Journeys of the mind
Nicholas Wrie
Saturday 25 March 2006
One fine day, and I know how romantic and old-fashioned that sounds, but it is what happened," says Cees Nooteboom recalling his first journey. "I packed a rucksack, took leave of my mother and caught the train to Breda. An hour later - you know how small the Netherlands is - I was standing at the side of the road on the Belgian border sticking my thumb in the air, and I have never really stopped since." This is Over the subsequent 50 years his travels have fuelled roughly the same amount of books - although only a dozen have been translated into English - in a career as a poet of "rather cerebral" verse according to JM Coetzee, novelist, playwright, translator and travel writer.
A new anthology of his travel writing from the last 30 years, Nomad's Hotel (Harvill), is published this month. The pieces range from the nascent sex tourist industry to the Isle of Arran - he has translated the plays of Brendan Behan and Sean O'Casey into Dutch - to the Australian response to Gallipoli. One proselytising critic has pointed out that while Nooteboom is a European writer of significance - his 1991 novel, The Following Story, was published with a print run of 540,000 for a Dutch market of just 15 million people - "his reputation takes the form of a distant rumour over here".
Despite being taken up by Mary McCarthy in the early 1960s in America, when introducing Nooteboom at a reading in New York a few years back the host got a laugh by explaining how he had asked several literary luminaries who knew Nooteboom, including John Ashbery and Paul Auster, how to pronounce his name. He got different answers from all of them. Nooteboom explains that the name translates as walnut tree, "hard on the outside, delicious inside" and for the record it is pronounced Sase - as in face - with the double os in the surname "oh". He was born in the Hague in 1933. His parents divorced and he moved eight times before the age of six but says, perhaps because of the emotional tensions, "and it's too late now to get into therapy about it", he has no memories whatsoever before the outbreak of war.
"We lived near a military airfield and I remember the Germans coming in May 1940 and the sound of Heinkels and Stukas. My father put an easy chair on the balcony and we watched on the horizon the glow of Rotterdam burning and I remember being very afraid and having to have cold water thrown in my face to calm me down." His father was later killed in a British air raid: "It was a mistake - they levelled the whole residential quarter".
When his mother remarried a "very strict" Catholic, Nooteboom was sent to board at a series of Franciscan and Augustinian monastery schools which he left without graduating. "They were rather severe places where I never fitted in and I still find the church as an institution not my thing. But I retain a fascination with the theatrical elements of these extreme lives" - monks habitually crop up in his fiction - "and I still visit monasteries from time to time. Especially in Spain where they fit so well in the landscape. And there was Latin and Greek and my love of the classics still persists, although last summer I sat with my school edition of Homer and a book of Greek grammar and I realised how much I had lost."
He says his mother insists he was always a keen reader, but he has few memories of books before classics at school and then, as a late teenager, Alain Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and Truman Capote's Other Voices which he read in English. "And when I left school to work in a bank I lived in this tiny cubicle where I definitely remember reading Faulkner in 1952."
While working in the bank, Nooteboom wrote a chapter of his first novel, Philip and the Others (1955), "just like that". It was based on a long hitchhiking trip to the Mediterranean. A publisher offered him 300 guilders to finish it, which was enough to keep him for the two months it took. The book was awarded the Anne Frank Prize and "got real acclaim in Holland. Today I would have been on bestseller lists and on the front cover of magazines, but those things didn't exist then. And it gave me a problem. I was now a writer, but I had written everything I had saved up. I didn't have a second novel anywhere."
Nooteboom's response was to enlist as a merchant seaman and travel to Surinam - "there was a girl I was in love with" - then French and British Guyana and home via New York. "I wanted to travel and I wanted to write, and it worked out that way." At the time, J Slauerhoff, a ship's doctor who died young in the 1930s, was a writer he enjoyed: "But it was more as a figure than a writer that he was important to me. The novels were perhaps not the best, but they were extremely interesting and were set in places like Macau." After his Surinam adventure Nooteboom said he wrote some "appropriately Conradian" stories about "ships and sailors and the sea", until I got a "more real inkling of what the writing life would ask of me".
He lists Proust and Borges among his heroes and his 1963 novel, The Knight Has Died, exhibits a Borgesian blurring of fictional boundaries as a Dutch writer commits suicide leaving an unfinished manuscript to a fellow writer asking him to finish it. The novel becomes Russian doll-like as the second author declines the request after learning that the book is about a writer who commits suicide and leaves his unfinished novel for another writer to complete.
Coetzee has said that Nooteboom's fiction, "is as much about its own processes and raisons d'être as it is about the fictitious activities of its personages". Nooteboom acknowledges that "when looking at my books I find I have often written to explore questions about literature. What is the difference between a myth and a fairytale? What is the nature of the 'fakeness' of writing?" However, by the time he had finished The Knight Has Died he had reached a dead end. "I think I had him commit suicide so I wouldn't have to write the book myself," he explains. "That sounds overly dramatic, but for the next 17 years I didn't write a novel but instead travelled around the world as if I was looking for something to write about."
In the mid-1960s Nooteboom became travel and poetry editor of a glossy Dutch literary magazine, Avenue. His first literary efforts had been poetry, and at Avenue he combined early translations of Czeslaw Milosz and Ted Hughes into Dutch with his own travel writing. "All they would say to me was, don't make it too long and not always about Spain. After that it was up to me." Nooteboom had first visited Spain in the early 1950s and has returned every year since. He now spends his summers on Minorca where he does most of his writing. The anthology of his writing on Spain, Roads to Santiago (1992), ranges across history, geography, philosophy, economics and art, with the New York Times reviewer claiming "it resembles a classic pilgrim's tale written for purposes of spiritual edification, a kind of Michelin for the soul".
Nooteboom's combining of journalism and travel led him to become a political commentator and he has long been a vociferous advocate of the European Union. He says that, today, it is about more than just reconciliation after two wars, "although that is important, as is recognising the sacrifices people made" - and more to do with economic and cultural challenges from other parts of the world. He speaks about the murders in Holland of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, and the protests over the recent Danish cartoons. "Seeing the bigger picture in all this is obviously very difficult. And it goes without saying that no one should ever be killed. But you could say that since Socrates, or more realistically since Voltaire, Europeans have fought the battles for freedom and for the separation of religion and state for themselves. I think the Muslim world will have to do it as well. And they really don't need the assistance of some bad Danish cartoons in doing it."
He says he supports Turkey's entry into the EU - and calls Orhan Pamuk's most recent novel, Snow, "a masterpiece". He travelled extensively in the Middle East in the 1970s, "when I was an innocent traveller in an innocent time. The Muslim world then seemed exotic and colourful and interesting. It certainly didn't look threatening. I wrote a piece after going to the holy city of Qom in Iran at a time when we all thought there would be a revolution in Iran. But we thought it would come from the intelligent left. Even Foucault, a homosexual, marched in Paris calling for the return of Khomenei. But at the very end of the article - I didn't know the word fundamentalist then - I did use the word 'purist'. I had some small sense that something else was also brewing. Perhaps if the CIA had read Dutch they might have been on to it all a little sooner."
Nooteboom returned to fiction with his 1980 novel, Rituals, about two friends, one who follows no rules and one who is governed by them. The book was quickly made into a film and became his first work to be published in English translation. "I always thought I might one day come back to the novel and I did. The blockage was gone." Subsequent novels have included In the Dutch Mountains, (1984) his reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, The award-winning The Following Story, (1991) and All Souls' Day (1999). His next novel opens and closes with fragments from Milton's Paradise Lost and is about two Brazilian girls travelling in Australia. "It becomes clear as I look back that all my work, especially including the novels, has been influenced by my travel. I started travelling to find something to write about and I succeeded." In the last three months he has been in Japan, travelled by sea from Mauritius to South Africa and explored graveyards all over Europe for a book he is writing with his wife, photographer Simone Sassen, on the graves of poets. And so it goes on, as it has since he left home to catch the train to Breda that first time. "That time when I posted myself at the side of the road, stuck out my thumb and opened my mind to the diversity."
Inspirations
The Odyssey by Homer
À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
The Forbidden Realm by JSlauerhoff
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
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