The Low Countries. Jaargang 5

[p. 88]

Extract from Letter to Baudouin
by Walter van den Broeck

Your Majesty,

You, who are wont to show a lively and uninterrupted interest in culture in general and Flemish letters in particular, you will not take it amiss that I do not provide you with a detailed account of myself. You already know me more closely and value my work more highly than those whose positions in the cultural sector should require that they devote serious consideration to such matters. This is more than obvious from the occasional modest allowances you extend to me by Royal Decree, which allow me to dedicate myself to belles-lettres without being subjected to too much material hardship.^1.

To enclose a curriculum vitae would, I fear, be but a demonstration of false modesty, and you know how I detest even ordinary modesty.

You should not regard the fact that I address you with a small ‘y’ as insolence. I am aware that your consort's secretary once declared in an interview given quite some years ago that you no longer insisted on the capital ‘Y’.

I have always wished to write to you at length, ever since I was a child. I must tell you that this is typical of our family. My grandfather, you know who I mean, Peter Jules van den Broeck, corresponded for a considerable period during the 1950s with Lyndon B. Johnson, the Texan senator who, following the death of John Kennedy in 1963, was to become President of the United States. There was something the matter with my granddad's pension arrangements or some such. I will find out exactly what happened for you in due course.

My father, Robert Sidney van den Broeck, followed in his father's footsteps. He considered himself a socialist because he read the Volksgazet and was a loyal listener to the Politieke Tribune on the nir, particularly when the socialist leader Jos van Eynde, with whom you are more than familiar, addressed the Flemish people so vociferously.

He was never a member of the Belgian Socialist Party, and only very briefly of the socialist trades union abvv.

And every time we didn't finish our dinners he would say that they had better start another war right away.

He thought that the class struggle was an illusion. He knew working people too well, and was convinced that neither patient persuasion nor spontaneous reflex would make them cast off their yoke.

Someone who has been working hard for eight hours doesn't feel like preparing the revolution - he only wants to be left in peace.

He expected an awful lot more from the written word, though. If dark thunderclouds began to build up on the horizon - the Berlin Airlift, the Korean war, the Cuban crisis, the Vietnam war - he would reach for his pen and write, shrouded in a mist of silence and detachment, to the mighty ones of this earth.

We would automatically hold our breath far too long and walk on tiptoe all evening.

1. On behalf of my wife, my two children and of course myself, I would like to take this opportunity of extending to you my heart-felt thanks.

[p. 89]

Eisenhower shouldn't be so spineless; he certainly knew the Russians from the war! He had to know what those Russkies had in mind for Western Europe!

Castro shouldn't slag off when it came to the United States like that; he would pay dearly for it one day. And then what would happen to all those world famous Havana cigars - three of which he would like to be sent in return for his good advice. Khrushchev should stop playing with fire. Hadn't his people suffered enough during the Second World War? It was the height of imprudence to so recklessly provoke America, which had the most powerful army in the whole world, by banging on conference tables with his shoes! And Lyndon Johnson should finally put an end to that business there in Vietnam. It could be done in a jiffy if he were only willing to take that topsecret laser gun they were talking about in the Reader's Digest out of the deep freeze. And so on.

This was clearly a substitute for taking real social action, but nobody would be able to reproach him later with having done nothing to try and improve the state of the world.

That my mother, fearing complications that might prove too much to bear for a working man's family, threw most of these letters in the fire is of little consequence.

I have briefly brought all this to your attention in order to prove to your majesty that my complaint is not based merely upon a whim^2..

And yet at the same time, I would like to make this distinction: it is not my intention to appeal to you to intervene personally in repairing an error of administration nor to provide you with any political or military advice.

From Letter to Baudouin (Brief aan Boudewijn. Antwerpen / Amsterdam: Elsevier Manteau, 1980, pp. 5-7).
Translated by Peter Flynn.

2. This is, it seems to me, a real family trait. Five years ago my eldest boy, who was eight at the time, asked at dinner what the name of the mayor of Turnhout was - Alfons Boone! And where did he live? - Look in the phone book! An hour later he shoved a letter under my nose.
‘Dear Mister Mayor, wouldn't it be possible to open a hall where poor people could get a square meal for three franks? Stefan van den Broeck, 18 Freedom Street, Turnhout.’
And could I post that for him in the morning.
A week later an envelope bearing the arms of the town of Turnhout dropped into my letter box. ‘Dear Sir, In reply to your letter of 19.04.74 in which you requested that a hall be opened where poor people could be given a square meal for three franks, we hereby have the honour to inform you that we shall be forwarding your letter for further consideration to the Royal Benevolent Society for Social Charity which shares responsiblity for the affairs of the poor in our town.
With the highest regards,
On behalf of the Town Council
A. Goossens, Interim Secretary
A. Boone, Mayor’