The best thing is to just sit still - Pessoan Nescio

Nescio is slotted with his contemporaries Robert Walser and Franz Kafka as an example of “clerk literature” by Joseph O’Neill.  That’s my term; O’Neill goes on for a while longer.  Stories in which the main characters are bureaucrats, whether private or government.  Clerk characters are ubiquitous in 19th century Russian literature, but strangely rare elsewhere, with the glorious exception of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a story that could not possibly have been known to Nescio, even though Melville feels like a direct influence.  The profession of clerk is literarily rich exactly because it is so dull:  what meaning can be found in a life spent as a poorly paid, over-educated human photocopier?

“And it goes on for years.  Then your old man sticks you in an office.  And you realize that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush.”  (“The Freeloader,” 23)

Working conditions and pay have improved, but the existential problem remains.

O’Neill missed a crucial example:  Fernando Pessoa, who made his living as a clerk in a shipping company, much like the “author” of The Book of Disquiet.  Pessoa displace his search for meaning onto his heteronyms, particularly the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro who writes as if he has found a solution:

I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it.  But I don’t think about it,
Because to think s to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.  (tr. Richard Zenith, from Fernando Pessoa & Co, 48)

The title character of “The Freeloader, Japi, is a pest and a sponger, but in his strongest moments he possesses a Caeiro-like clarity:

“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.  It’s too bad I have to eat and sleep.  I’d rather spend all day and all night just sitting.”  (5)

There is a painter in “The Freeloader” who struggles and strains for his art, but does produce paintings (Caeiro: “And there are poets who are artists \ And work on their poems \ Like a carpenter on his planks!”).  He befriends Japi who produces nothing, even less than Caeiro, but is adept at seeing, or sensing,  or perhaps I mean existing, “[s]omeone who thought it was fine just to let the wind blow through his hair, let the cold, wet wind soak his clothes and his body, who ran his tongue over his lips because the taste of the ocean was so ‘goddamn delicious,’ who sniffed his hands at night to smell the sea” (10).

As adept as Japi is at mooching food and cigars from his bohemian friends, he cannot live this way forever – he is the one speaking up above about his father’s office.  Japi becomes a clerk after all, just like Bernado Soares, but if he has his own Book of Disquiet, he burns it.

The World War II story, “Insula Dei” (“Island of God”), touches on the same themes, but with a horrible new context:  how can one find meaning in a world where everything has been ruined?  What happens to a Caeiro- or Japi-like life of the senses when everything you see has been corrupted?  Is it ethical to be an island in the face of evil?  Or is any other choice ethical?  I think I will not pursue this idea.  Someone else might.  Perhaps I will pick up the trail somewhere else.

A sedate and sensible man - Nescio's Amsterdam Stories

I want to jot down some notes on Nescio, now author of a slender NYRB book titled Amsterdam Stories.  Damion Searls is the translator.  The book is new in English, but most of it is close to a century old in Dutch.

Some or all of Joseph O’Neill’s introduction to the book has been archived at  Slate, so no need to repeat all that.  Just a summary:  important Dutch writer; deft touch with the prose; Nescio not his given name (Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh).  He wrote three short stories in the 1910s, and then, to his own surprise, another in 1942 as an oblique response to the Nazi occupation of Holland.  And that is almost everything, almost the complete Nescio.  Four stories.  Nescio is an odd case.

Two stories and a few little sketches are about a group of Amsterdam Bohemians, painters and writers and the like, always told in retrospect:

And when, in that short, balmy night, the darkness turned pale above our heads, Bavink sat with his head in his hands and spoke of the sun, almost sentimentally.  And we thought it was a shame to have to go to bed, people should be able to stay up forever.  That was one of the things we’d change.  Kees was asleep.  (“Young Titans,” 36)

I suppose most readers have run across these fellows in other settings.  The narrator, Koekebakker, like the author, Nescio, is looking back on a world he has left behind:

I remember one day when we, Bavink and I, went to the seaside and half the sun lay big and cold and red on the horizon.  Bavink hit his forehead with his fist and said, “God, God, I’ll never paint that.  I’ll never be able to paint that.”  Now he’s in a mental hospital.  (36-7)

The artists mostly work in offices, resenting their jobs, yearning for something meaningful, a few of them working to create meaning (“No, we didn’t actually do anything”).  The narrator writes, and even publishes, but it does not amount to much:

And old Koekebakker has turned into a sedate and sensible man.  He just writes, receives his humble wages, and doesn’t cause trouble. (62)

Kinda sad.  And this is before the Nazis invade!  The 1942 story is on the same theme, a tussle with the meaningfulness of the past, but now in a world that has become worse in every way.  Nescio sets the story in midwinter (“A gray, icy day”) to rub it in.  All that is important is “ration cards, food, fuel.  And: ‘How much longer”’ (131).  The narrator meets an old friend who is trying to keep hold of, or perhaps re-create, the meaning of his youth, of ideas, literature, and beauty.  It is not clear that he succeeds.  The Nazis are not mentioned until the last line, almost the last words:

When I’m back outside I see, across the street, next to the fence, here in this slum, in the grimy slush, two German naval officers.  (154)

I need to return to this character tomorrow, and to Nescio’s most famous creation, and to the genre of clerk literature, and to Fernando Pessoa.

For real reviews of Amsterdam Stories, please see Trevor Mookse Gripes and The Complete Review.  I believe Nescio was also covered recently in The New York Times Book Review, which is almost shocking.  Good for them.