The Immovable Now - Het ijzeren heden
De Morgen August 17 1998
Joris Gerits, 'Don't Leave me'
The title of Geerten Meijsing's novel Tussen mes en keel, published in the beginning of this year and well-reviewed, referred to the seventeenth century Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Robert Burton wrote that only God's blessing "may come betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat". The first novel of translator Bartho Kriek (1950) could have been titled, referring to the same quotation, Between bridge and bay: his protagonist, Albert Vijfhuizen, standing in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge just does not step over the railing, although he has done it often in his fantasies. The reason why he doesn't jump is rather silly: on the moment he wants to hoist himself on the parapet a little man pushes a microphone under his nose with the question how it feels to be the 800th since 1937.
Bartho Kriek has chosen as a title Het ijzeren heden [The Immovable Now], referring to the thoughts of the protagonist during his walk into San Francisco after his ceased suicide-attempt: "While I walk into the built-up area, I muse that the incident on the bridge may have been such a moment that we experience only one or two times in our life, a moment of total change. Everything thereafter will be different, old sufferings won't have to bob up anymore, crises and catastrophes are things of the past, lie permanently behind you. The present that starts after this incident will fill itself as a matter of course with possibilities and joys, pleasures and peaks."
But the quotation is followed by five chapters, and among other things Albert makes a trip to Antwerp were he buys a gun. Which he still hasn't used at the final page.
Kriek's protagonist is not as clearly manic-depressive as Erik Provenier in Tussen mes en keel or the first-person narrator in the also recently published Liefde is een zwaar beroep by Rogi Wieg. Albert Vijfhuizen is rather a 68-er who didn't feel at home in the middle-class family in which he was the youngest of three. He didn't want to enter into the struggle for power with his father and elder brother in the family-business. Although Albert has finished a polytechnic school, he preferred a job as a chauffeur, later as a postman. But time and again things went wrong. Also relationships with women that loved him suddenly were broken off.
Through talks with a friend and old classmate, a notebook in which he, on the advise of a therapist, has written down his "whole life" and recollections coming up while he walks along places that played an important role in his youth - the parental home, the school, the factory site - one discovers bit by bit why Albert's efforts to lead a normal life have failed. Hazy clues like "a lost love", "a recent mugging abroad", "numerous stays in the Sancta" gradually get sharp outlines. But why at certain moments in Albert such anger flares up that he destroys at one stroke everything he has built up, remains unexplained.
What happens to him is like what Hans Andreus described in his autobiographical novel Denise. Why does a man during a summer holiday at Elba suddenly get the urge to go for the throat of his lover? The question has been answered afterwards, but Andreus and Odile Liénard never reconciled. Analysis later revealed that the poet felt threatened by the people that were closest to him. The feeling of being threatened could in periods of depression lead to very agressive outbursts. The deeper cause would be a persistent and very strong fear of being abandoned.
Albert Vijfhuizen seems to be tormented by the same kind of fear. All the time remembrances bob up of the decision of his parents to send him to a public school. It has disrupted profoundly his relation with his mother. The feelings of guilt of the mother, written down on some diary pages which Albert has found after her death, point out that the essence of Albert's psychological problems lies therein.
Striking in Het ijzeren heden is the enormous self-control and the almost happy tone with which the protagonist speaks about his fiasco and suicidal tendencies. The novel may be about the neurosis, paranoia and panic of a man of this era, it doesn't fly the reader at the throat. Albert has reached a mature understanding and a stoical acceptance of his further destiny.
Between the last line of the first chapter "There are enough reasons to confront life cheerfully" and the last sentence of the novel "The evening sky hurts" there is no contradiction anymore. There is happiness and unhappiness, sense and nonsense, peace and discontentment in this existence, even more or less in the same degree. If Albert yet would decide to end his life, then this decision wouldn't be just the outcome of the wish to escape for good from psychological torments, but also of the philosophical insight that only a belief in life can prevent someone from ending this Sysiphus-existence.
In Het ijzeren heden the author contrasts the Catholic youth of his protagonist with the mentality of his generation ('68), the growing mental pressures of society and a penetrating reflection about the sense and senselessness of life. To complete such an undertaking convincingly an author needs to possess experience of life and stylistic talents. Bartho Kriek possesses both.
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