Sensitive rendition of suffering and survival

A grandfather's diaries paint a picture of suffering and survival, writes Jessie Neilson.

WAR AND TURPENTINE
Stefan Hertmans
Text Publishing 

By JESSIE NEILSON

Stefan Hertman. Photo: Michiel-Hendryckx
Stefan Hertman. Photo: Michiel-Hendryckx

As Stefan Hertmans' grandfather felt the end of his life drawing near, he handed over his diaries detailing his youth around the edges of a grimy industrial Belgium and then his involvement in World War 1.

Yet Hertmans, unwilling to have memories of his grandfather altered, which would fragment the sense of his own childhood, waited 30 years to approach the manuscript. While Urbain Martien recorded his life up until 1919, his grandson notes the remainder of his life, until his death in 1981, remains buried in a "stony silence''.

Hertmans takes his grandfather's precise observations and weaves around them a partly biographical, partly fictional account of this copyist-cum-soldier's experiences. The son of a church fresco painter, Martien learnt the tricks of the trade and a deep appreciation for aesthetics, which have clearly been passed down through this family.

The result is a sophisticated and almost painterly rendering of words and images by his grandson, renowned Flemish poet, novelist and art critic Hertmans. It is dense with sensitive observation of the entanglement in life of peace and war, beauty and ugliness, simplicity and complexity. This is despite the author's predicament over how to tell his grandfather's story authentically without falling into mannerism or an awkward contemporary prose style.

The author, like Martien, grew up immersed in the Renaissance tradition of art, surrounded as the generations of the family were by the legacy of Flemish painting.

The influences of artists such as Rubens, the van Eycks, Bruegel, Bosch and hundreds more based in Ghent, Antwerp and further afield stretched down through the centuries. With an eye for detail, and postwar-traumatised, Martien would spend hours each day at his easel, recording the pastoral scene outside his window.

Hertmans' eye is just as sharp, acknowledging that the memories his grandfather wished to forget kept returning, "in shards of stories or absurd details ... puzzle pieces I had to fit together ... what had gone on inside him all his life: the battle between the transcendent, which he yearned for, and the memory of death and destruction, which held him in its clutches''.

Much of the fictional memoir comes from imagined silent observation. Whether spending days lost in abstraction or marooned with fellow men in trenches of utter hell, where life is a "waking slumber, a slumberous wake'', Martien internally records. The reader follows this man through an unceasingly laborious childhood into the desolate landscape of war and back home again.

War and Turpentine has been translated into many languages. At times it is difficult to ascertain which male descendant is narrating or featuring in the narration, but this is a small quibble. Overwhelming is the visual quality of the prose and the pervasive sense of one man's suffering, enduring and, finally, surviving.

Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.

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