Reading JJ Voskuil’s seven-part series of diaries will be a mental marathon with many dropouts. What drives the perseverers, like me?
Almost 5,000 pages in total – it’s a lot of good stuff, especially because not everything is really good in these diaries. Wouldn’t it have been better if the deliverers had published a selection, asked reviewer Sebastiaan Kort NRC off. That question also occurred to me while reading the third part, Martyrdombut at the same time I realized that by doing so you would be doing both the reader and Voskuil himself a disservice.
Voskuil was burdened by a huge aversion to himself, his fellow human beings, yes, almost to the whole of life. The best way to reflect that aversion is the unabridged publication of these diaries. It is precisely in the repetition that Voskuil shows himself to be the master he remained, no matter how difficult, over his own life. Let the reader be the editor, who can shorten where it becomes too much.
If that reader wants to be very strict, he can suffice with this typical note on page 650, the penultimate of this third part. “So today I went to work again with a headache. Thank God I was left alone, except for the nonsense from Meertens (his boss at ‘Het Bureau’ – FA), but he left around noon and I regained some respectability a few hours later. A disgusting world, a disgusting profession, disgusting people.”
What particularly fascinates me about De Voskuil from these diaries is the deep contempt with which he writes about himself. I have never encountered that in a writer to that extent before, although Franz Kafka sometimes comes pretty close. But for example, to stay with Dutch contemporaries, you will not find this with Harry Mulisch, nor with WF Hermans and Gerard Reve.
Some more examples.
“If the Lord asks me what I have been good for, I will have to answer: ‘Not for anything, Lord.’ The things I would have been good for (walking through Enkhuizen on my own) were ruined by the things that had to happen afterwards.”
“Still furious last night. Again this morning. I am a resentful person.”
“On the edge of one of the pages I wrote that the cause of my melancholy is that I am afraid of fighting, but have nevertheless spent most of my life doing so because I dislike almost everyone.”
“I wanted to be understood the way a child wants. But if you are no longer a child, the only appropriate thing to do is self-deprecation, a feeling (by the way) that I am proud of.”
“I tried to look into my soul, but I could find no explanation other than my deeply rooted fear of people, the feeling of being unprotected, a snail without a home, threatened, vulnerable, insecure in everything I do or say.” ‘
Does Voskuil flirt with his weaknesses? His candor convinces me otherwise, also because I always feel a kind of regret that he is not put together differently. This third part extends to 1974, the question is to what extent the self-contempt remains when he is the writer of The desk achieves great success. So on to the next four parts!