The life of M. Vasalis :: Centre for Gender and Diversity

The life of M. Vasalis

Maaike Meijer (e-mail)
Universiteit Maastricht
Centre for Gender and Diversity

Biography of the poetess M. Vasalis (1909-1998)

M. Vasalis is the pseudonym of Margaretha Droogleever Fortuyn-Leemans. To the Dutch literature she contributed a small though often reprinted, very famous and popular oeuvre of poems. Three volumes appeared during her life - Parken en Woestijnen in 1940 De Vogel Phoenix in 1947 and Vergezichten en Gezichten in 1954. After her death was published the work De oude kustlijn (2002). Besides that Vasalis also wrote short essays and compiled selected lectures. Her relation with the social political side of the literary life was reserved.

Although she personally knew many writers and poets and had with many of them – like Victor van Vriesland, Bertus Aafjes, Gerrit Achterberg, Gerard Reve, Judith Herzberg, Fritzi ten Harmsen van Beek – special contacts, she seldom entered into poetical discussion or public debates.
Not that she did not have such poetical visions: her ideas on poetry were very explicit; she just never uttered them in public.
One of the driving questions behind this biography is why this popular poet was so determined to stay away from participation in literary life and from every interference by the media.

A long time before the media era broke loose she already seemed to sense the dangers of it. She never allowed interviews, seldom wrote about the work of others and stayed away from all publicity.

Her word of thanks at receiving the Constantijn Huygensprijs in 1971 clarifies this position: during the war she realized the powerlessness and the relativity of the individual against worldly disasters.

Displaying the ego in public seemed trivial to her. This vision is intriguing and admirable, especially because Vasalis respected this principle during her entire life.
It tells us something about her fascinating and strong personality. It also tells something about gender in the literary world: after her collision with the young men of fifty – who named her after that a symbol of the ‘old’ poetry – Vasalis kept silent.
Was she silenced? The gender relations in the social world of literacy will play an important role in this biography. Vasalis’ importance may be seen in the fact that the two most important literary awards of the Netherlands were given to her: the Constantijn Huygensprijs in 1971 and the P.C. Hooftprijs in 1982.
The influence of her small work on other poets has been particularly big – this was stimulated by the fact that some of her poems were frequently used in selected lectures and cited in schoolbooks. This made her know and popular to a wide audience. Vasalis’ silence has probably, in a paradoxical way, increased the respect for and the intrigue of her person.

The challenge of this biography will be that it has to describe the life of someone who has kept her life hidden for the big public and who protected her private sphere and that of others with great efforts.

The norms and values that defined this position will be a central point in the biography. Now that the influence of the media and the exposure of private life keep increasing Vasalis’ vision and attitude represent an important statement.

For that reason I chose to write a literary biography, namely a research which puts life facts and relations at the service of a better understanding of how the work came into being and its meaning.