Little Known Nescio: The Life, Works and Times of Jan Hendrik Gröhloh

'Amsterdam really is just a village.'

There was once a man who was born and raised in Amsterdam who wrote the following line: Behalve den man, die de Sarphatistraat de mooiste plek van Europa vond, heb ik nooit een wonderlijker kerel gekend dan den uitvreter (Except for the man who thought Sarphatistraat was the most beautiful place in Europe, I've never met anyone peculiar than the freeloader).

The author of these lines wasn't a particularly famous man. No. Aside from a brief, bohemian-romantic existence in his late teens and early twenties, he lived very typically of the time. Being Dutch he had to be practical, had to be sensible and decent and consider the future. So he joined the Holland-Bombay Trading Company in 1904 and then some two years later, married a woman named Aagje Tiket. 

A job then marriage. The couple had four kids. All daughters actually. 

In his spare time he wrote only a handful of stories, and published them anonymously throughout the years, going by the name of 'Nescio', Latin for 'I don't know'. 

Yes, just a handful. 

Yet strange and beautiful wonder his slender volumes of stories are perhaps the most beautiful in the Dutch language, a language many people may not find particularly beautiful. They are the stories of youth, a portrait of the author and his artistic friends as young, carefree, careless men, their layabout lives until they all had to learn to grow up and get on with it. They are a little melancholy these stories, each one filled with this colourful bevy of curious souls, each soul fighting the inviolable future in their own romantic way.

Only a handful of stories, really prose poems, pages filled with episodic scenes, images, everything cast in vibrant, impressionistic gold - sunsets, canals, leaves and streets. Within his tales there are girls on trams you cannot kiss, lamps heedlessly burning at the end of day like 'wonderful mistakes' (een wonderlijk vergissing), friends out rambling in the country, conversations, voices complaining about God. These young men, these little Titans drinking jenever, never really knowing what happened to Japi, the freeloader (uitvreter) on his trip to Friesland. All of them alive, falling in and out of love.

One reads his stories and knows intimately if not intuitively these worlds without having lived them. One feels them and longs for them almost as much as the author might have. Like thinking about a friend you haven't spoken to or someone you once cared for but who lives far away. That's what you feel when you read him though you live now and he lived then. Nothing changes. 

A whole other world perfectly preserved, a place that existed nearly innocently in the early twentieth century. Back then most people had no cars but then women didn't have the right to vote (though their voices were getting louder and their presence known). There were still horses in the street, carriages going by and one could still walk in horse shit. Recorded music was relatively new though gramophones could only play a few minutes of music so people still flocked to concert halls (concertgebouwen) and sat in family parlors listening to a young prodigy play Schumann or Chopin.

The war wasn't even on the horizon  in the time of Nescio' youth though the Dutch lost to the British in the Boer Wars in 1902. 

In Amsterdam, the year after Nescio married, there was an exhibit of a famous Noordt-Brabant-born artist. Famous but dead, little known in his lifetime. The son of a pastor, he worked for his uncle, an art dealer in The Hague and London before dabbling in religion only to find his love of painting in what would be the last seven years of his life. He traveled throughout The Netherlands, Belgium, England and France. Before he died he was in an institution and dreamed of returning to his native land. After a gunshot, said to be self-inflicted, his brother, an art dealer in Paris came to see him at his deathbed. Though they were both multilingual - as the Dutch tend to be - the two brothers spoke their native Nederlands, reminiscing about their far away land and lost childhood. The artist passed on, letting go of the pain, his lonely life and some time later, the brother unable to cope with his sibling's absence - no one to write him those beautiful letters - died in his own way, serene but solemnly.  

In Nescio, there is a troubled artist named Bavink who is in love with sun. And like Van Gogh he too was in love with the light and also was a heavy drinker. Bavink, like the great failure, went into a institution after cutting up his great, modern masterpiece into tiny pieces. Some believe Van Gogh cut off his own ear but it was only the lobe and again there is some speculation it wasn't self-inflicted. Maybe he was protecting his friend Gauguin from the authorities.

Bavink and Van Gogh. One might say there is a coincidence here or is it life and art simply doing their dance, wondering who precisely inspires who. 

(What came first, the art or the artist?)

But more than a painter, Nescio is a philosopher, always aware of the flux and flight of time, the changes incurred. He is a precursor of that erratic and joyful cynic Celine who would later write we are "nothing more than lamps on streets no walks down any more," that people are "sad when they go to bed" in his masterpiece Journey to The End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit). Nescio wrote something along those lines in a quaint tale of quiet desperation. 'And we thought it a shame to have to go to bed, people should stay up forever. That was one of the things we'd change.' (En we vonden dat 't zonde war naar bed te gaan, dat een mensch eigenlijk altijd op moest kunnen blijven. Ook dat zouden we veranderen.)

For the author lived his other life, the life of going to bed at a decent time successfully, eventually becoming a director of the company he started with back in 1904. A director some twenty years later in 1926 only to suffer a breakdown the following year for which he was hospitalized. Was it cognitive dissonance, being a man who lived two lives, one largely public and important, the other tiny and insular, a poet's interior life of angst and fragmented beauty? How could he be true to the two deities of his existence, the business and the artistic? Like being between the devil and God. 

It is no wonder these two figure so prominently in his story, the Little Poet (Dichtertje - Dichter being poet and tje being the dimunitive). Here a man who knows that because he is a poet only the pretty girls walk on the other side of the canal. Though the Little Poet is married to Coba he finds himself falling in love with the sister. And like life, he didn't notice the sister at first. How could he? Dora was fifteen when they first met but of course a beautiful girl is bound to become a beautiful woman, old enough  'to read edifying books, with chocolate in her mouth and the rest o the chocolate bar on the table' (Ze was nu zoo oud, dat ze verheven boeken las met een mondje vol chocla en de rest van de reep op't tafeltje.)

For the Little Poet's life, it doesn't end well. Between the devil and God, Coba and Dora... What can we say of the author, that he wanted to sacrifice a fictional life because that's what he wanted secretly for himself? 

Then in 1929, he Nescio, the man known as 'I don't know' had to tell the world who he was lest someone else receive all the credit for his works. So Jan Hendrik Frederik Gröhloh announced publicly he had penned the stories that concerned rebellious youths and wanderers, freeloaders and bohemians. There was some shock amongst his peers and colleagues but I'm sure they were probably suspicious. No man can keep an entire secret, fragments falling out here and there, scraps and sketches leaving a trail back to the source. 

One wonders if given the chance he could have forged a literary career. Nescio, nee Gröhloh was born the same year as Czech literary giant Franz Kafka  (1882) and was only four years younger than Robert Walser (1878), another genius storyteller of Swiss descent. Where could he have taken his career had writing won out over the practical and decent? Maybe nowhere. In 1937, ten years after his breakdown, the director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company retired, exclaiming he was free after forty years of servitude, free of his 'valley of obligations'. But free to do what? His youth behind him, some friends dead, some alive and close to retirement, he didn't manage to write anything other a smaller handful of sketches and stories. What we have then is all he was capable of.

Today he is known in The Netherlands and little known elsewhere. While Tolstoy and Dickens, Shakespeare and Ibsen, Austen and Bronte and other literary gods command the shelves of bookstore and libraries, Nescio appears now in the English-speaking world on the periphery, slender, tidy but still well-spoken. His works are like luminous afternoons you've half-forgotten but they were still beautiful even though nothing monumental or dramatic happened but you want to go back to them nonetheless. You are nostalgic only because you remind yourself to be, having the photographs and snippets of conversation still circling in your head. 

Nescio/Gröhloh, like a business man you might see on a tram in modern day Amsterdam, newspaper in hand, a spring afternoon maybe outside the window, his younger version by the canal or in a boat, the Sint Nicolasskirk standing in the distance.