Nineteen sixty-four was quite the year for me. Sixty years ago this year. The Sixties reached their peak for the time being, The Beatles came to the Netherlands, and The Rolling Stones. How did I, then eighteen years old, experience that period?
In a series of stories I reflect on big and small things that stirred the homeland at the time. Part 5: ‘pervert and criminal’ Jan Cremer throws a stone into the Dutch literary pond.
By Martin Rep
“In the coming issue we will have our first travel story by Jan Cremer, Martin.” Joop Swart looked at me kindly, his shiny eyes smiling at me through his glasses. “Will you get it ready for the press?” Joop placed a glass folder with a sheet of paper in it on my desk and strode out of my modest office. “I’m going to have lunch with Jan and Babette now,” he shouted as he closed the door behind him.
‘Zero’ (men’s magazine) was the smallest magazine I had ever worked for. The year was 1980, I had been involved with it for a few months. The permanent staff consisted of only three people: editor-in-chief Joop Swart, assistant Viviane Meslier and then the editor-in-chief – that was me. The magazine had three rooms in a boring office complex on Gelderlandplein in Amsterdam-Buitenveldert.
Did I now have to adapt a story by none other than Jan Cremer? The author of the Unrelenting Bestseller I Jan Cremer? The ‘dirty and filthy book’ that turned the whole of the Netherlands upside down in the 1960s?
Curious, I picked up the glass folder and took out the sheets of copy paper. Suddenly it was 1964 again, the year of ‘Ik Jan Cremer’.
Jayne Mansfield
‘THE URGENT BESTSELLER’ was already on the very first printing of I Jan Cremer stated in bold letters. No book in the literary history of the Netherlands has ever caused as much commotion as the ‘picture novel’ by the Twente visual artist Jan Cremer.
It seemed that in the book the author described for pages how he sat on the toilet. How he got one lady after another between the sheets and gave a graphic account of it. He bragged about his relationship with American film star Jayne Mansfield. In short: Cremer, just under 24 years old when his book was published in February 1964 by the respectable publisher De Bezige Bij, was well above the Dutch average.
The first printing of five thousand copies sold out within a week. A year later the counter had sold 180,000 copies. Religious Netherlands in particular were concerned about the book and the amoral view of life it propagated. The literary critic of the Christian daily Trouw, J. van Doorne – he called Jan Cremer a ‘pervert and a criminal’ – wrote the headline, which was not unkind The Filthy Bee Busy above his review:
“It’s a partially fantasy biography of a bastard. I don’t know why the publisher published the book. Presumably because the management saw value in it. Let us hope that this suspicion is incorrect, because if it is correct, De Bezige Bij is a stinking publisher. Spending something dirty because there is a legitimate expectation that it will make money is immoral.”
Caballero
De Bezige Bij filed summary proceedings against the newspaper because of the headline of the story, in which the judge ruled that Trouw had to pay compensation to the publisher for the immaterial and material damage suffered. The Catholic Volkskrant did not even consider the book worthy of a review.
I wasn’t that curious about the stories about Jan Cremer’s bowel movements. The writers I had discovered were Harry Mulisch, Remco Campert, Ewald Vanvugt (A very strange thief) and WF Hermans. I Jan Cremer was not part of the dinner conversations of the Rep family on the Meidoornstraat in Zaandam, which were invariably interrupted when the shop bell announced that a customer was waiting for a pack of Caballero (twenty-five cigarettes for one guilder) or a medium-heavy Drum (with rolling paper, one ten guilders). My Dutch teacher at the Zaanlands Lyceum AC Zwaga did not think the newly published book was worth a lesson. We finished reading together Epic and Lyric, an anthology of Dutch literature from the Middle Ages to the ‘present day’, or dissect a poem by Ed. Hoornik. Jan Wolkers was already on the edge; also a pervert actually, Zwaga thought, but at least he could write.
Even at the more conservative Christian HBS on Parkstraat in Zaandam, people were not very concerned about it I Jan Cremer. Friends of mine who attended that school at the time cannot remember that Dutch teacher Sijbrand had reservations about it. “He probably thought it was literary substandard and of course pornographic. That’s what it is, by the way.” Under no circumstances was it anathematized at the school. Nor did the pastor in our reformed Southern Church argue against it. But I may have missed it because I almost always immediately lost attention during the sermon, although I probably would have woken up at the key word ‘Cremer’.
Zero
How did the adaptation of Cremer’s story for the magazine ‘Zero’ turn out? Of course I didn’t mean to sit and change Jan’s text. The story was typed flawlessly, apparently on an IBM electric disk machine, perhaps by a typist from the publishing house. It wasn’t a bad story – Jan describing the nighttime atmosphere at a deserted airport in a faraway country – but it wasn’t much at all either.
I came up with an introduction, gave some typesetting instructions, put my initials underneath and placed the glass folder in a tray on Viviane’s desk. Just when Joop Swart came back in. “Nice story, Martin,” he shouted cheerfully. “Jan is going to write a whole series for us. He will soon be leaving for South America.” I had hoped to catch a glimpse of Babette Cremerbut apparently Joop and his guests had already said goodbye at the restaurant.
Fiftieth edition
The fiftieth edition of it was published in 2000 I Jan Cremer. I was now working in the art editorial department of the daily newspaper De Gelderlander. I wrote a short description for the newspaper about the new, richly illustrated, bound edition. I read the book for the first time.
Thirty-six years after its publication, I thought the content was not too bad. ‘Tam’ was still not the right word to describe it, but I was never shocked by the content, and sitting on the toilet for pages wasn’t too bad. I certainly didn’t think it was high-quality literature, but that was only an advantage, because a lot of high-quality literature is too high-quality for me.
But actually it was quite a disappointment.
Also read:
By means of Martin Rep. Image: Cover of the fortieth edition of I Jan Cremer and photo Anefo (Wikipedia)
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