After the death of his parents, ‘they did almost everything together, so die too’, Dirk van Weelden found three crates of binders with letters that his father and mother had sent each other between January 1948 and December 1950. Gerrit was 17 and Ank was 15 when they started sending each other countless sheets of rustling airmail paper. He sailed across the Pacific Ocean on the Japara, a white-painted motor vessel of the Lloyd company. She was in bombed Rotterdam, at home with her single mother, whom she had to take care of.
The discovery of the correspondence enabled Van Weelden, as an adult man, to get to know his parents at a time when they were still very young, to be ‘delayed’ in their first, tentative steps on the path of love. Their relationship was not self-evident. Gerrit longed for her, but Ank left him in uncertainty for a long time. “I don’t know if it’s love yet.” She demanded that he be strong and went to study. She wanted to make sure she could rely on him in every way. Only then would she love him.
Although Van Weelden had a wealth of material at his disposal in the correspondence that enabled him to tell the story of the budding love between his parents intimately and in detail, he The example of their love not satisfied with it. What does he want to discover in the letters? ‘The rule of the game’, he writes, ‘must be that my reading history describes an expedition, the journey of a self-interrogating traveller, who always wants to know what the read tells and reveals to him.’
It’s not for nothing that his new book is called The example of their love. He is not concerned with the love of his parents, but with what example that story contains for him. He wants to come to self-knowledge through the study and analysis of the letters and his memories. The essayist in him keeps the narrator in a tight grip.
Never straight forward
Van Weelden has never been a writer of straightforward novels, even if they have a clear, tangible autobiographical core. so was From here to here (1999) not a nostalgic history of his youth, but a collage of moments, associations and impressions, permeated by the ‘spirit of the bricoleur’.
His previous novel, The last year, was about the friendship with Martin Bril, from whom he became further and further removed until his much too early death in 2009. Together they made their literary debut with work vitamins, an encyclopedia of their worldview in 150 very different texts. While Bril developed into a successful columnist of the clear line, Van Weelden remained true to his philosophical-literary principles and published hybrid, sometimes difficult to access books.
The last year was also not the personal portrait one might expect. The main characters have anagram names – Brent Ramli and David Kennerwel – and the story was told through different typewriters. Literally: by Olivetti’s, Adlers, Underwoods and IBM’s.
Nice storytelling trick
In The example of their love Van Weelden uses a nice storytelling trick in the first chapter: he stabs two knives in his history. The first knife belongs to Samiran, a Javanese servant on the Japara, who, in a fit of madness, slashes at the captain and the steward. In 1948, Gerrit van Weelden, as an administrator on board, has to make the report of the bloody attack – and writes a letter to Ank about it.
The writer himself finds the second knife, 15 years young, it is the early seventies, in the kitchen of the parental home. His mother is startled, wants him to put it away again. It is the knife his father wielded when he was struck by a terrible depression. His father had put the knife on the steering wheel of the car with the point to his heart as he drove around desperately, fighting the urge to run into a wall or tree.
‘Why is this the heart of the story?’, Van Weelden wonders. ‘Because in the aftermath of Gerrit’s crisis, life took off its mask for me and I changed into my tiniest fibres, out of fear, without having words for it.’ That is what the memory of his parents makes clear to him: he sees his own fears and deep inner doubts reflected in them. By depicting their story, he wants to prevent ‘a mental catastrophe’. Conjuring his father’s ‘black pit’ and his mother’s ‘heavy heart’ within himself.
Strictly with himself and the reader
That seems to me to be the main reason why he makes the whole book consist, as it were, of one long letter to his daughter. At least, with a daughter he has christened ‘Chris’ – with Van Weelden, the fiction gets where it can’t go. He also wants his daughter to learn from the example of his parents’ love. In addition, a letter to his daughter allows him to set an example of the story of his own first love: the one between him and her mother in the 1970s and 1980s.
Dirk van Weelden is strict with himself and his readers. He barely leaves you the option of floating on the Pacific Ocean, or shuddering when he puts the knife in time. He forces you to keep your attention on the text and, like him, to look at it from all sides. To grope and doubt. He twists the crystal of his imagination between his fingers, so that a different light falls every time. Only in this way, he believes, can he really get to know his parents. And himself.
To know and to be known – that is the example of his love.
Dirk van Weelden: The example of their love. The Busy Bee; 232 pages; €23.99.
