Column | Versatile biographer – NRC

With the death of Henk van Gelder, Dutch literature loses one of the largest, perhaps the largest, connoisseurs of life and work by Simon Carmiggelt. Few have meant as much for the memory of Carmiggelt as Van Gelder.

His biography appeared in 1999 Carmiggelta concise, still very readable life story. The book was completely enough in all its concise to scare new Carmiggelt biographers. Van Gelder was a great admirer of Carmiggelt, as I also noticed at meetings of the Association of Carmiggelt friends for which we were sometimes invited together.

But his biography did not degenerate anywhere in a hagiography. He characterized Carmiggelt sharply: “Partly due to his repeated television appearance, Carmiggelt had created a popular image of himself: the image of the wise, affable spectator who could write and talk about humanity nuanced. The publicity with Renate Rubinstein was a secret. by suggesting frankness, and by staying in the telephone book as the most accessible writer in the Netherlands, he shouted. ”

In his ‘accountability’, Van Gelder also found that the autobiographical elements in the twists of salt should be taken. « Carmiggelt put them in his hand, changed herself into someone else or someone else in herself, made up to their heart’s content, sometimes jumped sloppy with the date of a memory and left details that were too personal for him. »

Incidentally, this does not seem to apply to the columns that Carmiggelt wrote about his war experiences and that I count as the best of his work.

In 2013, Van Gelder came with a new book by Carmiggelt: Wander through Amsterdam. This on the occasion of the hundredth birthday of Carmiggelt. He selected a number of columns, in part not bundled before, in which Carmiggelt describes his experiences during walks through Amsterdam. Carmiggelt thought that Amsterdammers wore their hearts more on their tongue than others. « The sense of humor of the Amsterdammers takes their lives so completely that they need a Hagenees to write it down, » wrote the Hagenees Carmiggelt.

Let me end with Bram Vermeulen – another preference that I shared with the versatile Van Gelder. Van Gelder also wrote an excellent biography about Vermeulen (1946 – 2004), Bram, in which he unraveled a dramatically expired artist’s life. Vermeulen fell into a black hole when Freek de Jonge released him, but recovered himself as an excellent singer-songwriter.

This biography concludes Van Gelder with this verse from Vermeulen.

Change is daring to die

Nature indicates that in an exemplary way

Low the sun punctures the trees

The hour of peace has come soft

To share

Mail the editors