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cocaine, as the city was occupied by the Germans. Although Van Ostaijen would end up sentenced for collaboration as a Flemish ‘Flamigrant’ nationalist, he was nevertheless an integral cog in the revolutionary European arts scene. He was greatly influenced by Apollinaire, DADA and Bauhaus; his multi-lingual, typographically expressionistic, hyper-modern diction was unlike anything that had appeared in the Dutchspeaking world. This from Occupied City (1921): nihil in crux suastika Nihil in vagina Zut building cathedrals and shelling them blaming others naturally citron nature others make babies vows of chastity are cheap buggered and blasted if we’ll give bishops generals statisticians the satisfaction of counting children Deo Gratias amen (Translation David Colmer) In contrast, the enchantment north of the death wire remained intact – here, it wasn’t a case of fairy-tales or pastoralism, but a bourgeois self-contentment, maintained by neutrality in the unfolding apocalypse. And so, by 1917, we have the leading author, Nescio, writing ‘In the year of the war, Bellum transit, amor manet’ (war passes, love remains). Could Graves or Owen have written this in a stinking trench in 1917? It is reminiscent of Larkin’s Arundel Tomb, an emotional 6
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distance that would be more appropriate far after the event. Nescio here has the tone of an erudite pavement-café writer. His writing echoes Henry James, it is an intelligent and wry depiction of the manners and mores of Dutch society at the turn of the Twentieth century. And so, lacking a seismic paradigm shift, it would take until 1934, and the publication of Martinus Nijhoff ’s New Poems, before we would witness a truly Modernist tone in Holland. In fact, many would maintain that the major revolution in Dutch literature was only brought about by the Second World War and the arrival of the new generation of experimentalist poets in the 1950s, although their work could be more accurately aligned with the Beats. As for Nijhoff, he was engaged in his own journey from ‘there is a captive animal beneath my skin’, in 1924, to ‘We were standing in the kitchen, you and me,’ by 1934. Nijhoff had always been a restrained character, averse to the excesses of the 1880s, and he would hone a mature tone by the time he wrote his masterpiece New Poems, which contains the classic Awater. By now, Nijhoff had been struck by the rise of Eliot, although he was not stylistically influenced by him as such. Nijhoff ’s craft is more reminiscent of Yeats’s Responsibilities period, and is evidence of the striking duality among the Dutch for the appreciation of the well-made on the one hand, and a baby-with-the-bathwater experimentation on the other. To illustrate, the seminal event in modern Dutch theatre is the Tomato Action of 1969, when the young theatre-makers pelted the actors at the City Playhouse who were performing Vondel’s classic verse play, the Gijsbrecht: a debunking of the primary poet of the Golden Age that ushered in a theatre ruled by makers rather than writers. By 1939, Nijhoff was opining that if he’d been writing in English, his international reputation would have been far more secure, and so he set the Dutch translator, Daan van der Vat, to 7

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cocaine, as the city was occupied by the Germans. Although Van Ostaijen would end up sentenced for collaboration as a Flemish ‘Flamigrant’ nationalist, he was nevertheless an integral cog in the revolutionary European arts scene. He was greatly influenced by Apollinaire, DADA and Bauhaus; his multi-lingual, typographically expressionistic, hyper-modern diction was unlike anything that had appeared in the Dutchspeaking world. This from Occupied City (1921):

nihil in crux suastika Nihil in vagina Zut building cathedrals and shelling them blaming others naturally citron nature others make babies vows of chastity are cheap buggered and blasted if we’ll give bishops generals statisticians the satisfaction of counting children Deo Gratias amen (Translation David Colmer) In contrast, the enchantment north of the death wire remained intact – here, it wasn’t a case of fairy-tales or pastoralism, but a bourgeois self-contentment, maintained by neutrality in the unfolding apocalypse. And so, by 1917, we have the leading author, Nescio, writing ‘In the year of the war, Bellum transit, amor manet’ (war passes, love remains). Could Graves or Owen have written this in a stinking trench in 1917? It is reminiscent of Larkin’s Arundel Tomb, an emotional

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