Jan Mulder: In ecstasy by the news of the root correspondent
Remco Campert and I have spent a large part of our nearly fifty-year friendship in the car. Spurred on by manager René Vallentgoed, we provided together with Bart Chabot A reading evening at a level in the theatres. Bart drove himself, I picked up Remco. Silent joy of the car ride. His beautiful sentences were on paper, he usually kept his verbalization short in public. Only when Joop den Uyl and Amy Winehouse were discussed or played on the radio did he become more enthusiastic (a gleam in the eye).
Besides poetry, theater and art, Campert had a few other loves: cats, red wine, cool jazz, birch and chocolate. He liked to drag a six-foot Toblerone out of the gas station. Greater exuberance was foreign to him. Except for that one time. Driving back home we listened to as usual With a view to tomorrow and then the ecstasy came with a raw shout of joy from the mouth of Remco Campert: the carrot correspondent in Portugal reported that at a high European level it had been decided to consider the carrot no longer as a vegetable but as a fruit.
In the next CaMu, our daily exchange column on the front page of de Volkskrant, he wrote: ‘I went to a greengrocer’s this morning to have a look around the corner, but apparently the news still hadn’t got through there. The carrot was still there with the potatoes, the onions, and the Brussels sprouts, like a prince among simple folk. When the greengrocer wasn’t paying attention, I took one such carrot, wiped it clean with my handkerchief and carefully placed it in the middle of its real brothers and sisters: the strawberry, the raspberry, the orange and the plum. Was I wrong or did I hear a soft whisper, heartwarming: Thanks, a thousand thanks…?’
Fifty years of friendship? Thanks, a thousand thanks, Ca.
Sheila Sitalsing: His mildly ironic commentary on the news is what I love most
Only the really great can write great about cats. Casual and mild and meaningful at the same time, with words that you didn’t know yet, but will never forget from now on and that gently sway in such a way that you know for sure that it is about life, your life in all its smallness, and about all the great and small miseries at once, and also about the war and about a catastrophic event far away.
Remco Campert could write great about cats. In sentences that are brilliant without exuding ‘look at me’. Because as a columnist, he never lost himself in loudmouth, sentimentality, vanity, self-compassion, or any of the many other offenses that the lesser ones commit all the time.
His mildly ironic commentary on the news is what I like most: ‘I notice that we have kept things hidden in all openness, as you call it. In all openness, I’ll just repeat it for a moment.’ Just like his commentary on the company in The Hague, seen through the eyes of Drs. Mallebrootje, the well-known Member of Parliament from Elst, who also designed a sifting machine for mosquitoes. Never again would the smallness of the scribbler in politics be so lovingly highlighted.
Sometimes you think, yourself a scribbler: ‘Would I dare to imitate him?’ After a sentence and a half you know: inimitable.
Arnon Grunberg: Writers don’t have to be nice
In 2004 Frits Abrahams wrote in NRC: ‘The bravest of all was Remco Campert, who was the first to dare to say it.’ In a column shortly after the murder of Theo van Gogh, Campert had stated that freedom of expression is something different ‘than the freedom to hurt people to the very soul’. Campert also referred to jokes about the burning of diabetic Jews and that it is painful that the joker would go down in history as a ‘hero of free speech’.
I immersed myself in Campert when Frans Weisz talked about his admiration for Remco in the late 1990s. That love was contagious and although I’m not sure if that was the reason, I wrote to Remco if he wanted to become my uncle. I received a very nice typewritten letter in which Remco wrote that he would like to become my uncle, but many meetings did not come. When we were in Prague together for a festival with Dutch writers and Cees Nooteboom said: ‘Come on, let’s go have a drink with Remco’, I did not attend. I preferred booze with a Czech lady. That was unkind.
Later I dined in New York with Remco’s daughter Cleo. She said that her father was not very nice. Now I had heard more daughters complain about their writing father, so I didn’t really care. Of course I should have said that for writers and columnists it’s not about being nice. In addition to style and insight into the human condition – I like Remco’s poems the most – courage is also required, I believe.
That is why I now once again like to agree with what Abrahams wrote in 2004.
Bert Wagendorp: No stamping words
What I have always admired about Remco Campert is the casualness of his style. He avoided big words, avoided bold statements and didn’t feel the need to take himself very seriously. The latter is the pitfall for every piece writer who is allowed to give his vision of the world, existence, others or himself in a nice place in the newspaper. That was cleverly avoided by Campert.
Weightiness and complacency are lurking, especially because they are easier to write down than light-heartedness and putting things into perspective. There are more stamping words than dancing and many piece writers prefer to beat the bass drum than the triangle. Remco Campert was never caught drumming or stamping. He avoided pomposity. It took him little effort, because his way of writing was very similar to his way of life. He was putting things into perspective, which is not to say that he did not take life seriously. The light-footedness was serious in a frivolous garb.
In 2014 I was allowed to make an anthology of his stories. First I also wanted to include a selection from his columns, especially because I was quite fond of the experiences of the Kneupma farming family and field ranger Bonkjes, from the CaMu period. Moreover, Campert’s columns can be described as (very) short stories rather than columns in the usual sense of the word.
Unfortunately, that plan was canceled due to lack of space.