Netherlands

Literature

Pathologies (Excerpt)

PATHOLOGIES: THE DOWNFALL OF JOHAN VAN VERE DE WITH

BY JACOB ISRAEL DE HAAN

TRANSLATED BY PAUL VINCENT

Jacob Israel de Haan

 

This is my refined, sensitively presented description of the pathologies that were the downfall of Johan van Vere de With.

 

The market square forms the rectangular interior of the small town of Cuilemburg, which is, however, very much like a village. In the centre of one of the long sides stood their house, an old dwelling.

From outside it seemed like a double residence, consisting of two step-gabled wings on either side of a wide door, wider than two front doors. Still, on the inside it was a single house. Three people lived in it: a boy, Johan, his father, and a very old woman, Sien. Because the house was so big, and these people generated very little noise, the place often seemed quite empty of life.

Johan’s mother had died quite a while ago, before he and his father moved to Cuilemburg. So there were no rooms in their present house that she had occupied, which lessened the unhappiness of Johan’s father. There were, though, many of her things, which for Johan were strange and of little value, but which for his father were very precious, irreplaceable treasures.

Johan occupied two rooms at the back of the house, both of which had a view of and access to the dark old fully planted garden, which was as large and mysterious as a wood. But the darkness did not come as far as the house. Between it and the garden was a paved path and a meadow, in which in the good old days there had been a display of many multi-coloured flowers. In the evenings Johan sat working at his window; the standard lamp shone out with its delicate light, a golden hazy sun that refined and transformed the colour of the flowers, like those in a strange, fragile story. The lamplight could not penetrate the dark, closed, wood-like garden. The trees stood in ranks like a black rampart, behind which there loomed the other world. [ . . . ]

 

Johan’s father, like his mother, was born into a milieu of flawless culture and lifestyle. They were unacquainted with any manual, coarsening labour, but were familiar only with work involving the full, lucid intellect. Johan resembled both his parents. All his life he was a strikingly beautiful young man. Until his life was disrupted in a terrible way, he preserved an aristocratic calm. By the age of sixteen he was fully grown. He looked like an immaculately groomed young man of twenty, who, however, seems younger.

His body was slim and finely structured, and impeccably dressed. Johan had blue eyes, like blue roses would be, were they in our gardens.

When he turned eight years old, he did not go to school because his father thought it more reasonable for his mental development to stay quietly at home, since Johan showed that he felt deeply, but that his feelings were unstable. He did have a reliable intellect, but precisely because of that his father did not want it to be put under too much strain. This is why when Johan was sixteen, he studied with boys who were two years younger. That was not unpleasant, because Johan was not stupid, and so remained effortlessly at the top of the class. He had little to do with the other boys, partly because of the age difference and partly because of his different temperament and nature.

In the last two years, since he had started to grow up, he had developed strange, intense attachments to small, well-dressed, frail boys at the school. He could not fathom why, since he knew of himself that he did not easily bestow friendship. But he felt that this attachment was dangerous, of such a kind that he could not say anything about it to his father. As his body grew stronger, those dangerous experiences redoubled and grew stronger. He dreamed at night of some boys, and he committed obscene acts with them in those dreams, which they also committed with him. Those acts were pleasant to him and evoked powerful feelings. After waking, he noticed that his nightclothes were damp and dirty. He often felt helpless and discouraged, while his thoughts were very melancholy.

Although he knew that these things happened in life and in the body of every boy growing into a man, he was ashamed, and felt very unhappy. He was quite clear that he was unwilling and unable to talk to his father about it, and at the same time he knew that it would bring him relief and solace, if he were to speak to his father about it. Often Johan felt an intense urge to speak to his father, and the fact that he did not give into that urge caused him pain.

 

Johan was always sure that he never had the slightest problem with his father. He never gave it a second thought in his earliest years. But he did think about it, with joy, which moved him deeply, when he heard of other families where there was smouldering discord between the father and his sons. Later he realised that his father never needed to desist from doing anything for his sake, just as he never needed to for his father’s sake, since because of their mutual affection all actions were settled in a calm way.

 

However, recently there had been a devastating upheaval in Johan’s life, because he began to involve his beloved and respected father in the dreams full of obscene behaviour. His father performed indecent acts on him and he in turn did the same with his father. And both of them enjoyed it greatly.

When he awoke Johan was speechlessly and vacantly ashamed at the horror of such thoughts. He looked at his father, his blossoming blue eyes open with shame, fear, and bewilderment. He could not possibly be calm and pleasant. He was also frightened to death of being difficult with his father. The terrible effort he had to make to remain normal made him precisely shy and abnormal. So that his father noticed and asked him naturally and lovingly if there were any problem. This made Johan hopeless with the deepest wretchedness.

The dreams repeated themselves, and from now on concerned only his father. They ruined every night for him. He became neurotic and deathly pale. His blue eyes dried up, becoming wrinkled in their delicate blue and dull in their whites, which had formerly been clear. Johan saw that his father already noticed his sick decline, and that made him precisely sicker still. Finally Johan said, with a calm voice and careful choice of words: ‘Father, I have a great sorrow and it’s making me ill, as you can see. But I can’t tell you what it is… and that the worst thing of all… but perhaps it will get better now that I’ve told you.’ 

They looked at each other with emotion, and this emotion shattered Johan’s calm and firmness of purpose. He sobbed, suddenly broken. He hugged his father, kissing him like when he was a little boy, on his eyes and open mouth. But then Johan felt the same evil and pleasant sensation as in his dreams with the obscene acts, and he felt that his clothes were becoming dirty and damp. His body felt wretched. He released his father from his paralysed arms, and crept upstairs to the bathroom, where he sluiced off his excited body with hard, cold, running water. His father heard the water raging and rattling. It made him uneasy, failing to understand the shyness, the wildness, and the strange behaviour of his beloved son. He thought of the madness of his wife, who had killed herself in a strange way one night when everyone thought that she had been completely free of suicidal plans. The man shivered and trembled with fear for his son. Johan was always precise in the shape of his sentences and in the value of his words, but Johan was never exaggerated in the strength of his expression. Now he had finally spoken, after a long period of suffering, as carefully as if he were writing the words instead of speaking them, he had confessed to a great sorrow that was making him ill, because he could not speak about it.

That same afternoon at the table Johan raised the subject again. Their table was always lavishly laid and provided with many choice artefacts. The boy was greatly pleased, in a way that he was not often pleased, at their possession of so many objects of such beauty. In that exquisite mood the boy addressed his father, while his blue eyes bloomed in the thin sunny light of the lamp. He said: ‘Perhaps my sorrow will pass again… and then we’ll be at ease with each other again.’ As he said this, he paid anxious and careful attention to the state of his body. His body, however, remained calm, without any noxious effect. Johan was very pleased about this, and he again enjoyed an evening with his father.


Jacob Israël de Haan (1881–1924) was a Dutch teacher, novelist, poet, legal scholar, and journalist. In 1904, De Haan published his first novel Pijpelijntjes, which is a thinly veiled version of his own promiscuous gay life with Arnold Aletrino in Amsterdam's “Pijp” working-class district. The book is dedicated to Aletrino. Aletrino and De Haan’s fiancée bought almost all copies of the book to prevent a scandal that would involve both of them, and De Haan subsequently lost his job. De Haan’s Pathologies: The Downfall of Johan van Vere de With was published in Rotterdam in 1908. He also wrote poetry, and a line from one of his poems adorns the Amsterdam Homomonument. In the 1910s he became interested in Zionism and left Amsterdam for Jerusalem. He was murdered in 1924 by a member of the Zionist organization Haganah. Read more about De Haan here

Paul Vincent (b. 1942) studied at Cambridge and in Amsterdam. Until 1989 he was a professor at the Dutch department of University College London. Since then he has worked as a freelance translator. His translations from Dutch literature include works by Willem Bilderdijk, H.M. Van den Brink, Louis Couperus, Midas Dekkers, Douwe Fokkema, Arnon Grunberg, W.F. Hermans, P.C. Hooft, Harry Mulisch, Saskia Noort, Paul Van OstaijenErik VlaminckGuido GezelleWillem ElsschotLouis Paul BoonErwin Mortier and Leonard Nolens.

Literature, Publishing

Amsterdam, 1900 (Essay)

Amsterdam, 1900: Guided by Monsieur de Bougrelon

By Sander Bink

This essay first appeared in Dutch at rond1900.nl.

In a decadent villa in Amsterdam North, on our crowded desk at the rond1900 offices, for a while a nice little book was waiting for us to review: Monsieur de Bougrelon by Jean Lorrain, for the first time in English translation. You, the well-read Decadent, of course already know of this gem of a novella, which was first published in 1897 and is set in fin-de-siècle Amsterdam. If you are a good Decadent you have read it in the original French in a first or early edition, or otherwise you might have read it in the 1978 Dutch translation Denkbeeldige genietingen (Imaginary Pleasures). Although this translation by Jeanne Holierhoek is, as far as we can judge, quite good, it was still made some forty years ago and a new translator might do it just a little differently today, thus keeping the text alive for a new generation of readers. Unfortunately in our small country it seems to be quite uncommon to translate classic French Decadent writers, let alone translate one of their texts anew. Dutch literary publishers seem to have very little interest in the French Decadents in general, despite their lasting modernity and literary value.

So we recommend that you buy this recent edition by the delightful new independent publisher Spurl, to keep your Lorrain collection up to date but also because it is a good-looking book and the modern translation keeps the text fresh and sparkling. Their site also links to the justly unanimous rave reviews of Bougrelon, which contains a detailed afterword by the translator Eva Richter.

And since quite useless details are our specialty here at rond1900, we wish to add something to that already-quite-interesting afterword. As you might know, Lorrain is one of our favorite writers, whom we wrote about earlier. But the reason for this review’s delay is that we wanted to tell you all about Lorrain’s stay in Amsterdam and to what extent he fictionalized this experience in his novella. That Lorrain visited Amsterdam in 1896, together with Octave Uzanne, is a fact, but we would like to know in which hotel he stayed, with whom he had contact, which places he visited exactly. Did he, for example, visit our decadent Amsterdam North? In Bougrelon the North Holland Canal is mentioned, as well as Monnikendam, and did Lorrain himself visit the nowadays-very-hip Tolhuistuin, which is mentioned in Chapter Six? That would be a nice literary coincidence, as about the same time Gerard van Hulzen immortalized this location.

That Lorrain must have at least had some Dutch connections we hope to have shown in a previous article about Wilde’s favorite painter Leonard Sarluis for The Oscholars (no direct link available). Lorrain was part of a Dutch-French social circle that must have included Alfred Jarry, Carel de Nerée, Antoon van Welie, Louis Couperus, and Sarluis. Unfortunately we have not found any documents or letters that could have shed more light on Lorrain’s stay in Amsterdam and his possible (literary) connections there. Some of his stories were translated for the avant-garde periodical De Kroniek, so he was possibly in touch with main editor P. L. Tak.

But we did find, thanks to the digitized historical newspapers, a very curious case of the reception of Jean Lorrain in the Netherlands. In or around 1900, Van Holkema and Warendorf published an Illustrated Guide to Amsterdam and Environs. Its anonymous author appears to have been a great fan of Monsieur de Bougrelon but deems it necessary to introduce the work to his readers, as apparently it was not that well-known.

This guidebook, nowadays a rare book itself, is one of the earliest Dutch mentions of Lorrain’s masterpiece. Maybe even the very first, but regardless it is the most extensive mention.

In Chapter Nine the author takes the liberty of borrowing Lorrain’s character to guide the reader to some of Amsterdam’s hot spots, like Kalverstraat and Buffa the art dealer’s gallery. It makes for some interesting and amusing reading. For your reading pleasure, we here translate and quote the first part of that chapter. The entire book can be read (in Dutch) here.


Illustrated Guide to Amsterdam and Environs

Chapter Nine

Walks through Amsterdam
Guided by Monsieur de Bougrelon.

Do you happen to know the hero of the amusing little book that Jean Lorrain wrote about Amsterdam and which bears its hero’s name as the title, Monsieur de Bougrelon?

As I look at you, rows of national tourists seeking joy as well as comfort, who each year set out to see the world’s eighth wonder, which is to be found in the world’s ninth – our great capital, right? – and if I would browse through your city bags, purses, suitcases, florid valises, travel baskets, German baskets, coffrets, sacks, pompadours, satchels, and bahuts with the curiosity of a landlady looking through the belongings of a new tenant who is already a month behind on the rent, then I would probably find a copy of Warendorf’s Travel Library, which you have been reading as compensation for the monotony of the journey, or an illustrated magazine like Die Woche, but I won’t even find mention of Monsieur de Bougrelon’s name in the newspaper that is wrapped around your “sandwich for the road,” a sandwich that is a symbol of the tenderness of a mother, sister, wife or girl, but which is nevertheless doomed to never reach its destination.

The “sandwich for the road” has become like the Chinese man’s prayer, which keeps existing but has no more meaning. Like the tragic remains of ancient times, of carriages and track boats, it has survived, a gray old man with a wrinkled face, a stranger amid modern comfort and modern luxury. The “E pluribus unum” of each station has become an epitaph for that “sandwich for the road,” as Amsterdam offers so many opportunities for one to refresh oneself well and at little expense that you are right to offer it to the boy who sells you The Nieuwe Rotterdamsche, Weekblad, Telegraaf, and Handelsblad, thus stopping his vocal trumpet. You are right to rush to a restaurant as soon as you arrive. Well, no, you are not right: why would you want to do that without our great friend, Monsieur de Bougrelon?

Look at him standing there in his long fitted frock coat, a large top hat bought at Meeuwsen’s Hat Shop rather crooked on his head, a truncheon-like walking stick in his hand, a pretty scarf tied around the most gracious of collars, a pair of Dent’s gloves from Mr. Sinemus’s store on Leidsestraat, and with a face you swear you have seen someplace before.

He already took hold of us, already joined us, already introduced himself, already pointed out the way around the tunnels of the Central Station to us, which is built too high, as compared to the museum, which is built too low.

Monsieur de Bougrelon, placing his walking stick with force into the ground that comes from the seas, leads the way to the Hotel Van Gelder on Damrak. This is quite a suitable place for you to stay, as your fellow Dutchmen possess three characteristics that make them excellent for hotels: they are solid, simple, and tidy. Look here, does not everything shine brightly? Look at this glassware, washed the way it should be, with a cold bath afterward, to get the pure lucidity that reminds one of jewelry. Ah, decency is the sister of tidiness! Really, you could swipe a finger underneath the cabinet and the bed and then swipe it on the white sheets without sullying them.

Rising already, Bougrelon glances at a large collection of bottles of “Kaiserbrunnen,” the most excellent of mineral waters, which had just arrived at the hotel again, and then you are obliged to follow him down Damrak, across Dam Square to Kalverstraat while he unfortunately only verbally burns down the new Stock Exchange and lavishes praise on the Royal Palace, whose silvery chimes ring out above the head of the lonely virgin who, he thinks, has done wisely by turning her back to all the ugliness that is behind her.

“The aorta of the city,” he says, “this Kalverstraat, which is only narrow so that no modern electrical tram shall disfigure it with its rows of gallows, whereupon beauty has been hung by executioners. We do not need a tram in this street. One walks through it like one walks through a beautiful and interesting book, and it is over before you realize it.”

Monsieur de Bougrelon suddenly stops in front of one of the big plate-glass windows of a stately house with a high façade.

“Beauty originates in the south. Here you are standing in front of the art trader Buffa’s gallery, one of the great attractions of your capital. The De Medicis brought the fine arts from Italy into my beloved France. But the Italians traveled farther north and it is the Lurascos, the Cossas, the Grisantis, the Boggias, the Valciollas, and the Buffas who brought art to your ancestors at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which was badly deteriorated by then. The Buffa brothers originally traveled to fun fairs with their etchings. The Venice of the North appealed to them and they settled here, on the Weesper Square, right near the Amstel. The sons expanded their father’s business and soon Buffa and Sons was of eminent importance in Amsterdam.

In 1836 the firm came into the hands of another son of the land of Dante and Petrarch, Mr. Caramelli, and today Mr. J. Slagmulder and Mr. P. J. Zúrcher are the owners of this booming art gallery, built across three houses on Kalverstraat.

“But you need not stand outside merely looking at the windows displays, although there is plenty of beauty to find there already. The rooms inside are free for anyone to enter and give an overview of the most beautiful and best Dutch painters, old and young, and more; beside the Israelsen, Marissen, Mesdags, Voermans, Witsens, and Mauves, you will see Daubignys, Montecellis, Daumiers, Henners, Ziems, Decamps, Millets.

“Quite often, when my old heart longs for the art-loving shores of the Seine, in whose wide stream the Louvre is reflected, I wander in front of this sanctuary of the arts and never do I leave unconsoled.”

(pp. 143-146)


Sander Bink is a Dutch scholar on fin-de-siècle art and literature, specializing in Decadence and Symbolism. He is the main contributor to rond1900.nl. He is currently working on a full biography of the Dutch Symbolist/Decadent artist Carel de Nerée (1880-1909).

To read more by Sander Bink, check out his articles on Jean Lorrain, Gerard Van Hulzen, and Jean Lorrain in the Netherlands in Dutch, as well as his piece on Carel de Nerée and Oscar Wilde in English.