Every time JJ (Han) Voskuil starts talking about his father in his diaries, I jump. There are inevitably some dark spots in such detailed diaries, but once people like that father show up, there’s a lot to experience.
Klaas Voskuil, Han’s father, was editor-in-chief of the social-democratic daily from 1945 to 1961 The Free People. From his son’s notes, also in Capitulation, the recently published second volume of the diaries, he emerges as a domineering, authoritarian, socially awkward man. The confrontations with his son have a brooding character because the feelings of incomprehension and disgust are rarely explicitly expressed. Father and son warily circle each other like boxers with much reason to fear the worst.
I suspect that sometimes the son saw more of himself in his father than he was willing to acknowledge. The father saw his son’s qualities, but did not understand his antisocial attitude – work was meaningless, just like the rest of life.
On August 6, 1958, Voskuil notes: “Recurrent short circuit between father and me. He wants to put me in touch with ‘interesting people’. Interesting people, in his eyes, are people with a disgustingly cheerful optimism and an all-consuming interest. […] Of course I feel guilty when I carefully try to make him understand for the umpteenth time that I don’t want to see or get to know anyone at all.
The father urges his son to continue writing, but he is initially suspicious of his talent: “Writing comes from instability,” he wrote in 1964 when he had already made his debut with On closer inspection. “It is a neurosis, not a cultural expression. Because it is a neurosis, there is fear behind it.” And a few months later: “The only acceptable form of life is living in a hole and sneaking to the movies after dark or sitting in an unfamiliar cafe unnoticed.”
In retrospect, you can hardly imagine that the same nihilistic man would start one of the largest (seven volumes) novel cycles in Dutch literature thirty years later: The desk. The diaries are the primeval source of that masterful cycle, as is also apparent from the passages about the father-son relationship. The diaries are concise, in The desk the scenes with the father are longer and presumably more imaginative.
What dominates is the mercilessly harsh judgment. In a diary he describes his father to a brother as “a mixture of tyranny, good intentions, sluggishness and pitifulness.” How it exactly ends in the diaries, the ordinary reader does not yet know – five (!) parts will follow.
That’s why I have it Planktonpart 3 of The desk brought in. There Maarten, Voskuil’s alter ego, sits at his father’s deathbed. “When Maarten took his hand, he clamped down and did not let go of his hand.” It sounds sentimental without context, but Voskuil was never sentimental as a writer. This is also evident from the closing sentence of Plankton, shortly after Maarten buried his father. “And unexpectedly a feeling of happiness flowed through him, so intense that all he had to push off was to fly away into space.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 14, 2023.