Jan De Hartog

JAN DE HARTOG, 88, author and playwright, died on September 22, 2002, in Houston, Texas. He was born in 1914 in Haarlem, Holland, to a Calvinist minister and his wife, a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship. At the age of 10, Jan ran away to sea and became cabin boy on a fishing boat on the Zuyder Zee until his father had him brought home. Two years later he ran away to sea again, this time on a steamer to the Baltic, once more to be returned home. As a teenager, de Hartog attended Amsterdam Naval College until he was ejected with the words, "This school is not for pirates." He returned to sea on an ocean-going tug, and started writing. In 1940, "Hollands Glorie" was published just as the Germans invaded Holland and became enormously popular as a symbol of Dutch resistance. De Hartog himself joined the Dutch underground and helped smuggle Jewish babies into safe haven, but had to go into hiding in an old people's home in Amsterdam. While there, he wrote his famous play "The Fourposter"; the manuscript was hidden in the matron's linen closet until the war's end. De Hartog made a dramatic escape through Occupied Europe; he was shot in the legs while crossing the Pyrenees, en route to Gibraltar and a flight to England. An international writing career between the U.S.and Europe followed and he became well known both for his books about the sea and for his epic Quaker trilogy, "The Peaceable Kingdom" (for which he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature). Several of his books were turned into movies such as "The Key," with William Holden and Sophie Loren. Motivated by the spirit of the Quakers and his wife, Marjorie, de Hartog became as known for his activism as for his writing. While in Houston as a writer-in-residence at the University of Houston in 1962, Jan and Marjorie became aware of the horrific conditions at the old Jefferson Davis Hospital, which primarily served the black community. Aided by the local Quaker Meeting, they organized a brigade of trained volunteer orderlies and nurses' aides, and de Hartog wrote "The Hospital," which became an international sensation, and resulted in extensive reform. The de Hartogs continued to work as a team in both writing and service. They worked with the Quakers to bring to the U.S. children orphaned by the Vietnamese War, and themselves adopted two Korean sisters. The de Hartogs have lived in Houston since their return in the early '90s. De Hartog's final novel was "The Outer Buoy" (1994), in which his longstanding literary counterpart, Captain Harinxma, finally sails beyond the "outer buoy," the last buoy encountered before the open sea, de Hartog's vision for death. De Hartog once ministered in Quaker meeting about that vision, quoting a poem he saw scratched in a naval bunk in Bristol during the war: There is an old belief That on some distant shore Far from despair and grief Old friends shall meet once more. He is survived by his wife, Marjorie; his children Sylvia, Arnold, Nicholas, Catherine, Eva, and Julia, and 14 grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at the A.D. Bruce Religion Center of the University of Houston on Sunday, September 29, at 1 p.m. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Live Oak Friends Meeting, P.O. Box 56308, Houston, TX, 77256-6308.