Not that I’ll miss him, because we haven’t spoken in years. But still, because he is dead, I looked in my correspondence folders for the letters of Jeroen Brouwers. Under one of the first, from 1984, it reads ‘bye, dear child, – I wish you every success, every happiness’. Letters are time machines. When you read them, it is always now and not, because I actually have no idea anymore who that woman was to whom Brouwers wrote that letter, even if she also bore my name. Still, that nice ending moved me when I read it again, as if I’m still the one it’s addressed to.
Brouwers could be so wonderfully kind, cordial and personable. He could also show very different sides, but when we visited him in Exel, or later on the houseboat in Krommenie where he temporarily lived, or later in Zutendaal, he was usually mostly nice. Or is that not true either? You never really know about anything anymore. Now that I think about it, I see the kitchen in Zutendaal in front of me, it is late in the evening, he takes the gin bottle and says: “So, now I’m going to drink”. Oh dear. That was especially terrifying, that bottle of gin diluted with barely equal parts Coca-Cola was quickly finished. And how someone falls apart. Fell. Because how did that go? We must have all had a drink, Brouwers must have been propagating theories. Assumptions. When I think about it, I really feel the mess the past makes in your head, as if I’m some kind of client E. Busken myself.
It is truly a miracle and a mystery that we pretend that we have no problem with the concept of time. You talk about years ago like you know what those are, years, but that’s not true at all. Looking back, you think: those were beautiful years, those years when Jeroen was so self-evident in my life. That ‘we’ and ‘us’ is no longer there either. The times when he was so kind and witty as well as the times when drink or annoyance played the main role are captured in something called “those years” that never was.
Perhaps that person in my letter folder was never there either. No one is who he seems to the outside world, with writers that is clearest, they are mainly what they write. In it another, deeper ‘I’ becomes visible, with accompanying fears, desires and obsessions, although you never know how these relate to the really living person.
Have you known for a long time that there is no such thing as a cohesive personality? That is an auxiliary construction.
The paper world puts you in someone’s head, but what that means for the real one isn’t always so clear. More than once Brouwers expressed his solidarity with those who could no longer cope with life, his characters are always tormented persons who constantly bump into the world. He himself preferred to live in places where he would not be disturbed.
I leaf through a photo album, see him solemn, rather drunk, busily orating. Far away in the past, where we were all different people.
Photos are worse than letters, with photos you are more startled by the distance, in photos you can clearly see that the image from the inside does not really coincide with that from the outside. You have more to letters anyway. Perhaps that’s why I mumble impotently: “Hello, Jeroen”, to that letter.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 23, 2022
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