{PDF EPUB} the Peaceable Kingdom an American Saga by Jan De Hartog Jan De Hartog
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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Peaceable Kingdom An American saga by Jan de Hartog Jan de Hartog. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Jan de Hartog , (born April 22, 1914, Haarlem, Netherlands—died September 22, 2002, Houston, Texas, U.S.), Dutch-American novelist and playwright who wrote adventure stories in both Dutch and English. De Hartog early was an adventurer, twice running away from home to work at sea. During World War II he joined the Dutch Resistance and in 1943 was forced into hiding. Later that year he fled to England and eventually settled in the United States. His first major novel, Hollands glorie: roman van de zeesleepvaart (1947; Captain Jan: A Story of Ocean Tugboats ), relates with humour the tale of a young boy’s career in the merchant navy. De Hartog’s later novels, written in English, are of mainly entertainment value. Among these are A Sailor’s Life (1956), The Inspector (1960), The Peaceable Kingdom: An American Saga (1972), The Lamb’s War (1980), The Trail of the Serpent (1983), and Star of Peace (1984). Many of the novels were adapted into films. Of his plays, the most popular is the comedy The Fourposter , first produced in 1951. Jan de Hartog. Jan de Hartog (April 22, 1914 – September 22, 2002) was a Dutch playwright, novelist and occasional social critic who moved to the United States in the early 1960s and became a Quaker. Contents. Biography. Early years. Jan de Hartog was born to a Dutch Calvinist Minister and professor of theology, Arnold Hendrik, and his wife, Lucretia de Hartog (who herself was a lecturer in medieval mysticism), in 1914. He was raised in the city of Haarlem, the Netherlands. [1] At around the age of 11, he ran away to become a cabin boy, otherwise referred to as a "sea mouse" on board a Dutch fishing boat. His father had him brought home, but shortly afterwards, Jan ran off to sea again. The experiences thus gained became material for some of his future novels, as many of his life experiences did. [2] At 16, he briefly attended the Netherlands Naval College [1] [2] but was only there for a year. Per his own account, he was expelled, and told emphatically by his angry schoolmaster, "This school is not for pirates!" [3] De Hartog was a coal shoveler on the night shifts with the Amsterdam Harbor Police until 1932. As he often had time on his hands, he began to write here. While employed as skipper of a tour boat on the Amsterdam Canals, he wrote several mysteries featuring Inspector Gregor Boyarski of the Amsterdam Harbor Police. At this time he used a pseudonym "F.R. Eckmar" (which is euphemistically translatable as "whatever." The literal meaning of 'verrek maar' is 'drop dead,' and it is commonly used like the English expression 'go and jump in the lake') for these works which ("luckily", according to the author himself) were never translated into English. His theater career began in the late 1930s at the Amsterdam Municipal Theater, where he acted in and wrote a play. [2] World War II. De Hartog's career as a writer, as well as his personal life, was decisively influenced by a coincidence that occurred during World War II. In May 1940, just ten days before Nazi Germany invaded and swiftly occupied the hitherto-neutral Netherlands, de Hartog published his book Hollands Glorie ( Holland's Glory , translated much later to English as Captain Jan ). The novel described the life of the highly skilled sailors on ocean-going tugboats, a specialized field of nautical enterprise in which the Dutch have always taken the lead. Without saying it in so many words, de Hartog portrayed the sailors—doing a difficult, dangerous and poorly rewarded job —as the modern successors to the bold navigators of the Dutch Golden Age. In fact, the book's plot as such had nothing political, anti-German or anti-Nazi, the sailor protagonists' conflict being mainly with nature and with their highly paternalistic and authoritarian (and thoroughly Dutch) employers. Nevertheless, for a country undergoing the shock of invasion and occupation, the book with its outspoken assertion of and pride in Dutch identity became a bestseller in the occupied Netherlands and a focus of popular opposition to the Nazi occupation. As a result, the Gestapo took a lively interest in de Hartog himself, who had joined the non-military Dutch resistance movement, [2] performing/writing plays while assisting in the concealment and relocation of Jewish babies to avoid having them sent to concentration camps. His book was banned [1] and he was forced into hiding, assuming the identity of an elderly woman in a nursing home. Eventually, he staged a difficult and adventure-filled escape to England. [4] His book became the best selling novel of the war years in the Netherlands. [5] In London he became deeply involved in the community of the exiled Dutch sailors. The exiles worked with their British allies, often going on dangerous missions, with inadequately armed (or sometimes, completely unarmed) boats. He joined the Netherlands Merchant Marine as a correspondent in 1943, and later served as a ship's captain for which he received Netherlands' "Cross of Merit". [1] This experience served as the background to several of his later books such as The Captain and Stella . Stella was made into a movie, starring Sophia Loren, Trevor Howard, and William Holden under the title The Key ; it also started de Hartog on the route to becoming a pacifist which later culminated when he joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). After World War II. De Hartog had many hesitations about authorizing the translation of Hollands Glorie into English, and when finally he did in 1947 the English version (entitled Captain Jan ) did not have as much success as the Dutch original. However, in the wake of the war he made the decision to remain in the UK; later he relocated to the USA. He also made the professional decision to write most of his later works in English, beginning with The Lost Sea (1951), which was a fictional account of his experiences working aboard ship as a boy, colloquially called a "sea mouse." [2] Precisely because in the war years he had been regarded as close to a national hero, quite a few people in the Netherlands resented this decision to write in English and felt betrayed and abandoned by him. While the sales of his books in the English-speaking world soared, his reputation in his own homeland took somewhat of a plunge, which took years to repair. For his part de Hartog continued to regard himself as—and take pride in being—a Dutchman, even after living several decades in America, and many of his later books had Dutch protagonists and themes. Indeed, for many people outside the Netherlands, these books became a major source of information about Dutch society, culture and modern history. In 1952, while visiting New York, he encountered a play he had written while still in hiding during the war, [2] and had sold the rights to while in England. [4] The play was called The Fourposter . A New York Times reviewer called it "the most civilized comedy we have had on marriage for years." [2] It went on to win de Hartog a Tony Award at the 6th annual Tony Awards Show for Best Play. Columbia Pictures also made The Fourposter into a partially animated movie, starring Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer. The scenes from the play were linked by cartoon sequences between them. The film was nominated for both, a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for its cinematography. Later, in 1966, it became the musical I Do! I Do! . The play also appeared under its original name at the Theatre New Brunswick in 1974. Jan and Marjorie de Hartog took a 90-foot Dutch ship (called The Rival ) and transformed it into a houseboat which they made their home. During the severe floods in the Netherlands of 1953, The Rival was transformed into a floating hospital, which de Hartog wrote about in The Little Ark . [1] Moving to America. In the late 50s the de Hartogs decided to take The Rival to the USA, on the deck of a freighter. [2] They had difficulty locating a dock with cranes large enough to lift the houseboat from the freighter, but eventually made for Houston, Texas. They decided they liked it there, and stayed. While Jan was out lecturing in Houston on playwriting, Marjorie was looking for community volunteer opportunities for both of them to participate in. She decided on Jefferson Davis County Hospital (now the Ben Taub Memorial Hospital). Conditions there were bad at that time, and with the hospital being significantly underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded, showed no sign of getting better. [1] Jan decided to document the conditions there, resulting in the non-fiction memoir The Hospital (1964), which exposed the awful conditions of Houston's charity hospitals in the 1960s. The book received a national response, but also a local response in which, within a week of the book's release, nearly four hundred citizens volunteered at the hospital. [1] It led to significant reforms of the city's indigent healthcare system through the creation of the Harris County Hospital District. It also led, however, to considerable hostility and many anonymous threats, which finally forced the de Hartogs to move away from Houston. [3] In 1967 de Hartog wrote The Captain , which revisited his love of the sea, featuring a central character based loosely on himself called Martinus Harinxma, who had first appeared in The Lost Sea (1951).