Jeroen Brouwers fled the ‘Dutch superficiality’ in Brussels
Brussels was Jeroen Brouwers’ biotope for twelve years. There he could live in anonymity, wandering through long streets that completely depressed him because they knew no end. He was also concerned about the ineradicable inferiority complex of the Flemish. But in the first place, he felt at ease in that chaotic city, because nothing reminded him of the raked-in Netherlands. ‘Dutch superficiality’ was the idea for him, he wrote in Flemish years (1978).
Also read: Brouwers was one of the most gifted and merciless polemicists of his time
Brussels was also the place where his heroes Multatuli, E. du Perron and WF Hermans had settled. But above all, for Brouwers, the city was a world that set his imagination in motion. So completely he in Flemish years a walk to the BRT building, where sits ‘a man who is deformed from the countless deformities’ of the city: ‘a man who, in addition to his left, is also missing his left arm, the coupled part of his jaw, his left nostril, his left eye, but his right hand with the booklet with tickets for the lottery ticket he puts up energetically to every goer and with real like he calls the date of the next draw and it sounds, if you walk on without having bought a ticket, a curse of which alone does already the sound makes you stiffen with remorse. In Brussels, stumble over the blind, crippled, deaf and dumb and other craters and resist their fates if you can and at the very least feel yourself an unbelievable bastard.’
In those sentences you can hear the gargantuan world that you find in his novels, like it doused with jenever. the deluge (1988).
He preferred to follow in the footsteps of his dead literary heroes in Brussels. For example, in the Galeries St.-Hubert, where between the World Wars, Greshoff, Van Schendel, Roland Holst, Ter Braak and Slauerhoff gathered in the Taverne du Passage Du Perron.
Also read: The struggle of Jeroen Brouwers and Rudy Kousbroek about Jappenkampen and the freedom of the writer
Multatuli the querulant who wanted to be, as he would later from his collected polemics Hammer Pieces in which he equals his friend WF Hermans in sourness and vehementness and even cleans Karel van het Reve’s ears when it comes to his admiration for Elsschot’s style.
Despite his love-hate relationship with Belgium, Brouwers protected Flemish poets and writers. This became apparent from his important non-fiction work, the essayistic The last door. Suicide in Dutch literature (1983), of which an expanded new edition edition in 2017 with 700 pages. Some of the literary suicide bombers he performed were friends he had come to know during his Brussels years, such as the poet Jotie T’Hooft and the writers Dirk de Witte, Jan Emiel Daele and Daniël Robberechts.
Robberechts (1937-1992) for the time being, just like Brouwers, a withdrawn life. He wrote about him: ‘I know what Robberechts was talking about. I myself, loathing just about anything outside the walls of my house, have organized my life in exactly the same way that he has. Result: alienation from the world, fear of people, introversion that quickly and easily leads to what Robberechts ‘sterile brooding’.’ It could have been about Brouwers himself.
A version of this article also in the newspaper of 13 May 2022