question, is Fear.’ On his broadest fictional canvas, Couperus plots the disintegration of a great Dutch colonial clan, the Van Lowes. The first volume,
The Small Souls (De kleine zielen, 1901), deals with the return from the wilderness of Constance van der Welcke,
née Van Lowe, who scandalised her family by eloping with the outsider she loved.
The Later Life (Het late leven, 1902) chronicles Constance's flirtation with social reform and trade
Louis Couperus (1863-1923) in his study (Photo Letterkundig Museum, The Hague).
unionism, while in
The Twilight of the Souls madness strikes one of the ostensibly most solid members of the family, her brother Gerrit. In
Doctor Adriaan (Het heilige weten, 1903) Constance's son Addy attempts to escape the legacy of the past by committing himself to the alleviation of human suffering as a doctor, but the author leaves us in doubt whether the attempt is totally successful. Many of these themes are powerfully and more succinctly present in the masterly
Old People and the Things that Pass By (Van oude menschen, de dingen die voorbijgaan, 1906).
Couperus' popularity peaked in the years preceding and following the First World War. In 1921 the critic A.W.G. Randall expressed the hope that ‘today, when Louis Couperus is again beginning to be translated and admired (...) he may yet produce an effect on the development of English fiction.’ In the event, after a brief surge of interest in his shorter fiction and in his travel writing, the revival petered out. As early as 1927 D.H. Lawrence damned Old People and the Things that Pass By with faint praise as ‘quite a good contemporary novel’, but inferior to Multatuli's Max Havelaar (1860), ‘a far more real book’.
J. Kooij (in an article in the magazine Merlyn in 1964) seeks to explain the decline in Couperus' fortunes in translation through the demise of the three-volume novel as the staple of the English subscription libraries. While this may be a contributing factor, it is at most a partial explanation. Ian Buruma, reviewing the paperback reissue of The Hidden Force (1994), finds the writer's international eclipse equally puzzling: ‘(...) he has been largely forgotten outside Holland. I don't know why. The translation, first published in 1922, is not great, but Couperus's precious, elaborate, sometimes quite bizarre prose seems less dated in English than in the original Dutch. The reason is not just that the translator was unable to produce the luxuriance of Couperus' style, but that the Dutch language has changed far more than English since 1900.’
While much of Couperus' most significant work is available in English translation, thanks in large part to the dedication of a single translator, the Dutch émigré Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, the omissions are equally telling: neither Iskander (1920), the study of the disillusion and decadence of Alexander the Great (De Mattos did not live to complete his version) nor The Mountain of Light (De berg van licht, 1905-1906), with at its centre the tragic figure of the androgynous boy-emperor Heliogabalus, found English publishers. Both were probably too outspoken for an industry still smarting from legal clashes with the moral establishment over ‘indecent’ foreign literature such as that of Zola. Today a translation of the latter book particularly, a dark literary pendant to the painting of Lawrence Alma Tadema, whose work Couperus knew and admired, might have more than a simple ‘period’ appeal.
E.M. Beekman's 1985 edition of The Hidden Force (Ian Buruma's review of which is quoted above), a study of colonial incompatibilities in the
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