Hugo Claus

Biography

In 1967, at the experimental film festival in Knokke-Heist, Hugo Claus put three naked men on stage to represent the Trinity. The play, “Masscheroen”, brought him to court: four months in prison, which after public protests was converted to a suspended sentence, and a fine. He went down in history as an author who was punished and honoured at the same time.

Claus was born on 5 April 1929 in Bruges, the eldest of four sons of Jozef Claus, a printer with a passion for amateur theatre. Three months later the family moved to Astene, his mother’s village near Deinze. He spent most of his childhood in boarding schools: from 1933 to 1939 with the nuns at Aalbeke, then at colleges in Kortrijk and Deinze. Many of his teachers were Flemish nationalists, and in his youth Claus joined the pro-German youth organisation of the Flemish National Union. After the liberation of Belgium his father was briefly detained on a charge of collaboration. These years would later form the basis of the novel “The Sorrow of Belgium”. In 1946 he left home and settled with the painter Antoon De Clerck. By some accounts he studied sculpture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, wrote poems and painted, and dreamed of becoming an actor. Book illustrations and landscapes with house façades paid the bills. In 1947, at eighteen, his father printed his first poems, and in the autumn he worked for several months at a sugar factory in the north of France. In 1948, in Paris, he caught a glimpse of Antonin Artaud in a bar and later called him his spiritual father. From April 1949 Claus did military service and edited a soldiers’ magazine; at the same time he became one of the founders of the avant-garde magazine “Tijd en Mens” (“Time and Man”) and held his first exhibition of paintings in Ostend.

His first novel, “De Metsiers”, appeared in 1950; according to the story, it was written in a month back in 1948, on a bet. The manuscript won the Krynprijs, a literary prize, while its themes of incest and degeneration also provoked hostile reactions. He himself still considered himself first of all a painter.

From 1950 to 1953 Claus lived in Paris, where he grew close to CoBrA. He was friends with Karel Appel and Corneille, in 1949 illustrated a book by Pierre Alechinsky, and later produced several joint books with Appel and Alechinsky. The experience of those years found its way into the book “Een zachte vernieling” (“Mild Destruction”). From February 1953 until the beginning of 1955 he lived in Italy, where his girlfriend Elly Overzier tried to become an actress; through her he entered the film world and occasionally worked on sets for Alberto Lattuada and Luigi Malerba. They married in May 1955. He held his first solo exhibition in 1956 at the Galerie Taptoe in Brussels, and his second in March 1959 at the Palace of Fine Arts.

What followed was a large and uneven body of writing. Claus wrote 35 original plays and dozens more translations and adaptations from English, Greek, Latin, French and Spanish. He wrote his first play, “De getuigen” (“The Witnesses”), in 1952; “Een bruid in de morgen” (“A Bride in the Morning”, 1955) brought him recognition, and in 1969 came “Vrijdag” (“Friday”), in which dialect is mixed with standard Dutch. There were poems: the collection “De Oostakkerse gedichten” (“The Oostakker Poems”, 1955) is counted among the main works of the Vijftigers, the Dutch-language poets of the 1950s, and later he moved to a more abstract manner (“De sporen”, “The Traces”, 1993). There were novels, opera libretti, and scripts for film, television and comic strips, among them the satirical comic strip about “Belgman” (1967), drawn by Hugoké. In 1962, together with Harry Mulisch, Ivo Michiels and Simon Vinkenoog, he founded the magazine “Randstad”.

In film, Claus wrote more than twenty screenplays, in particular for Fons Rademakers. As a director he made seven films between 1964 and 2001: “De Vijanden” (“The Enemies”, 1968), about an American soldier, a German soldier and a young Flemish man wandering through the Ardennes Offensive of 1944; “Vrijdag” (1980); “Het sacrament” (1990, shown in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes); and the last, “De verlossing” (“The Redemption”, 2001).

His main book is considered to be “The Sorrow of Belgium” (1983). It is a family chronicle with autobiographical details about the Flemish provinces during the war and about the roots of collaboration among the petty bourgeoisie. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages, and in 1994 the Swiss director Claude Goretta adapted it for the screen. “De geruchten” (“The Rumours”, 1996) won the Libris Prize and the Aristeion Prize, and “De sporen” won the VSB Poetry Prize. Among his other awards are the Constantijn Huygens Prize (1979), the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (the Prize for Dutch Letters, 1986), the Pasolini Prize (1997) and the Nonino Prize (2000). His name was many times mentioned among the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1970 Claus moved to Amsterdam, from 1974 to 1978 he lived in Paris, and from 1977 he was again in Ghent. In the second half of the 1980s he spent part of each year in the south of France. In 1996 the University of Antwerp founded a centre for the study of his work, the first dedicated to a writer who was still alive. In 2005, when the CoBrA Museum in Amstelveen was showing an exhibition of his visual work, he gave his last interview.

Claus died on 19 March 2008 in Antwerp, at the Middelheim Hospital, by euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium. The farewell ceremony took place on 29 March at the Bourla Theatre in Antwerp; his body was cremated, and his ashes, at his wish, were scattered at sea off Ostend. In 2015 a substantial part of his archive passed to the Letterenhuis (the literature archive) in Antwerp.