Amsterdam Stories
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JAN HENDRIK FREDERIK GRÖNLOH (1882–1961) was born in Amsterdam, the oldest of four children. After an idealistic youth, he joined the Holland–Bombay Trading Company in 1904, becoming director in 1926, suffering a nervous breakdown leading to a short hospitalization in 1927, and retiring at age fifty-five, on December 31, 1937; he married Aagje Tiket (b. 1883) in 1906 and had four daughters with her, born in 1907, 1908, 1909, and 1912. Meanwhile, as Nescio (Latin for “I don’t know”; he adopted a pseudonym so as not to jeopardize his business career, acknowledging his authorship publicly only in 1929), he wrote what is now considered perhaps the best prose in the Dutch language.
DAMION SEARLS is a writer and a translator of many classic twentieth-century authors, including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard. His translation of Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He also edited Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861, available as an NYRB Classic.
JOSEPH O’NEILL is the author of three novels, most recently Netherland (2008), and of Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2001). Born in Ireland, he spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands.
AMSTERDAM STORIES
NESCIO
Introduction by
JOSEPH O’NEILL
Selected and translated from the Dutch by
DAMION SEARLS
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
Amsterdam Stories
THE FREELOADER
YOUNG TITANS
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
OUT ALONG THE IJ
LITTLE POET
FROM AN UNFINISHED NOVEL
THE VALLEY OF OBLIGATIONS
THE END
INSULA DEI
Notes
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
It seems extraordinary that Nescio should have any reputation. He wrote very little, and he wrote small. Only four of his stories are of any length—“The Freeloader” (thirty-one pages), “Young Titans” (twenty-eight pages), “Little Poet” (forty-two pages), and “Insula Dei” (twenty-five pages). His standing becomes all the more unlikely when one considers how little time he allocated to sitting down to write. From the dates he appended to his finished work, it appears that his productive composition of fiction was limited to a handful of years scattered between 1909 and 1942, with almost nothing written in the 1920s and 1930s. How many important artists have been such slight practitioners?
Nescio’s work is highly preoccupied with the vexing, tragicomically lopsided proportions of human endeavor. Two of the above-mentioned stories use ironic diminutives, in their Dutch titles, to tenderly cut down to size their protagonists: “Dichtertje” (“Little Poet”) and “Titaantjes” (most naturally rendered, to my ear, by the Scotticism “Wee Titans”). All of Nescio’s writing is framed by the problem of a life’s smallness, and almost all of it is concerned with the grandiose struggle of young men, or men who were once young, against the compulsory dimensions of experience—metaphysical bafflement, the inseparability of desire and suffering, the demands of duty and work and social respectability. Not for nothing, in this context, is the English word plight (a bad situation) related to the Dutch word plicht (duty, obligation):
I sit on the hill and look down into the valley of obligations. It is barren, there is no water, there are no flowers or trees in the valley. A lot of people are milling around, most of them drooping and misshapen and constantly looking down at the ground. Some of them look up every once in a while and then they scream
The Nescio who wrote so gloomily in November 1922 was a forty-year-old who had published a single volume of stories and whose pen name means “I don’t know” in Latin. His public self was a businessman named J.H.F. Grönloh, a paterfamilias responsible for the care and upkeep of a wife and four daughters and in possession of no realistic option but to allow his days and years to be put at the service of the Holland–Bombay Trading Company, an enterprise devoted to the exportation of goods to India. This state of affairs never ceased to amaze and perplex Nescio, and not only because, like many writers, he was given to amazement and perplexity. He came of age when the social and existential predicament of the clerical classes was coming under unprecedented literary scrutiny, not least from the clerks themselves. Nescio (b. 1882) was a contemporary of Franz Kafka (b. 1882) and Robert Walser (b. 1878).
He was the son of an Amsterdam shopkeeper. At a very early age he fell in love with taking walks and as a nine-year-old began to go on solitary outings, making written records of his impressions. (Walking—in and around the margins of Amsterdam and farther afield in the Netherlands—became a passionate lifelong pursuit.) In 1899, the year he graduated from trade school and embarked with neither success nor enthusiasm on a series of minor office jobs, he logged 522 kilometers on foot. Around this time, Nescio fell in with a circle of young men who had in common a horror of the petit bourgeois life and a personal interest in finding an alternative. Nescio was not drawn to the alluring Marxist and anarchist movements of the day; he was, however, much taken with the communal idealism of Frederik van Eeden, the renowned Dutch psychiatrist who founded a short-lived colony in the countryside near Bussum. In 1900, Nescio applied to become a colonist but was unsuccessful; nonetheless, for a few years he and his friends remained actively intrigued by communalism and other possibilities of “getting out.” This did not, unfortunately, eliminate the need to earn a livelihood. As Nescio fictively writes:
Bekker and I had to spend most of our time at the office and do whatever those gentlemen said, and listen to their ridiculous opinions when they talked to each other, and put up with the fact that they thought they were much more clever and capable than we were. And when they thought it was cold then all the windows had to be shut and in winter the lights had to come on much too early and the curtains had to be pulled shut so we couldn’t see the red sky and the twilight in the streets and we had no say in it at all.
Nescio fatefully committed himself to a business career in 1904, got married in 1906, and almost immediately began fathering one child after another. Only subsequently, and one might say consequently, was he driven to produce, in the decade beginning in 1909, his bittersweet accounts of dreaming, scheming young men and their perdition.
His first published story contains his most famous character— the freeloader, Japi, who belongs to a strange human species of incompatibles distinctive for their indisposition to activity and whose varieties might include Melville’s Bartleby, Beckett’s Murphy, and Walser’s “divinely gifted layabout.” The freeloader exists at the edge of a group of impecunious, talkative young men with ambitions to become writers and artists and otherwise “astound” the world. (They would seem to be the exact, if less cerebral, contemporaries of the undergraduate Stephen Dedalus and his fellow collegians. James Joyce was also born in 1882.) The freeloader has no ambitions. He admits, “I’m not a poet and I’m not a nature-lover and I’m not an anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.” He passes his time wandering around and sampling the (to him) gratis pleasures of life: the feeling of rain, a slice of cake, a beach, a glass of jenever, a fine pair of yellow shoes. Mysteriously knowledgeable, rarely disagreeable, the freeloader excites friendship and envious curiosity even as he disregards the boundaries authorized by property and propriety:
The freeloader you found lying in your bed with his dirty shoes on when you came home late; the freeloader who smoked your cigars and filled his pipe with your tobacco and burned your coal and peered into your cupboards and borrowed your money and wore o
ut your shoes and took out your coat when he had to go home in the rain.
As Giorgio Agamben has noted, “Each of us has known such creatures … They embody the type of eternal student or swindler who ages badly and who must be left behind in the end, even if it is against our wishes. And yet something about them, an inconclusive gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain mathematical boldness in judgment and taste, a certain air of nimbleness in their limbs or words—all these features indicate that they belong to a complementary world and allude to a lost citizenship or an inviolable elsewhere.”
This inviolable elsewhere, for Nescio, was the Dutch countryside, to which his characters joyfully resort at every opportunity. Thus the “immortals,” as he nicknames the young protagonists of “Young Titans,” are very often to be found in the dunes, or walking the length of a dike or along the bank of a canal, or on outings to land-locked Rhenen or maritime Veere. These ramblers may be distinguished from that stroller we associate with urban noticing and longing, the flaneur, whose unauthorized investigations suggest to us modern kinds of awareness and feeling. Although Nescio’s immortals are alert metropolitan creatures, connoisseurs of the streets and girls and parks and waterways of Amsterdam, there is something residually archaic about them. When they venture out of the city, they remove themselves to a special space of aliveness. Nescionic aliveness is highly idiosyncratic. His country walkers are rarely detained by botanical or topographical or cultural details but are decidedly susceptible to impressionistic dramas of trees, waters, clouds, and sunlight. Most characteristically, the repetitive, maddeningly untransactional processes of nature—the flowing of rivers, the perpetual rising and setting of the sun—are experienced as ecstatic torments:
It was late July. The sun was still high above the ocean at seven o’clock and it made, again, I can’t help it, it’s God himself who keeps repeating himself, it again made a long golden stripe in the water and shone in our faces.
The intransigence of the natural world is mirrored in the intransigence of Nescio’s viewpoint, which in turns reflects the intransigence of his circumstances. To recap: in his early twenties, he is pulled under, into the bourgeoisie; he writes, de profundis, about such pulling under; he secretively publishes a book of these underwater writings in 1918; he then succumbs fully to his bourgeois fate. Either he has no more writing in him or he must suppress that writing—suppress Nescio. In any case, Nescio can no longer be.
It’s true that, after a rumor that someone else was the author of his book, Nescio’s actual identity emerged; but he was able or willing only to write a few, bitty things. His life’s largest undertakings remained, it seems, walking and working. He became, it has been reported, a notably demanding and severe boss, and eventually a director of the company. Then, in 1937, he retired. “I’m free,” he later wrote, “after forty years I’m free, and I can cut my hair whenever I feel like it and let it grow too if I want.”
Yet still Nescio did not write much, which is consistent with the notion that his impulse to write was essentially hobbyistic—which is to say, profoundly voluntary. Writing not actuated by pleasure or self-realization would have been Nescio’s idea of “doing.” Nescio was not a doer. As one of his narrators states, “I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be.”
But over the course of a few February days in 1942, in the midst of the Occupation, Nescio did get onto paper the remarkable “Insula Dei.” It is winter, and the narrator, an Amsterdam journal-keeper of sorts, records “A hostile world, a world in tatters. A world of cold and poverty.” He runs into Flip, an impoverished friend, and, puffing on precious cigars, they mull over old towns, old rivers, old vistas. (Flip remarks of the Occupation, “How could someone occupy me? That has nothing to do with me. Being poor has nothing to do with me either.”) The friends have further meetings. The narrator, a walker of course, discovers, while strolling, mystical inklings of contentment. The snow thaws, turns to slush.
Nescio’s second book was published in 1946. Further sketches and stories appeared in 1961, the year of his death. Only posthumously did his work become so known and esteemed that it is now part of the modern Dutch canon. The work is also popular: Nescio is beloved in Holland. This is partly on account of the gentle, humorous mischief he makes, a favorite joke being his fear of scandalizing his buttoned-up Dutch reader. In “Little Poet,” the hero
sees all the women sitting at the outdoor tables and walks past them to the street. “Oh God,” he thinks, “what if you performed a miracle now, what if all their clothes suddenly fell off?” A nearly mad little poet thinks the strangest things. You and I, dear reader, never think such things. And my lady readers … Mercy me, perish the thought.
The comic note is an element of the famous Nescionic voice, which has within it wryness, lightness, simplicity, and daring vulnerability. The desire to read Nescio (especially in the marvelous Dutch, of course) is the desire to be in the presence of that voice, whatever it may be saying to us. “Us,” here, refers not only to the familiar aggregate of readers. It refers also to the single reader, because one reads Nescio in the first person plural. His voice speaks to all our selves and most keenly to those which, unless we are not human, we must keep secret.
—JOSEPH O’NEILL
AMSTERDAM STORIES
THE FREELOADER
I
EXCEPT for the man who thought Sarphatistraat was the most beautiful place in Europe, I’ve never met anyone more peculiar than the freeloader.
The freeloader you found lying in your bed with his dirty shoes on when you came home late; the freeloader who smoked your cigars and filled his pipe with your tobacco and burned your coal and peered into your cupboards and borrowed your money and wore out your shoes and took your coat when he had to go home in the rain. The freeloader who always ordered in someone else’s name, who sat and drank jenever like a prince at the outdoor tables of the Hollandais on other people’s tabs, who borrowed umbrellas and never brought them back, who heated Bavink’s secondhand stove until it cracked, who wore his brother’s double collars and loaned out Appi’s books, and took trips abroad whenever he’d hit up his old man for money again, and wore suits he never paid for.
His first name was Japi. I never knew his last name. Bavink showed up with him when he came back from Veere.
All summer long Bavink had been painting in Zeeland and it was in Veere that he saw Japi for the first time. Japi was just sitting there. Bavink wondered once or twice: Now what kind of guy is that? No one knew. He was always sitting by the water somewhere, just sitting, hour after hour, not moving. At noon and at six he went inside for an hour, to eat; the rest of the day he sat. That lasted about three weeks, then Bavink didn’t see him anymore.
A couple of days later, Bavink was coming back from Rotterdam. Every now and then Bavink needed to have a lot of people around; he tromped along the Rotterdam harbor for a few days, then he’d had enough. On board the ship from Numansdorp to de Zijpe, there was Japi again, sitting. A stiff, cold wind was blowing pretty hard that morning and there were whitecaps on the water. Every now and then spray splashed up over the railing at the bow of the ship. The glass doors on the foredeck were closed; there was no one at the bow. Just Japi, peering out over the rail and getting completely drenched. “Look at that,” Bavink thought, “if it isn’t that same guy.” He went and stood next to him. The boat pitched and rolled. Japi sat on his little bench, held on tight to his cap, and let himself get soaked. This lasted quite a while, until he noticed that someone was standing next to him. “Nice weather we’re having,” Bavink said. Japi looked at Bavink with his big blue eyes and kept a tight hold on his cap. Just then a big wave splashed on board. There were drops of water on Japi’s face.
“It’s all right,” Japi said. The front of the ship crashed down onto the water with a jolt. Someone was trying to open the glass door of the salon, but the wind held it shut. “We’re making good time,” Bavink said, just to have something to say. “Well,” Japi said. “Time doesn’t
mean much to me.”
The conversation stalled. Japi looked at the waves. Bavink looked at Japi’s gray cap and thought: Who is this guy? Suddenly Japi said, “Look, there’s a rainbow in the water.” There was part of the arc of a rainbow in the water, but nothing in the sky. Japi looked at Bavink again with his big blue eyes and was talkative all of a sudden.
“Damn pretty here, if you ask me,” he said. “It’s too bad it can’t always be like this.” “In an hour we’ll be there,” Bavink said.
“You going to Zierikzee?” Japi asked.
“Actually, I’m continuing on to Veere tonight,” Bavink said. “I see,” Japi said. “You’re staying there?”
“Yes, I’m staying there and aren’t you the gentleman from Amsterdam who always sits by the water?” Then Japi had to laugh and he said, “I do sit by the water a lot, but ‘always’ is a bit much. At night I lie in bed, I need an hour to get dressed and eat breakfast, I eat lunch for half an hour and at six I have to eat again. But I do sit by the water a lot. That’s why I go to Zeeland. I still let the pressure get to me sometimes. Last week I went to Amsterdam. I had to, I was out of money.”
“You’re from Amsterdam?” Bavink asked. “I am, thank God,” Japi said. “Me too,” Bavink said. “You don’t paint?” Bavink asked. It was a bizarre question to just ask someone, but Bavink was still trying to figure out what kind of guy this was. “No, thank God,” said Japi, “and I’m not a poet and I’m not a nature-lover and I’m not an anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.”
That definitely appealed to Bavink.
The ship pitched, crashed, rolled, and swung from side to side; the water sprayed and poured over the rail; there was no one else to be seen on deck. Up ahead was an endless expanse of water, full of whitecaps; the shadow of a large cloud was a drifting island; far in the distance a black freighter pushed on, pitching wildly. “Look,” said Japi, “the City of Ghent.” You could see in the distance the water spraying up on either side of the bow; water churned and foamed and frothed around the propeller. The waves leapt with sharp crests in the hollow sea, green and blue and yellow and gray and white, depending on the depth and on the reflections of the clouds, nowhere and not for one single moment the same. A little tugboat was towing a barge and two tjalks.