Amsterdam Stories by Nescio
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Engagement & Alienation

To appreciate Nescio, I suggest it’s helpful to compare him with his English near-contemporary, Henry Green. Nescio might well be considered the Dutch Henry Green (or more precisely Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh is the Dutch Henry Vincent Yorke). Both were businessmen who were also authors of some remarkable prose beginning in the 1910’s and 1920’s. Although Green was far more prolific, Nescio like Green was a stylist interested in the perplexing details of everyday life. Both, perhaps because of their dichotomous lives, are primarily concerned with the idea of ‘duty,’ that is the implicit obligations or plichten that most of us respond to (or are trapped in, depending on mood).

Nescio and Green both use dialect extensively, which is unfortunately untranslatable in either direction. Green writes about the mores of the English country house, upper class snobbery and working class woes. Nescio is more narrowly focused on the bourgeois smugness of a much more compacted class structure in Holland. This he finds as tedious as the orderly and unvarying Dutch landscape:

“And the tide came in and the tide went out; the water rose and fell. Every night the limping harbormaster came and first he lit the green light on Noorderhoofd, the breakwater, then he came back down and then he had to go around the whole harbor and then you saw him by the tower again and then he opened the wooden gate and climbed the wooden steps and lit the light in that tower too. And then Japi said ‘Another day, boss.’”

Green tends toward description not evaluation. His characters aren’t trying to prove anything. They may be eccentric, but they are aren’t counter-cultural. Nescio’s, on the other hand, could be proto-hippies - a taste perhaps of what Amsterdam would become famous for a half-century later: “‘No,’ Japi said, ‘I am nothing and I do nothing. Actually I do much too much. I’m busy overcoming the body. The best thing is to just sit still; going places and thinking are only for stupid people. I don’t think either’... He had just one wish: to overcome the body, to no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, cold or rain.” His characters agonise over their apparent conformity to the ethic of work, responsibility and achievement. One way or another society wins, however.

Youth is consequently not a happy time in Nescio’s Amsterdam. Perhaps it never is anywhere. Society is oppressive, unlike in Green where it simply is. Dutch youth are portrayed as frustrated idealists who aren’t sure about their ideals. “We were on top of the world and the world was on top of us, weighing down heavily.” As office workers, they resent the wealth they see around them and the authority it exerts over them. For Green, young Birmingham factory workers are realists who recognise the world is changing, but largely without their help. They have no ambition to be other than they are except respected by authority and paid decently. Unlike the Dutch, they are comfortable with their social status.

The Dutch and the English seem ‘woke’ (to use the latest term for social awareness) in entirely different ways in the works of the two writers. The Dutch are remarkably modern; their conversations might be perceived as taking place today rather than a century ago. Although they are poor, they are cosmopolitain, travelling from one end of the Dutch-speaking world to the other and speaking other languages as if in defiance of their own culture. The English are parochial and provincial regardless of class. Except for some gentry, they do not travel, not even around their own country. They are entirely unaware of events outside their cultural world.

If I were fifty years younger, I might want to pursue this further. As things stand though, I think I’ll let the suggestion lie fallow. Perhaps some young aggressive scholar might pick it up.

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