Writing to feel as though you are in the land of milk and honey. A conversation with Jan Brokken

Novelist, essayist, journalist and traveller Jan Brokken has agreed to take part in our series of conversations, beginning, like everyone else, with his earliest memory. “I was three years and eight months old. We lived in a large house on the outskirts of a village in the south-west of the Netherlands. On the night of 31 January 1953, a terrible storm – force 12 on the Beaufort scale – swept across the coastal provinces. I heard nothing and slept the sleep of the innocent. At the first light of dawn, I got up and opened the curtains. Where I had seen land the day before, I now saw water. The dykes had burst; the sea and the great rivers had poured onto the land. I cried out: ‘Mum, I’m dreaming.’ The tendency to experience reality as a dream and a dream as reality would remain a constant for me. The flood claimed 1,800 lives: it was like the biblical deluge – but for the child that I was, it was a dream.”

“My parents and siblings had only just returned from Indonesia when I was born. Throughout my childhood, I listened to stories about life in the tropics. I wanted to live under the sun too, but instead I lived under gloomy, rainy skies. My parents and siblings had been held in Japanese internment camps during the war, places rife with hunger and disease. I was born later, and had experienced none of that. I was an outsider, a stranger within my own family. I only truly got to know my parents when they had already passed away and I was fifty years old. I read the letters my mother had written to her sister. My mother had once been a lively, curious and adventurous young woman who saw travelling – and the act of recounting that journey – as the highest achievement a person could attain. Through my books, I have fulfilled that desire of hers.”

“We don’t really know our parents. We only see them as our parents. Strange but true. Through her letters – more than forty letters, 200 handwritten pages – I discovered my mother before she became a mother. She was different; so open-minded, so sensitive, she resembled the person I have become.”

“It was a cold winter’s day and I was seven years old. My father, who was a Protestant preacher, always wrote his sermons in a small notebook with a sky-blue cover. On that winter’s day, unable to play outside because of the bad weather, I asked my father for a notebook. He gave me one. I opened it and wrote, in large, clumsy letters: ‘Once upon a time…’. It gave me a marvellous feeling – revealing life through writing. ‘Won’t you read it to me?’, my father asked after a while. I read it aloud. He smiled and said: ‘Much better than that sermon of mine’. I think it was the only compliment he ever paid me. But it turned me into a writer.”

“It gives my life meaning and depth. It’s like breathing. When I write, I never feel any pain or strain. I am elsewhere – in the land of milk and honey.”

“Once I’ve started a story or a book, I have to write every day. Even on Saturdays or Sundays, at Christmas or on New Year’s Eve, I have to write for at least a few hours to maintain the atmosphere and tone of the story. If I were to stop for three or four days, I’d have to start all over again to recapture that tone and atmosphere. A book should be like a bar you walk into; you need to feel at ease straight away. Achieving this requires concentration – and nothing but concentration.”

“Monique, who became Sister Jacques-Marie after taking her vows. She asked Matisse to design a chapel for her convent in Vence. He was an elderly, frail and ailing painter; she offered him something I would describe as youthful innocence and immaculate love. To bear witness to that love, Matisse created a chapel using very simple means – a work that became the pinnacle of beauty”.

“There is something divine in doing, in creating. And if that is missing, it becomes rubbish of little value.”

“John Fante’s novels. I was absolutely mad about those books; they were so incredibly bold in their atmosphere and tone, they were melancholic and had a marvellous sense of humour, and I wrote and wrote, and at a certain point I realised I was rewriting "Ask the Dust" and "Wait for Spring, Bandini". I threw it all away – absolutely everything – and never read another book by the fabulous John Fante again. That author is dangerous for me, like a cat to a mouse.”

“I have loved Goethe since I was very young – specifically The Sorrows of Young Werther – but not Goethe the travel writer; I did not find Italian Journey particularly captivating. And yet, the more I travel myself, the more respect I have for Goethe. The man was so curious, open-minded, modern, even witty – and, above all, incredibly full of enthusiasm for life. To me, he is in every way similar to Bruce Chatwin, even though two centuries separate them.”

“Of course, Céline. Journey to the End of the Night is the best novel ever written, but the man’s ideas are so abject that I do not wish to mention them. I’ve written a book about Jean Rhys, The Island of Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the most mysterious novels I know: I lived on a Caribbean island for ten years and can say that you cannot understand the Caribbean islands without that book. Yet her political ideas were often nothing more than drunken ramblings.”

“Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez has had a lasting influence because it is a novel written in the style of a report. I have always regarded reportage as a literary form – even when I was not yet a writer, but a journalist, or rather, a reporter. Like Márquez, I practised journalism for eleven years with great dedication and intense enthusiasm; Márquez came across the story for "Cronaca di una morte annunciata" whilst working as a journalist, and waited twenty-five years before turning it into a brilliant novel".

“For three years I wrote him a letter every four months asking for an interview. He never replied. Then, in September 1981, I received my letter back with a note scribbled in the margin: ‘OK, come to Paris – Gabo’. I made arrangements with his agent, Carmen Balcells, who allocated me forty-five minutes for the interview. We agreed to meet at La Coupole, the haunt of Latin American writers in Paris. I switched on my tape recorder and began to ask my first question. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I’m terrified of three things: dentists, aeroplanes and tape recorders.’ I took out a notebook and a pen. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘as a journalist, I never took notes. I used to listen and remember what I thought was important; with notes, you end up lugging around a load of unnecessary baggage.’ At last, I asked my first question. He looked at me and said: ‘Young man, that’s not a journalist’s question: your curiosity is that of a writer working on his first novel. Am I wrong?’ ‘No, sir.’”

“Over the course of the next few hours, he offered me all sorts of advice and warned me of the pitfalls an aspiring writer might encounter. We talked for an entire evening and for a good part of the following day. I have a photograph: we are sitting on a park bench, mentor and pupil, and García Márquez is raising his index finger. I still remember his first piece of advice: ‘Read the classics! Don’t think you can invent everything!’ It was a freezing November day, yet my cheeks were burning as if we were in Macondo.”

“Fourteen years later, I was in Havana, Cuba, staying at the famous Hotel Nacional. In the early afternoon, my wife and I took the lift, and a man wearing a snow-white tuxedo got in, accompanied by a woman I recognised immediately as Mercedes – Gabo’s legendary wife. He stared at me intently, as if racking his brains. Before getting off, he said: ‘A freezing Wednesday in Paris, in a small park.’ And after a brief pause: ‘Well?’ He meant: how did it go with your first novel? I nodded in agreement. And he said: ‘I was sure of it.’ After that, he made his way to the banquet that el Líder Máximo, Fidel Castro, was hosting for him and Mercedes.”

“Don’t shy away from the unexpected; lose yourself as often as possible – because that’s when you meet the most interesting people – and don’t forget that every man or woman has, at least once in their life, experienced something that has shaped their existence and given it direction. Try to discover exactly what that is.”

“Travelling is the quickest shortcut to discovering yourself, along with reading. Whilst travelling, you keep adding to your autobiography, because nothing nourishes the memory better than being on the move”.

“Kindness. The Dutch are the kindest and most helpful people in the world. And I miss my library; my books are my dearest and most loyal companions.”

“As a consequence of a democracy in crisis and a culture in decline. What I find disgraceful is that all those great American writers and artists – who have been lecturing us non-Americans for decades – are now putting up such feeble resistance against Trump.”

In my view, he represents, among many other factors, a reaction to the excesses of ‘woke’ culture and political correctness: do you agree?

“I’ve always wondered what political correctness entails. Does it mean accepting the fundamental principles of a democratic constitutional state and regarding the Constitution as the guiding principle for all political and social action? If so, I am one thousand per cent politically correct – and shouldn’t everyone be? I have travelled throughout the Baltic states for eleven years; I know what being politically incorrect can lead to: corruption, blackmail, mafia-like practices, sheer arbitrariness, and the law of the strongest and those who shout the loudest. As for ‘woke’, it is killing all artistic freedom, but that is not the main issue for Trump’s voters.”

“I believe in God when I listen to Bach or look at a Van Gogh; one can find God in creation and in the search for the Higher and the Spiritual. My entire upbringing was religious – Protestant. I once wrote: if I were to dismiss God as something ridiculous, my whole childhood would turn into a farce. The question of whether God exists will occupy me until my last breath. In my story The Painter and the Nun, a painter says: ‘An artist who does not engage in the struggle with God can never be a great artist’.”

“I was a great fan of Pope Francis because he was so human and humble amongst the poor and the oppressed – which is, after all, the most beautiful aspect of the biblical message. But his successor seems to be following in his footsteps.”

“He understands nothing about what the essential human values are. And that comes close to my idea of the devil.”