The Hidden Force (23 page)

No wonder the Europeans felt horribly humiliated when, dressed in rags, they were forced to bow to Japanese guards in Second World War concentration camps. The Japanese knew perfectly well what they were doing. Like the black slaves in Trinidad, they turned everything upside down, except that this was for real. As the Dutch writer Rudy Kousbroek, himself a former prisoner of the Japanese, has pointed out, the most common expression among the Dutch survivors was: “We were treated like coolies”—that is to say, much like the way the Dutch treated many of their colonial subjects.

Then there was the sex. People forget what a sexual, even sexy enterprise colonialism was. And I don’t mean just metaphorically, in the sense of the virile West
penetrating
the passive, feminine East. (The idea, by the way, of Asia as the temple of Venus, and all her temptations, is as old as the ancient Greeks.) Colonial life was quite literally drenched in sex. White men would enter the
kampongs
and take their pleasure with native girls for a few coins, or even
for nothing, if the men were cheap and caddish enough. Europeans enjoyed the
droit de seigneur
in the
kampong
, and anyway, native women and half-castes were supposed to be unusually highly sexed. They still had this reputation when Eurasians moved to Holland in the 1940s and 1950s, usually to settle in The Hague, where I grew up. Girls of Indonesian or mixed-race extraction at my school were all supposed to be “hot”. And the languid boredom of colonial life encouraged endless wife-swapping affairs among the Europeans as well.

Casual tropical sex is personified in
The Hidden Force
by Léonie, the District Commissioner’s wife, and her Indo lover, Addy de Luce. Both live for seduction. Neither of them has anything but sex on the brain. They are born voluptuaries. Léonie loves Addy. Indeed every woman and girl loves him, with “his handsome, slim, animal quality and the glow of his seducer’s eyes in the shadowy brown of his young Moor’s face, the curling swell of his lips, made just for kissing, with the young down of his moustache; the tigerish strength and suppleness of his Don Juan’s limbs…”

The European fear of letting go, of being “corrupted”, of going native, was to a large extent, I suspect, the northern puritan’s fear of his (or her) own sexuality. If Couperus had shared this fear, his book would have been another Victorian morality tale. But he is not a puritan at all. He doesn’t judge his characters harshly, not even the voracious hare-brain Léonie. Indeed, one feels that he himself would have fancied Addy. A dandy, a homosexual, and a Romantic, Couperus
understood the sensuality of colonial life perfectly. He was attracted to the sun—in the Mediterranean, as well as in the East—for just that reason. He cultivated the image of torrid indolence. His rooms in Europe would be heated to a tropical temperature, as though he were an orchid, and he pretended to spend most of his time dreaming. In truth, of course, like Noel Coward, who affected a similar pose, he worked very hard. But with his carefully tended, over-refined sensibility he might have seemed more in sympathy with Sunario, the “degenerate[…] Javanese”, than with Van Oudijck.

Couperus’s readings from his work were legendary. He would complain if the flowers on stage weren’t exactly right. He did not read his prose so much as declaim it, in his
high-pitched
theatrical voice, like a male Sarah Bernhardt. My grandmother once attended one of these performances in a provincial Dutch town. She remembered how Couperus not only had the flower arrangement changed after the
intermission
, but how he had changed his socks and tie to ones of a slightly different shade of grey.

And yet Couperus, however rarefied his tastes, did not try to identify himself with the Javanese. He was born in the Dutch East Indies, where his father was a colonial official, but he remained completely European. He describes Sunario from the same ironic distance as he does Van Oudijck. If Couperus felt close to any group in particular it was with those who were neither one thing nor the other: the Eurasians. Both Van Oudijck and Sunario are pure in their ways, the principled, full-blooded Dutchman, or
totok
, and
the refined, pure-blooded Javanese; and that, in Couperus’s eyes, was precisely what was wrong with them. For Couperus celebrated the ambiguity he himself personified: a Dutchman born in the Indies, a homosexual who was married to a devoted wife, a master of the Dutch language but an exotic outsider in Holland—“an orchid among onions” as one of his obituarists called him.

The only characters in
The Hidden Force
who are entirely at ease with themselves, despite their European
pretensions
, are the Indos: Addy and his extended family, or Van Oudijck’s daughter, Doddy. They appear to have the best of both worlds. But I suspect this is more a
reflection
of Couperus’s sympathies than real life. For in fact the Eurasians probably had the worst of all worlds. They were legally Europeans, but they ranked low in a society obsessed by race and colour. Some hardly spoke Dutch; others, like Van Helderen, who prophesied the native
rebellion
, spoke it almost too precisely. Like Van Oudijck, most
totoks
respected the Javanese as a civilized race, perhaps more civilized in their way than the Europeans, but despised the Indos. They were commonly regarded by the Dutch as lazy and stupid, as well as oversexed. People made fun of their efforts to speak proper Dutch. Even Couperus has some fun with this—something that tends to be lost in translation. The Indos overcompensated by disdaining the natives, as though this would make the Dutch accept them as equals. In fact, of course, it just made them seem more despicable. Rudy Kousbroek, who has written brilliantly
about this extraordinary social geography, described his native Dutch East Indies thus:

The fusion between Dutch and East Indian never took,
culturally
or politically, except in some individual instances of people highly educated in both cultures. Yet it is that blend, that ambiguity, if you like, that state of having the best of both worlds, which many Dutch writers born in the East, including Couperus and Kousbroek, have yearned for. This can result in mawkish regret. But the best of these writers came to see that their dream was bound to fail, as long as one side had its boot at the neck of the other. It would not work, no matter how well-meaning or idealistic the rulers might be. Of course, many rulers were neither. Van Oudijck was both, which is why he couldn’t understand why his native subjects hated him: “There was no logic in it. Logically, he should be loved, not hated, however strict and authoritarian he might be considered. Indeed, did he not often temper his strictness with the jovial laugh under his thick moustache, with a friendly, genial warning and exhortation?”

His insight into the tragedy of European colonialism made Couperus a great writer. And his sympathy for the hybrid,
the impure, the ambiguous, gave him a peculiarly modern voice. It is extraordinary that this Dutch dandy, writing in the flowery language of
fin-de-siècle
decadence, should still sound so fresh. But we can only be grateful. For now that the dreams of ethnic purity are making a comeback, his voice is more urgent than ever.

IAN BURUMA

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