Peter Middendorp: ‘One compliment and I start to wag my tail’

On the desolate station square of Groningen, writer Peter Middendorp is smoking a cigarette against the storm. Together we take a taxi to Garnwerd, about ten kilometers outside the city. We pass his house in the center – he lives there with his girlfriend and daughter of almost 11 – pass new residential areas, drive via Dorkwerd and past the detached white house that he dreams of buying should his latest book Cousins be a huge hit. Then we cross a bridge and here, he says, the wide world begins. He breathes as if he had been underwater before. “Haaa. Sky.” When we get off at café Bij Hammingh, he will show you how flat the land is behind the Reitdiep.

How long did this ride take? Not much longer than half an hour. And in that time frame, he has highlighted the most important topics to be discussed: his childhood, his writing, the death of his father, and the “big bang” that was before the creation of Cousins† His novel is about his childhood above the Blokker branch of his parents in Emmen Trusted Affordable from 2014. Like a newfangled Reve, he lets the 17-year-old protagonist complain about the light letters on the facade, which make his boys’ room turn orange. About the ‘shame of discount’ that will always envelop him and about the nothingness of his native province of Drenthe. But in the backseat of the taxi, it turns out that childhood in that busy family—where the hasty dinner was always about the shop, customers, and drying racks—awakened a writer in him.

“There was never time for quiet talk. If I wanted to speak up, I wrote a letter to my parents.” In retrospect, he says, these were his first columns. Later – from 2007 – he would create a furore with his daily column about politics at the Binnenhof in The Hague for free newspaper The press and since 2011 he has been writing a weekly column de Volkskrant† He shoved those letters under the door of the matrimonial bedroom at home. No, his parents never wrote back to him and he doesn’t remember if they ever got back to its contents. What he does know is that he read a book for the first time when he was sixteen, one of the three or four novels that were on the shelf at home. “My oldest sister read it for her havo literature list.” -Ultra thin bundle by Harrie Jekkers. “As he wrote, I discovered, I also wrote.”

His father has died, he says halfway through the route. Three years ago, just before the corona epidemic broke out, as if it was a foreshadowing. He had a disease that shut down his immune system and attacked his organs. He was put on a ventilator in intensive care and the family came to say goodbye. “It shouldn’t be a too real goodbye, because there was a slim chance that he would make it.” He himself was unable to say anything on his deathbed, but his father, he could hardly speak anymore, said ‘sorry’. “Made a mistake,” he said. Was he, I ask, just as heavy-handed as the father from Cousins, who might not beat his son Robert daily, but he beat him monthly and hard? “No, no, that father from the book is a bastard. I purposely described it in such a way that people who know us know that I am not talking about my own father.” He still doesn’t understand where his father’s apology suddenly came from. “There was no time to ask, what do you mean?” He got no further than “doesn’t matter, dude” and “it doesn’t matter anymore”. But later a kind of eureka thought occurred to him: “What if at such a moment you said to the regretful dying person: you’re a little late with that, jerk.”

Guilt and Redemption

‘My father’s sorry was the big bang’, the ‘penetrating experience’ set in motion what became the themes of his book: guilt and redemption, perpetrator and victim, fine and punishment. “I was always taught that good and evil could be separated. But it is not that simple.” All his characters are both. The main characters are two cousins, or actually double cousins. Their fathers are brothers and their mothers are sisters, genetically they resemble brothers. Middendorp itself has two such double-cousins. You see that more in sparsely populated areas, he says. Handy tool for a writer to show how different two boys with a similar set of genes but a different upbringing can turn out. One more successful and stronger than the other. The other weak and dependent on the one. The strong man stores his stock of weed in the other’s dorm room to help him with some pocket money. The odds turn when the strong cousin goes “legal,” but falls victim to a reckoning meant for the cousin who got stuck in it. The strong cousin becomes disabled, the other carries and lashes him in his wheelchair on a trip to the beach of Schiermonnikoog.

At this point in the drive, the driver said he has chosen the route that will not cause any problems. A chuckle bubbled up in Middendorp. “I love that. From routes that do not cause any problems.” We are here. Once at the table inside, the worrying starts with the menu. “I can’t choose,” he says. “Is that something Drenthe? I always let it depend on the other.” Me too, so he has to take the plunge. Shrimp croquette on bread and ‘Gruninger mustard soup’. Those cousins ​​who look so much alike, I say, reminds me of the look-alikes Osewoudt and Dorbeck from The Darkroom of Damocles by WF Hermans. “Funny,” he says. “I picked up that book after I put that by Harrie Jekkers back on the shelf. A formative book.” Until then he thought a book was something from “gays or professors” and in his circles you took their books and threw them on the roof, which he did. But when he finished Hermans, he decided to become a writer. He left for Amsterdam as quickly as possible, because that is where it “happened”. He mixed with the writers and the more he drank, the more he felt like writing. “Nowadays it is the other way around and writing makes me want to drink beer.”

What remained, he says, is the feeling that the nephew in his book is also playing tricks: at drinks with Harry Mulisch and Remco Campert, he felt like an outsider, a “farmer from buut’n”. Ah, now we’re what I wanted to talk to him about too. His column in de Volkskrant from February 11 in which he describes exactly this feeling. Rarely did he feel such a ‘stupid peasant’ as when he immediately shared everything he had observed at the Binnenhof in four years with Joris Luyendijk, who then wrote it down in his book. You don’t get it from me, but… as if they were his own impressions. He especially blames himself for allowing himself to “let the cheese of the bread be eaten.” How could it have happened? “I was in The Hague as a writer and not as a political journalist, which is what everyone thought. Joris -Luyendijk, the well-known writer, recognized my writing skills. He saw me and treated me as an equal.” In retrospect, he is particularly disappointed with himself: “They only have to give me a compliment and I start to wag my tail.” And now, after writing that column and the fuss it caused, he is disappointed again. – „Is that typical Drents? First being afraid for a long time, feeling ashamed and feeling the smallest and then bat, lash out.” He went from being a victim to becoming a perpetrator.

“It’s my own doubt too, isn’t it. Couldn’t I have sold myself a little better?”

dommerik

“People from outside the Randstad, from the periphery, recognize the feeling,” he says. Children in primary schools in the region receive even lower school advice than immigrant children in the Randstad, according to demographer Josse de Voogd. “I was also kicked out of school like a fool, twice. ‘Go and do something with your hands, because you can’t do it with your head.’” And when, like him in Amsterdam, you are surrounded by people who already read books when they were sixteen that he still has to start and they all radiate that If they are more dexterous, smarter, and faster, you may feel, he says, “overwhelmed.” “Just before my first television appearance, I discovered what was a bestseller. I always thought of orderer. Products that we didn’t have in stock at our store were buyers.” Apparently that stupid peasant feeling remains, even if, like him, you have published eleven books, which are not always, but often applauded by the reviewers.

Meanwhile, he is struggling in his chair like a schoolboy the day before the big holiday, plowing through the sandwiches on his plate. Doing two things at once, he says, is difficult for him. To put him out of his misery, I promise the interview is almost over. It is very pleasant, he thinks, „but I still have this feeling that we are still going to talk about my book? Didn’t we do that? Uncertainty is contagious, so we’ll go over the same topics again and I’ll summarize for the sake of certainty: that outsider feeling is a handicap that he also takes advantage of, it runs like a red thread through everything he writes. Yes, he nods. “I think so too.” How about a cup of coffee? We do. And then he again: “I hear my editor all the time in the back of my mind…” And what does he say? “Have you told everything that is important?” Well? “Yes, yes. It’s my own doubt too, isn’t it. Couldn’t I have sold myself a little better?”