The novel tells the story of Frans Laarmans, a humble shipping clerk who takes unauthorised sick leave to accept a post as a cheese agent with responsibility for Belgium and – deep breath – the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
He immediately orders 10,000 full-cream Edams, but turns out to be hopelessly inept at selling them, spending more time organising his office furniture and working out a name for his company. By the end, he had sold only a couple of these round, red cheeses. The rest remained piled up in a warehouse, slowly turning rank.
There’s not much more to tell, and yet it’s one of Flanders’ most popular novels of all time, and its author is one of the region’s literary icons. He’s being celebrated this year in Antwerp during De stad van Elsschot (The City of Elsschot), which marks the 50th anniversary of his death.
Elsschot (pictured above with his wife in the late 1950s) was born in 1882 as Alfons Jozef De Ridder, the son of an Antwerp baker. After a rebellious youth spent among anarchists, he eventually adopted a conventional career as an Antwerp businessman, founding his own advertising agency in 1931.
He wrote short novels, sporadically. His entire output of 11 slim books hardly weighs as much as one Dan Brown thriller. Yet Elsschot’s books make compelling reading, even 80 years after they were first published, a claim that can be made by very few early 20th-century Flemish authors. In Kaas, like in most of his novels, he describes the lives of small people with big ideas for making money. Their plans always fail, no matter what.
Elsschot died in 1960 the most celebrated Flemish writer of his day. Some of this is due to his staunch belief in writing in Dutch during a time when most of his Flemish contemporaries wrote in French. He used a modern, proper Dutch rather than that famous Antwerp dialect, raising a storm of criticism locally but making him extremely popular in the Netherlands. A shrewd businessman, this was no accident.
Though he might be long buried in the city's Schoonselhof Cemetery, Elsschot’s writing is as sharp as ever. Not every reviewer gets this. The book jacket of the Granta edition describes Kaas as “a delightful period piece”, but there’s nothing “period” about this story. It’s as contemporary as the TV satire The Office.
What makes Elsschot so compelling is the way he captures essential truths in a single dry sentence. In Villa des Roses, his first book, he dissects the sordid reality behind a prim Parisian hotel that described itself as “First Class Family Boarding House” with “English Spoken”. “English spoken,” he writes, “dates from the time when one of the paying guests was a gentleman who had lived in London and liked to show off his English. Madame Brulot still knew about five words, such as ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘money’, ‘room’ and ‘dinner’.”
Madame Brulot, in fact, is up to all sorts of tricks. She buys cheap eggs for her guests, pretending that they come from the chickens in the garden. She overcharges Americans (but not the Poles or Armenians). The most momentous event in the novel is the arrival of a new chambermaid, which Elsschot describes in one chapter of three sentences: “A new chambermaid has arrived whose name was Louise and who dressed in black. She never missed a day in washing Madame Gendron, and her coming to work there was bad news for the bedbugs. She did not make much fuss, but it was clear from the sound of her voice that she took things seriously.”
Flemish director Frank Van Passel made a film of Villa des Roses in 2002 starring French actress Julie Delpy as Louise. He unfortunately took Elsschot’s desperately sad story and turned it into a romantic war epic. It won the award for best feature film at the Hollywood Movie Awards.
Kaas, as well as four other Elsschot novels, including Villa des Roses, are translated into English, and the film rights to Kaas have been bought by a British studio. Not surprising, given its comic potential. But please, with all respect, don’t let it be a Frank Van Passel. Kaas is not an epic. It is not a romance. It is just a short novel in which nothing happens, twice. (DB)
Curse technology. This is one of the sentiments with which you might come out of Dicht bij Elsschot (Close to Elsschot). The exhibition that serves as the centrepiece to Antwerp’s Stad van Elsschot celebration is almost entirely made up of the archives of Willem Elsschot: original manuscripts, a wealth of photographs, charming home movies and letters – many, many letters that tell the story of a man and his family.
Without these hand-written letters and postcards, not to mention business contracts and correspondence, a slice of history – social, literary and commercial – would have been lost. It’s difficult to imagine a contemporary writer being able to produce such a wealth of material in an email world.
It’s fortunate that one of Elsschot’s six children, even while the author was still alive, gathered together both his professional and personal papers and manuscripts – from the early hand- written Villa des Roses to the typewritten Het Dwaallicht (Will- o’-the-Wisp). Elsschot’s archives are themselves a history of technology.
It’s further fortunate that Elsschot’s last surviving child, Ida, closed the deal to sell the complete archives to the city of Antwerp, who had been trying to get them for more than a decade, just a few weeks before her death last year. As such archives become rare and valuable commodities – surrealist master Andre Breton’s, for instance, were auctioned off in pieces to the highest bidders – it’s more and more difficult to keep them together and get them into a public literary archive, such as Antwerp’s Het Letterenhuis.
Dicht bij Elsschot, then, is an literary fan’s dream. The author’s life is narrated through documents and photos (and text provided by curator Wieneke ’t Hoen), from his anarchist turn- of-the-century youth to his love affair that produced a child out of wedlock to his travels to clerk in Paris and Rotterdam. He finally returned to Antwerp, married the mother of his child, and set to work to become a successful ad man.
The exhibition, which is all in Dutch, is heavy on text and therefore not too lengthy, though fans will find themselves easily whiling away a few hours reading Elsschot’s letters during the wars, corrections in the margins of his manuscripts and his wife’s postcards to her sister. The atmosphere is one of a 1940s home, with two colossal, purple-fringed lampshades looming over some of the simple interactive displays. Tuck under one of the lampshades to see which characters in Elsschot’s 11 books match which of the people he knew in real life. Press the button to light up the corresponding photographs above.
Another highlight is the home movies, shot by Elsschot and other members of his family, as they play about in the dunes of his beach home, swim in the cold sea and read in the garden.
They are fascinating documents, nicely and succinctly put together. But, as much as you do learn about Elsschot, you aren’t given the opportunity to discover the other side of the upright businessman, which in fact goes a long way to understanding him. Having started his adult life consorting with young artists, he ended up having a child very young. He got married and had several more children, and “he had to take responsibility for them”, explains Michaël Vandebril, artistic director of De stad van Elsschot. “So he conformed to the bourgeois ideal to have a house and a proper job. On the other hand, he had an artist’s soul. He also had mistresses and was in the bars a lot, even during the day. He really led a double life.”
If you mix the exhibition, then, with the books penned by his daughter Ida De Ridder about her father and her unhappy mother, this picture becomes much clearer. The most concrete evidence of this alter-ego is in his name itself: He was Alfons De Ridder, strict father and rather stiff Antwerp businessman, and he was jolly, drinking Willem Elsschot, a name derived from a mediaeval Flemish writer and a forest in southern Antwerp province called Helsschot.
Besides the exhibition Dicht bij Elsschot, there are a number of other events in Antwerp through October. Elsschot in vertaling (Elsschot in Translation) is an exhibition of his books in translation – more than 25 languages in all, including Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. Elsschot on the Road, meanwhile, is a caravan that pops up in different parts of the city with 3D animations of Elsschot novels. Elsschot Filmed is self-explanatory: see Het Dwallicht, Kaas, Lijmen and Villa des Roses onscreen. Finally, for the dark side of Elsschot, see page 11. (LB)
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