HC ten Berge (1938) has reanimated his childhood literary. He did not opt for the well-trodden prose path, but revived his early years in infectious narrative poetry. In A Child’s Eye – The Early Childhood of Xander Specht he portrays himself as Xander. Childhood is far away in years, but regularly takes possession of the poet:
While you were already asleep, you fell asleep again.
It happened in broad daylight,
Dreams took you to what you had forgotten –
Places you never went to.
Thus the ‘fugitive time’ returns. Ten Berge’s oldest memories are those of the last period of the war and the liberation, the most recent ones describe the end of primary school. For Xander Specht, happiness was not very common then. The war is to blame for this: a father in hiding, no light, no gas, no radio, bombers, blackout. ‘Fear struck, crawled/close under the skin’, is one of the first poems.
The tone is set.
Ten Berge draws Xander Specht as a sensitive, lonely and anxious boy. His anxiety only grows, with school, with bad swimming lessons, with recurring physical problems.
Child and adult
The title a child’s eye suggests that we experience Xander’s history from his child’s perspective, but that is only partly true. Ten Berge’s alter ego enables him to look at himself from a distance. The poet regularly addresses Xander, somewhat analytically, with today’s knowledge. One eye of the child, the other of the adult.
‘In blissful ignorance/ you suddenly almost died’, writes Ten Berge when Xander falls seriously ill shortly after the liberation and almost dies. Death haunts his young life quite well. A classmate with whom he shares the school desk drowns. An intimidating pediatrician dies a week after treating him. Xander’s response to all that passes and disappears is: hold on!
After years, Ten Berge has now collected his earliest past and thus created an image of the time. That sometimes results in sentences that stay with you.
Peace only brought prosperity to the sharks.
Still emaciated, people were already waging war in the East.
Xander’s parents are caring, but physically inhibited. “So never a kiss, a hug or a compliment.” His aunt Martje is more physical and hugs Xander comfortably. It is a pity that Ten Berge explains here explicitly, and also with a cliché, what is obvious:
It was a hug
you didn’t know, a warm bath, something
heavenly that you had never enjoyed before.
Xander’s budding authorship is described through the inspirational books he devoured as a child. Reading is an escape and purification for the boy, who experiences everything intensely.
Ten Berge’s poetry is considered difficult, inaccessible. That is not the case for these low-threshold, but high-quality poems. Read on, it says what it says. But they do make you curious about more.
great children’s drama
The sensitive Xander’s relationship with his parents and their effect on him remains somewhat unclear. His father is marked as anxious – a result of the war? We can’t quite figure that out. The mother yearned for an adventurous life, but came across ‘a rigid reality’. Only those of being a housewife? And what did the ‘black-skirt brothers’ who stalked and groped Xander in the ‘school hell’ do, also for his later life?
‘Now you lived hidden within yourself, / a mole under the ground’, says Ten Berge a human age later. “Fly out,” he advises the little boy he was, “and never come back.” But the aged poet returns to the past and recounts a great children’s drama in hypothermia, with compassion for the boy he once was.
Ten Berge has never wanted to know much about ego literature, ‘the oppressive I-lyricism of sweaty souls’, as he put it in an interview. a child’s eye is nowhere cramped, although in its barely a hundred pages it contains the material for a great novel or autobiography. Neither would make this poetic monument superfluous for a far from uncomplicated youth.
HC ten Berge: A Child’s Eye – The Early Childhood of Xander Specht. Koppernik; 96 pages; € 21.50.
