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Introduction to ‘Fade Portraits’
E.M. Beekman
[In 1982 verscheen bij The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst (USA) een vertaling van E. Breton de Nijs' Vergeelde portretten. Prof. E.M. Beekman, Amerikaan, die aan genoemde universiteit Germanic Languages doceert, schreef de inleiding. Hij is zelf dichter en romanschrijver die veel over Nederlandse cultuur en literatuur geschreven heeft, onder andere over Paul van Ostaijen en Multatuli. Hij is ook de initiatiefnemer en general editor van een serie vertalingen uit de koloniale Nederlandse literatuur. Een boek over Rumphius, door Beekman zelf samengesteld en vertaald onder de titel The Poison Tree, is kortgeleden verschenen.
Hier vindt men, enigszins bekort en ontdaan van de bronvermeldingen, de inleiding van Beekman. Hij schreef voor een Amerikaans publiek dat eerst uitvoerig geïnformeerd moest worden. Deze informatie is weggelaten, omdat ze voor Nederlandse lezers ook elders te vinden is. Het bijzondere van Beekmans inleiding is dat hij Vergeelde portretten in verband brengt met de invloeden die E. Breton de Nijs/Rob Nieuwenhuys zowel van sommige Nederlandse schrijvers als van enkele figuren uit de Angelsaksische literatuur heeft ondergaan. Beekman is de eerste die dit doet. Hij had het voordeel buitenlander te zijn en een goed lezer, met een achtergrond die hem in staat stelde dingen te zien die voor Nieuwenhuys/Breton de Nijs zelf een ontdekking waren. Op verzoek van de schrijver verschijnt deze introductie in de taal waarin ze oorspronkelijk geschreven werd.]
Nieuwenhuys spent nearly four decades in the Indies. It was part of his life from the very beginning, not as something extraordinary, but as a daily fact of life. His mother used native expertise and lore without the embarrassed self-consciousness of Europeans who considered such things superstition. For instance, the dukun (Javanese medicineman) was consulted in case of illness; certain native rituals were observed for funerals and, as in Faded Portraits, the house was purified with incense once a week. He learned Javanese as a child from his babu (ayah in British India), Nènè Tidjah, who cared for him for the first seven years of his life. She imbued him with a sense of awe for tropical nature, an environment the Javanese consider to be spirited, (angker in Javanese), and made him party to an existence where nothing is static or barren but alive with a fertile magie that maintains no barrier between the natural and the supernatural worlds. Her importance can be assessed by the fact that, even as a man in
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his seventies. Nieuwenhuys could recollect her smell as clearly as when he was a child.
This background provided Nieuwenhuys with a sympathetic perspective on Indonesian life, something that was by no means a matter of course for the Dutch colonialists. For example, he could be persuaded of the rightfulness of the Indonesian independence movement when, as a student in Leyden, he was confronted by the passionate arguments of Setijadjit (who appears here as Sudarpo). This exposure was a formative experience in his life, and was important enough to be included in this, his only novel.
Though Nieuwenhuys was a product of both worlds, he was always partial to his mother's homeland. In his father's country he acquired knowledge, and it was there that his intellect was formed. But this was a superstructure; below the surface lingered the Java of his babu and his mother, which nurtured his imagination, his emotions, and his passion. As was true of others from that era, Nieuwenhuys remained intellectually and emotionally a displaced person, a liminal man because he could never call himself a native of either region. In the Indies he would always remain an outsider to the Javanese community but - to echo what Kipling said of England - Holland could only be ‘the most wonderful foreign land I have ever been in.’ And if we consider those mutually exclusive regions metaphorically - the Indies as summer and Holland as winter - Henry Adam's characterization in his youth in New England provides an apt corollary. ‘Winter was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license... summer and country were always sensual living, while winter was compulsory learning. Summer was the multiplicity of nature; winter was school.’
There really can be no synthesis of these antipodes, and one will always live on the margin of both. But such a paradoxical situation may turn out to be one of strength, because the vision is different, refracted, perceiving elements of either place that would otherwise go unnoticed. Theory will speculate about one or the other, and scholarship will codify, but that disjointed existence is really fit only for literature. And then it can turn out to be a benefit for a writer like Nieuwenhuys who may well join in the praise of Kipling's ‘Two-sided Man’ [from Kim] who feels that he owes the ‘most to Allah Who gave me two / Separate sides to my head.’
Faded Portraits (Vergeelde portretten uit een Indisch familiealbum, 1954), Nieuwenhuys' only novel, was begun when he was in his thirties and interned in a Japanese concentration camp. The greater part of it was scribbled in pencil on Japanese wartime toilet paper. The extremity of his situation appears to have triggered the desire to know where his existence was rooted, and Faded Portraits is to some extrent the imaginative record of that search.
The novel is typical of colonial Dutch literature in several ways. It is, for
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De eerste twee hoofdstukken van ‘Vergeelde portretten’ werden in het Jappenkamp geschreven op Japans toiletpapier.
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instance, the evocation of a place with its tactile and olfactory peculiarities. T.S. Eliot correctly noted in his essay on Kipling that ‘the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it, as you smell India in Kim.’ Although this seems obvious, it is often the snare that trips up authors who are either not gifted with a chameleon imagination or lack the unreflected familiarity with a place that a child has. One form of proof was the author's surprise when he discovered how many Malay and Javanese expressions had surfaced in his prose without his ever being aware of them until the book was finished. Anyone familiar with the Indies wil recognize the authenticity of physical details - the floral profusion, the overbearing climate, the smells of incense and Indonesian cooking. There is a genuineness in the description of quotidian existence of that time, with the evenings' relaxation on the veranda, when, at ease in long chairs or rocking chairs one was entertained and informed by gossip after the long daily grind in a climate that was never accommodating. One will also find the familiar negative aspects: the bickering, the preoccupation with the color of a person's skin, the obsession with one's place in the social hierarchy, the snobbism, and, despite the fear of it, the daily involvement with native life. It was a feudal society, paternalistic, overbearing, conservative, but it was also so much imbued with the Indies that it could never be excised from the lives of those who experienced it, even after repatriation.
But one should not read Faded Portraits only as a methaphor for the colonial Indies. It is, first and foremost, the portrait of a family and, within that context, especially a representation of Aunt Sophie. Despite claims to the contrary, Faded Portraits is a crafted narration. It is enclosed by the frame of Aunt Sophie's death, and is unified by the voice of the narrator. One could consider the ‘argument’ or impetus for the novel the desire to know why the three girls are so insensitive to Aunt Sophie's death, what form her ‘meddling’ took, and why the house on Salemba Avenue was sial (unlucky).
At the time this novel was written no Dutch author writing about his youth in the Indies could escape the influence of one of the most influential figures of Dutch colonial literature in the first half of this century, E. Du Perron. His novel, Country of Origin (1935; published in this series), is a fictionalized autobiography of a childhood and youth in the Indies written from the point of view of an adult living in Europe. Nieuwenhuys was well aware of the inevitable comparison critics would make with Du Perron, a man Nieuwenhuys knew personally and whose work he applauded. But there is little resemblance, except for the inevitable similarity of place and time.
In Country of Origin the narration of events is solipsistic, for Arthur Ducroo is only interested in determining what effect his life's history has had on him; everything else is ancillary to his attempt to understand what kinds of influences molded the adult who is living in Europe in the 1930s.
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In contrast, Nieuwenhuys is not interested in how the De Pauly past shaped the present narrator. In fact, he could echo Henry Adams who noted about his own family that it ‘was rather an atmosphere than an influence.’ Faded Portraits is the depiction of such an ‘atmosphere.’ Although Du Perron's novel had been shown to be an almost exact replica of his own chronology, enriched by meditations on his experience, Nieuwenhuys' book reveals very little about its author. Such reticence makes, I would assume, for better novels.
The actuality of past events is less important to Nieuwenhuys than the quality of remembrance. The De Pauly history is feit too deeply to be recorded in any way other than by feeling and imagination. Perhaps in general terms, some of the events in the book may have happened as they are presented, yet it also seems clear that much did not and that a great deal of material may have come from other sources, from stories about other people, or even from inaccurate and partisan versions of these same events reported by people with a personal axe to grind. As an example of this fictionalization of so-called real events one may consider the portrait of Geraerdt Knol, who is said to have been the patriarch of the De Paulys. Nieuwenhuys calmly offers proof of this by referring to a famous work of scholarship about Java from 1600 to 1800. Actually, Geraerdt Knol did not exist. He is a fiction assembled from descriptions of several historical figures which can be found in De Haan's Priangan. In other words, facts are subservient to fiction, veracity subservient to mendacity. There is, then, the touchstone of reality, but only to the extent that all writers employ it. For there can be no such thing as perfect fabulation; it is impossible to invent fiction in a vacuum.
Nieuwenhuys has stated repeatedly that he is not truly a creative writer because he cannot invent. This is, of course, disingenuous, for he is not a writer of memoirs either. In Faded Portraits he calls himself a ‘memorialist’ which, if I understand him correctly, means that he commemorates a past, perhaps celebrates it. But one can only commemorate by recollection and it is the quality and tone of the memory that is important, not its truth quotiënt. Nieuwenhuys makes the point quite clear in his book about his experience in the Japanese concentration camps. Although the subject prevents this work from consideration here (because the present series considers the beginning of the Second World War beyond the termination point for this genre of colonial literature), the manner in which it is written is instructive. Called Een beetje oorlog in Dutch, the very title is ironie, because to typify these horrible events as ‘a bit of war’ is an understatement, to say the least. The title may be a direct quote from Kipling who, after his first visit as a journalist to the Boer War in South Africa, wrote to a friend that ‘there happened to be a bit of a war on, and I had the time of my life.’ Nieuwenhuys' conscious defusing of the horror of the events he went through is both an act of piety (because he feit that compa- | |
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red to other people's suffering, his was far less excruciating) and a method of preventing the writer from emotional and stylistic hyperbole which, ironically, would do injustice to the terror. The style of the book is appropriately sober and unadorned. But the very sobriety of the style intimates that what is told is true, and this turns out not to be the case. ‘My memories have become stories which, of course, closely resemble real events but which at the same time are no longer authentic truth.’ He confesses that he has ‘manipulated the
truth’ because ‘as a story teller or writer you can never excape the lie.’ ‘The truth’ Nieuwenhuys concludes ‘lies not in reality but in the story.’ He then refers with approval to the epigraph of his book, which is a quote from a novel by John P. Marquand: ‘A writer must be an untrustworthy, mendacious fellow who can teil a good falsehood and make it stick.’
This perennial (and fascinating) question of where fiction begins and truth leaves off is still vital. Since Goethe's designation of his autobiography as a mixture of Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811), most writers would concede that their work, no matter how much based on fact, has little to do with actual reality. Especially if the text is narrated in the first-person singular and professes tot be autobiographical. In his most recent novel, Earthly Powers (1980), Anthony Burgess has his narrator, Kenneth Toomey, ponder this question in terms very similar to Marquand's. ‘But the real question for me was: how far could I claim a true knowledge of the factuality of my own past, as opposed to pointing to an artistic enhancing of it, meaning a crafty falsification? In two ways my memory was not to be trusted: I was an old man, I was a writer. Writers in time transfer the mendacity of their craft to the other areas of their lives. In that trivial area of barroom biographical anecdotage, it is so much easier and so much more gratifying to shape, reorder, impose climax and denouement, augment here, diminish there, play for applause and laughter than to recount the bald treadmill facts as they happened.’ Marguerite Yourcenar who is particularly known for her novels set in the distant past, such as the autobiographical meditation called The Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), insists that ‘you must believe in reality. You can only write what really happens. I do not imagine.’ Even the work of that supreme fabulist in English literature, Kipling - a work that seems to draw from unlimited supplies of imagination - always began with something very concrete, although he ‘described imagination as a form of imperfect memory.’ Such problems of form and the demarcations of fiction are apposite for a discussion of Dutch colonial literature because a great deal of it is a commemoration of the past,
of childhoods, and of an emotional reckoning, if not a moral one.
Nieuwenhuys' acquaintance with Marquand's novel Wickford Point dates from the beginning of the Second World War. Published in 1939, it was Marquand's most autobiographical novel. It describes the life of the Brill
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family in the homestead that gave the novel its title. In reality this was Curzon's Mill near Newburyport, on the northern shore of Massachusetts. ‘Wickford Point’ is quite as lovingly considered by Jim Calder, the protagonist, as is the house on Salemba Avenue by Ed in Faded Portraits. And even though the Brills are very much an old family of Yankee Puritans, one has the curious feeling that one is reading about a New England version of Faulkner's Sartoris family, or the Compsons and Sutpens. The Brills are also a good family that has gone to seed. They are people not only incapable of dealing with present reality but also loath to do so because they feel that their present eccentricities and their past glory make them unique and somehow worthy of being supported by others. The picture of this indolent and genteel family living in and off the past, who has dismissed modern society and hankers after an agrarian past, as well as Marquand's evocation of place - an erstwhile Eden of hunting, dogs, fishing, and the indulgent camaraderie of the servants - gives the book its distinctly Southern flavor. If we disregard a substantial part of the novel that deals with Jim Calder's career as a writer, one can understand why Wickford Point struck a chord with Nieuwenhuys.
For instance Ed, the narrator of the Dutch novel, must deliver himself from the bondage of the De Pauly family just as Jim Calder must extricate himself from the alluring lassitude of the Brills. In that sense, both books are novels of a struggle for deliverance, of the desire to be set free from stifling families. It is also a wry irony - although it may be that such singular families are alike no matter what hemisphere they chose to brood in - that the New England host of aunts, uncles, and cousins could be so readily transplanted to the tropics and the colonial experience. It would seem that Marquand's Aunt Clothilde was the understudy for Aunt Sophie because the former also ‘wants to manage someone. She'd like to manage everyone because it means that she's doing something.’ Aunt Sophie is also kin to the Brills in her ferocious concern with the purity of the family's bloodline, which is a holding action to stave off change, reality, and the future. She hopes that her efforts will maintain the past glories of the De Paulys and the colonial Indies, even while Ed and his family are trying to accommodate to an unpleasant reality of the here and now. And the following passage from Marquand's novel not only hints at the title of Nieuwenhuys' novel, pinpoints an era as irrevocably vanished in New England as it is in Indonesia, but also echoes the earnest bewilderment of Nieuwenhuys' narrator trying to comprehend the peculiar distortion which time gives to individuals from another era who, though they might be kin, are also alien.
‘It was always hard to think of my forebears as people with thoughts and desires like my own. Even the pictures in the family albums - and there were a number of those albums, fastened with heavy brass catches, placed upon the third shelf of the whatnot in the small parlor at Wickford Point -
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even those pictures were unreal. The subjects sat in constricted positions, staring at nothing with cold grimaces that did not indicate either ease or pleasure. Some of the likenesses were tintypes and others were the faded brown of my father's well-colored meerschaum pipe.’
There are other parallels between these geographically dissimilar novels. There is, for instance, a ferocious kind of love that is called upon by the respective families to help them withstand hostile reality. For however virulent Aunt Sophie's actions may be, they have their genesis in the law that legislates that the affairs of the De Paulys come before affairs of the heart. It is this sense of obligation and of duty that does not allow either novel, especially Faded Portraits, to become morbid. There is a sense of sadness, of loss, of missed opportunities, and of the folly of contiguous misapprehensions between family members. But overriding any potential tragedy is the hope for the continuation of the line, and the preservation of what these people consider the best in them, though, inevitably, the hope must fail. And it is only in the final chapters that describe the disintegration of the De Pauly family when they succumb to the danger without, that the novel suggests - but never overtly - a parallel with the demise of the colonies. The disbanding, repatriation and deaths parallel the crumbling of an empire. And this is right, for the most persistent theme of this literature is decay, the spoilage of a fond dream which, as is true for Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga, is no match for change whatever shapes it takes, be it a Snopes or the ‘ethical’ liberalism of the Dutch government. And again we will recognize an unwonted similarity between the Dutch colonial Indies, the American South, and a vanished New England when Marquand observes that few writers not native to New England have really understood the area because ‘there was something which they did not see, an inexorable sort of gentleness, a vanity of effort, a sadness of predestined failure.’
The sensuality that Marquand concentrates in his portrait of the volatile Bella who, like a hazardous essence when unstoppered by a man will asphyxiate him, isdivided in Nieuwenhuys' novel between Kitty and Aunt Sophie. Kitty acts like a younger version of Couperus' Leonie van Oudijck in The Hidden Force (forthcoming in this series). She embodies the easy sexuality that one has come to expect from tropical literature almost with the inevitability of a cliché. It is a powerful attraction, a languid seductiveness that lures the untried European male, but it will not last in marriage.
Kitty does not move the reader. Even in the tropics, a Nabokovian nymphet is far less interesting in herself than are the reactions she stirs in her admirer. In Faded Portraits it is, paradoxically, Aunt Sophie who embodies a tragic sexuality. Uncle Tjen is lost to her as a man because he will never relinquish Winny, the girl whom he should have married but who died before he could. Aunt Sophie misreads her caring for a person as
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reciprocal love, which it can never be. When she takes care of Uncle Tjen she makes him (as well as others) beholden to her, but a dutiful response of gratitude can hardly masquerade as passion. She is a woman unfulfilled despite her frantic activity, and her apparent hysteria is more likely a barely controlled anger and despair. Her pathetic rivalry with Kitty for the affections of John, a callow totok realistically drawn, betrays an untapped emotional force that must spend itself by proxy because it does not partake of a sexual reality. It is Nieuwenhuys' carefully understated prose that makes her plight so poignant, for it could have been a sentimental portrait bordering on the ridiculous, if the description had been more flamboyant. As it stands, with its oblique hints and indirections, it is a touching portrait of a woman who will never have what that era and that society ascribed as her due.
Aunt Sophie will manage to take care of everyone with a bitter efficiency that is most likely hatred denied expression. Her sister Christien bears her children for her, dead Winny holds her husband, Kitty wins what seems to be Aunt Sophie's adolescent love delayed to middle age, and she can indulge in motherhood only by practically kidnapping Uncle Alex's illegitimate offspring. The almost frightening convolutions of her sexuality are only intimated when it is mentioned that she might have followed the example of native women and straddled the erotic fetish of the holy cannon in Batavia, acceding in her desperation to the very life she consciously despises. Aunt Sophie, and not the narrator, is the center of Faded Portraits, and hers is a fine characterization because it seethes with unfulfilled longings and unutterable despair.
Marquand might have provided Nieuwenhuys with a literary credo, but there should be little doubt that his most influential model was Willem Walraven (1887-1943; see the anthology in this series), a writer Nieuwenhuys admired and knew personally when he was still living in Java. Walraven died in a Japanese concentration camp in 1943. Nieuwenhuys was instrumental in getting Walraven's stories and sketches collected and printed, and he supervised the printing of a substantial collection of letters that reveal Walraven as a superb craftsman and master of Dutch prose.
It must be emphasized that a direct, forceful, and plain style of prose was by no means the norm in Dutch literature. Romantic effusion and stylistic excess had been the hallmark, and the genius of Couperus' baroque style only confirms the artificiality of the norm. Multatuli had been the great innovator and cast a long shadow, for it was Du Perron, Multatuli's apostle and gray eminence, who made a more natural prose a virtue, calling it a ‘parlando’ style. This is an Italian musical direction to indicate that a passage is to be sung or played as if speaking or reciting. Walraven is, arguably, the finest example of ‘parlando’ style in colonial literature and Nieuwenhuys did well to heed his example. Not only was this a litera- | |
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ry counterrevolution but it can also be proven that a finely tempered prose is far better suited to convey the excessive reality of the tropics, because the latter does not need amplification. Plain facts will be remarkable enough. Such prudent control, offset by the baroque or grotesque details that are inherent in the setting itself, energized, for instance, the genius of Kipling's prose. In any case, it would seem that it is certainly far better to err on the side of control than on the side of license. This problem of excess in Dutch literature is no longer so great, but when Nieuwenhuys was developing as a writer it was still very much an issue and it benefited him a great deal. It made it possible, for instance, for him to write a readable literary history of Dutch colonial literature (published in this series), and made his countless introductions in various anthologies palatable.
In 1941 Nieuwenhuys sent Walraven the story (‘One of the Family’) that was the embryo of Faded Portraits. After a diatribe against the kind of people Nieuwenhuys was describing, Walraven took the trouble of providing the budding author with practical comments on craft and style, and encouraged Nieuwenhuys to expand the story because it was ‘a peach which tastes like more.’ It took Nieuwenhuys more than a decade to comply. Walraven may also have influenced Nieuwenhuys' reliance on actual experiences, because everything Walraven wrote (except for the end of his story ‘Borderline’) was, as he stated in a letter, ‘mere copying of daily life.’
Although Nieuwenhuys knew personally and admired both Du Perron and Walraven, it is clear that, as a writer, he chose wisely in following Walraven's example rather than Du Perron's, because Walraven was the superior stylist. One may also wonder if Nieuwenhuys was encouraged by Walraven to read English and American literature, because his letters make clear that Walraven, who had been in the United States and Canada, liked reading Dickens, Kipling, and Conrad in the original. It is possible that in choosing Walraven over Du Perron (a Francophile), Nieuwenhuys was consciously choosing the second language - English - more compatible for a Dutch writer.
Nieuwenhuys had found his ‘voice’ and adhered to it throughout his career. In fact, it suits his personality, for seeing and hearing him talk seems like an echo of his prose; a ‘parlando’ style indeed, where the written word is molded by the spoken one. It is also perfectly suited to the subject of colonial literature and forms a link with the literature of the American South where, for instance, one finds the well-known example of Faulkner's use and adaptation of the rhythms and style of oral storytelling for his great fictions. The same is true for Kipling in India. It is interesting to note how one's style reflects a person because Nieuwenhuys championed the cause of writers who, though at odds with each other in terms of content, are stylistically related. There is the neglected Van der Tuuk whom Nieuwenhuys ‘discovered’ as a writer of superb letters quite apart
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from his being a linguist of genius; of Daum, whose novels ‘combined everything he encountered in his life into a unit and then phantasized a few additional things around it.’ And, though he had no place in colonial literature, there is the nineteenth-century poet and preacher François Haverschmidt (1835-1894), better known in Dutch literature under his pseudonym Piet Paaltjens.
Nieuwenhuys has maintained a lifelong admiration for this tragic figure, for reasons other than merely a personal elective affinity. This appealing, tormented minister from Friesland (a most inhospitable province of Holland, certainly in the nineteenth century) committed suicide. He was a gentle man, sensitive and brittle, and not suited at all for the horrendous task of trying to practice what he preached in the stultifying parishes of northern Holland, or in the bleak industrialized cities further south, below the Rhine. Nieuwenhuys discovered that Haverschmidt was not only a fine poet, but also a writer of impressive prose. In his book about Haverschmidt, Nieuwenhuys quotes a contemporary who characterizes Haverschmidt's delivery and style as follows:
‘If one has not heard Haverschmidt one has not known him. He made everything come alive with his voice, his eyes, his smile, with his gestures. And one thought that the way he read them, was the way those sketches and stories must have come to be. What was written or printed seemed like a copy of what had been voiced or told. It was popular, artless, spoken, and had little so-called literary value. For wasn't it a literature by itself, one that was particularly suited for the human voice, such as a play for instance, which, after all, has to be clear and distinct above all else, and which demands vivacity and naturalness rather than style? Haverschmidt... did not write the way one writes but the wat one talks. His voice can be heard between the lines.’
It was that ‘parlando effect’ of Haverschmidfs work that was - among other things to be sure - so attractive to Nieuwenhuys. For it can also be applied to his own work, be it creative or discursive. This style, of course, is not a natural function but becomes polished and perfected only with practice, but it is this ‘artlessness’ that suits Nieuwenhuys' personality and is therefore fitting for his work. And I doubt that it is coincidence that - mutatis mutandis - the best of colonial literature comes across with a similar delivery.
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Stofomslag van de eerste druk van ‘Vergeelde portretten’.
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