Maarten ‘t Hart will receive the PC Hooft Prize for his literary oeuvre next spring – finally. Because if there is one writer to whom this prize has been awarded out loud for a long time and with great regularity, it is him. “Why didn’t ‘t Hart receive the PC Hooft Prize a long time ago?” critic Arie Storm once wrote, which has since appeared as a blurb on ‘t Hart’s books. Critic Elsbeth Etty closed her studies Love letters to Maarten in 2019 with the sigh that ‘t Hart had already won the prize […] should have gotten.” Last year, writer Pieter Waterdrinker wished in a column that ‘t Hart would be the next laureate: “If not for his narrative prose, then for his essays.” Now that the PC Hooft Prize (60,000 euros) is going to narrative prose again, the time has come.
In this way, literary opposites united in their love of ‘t Hart, the “master storyteller in the best sense of that word”, as the press release of the PC Hooft Prize calls him. The jury speaks of an “erudite novelist”, whose oeuvre is “critical, poignant, loving, exciting, vulnerable and witty”. The writer, who recently turned eighty, thinks it is “the best prize you can get in the Netherlands,” he said in a response.
Storyteller qualities
Maarten ‘t Hart (1944) is one of the most popular and visible post-war Dutch novelists, he sold hundreds of thousands of books. His storytelling qualities, in exciting, psychological novels that always revolve around disbelief, hope and love, endeared him to a large audience. But ‘t Hart was also not without controversy, because of his strong and idiosyncratic opinions, and because of his unfashionable style in life and work, the classical-looking “anecdotal realism” that has been qualified as unliterary.
His exciting plots were successful: as in his breakthrough book A flight of whimbrels (1978), and it became a classic The rage of the whole world (1993), a development novel with a strong thriller plot. “I don’t see why writers shouldn’t bow down to the general public,” he said in an interview with The Guide from 2009.
Because being captured, carried away and engulfed by a book was precisely what he was meant to do as a reader. He saw that pleasure as something that “only occurs among people who have grown up in a completely cultureless environment and have discovered culture as the only thing where matters to them,” he once wrote about his development as a reader. That was also his development as a reading writer, because his broad and rich oeuvre of enthusiastic, erudite essays about writers he loved and music he admired, for newspapers and magazines, became at least as well known as his almost twenty novels.
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Calvinism
The story of ‘t Hart’s life begins as a boy in Maassluis: poor, Reformed, trapped by Calvinist norms. The fact that he preferred to immerse himself in books, which had the ability to move him to tears, made him a loner. Subsequently, the same books also sowed his doubts about Christian dogmatics and the Bible, in which a lot of things could not be correct if you reasoned about it logically, as he did. The discrepancy between the facts of the Holocaust and the alleged humanity of God shaped him into a true post-war writer.
Apostasy became a theme in his literary work, but not as a subject in itself, rather to illustrate the greater, existential loneliness of man. His debut Stones for a long-eared owl (1971) was about a main character whose homosexuality placed him outside the conformist order. In I had a brother in arms (1973), it was the norms surrounding hierarchy and masculinity. In that “ethological thriller”, as ‘t Hart called it, the unhappy, scared, weak Ammer Stol wishes he were a woman, because “a woman may be weaker, may show that she admires another who she considers big and strong ”.
This already reflected Hart’s penchant for transvestism, which would play a greater role in his later life. ‘t Hart (married to his wife Hanneke for decades) liked to dress in women’s clothes and, like his former character, escape from himself for a while. In 1991 he appeared in a Frans Molenaar suit at the Boekenbal, as ‘Maartje’. From that wish to cross dressing it was difficult to separate his sharp contribution to the feminism debate in the 1980s. In The woman does not exist (1982) he reacted against the feminists who ‘destroyed women [wilden] freeing herself from the tyranny of her biology”; he liked to maintain the differences between men and women. He did not accept that male and female behavior was not biologically determined but learned.
Observe
‘t Hart himself is an ethologist, the branch of biology that focuses on animal behavior: he obtained his PhD in 1978 on the ‘crawling behavior of the three-spined stickleback’. This certainly has similarities with how he fundamentally sees being a writer: observing and describing behavior. “A writer does not need to have a vision of society,” said ‘t Hart Guideinterview from 2009. “His only task is to describe the character of his main character as clearly and as honestly as possible. In this way, an image of the world is simultaneously created.” The PC Hooft jury is not talking about visions or ideas: his mastery is evident “particularly from his dialogues,” according to the jury report.
That honest worldview at ‘t Hart is emphatically not “well-ordered, well-thought-out, pre-formed like a bra that Hunkemöller wears.” […] comes from,” as he once polemically wrote. He found the order that his literary contemporaries created in their books to be an illusion. But that view suited later postmodern writers rather than his critical contemporaries. “You cannot proclaim that life is flat and banal and it is a mortal sin if you deliver that message in a cheerful tone,” said ‘t Hart.
But banal is not nihilistic. The renegade ‘t Hart always testifies, even in his last novel The night tuner (2019), of the all-too-human desire to fill the god-shaped hole. A common thread in his oeuvre is his admiration for the sublime, which focused on literary art or music: ‘t Hart also developed into a great Bach scholar. Or an almost-divine veneration fell on the characters: his oeuvre is full of transporting infatuations, which can also give great intensity to everyday life. As in The rage of the whole world states: “How strange that in such a sunlit moment you think that the whole of life is ahead of you, while in retrospect such a moment turns out to be true life.”