Among the best books of 2021 for me are two biographies: Nescio by Lieneke Frerichs and Philip Roth by Blake Bailey. Thick books about two writers who at first sight have nothing in common.
Both correspond to the image that could be expected on the basis of their work: Nescio, pseudonym of JHF (Frits) Grönloh, appears to be a solitary, distant man. Roth is the grim erotomaniac whom he describes rather spectacularly in almost every book. Because I read these biographies in quick succession, I noticed one strong similarity between the two writers, which I had never considered before. Both Nescio and Roth were tormented by severe depression. They have not said or written much about this in public.
Nescio mentions the word ‘depression’ once in a letter to a correspondent friend: „To get through my depression, I now work from seven in the morning to twelve in the evening and it goes well.(…) She say that I have become a lot more cheerful, I rather feel that I am numb. (…) I am bored through everything. I expect that this will be followed by a time of real revival, that’s how it went and that’s why I can hold on.”
Frerichs notes that Grönloh already suffered from severe headaches and nervousness as a boy and that he will continue to struggle with his weak nervous system for the rest of his life. He consults neurologists (one of them wants to ‘put him in one of his clinics immediately’) and takes ‘powders’. A daughter of Nescio said that as a child she had heard her father cry in Mommy’s front room: “O Ossi I am so lonely”.
Well, it wasn’t that strange that he called Japi at the end of the story the eater of the Waal Bridge. “You couldn’t call it jumping, the man had said, he had gotten off.”
Philip Roth has not reported on his depression for a long time, except to friends or camouflaged through novel characters. Just out of the autobiography Leaving a Doll’s House The 1996 book of his angry ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom, who was revengeful according to Roth, showed how much Roth himself struggled with periods of depression. He then suffered from insomnia, lack of appetite and difficulty concentrating. Sleeping pills gave him panic attacks and suicidal thoughts and he was admitted to a guarded ward of a psychiatric clinic.
Biographer Blake Bailey also uncovered such facts, and Roth apparently no longer wanted to be silent; eight years earlier he had done so to the journalist Claudia Roth Pierpont, who wrote him for her book Roth questioned about life and work.
Did Roth and Nescio have anything in common? Yes, although you would expect it less with Nescio than with Roth: an aversion to monogamous marriage. Roth said that after “two years at the most” he was sexually bored with a woman; a condition to which his biographer owes many smooth pages. Nescio in a pocketbook called “adultery the natural and even the reasonable complement of marriage for living men.”
Lieneke Frerichs assumes that Nescio’s wife ‘must have had difficulty’ with this statement, something which is indeed apparent from his story Dichtertje.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 27, 2021
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