Sailing with Slauerhoff in a world that has disappeared forever | Diaries and travel reports bundled in ‘Logboek Slauerhoff’

‘Summer is almost over now and it wasn’t even very warm. Yet I am exhausted, worse than ever in the tropics, I prefer nothing more than to hang and fall on a chair or bed’, Jan Jacob Slauerhoff wrote from Tangier in 1934 to a friend, the writer FC Terborgh. ‘The third and most important thing is the lack of a life companion. Then it would still be bearable.’

It was the first and only time that poet-writer-ship doctor Slauerhoff (1898-1936) – born in Leeuwarden and partly raised on Vlieland – attempted to establish himself. After traveling the world for ten years, he opened a practice as a general practitioner in Tangier. He completed it there overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar Life on Earth his second China novel after The Forbidden Realm (1932). But his practice failed, the sea fog irritated his weak lungs and his wife refused to come and live there; their marriage was on its last legs after five years anyway. He left after just a few months, ‘temporarily’, he said, but never returned.

What drove him to always choose the worst solution under the guise of necessity or inevitability, Terborgh later wondered about Slauerhoff’s decision to ‘create a civilian life’ in Tangier, of all places? Self-flagellation? Freudian Fehlleistung: ‘the secret wish to keep open from the outset the possibility of going back on it and of having a new reason for a new, equally unsatisfactory decision’?

Still at sea again

Perhaps he should live in Lisbon or Valencia, Slauerhoff suggested. Or become a consul in Latin America. But he didn’t really work on anything. He once again opted for life as a ship’s doctor. That assured him of a good income, but the varying contracts with Dutch shipping companies also seem to be intended to prevent him from having solid ground under his feet. As a ship’s doctor, he led an existence like so many of his characters. They have been called mortals: a voluntarily outcast who simultaneously seeks and avoids love, peace and wisdom.

After Tangier he would make two more trips as a doctor: one to the Caribbean and Central America, and one to Africa. On that last trip he would contract malaria, which further undermined his health, damaged by asthma and tuberculosis. His latest collection of poems had just been published and was called An honest sailor’s grave . He died at the age of 38 in a nursing home in Hilversum.

In addition to poetry (‘Only in my poems can I live’), prose, a play and letters – collected in 2016 under the title A sailing island – Slauerhoff also wrote diaries and travel reports. Many fragments of the last two are already known, including from Wim Hazeu’s Slauerhoff biography (1995, expanded in 2018). Now they appear together in their entirety for the first time as Logbook Slauerhoff compiled by Hein Aalders and Menno Voskuil, who also provided new editions of Slauerhoffs Collected poems (2018) and its Collected prose (2020).

Wing canoe, paddles

Like opening the lid of his sailor’s chest, this book takes you into Slauerhoff’s sailing life. With reports and ‘travel letters’, diary entries, sometimes extensive and precise, sometimes only in keywords with the force of a haiku: ‘3 November. Wing canoe, paddles. No 1 drunk, K. drunk’ (‘number one’ is the first mate). With Slauerhoff’s own photos of steamships and junks, islands and coasts, of writer friends, girlfriends and lovers, Chinese with braids, Indians in loincloths and Europeans playing cover golf. Portraits in a dark uniform and white tropical outfit, poems in draft, a conduit statement with stamps, maps with sea routes, and striking passages from the letters.

It is the bygone shipping between the Dutch East Indies, Macao, Hong Kong, ports and now high-rise cities in Japan and northern China. The ‘coolie boats’ that transported contract workers and the ‘corpse collectors’ that brought back Chinese dead overseas piled up in the hold for a funeral at home, the still-restless China just after the civil war. Opium dens, brothels and the Charleston dances in ballrooms in Singapore or Shanghai, the alleys, pubs and cemeteries where he encountered his characters.

And it takes you to the passenger services between Europe and ‘the East’ and ‘the West’, from the time before the airplane – from poor but energetic emigrants to the men and women of the first class, who are increasingly bored as the journey progresses and who in Slauerhoff’s eyes are often spoiled ‘upstarts’, for whom he has no pity when they become seasick.

Stroke cutting

You won’t find out everything about his work as a ship’s doctor, but a few glimpses into his work as a doctor tell the story. ‘Which specialist women’s doctor has ever performed a… [verlossing] with detached placenta, prolapsed umbilical cord, arm stored in a narrow ship’s cage on a tossing ship?’ he writes. And then: ‘A small chest on a winding rope, one two three, in the name of the Lord.’ Or: ‘Two passengers went insane, one committed suicide by cutting off the throat + esophagus, terrible carnage. I still kept him alive.’

On such a ship of the long-vanished Vereenigde Nederlandsche Scheepvaartmaatschappij or the Hollandsche Lloyd, the doctor has a special status. He is an officer and reports directly to the captain, but has no idea how to navigate the ship from A to B. And he has studied, belongs to a different social class. He is there for the well-being of the passengers, is expected to eat in first class, participate in games, dance.

The other officers find Slauerhoff strange, with his tendency to stay on shore as long as possible and to retreat to his cabin. He speaks Spanish and Portuguese, some Arabic, reads poetry. The lower ranks like him; he understands the ‘evil consequences of an evening on shore’ like no other. But he doesn’t really belong to anyone; he himself is that ‘sailing island’.

Attraction

His – in Terborgh’s words – ‘immediately conquering wooden politeness’ has great appeal to women. He can’t live without them and they are always there, everywhere. In this book you lose count, and sometimes he too, you get the impression. A ‘senhora Pereira’, ‘mademoiselle Fraga’ and a ‘Suzanne’ seek his interest on the same trip, although the diary does not respond. While ‘Madame Rampon presents herself under pretense of auscultation [onderzoek met stethoscoop]’. He himself starts something with the fickle Natasja, but is relieved when she leaves the ship.

Slauerhoff’s observations are sometimes chalkboard geography and ethnology (‘Just as the Marker fisherman is called the national figure of Holland, the gaucho is the national figure of Argentina’), which is not surprising because he wrote many reports for newspaper readers in the province who were never in a came abroad. But in the diaries he writes sharply about the colonial legacy of the Spanish and British (whom he hates). He is also ruthless about the Dutch: ‘All owners in the Indies and East Asia have a stupid arrogance that makes one wish that the Russian sickle would one day sail through these rotten ears.’ By the way, he was not a communist.

The rise of Nazism does not escape his notice: in Tangier he sees more and more refugee Jews. On a boat trip in 1933, he introduces a German who plays gramophone records with Hitler’s speeches, in order to demonstrate that ‘one can observe as far away as Africa what always makes the German people wander away like a herd: […] a surplus of bigotry and an equal shortage of critical discernment’.

This book takes you on a journey with Slauerhoff into a world that has disappeared forever. It is also a gold mine of scenes and characters that, as it were, hold a dress rehearsal for poems or stories. With the compilers, who know Slauerhoff’s work better than anyone else, as a non-intrusive guide. An example. At the Brazilian prison island of Fernando de Noronha, with a bare rock called the ‘finger of God’, he speculates in his diary that ‘an exile came swimming across’, which later leads to a wonderful poem about exile and abandonment, and not only of those poor prisoners.