Remco Campert - His Writings

His Writings

In Amsterdam, he started a secondary education at the Amsterdam Lyceum, occasionally writing articles or drawing comics for the school's newspaper. As the years went on, he skipped more and more classes and spent increasing amounts of time in cinema's, jazz clubs or pubs. He finally left school without graduating. With Rudy Kousbroek, a school friend, he founded the magazine Braak in May 1950.

Campert married Freddie Rutgers in 1949, but they separated five years later. In order to finance his living, Campert resorted to writing commercial texts or jingles as well as translating foreign literary works.

He later married author, Fritzi ten Harmsen van der Beek, with whom he lived in Blaricum until 1957, when he returned to Amsterdam. He divorced his second wife and married Lucia van den Berg in 1961. They moved to Antwerp in 1964, but Campert returned to Amsterdam two years later. There, he met art gallery owner Deborah Wolf, with whom he lived until 1980.

He has mostly kept quiet about his life in the following years, however, he once explained his situation in 1994, in an interview to Cees van Hoore, journalist of newspaper 'Nieuwsblad van het Noorden'. He was quoted as saying; "I don't choke myself. I'm my own best company. Whenever I lived together with someone, I felt like being underwater for days on end. To be together is to be twice alone and I don't need that. I'm more than happily married to my career."

By the end of the 1970s, he had written very little. He explained to journalist Jan Brokken of the Dutch newspaper Haagse Post: "I couldn't write for years on end. I didn't feel like it. I felt a physical repulsion towards it. I thought about it, but I was paralysed by doubts."

He resumed writing in 1979. He wrote Somberman's actie in 1985. From 1989 until 1995, Campert starred in theaters throughout the nation and beyond in a play he had created together with Jan Mulder (author and ex-football player). Their shows were based on both their literary works. 1995 was also the year he read his bestseller novel 'Het leven is vurrukkulluk' on the radio. C Dutch people of younger generations will most likely associate his name with CaMu, the partnership between Remco Campert and Jan Mulder that wrote daily front-page columns for national newspaper 'de Volkskrant' from 1995 until 2006. These columns traditionally have been bundled into books titled CaMu ....: Het jaaroverzicht van Remco Campert en Jan Mulder at the end of each year.