The Dutch colonial war in Indonesia came to an end in December, 1949 when the United States, which had funded the bloody Dutch campaign to retake its Indonesian colony from local partisans after World War II, now pressured the Netherlands government to accept Indonesia’s independence and Sukarno’s supposedly anti-communist “guided democracy.”
In 1952, the 30-year old Dutch prose fiction writer Willem Frederik Hermans (1921-1995) responded to those events with his second novel, Ik heb altijd gelijk (I Am Always Right). The narrative not only sardonically punctured his country’s virtuous self-image and pretensions to global influence, but also got Hermans into the first of many scrapes with Dutch political and literary authorities. Rather than draw attention to his critique, the state charged him with blasphemy — his novel’s main character had compared Catholics to “rabbits, rats, fleas, and lice.” In court, Hermans insisted on his absolute freedom as a writer, and when the court ruled that he could not be held libel for his characters’ remarks, he vehemently objected, insisting those figures reflected his own sensibilities.
The following year, he published a novella, Het behouden huis, written in 1950, first translated for anglophones as House of Refuge in 1966, and now presented as An Untouched House, newly translated by David Colmer. In the decade following the end of World War II, the popular version of Dutch behavior during wartime portrayed a valorous resistance to the Third Reich. But the unnamed partisan fighter in An Untouched House, like all of Hermans’ protagonists, not only struggles to survive in conditions stripped of morality, but is revealed as utterly compromised. As Cees Nooteboom notes in his incisive afterword to Colmer’s translation, Hermans “summed up his attitude to life or, if you like, his credo, with one potent sentence that couldn’t be clearer: ‘Creative nihilism, aggressive pity, total misanthropy.’” Once again, Hermans’ critics were outraged. His early masterpiece, The Tears of the Acacias, published in 1949, had deeply offended some of his countrymen by querying the character of Dutch resistance during the war.
As An Untouched House begins, the narrator recalls a pause in the fighting, though it is uncertain where he and his fellow partisans were located. He had left Holland four years previously, been captured by Germans, sent to and escaped from the concentration camp at Strellwitz, recaptured near the Swiss border, escaped again from a train in Saxony, then started to trek westward. The partisans are Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Spanish; a Russian detachment arrives and executes five of them for an undisclosed reason. “A silence descended,” he says, and continues:
All of the combatants seemed to be taking it easy as if the war was a large sick body that had just been given a shot of morphine. The only thing happening: a high altitude dogfight, two against one. I watched it, a blade of grass between my teeth. Like skywriters the fighter pilots were drawing a pattern of white loops on the blue background, as if for our entertainment and no other reason … The bullets from their machine guns drilled into the nearby ground. It could happen now too, I thought, and I’m just sitting here, not doing anything, thirsty. I could get hit now too, as if sitting was punishable by death. But death comes for everyone, even without any wars. What difference does war make?
After a skirmish with German troops, the partisans find themselves in a spa town, “a luxury resort.” A sergeant directs our man to proceed alone with his rifle. Solitary, he feels as if “the war had never really taken place … There had never been any other people, not in my lifetime, nowhere in the whole world.” In this way, Hermans not only enlists us as emphatic observers of our hero — at least for the moment. War and memory itself are pared away, leaving us with the elementary man, who now approaches a house: “Look inside. I had plenty of time. I had been given an order; I had been sent somewhere. I didn’t know where, but I couldn’t go back to the sergeant just like that. I would interpret the order my own way … who knows what would be in it for me!”
Nooteboom notes that Hermans’ “cool and at times almost forensic style cannot mask the pathos” – and Colmer’s crisply attuned translation sets the attitude and generates its effects with apt concision. The narrator makes his way through the rooms – he takes a hot bath! He says, “I was extra attentive. Now that I was so clean, I expected to discover all kinds of things in my face. I discovered nothing. All the things I had been through were gone without a trace. Memory can’t keep up with appearance. An eighty-year-old in front of a mirror doesn’t get the impression he saw someone else in it when he was eight.” Rather than putting on his dirty underwear, he dresses in clothes belonging to one of the house’s departed occupants. His identity shifts to impersonation – but of whom? From this point on, the man’s experience in the house is drawn inexorably back to the context of war – but his story is no longer a war narrative. The overwhelming emphasis critics place of Hermans’ satirical edge obscures his penetrating, macabre inventiveness. The man alone in the house is unmoored, detached, contemplating the contours of space and exploiting the objects within it — ideas and abstractions (the very things that start wars) dissipate. Hermans may be said to critique the image of the steadfast partisan, but he did not write op-ed camouflaged as fiction. Like Patrick Modiano’s novels in France, Hermans’ narratives treated the years after the war as an ongoing condition.
Most contemporary war novels have a way of ushering the reader into the “reality” of fighting and the desperate decisions made by those engaged – while flattering the reader’s powers of empathy and emphasizing a communal victimhood. We all get to look down from a lofty plateau — and refuse to question our preference for behaving, as John Ashbury mockingly described, like “spectators who find it helpful to be reminded that there is room for improvement in the existing order of things.” Alberto Manguel has observed that “the reality of the novel is Kantian. The protagonist sees the world as he imagines it to be, while the reader knows there is a world-in-itself, unknowable to the protagonist.” But Hermans found knowingness offensive. His novels reflect a world in the grip of dynamics unknowable to the author — except as psychologically chaotic. The moral neutrality of his narrative, an element of that chaos, triggers a unique anxiety.
The novel’s disquieting power emanates from the foggy zone between the narrator’s agency and impotence, the imagination and the force of events. To illuminate Hermans’ oeuvre, Nooteboom quotes from a piece he wrote about the author’s 1958 novel The Darkroom of Damocles where one finds “riddles that remain unsolved, inescapable destinies, surreal intrigues, always coming back to helpless insignificant people.” At times the surreal aspect has a comic tint. People can’t be blamed for the contradictions inherent in their circumstances, he seems to say – unless they are hypocritical and pretentious about their supposed higher level of awareness.
The academics at Groningen University, where he taught geography, were some of his favorite targets – and in 1972, a cabal of them inspired a parliamentary committee to investigate their claim that Hermans was scanting his teaching in order to write. The government found Hermans guilty merely of using too much university stationery for his creative note-taking. He was also chastised for traveling to apartheid South Africa — but Hermans was married to Emmy Meurs, a black Surinamian, and the two of them had participated in protests. All of this led to Hermans decamping with his wife to Paris in 1973 – and announcing that his subsequent nose-tweaking novel, Among Professors, was drafted on the blank backsides of his university papers.
[Published by Archipelago Books, October 23, 2018. 102 pages, $16.00 paperback]