Digital culture is alien to painter and storyteller Henri van Bentum, but that hasn’t stopped him from completing an ebook of fable-style stories.
The 84-year-old can’t even retrieve his new ebook, Apologues, Stories for All Ages. Instead, his wife Natasha will call it up on her laptop computer or tablet and place it before him.
“I have no clue about how to even get on a computer,” he said in an interview at his James Bay home.
His collection of stories, recently published by pegasuspress.ca, includes tales in which insects, animals — even plants — talk. Important kings mix with small children. And tradespeople complete their work with magic in their tool chests.
Stuart Hertzog, founder and owner of pegasuspress.ca said what attracted him to van Bentum’s stories, besides being “delightful” in their own right, was the timeless, “fable” nature of them.
“When [van Bentum] wrote them he was harkening back to an earlier time when storytelling was the way knowledge was passed on,” Hertzog said.
But he was also impressed with the tales’ moral element. They speak with a sense of right and wrong often missing in today’s stories, even those written for children.
“They have this element of myth but also an element of morality about them,” Hertzog said. “They teach good ways of living.”
The stories are a departure for van Bentum, who has mostly been a painter. One series of his paintings, 100 small circles painstakingly filled in with coloured dots called Organiverse, was featured on a website Colouring Space in which NASA had a role. Some of these even show up in Apologues.
Van Bentum said his written stories were largely inspired by his childhood memories. In wartime he was sent to a Dutch country village. School was a two-hour walk, mostly through wondrous, rural country.
“Swans on a lake, country gardens, chestnut lanes — all these things I would encounter every day,” van Bentum said.
After the war he embarked on a series of service work, in hotels and on ocean liners. It was a life of travel that continued after 1957 when he immigrated to Canada and began a career as an artist. In 1971 he met Natasha in India.
In 1972, van Bentum said he was inspired to sit down for one month and write. Drawing from his memories of stories he heard from his father and grandfather in Holland, he wrote the eight stories appearing in Apologues.
They all invoke elements of the human condition: greed, jealousy, power, anger, love and compassion. After writing the eight stories he stopped. “They say everything,” he said.
He also approached several publishers about having them printed in a book. The publishers were interested. The book might even have been published in paper had it not been for van Bentum’s stubborn sense of how children’s imaginations must be indulged.
Ironically for a visual artist, van Bentum’s complaints with virtually all children’s books are with the illustrations. He worries they put tethers on children’s imagined visualizations.
“The child is stuck with the way it is illustrated,” he said. “So I said I would require two blank pages with each story so the child can fill them in with his own imagination. Of course, that was never accepted.”