Ode to Aagje Deken | Not just any friend

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Dear Aagje,
 

Today is the birthday of your friend, Betje Wolff, about whom I am writing a biography. Earlier, three biographies have been written about the two of you, but I have chosen to write only about Betje. Before you came into her life, she had already published so much, and Betje's books from that period in particular have actually always been given too little attention. In my biography, I talk about her ‘aggressive period’, when she was really unmerciful towards orthodox believers. But don't think now that I consider you less than her.

I'd like to call you ‘dear’, because I don't think there has been a kinder ánd wiser woman around Betje than you. Except for her mother, but she died when Betje was 14.

What impresses me most is your friendship. You loved her so terribly, as everything shows. Especially the last years of your lives are so touching. Betje suffered from cancer for three years before she died, and you took care of her. When she was dead, you didn't want to talk, eat, drink, and nine days later you died too. You wanted to be united with her even in death.

I am also impressed by how you worked your way up. You were a farmer's daughter and when you were four you were orphaned. Your family then placed you in an orphanage in Amsterdam. Although you did not have to go to a poor orphanage, because there was money in the family, the children there were not educated like in the better-off classes. The intention was that the girls would later work as maids. You didn't learn foreign languages there, for instance. But you soon distinguished yourself because you wrote poems, which won you prizes. That encouraged you to continue. When you left the orphanage, you first became a maid, but that didn't suit you at all. Then you got the chance to become a carer for a sickly young woman from the grachtengordel (ring of canals), a woman who had received a good education and who had also taken up poetry. She was bedridden and her mother had appointed you to provide her with companionship and distraction. Her name was Maria Bosch. Together you started writing poems, or actually not together, each separately, but at the same time. She was 32 when she died. Then you had to find another way to make a living. However, with money from the mother, you were still able to publish a nice book with those poems by Maria and you. Now I have to admit that I am not a fan of those poems, you know, they are so religious, and that doesn't really appeal to me any more in my time.

I don't know how you got money after Maria's death. I heard you were supposed to have a tea shop, and worked at a bakery. But you continued to write poems and you were able to publish them from time to time. You even dared to send a poem to the most important journal of those years, Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen. So you really did have power in you. You also had your own group of girlfriends, all women who loved poetry and supported each other. What else could you do in those days: men didn't support you.

Your friendship with Betje started very strangely. You had heard a lot about her, because through her mocking attacks on the ‘fijnen’ (the orthodox Protestants) she had become a well-known Dutch person. Her sharp pen had made her the arch-enemy of the strict Reformed, who tried to undercut her in their magazines. All men, of course, who could not tolerate a woman in particular making them look so foolish.

But you thought Betje went too far in her satires. So you decided to write her a letter. Something like this: I think you are playing silly buggers and I think you are judging far too hastily. I want to cure you of your caprices, I have cried for you, I have begged heaven if I could possibly lead you on a different path. I want to try to restore your good name and reform your crazy behaviour.

Yes, you didn't realise that you couldn't write such a letter to Betje. So she responded furiously in her reply letter: what you were imagining, what you were meddling with, whether that was Christian to judge someone you didn't know like that. And then you turned around like a leaf in the wind: a hundred apologies, send that letter back, I want to burn it. Sorry sorry sorry. And then the curious thing: you became close friends precisely because of those two letters. 

True friendship it became. You moved from Amsterdam and together you lived first in De Rijp, then Beverwijk, then nine years in France and the last few years in The Hague. Time and again I get the question whether you were lesbians. I don't know, and don't need to know. Friendship does not depend on sex. It's just about being completely at ease with the other person, knowing the other person inside out and taking them as they are, knowing when and why the other person is suffering or anxious, and being there.

You became such a person for the nervous Betje. She was more vulnerable than you, more fierce, more quickly affected - and you stood up for her when she was once again accused of being a blasphemer of faith. Because religious, you both were, but mild and tolerant of other forms of faith, and the Reformed against whom Betje acted were not.

You defended her: even in public, you took up the pen when she was attacked and wrote against it.

Ah dear Aagje, you were often hurt yourself anyway. There were people who thought those nice novels you wrote were Betje's work and that only a few dry bits in them were yours. Well, when I read your letters I know that you can be witty too, and besides, both Betje and you expressed very clearly that you did all the writing together.

I dare not promise anything, I am already much, much older than you have become. I don't know how long I can go on - but it's true: after Betje, you actually deserve a biography of your own.

Lots of love from someone who dares to call herself a friend of yours,

Marita