Dick Pels: ‘Man is the master of things, but they return everything’

In the open steering position, a long day of sailing in an ice-cold north wind. He has just returned from Rotterdam, via the Lek, the lock at Vreeswijk and over the busy Amsterdam-Rhine Canal to the Zoutkeetsgracht in Amsterdam, his permanent berth. His boat is too long to turn there, so if he leaves again soon, he will have to reverse first.

The skipper is called Dick Pels and his ship Nymphaea. It is from 1948. And she, because a ship is one she, a steel motorboat of thirty meters in length that is officially called a saloon deck cruiser and was built in 1917 as a pleasure yacht for the Rotterdam shipowner Albert Goudriaan. Pels bought the ship in 1978, made it his home and restored it to its original state as much as possible. Nymphaea: water lily.

Pels was in Rotterdam to baptize his latest book in the Maritime Museum: about the history of the Nymphaea, which had its home port in Rotterdam until the Germans seized it in 1941. He also weaves through the many strands of his own life: his studies and teaching positions as a sociologist in Amsterdam, Groningen and London, his years as director of the scientific bureau of GroenLinks. The becoming of earlier books, including about Pim Fortuyn. The singer-songwriter he became after his retirement. And his life on board with three women, successively Renée, Aya and Baukje. “But the ship had to continue to play the leading role,” he says. Yet the subtitle ‘Autobiography of a ship’ is deliberately ambiguous.

The tour begins in the parlor of the Nymphaea, with its original Cuban mahogany panels. Then down a lazy spiral staircase. The owner’s cabin, the rooms amidships where Pels and his wife study and where two DAF diesel engines have been cunningly concealed. And the low aft where it smells of iron and oil and you can see the cables that control the rudders.

On the way back upstairs he opens another door. “This was ‘aunt’ Riet’s cabin,” says Pels. “She was the governess, but she was always with everything, even when the children had long since left home.” In his book he speculates about her role: menage à trois, maybe something between the two women? No one could – or would – tell him.

And then we are back in the living room, the table full of books: fiction, history, politics, poetry and the booklet Motor soulfrom his friend Warna Oosterbaan, also a sociologist, who also believes in a blurred boundary between people and things.

In 2020 you still argued passionately for a merger of PvdA and GroenLinks. Why don’t you write more about politics?

“I have been arguing for a progressive combination for thirty years, preferably with D66 there, but that has become a right-wing party that does nothing. The Netherlands is stagnating. Only in the corner of the PvdA and GroenLinks is there still a little energy. Rutte stops everything or postpones it. The middle parties are dead or drifting towards populism. I felt like I had said it all.”

Working hard on my boat helped me get over desperate moods

“The other reason,” says Pels, “is that I fell into a huge depression.” He does not write about that latest crisis, which lasted a year and a half. Well, something like this has happened before, in London. Just before a conference he had organized, “I throw everything down, call in sick and leave in a hurry for Amsterdam,” he writes. There he throws himself into work on his boat; “a form of therapy that has helped me overcome desperate moods before.”

How did this depression start?

“After my retirement in 2013, I noticed that I had run out of ideas. I still wrote, like a book about Europe, but then it was over. After that I started making music fanatically. A lot of songs just popped up and I started performing. I wanted to make three CDs and I did, with a friend. My hero is Paul McCartney. Then corona came and I couldn’t perform anymore. Not very; I was also able to work on my CD at home. But there were no more ideas for new songs. That was at the end of 2021.

“And then May 6, 2022 arrived: the twentieth anniversary of the murder of Pim Fortuyn. I knew: then they will bring my book from 2003 and I will have to find something about it, that scared me.”

Why?

“I couldn’t write a proper sentence anymore, I was totally depressed. In January this year, things got even worse. I went to the emergency room on a Sunday and was given oxazepam, which flattens everything out, but then the fears come back and you have to take another pill. Bizarre, but it also suddenly stopped when I got Valium. It does make you drowsy, but two or three weeks later all fears were gone. I suddenly became a huge positivo. Baukje thought: what is this, you look like 35 or something. I also came up with projects again. The psychiatrist said why always big? Surely you can do small things, work on your boat? But I couldn’t because I tore a tendon in my shoulder when I stepped on my granddaughter’s skateboard last May. I was almost relieved: hey, now I don’t have to play the guitar anymore. In psychiatry, such thoughts are called ‘disease gain’.”

In your book about Fortuyn you write about kinship, ‘people with a Catholic youth and a Marxist past always recognize each other’. Your paths crossed in Groningen.

“He was a joyous, nice man. When. We were the same age and like him, but much later, I also left university. He was resentful, thought he was entitled to the professorship.”

Are you also an outsider?

“I used to cultivate it. As an anarchist, later Marxist. In the student movement, we saw ourselves as collective outsiders: lower-middle-class kids who wanted to conquer the university. In the department of sociology I was more politically and philosophically interested, which also created tension. I decided to work in philosophy in Groningen and then I went to London, because I was not allowed to become a professor. That became Jos de Beus, a friend of mine, but I thought I was better.”

On a boat you also live a bit outside society.

“Yes, camping. And always work. I’ve always appreciated the dirty, hard work with your hands. Welding, carpentry. I admire the craftsmanship.”

You write: ‘I live in the boat, she lives in me’.

“Yes, the boat bought me.”

You saw “a diffuse beckoning light,” “as if she had a soul,” you write. That sounds like a mystical experience.

“That’s right. Though I don’t believe in it. It is something you project into it yourself. I saw, of course, that this was a weird, unique ship. I lived on a bad floor and this ship promised freedom and space. What an illusion it turned out to be. It leaked, in the winter the snow stood in the kitchen, everything froze. It took a year to get it going: to go to the yard for more repairs.”

What do you mean by “projection”?

“Something is calling inside you, but it seems to come from outside. But it’s damning if you think it only comes from outside. That God calls you, or the people or something. Thierry Baudet thinks so. In reality it is a trade-off. Man remains in control of things, but things return everything. When I started this book someone said let your boat speak for itself, but I don’t think things have a voice, that’s animism. I have experienced that this ship demands things from me that are unavoidable. Also so that she does not sink. You have to go through all that work.”

With your first lover, Renée, the boat seemed to have come between the two of you.

“That is not entirely true. When we met she was young, eighteen or nineteen, and there was quite a difference in age. And – this is a sociological comment – ​​I was actually in love with her whole family. Her father was a professor of sociology in Leiden and her mother a well-known political scientist. A vibrant family, where I felt at home, was lifted by. She studied sociology, was my assistant. And then she wanted to go her own way. She has always been a good friend. I was always jealous of men with tough boat women. I never got that in my net.”

I have experienced that this ship demands things of me that are inescapable

In the meantime he has been living on the Nymphaea for almost thirty years with Baukje Prins, a philosopher. She ‘touched it’, writes Pels, when he taught in Groningen and she studied there. He talks with pride about his daughter Zita, who is now a member of the Amsterdam council as alderman (Public Housing and Sustainability) for GroenLinks. “She’s more of a doer than I am.”

You thought GroenLinks should dream less and be more eager for power, is that the case now?

“I think Jesse Klaver combines it well. I think he’s knowledgeable, but he doesn’t really touch my heart. A Frans Timmermans would do that and that I now call a PvdA member is a coincidence. The scientific offices of the two parties understand how to reconcile economic and green views, but at the local level it is crumbling.”

You advocated a ‘relativistic policy’ at the time. What is that?

“Democrats must recognize that there is no absolute truth. That may seem contrary to activism, but you don’t have to own the truth to take to the streets. It remains a problem: Democrats must always fight with one hand tied behind their backs; they should never get as bad as their opponents. You can also see this in Ukraine. You always have to stand up for that difference in level of civilization, even if you are at a disadvantage at first.”

Isn’t Extinction Rebellion also looking for a way out of politics in activism?

“I think it’s sympathetic and I also sat down on the A12 in The Hague. And I am a member of Grandparents for the Climate. But here, too, you now occasionally see absolutism.”

Staying stuck in an academic career leads to tunnel vision and the undervaluation of something like manual labour

One of Pels’ songs is called ‘Crosspath‘. He sings: ‘Coming across my footsteps/ In a journey to the past/ Wondering who I was/ When I was passing through here last/ Wondering who I will be/ When I will pass through here again […]. With his ship he likes to visit places where it has been before: Veere – then an artists’ colony that appealed to the artistically interested Goudrians -, Den Briel, Urk, Terschelling, harbor towns on the IJssel. On such ‘crossing paths’ the Nympaea sails ‘through her own silhouette’, he writes.

Pels: “It happened again in Rotterdam, in the Veerhaven, once her home. Something falls together, a kind of déjà vu. You can also project that feeling forward. Will I ever come back here? Do I want that? I’m 75, I’m thinking about that.”

A pilgrimage to yourself?

“Yes. In London I always go back to regular places. Take a look at Turner’s painting of a dismantled sailing ship being towed to scrap by a steamer, The Fighting Temeraire. Cycling along the Thames, which I always did on Sunday morning. Rituals. It’s a kind of prayer, I think.”

Does that make life worth living?

“I remember what I actually knew in the past rotten time: the love for my partner, my daughter and my (bonus) grandchildren. And the sense and the courage not to get stuck in one thing, such as an academic career, because that leads to tunnel vision and also to the undervaluation of something like manual labour. I want to be in charge of my own time so I can switch games. On balance, I think I did that too little.”

You write that the Nymphaea will one day sail further in time without you.

“I am just a passerby. I hope that someone younger with the same intentions will continue to wear her hair, when I can no longer. Luckily I don’t have a steep staircase here, so I’ll continue with The Iron Lady for a while.”

Dick Pels: Nymphaea Autobiography of a yacht. Walburg Press, 240 pages, € 34.99.