Het groen van Delvaux.

Kops, Henri

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Paul Delvaux, my favorite modern Belgian painter and also a favorite artist of the present Belgian queen Paola. Blind during the last decade of his life, Delvaux died in July 1994. One of his peerless nudes adorns the jacket of Het groen van Delvaux. Scattered throughout the novel, references to reproductions of the master's art serve as metaphors for the deprivation in the lives of Willem Brakman's principals and reflect also the ever-hesitant union of woman and man: "Delvaux, his doll-stare women, wrapped in the powdering white of their melancholic skin, captive of the mirrored walls of their manic self-contemplation, listening to their own depth."

A refurbished castle near a Dutch village houses Wildenborch, a small private college which has just received a generous American grant from the fictional Middleton Foundation. Mr. Middleton made his fortune in the manufacture of grindstones. A recent lecture on Henry James had made him conscious of the cultural depth of Europe and the inverse superficiality and materialistic oscillation of Americans. The young nascent writer Quilp, at wit's end from frequenting The Hague gatherings of bohemian marginal students, artists, and journalists, manages with the aid of influential guidance to be engaged as an instructor in linguistics at Wildenborch. His lectures stress adherence to realities and avoidance of obscurantism. He fails to allure the Dutch coed educated in the U.S. who monitors the use of the grant. He is contemptuous of semiprofundities known to flow from tenured professors' lips and does not conform. Come summer, the foundation's pot is being scoured, and Quilp is let go, hardly the wiser.

Brakman's assiduously polished style uses numerous foreign elements: blase, embarras de richesse, vieux jeu, small talk, private eye, "Zigeuner! sing ein Lied fur mich!" "Mein torso gluht wie ein Kandelaber." He builds a twenty-five-letter compound Dutch word with aplomb. Scenes and people receive precise but not otiose description. He hits the mark with an apothegm: "Preach wine, pour water." But transitions resort to facile use of surrealism.

The versatile author's background choice of a college duly includes wild parties, gossip, protests, and divisions. It brings forth informed irony, however, about the unpredictability of cultural trends and a sophisticated appraisal of international nonprofit corporate largess. The growing intrusion of mechanization, media, electronic gadgets, and mass homogeneity raises his sociologic concern. Besides intelligent and interesting futuristic expectations, Brakman offers an intimate illustration of the perilous challenge awaiting an academic lecturer determined to dig and debunk.

Henri Kops Fort Bragg, Ca.