HELLO, XAVIERA HOLLANDER HERE

On a Sunday afternoon I presented the book "Angel of Death", written by my father Dr. Mick de Vries in 1940, in Indonesia ; for a select group of friends and acquaintances. It was a successful and emotional afternoon with beautiful speeches by Peter van Zonneveld and Floris, the publisher who had done his homework well and had read several of my books, in which my parents were also mentioned.

After the various speeches it was party time. Livened up by some Indonesian  piano playing by my namesake Xavier, whose mother also happens to be Indonesian  and has the name   de Vries.

My father's book: Angel of Death and my own books can be ordered from me personally and viewed on my website www.xavierahollander.com/shop for Euro 25 each. I wish you much reading and listening pleasure.
Xaviera Hollander

 AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE REPRINT OF MICK DE VRIES'  ANGEL OF DEATH

In the preface to 'Knetterend vuurwerk, brieven aan S. Vestdijk' Xaviera writes that the books Arlatine and Angel of Death by her father Mick de Vries may deserve a reprint after 45 years. That was in 1985. It took another 40 years, but here is the reprint of Angel of Death.

The novel is about a young woman, who is in prison in the Indies awaiting her trial for multiple murders. The woman grows up in the Netherlands in a family where the father is a loser, the mother a domestic tyrant and the son is seriously ill with polio . After the death of her brother, she leaves the parental home and becomes a nurse. She meets a man with whom she goes to the Indies where she has a son. The man cheats on her. She later remarries, but this man is also unfaithful to her and also abuses the boy. When he is an adult, her son treats his own mother like dirt. All three men die under suspicious circumstances. It seems that the woman, as a nurse, has been able to commit atrocities without anyone noticing. But is that true? Read for yourself how it ends for the main character.

What do we know about Mick de Vries?

He was born in 1902 and went to the Indies at a young age. His father had a ladies' fashion shop. His wife and five children followed later. The parents divorced, because the father was addicted to gambling. The mother had to work hard to pay off the debts; the business went well, which allowed the mother to pay for Mick's university education later.

At the  Highschool  Mick met Sukarno and they became friends. After the war there were speculations by the BVD that Mick, through his contacts with Sukarno, had played a role in an attempt to overthrow the Dutch authorities. However, nothing ever came of this. At school he already started writing for the school newspaper and with his brother he founded the magazine 'de Ochtendpost'.

When Mick grew older, his wealthy brother-in-law offered him a three-months stay in Paris. There he met a number of artists. He even lived with Piet Mondriaan for a while and met Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Josephine Baker and the singer Mistinguett were also among his friends and lovers .

After Paris Mick  went to study medicine in Amsterdam. Here he met Simon Vestdijk, also a medical student, and they soon  became very close friends. Later Mick would serve as the model for Lex Wevers in Vestdijk's novel Heden ik, morgen gij.

In 1929 Mick married the American Leone Browns and left with her for Indonesia .He became a general practitioner in Surabaya. He performed    hypnoses and  worked as a psychiatrist , among other things. In 1930 Vestdijk came to visit. Mick had a daughter , called Amondi and divorced Leone in 1934. His practice grew and he was popular, especially with women.

In 1938 he went to the Netherlands, where he met Germaine Schlütter. They got married in 1939 and  lived in Paris for a while and the following scene takes place there: Mick had asked Germaine if she could cook. Germaine agreed and produced the most delicious dishes every evening, but there were no cooking smells coming from the kitchen. Until one day Mick found a pile of empty boxes by the garbage can with the inscription: 'Chez Maxim'. Then a light went on for Mick. It is remarkable that Mick apparently never came into the kitchen during the so-called cooking by Germaine.

In 1938 his first book was also published: Arlatine. It is about a French doctor, Marcel Arlat, who is looking for the source of his neurosis. He owes his spiritual salvation to an encounter with a prostitute and with a noble young man who teaches him how to live. A reviewer of the magazine Nederland praised the book to the skies: 'He surpasses Victor Hugo and equals Dostojewski and Dante.' In 1940 Angel of Death was published.

Mick returned to the Indies with his wife, where their daughter Xaviera was born in 1943. Mick ended up as a doctor in the Japanese camp for women Ambawara near Bandung. But due to the shortage of doctors, Mick was also deployed in other camps. Outside the camp he sometimes managed to get bandages and medicines for his patients.

When handing over a package, he was caught by the Japanese. He was severely tortured. He would suffer neck pain and cramps in his fingers for the rest of his life.

After the war, Xaviera climbed a tree at the age of 2; she fell out and was injured. Xaviera insisted on being treated by a small, dark doctor who stood in a corner. She felt very calm under his hands. It turned out to be her father, but he did not know that because he had only seen his daughter as a baby. When he was reunited with Germaine after the camp, he saw  Xaviera again and realized that he had treated her shortly before.

In 1946 the family returned to the Netherlands. Mick became a general practitioner in Amsterdam. In 1947 he wrote the novel Ferdinand Ührer, a parody of the rise and fall of Hitler. The book was never published although Vestdijk was enthusiastic about it. However, his writing did not get off the ground and he devoted himself to painting. He mainly produced surrealist paintings. Hans Visser wrote in 1985: 'The paintings lack the talent that speaks from his novels.'

Mick liked to flirt with other women and that sometimes led to great tensions at home. One day in 1954, Germaine threw a woman out of the door in an expensive fur coat, but naked underneath, after she had found her in a compromising position with her husband. This scene almost led to a divorce, but Xaviera's interests were more important and they stayed together. Nice detail: Xaviera later asked her mother why she had not kept the fur coat and had thrown that woman naked out on the street.

In 1965 Mick suffered a stroke and was left partially paralyzed; he could no longer get out of bed. Germaine cared for him until he died in 1973, aged 71.

Simon Vestdijk described Mick de Vries as 'a small, wiry man, half Jewish, half Indian, very intelligent, but absolutely undisciplined and uncontrollable by anyone. A womanizer and skilled hypnotist, an excellent actor and musician, scientifically very well informed and much more of a man of the world than his fellow students, the center and heart of a party.

Xaviera loved her father very much; this is evident from her books Kind af and Met Xaviera op stap. And, on the occasion of the publication of Knett'rend vuurwerk, she wrote about her father as 'the man I loved very much, whom I respected above all, but whom I unfortunately never really got to know, at least not in terms of his soul life, suddenly came to life out of nowhere. His jokes and pranks, his fantastic stories, his enormous loneliness and not being understood, his treasure chest full of original and sometimes brilliant ideas, all this was conjured up for me in these letters. I recognized many of my own characteristics in this correspondence from my father: loneliness, camouflaged by his fast lifestyle, his aversion to mediocrity, the gift of dealing with people and in some cases manipulating them, like puppets, and also the desire for eroticism and sensuality.'

Mick's influence on Xaviera grew stronger years after his death. His involvement with 'magic' and the 'occult' as well as  death fascinates her immensely and perhaps because of those feelings he has never really been away from the world.

Floris Blankenberg
Little Wolf Publications
The Hague, June 2025

 Angel of Death

Mick de Vries (1902-1973) was a writer and physician. Like Simon Vestdijk, his best friend, he studied medicine in Amsterdam. After his studies, de Vries left for the Dutch East Indies. He became director of the hospital in Surabaya. De Vries and Vestdijk had a lively correspondence; Mick's letters have been preserved and published under the title Knett'rend Vuurwerk. During the Japanese occupation, de Vries was interned and tortured. Mick de Vries was married to Germaine Schlütter. In 1943, their daughter Xaviera was born, later known as Xaviera Hollander. After the war, he and his family returned to the Netherlands. In 1973, he died of heart failure after having suffered several strokes over the years and being paralyzed on his left side. Here was the man, who had once been obsessed with Dostojewski or Kafka literature and now had to make do with television recordings of Lucille Ball.

Angel of Death is largely set in the Dutch East Indies. De Vries paints a sharp picture of colonial society. The Dutch presence is taken for granted, but the criticism of European, Indian and Indonesian characters is no less. The main character is a woman who, as a nurse, is capable of committing atrocities without anyone noticing. Fate and the fascination with death play an important role in this. It is an oppressive book, in which the emphasis lies on gloom, violence, loneliness, ugliness, illness and other dark sides of human existence. The many striking scenes from a sunken world justify the reissue of this exciting novel.

Writer's afterword

Xaviera Hollander (1943) is the author of the bestseller The Happy Hooker and many other erotic autobiographical books. She worked in the United States as a secretary to the Dutch consul in Manhattan and later as a call girl and Madam in New York.

Peter van Zonneveld (1948) is a Dutch scholar, specializing in the 19th century and Indian literature. He has written numerous books and articles on these subjects.

Afterword

The novel Angel of Death (1940) was written by Mick de Vries (1902-1973), Simon Vestdijk's best friend. They studied medicine together in Amsterdam, after which De Vries left for the Dutch East Indies. There he eventually became director of the hospital in Surabaya. They kept up a lively correspondence; only the letters from Mick de Vries have been preserved. Vestdijk was inspired by what de Vries wrote to him. For example, The Doctor and the prostitute  is said to be based on the adventures of his fellow student.

During the Japanese occupation, dr. de Vries was interned. Because he had tried to smuggle medicine into the camp, the Japanese tortured him terribly. After the war, he and his family returned to the Netherlands. In 1973, he died of heart failure, after having suffered one stroke after another for 6 years.

Mick de Vries was married to Germaine Schlütter. In 1943, their daughter Xaviera was born, later to become known as Xaviera Hollander, who published the bestseller The Happy Hooker in 1971. Her childhood is described in the novel Kind af (2001), which shows her deep love and affection for her father. As a child of ten, she secretly listened to what Vestdijk and her father discussed as they walked. In doing so, she picked up a great deal about worldly affairs and literature, about the war and recent history: 'Without being able to fully understand them, I also listened to their learned conversations on subjects ranging from classical music to astronomy and to the stories about Vestdijk's gloomy moods and Mick's psychological expositions. They also discussed lighter subjects, such as memories of daily life in the Dutch East Indies and, in whispers, about Mick's romantic encounters. I heard and understood more of these intimacies than the two men realised.'

Angel of Death is a naturalistic novel par excellence, in which fate and death play an all-pervading role. The main character is a woman who, as a nurse, is able to murder her brother, her partners and her son without anyone noticing. In the background, the threatening figure of her mother is always present, who would incite her to her misdeeds. It is an oppressive book, in which the emphasis lies on gloom, violence, loneliness, ugliness and other dark sides of human existence.

The book is largely set in the Dutch East Indies, which de Vries knew very well, of course. He paints a sharp picture of colonial society, from the position of the white elite, with all the racial and discriminatory prejudices that go with it. The Dutch presence is taken for granted; not a word of criticism can be found anywhere. The portrayal of most of the characters, both European and indigenous, is critical. The book gives a penetrating portrait of that world, in various facets.

For the main character, the Indies are a disappointment. In the description of Surabaya, the contrast between the lower city with its impoverished working-class districts, where the poor natives live, and the upper city, where the rich and well-to-do whites reside, is extensively discussed. There is a lot of attention for the gray aspects of existence: dirt, lack of hygiene, illness and death. That also fits in with the naturalistic novel: 'That little gallery was about two meters wide and was right in front of the bedroom. It separated the house from a narrow strip of yard, which immediately turned into a kind of corridor, where there was a dirty ditch. Along that ditch lay piles of rotting dirt, discarded food remains and waste from other houses; it was crawling with rats, which also came into the house. It could stink terribly there, so that I often had coolies take away the rubbish, but they threw it in the ditch, so that, when there was little water, it started to stink again.

There was no cleaning, by the way, because the natives also regularly did their business there, too lazy to go fifty meters further, where the big river was, the communal and official latrine for an oriental city. Yes, you have to get used to these things, everything has to get used to, the nose, the ears...'

Later in the book we get to know the planter's environment: an enterprise in the mountains, where the administrator is in charge, inspects the gardens every morning and beats up the people who in his eyes do not do their work properly, the coolies, with the whip. About the river behind the planter's house it says: 'In the rainy season, when the mountain streams were very swollen, crossing the water (on horseback of course) was impossible and then one was completely isolated. Sometimes native houses floated along, washed away from the mountain slopes, also many uprooted trees or corpses; with the wild burning, brown-coloured waves one saw how the swollen carcasses of buffalo; goats and chickens floated along, occasionally a hideously bloated human body rolled along, naked, the same brown colour as the muddy water.'

In addition to the grey aspects of existence, sexuality also plays an important role. Intercourse with native women entails the risk of venereal diseases. As a doctor, de Vries knew all about that, of course. That also applies to diseases such as typhoid and cholera, and how to combat them. The main character specializes in performing illegal abortions, which earns her a lot of money. She gained that knowledge as a nurse in the hospitals where she worked.

The book contains many small miniatures, such as the description of the house of a patient, a wealthy Indian lady, a plump person with small sausage fingers: 'The front gallery, full of the most beautiful Chinese pots with graceful palms, was very deep and the yard on the street side was provided with a beautiful driveway for the carriages. On the front gallery next to the marble pavement there were two large stone lions that opened their heads wide. Everything made a rich impression, this could have been the house of a wealthy Chinese rather than a European.

The street was a main road where the steam tram passed. We got out, the women in their long white dresses and with their wide straw hats on, acted very agitated. The furniture was still new, tasteless, but expensive, there was even a fonola somewhere in a corner of the inner gallery, an expensive instrument that must have cost a small fortune in those days.

The back house opened onto a narrow road where the native population lived; there were the well-known wooden kampong houses, here and there was the slightly better housing of Chinese or Arabs. Diagonally opposite the back house was a native prayer house, a small missight. The narrow street led to a large open market place further on. 'That lady turns out to be a usurer: 'The 'business' often started in the morning at first light, then the small market traders came, women and men, who borrowed from ten cents to a guilder. In the evening they had to pay back that money, with a cent of interest for every dime. So they could buy their basket of merchandise from the wholesalers and trade with it on the market. They themselves did not seem to realize what a usury they had to pay, three thousand six hundred percent per year! On the contrary, those people still regarded the woman as a benefactor, they often lay bent over on the pavement at the back of the house and said prayers during the worst days of the illness...'

These and similar scenes together form a striking portrait of the world in the East, which Mick de Vries knows how to portray very well. All in all it is an exciting book, which after a slow start, with reflections in prison, knows how to hold the attention until the end. That is why we found a reissue of this novel fully justified.

Xaviera Hollander

Peter van Zonneveld