by Peter Berger (Honorary Member)
“When I was say about seventeen years old, I thought artists were exalted spirits who never uttered filth. It was also to my slight dismay that I, scholar still, and enjoying the mess of drinking a 35 cents cup of coffee, heard Mr. E. Elias uttering filthy obscenities. On the terrace of the Posthorn. Back then, something like that still shocked me. That gentleman. That writer with that finely cut, what do I say, with that noble face and those wise, ironic eyes. That brilliant, smile. Delicate, very white and charmingly flashy and to the connoisseur of people: very wicked. Darling of the distinguished Hague reading public! Especially the ladies. They should have known. On the spot they would have choked on a scream.
As a matter of fact, I often agreed with him later. But on one point I differed and disagreed with him. And I will continue to do so until my death, at least if in my final years I can still keep up with the times and still care about matters as important as they are utterly futile. And that is his opinion that The Hague has no bohemia. As long as he, Elias, lived, he himself was a bohemian. And he lived until his cool heart gave out on the train between ‘s Gravenhage and Delft and he was honored with the ugliest little statue The Hague knows, a little fellow made of bronze more or less dashing to remove his hat for uncharacteristic reasons in front of the former restaurant Royal on the Voorhout. Or is the figurine waving to Elias himself, who has passed? Like so many.
To be bohemian, one need not wear strange baggy ties, put one’s bare feet in sandals, drink and whore and burp. One need not, in short, conform to the image of Terpen Tijn in a verliederlijkste version, that Master Painter. To be bohemian, one need not be like Mr. Tijn. It only took one thing. One need only not quite fit into the world, and behave accordingly according to a stylized code. A garbage collector, a station wanderer, a quarter spitter or a begging rain slicker in rags: should they have psychosis-wrapped artistic souls that have not yet been completely obliterated by loneliness, raggedness and dirt: bohemians they are not. Not at all. A ragged has a form of behavior only because it is impossible to exist and then evade behavior.
To live, one must always do something. A bohemian cultivates a conscious behavior. Or, if he cannot do otherwise than he does-because that is what it will be-then he suggests that his behavior is conscious: an attitude. A choice.
The chosen fringe of society. This can be through maladaptation. But also by hype -adaptation, the dandy. And seen that way, Mr. E. Elias himself was a bohemian. A neat one, of course. Stylish in the suit, cuffs and such, enfin, you know. Silk ties with a work detail. White handkerchiefs. An immaculate gentleman, adorned by perfect courtesy when there were ladies In the vicinity. He called himself – older Hagenarians among us will remember – Flaneur. So is the name of that statue. Flaneur. A mild form of wanderlust, outwardly calm and dignified. Inside restless, hunted, restless. Like Slauerhoff, Mr. E. Elias had nowhere to live. Slauerhoff could still find shelter in his poems. Mr. E. Elias coped with the Kurhaus.
Wandering. In big or small. If necessary in the park. If necessary In the greenhouse. Being homeless, if necessary in a palace, that is bohemia. Especially that of The Hague, where the salvaged wanderer can still be restlessly fleeing in a chair, from nowhere to nowhere. And who then seems to sit still. But meanwhile … Yes, in this city one can safely be a wanderer in hiding during a stroll.
So writes Pierre H. Dubois in
Why does The Hague resonate so much in the hearts of poets and prose writers? The Hague is a city of desperate boredom where the demon of nothingness floats empty and blind and terrible in its invisibility through the long streets and avenues and in the parks and bushes. This is that fierce emptiness. You can see it in the deadly tired eyes of Willem Kloos, those jaded eyes of Kloos. In a photograph we see the poet stumbling through the leafy Hague on the arm of his rock-solid Jeanne Reyneke van Stuwe, he jaded like an old horse. Kloos in a Letter to his Reyneke, in a verse he not unjustly called
two together
Like a loving couple.
Then we walk together musing through the woods of Scheveningen
Or are we going to hoss there like two poets on our Pegasus…>
There wasn’t much hosing around. Look at me walking there in that old photo Kloos. Where will it be? The Koekamp? No, rather the parkway of Nassau Square near Avenue Copes. The saddest photo in the world, or it had to be Kloos sitting with Reyneke in the midst of a floral tribute. I believe it is on the occasion of their fortieth wedding anniversary.
. 
For old, very old, Kloos has grown old. He sits there laid out in a blooming grave amid the weeping flowers. But now that walk. Arm in arm with his Reyneke goes the wreck. Reyneke, Who looks a bit like Queen Wilhelmina. Likewise of thick coats and pot hats and forward steps. And then that Kloos next door. Propelled by his Reyneke. The world is terrible. So is man. But this picture is a hopeful sign. Man in all his despair cannot be destroyed so bravely. On William, of course, this does not apply. Well no. With that fat female? Never does that go down. That strength. Not the silent strength, but the faithful strength. The strength, fleshy with bravery, loyalty and desperate hope and will to live. Reyneke. With her women’s novels.
Oh Willem, it rises in me. Not large in stature yet he rises like a thin giant next to that lady-prop, little Dinosaur. Miserably long, like a child actually, a somewhat tearful child, toll lost, candy taken away, pelted with horse poop, knees scraped, tear in pants. A little fellow of eight concerning, but then one terrible night shot out into the wrong kind of adulthood, dwelling therefore in a lifetime of mourning crowned with a ridiculous bowler hat. Willem doesn’t want any more, that much is clear. Look at me that hollow look. Those drooping shoulders, that slouching. He’s slouching, I’m sure my grandmother would have said. Gin, of course. But before that, in the delirium of poetry, he had seen the Void in the face. And all that remained for the rest of his life was that long wait for fulfillment in the utter Nothingness of which The Hague can so murmur. Or being quiet. That demonic calm that sleeps sweetly in the parks with the children, the women, the tinkling of leafy leaves, a bill sighing in the small bushes. Deceptive loveliness. Rest, which could explode, explode, burst into shards at any moment. But who never does! Ever not.
The Hague, no ‘s-Gravenhage was first of all the waiting room of Willem Kloos. A large waiting room, sizzling and First Class with a large bar and a sky full of hellishly brilliant bottles. The last waiting room on earth, still just on the edge of somewhere. And Willem, Willem Kloos saw that single track to nowhere, and already heard how in the distance something rumbled. Less sensitive natures call that: the surf. But Willem knew better. Willem saw the clouds of steam in the sky above Bankaplein. And heard the train. And lifted the pale -blue eyes under the lead eyelids to the distance. Full of horror and longing. Willem Kloos suffered. And sighed.
I remember a book In my parents’ closet with a portrait of Kloos. It was a portrait that interested me fiercely. A photograph taken by Willem Witsen. This one fascinated me fiercely because in that picture Kloos looked strikingly like the Groningen professor of Byzantine law, Scheltema, who called himself N.E.M Pareau as a poet and who was often endearingly called Nemmie by friends because he did like gentlemen, edoch it not with them, if one understands what I mean.
Pareau had just such a countenance whose nobility was enhanced by the scars of smallpox or at least savage juvenile pustules. And he, Nemmie could look just like Kloos. Under that picture of Kloos it said … < Melancholy. For whom? For what… > I loved that. Melancholy. For whom? For what? All the riddles are now nearly solved and there is nothing more to it. The riddle of why Vestdijk wrote faster than God can read is simply because the writer was at times as manic as a lampshade and he was pounding on his tikmachien like a madman in order to stay ahead of the valley that was coming waves after him, while the vacuum cleaner was bellowing. And why Kloos so depressed? For whom melancholy? For Willem himself. For what? For life itself, of course, which he tormented because life coincided with Willem, that doomed God.
Just as Haarlem has gradually assumed the guise of Frederik van Eeden, Lodewijk van Deyssel, the ragged painter H.F. Boot, living in strange rags, Kees Verwey, that divine bastard, and Godfried Bomans, and the city there merged into the Teisterbant society, so The Hague has been shaped by its painters and poets. Haarlem is dangerous from rest, but the ignition is lost. And wet besides. And how much more dangerous is The Hague. With that feathery despair, that emptiness. Only the sea nibbling at Scheveningen is rough and firm in all its fluidity. Behind the porous surf that has been kept white. But then that sea was painted down there by the sturdy Groningen painting banker with his big brushes and coal-black pencils. Mesdag. Honorary citizen of the world. But beyond that…
It is the boredom of Boutens, who colored it with the sight of the young cavalrymen bobbing on their gleaming high knolls, chestnut brown, mildewed white, jet black, bobbing near the Alexander Barracks, or along the Schevening road, or through the Schevening groves planted with green shaving brushes. Bright in spring, dreamy in summer, haunting in early autumn. The horsemen on horseback, the cavalry, whom we still know from Breitner’s paintings, which can be seen on the eternally revolving canvas in Panorama Mesdag, colorful figures, arrows on the bow of their horse, polished men full of youth and war who, in sweet peace of yesteryear, once overwhelmingly alive, and once in Boutens’ eyes always already departing for the nowhere that has entered for them, leaping through an absent curtain, leaving the poet alone in his forbidden desire that tarred him with the molasses of sorrow. Beyond, beyond … Oh Scheveningen groves, surf of the Styx.
And Willem Hussem, the painter, himself a cavalryman on his meter-high ancient bicycle, men’s wheel, grinding on wheels and a huge man, the big chin In the air. He who had seen Boutens still there walking along the barracks. What a city of beyond it is here.
And Marcellus Emants, who, in his subdued manner full of airy gloom, knew no advice, no pagan advice, but was cheerful in the Circle of Arts, no doubt to his own piecey surprise.
Louis Couperus. Louis Marie Anne Couperus. Will he not like Kloos have seen that in the face? What else would it be in that man’s languishing chic? Oh that deadly tired Hague. Here is what is repelled to flowers broken in the bud and perished in the morning of their youth. And not just by Willem. A familiar story, told many times and retold by me again generous of greed. An admirer of the great writer turns up at his house on the Laan Copes van Cattenburch to ask for a break. At the door comes the servant, the little servant, who listens politely to the admirer and then says: “I’m sorry, sir, but unfortunately Mr. Couperus cannot see you now. Between three and four Mr. Couperus weeps.”
I remember … I remember The Hague where in the Posthoorn there was Nanninga, a kind of Dorus wholesale and full of hanging moustaches too, and equally melancholy. And if Nanninga didn’t have those hang moustaches-because my memory sometimes lets me down and he may have had less of a moustache in reality, -he still had them, all those moustaches, nay I see them growing, now, in front of me, at this very moment, dripping and black-and that’s what I mean by melancholy now, sir. Nanninga who was from Groningen, and therefore pried out of a hand organ thin, sad songs, peasant songs that died softly. Nanninga who quietly left the hall one evening to a lecture at the Art Circle because, he must have whispered, his father had called him, and then, like Berend Botje who wanted to row to Zuidlaren, he never came back either. Never again. No. Or should I write well, I lost the thread for a moment, but I mean Jaap stayed away.
Those songs by Nanninga, they smoke a little, yeah, what can I say. To burning bean foliage In the fall, when the cows start to get cold and cry softly and languidly, a little lummoxed by their knees, so that they look something like small farm stalls. Groningen, that is, on the North Country.
And speaking of the Groninger country, there we have Stutvoet, Cor so, poet, what a somewhat peasant man but quite small, born in a small farmhouse so, and who was a bit deaf and compensated with a horn as big as a bombardier. From copper and from his grandfather still, I think, his deaf Groningen grandfather. Maybe none of this is true. Who cares. It has been so anyway, with Cor, mien jong.
< Dead quiet December afternoon,
Mist and silence everywhere,
Not a single sound makes
Of a world of appearances and shal. >
Thus begins that remarkable poet, stranger on earth, J. C. Bloem, poet of impermanence, child of sorrow, his poem
Jacques flower was a slow man. He didn’t walk, he shuffled. Flower had his own time, and it lagged somewhat behind the world’s time which has at least the pace of a pedestrian. Bloem had his own temps longue that way. I think the pedestrians must have really flown past Bloem. That slowness, that immense slowness, that slowness which certain scholars have found petrified in fossilized mastodons, that ancient slowness which was to some extent mistaken for laziness and which in a certain sense it was, but which can also be called futility because there is no goal in this life, only an end…
Flower was a silent boozer. Not silent in the sense that he kept it hidden, but silent because Flower drank the silence in In the form of gin. He did that, too, so slowly, so immensely slowly that it took hours before the great poet gradually became a little lame, and a little, a very little reconciled to the irreconcilable. Because of this immense slowness, Bloem always saw how ordinary time and all the people and things in it were rushing toward their end at breakneck speed.
Flower: the living illustration of Vasalis’ poem
Slower than the oldest stone.
It was terrible…>
Indeed. Terrible. It must have been. Mr. J.C. Bloem, intimately smitten by the sweet and bitter unhappinesses of life. Of course, Bloem spent a long, long time in The Hague. Around several millennia for sure. What Couperus said of himself applies to Bloem as well. If I am anything then, I am a Hagenaar. No, it’s something else anyway. Because Bloem could never have said that. Because Bloem was actually not even a Hagenaar. Because he was not something or someone. As a resident of the world, of the Netherlands too, Bloem was nothing. He was from Nergenshuizen. Sadly dwelling In the world, briefly passing In the world, carefully picking a few flowers of calm joy, sometimes, the small pleasures. Little by little. Like -told, I believe, Ronald Holst, the sardonic observer- when a little servant placed a small wet refreshment on the table for Mr. Flower, and he caught a brief glimpse of the sweetly undulating beginnings of her young girl’s breasts, and that, I imagine, with an intimate pleasure. Although in the Posthorn only waiters resided, at the time, Henk and Theo in particular, and thus no maids, I always see before my mind’s eye the entourage of this occasion surrounding it. Not only because of the intrusiveness of this location, but also because opposite, say two hundred meters, and for Bloem about a quarter to a half hour walk, there was a bookstore, Synthesis. In that bookstore, operated by the lamented Mr. Douwes, many strange books are and were for sale. About astrology and yoga and Krisjnamoerti. And Oriental cooking without meat but with chickpeas, peanut shells aura, karma, hara and krishna, dried seaweed and pumpkin seeds and the slime of sea salad and fermented chantseed with mummified Osiris herb and Toth tuber ground in prayer mills and other foul ingredients that would kill an ordinary person on the spot, but which to a certain kind of Hagenaren provides something blissful, something unreal and transparent, something undeniably dry-clothed too. We were talking about bookshop Synthese, which offered for sale not only the Tibetan Book of the Dead, introductions to the finer nuances of Ming, Ying and Yang, the more suspect works of the great Carl Gustav Jung, the Tao, the Tarot and Tibetan Tea, but also the finest works of Western Literature.
And Douwes himself told how then Mr. Bloem came to spend whole afternoons browsing in his store, unerringly fishing out the real books from the bound and sewn-in chaos. He also told, with eyes shining with endearment and admiration, how the great poet did not so much steal those books he acquired there. Bloem couldn’t even have done that because he couldn’t, nothing at all, except sparkling and monkish conversation, on a bon mot of different from a brilliant interlocutor like Ronald Holst sabbing like a child on a pickle, enjoying, tasting, and furthermore some sparse but wonderful poetry and a little bit of bitterness, he couldn’t even be late Bloem, he always arrived punctually on time alone, in his time when it was always a few hours behind so. Let’s put it this way that Bloem had the books he purchased put into a large, imaginary account that was discharged only In the Mind, of which Bloem owned so much. Douwe counted that as an honor. But yes, a great soul possessed the owner of Synthesis who later also went into lemonade. But of course that is very flat jargon for wine shop and restaurant. Such a big heart that he allowed youthful artists to taste his fine wines for nothing if they were knowledgeable, or rather, talented, about them. I was not among them. And that’s a shame. But oh so much is a shame.
J.C. Bloem on the Hague house where he lived as a child: <How did it finally fall to the demolisher? Questions, to which I will probably never get an answer. The house is gone, so are its possible occupants, and we will follow them in due course. >
Typical Flower. Not just because of that impermanence. Because of that regret so deep that you still marvel that he bothered to write about it. The phenomenal scope of Vestdijk’s work and the minimal scope of Bloem’s have the same bitter source. Typical Bloem also because of that laziness. What Bloem thinks he will probably never get an answer to is fairly easy to figure out. He could have asked Schwencke or Bulthuis, because one knew, the other still knows all about The Hague. Schwencke of all that was made of stone and that dwelt therein. Bulthuis can tell àll the gossip, as can Jan Willem Hofstra, at home in the fine distinction between too High and Low Banka and the accompanying nuances of rank and file. And if wonderful gossipers and liars offered no solace, then Bloem might learn something at the land registry. But Flower and the cadastre. Bloem who must have acquired his title Magister utriusque iuris as the addition master of law once read in the more civilized circles, not because he knew the slightest thing about Roman, Old Testament or contemporary law, but because he knew nothing about them in such an elegant way. And why should he? As I said, or at least already suggested: Bloem and the cadastre, they are extremes. But Bloem, in his laziness here, lets something sing along in the answer he will probably never get. And that is, we will not get an answer to anything. So the search is a priori in vain. No land registry will provide relief. For even if he were to find out how that house has fallen to the wrecker, in that wrecker dwells the great wrecker of Time, and who he is, that remains the secret of which sometimes a poem by chance briefly lifts a little of the veil, and that veil is then a haze of absent tears that immediately hides the secret from view again. Ah that Flower.
Mischa de Vreede is a beautiful woman, and when she was so half girl, half young woman, she was an extraordinarily beautiful half girl, half young woman. She had touchingly innocent reverence for great writers because she thought they had great souls. And she tells that when she was with Jacques who was there half paralyzed again with Clara Eggink receiving love and care in the polder country, and when she went to visit Jacques, which the latter was pleased to see, the poet there quietly laid his hand on her, Mischa’s young breast. I find that moving. I think Mischa de Vreede wrote it down somewhere. And literary explorers can now verify how much I can lie, and it is at times by the beast. I care. And I see it in front of me. Flower after his stroke with a plaid in the autumn sunshine, meek because now thank God it’s almost over, that residential barge of Clara in a puddle nearby, polders and trees full of telling blisters all around, say: Peppels. And then Bloem himself; the great, noble bourgeois head, the head of a poetic gentleman who has grown old and very tired, already almost of delicate parchment, – the head thus reclined, eyes closed. Said plaid over the thin knees that no longer work. And then a left hand on the right breast of that poet so terribly beautiful in the relentlessness of youth already growing toward a woman. That has nothing, nothing to do with eroticism. It is a gentle farewell to life and its deceptive loveliness. A loveliness that is nothing but bile and betrayal. But on the outside, under the hand so hot sometimes. So intimate and almost real. And that yellowing autumn sunshine. And almost peace. Pagan last sacraments in the sweet polder landscape, among the ditches and the sweetly chattering trees that now hold their breath for a moment… Jacques Bloem has slipped worthily into his immortal death, making existence forgivable in his white-sided sleep.
Achterberg also sometimes visited The Hague, to inspect the emptiness here. Always good, so that he cut out a patch of it to quietly assemble it, back home, among the pine woods, in his poems in which it still vibrates, terribly, like style become time under power, in the wild balance of death. Achterberg stayed from time to time with Bert Bakker and Victorine Hefting. Victorine, in her memoirs titled with d’r first name:
What kind of man was Achterberg? Achterberg was the only man in the world whose big shoes you would believe that the big shoes he whipped around with under those too-high trouser legs were the ones van Gogh still painted. Achterberg wasn’t crazy. He was just not of this world, sometimes more, sometimes less and sometimes goose-stepping. Later some more. And would you think he existed.
A guy comes into the Posthorn and starts being a bit pushy with a group of poets and painters. Achterberg was there. Hussem too, because he was always there in the evenings. Eddy Hoornik must have been there too, because in those years he was practically glued to Achterberg for when the great Gerrit would get the creeps from the booze and imagery and start bellowing “Godverdomme” in the street, which is not done in The Hague – only Bert Bakker was allowed to do that when he came from Slawa and lived in a cone and all of The Hague belonged to him. Does the guy keep on ranting like that. Whereupon Achterberg:
I have the story from hearsay. From Jozef Eyckmans, that is, that wonderful, introverted poet, so receptive that he could marvel at even the saddest things if only they were beautifully put into words and then shoot into a dazzling emotion, and how do you say that: became merry with sorrow, trembling, and that is moving.
Anyway, I got it from Joseph, this story. The way he told it, sobbing with laughter, full of disbelief too, fragile as glass and portrayed in such a way that I saw Achterberg’s face. That head looking pale and ruddy as if it had been taken care of by a sadistic village barber who had escaped from the rasphouse, no combed hair, but raked, and blue-shaven temples, and then those eyes with those pale rays looking through reality, right through it…
Bloem was not fast on his feet. But Eddy Hoornik who thus from time to time also ticked up big and cautious was even slower. Eddy was hard on his feet. That was touching, that huge man, sweating with agony at times all at once, a literary conspirator pur sang, full of guilt whispering in his pure child soul. Hussem against the viceroy of Holland. Hussem often won because the Viceroy of the Netherlands didn’t give a damn. As long as it was pleasant.
A. Marja could do that better and more effectively: bully. As Achterberg tormented by guilt, but not blessed with the talent to turn that into poetry, he developed into a gifted bully.
In this, in sucking and teasing, he was truly great, although those around him could not appreciate it at all. His great mind was finally poisoned by a kind of post-natal pubertal and crackling bullying madness.
Marja had a horrible voice. He had a sharp thin nose attached to his big head. The nose of a true sarcastic shit-finder. And through that thin nose, his gray voice hummed whistling through the Posthorn, piercing and cutting yet sonorous. The voice of the jammer. Of all the riddles that can still fascinate me, this is one of the few. Women fell for that voice and Marja flattened many with it. Many women later thought he was a dirty bastard. Many men thought so right away. But Marja was essentially a nice man who had worked himself into the corner of the outcast with grating pleasure when he found that his ambitions had been greater than the talent that only accounted for a few very pure verses. I will not recount of his many practical jokes. They were never funny. So much so that anonymous ramblings were invariably attributed to him. Marja was a minor poet. Had he reconciled himself to that, he would have been a poet among minor poets. But alas, that minor talent was his misfortune that turned him into a major piece of unhappiness. And yet… Shabby as he could be, he was not afraid. Not even when he knew his array of ailments was about to push him into the grave. One of his last poems, if not his last, is a kind of farewell by daylight, in full nature, when he realizes crystal clear that the young woman, the girl he sees there, the girl he walked with a moment ago, will be alone some time from now. Without him. A bare poem. Not a sentimental word is there. It is neither furious nor resigned. Marja merely gives herself to it without any joy.
When Marja died, heart, Bronovo, it said on the frame of the window above the piss box in the Posthorn:
Joseph no longer comes to the Posthorn. Few more come the Posthorn of old. Many have changed. Many are dead. Albert Vogel. Albert of whom many say he was a lighthearted man. Yes. You could have a terrible laugh with Albert. And he really loved the Kunstkring, I don’t think he was really good at organizing, but he did it with full devotion, just as he sat diligently writing a thick book about the Circle, amidst piles of books and old manuscripts, drawings and photographs, in his gallery full of avant-garde art, sitting at a modern desk, on a modern, elegant office chair. But never quite detached from the past, like so many Hagenaars….
Take Braasem, so Willem with his tempo doeloe and his homesickness that was not homesickness but anger, bitterness, black bile. Willem Braasem had seen enough of Het Vaderland at one point, moved to Hoorn to run a museum there – and a sort of antique store on the Zuiderzee or whatever it’s called there, that wetness there – came to The Hague every weekend mad with homesickness to curse at Hoorn and its nits of citizens from a distance, was homesick for the place where he sat, under the trees of the Voorhout, near Het Vaderland where he tried to sniff out the smell of printing ink, restless as a little dog that has lost its master, and then left again, cursing and ranting, chalk white with anger and sorrow, for Hoorn. Week after week. Yes, that’s what Hague wants.
‘Tis as if I dare not speak well of Albert Vogel and I do. I miss him very often, very much. Albert Vogel did it his way. Whoever says he was superficial has no people skills. Whoever says he didn’t work hard didn’t know him. He just didn’t like the word work because displays of profundity don’t fit. But Bird’s profundity was of the good kind: it was the profundity of the surface. It must not disturb. It must remain pleasing. Light. Many people I mentioned had or have a hidden sadness. The emptiness, right? And Albert? Yes, of course. But in a wonderful, waving away vanity, yes utterly lighthearted way, with something cheerful even. As if life was a gift that, while not so convenient, ugly as it was, was also hard to refuse so as not to offend the giver, yet behind his back you somewhat embarrassedly mock it a bit. In that way, Vogel was an artist of life. He would have seen it sweetly different, too, if you looked deep into his heart … But oh well, let’s not look too deep into hearts, and other than that, we know how it is. And as for the rest, it’s generally nice, not to say not unpleasant right? Like a professional melancholic, Albert could live enjoyably in his grief, but indifferently and with a certain glee that he could get rid of his monsters that way. At least, so he did, because before all else: one is not annoying. Albert Vogels was Hague. Elegant, deadpan. Stylish in a form of tragedy that is not a tragedy, anything but, in fact, it is. Let’s not call it that. Let’s keep it light. In that, Vogel was poetic and hard at the same time, although he sometimes shivered with misery. Especially when there was a hole in his precious sweater.
Albert Vogel, that to me is the man who knew this city best, nay, lived it best. Or it had to be Victor Eduard van Vriesland, who often locked himself up in the Kurhaus with his owl head to think here – right here – about things that cannot be thought about. And who wrote, within walking distance of the house where Vasalis once lived, but I guess that was the coincidence of gossip:
And in the regulars who still go there.
The sea murmurs; even that murmuring is already becoming gray
In vain lived, in vain! appearances are done:
‘Tis again as if it never stood.>
But fortunately, after this poem, it was rebuilt again, that Kurhaus.
That emptiness, that terrible emptiness of The Hague, did it not sound so heavy, of a metaphysical nature it had to be called. It is a poem in which the people and houses and trees are airy words in the void; they are spoken and almost blow away, but remain in their rigidity; the streets are lines that hold the houses – or do the houses hold the streets? The ground here is sand that the sea has neatly laid down for a moment; it is not old here, everything is here only for a moment as in Venice, in all its apparent age, there is only for a moment, and that age or antiquity is only a layer of erosion. Patina that makes precociousness visible. The Hague is not the city of the past. It is a city that has no present. Or it is the city of the past as a present that is out of time. Or the city of temporality that got its final flavor in the fin de siècle and thus about a hundred years is temporality itself that endures for a while, against its better judgment. The dated Hague’s timelessness is its temporality. The Hague is engraved in nothingness, lovely and terrible, it is a city of tears that must not be seen, a city of smiling melancholy, the city of the Krul firm that is no longer there and the Sierkan and Lensveld Nicola and Paul C. Kaiser & Co, and of the Bonneterie where sometimes at night dead silent shadows are observed, who, with white umbrellas and white hats with voiles and many white skirts that nevertheless suggest long and beautiful and very white legs, show the entertainment fashion anno 1901.
Others say that although The Hague can be a ghost town even during the day, this cannot be true, especially since a man supposedly named Achterberg, living in the woods, was seen sneaking away with two mannequins. That must have been 1954, sometime in June sometime around midnight, when publisher Bert Bakker, early for his time, wandered out of the now defunct and completely vanished nightspot Slawa in the direction of the Denneweg to be found again in the Haagse Kunstkring, with his fat head, weeping and laughing at the same time.
They sometimes say that The Hague is a distinguished city. Nonsense. The Hague is a magnificent city, vulnerable in its precarious balance that has been dearly disturbed here and there by criminal architecture. It is a city with a soul as all true European cities have a soul. The soul of The Hague is gossamer. There is nothing stiff about it. No artist can party better than the Hague artist, and that’s the measure. Come once to a Jan Campert Foundation awards ceremony, and you will know what I mean. The way honors and festivity can go hand in hand in The Hague, that’s fabulous. Cheerful, generous, erudite, elegant even and exuberant.
Van Oorschot, spent and sullen, joins the checkroom after an important prize is awarded to one of his authors in the old city hall on Javastraat. The world holds its breath for a moment. Geert Wants Away. By the way, it is already late, and the official in the checkroom watching over the wardrobe hands Van Oorschot Jacket and Hat. When Van Oorschot puts on the coat, and quacks the artistic, dirty, black hat on his burly head with a grand gesture, that checkroom official says, < Sir, you are putting your hat on backwards. > The publisher pulls out his stinking cigar and snarls in his great voice:
The Hague is stiff? The Hague is hushed. Nadekend. wistful. It has above reality intensity of the park surrounding an insane asylum. Unreal, exalted, the eighth day of the week, the thirteenth month of the year. In The Hague, Achterberg says, he was on death watch. What did he mean? He meant, I think, that here is another time. It is a city so filled with death that death has been lifted. It is a city of poetry. For poetry drives out death by invoking it. Everything, everything knew gindse Gerrit who lived in the woods of that.
Ah Braasem who was called Willem. Those who live in The Hague are indeed always homesick for The Hague.
Annie M.G. Schmidt:
< What kind of weather would it be in The Hague,
north wind, with some fog from the sea ?
On the Denneweg it now smells faintly
To Couperus and also to sateh. >
The Hague is homesickness itself, it is the lost paradise seen through the eyes of an adult. Oh lovely city where we dwell but are not allowed to be. Where we can die but not live. Where the first lover lives in a house without walls. Or say: in the mirrored windows of the shop windows and the wind’s tinkling in the trees at Westbroek Park. It is a spiritual city, a city made for artists. And artists have made it by seeing it, experiencing it, painting it and singing about it. The fact is, we border Atlantis here, with only eternal water in between. The Hagenaar who does not know this has not been fatally happy here. He does not know this city, which stands at the edge of the cosmos. He does not understand that shells rustle in the houses, he does not understand the hidden secrets of eternity, nor the crumbled lace, nor the antique umbrellas smelling of mold that stand in forgotten umbrella stands, nor that in some attics the sand of 1923 still lies, when an adventure was suddenly aborted, while the sweethearts still lie panting dead and utterly on Oud Eik en Duinen, intimately and inexorably crumbled.
Crazy The Hague , that city I have loved since the day I arrived there, coming from Groningen, and which opened up to me, sailing along the dunes in a green Buick, like a liberation. Of course, I too have had my share. But I also, sitting behind my father, still weak from car sickness, got to glimpse paradise in an unforgettable ecstasy. And that was The Hague, as it opened in the golden evening light, a metropolis with De Witte, the Peace Palace and my Father’s Office, which lay sleeping under green trees in a mansion on Emmapleintje. We entered paradise. To say, Chris Buitendijk, that lover of his native soil and of much that was graceful of femininity there and who was in love with the bohemia, his bohemia, Chris so showed it all to my sister and me. Ockenburg and the Kurhaus and the little Palace on the Kneuterdijk and he made happy jokes, like, I can imagine, God the Dear Lord makes jokes of pleasure when he shows his creation to visitors from other galaxies. Here and there is some clutter, don’t mind it, tomorrow another crew will come to clean up. But the whole thing. Check it out. Such a little North Sea we laid here. Made of water, what do I tell you. Nice, isn’t it? And that sun that goes on and off by itself, and those swaying plants, and those officials, little joke. And look how lovely. People do die, I haven’t solved that, my divine lords from other galaxies, neither have you by the way, but they do it anyway in The Hague. Well then.
Such was Buitendijk, I mean: so intensely delighted, so grunting with amusement and witty satisfaction, so scheming with perkiness and pride. And I believe I was terribly happy, because I remember exactly, but was not aware of my happiness. There was so much future. And later, that summer, on the beach, I saw the most beautiful girl I ever saw. White skin, golden-blond hair. Gretchen, that is. Greetje from Scheveningen. And lounging on the beach I looked up every now and then to see if she was still there. And yes. She really existed! And that was enough. You just didn’t have anything like that in Paterswolde. So beautiful. So terribly beautiful. And mundane. And innocent, and white. Oh… And burnt that I was, from the sun, that evening. Like a lobster. Because what do you have to look for when you’re only used to fresh water? No, The Hague. Paradise it didn’t turn out to be. But something about it. Something…?
And with Chris on a terrace that later turned out to be the Posthorn’s terrace. The world opened up once more. Those painters! The artists! The artists! That’s what I wanted to be. Later. When I would grow up. Would become famous. And interesting. And pale with melacholia… Kloos I thought. And with ten women. As many as eleven!
Ah, endless paradise stretched lazily in The Hague with that summer of what will it be, 1953? That memory too. And wasn’t there, amidst the Hague bohemia on that little terrace in the sun, a remarkably distinguished gentleman, a simultaneously somewhat elderly and yet curiously young former Indian guest with silver-gray hair, sitting there looking amused? The gentleman whose name I would learn not much later, spoken reverently by the ladies. Mr. E. Elias? Honestly, sometimes I truly don’t know if I’m telling the truth. Or am I lying my ass off.”