On critics, Calvinism, and the strange persistence of a Dutch book
Although I am more active as a photographer, I still find myself haunted by a novel I wrote more than thirty years ago. I will not mention its title here; I feel no need to promote it any further. What I do try, instead, is to make sense of it for myself.
It certainly was not the reviews. One critic called me an idiot, and the father of mild criticism, Alfred Kossmann, observed that there was no difference between the novel’s protagonist and its author. He did not leave it at that. He returned to the point with some insistence, repeatedly calling me an “asshole,” which was not exactly his usual register. Another minor writer, who used reviews to compensate for the disappointing sales of his comfortably superficial books, arrived at the same diagnosis: idiot. Critics are not known for their originality, so I went on to read a number of other reviews that were little more than variations on that same text.
It is, of course, unpleasant. Then again, the Dutch literary world consists for a considerable part of idiots and assholes, so being called one may reasonably be taken as the hopeful beginning of a slightly more candid culture along the Amsterdam canals.
At first, it stung. Soon enough, however, those verdicts began to feel less like insults than like small, involuntary confessions. I grew rather fond of them. Especially because no one had anything to say about the structure of the novel or the way it was written. It became clear to me that I had done something else entirely, something that struck a nerve in Dutch literary culture. I had written a genuinely unlikeable antihero, a character whose traits I would not necessarily disown myself, yet antiheroes were almost entirely absent from Dutch literature. We are, after all, a small Calvinist country. We prefer to preach, and we prefer not to be seen as wrong, even though a disproportionately large number of Dutch people were exactly that during the Second World War.
It would be satisfying if that were also the reason the book continues to rise in price on the secondhand market. On bol.com I saw two copies offered at fifty euros. Fortunately, there was also one for ten, which is just as well, otherwise I might find myself short of amusing birthday presents. My limit is ten euros, though I will not object to one or two more. I may be an asshole and an idiot, but above all I am a Dutchman.
Recently I was reminded of how an article about laboratory animals in Propria Cures once prompted the KNAW, that bastion of Dutch science, to buy up the entire print run of an issue in order to avoid embarrassment.
Something similar must have happened to the novel. Too many people believed they recognized themselves in it. One of them, an Amsterdam porn magnate, happened to have access to sufficient storage space to remove a substantial portion of the print run from circulation and keep it there.
It cannot be easy to pay rent year after year for the storage of a book in which one suspects oneself of appearing. Then again, punctual payment was not among the man’s stronger qualities. At some point the storage must have been seized, and the novel returned to the market for a second time. Ten, perhaps twenty years later.
In life, most of what one fears never happens. The same seems to apply to those things one might almost wish to take pride in, but which, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than accidents of circumstance.