Sixteen years after his death and fifteen years after the last publication, work by writer Gerard Reve (1923-2006) appears again. Very Fine Boy is the title of a series of letters that Reve wrote between 1986 and 1997 to former TV maker Jef Rademakers, with whom he was on good terms until his death. In nineteen letters, Reve expresses his anger at the world in general and the artists in particular, the publisher writes. “Catholicism, eroticism, love, the decay of morals and approaching death are also reviewed.”
Rademakers told the new NPO Radio 1 program this afternoon Villa VdB how Reve and he met in the early 1980s. Rademakers had invited Reve to a TV program. After calling six or seven times, Reve gave in on the condition that Rademakers himself pick up Reve at his home in France. Rademakers thought that Reve lived close to Paris, but that turned out to be far south of Lyon. “Then you sit together in the car for ten or twelve hours and then a very comradely bond is created immediately. Because it turned out that he knew more about Catholicism than I did as a little religious man from Brabant.”
‘Knowledge of everything’
Rademakers made more TV programs with Reve, including a four-part series about the Virgin Mary. “The funny thing about Gerard was that he thought he knew everything about everything. That’s also the funny thing about those letters. He tells how television should be made, but also how to remove stains from something. And also how to get handkerchiefs cheaply. and socks can come.”
In a number of letters it is about the Rademakers family. Reve visited there regularly. “If he stayed for dinner with us, he would sometimes have a firm farmer after dinner, to the great joy of my children, who would imitate him. And then Gerard always wrote in the letters that followed: ‘Do the daughters still farm well? ‘.”
According to Rademakers, Reve’s letters, like the rest of his work, are characterized by a subtle balance between irony and seriousness. In one of his last letters, Reve wrote about a conversation he had had with a befriended Belgian pastor. He asked Reve if he believed in an afterlife. “I said: ‘There you ask me something. I will think about it and maybe I can look it up somewhere.’ So worrying, there’s no point.”
Very Fine Boy will be published next month by the Belgian publishing house Borgerhoff & Lamberigts.
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