Extracts A and B

“Father fled” British North Borneo in an “open canoe in 1917.” These are the first words of my notes. “Father” was Hans Nis Jürgen Petersen. [He was the German General Manager of the British-owned New Darvel Bay Tobacco Company at Lahad Datu, which had a workforce of more than two thousand and was the largest and most successful tobacco company in British North Borneo. He fled to avoid being interned by the British, the realities of. World War I having finally reached his remote location.]  Accompanied by his Dutch wife, Constance, who was called Stanni, and by baby John, Hans’s destination was the neutral Dutch colony of Java. The canoe was large. Possibly remembering a family photograph of several outriggers, John said the canoe could carry thirteen…

They were at sea for three weeks, often in dire circumstances. John told me they wore big hats to prevent sunstroke, and his mother supposedly told him that they “suffered a great deal.”

“Why don’t we just quit?” she asked Hans several times.

“You don’t give up a fight,” he always replied.

According to John, they were picked up by a Dutch steamer and made their way to Java.
(Chapter 1 – JOHN’S FATHER: IMAGINED AND REAL)

“My father left me when he should not have,” John told me. He maintained that his strong philosophic outlook and his “dream in himself” came from his father who, he believed, had been a courageous man of high ideals….

John’s ideas about his father and Lahad Datu and his parents’ marriage of exactly six years became personal archetypes and psychic bellwethers. What we don’t know is when he began to share with others the myths he developed about his father. To what extent were they genuine fantasies rather than manipulative tall tales? … When he told me he felt torn during [World War II] by his conflicting loyalties to the Netherlands and to Germany, he said, “It was like having to kill your brother to save your father.” This extraordinary analogy has mythic dimensions, especially in the light of his brother’s name: Constant. Presumably, the father to be saved was their biological father who died when John was barely three, the father he idealized and about whom he told heroic and highly romanticized stories.
(Chapter 2 – A NEW NON-FATHER AND THE ISSUE OF BELONGING)

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Extract B – The Fictional Mentor

John’s friend Ko (Jacobus) Elhorst, who he met toward the end of 1933, is an example of someone he disguised. When he spoke to me about Ko, he always referred to him as Joe. John’s supposed artistic mentor, Wiertz, was a more pronounced case of obfuscation, for after much research it turned out he didn’t exist at all, which part of me still finds hard to believe. Looking at my notes, it amuses me to find an entry in the margin, John telling me: “You don’t have to fictionalize Wiertz. He’s dead now.” The truth, which I didn’t learn for several decades, is that I never needed to fictionalize Wiertz because he had always been a complete fiction… (Chapter 3 – JOHN’S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH: FACT AND FICTION)

When John said he lived with Ko’s family after the circus, he made two other noteworthy statements. First, that he and Ko did pretty well everything together. Second, that Ko’s youngest sister, Frie, who he met during this period, was the first woman to interest him romantically.  (Chapter 7 – KO ELHORST, FRIE, AND THE HOLE AT THE HEART OF THE STORY)

John was conflicted in two fundamental ways during the mid-1930s. The first was between his dream of being an artist and his attraction to Frie. Wiertz was enmeshed in both the dream and the relationship with Frie. The second conflict was with the different sides of his personality. On one hand, he was the fun-loving individual, the “live wire” who could “make things go”; on the other, he was the solitary, contemplative young man in search of himself and his niche in the world. The former side was expressed primarily with Ko, the latter, it appears, drew psychic support, comfort, and companionship from the towering example of Antoine Wiertz [1806-65], the artist, whose success John wanted to emulate…. (Chapter 7)

My interpretation of [the fictional] Wiertz’s marriage breaking up is that John and Frie broke up. John told me that when he was with Wiertz, he didn’t see much of Frie because Wiertz did not like her. He said that his time with Wiertz was an important period in his life… He also said he and Wiertz were together for about two years, which was also the length of his marriage to Frie…. (Chapter 7)