Dola de Jong in The New York Times
The New York Times featured Dola de Jong’s The Tree and the Vine (tr. Kristen Gehrman), in the May 31 issue of The New York Times Book Review. In her review of de Jong’s midcentury queer classic, Lidija Haas writes:
To describe as doomed a love that begins in 1938 between two European women is to risk tautology. Yet the problems that dog Bea and Erica in Dola de Jong’s novel “The Tree and the Vine” are too personal to be defined by looming political catastrophe.
Before coming out in the Netherlands in 1954, the book was rejected as “unpublishable” and “shameless.” Kristen Gehrman, the translator of this new edition, writes in her afterword that it took the intervention of distinguished friends abroad, including de Jong’s American editor, Maxwell Perkins, to get the novel into print. When it first appeared in English in 1961, reviewers likewise misread this subtle character study, bizarrely, as trash about “compulsive sin” and “the world of the sexual pervert,” Lillian Faderman noted in a later reissue.
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It doesn’t surprise me that the novel, though by no means sexually explicit, was initially considered too shocking to publish. (Only V. S. Naipaul, of all people, seems to have recognized it as the “delicately rendered” portrait it is: His 1961 review furnishes the blurb for this translation.) Whereas Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt,” appearing under a pseudonym in 1952, notoriously provided a lesbian romance with a happy, or at least hopeful, ending, “The Tree and the Vine” accomplishes something bolder: It normalizes its characters’ unhappinesses, showing them to be just as complicated as anyone else’s.
Additional reviews in Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review are bringing renewed attention to de Jong’s work. Transit will re-issue her novel, And the Field Is the World, in 2021.