Because Joost Prinsen was such an excellent elocutionist, little attention has been paid to a lesser-known side of him after his death: that of a columnist. At 83 years old, he was even the oldest columnist in the Netherlands.
To be honest, as a columnist I didn’t know him until he drew attention to it himself by sending me one of his columns on May 12, 2011. It was a well-written piece about the value of predictions. I was impressed: could he even do that?
He responded with this to a column of mine on the same subject NRC Handelsblad. “The piece will be in tomorrow Haarlems Dagblad and some related headlines,” he reported. I understood that he followed my then daily columns closely. From that date on, he continued to send me very irregular comments about my columns, occasionally accompanied by his own column. That’s it – we never met in person.
He could be complimentary, but also let me know if he disagreed with me. For example, we differed in opinion about the argument between Rudy Kousbroek and Jeroen Brouwers about the treatment of Dutch prisoners in Japanese camps in the Dutch East Indies. Brouwers called that treatment barbaric, Kousbroek thought it was greatly exaggerated. I partly chose Brouwers, he unconditionally chose Kousbroek.
In his columns and emails he showed himself to be a phlegmatic, idiosyncratic observer with a hatred of nonsense and overestimated reputations. I have saved a column in which he rails against pop idols Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. He thought, not entirely wrongly, that they could not actually sing – something he himself could do very well. He did praise the singer Joshua Lee Turner, whom I had never heard of. “I’ll give you Dylan as a gift.”
Politically, I would classify him as a non-dogmatic leftist. He hated Baudet more than Wilders. About Baudet’s attacks on Sigrid Kaag: “As if he wanted to save the world from communism as a new Joe McCarthy.”
What we had in common was a wife who was a loyal member of the PvdA. To my surprise, he shyly told me in July 2012 that he had also written a column in which he teased his wife about her membership. “According to my wife,” he wrote me, “outright plagiarism of a column of yours that she had read to me the day before (…) Can I call it a source of inspiration?” I mainly thought of it as a nice compliment.
He never wrote to me about his medical misery. I heard about it thanks to a reader friend, who sent me his wonderful column about his collapse in July this year. He was found on the floor of his utility room after a day, and was quickly admitted to hospital. There the internist told him that his situation was similar to that of an orchestra that can “hobble along” for a long time with all kinds of poorly performing musicians, but that only dies when the conductor “puts down his baton and goes home. You are the conductor.”
Joost understood the message and worked hard on a quick recovery. That seemed to work. Cheerful closing line of that column: “Lazarus is not dead. He is alive!”
Back then.
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