Hans Renders

Jan Hanlo was a minor poet in the post-war Dutch literary world. Nonetheless, Hans Renders has undertaken to write a large biography in 677 pages (523 pages in 14 chapters, plus 154 pages of notes, etc.). Despite Hanlo's overall limited impact, he is famous and canonized because of the first line of one of his absurd poems.

Renders extensively describes Hanlo's passion for Jazz music, motor cycles and ... young boys. Hanlo was born in the Dutch Far East, but grew up in a rural part of the show more Netherlands, as his parents were repatriated and divorced. Throughout his life, Hanlo was financially independents, eking a modest living out of the earnings on family capital invested in stock. Thus, he was able to subsist while living the life of a mostly unsuccessful poet.

After his youth in Brabant, Hanlo settled in rural Valkenburg, in the south of the Netherlands. Devoutly Catholic, he suffered much over his sexual orientation, being solely interested in young boys. Himself appearing youthful, somewhat oddly dressed in colourful clothes, sporting a reddish short beard, Hanlo is described as resembling a garden gnome, and various witnesses told the biographer that their initial feeling about Hanlo was a sense of repulsion. Hanlo is repeatedly described as "a weirdo".

Hanlo was an outsider in many respects. His peculiar appearance, combined with his early interest in jazz an motor cycles set him apart in rural Valkenburg. Living far from the urban centres, Hanlo missed the connection to the literary scene there, although he often visited Amsterdam. He was too young to connect with the pre-war Catholic traditional writers, and too old to belong to the movement of the Vijftigers (Generation of the Fifties), although his absurdist poetry stylistically most fit with their work. It was only through his persistence that Hanlo got his poetry published, often in minor periodicals, or the vanity press.

The biography offers interesting clues to the creation and reading of Hanlo's most famous poem Oote, oote, boe, suggesting that the poem should be read with a jazz rhythm, and making considerable contributions to possible interpretations of this odd poem.

Many of Hanlo's major poems are reprinted in the text of the biography. According to the author, Hanlo's poetry cannot be well understood without taking his pedosexual interest into account. Thus, most poems should be read as laments, odes or love poems to young boys Hanlo adored.

However, Hanlo's adoration was not merely platonic. Besides, or along with his peadophilia, Hanlo had a history of recurring madness. Arrest, castration and an early, experimental psychiatric treatment were a life-long cause of fear, and Hanlo would be locked up in mental hospitals various other times. Some of these fear-induced experiences are described in his (autobiographical) prose.

Hanlo shunned contact with people of his own age, and was always on the prowl, looking for pre-pubescent boys. He had several long-term correspondences going with young high school students, who contacted him, often on behalf of school newspapers they edited. The most famous of these was the young Ronald Dietz, who later became a major Dutch publisher.

Often against people's will, Hanlo's stubbornness and perseverance led to his success in renting a small lodge within the grounds of a boarding school. He seduced the children of his friends right under their nose, causing rage and disgust on their part. The biography does not reveal or describe cases where Hanlo went beyond fondling and reclining on his bed with the boys, although the overall atmosphere of the biography is such that he might, and perhaps simply did not because there was no opportunity. More opportunity presented itself in North Africa, where other writers flocked in the eraly 1960s. In his later years, Hanlo all but abducted a young boy from Morocco. However, as Hanlo failed to follow proper immigration procedures the child was extradited within three months.

Hanlo's biographer has done a thorough job, locating manuscripts, biographical sources and contacting people who have known Jan Hanlo. The now grown-up "boys" almost invariably describe Hanlo with tenderness, while most people in his surroundings keep their suspicions.

Zo meen ik dat ook jij bent. Biografie van Jan Hanlo was researched in the early 1990s and published in 1998, at a time when, perhaps, tolerance for pedophilia in the Netherlands stood at a relatively high point. show less

Ooit kreeg ik als cadeautje van een huisgenote een uitgave van Jan Hanlo. Het was een ontroerend tedere kennismaking. Dat moet midden zeventiger jaren geweest zijn.

Vandaag (13 maart 2021) ging ik weer eens op zoek, want de kennismaking was indertijd niet echt doorgezet.

Nu vond ik de inmiddels uitverkochte biografie waarop Hans Renders in 1998 promoveerde.
https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/zo-meen-ik-dat-ook-jij-be... . De Bezige Bij publiceerde in 2007 een herziene show more herdruk, inmiddels ook uitverkocht.

Het proefschrift zelf is beschikbaar als publisher's pdf version of record.

Achter de personen index bevindt zich de Engelse samenvatting (p. 678-679). show less