The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Joost Zwagerman

  Jorge Luis Borges called the short story ‘the essential form of writing’, and he lent his name to one of the two types of stories identified by the American critic Harold Bloom: the Chekhovian story and the Borgesian story. (Obviously, the other variety is named after Anton Chekhov.) Bloom argued that Chekhovian stories begin fairly abruptly and end without a plot, and that they refer directly to a familiar reality. According to Bloom, Borgesian stories emphasize, above all, that they are linguistic constructs bearing no direct relationship to reality.

  The miraculous thing about many Dutch short stories is that they combine the best of both genres. Belcampo wrote hundreds of stories that begin in a Chekhovian mode, rooted (loosely, at least) in the realities of Dutch life, only to branch out into a mix of magical realism and burlesque surrealism. Their most distinctive feature is the self-referential use of language, which was also the trademark of the Revisor generation. This group, which emerged in the 1970s, was named after the literary magazine in which its members published (which in turn was named after a short story by Gogol). All four of them – A. F. Th. van der Heijden, Frans Kellendonk, Oek de Jong and Nicolaas Matsier – have stories in the present anthology.

  Frans Kellendonk summed up the literary credo of the Revisor group: ‘When we tell a story, we hold the form of that story, the form of the communication, up for debate, so that the reader knows what he is reading and can therefore remain critical.’ This point of view incensed writers like Maarten ’t Hart, who became embroiled in a ferocious debate with the Revisor writers. ’t Hart, the leading exponent of the neo-naturalistic Dutch story, called the Revisor stories ‘chandeliers that won’t light up’. So here we find at least a temporary dividing line between Dutch writers of Borgesian and Chekhovian stories.

  But as I mentioned, many other writers have no regard for that dividing line, instead combining the best of both genres. For example, Harry Mulisch once said that his stories always ‘begin somewhere in the real world and always end somewhere else’. That is undeniably true of the Mulisch story in this volume, ‘What Happened to Sergeant Massuro?’, about a soldier who undergoes a gradual metamorphosis. From its Chekhovian beginning, the story shifts into a purely Borgesian mode, in which dream and waking, hallucination and reality, seem to flow into one another.

  ‘What Happened to Sergeant Massuro?’ is set in New Guinea, and contrary to the old misconception that Dutch literature is inward-looking and set within our national borders, many of these stories unfold outside the Netherlands. ‘Green’, by A. Alberts, for instance, takes place on an unnamed island in the Indies. The settings of Arnon Grunberg’s stories (both fiction and non-fiction) vary widely, from Hungary to Afghanistan and from Berlin to New York. ‘Glass’, by Willem Frederik Hermans, is situated in post-war Germany and may represent the confluence of the Chekhovian and Borgesian traditions; it begins as a realistic narrative in a hospital ward for wounded soldiers, but winds up as a surreal tale of suspense, characteristic of early work by Hermans, who began his career as a writer of short stories that were equal parts surrealism and nihilism.

  We often find indications in Dutch short stories that the authors are in conversation, both stylistically and compositionally, with kindred spirits who worked in other languages. Remco Campert mentioned Capote and Fitzgerald. Emants felt a bond with Zola and Turgenev. Mensje van Keulen shows a similar family connection to the prose of Patricia Highsmith and Flannery O’Connor. Nicolaas Matsier’s story ‘The Minnema Variations’ plays with reality and imagination in a lucid manner reminiscent of Italo Calvino. Maarten ’t Hart has frequently pointed out his affinity with Anthony Trollope. Arnon Grunberg, who couches the relentless darkness of his world view in deceptively chirpy prose, has been tipped in the Netherlands as the great successor to Hermans, who referred to his own literary approach as ‘creative nihilism’. Grunberg himself, although clearly influenced by Hermans’ early novels, has repeatedly suggested that his work can also (or even primarily) be read as a dialogue, and sometimes a debate, with the oeuvre of J. M. Coetzee. Sanneke van Hassel’s stories reflect the formative literary influence of the generation of American authors known as dirty realists: Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. The youngest author in this anthology is Joost de Vries, who has been heralded on the Dutch literary scene as ‘the new Mulisch’. De Vries, an author and critic, fashions his stories with a playfulness and an interest in formal experimentation reminiscent of his generation’s most idiosyncratic American writer: David Foster Wallace.

  Almost all the authors in this collection have similar ties to authors working in major languages, ties which are essential to their creative process. It is rare for Dutch writers to place themselves in a strictly Dutch tradition; their literary horizons almost always lie beyond the bounds of their language and nation.

  Of all the contributors to this anthology, Maarten Biesheuvel may take his kinship with foreign authors to the most radical extreme. Biesheuvel’s stories are elusive, irresistible nonsense arias, both ludicrous and filled with despair, and the literary universe that they paint is unique to its very core. Although Biesheuvel is as Dutch as writers come, he also holds a literary passport from nineteenth-century Russia, a supernatural connection to three authors – Gogol, Chekhov and Dostoevsky – whom he has described as reincarnated and peacefully co-existing within himself. This may seem like an awfully self-aggrandizing statement. But if you read one of Biesheuvel’s stories, you will realize that statements like these are inseparable from the unique music of his nonsense arias.

  What, other than length, distinguishes a short story from a novel? One major characteristic that separates the two is that many short stories offer a place of refuge, a sanctuary, for fictional loners, for eccentrics, hermits and outcasts, for incorrigible fantasists, vintage nutcases, introverts, reclusive dreamers, darkly romantic criminals and other misfits. The American writer Frank O’Connor felt that this was a vital aspect of the genre, so much so that in 1962 he called his classic study of the American short story The Lonely Voice.

  This lonely voice addresses the reader not as an ally, but as a sounding board who, in reading, creates the setting for the voice. Short stories thus demand a more active form of reading than do novels. While a novel reader always expects to be rewarded for his or her tendency to identify with the main character – the mark of a philistine, Nabokov tells us – the reader of a short story must be prepared to fill in the details of the world left out by the writer for lack of space. This is because an effective short story often relies on the hint, the open question, the missing link. The story is embedded in a larger textual world created by the reader, based on bits of information carefully meted out by the author. While the novelist fills in, making the reader’s job as easy as possible, the author of a short story rubs out, leaving all sorts of work for the reader to do.

  Milan Kundera has written, ‘Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.’ A short story presents a scrap, a shred of that ‘map of existence’. And it is not the writer’s task, but the reader’s, to draw the entire map, with nothing more to go on than that small slip of paper.

  I have mentioned that in remarkably many short stories, these shreds of the map of human existence are extended to us by ‘a lonely voice’, a misunderstood outsider. This is a second prompt to readers to use their own imagination, first of all by asking the question, ‘Whose voice am I hearing in this story?’ Often, the author does not supply a straightforward, neatly packaged answer. How unreliable is the narrator in the average short story? Far more unreliable than the main characters in plenty of novels; that much is clear.

  On the fundamental shiftiness of many ‘I’-figures in short stories, D. H. Lawrence wrote, ‘Trust the tale, not the teller.’ In this anthology, many a narrator is troubled by a feverish brain. Is the poet Minnema, in Matsier’s ‘The Minnema Variations’, right to suspect that he does not really exist, that he’s merely the puppet of a nightmarish being with w
hom he carries on a correspondence, real or dreamed? Is the poet Minnema writing, or being written? This question fills Minnema with an existential horror that drives him to the brink of madness.

  Again, madness. While it forms the very fabric of Maarten Biesheuvel’s writing, madness also plays a role in many other stories, from Emants’s ‘An Eccentric’ to Grunberg’s ‘Someone Else’. Hallucinations, the fear of insanity, an overheated intellect, la folie, a short circuit in the brain – elements like these set the tone and form the marrow of numerous stories in this collection.

  Dutch writers frequently explore the vague borderland between delusion and reality, often sketching the disturbing process of delusion eating away at those borders and ultimately conquering the entire territory. In this respect, Nescio’s celebrated story ‘Young Titans’ may form the blueprint for the characteristic, half-mad Dutch short story. One of the characters most cherished by Dutch readers of ‘Young Titans’ is the painter Bavink, who ends up in an asylum after failing to achieve his dream. Bavink’s simple, innocent ambition also happens to be extravagant and practically unattainable: he wants to paint the sun on a piece of painters’ linen. Not an image of the sun, or an imagined sun, but the sun itself. This ideal, as I said, is both naive and arrogant: to succeed, wouldn’t Bavink have to unseat God from his throne? Incidentally, the God we encounter in ‘Young Titans’ is no Old Testament tyrant, but something more like a Buddha adapted to fit pragmatic Dutch notions of give-and-take, a ‘lonely voice’ from an unknowable reality, a voice of detachment that offers the young men in this story a Zen-like state of Being. ‘Young Titans’, as I mentioned, dates from the early twentieth century, and its spiritual dimension is anything but sappy and sentimental – subversive and surreptitious would be more accurate. The ‘Young Titans’ are fundamentally Dutch cousins of the two good buddies in Kerouac’s On the Road, except that Nescio’s young men embark on their journey without actually lifting a finger. In perfect repose, they hurtle through the heavens at high speed. If that doesn’t open the door to madness just a sliver …

  In the mental institution, Bavink often sits staring into the sun for so long that his eyes start to burn. The nurses tell him not to stare at the sun, but that doesn’t stop him. ‘Do you understand what the sun wants from me?’ Bavink asks his old friend Koekebakker.

  What does the sun want from me?

  The average cool-headed, calculating Dutchman is immune to the power of this High Romantic question. But to Bavink, it seems only natural that the sun wants something from him – he just doesn’t know what. His question, in all its compact force, may exemplify the most striking ambition of the short stories in this anthology: to capture the world of madness in words. To give a voice to madness. To show madness itself, lurking beneath the surface of the story. To embody madness in language. Just as Bavink wanted to show the sun itself, on canvas.

  Joost Zwagerman

  Haarlem, September 2014

  Translated by David McKay

  Chronology

  1588 Founding of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. The States General are the decision-making body and the government is led by a grand pensionary, while military leadership is in the hands of a stadtholder. Although it has been seven years since the Spanish king was deposed under the Act of Abjuration, the war with Spain has not abated. Calvinism is gaining ground at the expense of the Catholic Church.

  1602 Establishment of the East India Company, a shipping company set up by the States General to coordinate the lucrative trade with the Far East.

  1612 The first sizeable polder to be drained is the Beemster, by means of forty-three windmills.

  1621 Establishment of the West India Company for trade with North and South America.

  1626 Publication of a collection of political songs, entitled Dutch Sounds of Remembrance (Nederlandtsche gedenck-clanck), of which one, ‘The Wilhelmus’, will later become the Dutch national anthem.

  1637 Publication of the States Bible (Statenbijbel), which will remain the official bible translation of the Reformed Church until 2010, exercising a powerful influence on the standardization of the Dutch language.

  1638 First performance of the play Gijsbrecht van Aemstel, written by the country’s most important tragedian, Joost van den Vondel. It is traditionally performed on New Year’s Day in the Amsterdam Schouwburg.

  1642 Rembrandt completes The Night Watch.

  1648 Peace of Münster. After eighty years of war, Spain recognizes the Republic as a sovereign state.

  1654 Performance of Vondel’s tragedy Lucifer, about the fall of the archangel. The play is banned after three performances.

  1655 Completion of the Town Hall on Dam Square in Amsterdam by architect Jacob van Campen. Amsterdam is now the most important mercantile city in the world. It has more than 100,000 inhabitants.

  1672 ‘Disaster Year’, with the start of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) as well as declarations of war against the Republic by France and by two German bishoprics.

  1677 Death of Spinoza. Publication of Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata), about his pantheist worldview in which God is equated with nature. A ban follows, but the treatise is distributed across Europe and becomes hugely influential, as do Spinoza’s other writings. This is regarded as the start of the Radical Enlightenment.

  1685 Flight of 70,000 Protestants (Huguenots) from France to the Republic, many intellectuals among them. They integrate with the Dutch and establish their own periodicals.

  1689 In the Glorious Revolution, William III, who is married to the daughter of James II, king of England, becomes the Dutch stadtholder, remaining so until his death.

  1691 Balthasar Bekker writes The World Bewitched (De Betoverde Weereld), in which he maintains that witches and devils do not exist.

  1697 Tsar Peter the Great of Russia arrives in the Republic to learn shipbuilding.

  1775 Start of the American War of Independence. The Americans receive financial support from the Dutch Republic. Their Declaration of Independence is inspired by the Republic’s Act of Abjuration of 1581.

  1781 In the night of 25 September, anonymous pamphlets are distributed across the Dutch Republic entitled To the People of the Netherlands (Aan het Volk van Nederland), in which the population is urged to rebel against the politics of the stadtholder and his regents. The Patriot movement arises, made up of citizens who, based on Enlightenment ideas, want greater involvement in politics. Society becomes divided between the Orangists (loyal to the stadtholder) and the Patriots.

  1782 Publication of the epistolary novel The History of Miss Sara Burgerhart (De historie van Mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart) by Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken. It is the first Dutch novel to focus on the middle classes.

  1784 Foundation of the Society for Public Welfare, which aspires to spread Enlightenment ideas through a system of schools, libraries, readings, school textbooks and debates. The aim is to abolish social evils and cultivate good citizenship.

  1785 The Patriots take power in several cities. The stadtholder flees The Hague and withdraws to his summer palaces.

  1787 The wife of the stadtholder, sister to Frederick William II, king of Prussia, is detained and held by Patriots on her way to The Hague. At her request a Prussian army comes to the aid of the Orangists and defeats the Patriots. Many Patriots are imprisoned or flee to France.

  1789 Start of the French Revolution.

  1793 France declares war on the Republic, where the stadtholder is William V.

  1795 Since the rivers are frozen, the French army is able to advance into the northern Low Countries, with the help of returning Patriots. The country becomes a vassal state to France. Stadtholder William V flees to England. The Batavian Republic is established.

  1797 Appointment at the University of Leiden of the first professor responsible for the teaching of the Dutch language and rhetoric, Matthijs Siegenbeek.

  1798 Introduction of the first Dutch constitution,
the Staatsregeling voor het Bataafsche Volk.

  1806 Emperor Napoleon of France appoints his brother Louis Napoleon as the first king of Holland. Through his brother, Napoleon wishes to exert greater influence over the country.

  1810 Louis Napoleon is deposed by his brother for being too favourably inclined towards the Dutch. Napoleon turns the Dutch kingdom into a province of France.

  1813 After the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s power is broken. A Russian army arrives to help liberate the Dutch. The stadtholder has meanwhile died, but his son returns from England and declares himself sovereign prince of the United Netherlands.

  1814 The Congress of Vienna decides to unite the Southern Netherlands with the Northern Netherlands to form a strong buffer state against France.

  1815 William I becomes king of the United Netherlands and introduces a new constitution.

  1816 The Dutch East Indies becomes the official name for all the Dutch colonies in the Malay Archipelago. Dutch is made their official language.

  1830 The Belgian Revolution. The southern provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands rise in revolt against the policies of King William I, forming an independent Belgium.