Charlotte Mutsaers: ‘I had never read anything like that before’ | Indebted to Krol (part 11)

When I am about to ring the doorbell at Charlotte Mutsaers’ home in the center of Amsterdam on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, she is just coming out with Lola, a white stray dog ​​from Moscow that she has had in her care for a few years. Would I like to come along for a walk? Sure. Only when the dog has done her pee and settled back in the familiar surroundings of her basket do we shake hands: “How nice that you came to talk about Krol.”

Own style and vision

Straight to the point: why does she think Gerrit Krol is one of the best writers in the Dutch language area? Mutsaers: “That is not so easy to explain. Look, you have realism, you have surrealism and you also have your own reality. I sometimes find surrealism quite enjoyable, but my own reality interests me much more. You learn the most from that on a human level. As a writer, Krol has a completely unique style and vision. He is very persistent in that. Moreover, he always deals with heavy themes in a clear and light manner. I have always found that moving about his work. Also brave, by the way, because it is much easier to impress with turgid long sentences. But he didn’t need a show of power with his perfect language and his philosophical attitude.”

‘Completely new view’

Bee Joy Scheepmaker’s skirts (1962), Krol’s first novel, she immediately agreed: “I was still young, but I had never read anything like it before, so unique and remarkable. A book with a completely new view on how people interact with each other, also in the field of eroticism, and moreover in a very personal style.”

Since then she has closely followed Krol’s literary production. Yet she does not feel that his way of writing has influenced her: “No, in fact, it worked the other way around,” says Mutsaers. “When I read his books, I immediately recognized myself in them. Here was a writer speaking who goes about his business undisturbed. He fearlessly addressed important themes such as good and evil. Everything Krol has made is equally unique, but I still think that first book is his best.”

The author of the successful novel Rachel’s skirt (1994) – “I’m not a writer, I’m still a writer” – only met Krol a few times. The first time was in March 1995 during a publisher’s drink. They started talking about a Krol column about the Amsterdam café De Groene Kalebas. In that column the first person thinks back to the first times he was in the capital.

Mutsaers: 2,,Oh yes, The Green Gourd. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was a café in a basement near the Weteringschans. A stopping place for artistic types. As a young girl in Utrecht I really looked up to Amsterdam. I was looking for adventure and then – how old was I, twenty? – once went to De Groene Kalebas with someone. What a different world I found there! All art people like you only saw in Utrecht at the annual Art Market.”

And returning to Krol’s column: “At that reception I told him that I had really liked that piece about De Groene Kalebas. Who was talking about The Green Gourd? As a down-to-earth Groninger, he would have found it so wonderful there.”

Lecture on death penalty

The second, and last, time that Mutsaers spoke to Krol in person was in 1989 after his controversial Burning Issue lecture on the death penalty, entitled ‘For those who want evil’, in De Balie in Amsterdam. “I was in the audience at the time. In his lecture he had given a portrait of a psychopath, so I asked him afterwards: ‘How can you be so sure that that man was a psychopath?’ In his answer he tried to imagine what the consequences could be if he had been beaten a lot in his youth. That made quite an impression on me, as did the fact that he even dared to talk about something like the death penalty. That was completely taboo at the time. You weren’t even allowed to think about that. There was a lot of criticism for Krol. After all, there was only one thought possible about the death penalty: being squarely against it. If you wrote about that, as he did, you were doing it wrong. I have always resisted that bias.”

One of the most moving things that Krol, as he once essayed, had read from Mutsaers, was the snow death of the dog Pom in her novel Rachel’s skirt . And that for someone who ‘doesn’t like animal stories’. Also ‘the death of a bird’ in her essay collection Sea pain (1999) had moved him: “How terrible and how wonderfully it is described.”

Colorful aviary

Something lighter now. In Mutsaers’ eyes, the entire literary world sometimes resembles a colorful aviary: “Consider, for example, Poe’s raven, Céline and Flaubert’s parrots, Gerrit Krol’s bower bird.” as a writer I like to work with that Australian show-off, because he builds all kinds of beautiful nests for his wife, while she doesn’t care about it at all. This is how he saw the novels he wrote.

With which bird would Mutsaers like to compare himself as a writer? “I once drew an albatross above a black ship at sea. You could see that as a self-portrait. It is therefore a very literary bird, if you can say so. Just think of that famous poem by Baudelaire. But I must immediately add that, as long as there are people in the world, I would rather not run the risk of becoming an animal. What people do to animals gives every animal reason not to trust anyone.”