Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company     by Multatuli, Translated by Roy Edwards Original title: Max Havelaar Original language: Dutch Published by Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September 1995 Format: Paperback Dimensions: 0.68 x 7.81 x 5.11 in. ISBN: 0140445161 List Price: $13.95, £10.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.79 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.16 Published by London House & Maxwell, New York Pub. Date: 1967 Not available for ordering Published by Heinemann, London Pub. Date: 1967 Not available for ordering Published by University of Massachussetts Press, Amherst Pub. Date: 1982 Not available for ordering Published by Quartet, London Pub. Date: 1982 Not available for ordering Published by Penguin, London Pub. Date: 1987 Not available for ordering

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In 1860, the novel Max Havelaar by Multatuli, pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887), gave voice to Holland’s uneasy conscience about its colonial enterprise in the East Indies. The book shocked the nation, provoked questions in parliament and eventually led to a new ‘ethical’ colonial policy at the end of the century. For the Indonesian author Pramudya Ananta Tur, writing in the International Herald Tribune (18 April 1999), Max Havelaar ‘killed colonialism.’ Today, the novel is as vigorously alive as when it first appeared and the case of its hero, the idealistic colonial civil servant Max Havelaar (the alter ego of Douwes Dekker, who resigned in disgust from the colonial administration because he took his duty to protect the natives too seriously) continues to be the subject of polemic and public debate in Dutch society. Max Havelaar is at once the most famous and the most controversial work of Dutch literature.


First translated into English in 1868, the novel was much acclaimed by the British Fabian Socialists and was read by Joseph Conrad, whose narrator Marlow in his novel Lord Jim is of the same moral fibre as Multatuli’s hero. In 1927, in his preface to the second English translation, D.H.Lawrence observed that, although its structure was ‘a mess, Max Havelaar had to be recognized as both a literary masterpiece and one of the great works of political and social satire’.


Written, incredibly, in the space of just six weeks in a cheap hotel room in Brussels, the novel is a literary experiment of the first order. Multatuli applies a range of styles and narrative forms, and includes in his narrative not only dialogues, letters and stories, but also contracts, documents and lists together with sermons, poetry and all kinds of notes and digressions. Another literary innovation is his use of multiple narrators, as in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), a technique he employs with devastating effect against his first narrator, Batavus Droogstoppel, the archetype of everything that is smug and narrow-minded in Dutch society. With his dogged clinging to facts and common sense and his self-serving commercial truths about the coffee trade, this well-to-do, manipulative monster of an Amsterdam broker represents one face of the central conflict about truth. Max Havelaar, the selfless, poetic and compassionate civil servant who bangs his head against the wall of an indifferent but guilty bureaucratic system of colonial oppression in the Dutch East Indies, is in every respect Droogstoppel’s opposite. Between these two extremes of Droogstoppel’s complicit hypocrisy and Havelaar’s moral rectitude Multatuli weaves an intriguing and extraordinarily complex web of narratives and angles of vision that capture the reader’s attention from the first page to the last.


The clash between the incompatible truths of the various narrators sits at the heart of the novel, and forces us to decide whether to accept the hollow Biblical justifications of colonialism by the Reverend Wawelaar, the noble and ethical colonial rethoric of Max Havelaar in his famous address to the Chiefs of the Lebak District, the heartbreaking story of the native Saidjah and his beloved Adinda, or the cynical analysis of the Dutch system of exploitation given by Shawlman. All this culminates in the impassioned and majestic final peroration of the author himself, Multatuli, who in the novel’s concluding pages casts aside the entire fictional edifice he has created, questions the morality of the colonial enterprise and appeals directly to the Dutch King: ‘Is it your wish that the Havelaars are spattered by the mud of Droogstoppels and Slymerings? And yonder, thirty millions of your subjects are mistreated in your name?’

I am a coffee broker, and I live at No. 37 Lauriersgracht, Amsterdam. I am not in the habit of writing novels or things of that sort, and so I have been a long time making up my mind to buy a few extra reams of paper and start on the work which you, dear reader, have just taken up, and which you must read if you are a coffee broker, or if you are anything else. Not only have I never written anything that resembled a novel, I don’t even like reading such things, because I am a businessman. For years I’ve been asking myself what is the use of them, and I am amazed at the impudence with which a poet or story-teller dares to palm off on you something that never happened, and usually never could happen. If I, in my line — I am a coffee broker, and I live at 37 Lauriergracht — gave a statement to a principal — a principal’s someone who sells coffee — which contained only a small portion of the untruths that form the greater part of all poems and novels, he would transfer his business to Busselinck & Waterman at once. They’re coffee brokers too, but you don’t need to know their adddress. So then.... I take good care not to write any novels, or make any other false statements. And I may say I have always noticed that people who go in for such things generally come to a bad end. I am forty-three years old, I’ve been on ‘Change for twenty years, so I can come forward if anyone’s called for who has experience. I’ve seen a good many firms go down! And usually, when I looked for the reasons, it seemed to me that they had to be sought in the wrong course most of the people had taken in their youth.

Truth and common sense — that’s what I say, and I’m sticking to it. (p. 19, tr. Roy Edwards)