At home it was in the bookcase. Lord Heeresma. Don’t ask me about all the titles, but Dark stories for central heating (1973) was certainly among them. Strange title, I thought as a child, especially because our bookcase was next to the central heating. Heere Heeresma was cover to cover with Maarten Biesheuvel, Willem Brakman, Maarten ‘t Hart. Men brothers. Sons of Reformed soil, struggling with their background. I didn’t know then of course, but childish intuition told me that that name with two Lords in it could mean little good. And by now I was probably reading Jan Wolkers.
This as a prelude to the documentary And the name is Heeresma (EO) Monday evening about the writer who died in 2011 and, in addition to many books and poetry collections, also left behind a son and a daughter, plus a great mystery. Who was the man? His biographer Anton de Goede wants to know in any case. I wasn’t so sure if I wanted to, after I first heard about him from his son, or rather his clone, Heere Heeresma jr. Standing at his grave, he ordained that his father had put up a fire screen around him, and he, the son, felt little need to lower that screen. His daughter Marijne did. She described in short, measured sentences his malice when he had been drinking. Her first memory is that in which her father holds her out of the window and, to torment her mother, threatens to make her fall. “I was never allowed to look him in the eye,” she says. He was afraid that she would see the “sorrow, the fear, the dark” in it.
Let a biographer examine my life, Heeresma wrote in a last, unfinished letter. It seems that Anton the Good had already begun to do so when he was alive. We see images of him and the writer walking through the streets of Heeresma’s youth in Amsterdam South. He walks along those same streets in this documentary with the son, who talks with the same intonation and turns of phrase as his example, his father. The biographer tries to get a grip on him, but is constantly met with a wall of ingenuity. Junior echoes his father: “For those who have a huge ego, the path of humility is extra hard.”
Yes, father drank, says the son. But when he stopped doing that (after a fall), something else took the place of that addiction. Good luck. His book A day at the beach was translated into many languages, 80,000 of the English version were sold, and it was filmed twice. In 1969, based on a screenplay by Roman Polanski, and in 1984 by Theo van Gogh. A father, a ‘drunk’, loses his daughter on the beach. In the film, the girl has braces on her damaged leg. Daughter Marijne, the girl with the ‘damaged mind’ at the time, watches the film with rolling tears, not so much for herself, but for him, the father who, according to her, had such a hard time. “No one has ever comforted him.” Which once again shows how colorful you can make it as a parent, a child remains loyal for a long time.
Kneaded into image
The biographer gropes and searches the film for answers. In Heeresma’s children he finds the repercussion, the echo of the writer. I don’t know who I feel more sorry for. With the daughter or at least the son who has been molded into his image by the father from an early age. Who, speaking of his father, his ‘gabber’, says that it is ‘no merit, but an achievement to maintain himself in his mighty, cold shadow’. Beneath his crazy and comical writing, he says, was a “very sensitive” man. That will be fine. But the request to interpret that sensitivity again comes up against concrete. “My father always said: my private life is not for general consumption.” The biographer finds out for himself and we join in.