The last of the three great post-war children’s authors has died. Publisher Leopold announced on Saturday morning that Tonke Dragt, Antonia Johanna Dragt in full, has died at the age of 93. Together with Annie MG Schmidt and Paul Biegel, she proved that children’s books were no less than literature for adults.
Dragt published her most important youth novels, De brief voor de koning (1962), De Zevensprong (1966) and Torenhoog en veleen breed (1969), in the 1960s, but they are read by new generations of children and reread by their parents. And that will continue to be the case for some time.
Youth in Indonesia
Dragt was born in Java in 1930 as the eldest of three daughters of insurance expert Dries Dragt and his wife Ada. The greatest drama in her life was the Japanese occupation and the teenage years behind the kawat, the bamboo fence with barbed wire of camp Tjideng, a sealed-off district of Batavia. She preferred not to talk regarding it.
But perhaps she found the camp less terrible in retrospect than having to go to the cold, unimaginative Netherlands and never being allowed to return. What she certainly found more important were experiences that would remain dear to her for the rest of her life: the secret physics lessons she received under the starry sky and the stories she made up with her best friend. Dragt thought: she survived the camp because she had imagination, not the other way around. When The Letter for the King was published in Japanese in 2004, she found it ‘a satisfaction’, but nothing more.
Yet following a while she always got a light in her eyes when the conversation turned to Indonesia once more. Then she would tell of long walks through the jungle, mountain climbs to fairytale lakes. She would cower, make claws of her hands and whisper regarding Si Matjan the tiger, whose name you were not allowed to say out loud. Otherwise he would come and get you!
In her batik robes, with her usually tangled, medium-length hair with straight-cut bangs, she remained somewhere between a medieval page and an Indonesian witch – myth-making that she fanatically opposed, because she hated psychologizing, but which she lovingly maintained.
Writing in The Hague
In The Hague she attended the art academy. There was plenty of work, thanks to the post-war baby boom. In the late fifties she was able to start work immediately in a temporary building of the Rijswijkse Scholengemeenschap. It is a major achievement that in addition – she continued teaching until the eighties – she also became one of the greatest fairy tale writers in the Netherlands. Perhaps even the greatest. That meant: working at night, in bed.
But not being dependent on art was also a blessing. While Schmidt and Biegel might sometimes suffer from prolific writing in addition to their masterpieces, Dragt weighed up the pros and cons, worked through the night on her thick novels, regularly seized reprints to take another good look at the text, procrastinated endlessly with manuscripts, was never satisfied and, above all, did not publish much. She limited herself to nine flawless, thick youth novels and a few collections of short stories, which still read as if they were written today.
The most important thing she paid attention to was that everything was right. In few oeuvres do fantasy and reality intertwine so eerily believably and do readers continue to think for so long regarding how things really are. She received thousands of letters with pressing questions regarding this. She always came up with a solution and in her handwritten answers she kept the magic of her books – which she also illustrated herself, by the way – alive.
The combination of teaching, her success as a writer, lectures, working on the much-publicized film adaptation of De Zevensprong by Karst van der Meulen and the national and international interest eventually broke her. She was in her fifties, might no longer cope and in the early eighties she left school under protest. After that, fewer and fewer books were published and the books became increasingly strange.
Renewed interest
At the beginning of the new century, interest in her work, which had never completely disappeared, revived. The fantasy wave surrounding Harry Potter contributed to this, as did the Griffel der Griffels she received in 2004 for – of course – De brief voor de koning, perhaps the most successful children’s book ever published in the Netherlands and permanently in print since 1962.
She herself was very proud of the appearance, more than fifty years later, of The Letter for the King in England, the land of King Arthur, where she believed the book also belonged. That translation led, well following her ninetieth birthday, to a Netflix series in 2020.
The plotless diptych with the telling title Seas of Time was never finished, although she continued to work on it until a few years before her death, if only because she had to incorporate inventions such as the internet and the mobile phone to remain credible. Perhaps, her fans will like to believe, she got lost in her last book.
