Perhaps Assen is Valhalla. On the Rolden side of the station, one Assen resident after another tempts passers-by with take-along books in the front garden. Books from three-quarters of a lifetime ago, such as the committed youth novel The squatters and Aunt Da’s cat by Henk Barnard and a collection of chess stories from NRC by Hans Ree. But also a not quite read Salamander pocket from 1966 by the not quite forgotten Top Naeff (1878-1953): Miss Stolk. This is a reprint of a collection of short stories from 1936, at that time admired by Menno ter Braak.
Menno had a view on it, or at least he had a view on Naeff, because Miss Stolk is excellent. On the first page of the title story: “In the good old days, which were cruel in their way, Kea Stolk would have been unceremoniously classified as an old maid.” Naeff introduces her readers to “a third female race”, in addition to the ladies and the mistresses, “that of working women”. According to the outside world, Kea Stolk, director of a library, has “something unresolved” because, Naeff writes, there is still “a certain condescending benevolence” with the misunderstanding that a woman’s ultimate destination is marriage.
In this way, Naeff, a great psychologist with a wink, sketches a woman’s life on the edge of modernity, decades before the second wave of feminism would challenge that condescending benevolence. Stolk is the confidant of a student, the son of a deceased girlfriend, who finds her the most reasonable, perhaps the only reasonable adult in his existence.
The entire collection is about new mores and Naeff shows with great empathy how this has an effect on people who lack stability. She does this movingly in a story about the consequences of a fatal car accident and extremely wittily in ‘The window’. In it, a provincial grammar school wants to honor a deceased teacher with immortalization in stained glass, but then they choke on moral doubts. First of all about the man himself, a jewel of the school, about whom it becomes clear in retrospect that he could not keep order while there was also transgressive behavior. He had ‘adopted principles with which the head of the school could not agree with the principle of friendship between the male and female elements in secondary education’.
It leads to panic at the revelation, because can the grieving widow be confronted with the sight of her late husband’s beautiful colleague from the Dutch studies section? However, the world also turned for the widow, who turns out to have remarried a certain De Haan, which means that a new impropriety has to be folded into the whole. See there the difficult compromise of man and his mores.
That’s not all. Naeff also casually shows the frightened citizen in 1936, in the person of Mr Brunner who, at night, uses international radio stations to contact “the rhythm of doom”. Naeff compares him to the walker in the zoo, “when on the other side of the moat the king of the desert stands up for the jump. It was horrifyingly real, and yet you knew that nothing could happen to you.” A beautiful image, as ominous in the light of the 1930s as in current events.
Would you like to have the discussed copy of Juffouw Stolk? Send an email to boekuitdekast@ nrc.nl; the book will be raffled among entrants and the winner will be notified.