T'Hooft's poems, for which he was feted during his short life, capture the essence of those times, but also echo the eternal voice of disgruntled youth for whom oblivion, and sometimes even death, are a righteous response to the troubles of the world.
Johan Geeraard Adriaan T'Hooft, known as Jotie, was born in 1956 in Oudenaarde, an only child. His father worked, his mother was bedridden, and he was cared for by his grandparents. He began to go off the rails in secondary school, turning his back on schoolwork to find himself, in the manner of the times, immersed in literature by Kafka and Hesse, and in music.
Drugs were also very much of the times, and he was addicted by the age of 14. At 17 he left home and went to art school in Ghent. However, the big city only made his drug problem worse, and he began dealing to earn the money to feed his habit.
In 1973, he made his first suicide attempt, after which his parents brought him home for a brief time of peace. The following year, however, he was picked up by the drugs squad and placed in an institution.
He met a girl named Ingrid Weverbergh and married her in August of that same year. Her father, a publisher with the firm Manteau, found him work as a reader and arranged the publication of his first volume of poetry in 1975.
But this wasn't enough to calm the beast that raged in Jotie's soul. He tried to kill himself again in 1976, despite literary success. His second volume of poetry was published and picked up an important literary prize. He gave readings and talks and contributed to several literary magazines. But drug addiction remained, and Ingrid left him because he abused her. In October 1977, in a friend's bedsit in Bruges, he took an overdose of cocaine.
"Those are, more or less, the facts," wrote Hugo Brems, editor of a selection of T'Hooft's poems published in 1992. "Next to that is the myth, in which Jotie T'Hooft plays by turns the role of the romantic, decadent and doomed hero, symbol of a generation and of a poetic lifestyle. The two images - that of the facts and that of the myth - have hardly anything to do with each other. Between the two lie the poems."
A death foretold
The Flemish consider T'Hooft a neo-Romantic, a genre that, in English at least, extends all the way from Lewis Carroll to Ted Hughes; a nebulous division of literature characterised by a concentration on nature, a rather naïve escapism and a taste for the supernatural.
T'Hooft's poems and, to a lesser extent, his prose are marked by two main traits: his youth and the constant shadow of death. It's difficult to escape the conclusion, admittedly with hindsight, that his work is one long chronicle of a death foretold.
People tend to think of the 1960s and '70s as flower power days, but we've all forgotten how the world of that time, pre-perestroika, seemed on the brink of total destruction. T'Hooft's poems carry the marks of adolescent angst - the Dutch considered him too juvenile to take seriously, even as he was lauded in Flanders. But there is also an insight and profundity that point to a great talent, had he made it to maturity.
His star has since dimmed, as have those of many of the icons of that time. Maybe young people of the 1980s just weren't that interested in deathly melancholy, a popular theme of songs since Elizabethan times. The new collection couldn't have come at a better time. Perhaps T'Hooft, with his brooding dark looks, his slightly Byronic life, his obsession with death and his premature end, could be a new hero for the Twilight generation.
The book presents a wide selection of the poems as well as prose (which stand the test of time much less well) and letters - more than 900 pages in all. While perhaps not priced for a new market of young people coming to him afresh, it's a beautiful object: fine paper, the pages edged in black, a black silk bookmark, the cover decorated in psychedelic lettering. A book, in short, fit to take its place on the shelves of any self-respecting library.
Jotie T'Hooft: Verzameld Werk; Meulenhoff/Manteau; €49.95
What they're saying about Jotie T'Hooft
Karen Van Godtsenhoven
Curator at the Fashion Museum in Antwerp
"I just bought [the new collected works] because he was an icon when I was a teen. You couldn't find his works anywhere before. Everything was always sold out or stolen from the library. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, literature students vied to get a copy from one of the antique book stalls...or in junk markets, but he was impossible to find, all adding to the cult status. I now find it a little ‘much', but still good."
Marc Ernst
Webhost publisher and former magazine editor
"T'Hooft belongs to those few poets I have a volume of, together with the obligatory Herman De Coninck, Charles Ducal and Gust Gils. In fact, the book used to be in my bookcase, because I've just realised it's not there any more. Most likely it's somewhere in the mess of my 16-year-old son, who used it for school. He wanted to get to know our Belgian Jim Morrison because he read Morrison's biography last year for a class assignment. Nowadays people younger than me will probably be more likely to compare T'Hooft with Kurt Cobain. I consider T'Hooft - the man and the poems - as a part of my youth, together with Salinger, Kerouac and Gerard Reve. Going through puberty and becoming an adult with a bit of repulsion, rebellion, sturm und drang and so on. It was I think the personage Jotie T'Hooft that appealed to my generation rather than the poetry."
And what then?
Jotie T'Hooft's poems may be coloured by the pall of death, but they can also be funny and loving. One of his best-known is "En wat dan?", in which he imagines (or fails to imagine) the world going on when he is no longer in it.
One day I'll be gone and
What then? Vanished without a trace
or a farewell, the mess I leave
behind has gone beyond a joke.
For who else but me
built nothing
leaves nothing behind
but expectation and confusion
and what then?
Maybe I'll be frozen in your memory
Faded into the past and
what then? What to do then?
"It was real," you'll say, "he played with words
like nobody else could,
but so what?
Faded like so.
In your mind...
And what then?
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