The Quaker Liar
by Ann Sieber, originally published in the Houston
Press
Part One: Leaving Houston with a bang; a charity hospital worse than
a zoo; the country takes note or, a new view of astronauts; a quiet
return; the hooks of Houston; Dante's hospital; Zorba the Greek and
the baby in repose; the glory of herrings in the Nazi occupation; and
being given a baby.
34 years ago, Jan and Marjorie de Hartog were run out of Houston. After
enduring unpleasant phone calls, angry letters, even a paper bag full
of excrement flung at their front door, they decided the Lone Ranger
may just have had a good idea - upon the execution of good deeds, sometimes
it is best to make an energetic exit.
Neither Houston nor even U.S.-born, the de Hartogs brought Houston's
dirty laundry into the national spotlight at a time the Space City
boom town was flying high on a bigger-than-big bucking- bronco-and-rocketship
image. -Houston's motto seemed to be, 'Not knowing it is impossible,
we have done it," Jan wrote in The Hospital, the book that all
the fuss was about, the book that the Texas Observer called -the biggest
controversy to fill the front pages of both Houston newspapers for
many years,' that the Wall Street Journal said was -journalistic muckraking
in the best sense of the word,' that the Los Angeles Times described
as a -formidable power for betterment' and -the book that changed a
city.'
Jan and Marjorie de Hartog have led an exotic and crusading life. They
have lived the life many have dreamed of living - full of adventure
and full-flush living, yet turned in the cause of helping others. Although
to most Houstonians they are now just a piece of forgotten Houston
history, the de Hartogs are fiercely remembered by some long-time Houstonians,
as well as the medical, Dutch and Quaker communities.
What most don't know is that last year, more than a quarter century
after their diplomatic retreat, the de Hartogs moved back to Houston
- not exactly with a whimper, nor under cover of night, but perhaps
in what might be described as Quaker silence. They may be Houston's
least-well-known celebrities.
Prior to his sojourn in our hyperbolic city, Jan de Hartog (his first
name is pronounced yon) was already famous for his plays, novels and
sea tales. His two-person The Fourposter launched the genre of the
husband-and-wife play. It served as a vehicle for such famous acting
couples as Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronin, and Rex Harrison and Lilli
Palmer, and was later made into the musical I Do!, I Do! In his native
Holland, de Hartog has the stature of a Hemingway or Faulkner. In the
U.S., his novel The Captain has sold more than one million copies.
Several films have been made from his books, including The Spiral Road
with Rock Hudson and Gena Rowlands, and The Key with William Holden
and Sophia Loren. He has won a Tony, been made a knight, and even been
nominated for a Nobel Prize. But he was not known as a muckraker.
But, on October 27, 1964, Jan de Hartog published a book about his
experiences as a volunteer orderly at Houston's old charity hospital,
Jeff Davis (now Ben Taub). Even three decades later, The Hospital is
difficult reading. -The floors were slippery with blood and vomit,
littered with soiled linen, dropped instruments, discarded bottles
of Novocaine, torn gloves ' blood-soiled mattresses had been flipped
over and hastily covered with another sheet, as long as there were
sheets. After that ' each man lay in the blood of his predecessor.
' This was not a hospital, this was a public utility to keep the dead
and dying off the streets.' The conditions described were worse than
deplorable. De Hartog lay the task of change at the feet of all Houstonians.
All hell promptly broke loose. The newspapers' front and editorial
pages lobbied volleys back and forth. -Criticism Mounts on Ben Taub,
JD Conditions,' read the Post. -Top Nurses Join Hospitals Blast,' read
the Chronicle. The Chronicle's vice president and former editor M.E.
Walter charged that de Hartog was just being emotional and didn't know
what he was talking about. The letters pages were filled for weeks,
mostly supportive of the book. Within two months in Houston, the first
edition was sold out. Channel 11 began its evening broadcast, -There
are mutterings in our town and county about 'that Dutchman."
Soon the national press followed suit. Life magazine did a three- page
spread on the playwright-crusader. The Hospital became a Book-of-the-Month
Club selection, the American Library Association picked it as a notable
book of 1964 - right above Ernest Hemingway's The Movable Feast. There
is a whole scrapbook of clippings just from Jan's native Holland. (-Jan
de Hartog's boek schokte Amerika.') The book and its revelations about
the charity hospital became for that period the defining image of Houston.
An otherwise unrelated, upbeat NASA story in Newsweek closes with a
sudden dark mention of Ben Taub. Houston's boom-town image, our Astrodome,
our astronauts, our oil glamour, all suddenly became lit with an ironic
and unflattering light. We became the city that air- conditioned its
zoo, but not its poor black hospital.
The de Hartogs first came to Houston because of our big hooks. They
were living on a big Dutch sailing coaster, the Rival; they'd sailed
most of the waterways of France, sailed throughout the Mediterranean
- all the time writing up a storm - and then got taken with the idea
of sailing the intercoastal waterway in the U.S., which stretches from
Brownsville to New York. No longer capable of a trans-Atlantic trip,
the Rival crossed the Atlantic on board a freighter. The only dock
with a big enough hook to lift her from the deck was in Houston.
After the trip was made - and a book written about it - the University
of Houston invited Jan to return to teach playwriting. Jan and Marjorie
had fancied Houston - -Houston has a savor that is unique in the world,'
Jan says - so they sailed the Rival up the Ship Channel and lived on
Braes Bayou.
Like many undertakings in the de Hartogs' lives, their involvement
with Jeff Davis started with babies. At a cocktail party, Marjorie
heard that the babies at Houston's charity hospital were going hungry
because there were not enough nurses to feed them. Marjorie started
volunteering in the nursery; when Jan went down to the hospital and
offered his services, he was assigned to the emergency room.
Within his first ten minutes he encountered a young black woman hemorrhaging
from a miscarriage, a pool of blood spreading under her wheelchair.
She had not received any assistance because she was too weak to wheel
herself to the front desk to register. In what reads like a scene from
Dante's Inferno, Jan described the corridors lined with patients in
extreme need, here a -twitching body lashed down with leather straps,'
or -a pair of pitch-black feet covered with sores,' or an incoherent
old man -bleeding from his rectum.' Just reading the account feels
like a harsh duty.
Despite the horror, the couple continued to volunteer at Jeff Davis,
and soon it became their prime concern as they worked every odd hour
they could find. The book recounts the daily neglect and struggle in
the face of vast under-staffing. As The Hospital theorizes, Jeff Davis
was in such horrible straights financially because it was funded by
both county and city, each blaming the other for lack of resources;
every budget dispute was resolved simply by cutting back yet further
on the charity hospital's allocation.
However, The Hospital's publication raised such an international uproar
that, as an epilogue explains: -the city's anonymous power brokers
got together in a smoke-filled room and compared the cost of a hospital
district to that of the damage to the city's image.' A special referendum
was called and, two years after The Hospital was published, the voters
of Houston decreed that there be formed a hospital district with independent
taxing ability.
Jan has a lust for living, like a Dutch Zorba the Greek. He exhibits
a very male, voracious, expansive, -nothing is impossible'-ness, a
galoomphing -yes!' to life. Film director Michael Powell (who once
directed de Hartog's first play, Skipper Next to God) says of him:
-Jan has the face and puzzled expression of a child, but his eyes give
him away. They are watchful, worried, thoughtful and tragic. He tells
you a story and rolls about roaring with laughter, but his eyes have
seen the sins of the world. Lord have mercy upon us. This is perhaps
what has made him so popular in America. Americans love a club sandwich,
a three-decker, and Captain Jan de Hartog, Skipper Next to God, is
a three-decker of a man.'
Jan has translucent white hair, and his blue eyes are forever eliciting
sea analogies from corny magazine descriptions. Of his Dutch accent,
I did not place it as a foreign, it was simply the rich, rolling inflection
of a voice telling tales outside of time. Now at age 79, Jan is cultivating
the life of an old man; he wanted to subtitle his upcoming book -In
Praise of Fat Old Men.' (His long-time publisher at Pantheon vetoed
the suggestion.) Although now his face has weary sags and his body
is no longer of swift proportions, he is a merry participant from his
chair. His astute and patient wife, 14 years his junior, brings him
home the meat of life from which he takes such sustenance and produces
such triumphant product.
He is, above all else, a fat chortling baby. One often hears of babies
likened to old men, but it also goes in the other direction. Jan has
an affinity for the tiny; he bristles with delight as he speaks of
-that luminous wisdom that babies have before they start to talk.'
When he tells the story of the Vietnamese orphanage, he becomes in
the telling that baby that he rescues. His face lights up. As he grins
-eh? eh?,' the sad bags under his eyes are illuminated. Listening to
him, I guess that he has gotten sophistication out of his system. He
has developed, or he retained from babyhood, that capacity to be touched
by everything, most of all the least: the babies, the poor, the dying.
As he described his first sea captain, the Black Skipper, -in the light
of his setting sun even the smallest objects threw long shadows.'
Growing up in a conservative Calvinist sea village in Holland (-they
even said Jesus could be too liberal at times'), Jan left home to become
the cabinboy (what he calls a -seamouse') on a fishing boat. Depending
on which account he is telling, this boyhood experience was either
-a happy one,' or -the saddest time I ever lived through, to use the
majestic words of The Messiah, 'I was a child of sorrow acquainted
with grief."
Whichever is the true version, he continued to work on the sea - achieving
the -dizzying rank' of junior officer - and used his experiences as
fodder for short stories. One day a crusty old editor familiar with
his sea tales called him up and asked if he was working on a book.
He wasn't, but he said he was. What was the name? Jan remembered a
herring stand that had just opened with the bold name, Holland's Glory.
Holland's Glory, published when Jan was 26, came out just as the Nazis
occupied Holland. All about life on the ocean-going tugs on which he
worked, Holland's Glory was seized upon as symbolizing the Dutch spirit.
It sold more than a half million copies (-which is pretty much everyone
in Holland,' Jan says), and de Hartog became a national hero. And from
that was born the first of his baby stories.
-I gave lectures. Which were immensely successful. Sold out houses
everywhere. Sowing Quaker oats like crazy. I really had a very good
time. The war was going on but [chuckle] not for me. At one moment
I was heading for another glorious lecture somewhere in the provinces.
I got to the box office and there was a sign saying, 'Jews not admitted.'
That was it. For some reason, I couldn't do it. -If I'd been a hero
- and I've been known to tell the story as though I was - I'd have
gone in there and said 'What are you doing?! Can't you read?' But oh
no, I slinked off. Said I had a headache or something. But yet, that
started it all.
-Holland was occupied by the Germans. They were very severe, they picked
up all Jews, gradually, and deported them to Auschwitz - which we didn't
know about at the time where they went, we thought they were in work
camps in Poland. These desperate families, if they had small children,
they wanted them safe, and they tried to place them with other people.
-And I wanted no part of this - why should I? I was at the time a famous
writer, I gave lectures. And during one of these occasions, somebody
came up and gave me a baby and said, 'look, you are a famous man, and
this baby is the baby of a Jewish couple about to be deported - please,
please, place it somewhere where it might be safe.'
-I, I, I, wasn't about to, I was going to give lectures, I had other
things to do. But I found you cannot give a baby back. [pullquote]
It's as simple as that....
-So there I was with the baby, and, as you know, I grew up in a fishing
village on the Zeider Zee, heavily Calvinist, oh, couldn't be more
Calvinist and be alive. And that was a safe community for babies because
nobody would be able to penetrate it, except they wanted no part of
it because they were Jewish babies and the Jews had crucified Christ.
-So I went with the baby to people I knew there and said what do I
do. There were these guys that said 'It's God's loss,' and all that
stuff, you know. And while this whole theological debate was going
on, one of the women said 'Oh, men!,' and took the baby. And that was
the beginning; they kept them in that village and they grew up and
were little fisherman's children. We placed a great many. When I say
a great many, there were 20, 30 of them. And all that in one village.'
Part Two Scaring a roomful of nurses; the relishing of farts; the storyteller's
license; the critics speak; a brief definition of the Friends; the
uselessness of fame; and an abolitionist Quaker uses the baby trick.
Jan is the third and last speaker in a program on -Compassion and the
Practice of Nursing,' part of an all-day accredited seminar for nurses.
The women in the room (of the 100 or so present, only three or four
are not women) have generally kind, pragmatic faces - no flamboyance
here. The first two speakers are nurses, but they relate their experiences
as the nursed instead of the nursers, one about the death of her mother,
the other about her own cancer. All three sit behind a table at the
front of the spacious, white lecture hall in the Medical Center, their
faces blown up on a large video monitor above them. The first speaker
speaks in a chipper, detached tone, using medical lingo to describe
her mother's illness (-she infarcated her valve'), until --quite suddenly
- she breaks off. -I planned to tell the story okay, but I'm surprised.'
She looks down, stops smiling, and her body contracts as she struggles
to maintain control, all magnified on the monitor over her head.
Through the first two speakers, Jan sits immobile, his head in his
hands; he could be asleep. The second speaker finishes her story (-I
don't know if I'm cured, I don't know if anybody knows'). Jan is introduced
in glowing terms - how he set the city on its head with his book about
conditions at old J.D., how he is read by every schoolchild in Holland,
etc. - but still his head is bowed. This audience of kindly women starts
to worry. Is this old distinguished writer really asleep? The intro
is finished. There is an awful pause. The nurse just finished gently
touches Jan on the shoulder and starts to say, -It's your turn now" when
his head comes up dramatically. -Have you ever,' he announces in a
grand actor's voice, each sound slowly rolled, -heard the word,' and
here he pauses a breath-intaking moment' -'anticlimax'?'
The room bursts into raucous, relieved laughter. -I'm a sort of souffle
that goes, fo--ooph!,' Jan says, bunching his face up exaggerately,
then rubbing his bushy old man's eyebrows with his beefy hands. The
audience is transformed from nurses, all their caretaking instincts
abuzz with concern, to women who are being entertained, being told
stories. Jan relishes the storyteller's glamour, if -glamour' is to
take its old meaning of a -magick' or -spell.' He waggles his face,
he rumbles and rolls his words and non-words, he grimaces and grunts
and groans. He loves stories given to the grumbling of bellies and
-po--oops!' and all the body's exclamations and exhalations - such
as the -delicious little farts' of his Wagnerian aunt's horse emitted
as it trotted along, back when Jan was a rambunctious boy.
He weaves his stories through each other, one setting up a theme that
is not picked up until much later, like a long running joke elaborately
staged over the course of a weekend party. -And it was the yacht with
the bikinis,' he concludes. But it's not a joke - it is about dangerous
hospitals and dying vagrants and smuggled Jewish babies and plagues
in orphanages. His stories have been crafted over the years, as becomes
evident when they begin to repeat. (Marjorie sits benignly in the audience
as Jan once again tosses out the line about how he, as a famous young
man, sowed his Quaker oats. Or about his minister father and Quaker
mother, -He preached and she practiced.' Or launches anew into the
Vietnamese nun story.) -I am a liar,' Jan announces at the onset of
another talk to medical students. This time it's a whole assembly hall
of them gathered together for the Baylor elective -Compassion and the
Art of Medicine,' to which Jan annually gives a widely attended lecture.
He explains that although storytelling is a Dutch tradition - especially
on board ship - the literal-minded Calvinists call the spell-spinners
for what they are, namely -liars.'
(After Marjorie tells me a story about their life together, Jan adds,
-Anything that Marjorie tells you is absolutely correct.' -Whereas','
Marjorie says, smiling.
-Whereas',' Jan echoes. -But the thing to remember is, as Renoir said,
Il faut corriger la nature. You have to correct nature. So look upon
me as an Impressionist painter, correcting nature.')
Deprived of his pauses and dramatic throat clearings, on the page Jan's
storytelling comes across as vivid narrative going full-bore,with an
old-fashioned leavening of morality. His exaggeration becomes clear
when he describes something familiar, such as his portrait of Houston
in The Hospital. Like Tom Wolfe describing our city in The Right Stuff,
when the hyperbole is brought to bear close to home, it becomes more
transparent. Nothing is wrong, exactly. But we are aware that the more
garish or poetic elements are being selected. De Hartog's novels have
been described in the Saturday Review as -follow[ing] the lead of his
great predecessor Joseph Conrad,' and in the New York Herald Tribune
as possessing a -superb narrative skill, as artlessly artful as Defoe's
and as boyishly exciting as Jules Verne's.' A 1977 Newsweek review
of a Philip Roth book gave the curious assessment: -'the whole pile
of Roth's ventings still comes nowhere near the moral clarity and horror
that a workaday but perceptive novelist like Jan de Hartog was able
to achieve in 50 pages of The Spiral Road.'
He's also had his share of negative assessments. In 1984, Newsweek
said de Hartog -uses prose that is often, to put it gently, quaint.'
Calvin Trillin, in an otherwise enthusiastic review of The Hospital,
pokes fun at de Hartog's Quaker persuasions: -de Hartog's admitted
predilection to find the best in everybody occasionally makes it difficult
for the reader to understand how a group of such superior beings, even
if they are facing tremendous odds, could be overcome by such chaos.'
Jan's own favorite criticism is by a Quaker schoolboy in response to
an assignment, in which he unwittingly revealed his true feelings with
his title: -The Long Works of Yawn de Hartog.'
In the midst of Jan's love of flair and farts and raciness, one finds
a quiet core. For example, buried in his notes for The Hospital is
scrawled an Elizabethan prayer: -Lord, our manifold activities, temper
with tranquillity, let all our deeds for thee be done in silence and
simplicity.'
The Antioch Review wrote that -the Quaker Jan de Hartog reminds one
of Graham Greene, his Roman Catholic counterpart.' Jan is one of the
most esteemed (if somewhat renegade) Quaker writers living. More formally
known as -The Religious Society of Friends,' the Quakers are an obscure
and odd bunch of pacifists, do-gooders and affluent idealists - -the
peculiar people' Jan called them in the title of his most recent book,
published fall 1992, the final installment in a trilogy of fictionalized
Quaker history. Jan's favorite, oft-repeated definition of Quakers
is that they -practice what they preach, and the preaching is optional.'
(At which point he is likely to add -and that from a man who has been
sitting here talking half an hour.') Jan helped the Quakers with relief
work after World War II. He tells the story of a big meeting in Hamburg
in which the American Friends Service Committee was discussing all
the ways in which they'd botched the job, one self-condemnation after
another, when there is a knock. As the meeting continues, a British
Friend dealt with the person at the door. After a while someone asked
what the messenger had wanted. The Englishman replied -I'm afraid we've
won the Nobel Peace Prize.'
Like the Quaker body, Jan has somewhat of a lack of concern for worldly
recognition. Having received fame so young with Holland's Glory, he
claims to have gotten his full of it.
-It's no damn good. It doesn't lead to anything,' he says emphatically.
-If you hit a set of circumstances as I did that are totally beyond
your control - I'd written that book before the war, then came the
war, only German plays in the theaters, only German music on the radio.
You had to be home at 10 o'clock every night. So, what do you do? You
either make love or read Holland's Glory.' Puts you in a great mood
for it.
-I didn't say in that order.'
After the war, he decided not only to emigrate, but to emigrate into
another language where nobody had ever heard of Jan de Hartog. -And
that's what I did. And my God, now in Holland, there are squares named
after me and all that ... you can't live in a climate like that, you
simply can't, it's crazy.' He puts on a stuffy English accent. -After
dinner, would you be interested in me showing you my square?' He bursts
out laughing. -The whole thing is hooey. Because you see, as they say,
every seven years a man changes fundamentally. So, if you calculate
that in, it was my great- grandfather that they dedicated squares to.'
Many of Jan's stories are about the quaint and silent Quakers. Since
the sect has no dogma or ministers, he says, all they have to guide
them are the stories about these -weighty Friends.' Perhaps the most
influential in Jan's life has been the story of 19th-century Quaker
Levi Coffin.
-Levi Coffin, who was the quote president of the Underground Railroad,
always had escaped slaves in the house. The place where he put them
was behind the mantle bed. He wheeled the bed away and there was a
little door and behind it a whole apartment for whoever came in. The
sheriff would come and would say 'Mr. Coffin, do you have any slaves
in the house?' and he would say, 'no' - because the moment they entered
his house, they were no longer slaves. That's why I say, if you don't
have violence, you must have slyness. -And he was about to be read
out of meeting because the Quaker movement then felt that to help slaves
escape to Canada did not minister to the owners,' Jan drags out the
word o-o-owners, -and they sent a delegation to excommunicate him....
-So Levi Coffin said just a moment. He called in and the bed was moved,
and 12 African-Americans came out, [including] one mother with a baby.
He presented them by name, and they all had to shake hands. Then he
asked the mother if it was okay, and he took the little baby and handed
it to the chairman of the committee that had come to excommunicate
him - and the guy didn't know what to do with it. You're given a baby
and you say, 'no, not today'? - what do you do? So he stood there with
this child. And then Levi Coffin said 'Look, it's not a matter between
yearly meeting and myself, it's a matter between you and him." A
slow flourish on each word. -At which the man put the child on the
table and ran. That was the end of that excommunication, of course.
It's a famous Quaker story.'
Part Three Lucretia's alternative to violence; what does Marjorie look
like?; men preach, women practice; a case of mistaken identity; the
similarity of the beginning and the end; and the Vietnamese nun story.
Once, while Jan de Hartog's mother was in the kitchen chopping spinach,
his older brother - who was going through a Humphrey Bogart phase -
leaned against the counter and asked his mom -Why are you so sly?'
She turned around, knife in her hand. Jan was scared that his brother
had done something rash, but the incipient Bogie stood his ground.
-That's a very good question,' their mother, Lucretia, replied. -If
you can't have violence, you must have slyness.' And she turned back
around.
Query: what does Marjorie look like? She has a kind, handsome face,
the sort of face that gets even better as it gets older. She is trim,
both in appearance and speech, yet she can keep pace with the bawdiest.
After all, she is married to Jan, and serves as editor of all his ribald
stories of farts and shits and -hoores,' as he pronounces it.
If not exactly sly, she is frequently wry. Raised in Bishopshalt, she
is quite British, and not in the least bit mushy or sentimental, although
she has eyes that soften when they talk about certain subjects - like
the children in Waco, or the families of her hospice patients, or even
a cranky dying woman who keeps getting the Quakers confused with the
Mormons. She uses these kind eyes with Jan, but with a good dollop
of irony. -Dost thou want dessert?' she asks, her voice buttered with
tenderness on one side, while the other side is dry. When Jan allows
as how he might have some carrot cake and asks if she'll join him,
she answers, -No, thank you. I'm not on a diet.' By the time Jan and
I have sorted that one out, the conversation has moved on.
Marjorie and Jan are a tender, intimate couple - it especially seems
so when they address each other with the slightly anachronistic Quaker
-thee's and -thou's. Perhaps it is the years that have given Marjorie
detachment. Perhaps this is what makes possible a true loving union
of minds and hearts, this tender, slightly detached devotion.
Jan's first marriage was to J.B. Priestley's daughter, Angela - one
might imagine that would have been a more exciting match for a writer
gallivanting in literary circles. But although he and Angela had four
children, Jan virtually never refers to that marriage. Jan and Marjorie
met in 1952 in Paris through film director Michael Powell. Marjorie
was Powell's assistant and they'd just finished making The Red Shoes;
Powell knew his friend Jan needed an assistant to help translate and
generally Anglicize his latest novel, The Spiral Road, and recommended
Marjorie, and the relationship went from there. Jan's projects blossomed
with Marjorie as editor and collaborator in adventure and service.
The couple lived in Houston, in Florida, and in Belgium with their
adopted daughters, Eva and Julie, two Korean war orphans.
Throughout Jan's life, he's embellished the theme of men preaching
and women practicing. It began with his parents. His father, Arnold
Hendrik, a Dutch Reform minister and professor of theology, was afraid
of germs, so his mother, Lucretia, would nurse the sick in their parish.
When she returned from her rounds, Jan says, -she had a strange radiance.'
Likewise in de Hartog's Quaker history, The Peaceable Kingdom, he gives
a rousing and romantic account of George Fox, the 17th-century founder
of the Friends, and his relationship with Margaret Fell, who divorced
a rich, respected landowner in order to marry the outrageous Quaker.
While Fox was off preaching and generally provoking trouble, Fell was
at home sending parcels off to the inmates in England's horrendous
prisons, and generally putting into practice the message that Fox was
spreading.
Says Jan, -The thing is you see with all this stuff, the works, is
- you have to be married to someone who does it. If you're doing it
alone, there's a great danger that it deteriorates, if you want to
call it that, into eccentricity.'
When they first moved to Houston, it was Marjorie who persuaded Jan
to volunteer at Jeff Davis. In The Hospital, Jan compares Marjorie
to the Chinese goddess Kwan Tin, who -never succeeded in attaining
Nirvana because each time she was about to knock on the gates of heaven
she heard a child cry on earth and went back to find out what was the
matter.' It was Marjorie who led the newly formed Red Cross volunteers
at Ben Taub.
At the end of Jan's typewritten record of his Jeff Davis/Ben Taub experiences
is the handwritten note: -Conclusions: 1) No man, unless he be a saint,
should expose himself to the temptations of doing charitable work alone.'
There are no other conclusions. After their first Houston sojourn,
Marjorie volunteered on a crisis hotline in Florida. She received one
call from a young woman on the verge of suicide. By the end of the
conversation, the woman had given up her bleak plans and was playing
the flute over the phone. Now it is Marjorie who goes out and brings
back stories to what Jan calls their sedentary -garden enclosed.' Marjorie
is now volunteering at the Hospice at the Medical Center, and their
by-and- large peaceful lives revolve around her work there.
Jan and I are talking about Marjorie over lunch - she is not present
because she's off with a sick friend. For the last five minutes a baby
has been crying at a nearby table.
-Oh, there he goes. Our minister, ' Jan says. -Margie said something
fascinating when she first started here in old Jeff Davis 30 years
ago. She worked in the newborn nursery, and she realized that most
of the babies were terrified of this new world, this new reality. They
wanted back in the womb. And that's what you had to speak to. You have
to hug them, and really, consciously assuage their fear. Now, she says,
she's in a position where she has to do the same thing for people who
are at the other end and have to change, prepare themselves to go into
another world. The similarity is striking, she said, because most of
them are not all there, and just need hands held, and whispers on the
pillow.'
Often Quakers have found themselves led to help babies, especially
in the wake of war. During the Vietnam War, the Quakers were divided
as how best to be of service. One group got up a yacht to dispatch
medical supplies and goodwill, which Jan dismissed as being full of
young female hippie Friends in bikinis. (-I was a much older man then,'
he says.) Jan proposed that they should send someone to bring back
children orphaned by the war, and place them for adoption with Quaker
couples. Naturally the Quaker committee responded that the ideal person
for the mission was Jan.
-But to give you an idea of how this Quaker thing works,' he says.
-I was sent to what was called contested territory, which meant that
during the day it was South Vietnamese and during the night it was
Vietcong. I was given a military escort, which is to say, a guy with
a gun sitting beside me in the car.
-I had to go to a certain orphanage, which was way way out in the hinterland.
One of these guys in a conical hat and black pajamas was opening the
gate, and led me into the orphanage, where I was received by a very
very old and blind mother superior, who spoke - in a whisper - only
Vietnamese. But there was a pretty young nun who spoke French and she
was an interpreter.
-They took me in there and I saw the wards and realized it was not
an orphanage at all. It was a hospital for infectious diseases for
children. Any child that went in there, that was it. They all lay in
small iron cots in long rows, and the young nun who showed me around,
before we went upstairs, she took a bunch of little red ribbons with
her. As we walked around, occasionally, she tied one of them to one
of the cots, and that was a child who was dead. The little children
who were babies lay rolling their heads, all the time, all the time,
rolling their head. The result was with their soft skulls, they all
got pointed skulls. You could see from the form of the skull how long
these children had been there. Anyhow, it was an absolutely gruesome
place....
-I went back to the office of the Mother Superior and there was an
elderly man with a baby on his hip. Fat, chortling little boy. He was
talking to the Mother Superior. I asked the young nun, -What is this?'
-She said, 'Oh, this happens all the time, a village nearby has been
bombed, the parents of this child have been killed and this man is
the friend or the grandfather or something and they take them here.'
-I said, 'Why?'
-And she said, 'You know, we take them in.'
-'You, you, you're an infected hospital, how can you?'
-And she said she had to ask the Mother Superior what to say, and the
old Mother Superior with the rolling blind eyes answered in a gentle
whisper, and the girl translated, 'The Mother Superior says God sent
them here.'
-So I said 'Who do you think sent me here?' And she translated, and
I said, 'Give the little baby to me and we'll make sure in America
that he is adopted.'
-At which the man who had opened the gate, the man with the black hat,
turned up and stood behind the Mother Superior and suddenly said in
very good schoolmasterly English, 'We are not about to turn our children
into little Americans.' At which I said, 'Would you rather turn them
into little corpses?' and he said 'Yes." Jan repeats the last
exchange quite rapidly and we can easily see this man, eyes narrowed
with spite and bitterness, saying -yes,' like an embattled snake.
Jan pauses in his story for a slow count of three. -And then, who came
to my aid but the memory ' of ' Levi Coffin.' He laughs a great -Ha!'
as the light of delight spreads across his face.
-So I asked the grandfather, may I? And I took this baby, and handed
it to this guy, and by golly he took it! I knew by experience that
you can't turn it down. And there he stood with this baby in his hands
and I said, 'Now look' - it was a quote of George Fox really - 'I know
what Lenin says, I know what Marx says, I know what Ho Chi Minh says,
but what dost thou say?" Another great laugh to the heavens. -'It
is a matter between you and him.' And there was a silence ... and he
finally said, 'Who are these people who adopt these children?' I said
'They're Quakers,' and he said, 'Ah!' and he'd read about them with
that yacht.'
With the bikinis?
-With the bikinis. And everything worked out just fine.'
Part Four
Death and the British officer; the ending of a character, a play and
a typewriter; and the outer buoy.
Jan was a courier during W.W.II, got shot through the leg in the Pyrenees,
and ended up in a succession of Spanish prisons. He woke up in a prison
hospital in Zarigossa [ck spelling], only to find himself in a coffin,
just as a beautiful Spanish nurse leaned over and kissed him. He was
about to say something, when she said -sshh!' and kissed him again,
and then they nailed the lid on the coffin. Thus imprisoned, he began
to get in a hysterical anger. -I have had enough!' he stormed to himself
inside the box. -First shot, and then shunted from prison to prison,
and now this!' Finally the lid was removed and a British officer -with
one of those little sticks under his arm' peered down at Jan and said,
-Oh, there you are,' as if he'd been lost under the table. Then the
Englishman asked, -Did you have a good trip?' Jan pauses in his retelling
of the story, to relay the dawning of insight. -The ghost of Noel Coward
leapt on me, and from somewhere I was given a line from a play, and
I replied, 'Oh fair to middling, thank you.'
-That was my life buoy,' he says, in yet another -Compassion' lecture.
This one is on death, and is addressed to young physicians (-who, we
all know, are immortal'). -It was my introduction to the way the British
deal with death during the war. Death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?'
Jan has been talking about aging and death a lot lately - addressing
the immortal young doctors at Baylor, in his messages in Quaker meeting.
Just as he has cultivated and woven stories around all of his life,
he is exploring to the hilt this phenomenon of being, as he puts it,
a -fat old man.'
In his latest book, The Outer Buoy, which he and Marjorie are now editing
for publication in spring 1994, Jan returns to Captain Martinus Harinxma,
his protagonist of three other books who is a thinly veiled portrayal
of himself. Only this time, as the title suggests, his fictional counterpart
is at the end of his life. (Says the storyteller, -I'm sure the great
regret of my life will be that I will not be able to describe my own
death.')
There have been a lot of last acts in Jan's life recently. This past
summer, his perennial chestnut, The Fourposter, closed after a record-breaking
22-year run in Minneapolis. The Dutch actress for whom the play was
written died that same month, at age 93. Even his old typewriter, his
Hermes that he's relied on for more than 50 years of books, he has
given over because it is spitting out keys. When the writing of this
profile is delayed, Jan asked playfully, -This isn't going to be an
obituary, is it?'
In The Outer Buoy, the now-retired Captain Harinxma is given the job
of gathering together a group of old men for a curious experiment that
involves both NASA and out-of-the-body travel. In a passage from the
book, Harinxma describes this state of being an old man to an efficient
young woman facilitating the experiment:
-I live alone, by choice. I do not want to see or hear anybody else.
I want no outside interference, not even a cat, except for my Moroccan
maid who comes once a week to wash the dishes and make ritual gestures
of clearing up the mess. I used to walk two hours every day, even on
the bridge of my ships, back and forth, driving mates and men at the
wheel crazy; now all I can manage is twenty minutes, during which I
have to sit down and rest five times. When the telephone rings, I have
an episode of cardiac insufficiency, not because I am a heart patient
but because I am an 80-year-old recluse who leaps out of his skin at
sudden noises that shock him out of his state of suspension between
two worlds.'
-At my age a man finds himself in a no-man's-land between memories
and dreams. Not 'the misty marshes of Hades-approaches' Virgil speaks
of, but a state of awareness, which came upon him gradually, that the
range of his perception is much wider than he has assumed all his life.
I know this from firsthand experience. Left to my own devices, unbothered
by the outside world, safe in my old parrot's cage, I began to move
with a growing sense of excitement and adventure into the outer regions
of our so-called reality. I began to discern mysteries never before
revealed, perspectives never before perceived, states of mind detached
from our purblind human awareness. I haven't the faintest idea where
all this will lead me eventually, while I'm still, as they put it,
in the body. But I'll tell you this much: despite my staggering walk,
unzipped fly, palpitation at the sound of the telephone, solitary fits
of laughter, senile rages with inanimate objects that make a fool of
me, like teapots spitefully losing their lids, jammed cupboards that
refuse to open, at glorious intervals beyond my control I have the
most extraordinary, exciting adventures.
-I prefer my solitude, where I sit quietly boozing and snacking, shedding
peanuts and cracker crumbs far from bullying housekeepers, rude waiters,
lethal contraptions like cars driven in a way that scares the daylight
out of cats, sparrows, squirrels crossing the road and old men standing
stock still at the curb because they have omitted to relieve their
bladder before they left for the post office, and are now caught halfway,
knees crossed, eyes rolled upward, praying for mercy, deciding never,
ever to venture out into the world again without diapers for the elderly.
I don't know where my solitary voyage of discovery will lead me, but
then neither did Ulysses, and at my age I am closer to Ulysses than
to John Glenn.' I don't know what I expected - a respectful silence,
maybe applause - but Miss Bastiaans said, -We're going to have dinner.'
On the way we passed the men's room. She stopped. -Go ahead,' she said,
-I'll wait for you.'
I bridled, then realized that I had brought this upon myself. The only
thing she had been able to identify with, from her own reality, was
the old man overcome by urgency when he was about to cross the street.
But of course this story is not an obituary, and Jan de Hartog is very
much a vital and passionate man, albeit a trifle old, a trifle fat.
And after all the transfixing stories and rowdy, inspiring novels,
it is this presence that matters. As he said just last Sunday in Quaker
meeting, -Perhaps at some point in time, we will not be remembered
for what we have said, but for what we were.' |