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.

Rereading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Of all the books I read in my adolescence, from The Great Gatsby to The Catcher in the Rye, books assigned in English classes (The Mayor of Casterbridge), books I read for fun (Don Quixoite) and edification (The Consolation of Philosophy), I still believe John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has been the most important.

Like a song that not only stirs us but revives memories in us of a time when we first tuned in, a great book is both a tome within itself and within us. There is something of a bridge between the words on the page and how they resonate inside us. The philosopher Plato looked down upon artists because they chose to imitate what he considered an imitation. A painter paints a table when the table, in Plato's argument is only a copy of the great eternal idea of a 'table'. 

For me, a great writer is able to create an entire world and the fortunate reader, an opportunity to explore it and become in some way lost in the images, amused and entertained by the scenes, befriended by the characters and moved by the varying moods. The work of art, especially a book is not truly an imitation but a reality, a realm unto itself, a place that changes though the print never truly changes, the story never changes. There is a kind of mystical relationship between the reader and the words written. It is a timeless world that unfolds in time and does so eternally. The words remain but the reader encounters a variation of the same due to his or her experience with the book. 

Steinbeck's world is such a place that ones feels at home. Once the book begins, there is no turning back and though some chapters are difficult, it is a journey that doesn't let go until you find yourself at the end.

For those that haven't read The Grapes of Wrath it's more than just a novel about the Joads. Though the backdrop is the Depression, the places, Oklahoma and California and the roads in between, the real focus is survival along with the need for human support and co-operation, ideals and dreams that are achievable and in reach but often thwarted and obstructed by the greedy, the arrogant and ignorant (for isn't greed a form of blindness). Though there is no good and evil, no black and white in the story, merely a struggle between viewpoints, the conflict between the haves and have-nots is upfront and personal. 

To begin, the Joads, like many farmers of the 1930s Dust Bowl drought years lose their farm and in order to make ends meet, drive out to California in search of work. Along the way they are challenged and though the family is little by little torn apart, a greater picture arises, a greater bond becomes recognized. Though people like the Joads are abused by the cops who act as bullies for the well-to-do, they are never broken. 

It is a perennial story of survival and hope. The ending differs from the film adaptation and perhaps it is the most haunting in literature. 

To read such a work has brought back memories of my teen years, the time when I first discovered Bob Dylan's early folk music and the music of Dylan's main influence, Woody Guthrie. 

While reading the novel, I seemed to recall the strikes my father attended at General Motors in St.Catharines. 

I also remembered the effect the novel had on me then, the longing to live in a world where families worked hard to stay together. Though I knew my parent's separation was inevitable, I admired Ma Joad's tenacity, her fierce will to stay strong in the face of adversity and loss. 

I also looked upon Tom Joad, the pivotal protagonist as not only an icon of hope and justice, but of courage and endurance. For me, high school was hell but there had been other hells out there and Tom was the kind of man I would have wanted to be my best friend, my wing man in a fight or conflict or bad corner.

There was also something to having a brother like Al or younger siblings like Ruthie and Winfield. The Joads are never alone and when I first read the book, it was difficult coming to the end when I knew it would be the end of their kinship. Even tonight, after reading the last page for the second time, it is like closing the door on a crowd of kind, but sturdy companions.

There should be a word to describe the melancholy people feel when a good book comes to an end, when the reader must resentfully place the book back on the shelf after there are no more page to embrace and devour. It is a mournful waking moment and only with beautiful works of literature do I encounter such sombre moods. I can't just jump into another book because the aura of the just read masterpiece is too overwhelming. And the aura, I know, often lingers to the point that other novels will routinely feel pale in the great work's wake. 

I felt the same after my first reading. It is harder even now. I'll probably be a wreck should I return to the book in the years to come.

The thing that stays with me the most is how timely and timeless the scenes of the book played out, especially when the Joads and the other characters in the novel had to deal with cops. The law enforcement of those times and places were bullies then, they are bullies now. I've kept abreast of the Occupy Movement through Democracy Now and it saddens me to think that so little has changed and yet so much. I think about my recent dealing with a Niagara winery, their mistreatment of employees and if it wasn't for books like The Grapes of Wrath, for human rights and labour relations groups, I wouldn't have received a settlement. I can say John Steinbeck has had a great influence on my life in both his writing and the awareness he spread, rippling through the decades. 

Such novelists leave deep impacts in our lives when we let them. All it takes is a simple motion of the eyes and some understanding, some basic literacy and we're on our way to dreaming and feeling something beyond ourselves. The trouble is the confusion we encounter when the books end. What do we do with our learning, who do we talk with? I've always been a loner and there are so few people I can speak to that share similar interests. The Internet is one place but I don't really feel connected to people, not with a blog or with messages on Facebook. Our digital age has tried to recreate a pale version of human interaction. Social media is far from truly being social. I much prefer the company of the Joads, their faces in the firelight, the distant sound of harmonica, the smell of bacon and the soulful eyes of Tom and his preacher friend Casey discussing God, the world and humanity. 

I know I can go back to them.

Falling in Love with Karin Fossum

I'm not one for mysteries. There never seems to be a shortage of hard-boiled, alcoholic detectives with ex-wives and troubled children. Every time I wander into the mystery section, I feel a yawn rising in my chest. I've picked up so many books and it's the same thing for me. Either an American mystery with the same page-turning gusto of a Michael Bay movie where you have to keep reading because your reptilian brain won't forgive you if you don't or another badly translated, badly written Scandinavian novel (or trilogy of novels....hmmmm what could they be?) with boring characters who speak boring dialogue. And the narration is terrible (really can anyone explain the popularity of Steig Larsson's books? Come on....)

(Though to my mother's credit, I applaud English mysteries in her honor and hopefully, eventually, will get around to them when I get the time.)

The mystery section, in other words is the last section for me in the book store. 

But there are a few shining lights and one I must mention is Karin Fossum. 

I simply love her books. I first came across her by accident while perusing Amazon.com. I had read the Toronto's Star bi-weekly 'Whodunnit' section and came across the name of an Icelandic writer. I requested the book from the library only to find it a bit disappointing (again hard-nosed detective who drinks a little too much and has a drug-addicted daughter....and a case that 'can't' be solved...blah, blah, blah...). 

When I went back to Amazon I wanted to see if all Scandinavian mystery novelists were the same. To my eternal joy and happiness I found the name of Karin Fossum among the Amazon recommends section.(I found others but they're not worth mentioning, their books seemingly suffering from bad translation and typical plot-lines relying too much on shock and gore instead of good characters.)

I started with Se deg ikke tilbake or Don't Look Back, her first novel to be translated into English from Norwegian. And all I can say is I can't look back. The book is excellent and best of all, believable. 

The story revolves around the mystery of a girl found naked on a cold Norwegian beach. Detective Sejer is heading the investigation, an older, well-seasoned but certainly not cynical police man. Though he has a world weariness to him, he demonstrates poise and diplomacy and is tough and terse when he needs to be. There is no element of corruption in his character and though he might sound like a by-the-book gumshoe, he's more a down-to-earth realist who simply wants to get thing solved and set right. There is an Everyman quality and he isn't perfect. He has regrets, he suffers from the loss of his wife. He knows he won out by meeting and marrying her. There is an element of mourning but an equally real motivation to let the past be and move on. 

His sidekick Skarre smokes cigarettes. He is young and attractive and there's a kindness to him. Though he might appear innocent and wide-eyed, he's no rookie and works alongside Sejer. 

What I loved about the book is the simplicity, the directness of the text. A good artist paints a picture but a great one allows you to step in it. And that's how Fossum works. She relies on the reader's imagination to help her paint the scenes. Most readers have an idea of the Norwegian countryside and so she helps us in some ways, but she lets us go in others. Her descriptions are rarely elaborate and exaggerated. I would say she sets up her world with a modicum of sentences. The spareness is beautiful and often bewildering because it seems we are following just behind the main characters, getting lost with them, wondering the same things. 

Something similar could be said for all her books. We are there and the best part of being there, is the feeling, both in the moods of the characters and their emotions. We sympathize with Sejer because he in turn is sympathetic. We learn he has a daughter and the daughter has adopted a boy from Africa. Fossum sheds light on the racism in Norway where in such books as When The Devil Holds the Candle and The Indian Bride, the immigrant and the outsider are given harsh treatment. 

There is also a great deal of compassion felt for the mentally ill. Fossum herself worked in hospitals and nursing homes and was most likely no strange to the trials of the psychologically wounded. This is evident in He Who Fears the Wolf, Black Seconds and Bad Intentions. Her crazier characters are often more sane and human than her criminals which exhibit their own crazed behavior. 

And yet, I often hesitate to use the word 'criminal'. The guilty are guilty but there are too many shades of grey here in Fossum's Norwary, a nice contrast to the black and white we see in  our typical American mystery where we are safe with the good guy and threatened by the bad. With Sejer, there are often cases  he has to deal with where the criminal is an old lady or just some kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. The so-called 'bad intentions' aren't really 'intentions', just results of a situation gone wrong which makes the endings of her books feel more incomplete and of course, more real. The case might be closed or it might not be. It's all so ambiguous and complicated and all-too-human.

I've read nearly all her books and I've not been disappointed with a single one. Some I've loved more than others but as a whole, I love them the way any voracious reader would love a writer who continually delivers. I can look forward to Sejer, to his outlook, to his development. At one point he had a dog who passed on. At one point he had a girlfriend, a doctor in a mental hospital with a kinkiness to her. Like in life, people and loved ones come and go. In my latest Fossum read, Bad Intentions, the reader encounter's a moment in which Sejer faces his own fears and thoughts regarding mortality following a walk with Skarre. 

Again I don't read mystery but I wouldn't call Karin Fossum just a mystery a writer. She transcends the genre, makes it personal, making it, in short, her own. For me, it is literature with a mystery. Her books are like the best friends you want to keep in contact with. Seeing where it all goes in turn allows the reading to feel even more rewarding. She's an author who values the intelligence of the reader and over delivers with her characters, her stories and her writing.

And when someone goes above and beyond, thinks the best of us, doesn't insult our intelligence or rely upon the derivative to sell her story, what's not to love? (Fans of the Larsson, you really need to see the light...)

(A final note, I must acknowledge the astute and careful work of translators like Charlotte Barslund that have made Fossum's world so readily available in English. Without people like her, the atmosphere, mood and credibility of another world would remain alien and inaccessible. Many, many, many thanks Charlotte.)