From the Hunger Winter to the First Morning, 1940–1960

Ton Anbeek

Stone and Clouds

A YOUNG HOUSEPAINTER in a small provincial town in Flanders labors doggedly at his great novel. He has written more than four hundred pages and still there seems to be no end in sight. His wife, practical by nature, decides to intervene. She has read in the newspaper about a new prize for a book, a novel. So she sends her husband off to run some errands and takes advantage of his absence by writing at the bottom of the last full page, “And so on and so on.” She asks a girl in the neighborhood “who was learning to drum at a typewriter” to type out the text. Sure enough, the thick typescript wins the award. Louis Paul Boon (1912–79) receives the coveted literary prize for his debut, The Suburb Grows (De voorstad groeit). The book appears in print in 1943.

The factual truthfulness of the anecdote is less important than the story itself. At the very least it demonstrates Boon's keenness to pass himself off as an “ordinary” writer, one who did not give a damn about literary pretensions of any kind. No muse, no divine inspiration, only a man who never stopped working. His book had been written at the kitchen table and completed by his wife, so it was she who should really be given the prize.