Willem Frederik Hermans

After World War II, Hermans tried to live off his writing exclusively, but as his country was recovering from the Occupation, he had no opportunity to sustain himself. He published three collections of short stories from 1948 to 1957, chief among them the novella The House of Refuge (1952), and in 1958 became lecturer in physical geography at Groningen University, a position he retained until his move to Paris, France, in 1973. The same year 1958 he broke to a wide audience with The Darkroom of Damocles.

In the 1970s, Hermans played an important role in the unmasking of Friedrich Weinreb as a cheater of Jews in the war. Hermans refused to accept the P. C. Hooft Award for 1971. In 1977, he received the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the most prestigious literary award available for writers in the language, handed out every three years alternately by the reigning Dutch and Belgian monarchs to a writer of the other country, the Belgian king Boudewijn handing the prize to Hermans. Hermans is considered one of De Grote Drie, the three most important authors in the Netherlands in the postwar period, along with Harry Mulisch and Gerard Reve.

Biography

Early life

Willem Frederik Hermans was born on 1 September 1921 in Amsterdam to Johannes ('Johan') Hermans (1879–1967) and Hendrika ('Rika') Hillegonda Hermans-Eggelte (1884–1967), who already had a daughter, Cornelia ('Corry') Geertruida (1918–1940). His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were breadbakers in the town of Brielle, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and from the ranks of the "lower bourgeoisie." Johan Hermans, the only one of the eight children (two sons and six daughters) allowed to pursue an education, became a grammar-school teacher. Hermans' predominantly Lutheran maternal family was slightly more middle-class. All three sons of the great-grandfather, a goldsmith, became schoolteachers.

Johan Hermans graduated as a teacher in 1898 and began his career as a teacher the same year in the Amsterdam area, where he met his future wife who was a teacher at the same school he worked. After their marriage in 1913, Rika Hermans quit working and devoted herself to the household. The couple's first child was born five years later. From 1913 to 1929, they lived on the second floor of an apartment in the "Old West" part of Amsterdam, near the center of the city, in a neighbourhood with blocks built in 1910 specially to accommodate schoolteachers. In 1929, the family moved to another apartment in the same block, where they occupied the fourth floor, Corry having a large room for herself in the attic. Johan Hermans continued to improve his teaching qualifications, eventually rising to teach beyond grammar school. Though his own career was unremarkable, he had great ambitions for his two children, both of whom he sent to the prestigious Barlaeus Gymnasium, evidently to have them prepared for a college education. To save money to pay for such education, the parents were forced to be as tight with money as they could, especially since the salaries of teachers would be decreased thirteen times in the years from 1925 to 1940, with a 10% decrease in the period 1930-1933 alone. These were precisely the years when their children were growing up.

Hermans's intelligence first emerged at grammar school, where he was included in the selection of four boys who were taught a more challenging Arithmetic course than was demanded of the other classmates. Apart from that, he followed the standard curriculum: Reading, Writing, Geography (with attention to the Dutch Indies), Native History, Gymnastics, and Singing. The grades of his admittance to the Gymnasium in 1940 were generally good, though not outstanding.

Hermans's reading, remarkably well-documented from early age onward, included some favorites he could read again and again without exhausting them. Most important were children's versions of classic works: he cited the legend of King Arthur, which never ceased to give him the chills even as an elderly man, as "the most significative work" of his youth. Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, which he could read over and over without ever getting enough of it. Alice in Wonderland both charmed and scared him, especially the poem on Father William. Besides these international classics, he also read Dutch children's book, most notably Woutertje Pieterse by Multatuli.

Hermans's parents were unreligious and did not have a Bible at home. Yet on a visit with his parents to an acquaintance of theirs who was religious, he discovered a Bible for children by Siebold Ulfers, one of the century's most popular children's Bibles for its beautiful illustrations. He was allowed to take it home, though his father had some misgivings. Hermans was fascinated especially by the cruel Old Testament stories of Ahab and Jezebel, and of Jehu and Jehoram.

Hermans's interest in science, technology and especially inventors also emerged during these years. Angel's 1927 biography of Thomas Alva Edison was a favorite, and Bernard Jaffe's Crucibles. The Story of Chemistry, read in a Dutch translation, also made an enormous impression on the young Hermans.

In 1933, Hermans enrolled in the prestigious Barlaeus Gymnasium in Amsterdam, where most teachers held an academic degree, often a doctorate. The curriculum in the first class was Latin, Dutch, French, History, Geography, Arithmetic, and Biology. In the second year this was augmented with Greek and German. In the first two classes, Hermans's results were mediocre at best, and when he had to double the third class for lack of applying himself, he vowed such thing would never happen to him again. During this time, Hermans had fallen under the spell of literature. When the school staged a performance of Sophocles's Antigone, Hermans was given a minor role, but the play left a lasting impression upon him: "It was my first introduction to the kind of literature that could swipe away the everyday world like a dull nightmare." In that period, during the lessons in German, Hermans delivered oral reports (in German) on Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann.

1950–1995

Hermans married Emmy Meurs (1923–2008), a Surinam woman, in 1950.

In 1957, Hermans worked as volunteer assistant to photographer Nico Jesse while writing his The Darkroom of Damocles (De donkere kamer van Damocles) which features a mysteriously blank photograph. In 1958, he was appointed reader in physical geography at Groningen University. In 1972, after accusations by among others the Calvinist Member of Parliament and later minister Jan de Koning that Hermans was using his time writing instead of lecturing, a parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the matter. The committee found that Hermans's chief crime was his use of university stationery for writing his notes.

In 1973, he resigned and settled as a full-time writer in Paris. In Onder professoren (Among Professors) (1975) he described university life in Groningen in a bitter and satirical way. It can be read as a roman à clef and was entirely written on the empty sides of university letters, according to Hermans's alter ego Zomerplaag "to do something useful with this expensive paper that would normally disappear unread in the garbage bin, polluting the environment".

Hermans received honorary doctorates from the University of Liège (Luik) in 1990 and the University of Pretoria in 1993.