Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 29

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Particells of Ted
Aidan Chambers

There are two things I worry about. One is travel, the other is crowds.

One day a few years ago my presence was required at the Frankfurt Book Fair, to me an event like a training camp for hell. Travel and crowds. After the Fair I had to take a train from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. The mere thought of that journey, alone in a crowded carriage in a foreign country where I did not speak the language, was enough to bring agoraphobic panic.

Ted knows about my travailliers. Before I set off he told me he also needed to be at the Fair, suggested he buys the train tickets, and we travel to Amsterdam together, which we did. I discovered afterwards that he had had no business at the Fair. None. He only came to keep me company on the train.

Another time I was staying in Amsterdam. I was plagued by sciatica, which made walking, standing, or sitting for longer than a few minutes exhausting and painful. The pain made me irritable, not good company. At the time I particularly needed to visit Rembrandt's house but couldn't face it. Ted found out, came to see me, raised my spirits with his teasing, eased me outside, patiently guided me to Rembrandt's house with relieving stops along the way, took me on a tour more knowledgeably than an official guide, found a place for me to sit while everyone else had to stand during a lengthy demonstration of how Rembrandt made his etchings, and then, with saintly patience, put up with my stop-go, wincing walk all the way home. A whole day of his time, generously given and never a hint of irritation or boredom with his sorry companion.

Oddly enough, as I am drafting this article (11.15 on 28 August 2015) an email from Ted has come in. I needed some information about one of his books. As it happens I'm not feeling well. I'd mentioned this. Ted replied: ‘While you are lying in your bed, hoping to make it through the

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night, you might want to picture me in utter devotion, praying five times a day on my bare knees for your recovery.’

Complete tosh, of course. I am not in bed, it is not night, and the rest is hilarious fiction (Ted on his knees praying) and hyperbole. It is a message rich in irony, playing on my long-ago life as a monk and joshing my scorn for what I insist in calling Pop in order to annoy aficionados of the many different categories of rock, roll and the other cacophonies beamed at us at high volume these days.

You could say that Ted is simply making fun with me, a game he likes to play, especially if you return the favour. But what makes it more than a pastime joke is its wit and, as the critics might say, the intertextual references.

These small instances of Ted's behaviour are typical. They are particells of the man, those short passages in music which contain all parts of a composition concentrated into a few staves.

Ted's dedication to his art, his efforts and support on behalf of his fellow artists and writers, his generosity and loyalty to his friends are well known.

So much for the man. But what about his work?

The first thing to be acknowledged is not only the huge number of books of the highest quality he has produced but their range: everything from little stories for the youngest readers to adult novels, picture books of the simplest kind to those which are so sophisticated and innovative they are unmatched anywhere in the world, and an equally extensive and diverse body of poetry.

Two particells as examples.

Het droevige leven van Weggedaantje Stippelmuis is a beautiful little book, 16.5 × 10.5 cms, with thirty-two unnumbered pages printed on good quality light cream paper bound in a full-colour glossy cover with flaps, published by Leopold in 1992 and now, sadly,

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out of print. In it a hen lays an egg from which emerges such an odd animal, more mouse than chicken, that the father-rooster throws it away. The stippelmouse wonders why she is different from the others, why she doesn't belong, and why she yearns for bacon and cheese. And cheese turns out to be her fatal temptation - the smell of it takes her into a house where there might be cats. But it is a mousetrap that gets her. She dies. And is resurrected as an angel. But an angel that is a ladybird rather than the usual kind we see in storybooks.

Told in thirty-five stanzas of verse, two stanzas to a page, four lines in one and two lines in the other, with a rhyme scheme of a b c b, and a a. It begins:

Tok tok, zei Kip, wat voel ik toch?
Een jeukje aan mijn gat.
Als niemand kijkt, dan durf ik wel
en krabbel gauw eens wat.

Wat komt er nou uit mij?
Kijk kijk, ik leg een ei!

A delightful naiveté and a rhythm that feels like nursery rhyme.

The pattern is broken only at the end, where the last word of the final stanza, omhoog, is repeated alone, by itself, on two double spreads. There

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are no words on the last page, only a little drawing of a ladybird. Finally, we escape words and fly. The paradox of language is that it imprisons us while freeing us. And the paradox of drawn images is that they do not tell us what they are but free us to interpret what we think they mean.

On each page under the verses a black and white drawing in half tones depicts the birth, life and death of the stippelmuis, and its angelic transformation.

If there is one word that characterises Ted's work it is this: Transformation.

I'm reminded of that wonderful moment in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, when the spirit Ariel sings about the transformation of death:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Ted's work is redolent of that sea-change, in which not only his stories' characters but he himself are transformed in the deep ocean of his words and pictures into something new, something that is in fact what they and Ted himself were meant to be all along, and which we also partake of by reading him with close attention.

By the making of art, we are transformed in the stories we tell about ourselves. Ted's talent, his dedication, is in creating this transformation for us - objectifying it in memorable images.

All his masterpiece picture books of poetry, for example, beginning with Mijn botjes zijn bekleed met deftig vel, are transformative, not only in what they tell of human life but also of the art form of the picture book. He will take a familiar sight, as in the page devoted to ‘Schreierstoren’ in Amsterdam, and refresh our view of it by the technique in which he depicts the building in collage and paint, and by what he says in his poem about it, the words of which are superimposed on the picture. Making a

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unity of words and image that speak differently of something that is, to most eyes, mundane.

Then, by the way he structures the book, double spread by double spread, he creates both a story and a whole object that are in themselves transformative. What they transform with words and pictures is our understanding, our perception of what it means to be alive. His books energise our senses. We not only see what he sees as he sees it, and hear what he thinks and feels as he thinks and feels it, but as we look through the book we feel we can even smell what he is showing us, can taste the colours they are so visceral, and we want to touch the pages because we want to feel the textures they seem to be made of.

All great art makes the ordinary extraordinary. It renews what we think, feel, and perceive. Indeed, it creates in us that which we could not create for ourselves. Ted's art - the oneness of his wordsandpictures - does this.

Though the lovely little Stippelmuis book is no longer in print, the story appears again in one of Ted's collections, Het rijmt, published by Leopold, 2014. In this version, the pictures are drawn with delicate outlines, coloured in with soft tints of yellow-brown and light-rust-red placed on a square of very light cream, and are placed above the verses, four episodes on a page, spread over five pages. This gives the story an almost comicstrip appearance and a tighter unity than in the little book. Somehow in this form the story is funnier; whereas in the little book it is touchingly sad. Perhaps this is the result of the original version being in black-and-white: a more sombre atmosphere. (How interesting it would be to discuss these two versions with eight- or nine-year-old children, to find out how they respond both to the story and the two treatments.)

One more thing. Death. Ted is never afraid of tackling the Big Questions of life in his work for children. He does so with humour, which takes the wounding edge off the more worrying subjects. His treatment transforms them, transforms the anxiety they often arouse into acceptance of inevitable reality, not only in the young.

Stippelmuis is a particell that contains within its brief score the major elements of Ted's larger, symphonic compositions.

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And now another: Nu in handige meeneemverpakking, published by Querido in 2013. I call it ‘the banana book’ because of the banana depicted on its cover.

This is a book that needs a long essay to appreciate its multiplicities. I want to mention only one of its qualities.

The banana book is at the cutting edge of contemporary literary writing. It is avantgarde. Ted's work often is. In this case it is at the forefront in two features.

The first is the kind of writing that is now acceptably called Flash Fiction.

The second are the digital developments of on-line literary writing.

Flash fictions are narratives of fewer than 1,000 words. They include any kind of writing, fictional or informational, autobiography, biography, miniessays, diaries, letters, etc., so long as they are narrative - storytelling - in form.

Though examples go back as far as storytelling itself (think of Aesop's Fables), it has only become recognised as a modern literary form with its own aesthetics in the last twenty years or so. There are now writers who work mainly in this way.

Ted's banana book is exemplary of this form. The stories are of different lengths within the limits of flash fiction. They are presented in a modern sans serif typeface which he adjusts by point size and spacing to ensure that each story exactly fits one printed page and the screen of an iPad or other tablet. He calls them ‘blocks’ because they are printed without paragraphs or other spaces.

I know of no other flash fictions of such variety which work on different levels of narrative and at the same time are designed to be read both in book and digital form with equal appropriateness to the virtues of each way of presentation.

The banana book demonstrates how Ted is both a traditional book person and at the same time an innovative artist in his use of the new technology. He is at the growing point of what is the future of literature.

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He has translated some of his ‘blocks’ for me. They do not involve the same linguistic challenges as his poetry, which have prevented it being published in English. And I cannot for the life of me understand why this wonderful banana book of prose has not been snapped up by English-language publishers.

As I was finishing this article, I emailed Ted to check the bibliographic information and told him I was not happy with what I'd written. In his reply today, Monday 7 September 2015 at 11.27, he says: ‘You should have simply written about yourself in relation to me. Something like: “I met Ted about 25 years ago and he's the most handsome man I've met in that quarter of a century, the most talented one too, let alone the sexiest one...” and so on. Simply the truth.’

A flashy flash fiction. And another particell of Ted.