in a double-bill. The third author, Jiśí Dienstbier, not only wrote a Vanek play, he included the brewmaster, too. I had been trumped three times over before I had played my card. (What made it all the more piquant was that I had put Kohout into a play of mine, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, which was staged in London in the same month Kohout’s first Vanek play—he wrote two more—was receiving its premiere in Vienna.)
By the time I caught up on all this,1 Ferdinand had lost his surname anyway. I didn’t know, when I began, that in the second half of my play it would be Jan, and not Ferdinand, who would be Havel’s spirit. I ought to have realised that I wouldn’t be able to—or wish to—sustain Jan as a cautious dissenter from dissent. Whether or not Tomas (that is, I myself) would have signed the Charter and gone jobless or even to gaol is something I’ll never know, but if, in my parallel biography, I had kept my head below the parapet, it would have been out of fear and timidity, not out of disagreement with Havel’s philosophical and political writing.
Jan, at any rate, changes. He no longer takes his cues from Kundera or Vaculik, or from the bohemian underground, which deprecated the ‘official opposition’ of banned writers, artists and intellectuals (‘a bunch of tossers’). In the second act, he takes over Vanek’s mantle from Ferdinand, at least by implication. In temperament Vanek could not really be either a Ferdinand or a Jan; his nature is too polite and reticent. But Jan now takes his cues from Havel.
The most important sources for the ‘Czech arguments’ in this play are the essays, articles and letters written by Havel between 1968 and the 1990s. I’d had most of them on my shelves since publication but had been lazy about reading them properly. (An exception was a speech, ‘Politics and Conscience’, read out in absentia in Toulouse when Havel was awarded an honorary doctorate from that university but prevented from travelling there to receive it. At his request I represented him on that occasion.) When I did read them all within the space of a few weeks in 2004 I was left with an overwhelming sense of humility and pride in having a friend of such bravery, humanity and clear-sighted moral intelligence; who, moreover, as was clear even in translation, was as complex and subtle in his long paragraphs as he was adroit in his dialogues. The open letter titled ‘Dear Dr. Husák’ (1975) and the long essay, ninety pages in my edition, called ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978) were influential in their own time and place, but transcend both and will continue to be important wherever ‘living in truth’ requires not merely conscience but courage.2
*
Rock ‘n’ Roll manages to allude to only a tiny fraction of Havel’s writing. The Toulouse speech by itself is a mine of timely reminders of the need to put morality above politics, and nature above scientific triumphalism; to return life to its human scale, and language to its human meaning; to recognise that socialism and capitalism in their selfish forms are different routes to global totalitarianism. A later essay, ‘Stories and Totalitarianism’ (1987), provides Jan with his dialogue about there being ‘no stories in Czechoslovakia … We aim for inertia. We mass-produce banality’; and about pseudo-history in pseudo-newspapers. The assertion that Czechoslovakia’s need is deeper than a return to Western democracy is one of a hundred striking moments in ‘The Power of the Powerless’. It is in the same essay that Havel observes that ‘living in truth’ could be any means by anyone who rebels against being manipulated by the Communist regime: it could be attending a rock concert.
*
Even if Rock ‘n’ Roll were entirely about the Czech experience between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, it could only hope to be a diagram. Yet, a diagram can pick out lines of force which may be faint or dotted on the intricate map of history that takes in all accounts. Rock ‘n’ Roll crystalised around one short essay by Havel, ‘The Trial’ (1976), and a few pages in a book-length interview from 1985. (Havel worked on the transcript, which became the first samizdat book to be legally published in post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Translated by Paul Wilson under the title Disturbing the Peace, it was published in England by Faber and Faber in 1990.)
The interviewer, Karel Hvizdala, asked about the origin of Charter 77. Havel’s reply began like this:
For me personally, it all began sometime in January or February 1976. I was at Hradecek, alone, there was snow everywhere, a night blizzard was raging outside. I was writing something, and suddenly there was a pounding on the door, I opened it, and there stood a friend of mine, whom I don’t wish to name, half-frozen and covered with snow. We spent the night discussing things over a bottle of cognac he’d brought with him. Almost as an aside, this friend suggested that I meet Ivan Jirous … I already knew Jirous; I’d met him about twice in the late 1960s but I hadn’t seen him since then. Occasionally I would hear wild and, as I discovered later, quite distorted stories about the group of people that had gathered round him, which he called the underground, and about the Plastic People of the Universe, a nonconformist rock group that was at the centre of this society; Jirous was their artistic director.
Havel goes on to explain that Jirous’s opinion of him ‘was not exactly flattering either: he apparently saw me as a member of the official, and officially tolerated, opposition—in other words, a member of the establishment’.
Havel and Jirous met in Prague a month later: ‘His hair was down to his shoulders, other long-haired people would come and go, and he talked and talked and told me how things were.’
Jirous played Havel songs by the Plastic People on an old tape-recorder. ‘There was disturbing magic in the music, and a kind of inner warning. Here was something serious and genuine … Suddenly I realised that, regardless of how many vulgar words these people used or how long their hair was, truth was on their side; … in their music was an experience of metaphysical sorrow and a longing for salvation.’
Jirous and Havel went to a pub and talked through the night. It was arranged that Havel would go to their next ‘secret’ concert in two weeks’ time, but before that happened Jirous and the band were arrested, along with other members of the underground.
Havel set about getting support for the prisoners, but among the people who might have helped almost no one knew them, and those who did tended to think of them as layabouts, hooligans, and drug addicts. They were at first inclined to see the case as a criminal affair. But for Havel it was ‘an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity’.
Somewhat to his surprise, his contacts quickly got the point: the ‘criminals’ were simply young people who wanted to live in harmony with themselves, and to express themselves in a truthful way. If this judicial attack went unchallenged, the regime could well start locking up anyone who thought and expressed himself independently, even in private.
The Plastic People affair became a cause célèbre. The regime backtracked, and started releasing most of those arrested. Ultimately, Jirous and three others came to trial in Prague in September 1976. Havel attended the trial and wrote about it: this was the other text—‘The Trial’—which was a focal point in the writing of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Milan Hlavsa, who died in 2001, formed the Plastic People of the Universe (he took the name from a song by the American rock musician Frank Zappa) in September 1968 when he was nineteen. The fact that the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia had occurred in August was not immediately relevant: ‘We just loved Rock ‘n’ Roll and wanted to be famous.’ The occupation by the Warsaw Pact armies was background, ‘the harsh reality’, but ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll wasn’t just music to us, it was kind of life itself. Hlavsa made the point more than once in his interviews. The band was not interested in bringing down Communism, only in finding a free space for itself inside the Communist society.
But of course there was no such space, and the story that Rock ‘n’ Roll is
