Dag Anna

On the southern flank of the Grote Kerk, facing the terrace of Café Colette, where Yvonne and I would spend her birthday every year eating oysters alongside seagulls, two letters interrupt the paving of the Oude Groenmarkt: an A and a Z in black marble, ninety thousand euros' worth, designed by Marinus Boezem. The A stands chest-high; the Z lies on its side and is often taken for a bench. The first and last letters of the alphabet are, we are reminded, the raw material of a writer, and Haarlem fancies itself a literary city in the most literal way. Cut into the monument are lyrics, among them Dag Haarlem, slaap maar lekker, Lourens Coster houdt de wacht. The watchman is the city's first man of letters, or the legend of one; Haarlem maintains, against most of the evidence, that movable type was invented here. As the story goes, Coster cut letters out of beech bark in the wood south of the city to amuse his grandchildren, and one fell into the sand. His statue has stood on the other side of the church since 1856, a bronze printer with a letter A in his raised hand. You need a zoom lens to make it out. For a time a small fountain rose out of the marble A; at some point it vanished, and nobody I have asked remembers it going. In the evening the church puts the square in shadow long before the light goes, and the heat stays on in the stones. At nine, two small bells high in the tower begin half an hour of ringing, the old signal to close the gates. The gates themselves are long gone, and the ringing has outlived its instruction. This, I take it, is Coster's watch. Lennaert Nijgh was born in Haarlem in the hunger winter and died here in November 2002. He wrote song lyrics and was a local historian. The A to Z is a monument to him, and his writing is cut into the slabs underneath them. The stone, still in excellent condition, contends with a fine yellow litter from the nearby lindens; the thinner lines are cut deeper and hold it, the bolder ones lie flat and the wind mostly clears them, so that each summer the finest writing turns yellow and the boldest stays clean. The monument was unveiled by three women on 28 April 2006, each of whom had at some time been married to him; the presentation that day was shared between the mayor of the city, with the musical name of Pop, and Boudewijn de Groot, who had been singing Nijgh's words for most of his life. The mayor was present in his official capacity. De Groot was present as a dear friend. Nijgh and Boudewijn de Groot grew up on the same street in Heemstede, and met at the Coornhert Lyceum, a school named for the humanist whose Haarlem press had set the city's printing claim in type before the legend had Coster's name. They worked together for the first time as schoolboys. Nijgh did not last: thrown out, by his own telling, he finished at a lyceum in Overveen, though at least one account has him completing the Coornhert after all. In 1963 Nijgh wrote and directed a short film on 8mm in which de Groot appears as a troubadour, singing; a newsreader saw it at a private showing, thought little of the film and something of the songs, and pushed the two toward the record business. Their first singles failed. Then a producer set a record in front of de Groot, an English single with a French song folded inside it. Une enfant de seize ans Une enfant du printemps Couchée sur le chemin It was a French chanson, a product of the old entertainment machinery, several hands to one voice; the expressive individualism of the sixties had not yet arrived. Piaf never needed it: she sang each song as though it had happened to her. Of its many voices, hers is the one the world remembers, and it lets La vie en rose stand for her life. Aznavour wrote Une enfant, a small brutal chanson, sung first by Piaf, about a girl of sixteen who leaves a comfortable house for a boy with no address, and dies. De Groot objected to the death being sung in so many words, which he found a bit smartlapperig, the stuff of tearjerkers, and he asked Nijgh not to write it. So in the Dutch version, Een meisje van zestien, recorded in Hilversum in the autumn of 1965, the death is never named; the girl lies still at the side of the road, ach wat lig je hier stil, and the last word about her goes unwritten. It reached number 23 and made him famous; he hated it, and wrote on his own copy Dit eens maar nooit meer. Nijgh could have sent the girl home, or married her off; he took out the one word and left her where the French had laid her, and the song came out heavier for it. The partnership ran that way, with a single interruption, into the next century: Nijgh wrote, de Groot composed and sang, Het land van Maas en Waal, Testament, Prikkebeen, songs the country still knows by heart. The machinery had fit de Groot badly from the start. Toward the end of the sixties he wanted out of it altogether; he stopped performing, stopped working with Nijgh, tried other directions, and for a while gave up singing itself; by 1973 he was singing Nijgh again. On the back of that single sat Nijgh's Dutch Universal Soldier, after Buffy Sainte-Marie. The old division of the trade was dying out by then, the new songs coming from people who were writer and singer in one person, Dylan, Donovan, soon Cohen; in Holland it survived, in two friends who between them made one singer-songwriter. Nijgh lived the adventures and wrote them down, and de Groot embodied them, so that everyone believed the songs had happened to him. The hit that followed in the spring sang an American president to sleep in his beautiful white house, Welterusten mijnheer de president. He wished Johnson a good night in 1966, and forty years later the pavement around his letters wishes Haarlem the same. De Groot was born in 1944 in a Japanese camp on Java. His mother, Fee, had been a dancer in Bandung; she is buried on the island. The boy was brought to Haarlem, to an aunt's house, before he was two. Twenty years later he was handed a song in which a girl dies young at the side of a road, and he asked for the death to be left unnamed. The reason he gave was taste. Of the three women who unveiled the letters, one, Anja Bak, had met Nijgh when she was sixteen. He wrote a lyric for her called Avond, a song in which nothing happens except that it gets dark and one person asks another to stay the night, and then he married her. The marriage ended; she stayed near, became de Groot's manager, and married de Groot, Nijgh standing witness at the wedding, we have always been one big family, he is supposed to have said. The year after the wedding de Groot recorded the lyric his friend had once written for the woman who was now his own wife; the record company passed over it, and radio played it anyway, and went on playing it, and in the winter before the letters were unveiled the country's listeners voted it, in the poll that ranks every song ever recorded, first. In 1972 a son, Jim, was born to de Groot, and on the twentieth of October 1973 came a song called Jimmy, a top-ten hit whose opening line named the album around it. The album was the return: Nijgh wrote most of it, and the B-side of the single itself. Jimmy itself arrived by another road. Ruud Engelander, a dramaturg who was then the singer's brother-in-law, handed de Groot an untitled text that had, de Groot later said, hardly any meter or musical feel in it, a text about the kinds of men one can turn into, the lonely cyclist of the opening line, the footballer, the businessman. He set it quickly all the same, and only afterward did he and his then wife hear what the setting had done: a father addressing a small son, become what you like, only not the businessman with the hard head. The song took the son's name. The words had not passed through the friend, and the position the friend had always held, the one who knows what the song is about, stood empty until the song was already in the world; I notice the sequence without quite knowing what to make of it. In the bridge there is a doo-doo, toe-toe-doe that comes from Walk on the Wild Side; the dates cooperate, Bowie having produced it in London the month Jim was born. The son grew up inside the name, became an actor, and played Jesus once on live television, a camera following him into a monastery in the days before the broadcast. His first name, typed into a search engine, completed itself with jim shows his dick and jim does a line of coke; he was better known, he said, for those than for any association with the universal saviour. Far from Haarlem, on the twentieth of October 1967, a limousine was on the road from Detroit to Ann Arbor, carrying The Doors to a homecoming dance. On the way the band wanted to stop for ice cream. Ice cream is for babies, Jim Morrison said, I want whiskey; or so the keyboard player tells it. A liquor store was found; something about watching the others eat their ice cream set the singer off, and he drank sullenly in the back for the rest of the ride, arriving drunk as a skunk. The dance was in the Intramural Sports Building, a few dollars a ticket, in the years when homecoming still meant bed races and elephant races, Buffy Sainte-Marie on the same weekend's bill, the woman whose eternal soldier Nijgh had turned Dutch. The band played the opening riff of Soul Kitchen over and over because their singer would not come out, withdrew, and returned half an hour later with a singer who could barely stand, who swore at a hall of crew cuts and football players, threw things until someone called the police, lost his guitarist and his drummer to disgust, sat down on the riser, and left with an arm over the keyboard player's shoulder. In the audience stood James Osterberg, a dropout lately of the Ann Arbor High debate team, with a new band and no particular reason to believe in it, who watched the whole wreck, thought it was cool, cool being the word that survives, concluded there was no excuse left not to do it himself, and went home. In time he answered to a new name, Pop, hung on him after a local character named Jim Popp. After the hall emptied the Doors came back out and played once more for the stragglers, and how good the late set was depends on who is remembering. The bandleader of the opening act counts it among the best shows of his life, a Morrison suddenly sober, and the girlfriend beside him saw it too, and later married him, the evening securing its corroboration by marriage; others who stayed heard a band being merely competent, and one couple went home suspecting the Doors had been told they would not otherwise be paid. Osterberg, it seems, had already gone; everything he went on to do descends from the first half of an evening whose second half he never saw. Some years later Osterberg was in New York, staying in the loft of a publicist and watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on television, when the publicist came up to fetch him: an English singer was at Max's Kansas City, a man who had been praising the Stooges in the English music press, which nobody else was doing, and wanted to meet him. The Englishman was David Bowie. What began that night lasted the rest of Bowie's life. He mixed the last Stooges record; and when Osterberg, coming apart on the drugs of those years, committed himself to a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles, the visits were few. Nobody else came, he said long afterwards, not even my so-called friends. But David came. The two of them got out together, to Berlin, sharing a flat on the Hauptstraße in Schöneberg, there to get off the same drugs in the same rooms, a household of convalescents. Out of that time came The Idiot and Bowie's own Low; on The Idiot the labor divided the old way, Bowie mostly building the music, Osterberg finding the words, and when the record went on tour, Bowie sat at the side of the stage, unannounced, at the keyboard in his friend's band, the way another keyboard player had once walked a singer out of a wrecked hall. Back in Berlin they made a second record inside a few weeks. In the evenings they had been watching the American forces' television network, which between programmes broadcast its station signal, a staccato electronic figure, and one night Bowie took up his son's ukulele and played the figure back at the set; it became the drumbeat and the title song of Lust for Life. The other song everyone knows from that record is The Passenger, Osterberg's words over a guitarist's riff, a man riding through the city at night and watching it through the glass. Asked where the words came from, he has pointed to the S-Bahn, which he rode for something to do, and to the years of being driven through America and Europe beside Bowie; the commentators add a poem by Jim Morrison, dead by then, in which modern life is a journey by car. However the credit divides, the song is a man in the passenger seat, and someone else is driving. No two friends stood on a stage more differently, Bowie all construction, the painted face, the borrowed persona; Osterberg all body, shirtless, cut, thrown into the crowd; face paint and skin, two answers to the same question, and the painted one, they say, kept the skinned one alive. The painted face has a longer genealogy than Berlin. In Japan a dance began in 1959 with a piece called Kinjiki, danced on a darkened body, in near darkness, at a speed nobody would later associate with the form; the white came a few years afterward, plaster first, then the smoke-slow movement the world now knows, and the founders tied what they had made to the ruined and remade country they had grown up in. And there is a Japanese song from 1993, six minutes and twenty-one seconds long, that opens with the singer dozing against someone before a mirror and rises to a promise: he will put on the dress, he will dance, and he has no wings to float up to that sky. I cannot listen to it without supplying the ruins, the camps, the white; the supplying is mine; I am the one who cannot see a painted face without giving it a war. On a warm July evening I sat on the terrace of Café Floryn, where Marcel, the owner, had just come back from Italy, and where the neighbors arrived one after another to ask about his travels, first from Ohm, the Indian restaurant, then from Coster 52. It was too hot in Italy, said Marcel, but there was a pool. The Kleine Houtstraat was busy, and many of the people passing greeted him, on foot or leaning back on a bicycle; the names came back – hee Erik, hoi Ans, hallo Joop, dag Wim – at a speed I cannot account for. Only the house cat, a white one called Anna, took no part in the homecoming, and spent the evening inside, in the window; she had missed him, the other bartender said. At some point, I no longer remember in answer to what, Marcel mentioned that Lennaert Nijgh had been a regular at Floryn, another man at the bar with a beer; and he said it in passing, without lowering his voice, before the conversation returned to the corner home where he stayed in Piemonte. There is no plaque, no letters of any size. Grote mensen praten niet met poezen, Nijgh wrote in 1966. When I left, the white cat was still in the window, ready for a chat.