"Not acceptable." The answer is instant. "Because I never want
to be forbidden something. I find it unrealistic. Kundera said if we know
that the one we love finds it hard to be true but we still want that from
them, do we really want them? I don't ask Natalie to be true. It would hurt
me if she said she had slept with another guy. This may sound hypocritical,
but even in my own promiscuity I also have these emotional feelings."
And if someone said, "Kluun, it has been decreed that you must never
again have an extramarital relationship. As opposed to just sex."
"That I would agree with." The answer is just as instant. "Human
beings are not yet built for loving. It is very sadistic of our creator to
connect sex and love. With pure sex, there is a way to deal with it
emotionally. The moment love comes in, it's impossible."
I want to know what Natalie thinks about all this. I later seek her out in the
kitchen, but Kluun is at my shoulder, and she makes an open-palmed gesture
and says she is not very good at talking.
Just after his remarks about the inconvenience of how we are constructed (he
doesn't specify gender here), he drops in the observation that he would not
have had a relationship with Natalie if it had not been for his first wife's
illness. Hence he might not now be married at least not to her and the
non-fictional Rose would not have come into being.
This brings us to the first of two inconvenient truths in the Ray Kluun story.
Inconvenient, that is, for particular sectors of his onlookers. In the book
Danny can be faulted for many things indeed he faults himself for them.
What he cannot be accused of is dereliction when the going gets rough. And
does it get rough. First, and not least, he has to do something with his own
rage when he believes that six crucial months have been lost to misdiagnosis
(not true, he concedes, in the case of his late wife, since her cancer was
of the inflammatory kind which moves straight into the blood cells and often
does fatal damage before it is detected). Then he has to support her through
the wild highs and lows of her treatment the elation of remission, the
torment of chemo, the loss of denial, of hair, of beauty, of breast, of life
hence of husband, daughter, home, the lot. In all this he has to go at her
pace, put his own sense of impending bereavement on hold while she is the
focus of everyone's sympathetic impulses. Oh yes, and there's no sex. Other
husbands whom he sees at the hospital and then sees no longer do not
acquit themselves as well as he.
In the end she makes that compressed and unimaginable journey unimaginable
for a healthy 35-year-old or her partner to acceptance, valediction,
serenity and beyond. There are some perilously funny exchanges about
sleeping with other people. She has known about his affair (surprise
surprise), but he has not known about a fling she had, and does not take the
news brilliantly. The tone in the last few days before the end becomes close
to festive. She even smiles and says, "No, I'm still here," when
the doctor waits for the fluid to do its work and says, "She's gone now".
But the rest of them are left, literally left behind holding the baby. And
if you accept the extent of their bleakness you could say that her joyful
embrace of death might just seem like a kind of adultery from where they're
standing. Her mother, a heroic portrait of self-cancelling care, was hit by
debilitating depression several months later. Kluun himself sold his
business and took their daughter Eva off to Australia for several months to
try to recover from the bereavement, and this is the subject of his
follow-up book, The Widower. In the months immediately after his wife's
death, his affair with Natalie dwindled to friendship, before being
rekindled when she went out to join him in Australia. He does now say he
believes that people live on, and although he stops himself a long way
before describing the mechanics of such a thing, he also says that it is
more than mere continuity in the memories of others.
"I'm not proud of what I did," he says, referring to his infidelity, "but
when you have to give all your energy to something like this, in a part of
your life when you should be having fun when you turn from a man into a
nurse having to support someone physically, mentally, emotionally, then
something else drops out. If all this positive energy is going out towards
someone else, then an existing black side of you comes up. Psychologists
agree. If you drink too much, then (in such a crisis) you might become an
alcoholic. A guy I know collected stamps. When his wife got cancer, he
became obsessed with stamp-collecting, and he never cheated on his wife. You
always use your escape route. My weakness had been nightlife and women."
What he said earlier about accepting the flaws, including promiscuity, of the
one you love may have sounded like the shabbiest casuistry going. I must
admit I was deeply suspicious about it, and still am, on the grounds that
it's a philanderer's charter posing as a radical understanding of
unconditional love. Still, it would be presumptuous, wouldn't it, to lecture
someone on such things when he and his dying wife so obviously fell ever
more deeply in love even as the attributes which had first drawn him to her
were snatched from her (and therefore from him) one by one by the cancer. "I
know the uncomfortable thing about this book is that it confuses you,"
he says. "It would have been easier if they had divorced, wouldn't it?
You hear a voice inside you that starts nibbling away at your existing moral
code."
Yes, and that's the first inconvenient truth. The second one is causing
similar confusion in the literary world. On the evidence of several reviews
in the serious Dutch press, which seems obsessed with Kluun, it is important
to despise him. For some critics he has become a symbol of all that is wrong
with modern society. As a result they have unwittingly lionised him yet
more. His "offences" range from profiteering from cancer to using
quotes from popular song lyrics (Radiohead, U2 and Springsteen are
favourites) for his chapter-head references. And he is also far too free
with his soccer analogies and his references to the failed former manager of
the national team, Louis van Gaal. Writing in the national daily newspaper
Parool, the critic Arie Storm accused him of using "the powerless
literary language of a 12-year-oldŠ better not to buy the book at all but
put the money towards charity. I never want to hear from this Kluun again".
But then Storm contradicts his own intentions by having a character, a
dreadful writer called Kluun, appear in his novel, De Bruid en de Kogel (The
Bride and the Bullet). Moreover, when he is asked to read an extract from
this book, he often selects the passage with an unflattering portrait of
this Kluun. All rather surreal. Needless to say, the subject is delighted by
these free mentions, even if the book sells a fraction of his own.
But here too there are complications as Kluun, ever the marketing man, has
played a central role in starting the regular Night Writers events,
commercially sponsored at an Amsterdam club called the Panama. Here authors
appear and read their work, getting paid more than they would at small
literary occasions, and sharing the bill with stand-up comics and musicians.
The thing that throws his detractors is that some serious literary figures
such as Tommy Wieringa, Joost Zwagerman and Morocco-born Hafid Bouazza have
appeared there. So too has one of the city's most established novelists,
A.F. Th. van der Heijden, author of a seven-volume saga about Amsterdam in
the Seventies and Eighties. It has been hard for some to square this
activity with the work of a first-time purveyor of snikkelproza, or DickLit.
