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

by Joost Zwagerman

  1837 Establishment of De Gids, the first fully-fledged Dutch literary magazine.

  1839 The Netherlands’ first railway is built, from Amsterdam to Haarlem.

  1848 Introduction of a new constitution that limits the power of the king and turns the Netherlands into a constitutional monarchy.

  1859 Under the pseudonym Multatuli, Eduard Douwes Dekker writes the novel Max Havelaar, which denounces colonial abuses in the Dutch East Indies. Max Havelaar has since become one of the most translated novels of Dutch literature.

  1863 The Law on Secondary Education introduces a new type of school, the Higher Civic School, to train children for senior positions in trade and industry.

  1871 Aletta Jacobs becomes the first woman to be admitted to a Dutch university (Groningen).

  1874 Samuel van Houten’s Child Protection Law bans child labour before the age of twelve.

  1885 Establishment of De Nieuwe Gids, an important and innovative literary magazine, featuring writers and artists who are adherents of naturalism, impressionism and symbolism.

  1885 Opening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

  1890 Suicide of Vincent van Gogh. In 1888 he painted his famous Sunflowers.

  1890 Publication of Louis Couperus’s debut novel, the naturalistic Eline Vere, which has a powerful impact on readers and is much translated and reprinted. Couperus is said to have been one of the most frequently read authors of the period.

  1894 Establishment of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Support for the socialist movement had been increasing for several years.

  1899 The first international peace conference is held in The Hague. The decision is made to establish a Permanent Court of Arbitration, to be based in The Hague. American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie finances the building of the Peace Palace, which is completed in 1913.

  1900 Education is made compulsory for children aged six to twelve.

  1914 Start of the First World War. The Netherlands pursues a policy of neutrality. A million Belgian refugees find temporary refuge in the Netherlands.

  1917 Establishment of the modernist periodical De Stijl. Those involved include Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld. Their aim is the complete overthrow of traditional art.

  1919 Historian Johan Huizinga writes The Waning of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen), a book that soon meets with worldwide acclaim.

  1935 The last building by architect H. P. Berlage is completed, the Municipal Museum (Gemeentemuseum) in The Hague. Berlage combines the notion of a synthesis of the arts with a modernist style.

  1940 German troops invade the Netherlands, which capitulates after the heavy bombing of Rotterdam.

  1941 Establishment of the Dutch Chamber of Culture (Kultuurkamer). Writers and artists must become members of the Chamber before they are allowed to publish or exhibit their work. They are required to declare themselves in agreement with National Socialism.

  1944 Piet Mondrian dies in New York before completing his abstract Victory Boogie-Woogie, in which he attempts to distil music and painting into blocks of colour. It will become one of his most famous canvases.

  1945 End of the Second World War.

  1947 The father of Anne Frank, who died in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, publishes her diary of her years spent in hiding (1942–4), under the title Het achterhuis, ‘The Annexe’.

  1947 Gerard van het Reve publishes The Evenings (De avonden), regarded as the most important novel about the atmosphere prevailing among young people immediately after the war.

  1948 Surrealist-expressionist painters from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam form the group CoBrA. Its Dutch representatives, Constant, Karel Appel and Corneille, are joined by poets who will later become famous as the Vijftigers, writing spontaneous, free verse. The leading figure among them is Lucebert.

  1949 The Netherlands recognizes the independence of Indonesia, four years after the colony declared itself independent in 1945.

  1951 First Dutch television broadcast.

  1953 Flooding in the province of Zeeland causes 1,835 deaths (in fact 1,836 – one newborn child drowned before its birth could be registered).

  1956 The cabinet under Willem Drees introduces the General Old-Age Law, giving all citizens the right to a pension from the age of sixty-five.

  1958 Publication of The Darkroom of Damocles (De donkere kamer van Damokles), the most highly regarded novel by prominent author Willem Frederik Hermans, about appearance and reality during the Second World War.

  1966 A turbulent year, especially in Amsterdam, with the Provo movement and the start of student protests.

  1969 Formation of Dolle Mina, a women’s emancipation movement. Meanwhile Aktie Tomaat and Aktie Notenkraker protest against the conservative repertoire of theatre companies and orchestras.

  1982 Publication of The Assault (De Aanslag) by Harry Mulisch, the book that will make him one of the most translated of Dutch authors.

  1985 The Schengen Agreement abolishes border controls between European countries.

  2000 Paul Scheffer writes ‘The Multicultural Drama’ (‘Het multiculturele drama’), an article in which he foresees the creation of an underclass of second-generation immigrants who will not integrate and will become radicalized.

  2001 Same-sex marriage is recognized in law.

  2002 The euro replaces the guilder.

  2004 Murder of writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist.

  2005 Establishment of the Party for Freedom by Geert Wilders, which will enter the Lower House of parliament for the first time in 2006. The party attracts a great deal of attention and represents a large number of dissatisfied voters, marking a turn towards intolerance and the extreme right in Dutch politics.

  2009 Publication of De Nederlandse en Vlaamse Literatuur vanaf 1880 in 250 verhalen, a 1,600-page anthology by Joost Zwagerman, hailed by the Dutch press as ‘a monumental publication’ (NRC Handelsblad) and a ‘treasure trove’ (Het Parool).

  2015 Suicide of author Joost Zwagerman, a leading figure among a new generation of writers of Dutch literature in the 1990s as well as an essayist and compiler of anthologies of Dutch literature, including this Penguin anthology.

  1

  Marcellus Emants

  An Eccentric

  Een zonderling

  Z. was sketched at a debating table in the club. So it is possible he never existed. But the description was as follows: according to Z. creation was an insane act of the Absolute, as a result of which we are doomed to live in absurdity, act in absurdity, endure absurdity. Z. does not trumpet that doctrine about. On the contrary. Usually he refuses to speak about it; he is almost never talkative. As a result Z. has no friends and only very rarely comes into contact with his acquaintances. Many people therefore consider him a fool, an ass or a poseur; but those unwilling to judge from a distance and by appearances do not believe that Z. deserves such an unfavourable judgement. There are also those who see him as a brilliant thinker who unfortunately lacks sufficient ambition to publicize his ideas. That he is an eccentric, no one denies, and in the empty streets of the quiet town he lives in, Z. cannot venture out of his house without being the target of jokes, or at least giving rise to a conversation. The greengrocer, giggling all the while, tells the kitchen maid who opens the door to him that he has just seen that old duffer with his big floppy hat and his eternal raincoat. The schoolboy asks his classmates who on earth that man is, who always walks alone and looks straight ahead as if he is furious. The visitor to the club enquires of his fellow members: what kind of individual is Z., what does he do and what does he live on? With his long beard and long hair he looks like a street preacher; but he never preaches.

  There are also those who classify Z. among the deaf mutes.

  The truth is that Z., who ekes out a poor living from a small capital sum, does nothing, wants nothing and that most people cannot imagine such an existence, while for Z. this way of life is the only way of acting with as little absurdit
y as possible, of spreading as little absurdity as possible and having as little bother from absurdity as possible. So – someone once said to Z. – you are a philosopher. However, Z. denied this as firmly as possible. Of all the absurd people – and according to him no one living is entirely free of absurdity – he calls philosophers the most absurd of all, as they try to make sense of nonsense, which is impossible anyway.

  Z. seldom allows himself to be talked into giving a more extensive exposition of his view of life. If things get that far, he begins as follows: What is the first thing that a newly born human does? Suck. Why does it do that? To stay alive. Now isn’t it absurd that someone who knows nothing of life in general and in particular does not know whether his own life will turn out to his taste, still immediately wants to maintain that life? And human beings, who are and remain blind to the future, continue with that absurdity until the last ounce of vitality in them is used up. If he can no longer see or hear virtually anything and no longer has any limb of his body properly under control, if he, from morn till night and often all night long, has nothing more to do but suffer pain and endure misery, he still tries to prolong his dreadful existence with all kinds of remedies. Isn’t that absurd? Isn’t it also absurd that we condemn, abhor or lament suicides – the only truly sensible people?

  And what does a person do as soon as he gains the least bit of awareness of a world around him? Play. Isn’t that absurd too? He wraps a rope around the arm of a chair, sits behind it with a whip in his hand and imagines that, in a horse-drawn carriage, he is making headway. Not nonsense? He rocks dolls in his arm, dresses them, gives them food and drink and pretends they are children. Not nonsense? When he has grown a little older, he has to cram his head full of thousands of so-called useful facts, which he will never bother about later or call them incorrect and discard by the time when he might have use for them. It must be said to man’s credit that in his youth he himself finds this extremely absurd and only does it … because older fools, i.e. foolish parents, force him to, for fear of cultivating a generation that would in an unbiased way see the absurdity of all this. But before he has finished his studies, he immerses himself in the greatest possible absurdity when he falls in love and wants to marry. Love! Our senseless art lives on it; but I ask you: can anything crazier be conceived than love? Look around where you will and you will see that people do not differ greatly, either outwardly or inwardly. Apart from a few hunchbacks, freaks, rare abnormalities and great criminals … and even in them the human type can be easily recognized … individuals display only minor physical and mental differences. Yet a person in love suddenly hits on the insane idea that one being, of whom he did not even suspect the existence yesterday, is in all respects inwardly and outwardly an ideal, elevated high above all beings of the same species. And in order to show his stupidity clearly, he presumes to claim a kind of right of possession over that idea. He can no longer imagine his own existence separately from that other being, and dreams of the most wonderful delights if only he can be united with it for his whole life. All that this other possesses: eyes, nose, mouth, hands, indeed, even those parts he has not yet seen, make him swoon with rapture and without a trace or shadow of proof, he ascribes to the one he adores all the qualities of mind and heart, which in daily life qualify as beautiful, noble and good. That a person is not responsible for his actions in this period of confusion is generally recognized; but no one realizes that love must be seen only as a temporary intensification of the enduring malady: vitality.

  Once married – in other words, given possession of the object of his crazy affection – he does everything possible to increase the burdens and pains of his life, although he constantly bewails those burdens and pains. He also maintains that those burdens and pains have been imposed on him, for the sake of his moral improvement, an improvement which those around him may enjoy but he himself never could. He mainly achieves this increase of burdens and pains by producing children, who continue his madness, who torment and taunt him with it, while they cannot yet stand on their own two feet and leave him to his own devices as soon as he expects recompense from them for all he has spent on their upbringing and all he has endured for their sake. If only this stupid longing brought him to the point of buying or renting them! Then at least he would be able to assess what he gained. But that would not be absurd enough. A woman who refuses to buy the smallest item of merchandise without having felt it first and tested it for durability does not shrink at all from braving the most appalling pains to have children, though it is completely uncertain whether they will be affected with the most dreadful disorders of body and mind. And both parents love these creatures before they have ever seen them. They would not sacrifice a single guilder to a lottery of millions of duds and a single prize; but they give up the relative quiet, the relative freedom and the relatively carefree existence of the whole of the rest of their life with the greatest frivolity for the highly problematic chance of being able to enjoy a small amount of pleasure from their children.

  And while the wife is occupied with the children, the husband toils and sweats to demolish what their predecessors built up and to produce new works for his fellow men, which his successors will in turn destroy just as contemptuously. Unless those works are themselves not completed and no one cares any longer for the decaying piles of rubble. That a man is actually envied during this labour by idiots, who are even sicker than he is, is still belittled and disparaged by those just as crazy, who perceive only the sickness of their fellow man and not their own malady, he himself sees only a necessary evil native to all labour, and in his blindness he curses the do-nothings, who, slightly less crazy than he, have asked themselves: why should I shoulder all those burdens; isn’t it bad enough to have to be alive? If the worker receives from the government – which he of course hates, because no one wants to be ruled – a patch of ribbon in his buttonhole as an honour and a reward … then he proves … the man who laughs at other people’s decorations … not one jot more sensible than in his childhood, when seated on a wooden hobby horse, he imagined that the nanny took him for a general.

  Oh, Z. would then conclude, consider frenzied human activity where you like and if you are not too intoxicated by the delusions of a crazy life instinct, you’ll see the insanity of it all soon enough. Look, for example, at how human beings constantly fight against the maladies that undermine them and at the same time do their best to keep the sick alive, by whom those maladies are perpetuated. Listen to them eternally arguing and proving, although they admit they know nothing. See how they honour truth as something sacred, and constantly lie to and cheat each other on a small and a grand scale. Notice how everyone is praised after his death, but is disparaged, thwarted and even persecuted during his lifetime. Consider that people regard earthly life as the most valuable thing they possess, the sine qua non for enjoying everything else, and consider how frivolously they behave with that life, risk reckless adventures, shorten it through their behaviour, sacrifice it for figments of the imagination like a love, the fatherland or honour. Wherever you look, you see absurdity, nothing but absurdity, and it’s just as well that man is finally coming to realize that. Many years ago we began treating the worst criminals as insane; in our age we are considering setting up so-called asylums for degenerates, and it may not be long before the whole of society is constructed on the model of a gigantic madhouse with a system of wards.

  Probably this will herald a period of relative happiness for mankind; but for as long as human beings try to introduce sense into nonsense their work is inevitably doomed to failure.

  When the narrator finished telling them about this philosophy of Z.’s, most members of the debating table could not come up with a better response than a pitying or contemptuous laugh. However, one said: What the man is maintaining is not as daft as all that. Whoever admits that he is insane undoubtedly is and whoever doesn’t admit it is probably already too insane to see his situation. The others’ view of this one speaker was: another m
adman.

  Translated by Paul Vincent

  2

  Louis Couperus

  The Opera Glasses

  De binocle

  It was about five years ago in Dresden that a young tourist, a Dutch Eurasian journalist, a bright chap, of a slightly nervous disposition, very mild-tempered despite his tropical blood, bought a ticket for the opera one morning, for a seat in the front row of the fourth tier, to hear The Valkyrie. At the time the fourth tier was where all the foreigners who could not afford the luxury of a box of their own sat; indeed, even those who could often preferred the fourth tier to the third or the second, though the abyss of the wide auditorium opened up between that tier and the stage. It was a splendid day; the parks were clad in golden leaves; a sweet sense of joie de vivre floated through the ample sky and the young tourist, in his melancholy-tinged loneliness, was happy to wander through the beautiful city, walk into a museum, have lunch in a summerhouse somewhere by the sun-drenched waters of the Elbe. And he had the happy expectation of hearing The Valkyrie that evening, an opera he did not know, for which he reproached himself, adoring Wagner as he did.

  The hours passed without him speaking to a soul except the waitress and the tram conductor. He had a cup of tea and a bite to eat, since as the opera began very early he knew there would be no time to dine. And then, satisfied and gently, quietly happy, as was his nature, he walked calmly – he had plenty of time – to the Opera House. A few shops in Pragerstrasse were already closing for the day and he saw an optician instructing his assistant to put up the shutters in front of the window, when he remembered that he didn’t have any opera glasses. It occurred to him in a flash that the fourth tier, where he had often sat, at the back, was a long way from the stage and that opera glasses would come in handy. He also reflected that he had had a cheap day and that his seat cost only three marks and now his eye happened to catch that of the optician on the lookout for custom, he waved to him, as if by inspiration, hastened his step and called out, while still on the pavement: