Hugo Claus - Life

Life

Hugo Claus was born on 5 April 1929 at Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges, Belgium. He was the eldest of the sons born to Jozef (Joseph) Claus, a printer who had a passion for theater; his mother was Germaine Vanderlinden. Three more sons were born into the family within the subsequent decade: Guido (February 1931 - 9 November 1991), Odo (born January 1934), and Johan (November 1938 - 13 February 2009).

Educated at a boarding school, the young Hugo Claus lived in Flanders during Nazi Germany's invasion of the country in World War II. Several of Claus' schoolteachers during the half-decade of the German occupation of the country were right-wing nationalists eager to support the Nazi government; his father was briefly held in custody for pro-German activities at the end of the occupation, and Hugo was himself swayed into supporting the pro-German Flemish fascist youth movement. Claus' experience with the wartime nationalist right would later become a source for his 1983 book The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel which tells the story of Claus' alter ego Louis Seynaeve. A sympathizer of the political left at a more mature period in his life, Claus lauded the socialist model after a visit to Cuba in the 1960s.

Claus' prominence in literary circles and his debut as a novelist came in 1950, with the publication of his De Metsiers at age twenty-one. His first published poems had in fact been printed by his father as early as 1947. He lived in Paris from 1950 until 1952, where he met many of the members of the CoBrA art movement.

From February 1953 until the beginning of 1955, Hugo Claus lived in Italy where his girlfriend Elly Overzier (born in 1928) acted in a few films. They were married on 26 May 1955, and had a son, Thomas, on 7 October 1963. In the early 1970s, he had an affair with actress Sylvia Kristel, who was 23 years younger, with whom he had a son, Arthur, in 1975. The relationship ended in 1977, when she left him for actor Ian McShane.

He was a "contrarian", of "anarchist spirit". Journalist Guy Duplat recalls that Claus had organized in Knokke the election of a "Miss Knokke Festival", which was a typical beauty contest, except for the Claus ruling that the members of the all-male jury would have to be naked.