Bzzlletin. Jaargang 6
(1977-1978)– [tijdschrift] Bzzlletin–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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Ter Braaks Vestdijk via K.L. Poll
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of an otherwise subordinate aspect of a text. It will distort because it must. This compulsion is damaging to a fair scrutiny, even if it is due to a private obsession the way, for instance, a novelist might notice af ter the completion of a text that particular structural obsessions forged a link of repetitions he was not conscious of. The latter is due to the aseity of the verbal organism while the former is a fixation embedded in the psyche of the commentator. Ter Braak's affixing the parasite label to Vestdijk is a case in point. Based on his admiration of the poem with the same name, Ter Braak equates parasite with ‘burger’ and proceeds to assume that the poem is an autobiographical portrait of its author. Nearly four decades later an epigone of Ter Braak uses the statement to denigrade a superior achievement. But isn't Ter Braak's fascination with this poem a reflection of his obsessive dislike of ‘burgerlijkheid’, if not with the ‘burger’ in himself?
Ter Braak's intellectual furor seems to have originated in his youth when he had to admit that physical prowess was superior to intellectual acumen (VW III, p. 120 ff). What really pained him then was a personal affront to his dignity (and no one is more easily affronted than an adolescent), and this emotional conflict was subsequently elevated to an intellectual battle and finally to a cultural dichotomy. Any perceptive parent knows the agony a sensitive child must withstand in a society of peers who are obsessed with physicality and materialism. When intellect finally begins to reap its rewards, it is used with a vengeance by the erstwhile outcast, yet such intellectual successes are as much achievements as were the despised material ones. This subsequent realization is all the more painful because it unmasks a betrayal of idealism - that the purity of thought can be mired by reality. The adult intellectual recognizes Sartre's mauvaise foi in himself and suddenly finds himself stuck in a dialectical treadmill. This was the inducement behind Carnaval der Burgers, written in a style more lyrical than critical, which, in a curious fashion, comes very close to being an apology for the sensititivy of the ‘burger’! It is a dirge for a prelapsarian innocence, a state of bliss when no opposition existed, but it has been irrevocably lost. Now ‘moeten de burgers omzwerven met de gelijkenis van de verloren dichter in zich, uiterst ver en uiterst nabij (VW I, p. 31). Ter Braaks dilemma is remisiscent here of Thomas Mann's heroes, Tonio Kröger, Aschenbach or Hanno Buddenbrook do not find a satisfactory solution either and must live with the bitter conclusion that they are both artist and burger, and by comitting themselves to either one over the other they irrevocably inherited a sense of loss. Ter Braak's predicament is echoed by Tonio Kröger's realization that one does not ‘ein Blattchen pflücken dürfe, ein einziges, vom Lorbeerbaume der Kunst, ohne mit seinem Leben dafür zu zahlen’Ga naar eind3. It would seem more fitting to identify ‘de parasiet als kleinburger’ as the ‘schaduwzijde’ (Duivel, p. 14) of Ter Braak's rather than Vestdijk's personality. Vestdijk used his milieu as Stoff for his imagination and overcame it in the creative act of remolding it into fiction. When he returned to smalltown settings in later fiction it was due to his perennial fascination with youth and not from the irritation of an unresolved dilemma. Furthermore, to brand someone with the label ‘burger’ is more curious than concise. It is a ‘dooddoener’ which proves little more than ill faith on the part of the accuser. Du Perron was more sensible when he noted, five years earlier than Ter Braak's utterance, that this stigma does not mean anything. Dat Vestdijk dus een ‘burgerlij’ auteur zou zijn, ook als hij gedoemd zou zijn in een nieuwe samenleving volkomen onder te gaan, is een van die oppervlakkige waarheden die men niet genoeg kan wantrouwen. Couperus was een ‘burgerlijk’ auteur die in zijn Kleine Zielen de bourgeoisie een gevoeliger stoot heeft toegebracht dan menig proletarisch schrijver. De haat van Vestdijk tegen het kleinburgerlijk milieu, hoewel in zekere mate ontkracht door de poëzie die hij uit deze haat nog weet te distilleren, is zeker niet minder dan die van de even gevoelige en bijna even ‘afzijdige’ Couperus (VW VI, p. 22).
Du Perron's statement follows logically from his observation that Vestdijk is the most ‘onmaatschappelijk’ of authors (Id., p. 21). An apt conclusion when we consider that if there was a problem with Vestdijk's ‘burgerlijkheid’ he overcame it by disassociating himself from the normal world to live an almost ascetic life devoted exclusively to literature. Surely, one cannot imagine an existence less bourgeois than that; in fact it would be a choice denounced by any ideological persuasion, including that of the bourgeois bater. But since Mr. Poll makes Ter Braak's passage the crux of his article one should examine it a bit | |
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more. To begin with one should notice that ‘De Parasiet’ is the only poem which Ter Braak discusses at length. One should really qualify that statement: Ter Braak ‘abstraheert’ a sketch of Vestdijk's personality from the poem. But, nevertheless, the poem is the touchstone, and it is a text which is judged to be ‘meesterlijk’. From the point of view of Vestdijk's later and superior poetry it is an assessment which is somewhat hyperbolical. But I think it should be taken in the same vein as Vestdijk's excessive appreciation of Edward Arlington Robinson's poem, ‘Luke Havergal’, which, similarly, is not the best example of the American's work - from a technical point of view, ‘Richard Cory’ deserves such praise more readily. In both Vestdijk's and Ter Braak's case, one may call it praise due to personal affinity. Secondly, Ter Braak makes his case rather haphazardly. It develops from his original statement that Vestdijk's poetry fascinates him because of the ‘zeldzaam voorkomende’ combination of a ‘scherpe intelligentie’ and poet's sense of nuance (Duivel, p. 12). Vestdijk's work is called an intellectual poetry. Again we must note an appreciation based on subjective preference, for, if anything, Ter Braak liked primarily a poetry of ideas. This is, therefore, another glimpse in the mirror. It is telling that the later Ter Braak was positively inclined to the work of such a cerebral poet as Verwey, who was also the only Dutch poet Vestdijk devoted a book to. Ter Braak rescues a potentially negatory statement with the rather obscure qualification that Vestdijk's thought is ‘een soort alchimie’. Vestdijk's inspiration, he continues, ‘ontbloeit bijna altijd aan die plaatsen waar de menselijke geest verstrikt raakt in vampyrlegenden, wonderformules of magische bezweringen’ (Duivel, p.13). This is hardly a happy definition; in fact, it is vague and begs the question how any mind can produce intellectual poetry from a mode of rumination which is anything but intellectual. It would have been better to state that (at this stage in his career) Vestdijk delighted in the grotesque or that such poetry aptly illustrated his own definition of baroque lyricism (in his Rilke essay). For instance: ‘barok veronderstelt steeds discontinuiteit, sprongsgewijze veranderingen, conflicten en al of niet schijnbare willekeur’. He than characterizes Baroque literature as the conflict between ‘het normatieve vormprincipe en de bijzondere inhoud’, while his secondary aspect of ‘verbijzondering’ also applies particularly well to ‘De Parasiet’ in that it constitutes a ‘concretisering van abstracte begrippen’Ga naar eind4. But solely from Vestdijk's fascination with the gothic Ter Braak suddenly draws the deceptively strong - i.e. ‘vandaar ook’, which is hardly justified by what he said previously - conclusion that this particular poem (and by extension Vestdijk's genius) is masterful simply because it deals with something which one might call ‘vampyrachtig’ (Duivel, p. 13)! Isn't this really a case of putting the cart before the horse? For this is really an inverse argument: because the character in the poem has vampyrlike traits, the author has a vampiric mind also. This is the kind of simplistic identification spawned by the erroneous fascination with the ‘personality’ of an author. And it is after this series of dubious associations that Ter Braak makes the (for Mr. Poll so important but) unfounded identification of ‘parasiet-vampyrachtig-kleinburger’. He asserts this as if spelling out an edict. But it is not argued. One can easily demonstrate the opposite: i.e. that this poem manifestly does not apostrophize the ‘kleinburger’ in that a ‘kleinburger’ could not possibly have the refinement which these quatrains so subtly display. But Ter Braak legislates the equation and then proceeds accordingly, winding up with the totally unwarranted identification of ‘het kleinburgerlijke parasietenbestaan’ and Vestdijk's personality, if not his oeuvre. For a moment Ter Braak appears to backtrack when he defines parasitism as ‘de tegenhanger van alles wat in de literatuur rhetorisch, musiceerend en anti-psychologisch is’ (Duivel, p. 14). Ter Braak is essentially speaking here about his own credo or, shall we say, taste in literature. Forum fought under the banner of that kind of writing which is diametrically opposed to ‘sierpoëzie’; against the stentorian lyricism which is interested only in its own sound. Vestdijk's work is precisely what Forum wanted hence it is strange (or is there here again guilt by association?) that what Forum admired is here characterized by Ter Braak in such pejorative terms. The remainder of the passage is even more incomprehensible. ‘Parasiteren’ is equated positively with ‘aardsch’ as opposed to ‘hemelsch’, the latter being yet another term for the kind of poetry Ter Braak disliked; and how Marsman's ‘vlammend zwaard’ got into the argument is not very clear.Ga naar eind5. I am not arguing that opaque language may not hide brilliant theories or ideas. If this were not | |
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true, one would have to dispense with Hegel, Marx or even Heidegger. But whereas in instances of Kulturphilosophie Ter Braak argued with fairly much the same associative techniques, they simply are not sufficient in a case where a poem must bear the brunt of restructuring the personality of its author. Surely no one will deny that the major terms in this passage have negative connotations (‘vampyrachtig’ - note the indefinite suffix -, ‘kleinburger’, ‘schaduwzijde’, goedkoper tweede ik’, ‘parasietenbestaan’, ‘binnensluipen’), so that a sober mind wonders how such a vocabulary can be describing a ‘meesterlijke’ text? In short, Ter Braak is an illustration here of Pope's anatomy of a critic who ‘damn[s] with faint praise’ (‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’) while discussing something which is very much akin to him. Perhaps a subtle case of displacement? In conclusion one should mention that, after the second paragraph on page fifteen, Ter Braak rarely if ever mentions this socalled ‘sleutel’ to Vestdijk's work again in all of the remaining one hundred and thirteen pages of his study. Yet this is what constitutes the backbone of Mr. Poll's case against Vestdijk. 
Simon Vestdijk
V.l.n.r. Ter Braak, Vestdijk & Du Perron
In his ingratiating comments on Ter Braak's evaluation, Vestdijk makes the gracious disclaimer that Ter Braak could not possibly have meant that the poem was meant to be a selfportrait of the author. Vestdijk does find it ironic, however, that Ter Braak was won over to his side when he praised the originality of a poem which examines unoriginalityGa naar eind6. Despite the example of Vestdijk's loyalty to a friend's memory, one would have to insist that the passage clearly makes the identification. The unoriginality Vestdijk mentions is to be found in the poem, to be sure, but only as a kind of plagiarism, both literary and intellectualGa naar eind7. However, Vestdijk is writing about something much more pertinent than that in this long introductory poem to the volume Berijmd Palet. The poem pictures a psychological abstraction - subsumed under the personification of a parasite - which is social, cultural, and emotional. It is a picture of the travesty of a communal personality; it is a presentation of the lie society can live. Vestdijk is subtly delineating a malicious emptiness which also horrified Baudelaire. One has to use a string of synonyms to particularize the ‘parasitism’ in this poem: hypocrisy, | |
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pseudo-intellectualism, pretentiousness, duplicity, superficiality, hollowness, cant, humbug, pseudology, perversion, what Molière's Tartuffe or Dickens' Pecksniff stands for. In section IV of the poem one can see that ‘parasitism’ is not a very apt term for what Vestdijk is describing. It has become far more important: the inevitable unfairness of existence, represented as the slow attrition of reality. It is a hollowness which gnaws at the best of intentions, at the most glowing of ideals, and is one which reduces love to the daily combat of marriage. This is the perversion of quotidian abrasion which reality uses to pulverize spontaneity, originality and ideality. One might be tempted to call this section of the poem a psychological portrait of the sin of accidie, except that Vestdijk understands its sinister delight in making everything mundane and paltry. Calling this parasitism is insufficient because the complex at work in the poem does not merely cohabit with its victims, it partticularly enjoys diminishing them while letting them live. ‘De Parasiet’ is tantamount to a Gnostic picture of life. Vestdijk provided a gloss on the poem in a passage from an essay published much later. De leugen als karaktertrek, als sleutel tot het karakter, ja, als het karakter zelf, is een onderwerp voor zich, aan het eminente belang waarvan ik geen twijfel wil zaaien door het slechts in het voorbijgaan aan te stippen. Ertoe behoren: het geïdealiseerde beeld, dat men van zichzelf ontwerpt, van vrienden, vrouw, familie en, als ‘negatieve’ idealisering, van vijanden, - de ‘levensleugen’, de leugen, waarop b.v. een huwelijk ‘berust’ - voorts de moralistische leugens, de justificatie, het goedpraten, de rationaliseringen, waarin de huichelaar uitmunt, en waarin wij allen bijwijlen wel eens dilettérenGa naar eind8. That Ter Braak became confused by the employment of a first person narrator in the poem is understandable, and Vestdijk admitted as much. But if one understands that the poem is deliberately placed at the beginning of Berijmd Palet as a kind of emblem, it acquires the same function as Baudelaire's introductory poem ‘Au lecteur’ in Les fleurs du mal. ‘De Parasiet’ indicates a program for the series of poems which follow it. The first poem of the first section is called ‘De Imitator’ in almost a direct echoing of ‘De Parasiet’, and the volume proceeds to depict a gallery of people who live a lie. Particularly striking in these portraits is Vestdijk's sympathetic tone. This has nothing to do, as Ter Braak or Mr. Poll would have it, with identification, but indicates Vestdijk's superior insight. He sees the sadness of inauthenticity: its waste of potential and the painful realization that quotidian reality can tame even the most extraordinary individual. Hence the tone of the poem is more Baudelairean than satiric. The sonority of the French poet is mostly absent in the Dutchman but in its stead one finds a subtlety which undermines with a delayed reaction. Baudelaire's melancholy admission of semblance is also present in Vestdijk, but far more objectified. It is yet another instance of Vestdijk's paradoxical honesty because no one likes to admit the fact that the commonplace is shared by everyone, if only in the surprise at nightfall that we have managed to slog through yet another day. No poet likes to admit it, especially no poet with a romantic inclination. Vestdijk, in a sense, wrote magnificently about the tragic inevitability that one cannot escape the harness of daily reality, the horror of loss, or the sentence of death. That is the general sense of his assertion that we, as human beings, are fostered by a lie, the same lie which 20th centry literature has accepted as its major subject. If personified this might become the Philistine, and what provides Vestdijk's poem with a fearful apprehension is his discovery that a true Philistine is contented with his lot, revels in it, and will evangelize his inauthenticity. This crushing power is underlined in the poem about Baudelaire in the same volume where the self-exiled poet, languishing in Brussels, fears his landlady not only for taking the little money he has left but that she, after cleaning him out, will also walk off with his soulGa naar eind9. To return to Mr. Poll's denunciation. He reduces Vestdijk to someone who has ‘een talent voor nabootsing en geestelijke toeëigening’ and wants to exile him to a basement limbo by the exhortation that ‘een eigen toon, de naïviteit van een sterke persoonlijkheid, geen eigenschappen [zijn] die je van anderen kunt overnemen’. And further on: ‘die afhankelijkheid, dat ontbreken van een eigen geluid, van een zelf opgebouwde ideeënwereld wreekt zich in vrijwel alles wat Vestdijk aan kritieken en essays heeft geschreven.....’. This is curious coming from someone who bought Ter Braak's opinions wholesale and who does not display much originality in his own critical ‘sjabloon’. Be that as it may, Mr. Poll's is a simple case of misconception. | |
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Vestdijk's essayistic efforts are investigations of literature and aesthetic problems, augmented by disquisitions on philosophical and psychological issues which relate to his own work. In the truest sense of the word, Vestdijk wrote each time an evaluation of a text, a ‘indenken’ which has nothing whatsoever to do with the crude methods of polemical castigation. The latter spends itself in the headlong rush to demolish, while the former informs by its careful delineation and by its respect for what has been achieved. The first is philistine, the second indicates a largesse of mind. Vestdijk was not a social commentator, a political filibuster, or even a Kulturphilosoph in the narrower sense. His was a life truly devoted to literature. His interests were manifestly more inspired by foreign authors than by his native peers. His great exemplars were Rilke, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Dickinson, Valéry, Sartre (etc.) and none of the Dutch authors he appreciated quite measured up to these. It is therefore petty and incorrect to assert, as Mr. Poll does, that Vestdijk worshipped at the shrine of Ter Braak and Du Perron the way a ‘bakvis’ moons at the feet of an idol. He didn't need to because he was admiring minds greater than these. It is only correct to say that Vestdijk appreciated his Forum friends as kindred souls during a time when he could have felt only as a solitary traveller. He admired their intellectual posture - the cultural position they had taken at the time - if not their personality in the normal manner of friendships: i.e. not from intellectual proclivity but from purely private ‘menselijke’ reasons which have little to do with anyone's I.Q. A person may have intellectual acquaintanceships, but friendship is an emotional prerogative. It is, finally, amusing to see Holland's most cosmopolitain author accused of being a sycophant of those who were not his equals. There is another point to be made which carries the argument beyond such mundanity as hero worship. By the time he is through, it is clear that Mr. Poll is interpreting parasitism as an intellectual function. In fact, what he is talking about is literary influence. Curiously enough he finds this a liability. No one can be said to possess a modicum of knowledge about literature when he denies the all important presence of precursors. In literature are no virgin births; any one work struggles with another just over the horizon and greatness is measured by the degree of liberation from those who became before or the degree of subtlety with which a genre or convention is reinterpreted. In the truest sense, influence is an affinity, a shock of recognition when a kindred spirit has formulated an echo which one recognizes as a familiar voice in one's own mind. One learns this way. No writer works in a vacuum. No intellectual either. Not even a critic. Not even Mr. Poll. Every achievement in both the arts and the sciences is based on antecedents and not to be aware of this painfully obvious fact is a condition dangerously close to ignorance. The effect of seriously examining an affinity can only be positive. There is, for instance, the case of Vestdijk's discovery of Dickinson and Rilke, But to find a more creditable source for partisan critics, one should quote Valéry on this issue. Nous disons qu'un auteur est original quand nous sommes dans l'ignorance des transformations cachées qui changèrent les autres en lui; nous voulons dire que la dépendance de ce qu'il fait à l'égard de ce qui fut fait est excessivement complexe et irrégulière. Il y a des oeuvres qui sont les semblables d'autres oeuvres; il en est qui n'en sont que les inverses; il en est d'une relation si composée avec les productions antérieures, que nous nous y perdons et les faisons venir directement des dieux. | |
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d'une conquête spirituelle décisive.Ga naar eind11 If this is negative, so be it. One should consider oneself rich with such poverty. More necently an American critic fashioned an eccentric but brilliant theory of literature from just this very phenomenon. Harold Bloom feels that any poet of stature undergoes ‘the anxiety of influence’ as he calls it. In three critical examinations (Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading and Kaballah and Criticism) he outlines his contention that ‘the profundities of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images. Poetic influence, or as I shall more frequently term it, poetic misprision, is necessarily the study of the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet. When such study considers the context in which that life-cycle is enacted, it will be compelled to examine simultaneously the relations between poets as cases akin to what Freud called the family romance, and as chapters in the history of modern revisionism, “modern” meaning here post-Enlightenment.’Ga naar eind12 Hence when we speak of influence we are not dealing with parasitism at all but, if one must keep the metaphor, with something more akin to a symbiotic relationship. There is just the slightest suspicion that Mr. Poll misreads parasitism as plagiarism - perhaps because it is mentioned in Vestdijk's poem? But plagiarism is a case of libel not of criticism. Far from being that, Vestdijk's essayistic ‘toeeigening’ as Mr. Poll calls it, is a case of penetrating analysis; penetrating in the sense of boring into the core of the work he is examining. Vestdijk is unusually sympathetic to any subject he is writing on, and it may well be that it is precisely this sympathy which Mr. Poll misreads as ‘vrijblijvend’ or ‘het ontbreken van een eigen geluid’. This rather uncommon symbiosis (uncommon in professional critics but a trait shared by practising writers) is due to Vestdijk's professional interest as a writer in what a peer has achieved. The latter is not the same thing as the obligatory wool gathering of academicians bucking for promotion. I am not the only one who discerned this superior working method of Vestdijk as critic. In his study of Forum criticism, J.J. Oversteegen discussed Vestdijk's critical methods in a chapter which is still the best synopsis available in Dutch. Oversteegen was also struck by this unusual feature. Een zeer grote tolerantie, dat mag men de meest opvallende eigenschap van de criticus Vestdijk noemen; en deze verdraagzaamheid is de resultante van een intentioneel gerichte beschouwingswijze, gekombineerd met een door de feiten van het werk bepaalde aandacht... Zo zijn er dus twee vragen die voor Vestdijk als criticus van doorslaggevend belang zijn: hoe leer ik de eigenschappen van het werk het beste kennen, en: op welke wijze schep ik voor mijzelf de gelegenheid om zo ver mogelijk tot de schrijver door te dringen, om zijn optiek zo volledig mogelijk te delen?Ga naar eind13 Which is precisely what great criticism tries to do. Two small points. I fail to understand the fascination with the ‘personality’ of an author. I am perfectly aware that Mr. Poll's infatuation with it stems from Forum, and that Forum's adulation of the ‘vent’ is due to a reaction formation in terms of an epoch; but sui generis it is far too shallow a prognostication for literary genius. Especially when one lives in America and have seen it develop into a cult for purely egotistical and material reasons, it is entirely something that smacks too much of Hollywood. In today's climate of levelling, it is a quality which erases spontaneity and originality because it is a posture, it can be manufactured, it is a product from the drawing boards of public relations engineers. Norman Mailer is a case in point (Advertisements for Myself), and it is not an edifying one. Parenthetically one may add that, given Mr. Poll's interest, it is indicative that Mailer's narcissism is due to his obsession with precursors, yet his ‘inpoldering’ of Hemingway and Miller has still not been completed. Secondly, it baffles me what is superior about naiveté, even the ‘naïveteit van een sterke persoonlijkheid’. It is not clear what this means, but I suspect that it might refer to something called inspiration, without undue pressure from one's intellect. Now it is true that Vestdijk was anything but naive. He is a difficult author, subtle and nuanced, and it was his extraordinary mental acumen coupled with a lyrical genius, which impressed both Ter Braak and Du Perron. Vestdijk would have agreed with Valéry when the latter noted: ‘J'avais pensé et naïvement noté, peu de temps auparavant, cette opinion en forme de voeu: que si je devais écrire, j'aimerais infiniment mieux écrire en toute conscience et dans une entière lucidité quelque chose de faible, que d'enfanter, à la faveur d'une transe et hors de moi-même, un chef-d'oeuvre d'entre les plus beaux’Ga naar eind14 | |
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To return to Ter Braak's Duivelskunstenaar for the last time. The persistently polemical tone and satiric interludes make it clear that Ter Braak found a superior quality in Vestdijk's work which he could use to castigate the ‘burgerdom’ of contemporary critics, exemplified in the person of the eponymous Mr. Hans. The result is a book which is generally - the unfortunate pages which form the substance of Mr. Poll's platform constitute about two percent of the total - a favorable description. In short, Vestdijk was a utilitarian device for Ter Braak, in the same manner he enlisted Nietzsche or Rauschning for his crusades. The study provides many examples where Ter Braak admired elements in Vestdijk's work because they struck a personal chord. In that sense Ter Braak had very much common with the Vestdijk of the Dickinson and Robinson essays. A few instances. Ter Braak praises Vestdijk's poetry because he finds it essentially a ‘meesterlijke verpoëtisering van abstracte begrippen’ (Duivel, p. 22). In other words, Vestdijk wrote intellectual poetry. As is clear by now, it was only this sort of poetry Ter Braak was able to appreciate. Hence an affinity discovered a truth because it is also an accurate description of Vestdijk's lyrical output. Terug tot Ina Damman receives Ter Braak's most subtle commentary. The reason, I would suggest, is that Ter Braak saw in the novel an analogue to his own youth. Note that Ter Braak isolates the revealing factor that Anton Wachter is the ‘uitzonderings individu’: ‘dit is niet de tijdelijke, voorbijgaande romantiek van zijn medepubers, die door Vestdijk in scherpe portretten worden geobjectiveerd, maar het is een bijzonder noodlot, dat van gevoeligheid en kwetsbaarheid langs gecompliceerde wegen leidt naar het duivelskunstenaarschap.’ (p. 28). One should further isolate here another important point Ter Braak makes concerning this novel, one which is also true for a great deal of Vestdijk's subsequent work: that the fictive realizations, called characters, never lose their imaginative aura; that language always remains the final and supreme conjuror of existences which are no longer present in reality. This, in fact, constitutes Vestdijk's genius: an almost mystical union with the word, because it is the poet who conquers time. One must immediately qualify this with the observation that it was also tinged with sadness because Vestdijk was well aware that such a victory is a Pyrrhic one. Compare Ter Braak's subtle insight to Du Perron's more sober appreciation of Terug tot Ina Damman. He calls it ‘een afrekening met de jeugd’ and sees the novel as a revenge of the outsider on those adolescent plebs who made the author's schoolyears a trial (V.W. VI, p. 24). Anyone who knows Vestdijk's work must agree that this is a far more superficial interpretation if it isn't somewhat misguided. Youth is for Vestdijk the cauldron of existence, the shaping force of life; for the remainder of his life the adult hankers after what he left behind. But Du Perron is correct again when he notes how ‘onmaatschappelijk’ Vestdijk's work is. I think that both Ter Braak and Du Perron were puzzled by Vestdijk's undeniably superior talent and I would hazard the guess that if Vestdijk had not been maligned in the press, they would have written a great deal less about him. Ter Braak, perhaps reluctantly, saw a congenial spirit in Vestdijk. Other passages in De Duivelskunstenaar reiterate this point. In Sint Sebastiaan he particularly admires the superior psychology it displays (Duivel, pp. 31-39), and he is quite correct in noticing that Meneer Visser's Hellevaart is not naturalistic but realistic in its detail. More germane to our argument is Ter Braak's interpretation of meneer Visser as an instance of his own ‘rancunemensch’ (Duivel, p. 47). There is even a hint of Forum's predilection for the vent in his statement that Vestdijk's poetry may be uneven but that is is decidedly ‘menschelijk’ (Duivel, p. 15). How much of a mirror image he saw in Vestdijk's work becomes clear when Ter Braak isolates as Vestdijk's main themes ‘dood’, ‘angst’ and ‘jeugd’ which, as Oversteegen also points out, had a ‘persoonlijke grote betekenis’ for Ter Braak. Ter Braak finds Vestdijk's short stories preoccupied with death and exemplary of two styles: the first is the Ina Damman style and the second is that of the historical novel, particularly the erudite Het vijfde zegel. There is some truth to this division. But it is also clear that Het vijfde Zegel is the least of Vestdijk's achievements in the genre of the historical novel and was subsequently disavowed by him, while making superior claims for the style and ambience of the Ina Damman type of novel is again a personal preference. Ter Braak singles out the story De bruine vriend as especially ‘betoverend’ while Du Perron, to the contrary, found it ‘kitsch’ and totally unauthentic. Du Perron praises the historical stories more (VW | |
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VI, p. 24). My point is a simple one. Ter Braak approached Vestdijk's work with great admiration, saw the originality of this literary phenomenon and found themes and traits in Vestdijk's work which were sympathetic to his own most private preoccupations. Where he saw these elements clearly displayed he judged those works masterful and when they were absent he considered those texts less infused with the author's personality. What that means is that he liked them less. The contrary opinion of Du Perron simply shows that someone who was less preoccupied with his youth and more interested in a European forum for Dutch letters, would chose different favorites. Together these Forum twins admired just about everything Vestdijk had produced up to that point and I fail to see any overwhelming evidence that they were simply kind to an inferior sycophant. Ter Braak's criticism was subjective, fed by personal preference, and anything but objective. His comments on Vestdijk are generally laudable, as they must be since he uses Vestdijk's work to lambast the Philistines of his time. The infamous parasite theme proves to be far more deceptive than a first glance warrants and, more than likely, reflected Ter Braak's own preoccupations. Even so, those few pages form a brief lapse in an otherwise typical Forum eulogy to a confrère. Nothing substantial in De Duivelskunstenaar justifies Mr. Poll's denunciation of Vestdijk, while Vestdijk's subsequent career makes the charge only more preposterous. In fact, his article seems uncomfortably close to the spirit of ‘dominee's land’ Forum tried to exorcise. Finally, Mr. Poll seems particularly bend on destroying Vestdijk as thinker. Now it is unfair of Ter Braak to describe Vestdijk's essayistic efforts in a fashion which is very much aware of the quality I previously noted and which Oversteegen outlined in his Vestdijk chapter in Vorm of Vent.Ga naar eind15 Vestdijk, states Ter Braak, should be noted for his exceptionally refined intellect which distanciates itself from the scrutinized text in an act of comprehension while at the same time trying to maintain the original magic of what first struck him as outstanding (Duivel, pp. 108-9). In other words, sympathetic evaluation, or what Oversteegen praised as Vestdijk's unusual tolerance. As Ter Braak informs: Behalve koelheid is er dan ook warme genegenheid en zelfs passie in dit werk: dit laatste pleegt men te vergeten, als men over Vestdijk schrijft. De genegenheid voor de cultuur is immers niet iets, dat men er dik bovenop kan leggen, aangezien de cultuur zelf niet dik is, maar op de intiemste wijze verweven met ons animale leven van rechtopgaande omnivoren (Duivel, p. 109). This describes the height of criticism, not the workaday variety of dealing out blame or praise. Vestdijk understands his texts via a sympathetic focusing of his intellect; he seeks neither to destroy nor dismiss them. A first-rate mind is required for this effort, coupled with a supple erudition which must be readily at hand. Such a mind does not hire itself out to ideologies or fashionable issues and Ter Braak duly notes how distinctly unpolemical a mind Vestdijk possessed. It almost seems that he felt he should come to Vestdijk's rescue precisely because Vestdijk refused to enter the lists; he therefore made Vestdijk ‘toch een polemisch standpunt, ook al is Vestdijk zelf geen polemische geest’ (Duivel, p. 127). Ter Braak saw clearly that Vestdijk would make enemies simply by refusing to ally himself with any one's position and by devoting himself stubbornly to the pursuit of literary excellence. It was such singular devotion which bothered the Philistines of his day: uncompromising devotion to a craft and to a lyrical and intellectual ideal. There is nothing to assail there unless one wants to deny the entire effort. And where Mr. Poll would perform such a radical amputation because for him it is the only way to avoid dealing with a superior force, Vestdijk's work was for Ter Braak a triumph and a superior standpunt. Ter Braak made Vestdijk a cause for polemics, Vestdijk did not.
Given the issue of this article, I also regret haven lapsed at times into a somewhat polemical tone, I say regretfully because it is a wasteful activity. Polemics do not accomplish anything except, one would assume, vent the spleen of the polemicist. Which is not to say that one should hesitate to expose the bogus or the trivial which pass for profundity. One should do so fairly and with élan. The rest is shouting in the wind. For polemics is primarily a political weapon, a tool designed to maim and destroy. In literature it serves very little purpose indeed. Civil inquiry and considered evaluation should be the forum for discussing the excellence of literary texts and the pertinence of intellectual ideas. In such a fashion critics can even reinstate what re- | |
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viewers ignored or destroyed. A case in point is Van Oudshoorn's posthumous reputation or the way Alfred Kazin rescued Henry Roth's remarkable novel Call It Sleep from the oblivion assigned to it by contemporary reviewers. Polemics is belligerence; its etymological root is the Greek word for war. Bellicose disputatiousness does not indicate superiority but is more suitable to the mentality of a bully who can impress with force but cannot convince with mental ascendancy. It is often an expression of inferiority, if not frustration. It does not consider, does not balance; it sees no cause but its own delusion. In the final analysis polemics is the exact opposite of the creative spirit because it does not enhance but deny. It is an expression of negation. Vestdijk was also struck by the preponderance of this humor among his countrymen. In a little piece called ‘Onze polemisten’Ga naar eind17 he can only trace their splenetic behavior to a national trait: ‘kankeren’. From the tone of the short article one can sense that Vestdijk saw little profit in it. What did he propose as an alternative? A few pages earlier Vestdijk praises the virtues of the polyvalence of scientific thought. What he is recommending there is precisely what Ter Braak indicated as essential to Vestdijk's method: nuance. Both in his creative oeuvre and in his purely intellectual disquisitions, Vestdijk refused to be dogmatic. His work upholds the paradoxical nature of existence in every possible variation. This is also, by the way, the hallmark of the great novelist. Ter Braak saw his characteristic of Vestdijk also when he refers to Vestdijk's commingling of the normal and the abnormal in order to create a ‘voorlopige synthesis’ - provisionary because existence does not allow stathis. Reminiscent of Charles Pierce's fallibilism, Vestdijk's work never fell prey to the comfort of singularity. It is a measure of his honesty, if not indicative of a superior mind. For one should oppose polemics with irenics. The critical evaluation of literature should be irenic because it promotes such positive factors as skill, excellence, subtlety, nuance. No matter how objective in its manner or how exhaustive in its argument, the best literary scholarship celebrates perfection and thereby preserves a continuity of eminence. To do otherwise is an exercise in futility. |
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