during the Depression shows similarities with the Romantic idealization of pre-industrial rural society.

While Kuyle, out of disgust at the existing social order, joined a radical right-wing organization, Jef Last worked for an all-embracing left-wing revolution. Yet there is no question of a diametrical opposition between the two, certainly if we limit ourselves to the narrative prose they wrote during the 1930s.

The social commitment of Hearts and Bread is equally apparent in Last’s Zuyder Zee (Zuiderzee, 1934). This great book about the building of the dam to close off the IJsselmeer from the North Sea (the so-called Afsluitdijk, built 1927–33) fits the aesthetic of the New Objectivity only up to a point. It has an obvious documentary content: the account of the land reclamation project is supported by statistics, newspaper reports, and minutes of cabinet meetings and parliamentary sessions. Real-life politicians appear as characters. But besides the partly factual, partly heroic account of the struggle against the water, Zuyder Zee contains numerous passages of traditional narrative prose. Sometimes the book even resembles a regional novel. While the faithfully rendered dialect of fishermen and farmers can be read as adding local color, the detailed and loving descriptions of local customs go well beyond factual requirements. Like Kuyle, though less explicitly, Last idealizes a pastoral world that is falling victim to the compulsive belief in progress of the modern age. True, he interprets the world by means of historical materialism. The proletarianization of the tenant farmers and the exodus of the fishermen onto dry land where there is ample work on offer are related to the parallel development of capital and technology. But Last does not leave it at this analysis. He ends his Zuyder Zee epic with an apocalyptic flood — and it is no accident that at this point the narrator chooses a Calvinist register to prophesy the approaching disaster. All that distinguishes Zuyder Zee from Hearts and Bread is that Last’s novel is less outspoken in its criticism and recommendations. In terms of social commitment there is little difference.

Other writers who drew their inspiration from New Objectivity display a similar measure of commitment. W. A. Wagener (1901–68), for example, turned his novel Shanghai (Sjanghai, 1933), similar in subject matter to André Malraux’s almost contemporaneous Man’s Estate (La condition humaine), into a fierce indictment of Japanese imperial incursions into China, tolerated by the Western powers for the sake of their trade interests.

Madelon Székely-Lulofs (1899–1958), in her day a widely read and successful writer at home and abroad, indicts capitalism and colonialism in her novels Rubber (Rubber, 1931) and Coolie (Koelie, 1932). Rubber is set in a small community of western businessmen who have come in search of big profits and immerse themselves in unbridled prosperity and luxury, until the stock-market crash of 1929 bursts the bubble. The writer’s criticism is directed not only at the failings of a capitalist economy and the accompanying lifestyle but also at the exploitation of the Indonesian land and people. In Coolie, where the main character is an Indonesian wage slave, the latter aspect is much more pronounced.

The work of the Flemish author Lode Zielens (1901–44) shows a similar level of empathy with the downtrodden. Zielens grew up in a working-class family and never disowned his origins. He incorporated his experiences and impressions in the novels The Dark Blood (Het duistere bloed, 1931) and Mother, Why Do We Live? (Moeder, waarom leven wij?, 1932), both of which are set in the big city and peopled by characters from the lowest social rungs. The narrative style is unadorned and realistic, and no subject, however banal or surrounded by taboos, is eschewed. The writer never makes a secret of where his sympathies lie and what his own position is.

It was not only novelists who pointed to social injustices in the years of economic and political crisis; a few poets also focused on this. They included not only the committed worker poets of the Marxist magazine Bearing Left but also figures who in the 1920s had written poetry remote from everyday events. In the second half of the 1930s Marsman was to become a severe cultural pessimist in the line of Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, and Johan Huizinga. His last collection, Temple and Cross (Tempel en kruis, 1940), can be read in large part as a flaming protest against the brute violence of National Socialism. In this collection Marsman put all his hope in a regeneration of European culture, a regeneration that would only be possible through a harmonious amalgam of classical paganism and medieval Christianity.

The comparison between Albert Kuyle and Jef Last, which revealed similarities where they might not have been immediately expected, and which indicated how closely literature and politics were interlinked in the interwar period, gains significance if we place it in a wider context. The artistic avant-garde of the first decades of the twentieth century emphatically demonstrated its social-reformist aspirations. It was after all the age of the great revolution: around 1920 there were upheavals in Russia, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and other European countries, which for a shorter or longer period brought either a Communist or Fascist regime to power. Among the revolutionary offshoots of the avant-garde one may think of expressionism with its call for a new humanity, surrealism, which wanted to liberate consciousness from the straitjacket of convention, and constructivism, which believed it could bring a better world within reach with the aid of a ruler and compass. Typical of this aspiration is a piece by Mondriaan on the homes and towns of the future:

With a modicum of goodwill it will not be that impossible to create an earthly paradise. It cannot be done in a day, but with a concentration of powers and without worrying about time, we will not only finally achieve it but will be living in paradise now. For the abstract spirit is not hampered by the past, which is still apparent everywhere: it sees only the expression of the future and it constructs this earthly paradise in an abstract way, as it gathers all the expressions of the future together.

These utopian ideas were to be put into practice by the architects who formed part of the Stijl group, of which Mondriaan was one of the founders (J. J. P. Oud, Gerrit Rietveld, Cornelis van Eesteren), and by the Bauhaus (Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer), based in Weimar and later in Dessau. Both De stijl and Bauhaus greatly emphasized functionality and anti-individualism, which in practice often acquired collectivist features.

Cover of Ferdinand Bordewijk’s Blocks (Blokken). The Hague, Literary Museum.

Both the collectivist theory and constructivist practice of these two movements play a dominant role in the short novel Blocks (Blokken, 1931) by Ferdinand Borde­wijk (1884–1965). In the space of just over ten thousand words Blocks evokes the image of a future society based on the kind of blueprints we found in Mondriaan and like-minded thinkers. The nameless “State,” which is the real protagonist, has so effectively transformed individuals into a collective that differences in clothing, housing, and salary have been abolished. The ten-strong “Council” also tries to standardize habits and behavior, for example by abolishing individual names and henceforth making do with numbers. People live in strictly planned, rectangular districts and in rectangular apartment blocks. Villages no longer exist: “The move to the towns had stopped; now everyone was housed in towns.” National holidays are celebrated with marches and public expressions of unity and power. Besides work and sport there is almost no other activity open to the subjects of the state. Individualist art and culture from the past are suspect. The canonical masterpieces of the past (a painting by Raphael, the epics of Homer) are displayed without a name and with only the occasional critical caption in a historical museum, more or less as a deterrent. “The builder of the people’s hall, a remarkable work of architecture, was anonymous. Paintings, sculptures, prose, and poems were not signed. . . . The whole was not a sum of individuals but a new unique being, with its own powers and the power of immortality.” Resilience and vitality are what matters: “Universal dental hygiene had produced splendid teeth, teeth for laughing and biting. People’s eyes were fierce, inquiring, almost hard.”

The intentions underlying Bordewijk’s fictional work of the early 1930s have been the subject of debate. The discussion centers on Bint (1934), one of a threesome of novels that also includes Blocks and Growling Beasts (Knor­rende beesten, 1933); they were written one after the other and since then have often been published together. In Bint we encounter the grotesque image of a head teacher called Bint, who systematically tries to transform his school into a model society. Was this caustic satire or the indirect glorification of an aspiration simultaneously being given concrete form in Germany and Italy? Various reviewers at the time believed the latter. Some even used terms like “Nazi system” and “proto-Fascist” and showed a revulsion directed not only at the main character but also at Bordewijk himself. Most postwar critics were more moderate in their language, but some reached a similar verdict.

However, one cannot ascribe to the author Bordewijk the totalitarian opinions that pertain to the character Bint. The narrator’s strictly impartial narrative point of view makes his position unimpeachable. It is different with the opinions that Bordewijk expressed outside the fictional text, for example when he criticized pupil-oriented or child-friendly education in the style of Maria Montessori and other educationalists and instead recommended a “Spartan” school system. Another point on which the opinions of Bint and Bordewijk converge concerns linguistic expressiveness. Bint is an advocate of precision and conciseness. He likes orders because of their pithiness:

We must combat, give the lie to, the proverbial expansiveness of the Dutch. The language of the government, from top to bottom, the language of statutes, the language of the newspapers I find horrific. I no longer read papers, because out of ten words not one is justified. . . . My neighbor has a gramophone and jazz records, Negro jazz. I always listen. It’s not beautiful, it’s more than that. It’s halting, ragged, primeval. That’s how our language should be. Eloquence is dead. Anyone exhuming it is committing necrophilia, is a psychopath.

They are words that would not have been out of place in a manifesto by the futurist and fascist Marinetti.

Bordewijk was to pluck the fruits of his training in succinctness and his experiments with the grotesque in writing the novel generally regarded as his best: Character (Karakter, 1938). In many respects it is a treatment of an age-old motif: the struggle between father and son. Dreverhaven, the father, is a figure modeled on the god Kronos, who taunts his children, challenging them to depose him. For years he thwarts his illegitimate son Katadreuffe at every step, as a way of making him stronger through adversity. This timeless narrative theme is set in the industrial port of Rotterdam during the dark years of the Depression. The merging of the universal human theme and contemporary realism gives Character a unique power and tension, equaled only in Nijhoff’s narrative poems Awater and H Hour.

Prose in the 1930s: Ethical Questions

During the 1930s narrative prose in Flanders was radically renewed under the impetus of Maurice Roelants (1895–1966) and Gerard Walschap (1898–1989). In the sobering and structural tautening of the novel as a genre these two young writers were far ahead of most of their Dutch colleagues. In the short novel Coming and Going (Komen en gaan, 1927) Roelants restricted events and descriptions to a minimum while giving ample space to the reflections of the protagonist-narrator. Walschap distinguished himself by a sharp increase in the narrative tempo, which manifested itself in the schematic, quasi-chronicling nature of the factual account. Where Roelants made frequent use of dialogue, Walschap avoided it as far as possible. This latter feature has been associated with the vitalistic nature of Walschap’s novels: words are much less direct than actions. In their early work both Roelants and Walschap struggled to free themselves from Catholic dogma and church authority. As the story of a love triangle that does not come about, Coming and Going is dominated by a conflict between good and evil that issues from the Christian sense of sin. In this context Roelants’s analytical and ethically oriented approach is striking. Unusually, perhaps, given the spirit of the age, there is little or no influence of Freud’s stress on the instinctual life as the basis of all action.

Where Roelants concentrated on a crisis-like situation in the life of an individual, Walschap tended to opt for the story of a whole life, a dynasty embracing several generations or a complete community. His trilogy Adelaide (Adelaïde, 1929), Eric (1931), and Carla (1933) was conceived as a family novel in the great nineteenth-century tradition; in style and composition, however, the novels were much more sober and taut. The narrative style remains remarkable, recording the spoken word not as monologues and dialogues but in a form halfway between direct and free indirect speech. The language register stays close to the spoken word and the syntax is simple. His later novels continue this process of formal renewal.

Philosophically Walschap, like Roelants, continued to be obsessed by problems of Catholic morality. Adelaide, the protagonist of the first part of the trilogy, is the victim of feelings of guilt engendered by a priest; he ascribes the fact that she has borne only one child to her egotism. Her son Eric and her granddaughter Carla are still doing penance years after her death, which may have been a case of suicide. Despite his moral and religious concerns Walschap was branded a heretic in the Catholic press and accused of being too outspoken in describing the intensely personal problems his characters were struggling with. Later novels like Marriage (Trouwen, 1933), still considered by the author as an example of “realistic Catholic art,” Ordeal (Celibaat, 1934), and Sibylle (1939) met the same fate. These conflicts contributed to Walschap’s increasing estrangement from the Catholic church, which he made official in his defiant pamphlet Farewell Then (Vaarwel dan, 1940).

After turning his back on clerical Flanders Walschap let his hair down in the novel Houtekiet (1940­), which begins as a glorification of pagan vitality embodied in the natural primitive man Jan Houtekiet, who, unconcerned about God or his commandments, lives from the fruits of the field. But when he begins establishing sexual relations with girls from the neighboring estates, and fathers children, culture slowly annexes nature from without. Gradually colonization gets underway, and Houtekiet is even prepared to build a church and tolerate a priest.

Comparable with Houtekiet are two novels from a later phase of Herman Teirlinck’s extensive writing career: Marie Speermalie (1940) and Wrestling with the Angel (Het gevecht met de engel, 1952). Both books feature a confrontation between vital forces of nature, embodied in working-class types, and the class of the former masters, who in Wrestling with the Angel particularly are portrayed as degenerates. Teirlinck’s fascination with moral and social decay is clear from Rolande with the Blaze (Rolande met den bles, 1944), a novel that with its aesthetic-decadent themes belongs in the early period of The Ivory Monkey (Het ivoren aapje, 1909).

The third innovator in Flemish prose, Willem Elsschot (pseudonym of Alfons de Ridder, 1888–1960), was extremely radical in his anti-clericalism. Like his fiction, his youthful poetry was discovered only after 1930 and from then on contributed significantly to the literary program of the magazine Forum, edited by Menno ter Braak, Edgar du Perron, and Maurice Roelants. It includes quatrains such as these:

But to my shame I must admit

that I’m corrupt and quite unfit

for God, the Soul and other things

of which the pious churchman sings:

 

Conscience and my Country’s plight,

the starry Sky and Death’s dark night:

no sense of such things can I make,

the ice I try in vain to break.66

Elsschot’s novels are shot through with the same cynical skepticism. His first novel, Villa des Roses, dates from as far back as 1913. Through a partly satirical, partly detached description of the relationships between the residents of a Parisian boarding house, Elsschot exposes mercilessly the nature of the petite bourgeoisie with its hypocrisy, egotism, and greed. This critical tendency is even more evident in Soft Soap (Lijmen, 1924), the story of the gentleman con-artist Boorman and his World Review of Finance, Trade and Commerce, Art and Science. The publication with that sumptuous title is nothing but a subtle way of exploiting vain businessmen anxious for publicity. Boorman usually devotes an over-inflated article to their business and subsequently offloads a few thousand or even a tens of thousands of copies onto the company in question. In The Leg (Het been, 1933), a sequel to Soft Soap, Boorman becomes sentimental and hence falls prey to his own system. After having dumped a hundred thousand copies of the World Review on the widowed female boss of a metal works, he is subsequently moved to pity and offers compensation to the victim. She, however, proudly refuses, which leads to a fencing match to decide who will be left with the “blood money.” Boorman wins, but in so doing he loses his reputation as a ruthless cynic in the eye of his subordinate Laarmans, with whom the author more or less identifies.

The situations in Elsschot’s later novels are equally odd, not to say bizarre. Cheese (Kaas, 1933) is the story of a man who allows himself to be talked into trading in a commodity he knows nothing about, to say nothing of the fact that he lacks any talent for commerce. Laarmans, here not a con artist but an ordinary man seduced into entering the world of big business, is a frightened rabbit and at the same time a domestic tyrant. Within the four walls of his home, he prides himself on successes he has not yet achieved, and meanwhile he fears the prying eyes of the lady next door. Like a whipped cur, he eventually slinks back with his tail between his legs to the office from which he had with great aplomb taken three months’ unpaid sick leave.

Elsschot makes it clear that he had experienced the same dichotomy between business and home in a postscript to his novel Cheep (Tsjip, 1934), a comic account of the marriage of his daughter Adele, who marries a Pole, has his child, and a few years later leaves her husband. In the postscript the author confesses his selfishness in cutting himself off from his family and pursuing his literary aspirations, without it even making him happy. What is so pleasurable about “spying on the members of one’s family or on one’s own innermost self from a dark corner and dissecting them one by one in order to prepare a filtrate of their blood for others?” This confession is written in the margin of a book that can still be seen as humorous, though the fact that at the end the first-person narrator greets his newborn grandson as the “Savior” who will reconcile him with himself and cure him of all evils gives pause for thought.

If Elsschot regarded Cheep as going too far in washing dirty linen in public, what must he have thought in retrospect of the sequel, published as The Lion Tamer (De leeuwentemmer, 1940)? Here he seems to abandon all restraint. Daughter divorced, ex-son-in-law a brute, grandson abducted to Poland and smuggled back to Belgium: it is laid on very thickly. But before the drama becomes too tearful, Elsschot invariably resorts to the irony with which he put himself out of range of the critics. The man who regularly broke into sobs when reading aloud from his own work was able as a writer to avoid false sentiment, which is why he is still so hugely enjoyable to read.

At the moment when Elsschot was induced by admirers like Jan Gres­hoff and Ter Braak to start writing novels again, Arthur van Schendel had already embarked on a remarkable change of direction in his work. A previous section described his early novels A Wanderer in Love and A Wanderer Lost (1904 and 1907), which set the tone for neo-Romantic fiction. Van Schendel continued working in this vein for years. The change came with The Frigate Johanna Maria (Het fregatschip Johanna Maria, 1930), the story of a solitary and reclusive man who spends his whole life pursuing the dream of one day owning the sailing ship on which he has risen from sailor to boatswain. By the time he finally takes possession of it, the ship is virtually a wreck and he loses his life.

In subsequent novels, such as The Waterman (De waterman, 1933), A Dutch Drama (Een Hollands drama, 1935), The Rich Man (De rijke man, 1936), and The Gray Birds (De grauwe vogels, 1937), regarded by many as his best work, Van Schendel evoked the doom of the Calvinist sense of sin. What makes the later Van Schendel special is the way he links thoroughly Dutch themes with motifs from Greek tragedy. The main characters, frequently acting on an ideal or inspirational idea, are confronted by opposing forces or antagonists who are the embodiment of evil. In that confrontation the heroes invariably come off worst.

Poetry in the 1930s

The 1930s saw a number of remarkable poetic debuts. In nearly all cases the formal characteristics are traditional, reaching back to classical verse forms and prosody. An awareness of tradition also reveals itself in the recurrence of classical themes and motifs, especially mythological ones. Like Van Ostaijen and Nijhoff the new poets seek to connect with late-nineteenth-century symbolism. They renounce the symbolists’ ethereal unworldliness but share the view that the poem is the only way of giving meaning to a reality experienced as unordered, chaotic, unknowable, and even absurd. A new feature is their choice of a poetic idiom close to everyday speech, and metaphors that incorporate the contemporary, the banal, and the ugly.

In the work of Gerrit Achterberg (1905–62), who published his first collection in 1931, the use of everyday language serves well the confrontation between the exalted and the profane, an opposition embedded in the network of antitheses that characterize this poet’s outlook. Very often the issue is the struggle between soul and senses, which has its roots in Achterberg’s Calvinist background. In his poetry the extremes of depravity and exaltation meet:

O valleys without falling, so exalted

that on every piece of land one meets new angels there

These two lines could serve as a motto for his work. It is striking how often he takes outcasts as objects to identify with, from the fratricide Cain, the patient Job, and the prostitutes Mary Magdalene and Rahab to the doomed Flying Dutchman.

A frequent motif in Achterberg’s poetry is the dead beloved whom the first-person narrator must bring back to life, as Orpheus once did Eurydice, and the accompanying faith in the purifying and magic powers of the poetic word. What is new is the inevitability of failure and the doubt about the power of poetry:

This poem supersedes the one before.

I am my own subordinate once more.

Also new is the mixture of high and low language registers, the combination of situations originating from classical mythology and Biblical themes with what at the time were considered vulgar images. The triptych “Traveler ‘Does’ Golgotha” transposes Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection to the twentieth century, the age of the newspaper, radio, and tourist cruises round the Mediterranean. The second part of the poem buzzes with commonplace expressions, clichés, and amateurish use of rhyme and meter. All in all it is a typical example of Achterberg’s style, as unorthodox as it is arresting:

Then in the paper — on Cyprus, it was — I read:

J.o.N, called Christ everywhere,

after three days on the cross He had bled,

as our readers will of course be aware,

 

in His open grave was not to be found.

Stubborn rumors are going around:

His disciples slipped by the watch without a sound,

 

while they slept, and removed the corpse from its bed.

Hysterical wives got it into their heads

That they saw Him walking where cattle fed;

 

Mary had stammered, so they say: Godhead!

And fishermen swear that He was fed

by them down by the lake and shared their bread.

 

Official sources have played this down.

We’re far too shrewd to be fooled around.

One problem in the interpretation and appreciation of Achterberg’s poetry is the relationship between his work and his life. The poet was a sexually obsessed psychopath, and in 1937 he actually attempted a double murder, leaving one victim dead and the other crippled for life. However, readers who associate the Orpheus and Eurydice theme with this tragic event overlook the fact that the dead beloved is already emphatically present in the collection Departure (Afvaart, 1931), published well before the incident in question. There is also controversy about whether Achterberg’s work should be condemned because of its sexist nature, which proves how very much alive the work still is.

Achterberg forms the bridge between a modernist like Nijhoff and the “cynical” authors of so-called “cocktail party poetry,” who in the footsteps of the Forum poets Du Perron, Greshoff, and Elsschot wrote about “modest happiness.” Much of this work steered a middle course between the rationalism of Forum and the Romanticism represented by such poets as Adriaan Roland Holst, J. C. Bloem, J. J. Slauerhoff, and Hendrik Marsman. The most important poet from this circle is without doubt M. Vasa­lis (pseudonym of Margaretha Drooglever Fortuyn-Leenmans, 1909–98), who made her debut in 1940 with Parks and Deserts (Parken en woestijnen). The collection contains only twenty-one poems, but most are now among the best known in twentieth-century Dutch literature. In post-symbolist fashion Vasalis connects the everyday world with an underlying reality in which animals, children, and the mentally retarded can still take part but from which grown-ups have been banished forever. This reality generally reveals itself in a flash, almost like an epiphany or vision. A good example is the poem “Enclosing Dam,” not only because of its layered structure of reality and metaphysics, but also because it was prompted by a contemporary event; the Enclosing Dam, built in 1932 as the first step in the process of land reclamation from the former Zuyder Zee, is a pre-eminent symbol of twentieth-century technology:

The bus drives like a room into the night

the road is straight, the dike will never end,

left of us sea, still restless though now penned,

we look outside, the moon sheds gentle light.

 

Ahead the new-shaved necks of a couple

of young sailors, who suppress a yawn

and later, after a stretch brief and supple,

sleep on each other’s shoulders as if new-born.

 

And then I see, as if it were a dream, in the glass

attached to ours, transparent, thin as can be,

sometimes as clear as us, sometimes drowned in the sea

the spirit of this bus; now by grass

the sailors’ forms right through are mown.

Then I also see myself. Alone,

my head’s above the water’s swell,

the mouth moves as if about to tell,

a mermaid shocked by what’s occurred.

There’s no beginning, no final word

to this trip, no future and no past to it,

only this now, which is so strangely split.

After the war Vasalis published two further collections, The Phoenix (De vogel Phoenix, 1947) and Distant Prospects and Faces (Vergezichten en gezichten, 1954). They mark the various stages of her life as a woman and a mother and, with Achterberg’s work, are among the most popular poems in the Dutch-speaking world.

Simon Vest­dijk (1898–1971) also belongs with the post-symbolist poets. Although his reputation rests largely on his fifty-two novels, he wrote a body of poetry more than twice as large as the oeuvres of Nijhoff and Achterberg put together. During the early 1930s particularly he must have written hundreds of poems, though most were collected only much later.

Vestdijk was not only a prolific poet; he also wrote extensively about poetry. In addition he authored large-scale studies like Albert Verwey and the Idea (Albert Verwey en de Idee, 1940) and The Shiny Germ Cell (De glanzende kiemcel, 1950). He proved himself a worthy disciple of the great modernists by demarcating the realm of poetry from that of prose on the one hand and music on the other. The poem cannot be reduced to the ideas it contains, nor is it purely sound. It is rather that poetry, as in painting and sculpture, creates an image. The influence of Rainer Maria Rilke’s New Poems (Neue Gedichte, 1907, 1908) can be easily detected. Applying his own criteria, much of Vestdijk’s poetry can be discarded as too cerebral, a criticism he himself leveled at Albert Verwey, whom he greatly admired. But in his best poems he achieved an evocative visual quality and an almost chiseled precision.

That Vestdijk saw poetry as the central literary genre is clear from his essay on “the lyrical principal of the novel.” For him narrative prose was first and foremost a personal confession, in however veiled a form. It is as a poet that Vestdijk was first discovered. To Forum he contributed not only poems but also essays on favorite modernist authors like Paul Valéry and Joyce, short stories that partly follow the model of Poe and Bordewijk and partly explore new avenues, and finally also a number of novels that have become among the best-known in his oeuvre. The first, which also marked his debut in the genre, was Back to Ina Damman (Terug tot Ina Dam­man, 1934). The book was embedded in an autobiographical project that in the final version became an eight-volume saga. It has become know as the Anton Wachter cycle, after the main character, Vestdijk’s alter ego. Although Back to Ina Damman has similarities with Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, including the motif of the “involuntary memory” that guides the associative stream of recollections, it is much more realistic than its French model. Realism also typifies Else Böhler, German Maid (Else Böhler, Duits dienstmeisje, 1935), a novel in which Vestdijk links the fact that in the 1930s many young German women crossed the border into the Netherlands to find work with the rise of National Socialism, which he describes with crushing sarcasm. In Mr. Visser’s Descent into Hell (Meneer Vissers hellevaart, 1936), a caricature of a petit bourgeois, Vestdijk was clearly inspired by the narrative technique of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Ter Braak called Vestdijk a “sorcerer” on account of his astonishing productivity and versatility. Indeed Vestdijk did not limit himself to contemporary or autobiographical material. He won his first literary prize with The Fifth Seal (Het vijfde zegel, 1937), a historical novel centered on the life and work of the sixteenth-century Spanish painter El Greco; King Philip II looms large in the background. The relative patchiness of El Greco’s biography enabled Vestdijk to fill in the gaps with his imagination. He was to do something similar in The Latter Days of Pontius Pilate (De nadagen van Pilatus, 1939). Here the principal and supporting role are played by Governor Pontius Pilate and Emperor Caligula; in the far background stands the figure of Jesus Christ.

Maurice Gilliams. Antwerp, AMVC House of Literature.

The description post-symbolist also fits the Flemish poet and prose writer Maurice Gilliams (1900–1982). His poetry, markedly elegiac, was initially greatly influenced by Pros­per van Langendonck and Karel van de Woestijne and is baroque in style and hermetic in meaning. Later his language became more sober, but it retained an air of artificiality. In Gilliams, as in Achterberg, the higher and lower registers are allowed to clash violently, as in the poem “Dying in Antwerp,” which with its macabre atmosphere recalls the work of German expressionists like Georg Heym and Georg Trakl:

The angel on the Cathedral front

raises stone scales at midnight for souls fleeing.

The host of lice are creaking. The cats are peeing

in crooked alleys that no wind blows through.

 

Massed upon the mounds so full of silence,

covered entirely by a sleepy crust,

blood in throats congealed, their skulls plucked

bare, the Cocks of pain spread pestilence.

 

Gone are the rosary beads once told;

not a scrap of mystery is left

where emptiness in emptiness will dwell.

 

The house of rooms and the city of streets:

ah, leave the clock alone. Count gold, drink wine.

The filth rots underground. Don’t pray for bones picked clean.

As a prose writer Gilliams was out of step with his contemporaries. Elias or the Struggle with the Nightingales (Elias of het gevecht met de nachte­galen, 1936) and Winter in Antwerp (Winter te Antwerpen, 1953) cannot be compared either with the naturalist novel in the style of Buysse or with the Roelants-style psychological novel. If there are any points of reference at all, they are to be found in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeich­nungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) and Alain-Fournier’s Big Meaulnes (Le grand Meaulnes, 1913). As in Carry van Bruggen’s novels Heleen and Eva and Roelants’s Coming and Going, the story revolves almost entirely around the inner perceptions and intellectual development of the first-person narrator. Unlike with Van Bruggen and Roelants, these themes are not incorporated in philosophical or psycho­logical reflections but externalized in actions and events that, as in symbolist poetry, refer to something other than themselves. Elias, for example, features the motif of paper boats which the young main character and his cousin fold and float on the water; they stand for the unexpressed and vague longing for another life and another reality than the here and now. That other reality is both close at hand and far away. It is close because it is intuited in the woods and villages around the chateau where the first-person narrator lives; far away because as in a dream it remains inaccessible. Closely connected with the childish longing for the dream are the fixation on death and the split self.

The striking quality of Gilliams is that he incorporates all these motifs, so characteristic of both symbolism and modernism, in a developmental novel, a supremely Romantic genre. A comparison with Vestdijk’s Anton Wachter cycle seems obvious. But whereas Vestdijk uses the action as illustration for a Freudian analysis, Gilliams remains the lyrical author, writing not so much in a psychological as in an evocative vein, and choosing a narrative form inspired by the classical sonata.

Forum: Menno ter Braak and Edgar du Perron

The appearance of Menno ter Braak (1902–40) and Edgar du Per­ron (1899–1940) on the literary scene heralded the return of polemical and essayistic criticism, which since the heyday of Lodewijk van Deyssel had been rather neglected in Dutch letters. Their most productive period lay in the early 1930s, the years when they were the hub of the magazine Forum (1932–35).

The way in which Ter Braak and Du Perron reformulated their critical program in book titles — One to One (Man tegen man, 1931), Farewell to the Land of Clergymen (Afscheid van domi­nees­land, 1931), Friend or Foe (Vriend of vijand, 1931), Counter-Inquiry (Tegenonderzoek, 1933) — also served a polemical purpose. The confrontational way in which they approached literature helped to keep up a certain élan, that of the boyishly curious and boyishly enthusiastic reader who wants the writer to be a congenial personality. In the programmatic introduction to Forum Ter Braak proclaimed: “Personality is the first and last criterion in judging an artist. Whatever miracles take place in the process of creation, they seem to us only of importance if the personality of the artist asserts itself in his work.” Here “artist” was contrasted with “creation,” and Ter Braak and Du Perron were taking issue with Martinus Nijhoff, who had defined great literature as work from which the author had completely disappeared.

By putting such stress on personality as a touchstone, the editors of Forum were reaching back to a position that seemed to have been consigned to history by the modernist avant-garde: the cultivation of the figure of the poet. This person-oriented outlook is one of the many signals indicating that Ter Braak and Du Perron had scarcely any affinity with the international avant-garde. They saw little or nothing worthwhile in the experiments of the Stijl group, the Bauhaus, and French surrealism. Even the innovations in the novel led by Joyce, Woolf, William Faulkner, and Robert Musil escaped their attention. The only contemporaries of international caliber with whom they felt an affinity were the French chroniclers of the condition humaine André Gide and André Malraux, with whom they shared an admiration for Nietzsche, and moderate English modernists like Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence.

Du Perron’s magnum opus is his autobiographical novel, Country of Origin (Het land van herkomst, 1935). The book has two story lines: one consisting of memories and one in which the first-person narrator, Arthur Ducroo, notes down the effect that writing has on him and what he feels and experiences in the here and now (Paris between September 1932 and March 1934). Du Perron/Du­croo thus combines the genres of memoir and diary, two genres that because of their supposed authenticity and directness occupied a prominent position in Forum poetics. The memories are predominantly connected with a youth spent in Indonesia, a period that Ducroo sees as decisive for his later life. His fascination with literature, his taste for adventure, and his relishing of struggle and conflict all stem from that period. At the same time he is aware that this is a paradise that has gone for good.

The intention of Country of Origin was typical of Du Perron: to show the writer holding himself to account for the how and why of the literary adventure triggered in the book itself. At the beginning of the third chapter Ducroo justifies committing his memories to paper; they are intended for his wife Jane, to help her understand the character of the man she has just married. The same applies to the notes on the here and now: without the immediate presence of that one female reader and the possibility of entering into a dialogue with her, they will remain sterile and useless. Here the accomplished and productive letter-writer in Du Perron reveals himself. In addition it is clear from another reflective passage what kind of literature Du Perron and Ter Braak preferred: that of unconstrained first-person writers and seekers after truth like Multatuli, Nietzsche, and Gide. “It may be madness to want to put down what is living in us now, but I can still try to write down for Jane what I was like before she came along. The difference between the authenticity of letters and the unavoidable falsification of a diary lies in the sincerity of the motivation.”

Despite the urge toward authenticity and self-knowledge, Du Perron is fully aware of the doubling and alienation resulting from the act of writing. At the end of Country of Origin Ducroo has to admit that he finds his honesty, as it has manifested itself in the preceding pages, far from satisfactory. He has not escaped the mechanism that “as soon as one writes stories, inevitably turns every ‘I’ into a character.” It was no accident that Du Perron called his book a novel, stressing that Ducroo and Du Perron were not identical. Also telling is the book’s motto, taken from the writer’s friend André Malraux (the model for the character of Héverlé in the novel): “One must look inside oneself for something other than oneself, if one is going to be able to look for a long time” (Il faut chercher en soi-même autre chose que soi-même pour pouvoir se regarder longtemps).

The skepticism about the reliability of his own intentions that Ducroo expresses time after time, the predominantly reflective focus on such elusive phenomena as memory and consciousness, and the will to order a whole life in a linguistic construction make Country of Origin a superb example of the international modernism that embraces not just authors that Du Perron admired, such as Valery Larbaud, Gide, and Malraux, but also those with whom he felt little immediate affinity, such as Proust, Joyce, and Musil.

The real breakthrough of new prose came, as explained above, from Flanders, with Maurice Roelants, Gerard Walschap, and Willem Elsschot. They all contributed to Forum and indeed published a significant part of their work in it. The novelist, poet, and essayist Simon Vestdijk, both in and outside Forum in a class of his own, will return in the next chapter. He can be seen as the discovery of Ter Braak and Du Perron, like the Curaçao writer Cola Debrot (1902–81). Debrot had made his debut in Forum in 1933 with an anti-utopian satire. In 1935 Forum printed his novella My Black Sister (Mijn zuster de negerin), widely regarded as his masterpiece. The confrontation between the Europe of “civilized” whites and the colonial society of the Antilles, a confrontation that the emigrant Debrot knew from his own experience, was here projected into the relationship between the main character Frits Ruprecht, son of a white Curaçao family, and the mixed-race Maria, the woman he wants for his lover but who is also his half-sister. The intriguing aspect of this ostensibly simple story is its ambiguity: it can be interpreted both in terms of the current post-colonial discourse and from a psychological perspective. Maria is both a representative of the oppressed black population and Ruprecht’s shadowy sister-soul.

My Black Sister is one of the few literary texts from the period 1916–40 to bring the Dutch-governed areas of Central and South America within reach. Debrot had been preceded by Albert Helman (pseudonym of Lou Lichtveld, 1903–96), who was born in Surinam and later embraced radical left-wing politics. Helman made his reputation with The Silent Plantation (De stille plantage, 1931), a novel modeled stylistically on Van Schendel, in which the struggle between black and white is situated in the eighteenth century, when Surinam was still the center of a brutally maintained system of slavery. Here too there is interracial sexuality: a white planter’s wife begins a relationship with a black slave. Helman subsequently reused the material in The Blazing Silence (De laaiende stilte, 1952), this time told from a different point of view.

In the course of the 1930s political tensions in Europe mounted sharply, largely because of the rise of National Socialism. After Hitler had come to power in 1933, it became clear that Germany was out for revenge for the defeat of 1918 and for the Treaty of Versailles, which it saw as a humiliation. Not only Belgium but also the Netherlands, once again neutral, were threatened by German expansionism. Relatively few people in Holland recognized the danger of a German invasion. Among the alarmed minority were Ter Braak, Du Perron, and Marsman. In 1936, shortly after Hitler had occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, Ter Braak, the historian Jan Romein, and a number of other figures from the world of culture and science set up a “Committee of Watchfulness against National Socialism.” Earlier, in Forum, Ter Braak had expressed his revulsion at events in Germany since 1933. Polemic was no longer a game, not even a life-affirming activity for its own sake. The aim now was to ward off the threat of dictatorship.

The written word was unable to avert the threat. In May 1940 the Low Countries were overrun, the Netherlands in five days, Belgium in nineteen. The consequences for literature were disastrous. On 14 May 1940, after the news of the Dutch capitulation, Ter Braak committed suicide. On the same day Du Perron, deeply disturbed by events, died of a heart attack. Marsman, who at the outbreak of the Blitzkrieg attempted to flee from Burgundy to Britain, was drowned in the English Channel during the night of 20–21 June 1940.

— Translated by Paul Vincent

 

60 Unless indicated otherwise, translations of quotations in this chapter are by Paul Vincent.

61 Translation J. T. Grein.

62 Translation J. M. Coetzee.

63 Translation Walter Thys.

64 Translation Felix Douma.

65 Translation James S. Holmes.

66 Translation Peter Large and Paul Vincent.