Polemical Editions: The Mathilde Sonnet Cycle of Jacques Perk
Fabian R.W. Stolk
1. Poetical Edition of a Poetic Legacy (1882)
Jacques Perk was a proud, passionate poet. At the age of seventeen he had left school because he
felt there was something that distinguised him from other people, as he wrote to his father. He
did not yet know the right name for it ‘maar ’t is eene verheerlijkende gewaarwording, een
ongekende gemoedstoestand, kortom iets algeheel verheffends’ [‘but it is a glorifying sensation,
an unprecedented frame of mind, shortly something completely elevating.’].1 Two years later, in
the summer of 1879 he met a girl in the Belgian Ardennes. She was dynamite, or at least she was
the poetic fuel he was waiting and hoping for. The sheer sight of her enabled him to bring about
the work of literary art he had been thinking about for quite some time and which made him quit
school. The girl also supplied the title of the cycle of 106 sonnets Perk wrote for her, or about
her: Mathilde.
A few months later, May 1880, Perk met the equally young and ambitious poet Willem
Kloos in the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam. He told him about his own poems. Kloos read the looseleaf manuscript of Perk’s sonnets and was astonished. He didn’t like all of them, but most of
them he considered marvellous. With a pencil Kloos wrote down on his exclamations as well as
his criticism next to the sonnets. One of his most impressive notes is a simple sigh of admiration:
‘O, Jacques’, written beside a sonnet on the sweet sensation of sinn.2 Kloos wished the future
Dutch poetry to be like Perk’s sonnets, and like his own poetry obviously. Notwithstanding
Kloos’s appreciation of his poems, Perk has not been able find a publisher interested in his
Mathilde sonnet cycle.
The friendship of Kloos and Perk was ardent but didn’t last. Kloos was pushy and besides
Perk fell in love with another girl. So in some of his sonnets he changed the name ‘Mathilde’ into
‘Joanna’. In a sonnet he originally had written for Kloos he changed the capitalized word ‘Mijn
Vriendschap’ [‘My Friendship’] into ‘de Jonkvrouw’ [‘the Damsel’].3 Doing so and leaving out
most of the other Mathilde sonnets and adding some new ones, he (re)created a small cycle of
only ten sonnets. ‘Eene helle- en hemelvaart’ [‘A Journey to Hell and Heaven’] as it was entitled,
was published in the magazine of his friend Carel Vosmaer, who, as a senior colleague, acted as
1
Jacques Perk, Brieven en dokumenten. Bijeengebracht en uitgegeven door Garmt Stuiveling (Amsterdam: N.V. De
Arbeiderspers, 1959), 87.
2
G. Stuiveling (ed.), Jacques Perks Mathilde-krans. Naar de handschriften volledig uitgegeven door G. Stuiveling
(Den Haag: L.J.C. Boucher, 1941), vol. 2, 65.
3
G. Stuiveling (ed.), Jacques Perks Mathilde-krans. Naar de handschriften volledig uitgegeven door G. Stuiveling
(Den Haag: L.J.C. Boucher, 1941), vol. 3, 100 and 106.
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his tutor in poetry. ‘Eene helle- en hemelvaart’ was Perk’s masterpiece: ten paramount poems
based upon his own and Kloos’s poetical avant-garde convictions. Two months later, 1
November 1881, he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. By that time some thirty
poems of Perk had been published in magazines; but not one single book of his poetry.
According to Marita Mathijsen, the literary friendship between Kloos and Perk was not a
unique one:
In the friendship cult of the Romantic era we can see a tendency among authors
throughout Europe to present themselves as a group of like-minded souls, giving rise to
the phenomenon of the literary generation. Young writers present themselves not as
individuals but as members of a circle of artists with similar literary ideals [...]. [...] The
authors are willing to be influenced by one another: they present draft versions to the
circle and rewrite them having taken note of the comments. [...] When a member of such
a circle dies, we see his friends taking responsability for his literary legacy: they regard
themselves as authorized to publish it. They feel so close to their late comrade, that they
organize his work and choose between variant textst, even considering themselves
capable of completing unfinished work.4
December 1882 Willem Kloos – in collaboration with his senior colleague Carel Vosmaer published a fine selection of poems from the legacy of Jacques Perk. This book, simply entitled
Gedichten [Poems], soon was recognized as a landmark in modern Dutch literature, not just
because of the quality of Jacques Perk’s poems, but also because of the polemic preface written
by Kloos. His ‘Inleiding’ [‘Introduction’] was understood as the manifesto of the so-called
literary movement of the poets of the Eighties. So Perk’s position in modern Dutch literature has
been created by Kloos in the context of a poetical polemic with outdated predecessors.
From the exchange of letters between Kloos and Vosmaer we know that Kloos
intentionally edited Perk’s poems very liberally.5 Far from being a scholarly editor, although he
was a student in classical languages, he was inspired by passion, like a congenial poet, ‘genious’
being the crucial concept for poets of this romantic era. Kloos modelled Perk’s poems upon his
4
Martita Mathijsen, ‘De mortuis nil nisi bene; the Influence of Romantic Friendship on the Genesis of Some
Nineteenth-Century Publications,’ H.T.M. van Vliet (ed.), Produktion und Kontext. Beiträge der Internationalen
Fachtagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für germanistische Edition im Constantijn Huygens Instituut, Den Haag, 4. bis
7. März 1998. Beiheft zu Editio, Band 13 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 237-243; 238.
5
G. Stuiveling (ed.), De briefwisseling Vosmaer-Kloos. (Groningen-Batavia: J.B. Wolters’ uitgevers-maatschappij
N.V., 1939).
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own poetic ideals. Besides removing thirty-four of the 106 sonnets Perk had strung together,
Kloos also rewrote and rearranged almost all of the remaining seventy-two sonnets to some
extent. As Martita Mathijsen put it: ‘He permitted hiself liberties that would make us, as
scrupulous twentieth-[and twentyfirst-]century scholarly editors, cringe – or – liberties that we
can only dream of.’6 In doing so he was proudly presenting the new poetry of the Netherlands.
At the same time Kloos as a serious editor took great pains presenting Perk as a serious
poet by annotating the poems, for example to demonstrate Perk’s knowlegde of and affinity with
classical poets and concepts, thus showing that Perk was not just another rebellious adolescent
trying to write poems. Editing Perk’s poems was not just a friendly turn. Kloos and Vosmaer
considered and reconsidered their editing principles over and again, but in the end they both were
poets striving for a new kind of poetry and they both had been friends of Jacques. So Perk’s first
and final book of poetry is neither really his book nor a real edition of his literary legacy. It’s just
a major work of art disguised as such an edition. But in 1894, when Kloos published so called
left poems of Perk in his magazine De nieuwe gids,7 the clock stroke midnight: the mask of
editorial scrutiny fell.
2. Diplomatic Edition of Three Manuscripts and other Documentary Sources (1941)
Ever since scholars have made efforts to reconstruct Perk’s original Mathilde sonnet cycle,
comparing the two full manuscripts and a third one that remained unfinished, and poems
published in magazines, and the sonnet cycle Kloos had constructed of all this.
In 1915 Greebe published his study Jacques Perk’s Mathilde-cyclus in den
oorspronkelijken vorm hersteld [The Mathilde Sonnet Cycle by Jacques Perk Restored to its
Original Form].8 One can imagine Kloos wasn’t pleased with this research. Greebe’s book
represents in a way the origin of textual editing: philological research concerning the authenticity
and the reconstruction of the real, the origional text. Unfortunately Greebe’s book is the report of
his investigations, not a real edition of Perks poems, so I have to skip it here.
6
Martita Mathijsen, ‘De mortuis nil nisi bene; the Influence of Romantic Friendship on the Genesis of Some
Nineteenth-Century Publications,’ H.T.M. van Vliet (ed.), Produktion und Kontext. Beiträge der Internationalen
Fachtagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für germanistische Edition im Constantijn Huygens Instituut, Den Haag, 4. bis
7. März 1998. Beiheft zu Editio, Band 13 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), 237-243; 241.
7
Jacques Perk, ‘Nagelaten verzen van Jacques Perk,’ and ‘Nagelaten verzen van Jacques Perk; uit den Mathildecyclus,’ De nieuwe gids 9 (1894), vol. 1, 3-30 and 197-210. http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_nie002nieu09/ [15 February
2006]
8
A.C.J.A Greebe, Jacques Perk’s Mathilde-cyclus in den oorspronkelijken vorm hersteld (Den Haag: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1915).
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More important in the history of editing Perk is the semi-diplomatic edition of the
manuscripts and other documents Garmt Stuiveling completed in 1941.9 It consists of three
volumes, one for each manuscript; textual variants in each manuscript are presented in a so called
exclusive apparatus presented underneath the texts. This edition primarily makes it possible to
explore the differences between the manuscripts as far as the the arrangement of the poems is
concerned. Such an exploration is of interest to literary history only if the manuscripts can be
collated with the 1882-edition of Perks Gedichten, which unfortunately is not included in the
Stuiveling edition. Progress in textual scholarship and editing has made it claer that the
Stuiveling edition is not an adequate tool for modern research.
This edition is not fully trustworthy. The apparatus isn’t completely progressive, nor fully
regressive. In other words: it looks like Stuiveling has choosen the version of the text he liked
best, moving other versions into the apparatus. There is reason to believe he did so in order to
make Perks poems look good, and to make Kloos’s work as an editor look bad. Stuiveling, like
Kloos and Greebe, was involved in a polemic or a dispute, a quarrel. As an editor he was
argueing with Kloos and he had reason to do so since he had published the exchange of letters
between Kloos and Vosmaer.
Stuivelings edition of the Mathilde manuscripts is an important tool for the study of
Dutch literature, but it is not without failures. This also holds for his edition of Perk’s
Verzamelde gedichten [Collected Poems].10 In this edition Stuiveling mixes and blends all kinds
of texts and versions, as if to demonstrate the high quality of Perks poetry at his centennial. It is
no surprise therefore that Redbad Fokkema in his article on incorrect editions of so called
‘Collected poems’ frequently refers to Stuiveling-editions.11
3. Critical Editions of the First Poetical Edition (1958-1999)
In 1958 Stuiveling published a critical edition of the 1882-text of Perks Poems.12 Basically this is
a good edition, but even this book is part of Stuivelings ongoing argument with Kloos. It not only
contains Perks poems, the original preface by Vosmaer and the original introduction by Kloos.
Stuiveling added other essays by Kloos concerning Perk, and on top of it his own reflections on
9
G. Stuiveling (ed.), Jacques Perks Mathilde-krans. Naar de handschriften volledig uitgegeven door G. Stuiveling
(Den Haag: L.J.C. Boucher, 1941), vol. 1-3.
10
Jacques Perk, Verzamelde gedichten. Naar de handschriften uitgegeven door Garmt Stuiveling (Amsterdam: N.V.
De Arbeiderspers, 1957).
11
R.L.K. Fokkema, ‘Verzamelde gedichten: een loze term,’ De nieuwe taalgids 69.1 (1976), 89-101.
12
G. Stuiveling (ed.), Jacques Perks Gedichten volgens de eerste druk (1882). Met de voorrede van Mr. C. Vosmaer,
de inleiding van Willem Kloos, en andere door Kloos geschreven Perk-beschouwingen uitgegeven door G.
Stuiveling (Zwolle: Uitgeversmaatschappij W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, 1958).
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these essays. Stuivelings main goal was to show that Kloos was wrong and not telling the truth
about Perks Gedichten.
This edition has been reprinted in 1971, 1976 and 1980. Then in 1999 I myself re-edited
the 1882-collection of Perk’s Gedichten (reprinted in 2001).13 This edition is based upon
collation of three copies of the 1882-text, leaving out all the Kloos-Stuiveling essays Stuiveling
had added to his 1958-edition. One could say I purged and updated Stuivelings critical edition.
While preparing this book, I found out that until then – and here I must add: until now –
little research has been done on the small scale textual changes made by Perk and subsequently
by Kloos and subsequently by Perk in each individual poem: small changes in words,
soundpatterns, rhythmical and metrical patterns, syntactical structures, tropes and figures of
speach. One reason for this lack of research is the absence of a reliable historical-critical edition
of the Mathilde sonnets.
4. Historical-Critical Edition (to be)
I know the subject of the 2005 ESTS conference is ‘Histories of Editions’ but I think it is only
useful to talk about history when it holds out prospects for the future. Here is my prospect. A
historical-critical edition generally only contains authentic texts that really stem from the author,
and rightly so. The future historical-critical editor of Perks Gedichten however, or at least of the
Mathilde sonnet cycle, will have to ignore this rule of thumb. The textual changes Kloos made in
the 1882 edition of the Gedichten and especially the notes Kloos wrote on the margins of one of
the manuscripts in 1880 all should be integrated in the apparatus of textual changes and
considerations. Only such a twin-voiced, dual edition will give us a full insight into the growth,
the formation and the deformation of Perk’s – or should we say Perk’s and Kloos’s late
nineteenth century, avant-garde poetry.
Authors adress:
Universiteit Utrecht, OWI Nederlands
Trans 10
NL – 3512 JK Utrecht
030 – 253 8183
[email protected]
13
Jacques Perk, Gedichten. Met voorrede van Mr. C. Vosmaer en inleiding van Willem Kloos. Ed. Fabian R.W.
Stolk (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1999).
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