‘July 1954: From first sight, Holland was neat and clean.’
Prodigal child, those few words are pretty much all you left as your first impression of the Netherlands. Too young to step away from the mirror’s view of yourself, were you? Still too scared to look around and see more than what lay directly behind you. Or were you saving adjectives for the more vivid Latin sites ahead on your itinerary? Fair enough, an ignorant kid could not mark the quirks of topography reclaimed from the sea by the blistered hands of men, or note the way birds fly a long straight line against a horizon made abstract by flatness of the land. But how could you fail to comment on the curious liquidity of daylight in Holland? The way it flows around every tree and steeple, and makes even industrial cranes and chimneys stand as proud as dry things at sea. Except for Rotterdam, reconstructed after the war in sky-scraping canyons of glass and steel, thanks to its unearthly levelling and light Holland offers few places to lurk even in built-up areas. Alleys are plentiful and give a special charm to strolling in Dutch cities, rather like the lure of footpaths in a forest; the narrow ways are far from sinister, however, they are too well peopled by pedestrians trying to avoid the wider streets and boulevards hectic with trams and cyclists.
Eye contact with passing strangers in the streets of Amsterdam lacks the edgy side of glancing contact in London, or the quick assessment and totalling of sum parts that happens in Paris and New York. Even-handedness and limpidity seem to have entered the very bones of Netherlanders. The shock of a European political assassination soon after my journey was compounded for the world because it took place in Holland, of all places! And though the victim, Pim Fortuyn, stood to the far right in that level land, anywhere else in the world his tenets would barely have tipped the ideological see-saw.
Whatever nastiness Netherlanders got up to in the days of their mercantile empire, these days at home they show tolerance that is benignly totalitarian: it allows no rebellion. Against what? Legislation is designed to accommodate and control rather than outlaw. Kids smoking pot? Let them. That way you can keep an eye on them and track infiltrations of hard drugs. Bicycle theft on the increase? Try putting licensed state-owned bicycles into circulation, to be borrowed then left outside unlocked for the next needy passer-by to borrow and leave unlocked, and so on. Squatters squat. Why not? Allow the terminally ill and incurably sad to pass away in peace. And give minority groups time and space in media to put across their messages, or semblance of messages; is there a more sensible way to keep quiet in the streets than to credit the metropolis with the principled friendliness of smaller communities? Contrary to most cosmopolites who boast of their urban roots, it is very hard to find a Netherlander even in Amsterdam or sky-scraping Rotterdam who does not proudly claim to have come originally from a small town. As refreshing as Amsterdam is in many ways, it is too even-minded, too upfront, too downright wholesome to be sexy. Darker, madder cities are sexier.
‘Guys always end up at the Banana Bar. The strippers there do something weird with bananas,’ said Flavia, a young Italian woman also a guest at my bed and breakfast. Flavia had been resident there for many months: postcards were pinned up on the wall of her little room, her toiletries were permanently installed on the shelf in the communal bathroom, and she sat down for her evening meals in the kitchen with the Indonesian Buddhist couple who owned the place. They seemed bewildered, not to say a little frightened, by a guest who took ‘family run’ so literally. It was early morning, our quiet home on a residential street near the Museumplein had just been descended upon by eight tough, streetwise Glaswegians on a weekend stag party in the charge of a frantic and despairing older man, the father of the groom-to-be, and Flavia was explaining to me why Amsterdam was the destination of stags’ choice. Strong beer and marijuana aside, I had seen the strip clubs and red-light district of Amsterdam where prostitutes are proudly displayed in every window, like butterflies in cases. Flavia’s whispered disquisition on Amsterdam’s clean-shaven underbelly was interrupted by the arrival of eight well-dressed young women, who turned out to be medical interns from London on a hen party. Stags and hens commingled for a while at the hotel reception.
Humankind does not merely eat; we restaurate, marinate, celebrate. Other creatures drink, we ferment and inebriate. Breathe? Certainly. Of course. But first, aerate and fumigate, if you please. Right to the end we decorate, complicate and obfuscate animal functions. Die? If we must. But let us obliterate with dignity and incinerate in style. As for the way we fuck, in default of automatic lust and a regular mating season, we alone among animals have contrived institutions, aids, agencies, fashions, fantasies, romance, big, big business, even so-called experts to keep us at it. What a song and dance to renew our tribe’s residency on earth! Necessity no longer pertains. We do it for love, for fun, for money, for vengeance and for fame. Procreation? Not right now, thanks. We prefer recreation. Sometimes with bananas. Only late that night when I was awakened by a loud knock on my door and a slurred drunken voice said, ‘Let me in. It’s the Scottish man …’ did the sheer, exuberant absurdity of human sexual appetite manifest itself to me in Amsterdam.
‘Oh, go away!’ I told the befuddled stag.
Vaguely wondering for which roost the jerk had mistaken my room and which posh hen was going to miss out on her bit of rough, I went straight back to sleep.
‘July 1954: I’m surprised to see so many women out scrubbing their front stoops! Is it a kind of community service, I wonder, or are the Dutch terribly house-proud? And every window has something interesting in it so they look like framed pictures along the street. Walking around Amsterdam without the rest of the mob, Ev and Midge and I went in and out of enticing little shops on pretty shady streets with bridges and canals looking for a gift for Ev’s mother. In one shop window she saw a teapot she said her mother would like. The door was standing open so we went in to browse around. Only it turned out not to be a shop! We had wandered into someone’s house! The woman was very understanding when she found us in her living room, picking up her candlesticks and saucers, looking for price tags! She laughed when we made her understand our mistake. In New York she would have called the cops.’
Enticing shops are thin on the ground everywhere in Europe nowadays. They have been overtaken by souvenir shops stocked for a Normal School sensibility, in Amsterdam with tulip bulbs and wooden shoes. And, of course, everywhere are installations of the huge chain stores that are strangling self-expression in low- to middle-income shoppers and preempting the inspiration of artisans everywhere in the swelling Western world. Arise, prisoners of obesity, conformity and insecurity! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Not that having lots of money encourages originality or taste. Like every other city, Amsterdam has a few streets where toffee-nosed salesgirls purvey trademarks just as banal as the others, only they are pricier and harder to pronounce. At least the domestic windows of Holland continue to frame verve and style that misled Evelyn and Midge and me all those years ago. Set out on practically every ledge are prize pieces of china, oriental gewgaws, carvings, dolls, toys and flowers in beautiful vases, all arranged with taste that transforms residential streets into galleries. If there turns out one day to be a painterly gene, then it will be found in abundance among the Dutch.
‘1954: Amsterdam – Marjorie always says I don’t know how to look at paintings. Maybe she’s right. I am looking for a glimpse into another life or way of life. I want a painting to tell me a story. Will the sick child survive? Will the cat have that cloth off the table? Why is one man scowling at another? What games could children play, wearing such clothes? For me, paintings are like windows or open doors. Marjorie says that’s all wrong. I am supposed to feel things about a painting, not think about its content. She says I think too much. I say there is no such thing. But in the Rijksmuseum today, I sort of knew what she meant. Looking at paintings feels more like reading stories than looking at pictures.’
You and me both, young I; we are not connoisseurs but voyeurs in the galleries. I remain as deficient as you were in whatever is the quality that makes a great viewer of great pictures, and thus the classic Dutch painters have always pleased us both simply because their greatest pictures are as scenes glimpsed through a stranger’s door. In the 1970s my son’s father, a painter of Dutch extraction as it happens, used to take me along to exhibitions of art that was modern then. I wasn’t sure how