In Memoriam: Jan Wolkers (1925-2007)
Jan Wolkers died on 19 October 2007, at 1.30 p.m. to be precise. It was a week before his 82nd birthday. A couple of days prior to his death, when wife Katrina asked if he perhaps wanted something to eat, he had responded: ‘I have had enough.’ He subsequently fell into a deep sleep from which he never awoke. ‘I have had enough’ were the last words of a gifted, vital and versatile artist.
Wolkers referred to himself as a ‘sculptor-painter-writer’. He was educated as a sculptor and, with his public monuments and figures, his artistic reputation was first based in this domain. After the publication of two poems in 1957 - the year that Wolkers stayed in Paris to study in Ossip Zadkine’s studio - he made his debut as a prose writer with the story entitled ‘Het tillenbeest’ in the Tirade magazine. His first major breakthrough to a wider public occurred with the publication of his debut novel Kort Amerikaans (Crew Cut) in 1962.
In that novel, and also in Terug naar Oegstgeest (Return to Oegstgeest), 1965 and De walgvogel (The Dodo), 1974, he recounts many autobiographical details. His youth in a Calvinist family with eleven children, in Oegstgeest, a village in the vicinity of Leiden, often crops up in his writing. ‘My work and my life are one and the same thing,’ he said. ‘No one has remained closer to the truth than I have.’
To Wolkers personally, and also to many of his readers, Wolkers’s novels meant a liberation from religion and the oppressive atmosphere in which they grew up. Turks fruit (Turkish Delight), 1969, which has been reprinted dozens of times and successfully filmed by Paul Verhoeven, also represented liberation in sexual terms. Rarely had a Dutch writer written so provocatively and freely about love: ‘I screwed one girl after another. I dragged them to my den and pounded myself to death.’
Wolkers’s work also aroused much resistance, particularly among Protestant communities. The author also had a rather tense relationship with the literary critics. His books sold phenomenally well, but were often disparaged. This drove Wolkers to refuse the two most prestigious literary awards in the Dutch-language region, the Constantijn Huygens Prize and the P.C. Hooft Prize.
Wolkers could write just as tenderly as he could shamelessly, in brilliant, effervescent language that betrayed that he had listened attentively to his father’s daily readings from the Dutch Authorized Version - even when in the womb, as he himself claimed. The Bible had taught him this: ‘To live as if I am immortal while I am simultaneously aware that I can sink down into the earth to return to dust forever.’
Death permeated his entire oeuvre, both visual and literary, his paintings and sculptures, his novels, essays and poems. He had a lifelong obsession with the theme, and, in his last few days, he saw the demons of his father, elder brother and daughter Eva glide past. He recorded Eva’s death in the stunning Een roos van vlees (A Rose of Flesh), 1963. Nevertheless, he did not regard death as a punishment but rather as a condition of life: ‘If there was no death, everything would become pointless.’
After a rich and intensive life, Jan Wolkers could accept his own death without fear. ‘Een kraai krast dat het is volbracht,’ (A crow caws that it’s complete) he wrote in the poem Zelfportret zonder kik (Self-portrait without a whimper). ‘Ik sluit mijn mond en geef geen kik, / Dit is de dood en dat ben ik.’ (I close my mouth, I do not whine / This is death and it is mine.)
By Onno Blom