It is perhaps the most beautiful form of appreciation a teacher can receive: friendship with a former student. In 2020 Margaretha H. Schenkeveld (1928), emeritus professor of Dutch literature, got in touch with journalist and author Jannetje Koelewijn, who had attended lectures with her in the 1980s. In a short time a friendly contact developed with ‘Greet’, who openly told her former student about her love for her Greek teacher, Arie Hoekstra, to whom she eventually married.
She was taught by him in the second grade and immediately felt a lot for him. But the teacher sixteen years her senior was married and had children. When Hoekstra heard at the graduation ceremony that Greet was going to study Dutch, he invited her to visit, since his wife had done the same study. Greet became a house friend who also looked after the children.
Schenkeveld obtained his doctorate in 1962 with a dissertation on the poet Willem de Clercq and worked as a teacher, deputy headmaster and deputy headmaster. In 1969 she became professor of Dutch literature at the Free University in Amsterdam.
The contact with the Hoekstras, who did not have a good marriage, remained. After she had spent the Christmas holidays of 1973 with them, she received a letter from Arie in which he declared his love for her. That was the beginning of their relationship. After his divorce, they married in 1976. Arie Hoekstra, Wopke’s grandfather, died in 1995.
Weekly calls
For about a year, Jannetje Koelewijn had weekly conversations with her former teacher. The result is Late love. Margaretha Schenkeveld emerges from this ‘portrait’ as a resolute, honest, sober and determined woman, who frowns at buzzwords such as ‘super’ and ‘role model’.
She candidly let Koelewijn read love letters from Arie, but we hardly get to know what really went on in her mind during the more than thirty years of unrequited feelings. What was it like babysitting the family of an adored man and his wife who became a friend? How did Greet endure this torment? She didn’t talk to anyone about her feelings – did that make her very lonely? Answers to questions like these could have given more relief to the beautiful story.
Koelewijn regularly weaves her own life and that of her parents through Schenkeveld’s story, mirrors events, elaborates associations. This leads to a playful book, but sometimes the Koelewijn content is such that Schenkeveld threatens to disappear from view.
outings
When Schenkeveld tells that Arie had already kissed her unexpectedly in the fifties, this yields more than three pages of memories for Koelewijn of a friend’s father. He had once played a ‘game’ with her, 14 years old: bite of whipped cream, touch, bite of whipped cream, touch. It gave her a pleasant sense of power for a long time, because the father liked her and had done things through her “that were very much forbidden.” This story is of a completely different quality than the subtle, hesitant rapprochement between Arie and Greet and you wonder why Koelewijn links these two experiences together.
The loose structure of the book is regularly broken up by trips that Koelewijn makes. She provides a lot of information, interesting in itself, about authors who are interested in Schenkeveld, such as Betje Wolff and JH Leopold. These have become small entries that distract from the big story. In passing, Koelewijn draws in a fascinating way the contours of the Reformed life of the past and the position of women.
The story of Arie and Greet is also a history of the decline of education. A disappointed Arie saw the status of subjects such as Greek and history dwindle after the Mammoth Act was introduced. His chair at the University of Brussels, where he became a professor at an older age, has disappeared. Schenkeveld had to get used to Dutch students who no longer read French and German and had no idea about classic Dutch writers. In 2019, the entire study of Dutch at the Free University disappeared because there was no longer any interest in it. A ‘sad story’, she thinks.
So is late love also a book about impermanence that I have read with great pleasure – despite its weaknesses. Schenkeveld is quite a character. She looks back modestly on her life and successful career. ‘Satisfied’, not ‘proud’. She has only been proud once in her life: when she got her driver’s license in one go.
Jannetje Koelewijn: Late Love – Portrait of Margaretha H. Schenkeveld. Van Oorschot; 138 pages; € 17.50.
