Books: Below Sea Level

OLD HAVEN—David Cornel Dejong— Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

THE HOUSE OF TAVELINCK—Jo van Ammers-Küller—Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Two hundred years after the flood of British sea power drowned Holland as a first-class nation, hardworking, stubborn Dutchmen have at least succeeded in reclaiming a well-diked reputation as leading producers of tulips and cheese: But Dutch literature, which even at its high point, in the time of Erasmus and Spinoza, was always Holland’s lowest point below sea level, remains almost wholly unreclaimed. Last week two Dutch novels stood out as new patches of dry land.

Solider-looking of the two was Old Haven, a 559-page novel laid in a small fishing village on the North Sea. Despite its wholly Dutch characters and background, it is only semi-Dutch. Author Dejong, a slight, redheaded, 33-year-old ex-bank clerk, soda-jerker, gravedigger and onetime student at five U. S. universities, left Holland when he was twelve, has spent most of his life in Grand Rapids, Mich. Old Haven tells the story of a picturesque Dutch clan of builders and landowners, headed by a hardheaded, wise old dame who defies strait-laced Calvinist townsfolk by opening a saloon, vents her disgust on a pious daughter-in-law by spoiling her grandson Tjerk. Best part of the story pictures Tjerk’s rebellious boyhood, his adventures with his grandmother, the hell-raising activities of his brothers, family quarrels, a ceaseless round of weddings and funerals, his puppy loves—the period, in short, which is grounded in Author DeJong’s own boyhood. Of Tjerk’s experiences in the Dutch Army, his marriage, the dissatisfactions that make him decide to go to the U. S., Author Dejong makes a more sentimental case.

The House of Tavelinck, by Holland’s leading feminist and most popular novelist, is a long (738 pages), crowded, historical romance told against an 18th-Century background of the fight between the House of Orange and the Dutch democrats. Like many a present-day historical novel, this one is a tribute to the author’s talents as a researcher rather than as a novelist; like her U. S. contemporaries, she lays history and romance in layers as neat as layer cake.