Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager, who generally published with only his initials as C. B. Vaandrager, was a Dutch writer and poet who lived and worked in Rotterdam. Later he came to be known simply by the shortened version of his name as Vaan. Vaandrager was a leading writer, along with Hans Sleutelaar and Armando, in the group of experimental Dutch writers called De Zestigers, who were preceded by De Vijftigers.
Life and work
Youth, education and early career
Vaandrager was born in the Pretorialaan in southern Rotterdam. His father was a postman and van driver, his mother a housewife. The family moved when he was six to the Brielselaan, where he grew up. He was a brilliant student at the Charlois Lyceum, where he received a straight A at his exam for his Greek translations of Homer and Herodotus. The principal urged him to go on to university, but Vaandrager opted to become a trendsetting poet, writer and artist. After his military service Vaandrager started working as copywriter for a local newspaper, and later for some publicity agencies. In the new paper Het Parool he published his first children's story. He joined the artistic scene, taking part in the café night life with his school friend Hans Sleutelaar and such emerging pop artists as Woody van Amen and Daan van Golden. Together with Sleutelaar and painter-poet Armando, he joined the editorial board of the Flemish-Dutch literary magazineGard Sivik, which was then relocated from Antwerp to Rotterdam. Later the three were joined by the poet Hans Verhagen in starting the new magazine De Nieuwe Stijl.
Work
In 1960 Vaandrager made his prose debut with his 60-page coming of age story, Leve Joop Massaker, which was compared by critics to novels by Gerard Reve and Hugo Claus. A year later came his poetry debut, Met andere ogen. With those works he established his name as a promising local literary talent. Vaandrager set his face against literary pretension and identified his work with the "dislocating, raw city mentality of punk and New Wave". In the preface to his 1967 collection of poems he claimed "not to give a shit about poetry". Like several others in his generation, he took inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade. At the heart of his "Dutch Railways", for example, there is a railway schedule, given context by the opening line "Tanya, it's up to you" and those following the train times: "Say hello to Amsterdam/ and no messing around". The poem tells a story without descending into the anecdotal. Similarly, in "Tourist Traffic" the mind plays over three statements that juxtapose a river in motion and a moving bridge in "Fluent Dutch/ Fluent English and/ Fluent German". The element of collage also carried over into Vaandrager's 1970s prose works, including the highly autobiographical documentary novels: De reus van Rotterdam: Stadsgeheimen and De hef, detailing the city’s musical and literary scene during the sixties. The two works were later issued together in 2002. Another such work from the same period, the 'street-collage' Sleutels was only published posthumously.
Later decline and death
Vaandrager's life was now going downhill. Drug use began to dominate his life, as a result of which he became labelled as "the junky writer". With severe clinical depression, he sometimes spent months in a psychiatric hospital. In 1981 he was awarded the Anna Blaman Prize from the Prince Bernhard Fund for his entire work. Afterwards Vaandrager published only a few poetry collections, including Metalon and Sampleton. As a wandering eccentric, Vaandrager died lonely in 1992 at the age of 56.
