CONCEPTOS DE LA ADMINISTRACIÓN

Before analysing the sonnets themselves, it may be useful first to examine the events which probably inspired Kloos to write his cycle. What had happened for Kloos to publish important new Shelley material ahead of the centenary of Shelley’s death? Why did he display such impatience, unable to wait a few more months for the start o f the commemorative celebrations in 1922? A possible answer may be found in the following letter which Kloos wrote to his brother-in-law Jacob (‘Co’) Reyneke-van Stuwe in London on 23 March 1921.

Beste Co, Wat hier volgen gaat, zul je niet dadelijk willen gelooven. Je zult zeggen: “Willem droomt of schertst”. Maar ik kan je verzekeren, dat ik de nùchtere waarheid meedeel, als ik je zeg, dat ik gisteravond op de verkooping bij Kerling hier de gelukkige eigenaar ben geworden van een onuitgegeven want tot dusver 66k in Engeland, onbekenden brief van Shelley.^

Outbidding a considerable number o f prospective buyers from Britain and the United States, Kloos acquired ‘het heilige document’ for the hefty sum o f five hundred and fifty guilders. The manuscript letter had been discovered recently in J. Kneppelhout’s estate which was auctioned at The Hague after his widow’s death earlier in 1921. Naturally, Kloos was enraptured to have a truly unique and tangible Shelley relic in his possession, and one coveted by many as the auction had made manifest. He continued his letter to ‘Co’ with unmitigated enthusiasm: ‘Ik ben wezenlijk over-gelukkig met dit unieke document, van waaruit nog iets van de psychische essentie van Shelley-zelf je toe te vliegen schijnt’.^^ It was Kloos’s fervent desire to inform the public in England about Shelley’s newly discovered letter thereby giving him the opportunity to assert his

^ Quoted from Prick’s ‘Willem Kloos als eigenaar van een brief van Shelley’, p. 12. ^ Prick, ‘Willem Kloos als eigenaar van een brief van Shelley’, p. 15.

ownership. To this end, a transcript, accompanied by a note drawn up by ‘Co’ with much proprietorial signposting on behalf of ‘Mr. Willem Kloos, the Dutch poet’, was sent to The Times Literary Supplement. It was published in the issue o f 2 February 1922.^

Kloos had the precious document framed between two sheets of glass and hung it in a prominent place in his study which had gradually been turned into a shrine to Shelley.^ As his eyes roamed over his new, proudly displayed treasure, he must have felt the need to express his euphoria in a more lasting and more public form than in his private correspondence with Co. The sonnet cycle which Kloos wrote soon after his acquisition o f the letter may therefore be interpreted as the actual materialisation of the excitement and glee which the auction had previously occasioned. In a way, the sonnets are Kloos’s attempt to capture the volatile ‘psychische essentie van Shelley-zelf which he had brought in to the house, together with the manuscript letter. This letter was nothing less than a holy relic, as he explained to another correspondent:

Die brief van Shelley vooral, je begrijpt wat een vondst dat voor mij is. Ik had nooit gedacht er zelfs maar een onder mijn oogen te krijgen, en nu ligt hij bij ons zorgvuldig beschermd tegen alle ongevallen als een reliqui van den grootsten en echtsten dichter van den modemen tijd.^

With such a potent charm close at hand, Kloos now found himself in a position to conjure up some phantoms of the past.

Shortly after the acquisition of the letter and with all the propitiousness of a self- fulfilling prophecy, Kloos experienced a visitation from Shelley’s ghost. This event found its expression in the self-contained sonnet cycle mentioned earlier. The series o f twelve sonnets was dedicated to Co and appeared under the heading ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley, door Willem Kloos’ in De Nieuwe Gids. With the whole set tightly constructed, each sonnet is

^ In previous negotations with The Times, Kloos had only wanted to disclose the first line of the letter. On 26 April 1921, B.L. Richmond wrote to ‘Co’: I am obliged to you for your offer of a letter on the subject of your brother’s Shelley-letter. I am afraid the brief indication of its contents, which you give in the letter you have sent us for publication, is hardly of enough interest to be published [in The Times] as it stands’. The typed letter is preserved in the uncatalogued material in the Kloos Collection (K533).

^ Gé Vaartjes, ‘Shelley beschut tegen rook en beschadiging: Nog een brief van Kloos als eigenaar van een brief van Shelley’ in: Juffrouw Ida, 16, August 1990, pp. 8-10.

^ Undated letter from Kloos to K.H.E. de Jong. Quoted from Harry G.M. Prick, ‘Willem Kloos als verzamelaar van boeken’: in Boeken verzamelen: Opstellen aangeboden aan Mr. JR. de Groat

given a separate title, pointing towards a progressive and logical narrative: 1. ‘Prooimion’,

II. ‘Voorgevoel’, III. ‘De moord’, IV. ‘Shelley’s sterven’, V. ‘Bekentenis van den

moordenaar’, VI. ‘Shelley’s verschijning’, vii. ‘Vervolg’, vm. ‘Vervolg’, IX. ‘Antwoord

van mij’, X. ‘Vervolg’, XI. ‘Shelley’s oordeel’, Xll. ‘Slot’.* The main title summarises at once the whole agenda behind the set of poems: the reader is presented with an image o f Shelley as seen through Kloos’s eyes [‘door Willem Kloos’], and as he wants it to be perpetuated. Indeed, Kloos appoints himself the trustworthy intermediary through whom the reader is allowed to enter a heavenly kingdom governed by Der zonnen Zon’ (VI,

1. 14) where he can behold a splendid, and above all, authentic, vision o f ‘’t goddelijk genie’ (ll, 1. 14). It will be remembered that Kloos had adopted the same procedure in De R aafs preface to the Dutch Alastor where he promoted his own works as the appropriate channel through which the reader was able to appreciate Shelley’s original works in a legitimate manner.

Given the underlying motivation and the importance of the issues at stake, it was imperative for Kloos to preclude all readings in which his Shelley persona would come across as an entirely fictionalised character with little or no bearing on the historical figure. The illusion o f historical veracity is achieved by the inclusion o f footnotes commenting on a few factual details in the poems, such as the names o f Shelley’s sailing companions when the poet made his fateful journey from Livorno to Lerici, and the title o f the volume of Keats’s poetry which was found on his body.^ These references are

bij zijn afscheid als bibliothecaris der Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden (Leiden: Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, 1983), pp. 249-60 (p. 259).

* Incidentally, the opening sonnet in Het boek van kind en god’ bears the same title as the first poem in the Shelley cycle, i.e. ‘Prooimion’. This is another indication that Kloos may have gone through the same efforts, compared to the earlier cycle, in the general construction of his Shelley poems.

^ One of these refers to the copy of Keats’s third and last volume of poetry which was found turned back in Shelley’s pocket. In his minutely researched article on Kloos’s Shelley letter (see footnote 4), Harry G.M. Prick devotes nearly an entire page to this detail, admitting ‘dat [hij] langzamerhand een beetje tureluurs [is] geworden van de tegenstrijdige en vage berichtgeving op dit punt’ (p. 17). In several accounts of the discovery, burial and subsequent cremation of Shelley’s body. Prick has come across different titles with regard to the specific poem Shelley had been reading before thrusting the volume in his pocket. Some sources give Lamia, others Isabella, whereas Kloos believed it was The Eve o f St. Agnes. In my opinion, however, the apparent confusion finds its origin in a misinterpretation by earher biographers. I would suggest that abbreviated references to Keats’s entire volume, properly called Lamia, Isabella, The Eve o f St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), were taken as the titles of individual poems. Going back to Leslie A. Marchand’s scholarly edition of Lord Byron’s Letters and Journals (1979), Prick, for instance, opts for Lamia, thereby falling into the same trap as his predecessors. Prick has obviously misread Marchand for the quotation he uses to support his argument literally reads:

devised to underpin Kloos’s premise about the events of Shelley’s final hours. Indeed, the point of departure o f the cycle relates to the specific circumstances o f Shelley’s death, which according to Kloos was the result of a cruel felony: ‘Shelley is op zee door moord vergaan’ (l, 1. 14). In the ten-page prose explanation following his poems, Kloos sums up some evidence to substantiate his claim that his account o f a deliberate collision at sea between a pirate vessel and Shelley’s Ariel ‘in haar grondtrekken historisch [kan] worden genoemd’ (p. 710). He paraphrases some reports in ‘de Engelsche pers’ about an unnamed Italian sailor who allegedly confessed to the crime half a century after the tragic events in the Gulf o f Spezia. The direct source of this piece of information, which Kloos does not mention, is an article by W.M. Rossetti which had appeared in The Times of 1 December 1875 and which had caused quite a stir on its publication. In sending his article to the newspaper, Rossetti had acted on the request o f Trelawny whose daughter had picked up the sensational news in Italy. At the time. De Nederlandsche Spectator had devoted a column to ‘deze verrassende mededeelingen betreffende den rampspoedigen dood van den dichter Shelley’.^® If the author of the article in the Dutch periodical was totally uncritical o f Rossetti’s account, most scholars nowadays attach little or no belief to this thesis, though, strictly speaking, it cannot be entirely ruled out.

It is easy to see how the idea of a violent death would have appealed to Kloos. Presented as a martyr, Shelley could be appropriated as a redeemer o f all future poets and invested with the authority to salvage Kloos and recognise him as one o f the elected. As such, the sonnets evince how much Kloos relied on Shelley’s spurious image to construct his own public persona. Naturally, a reference to Kloos’s famous first introduction to Shelley, when he saw a volume o f his poetry in a bookseller’s window display, could not

‘Keats’s Lamia had been in Shelley’s pocket, but nothing remained except the leather binding to identify it’. Marchand’s Lamia therefore must be read as a short title of the entire, bound volume and not as a reference to one particular poem, as Prick erroneously believed. Shelley’s original copy of Keats’s poems, or what remained of it, was burnt together with his body on the beach near Viareggio.

L. [A.C. Loffelt], ‘Shelley’s dood’, in: De Nederlandsche Spectator, December 1875, p. 403. In 1878, Wetenschappelijke Bladen published a Dutch translation of an article by Richard Garnett from The Fortnightly Review in which the Shelley scholar maintains that Shelley’s death had very likely been an accident, and not the result of a crime. Richard Garnett, De laatste dagen van Shelley’ in: Wetenschappelijke Bladen, 1878, pp. 161-88 (especially pp. 187-88). In an unpublished letter, David Spanjaard communicated his scepticism about the murder thesis to Kloos: ‘Wat uwe opmerking in Uw brief over Shelley’s dood betreft, ik heb ondertijd wel gelezen wat Rossetti en vooral wat Trelawny daarover vertellen; maar de waarheid dezer vermoedens schijnt niet te zijn aangenomen [...]. Trouwens de storm op zee is op zich zelf reeds voldoende om

be left out. In the ninth sonnet o f the Shelley cycle, this particular event is described as another epiphany:

In de’ allereersten opgang mijner jeugd

Met wijdingsvolle ontroering heb [ik Uw naam] vemomen. Ik zag hem ... las hem ... wist niet, hoe mij wierd ...

(IX, 11. 7-9)

Holding the promise o f ever bolder variations, this little motif was to be incorporated in many of Kloos’s future compositions.“ Apparently, Kloos never realised that the prominent place given to Shelley’s works in the bookshop was in itself a direct refutation of the alleged unpopularity o f Shelley in the Netherlands at that time, as Kloos would have it. Yet the key-moment in the cycle had occurred three sonnets earlier when Shelley’s spirit like a ‘zoeltje’ (VI, 1. 5) had come to pluck the chords o f Kloos’s inner

being. This moment is also described in a passage in the ten-page explanation appended to the cycle: ‘toen ik deze [verzen] dus in mij voelde bewegen, heb ik [...], aandachtig luisterend, op papier gebracht [...], wat mij door mijn innerlijkste Wezen werd voorgezegd’ (p. 717). Kloos did certainly not assume a passive role in this process. I believe that he is, above all, listening to and transcribing his own voice. The sonnets illustrate how Shelley’s spirit is attuned to Kloos’s own ‘innerlijkste Wezen’ as the quotation above also seems to suggest. As such Kloos brings the message o f Shelley’s sprite in unison with his own hyper-individualist strain.

In an earlier sonnet (‘Moisa’) published in 1888, which Hubert Michael tentatively identifies as another address to Shelley, Kloos had written: ‘Komt Gij dan nu ik val ... Ziel van mijn Ziel / Die niets dan droom z ijt... ‘k roep u aan: O, koom!’ (WKV, p. 8).^^ In the sonnet cycle, Kloos’s incantation has at last become successful. In order to silence his critics, who had many misgivings about his remaining capacities as a poet, Kloos now has

het vergaan van het ranke vaartuigje te verklaren’. Unpublished letter by David Spanjaard to Kloos, dated 30 March 1922 (K533 B2).

For example: ‘Binnengedachten CIX’, in: De Nieuwe Gids, 1925, p. 704; ‘Binnengedachten

MXV’ in: De Nieuwe Gids, 1936, p. 452; and ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley in Nederland’ in: De Nieuwe Gids, September 1922, pp. 306-320. See also: Harry G.M. Prick, ‘Frans Erens in zijn brieven aan Andries Bonger/6’ in: Juffrouw Ida, 8, No. 2, 1982, pp. 22-23, reproduced in Prick’s Een weefsel van overpeinzingen: Causerie over Frans Erens in diens briejwisseling met Andries Bonger (Nijmegen: Vriendenlust, 1986), pp. 45-46.

himself acknowledged by Shelley as one who has taken to ‘de weg, dien alle dichters gingen’ (vill, 1. 12). That Kloos should bring up the issue of his own enduring artistic excellence was, given the circumstances, no inopportune a gesture. One excerpt from an article in De Kunst of November 1916, and quoted by B. Wielenga, will help to appreciate the extent to which Kloos’s literary star had waned:

Ware Kloos gestorven, toen hij 30 lente’s telde, met, neen, boven Perk, zou hij de roemruchtige van het réveil zijn geweest. De latere verzen-knutselaar, de oer- zeurpieterige criticus leefr en vergeteert [sic] nog, en baart eindeloos uitgerekte reepen veterdrop. Hij zeurt, met een onduldbaar pedanten domineesaanleg over het al of niet bestaan van God. Hij is een konservatieve Chinees met een staart van 80 ellen lange kroniek. Onze oogen zijn opengegaan voor Willem den Saaie, Willem den Duffe.’^

The raison d'être o f Shelley’s spectre seems to be to justify Kloos’s life fulfilment and promote it as an example to the world, and, one would like to think, especially to Albert Verwey and his circle. The sonnet sequence seems almost to challenge them by featuring ‘de allergrootste [dichter] der 19e eeuw’ (p. 719), and making him find at last a truly like-minded spirit on earth: Shelley’s spectre is thus presented as a personal Paraclete, comforting Kloos with the prospect o f a just reward in an existence yet to come.

The cycle has many distinct religious overtones with its concentration on the transitory states o f life and death and the permeable boundaries o f the hereafter. Shelley, the notorious atheist, is said to reside with ‘’t Niet te noemen Eerste’ (vill, 1. 6) and ‘’t Verbeelde Kempunt van dees Chaos’ (xil, 1. 14). Contemporary reactions to Shelley’s death at sea were rather different in nature. In August 1822, the correspondent o f The Courier commented: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned; now

Quoted from B. Wielenga, Moderne letterkunde: Willem Kloos als literair profeet; Louis Couperus als type van den modemen mensch (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1917), pp. 50-51. In her De Waarheid, Jeanne Reyneke-van Stuwe claims: ‘In mijn schrijfbureau bevinden zich verscheidene laden, vol met uitknipsels, brieven en andere bescheiden, — de bewijzen van de vijandschap, de misgunning, de jaloezie, den achterklap, die er altijd tegen Kloos en zijn Nieuwe Gids heeft bestaan’; De Waarheid ([The Hague]: De Atlas, [1950]), p. 24.

It is worth pointing out that in 1919, two years before the composition of Kloos’s Shelley sonnets, Verwey’s periodical De Beweging had ceased to exist.

he knows whether there is a God or no'/^ The outspoken mysticism of Kloos’s cycle, however, was a prerequisite to turn the visitation of Shelley’s spectre into an existential possibility. At the same time, it renders Shelley as an innocuous creature seemingly invested with divine, and hence indisputable, authority. Each sonnet represents, as it were, a Station which the reader has to visit with Kloos himself as the expert guide. Starting with Shelley’s premonition o f his imminent death, the narrative continues with his subsequent murder, resurrection and, finally, his pentecostal apparition to his most devout apostle. Shelley is indeed presented as a Christ figure throughout. When his boat is sinking, Shelley wonders: “Ts dat de Dood? ontvang me...” en willig glijdend / Valt hij de diepte in, zwijgend, de armen breidend’ (rv, 11. 13-14). As in St Matthew’s version of the Gospel, where the two thieves crucified with Jesus, are given a voice to speak, Kloos’s fifth sonnet consists o f the confession of one o f Shelley’s alleged slayers who, on his deathbed, is haunted by Shelley’s spirit, and begs for forgiveness.

All this seems to be designed to inspire the reader with religious awe and reverential solemnity. Such a mood was imperative to minimise as much as possible the reader’s potential scepticism before being confronted with the dialogue between ‘Meester’ Shelley and ‘vriend’ Kloos in the second half o f the sonnet cycle. Having described Shelley’s murder, Kloos now concentrates on the visitation of Shelley’s spirit which duly informs him of his own redemption. Shelley’s status o f apocalyptic angel is suggested by the title of the penultimate sonnet (‘Shelley’s oordeel’) in which the apparition is painting a very bleak picture of the future: