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The President Wrote Absurdist Plays
| Article
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17819 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
3,384 Words |
| Author
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Josef Skvorecky
Josef Skvorecky's books include Talkin' Moscow Blues, The
Swell Season, Sins for Fathers, The Mournful Demeanor of
Lieutenant Boruvka, The Engineer of Human Souls, Dvorak in
Love, and the Cowards. He emigrated from Czechoslovakia in
1968 and now teaches literature and film at the University of
Toronto. |
A playwright for president? At a critical time like this? A man without any political experience?
Doubts hovered over a party I attended when he world first learned that the next president of Czechoslovakia would most likely be the author of The Memorandum, The Garden party, and other pieces written in the Beckettian vein of modern drama. A guest, known for his distrust of gloomy news about conditions in the workers' paradise, grumbled, "At least he isn't an actor!"
Václav Havel is not an actor (although he did appear in amateur theatricals and a secretly taped studio production of his Audience), but no matter how many differences there are between the two men, of one thing I'm pretty sure: Havel would not call Regan's notorious characterization of the USSR an "unjustifiable simplification." Havel's life is an indication that though the former U.S. president's bon mot may be a simplification - after all, concise definitions always are - it is hardly an unjustifiable one. As a highly idealistic man of deep civil morality, Havel has been fighting evil in both its abstract philosophical and concrete political forms ever since he was a teenager, because he has lived his life in a Soviet colony.
The will to create
Havel's encounter with the simplifications of Marxism Leninism was intense, since he born into a family of enterprising capitalists. His great-great-grandfather was a wealthy miller, his grandfather an architect who built some of the handsomest fin de siecle houses in Prague and also the legendary Lucerne, a sort of Carnegie Hall of Czechoslovakia, a multipurpose building that housed Prague's most famous nightclub - the very first Czech jazz bands performed there - and, above all, a huge concert-cum-dance hall, the site of events that punctuated the fortunes of the capital city throughout the century.
The Communist Party, thanks to the liberal-minded father of Václav Havel, had its rallies in the barnlike space in the thirties, and swing bands of the forties made no-Aryan noise to spite the Nazis under its gilded ceiling. There rock and roll was reintroduced after the post invasion ban to serenade the communists. Havel's father added to this mythopoeic building a public swimming pool with an attached café-cum-nightclub. From this fabled café one can walk along a winding row of beautiful cubist villas, also built by Havel's father, to the great film studios on Barrandov Hill, the creation of Havel's uncle Milos, an enthusiastic film
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