R.I.P., Václav Havel

I'm not usually in the habit of quoting myself, but until I have a chance to write a better memoriam, I thought I'd trot this out.

When I taught at Cornell College in Iowa, the local newspaper ran a weekly essay column to which faculty from the three local colleges contributed. I wrote this piece on Havel, which appeared under the headline “Havel Dedicated to Illuminating Truth” (I didn't write the headline) in the August 13, 1990 edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

In subsequent years, I would play the leading role in Largo Desolato and direct both The Memorandum and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. Havel always figured prominently in my “Uncle Norb lecture,” which seeks to dispel the inane but ubiquitous canard that we in theatre don't do anything that “matters.” He was brilliant; he was passionate; he was playful; he was iconoclastic; he was indomitable. I feel his loss deeply and personally. But the business of telling the truth goes on. Here's to you, Václav.

Without further ado, here's the piece...


Ever since Plato expelled poets from his Republic, artists have been viewed with a mixture of distrust and contempt by those involved in the “real” business of politics. Even in the Renaissance, artistic dabbling was encouraged, but for a Prince to develop the skill actually to write as well as a poet or to paint as well as an artist was to fritter away time better spent learning the affairs of state. It is not surprising, then, that journalists today cannot resist the hint of a smirk when referring to Czechoslovakia's “playwright-president,” Václav Havel.

Of course, other writers and theatre people have recently played important roles in international affairs. Acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was a leading candidate for the Peruvian presidency; Karol Wojtyla was an established playwright and co-founder of a theatre before devoting himself exclusively to more sacred pursuits as Pope John-Paul II; Ronald Reagan was an actor. But unlike the self-consciously intellectual Vargas Llosa, who was thrashed in this spring's elections by the crowd-pleasing Alberto Fujimori, Havel, the “amateur politician” and former brewery worker, appeals to the entire spectrum of society. And while opinions vary widely about Reagan's political legacy, no one seriously employs any derivative of the word “art” to describe his acting career. Similarly, Wojtyla's plays are theologically and even narratively sophisticated, but theatrically static: they are dialogic but not dramatic. That the same could be said of Plato is perhaps not without significance.

By contrast, Havel is a true artist, probably the greatest playwright in the history of his country, both technically skilled and dedicated to the illumination of truth at all cost. His plays combine many of the best elements of Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller, all of whom have dedicated works to him; one can also see the influences of Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, and Havel's fellow Prague native, Franz Kafka.

In The Memorandum (1968), the central character, Gross, heads an unnamed government agency. After authorizing the circumvention of a silly regulation, he allows himself to be half blackmailed, half cajoled, by an amoral underling into approving a new synthetic language called Ptydepe. Said to make communication more “efficient,” Ptydepe mandates that every word must differ from every other word of equal length by at least sixty per cent of its letters. Further, words are assigned to concepts by the relative frequency of their use: the more often a word is used, the shorter it will be. Hence, the shortest word in the language, “ng,” means “whatever”; the word for “wombat” has 319 letters.

Gross spends most of the play trying to decipher a Ptydepe memorandum he had received, only to discover that the memorandum in question had officially terminated the use of Ptydepe, and that another new language, based on a totally different set of “efficient” principles would be introduced in its stead. That Havel's immediate targets were Stalinization and post-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia is clear. But his indictments of bureaucratic senselessness, of the irrational quest for rationality, and, most importantly, of moral cowardice, apply undeniably to every person in every society.

Havel takes up the question of moral courage again in Largo Desolato (1985). The central character here is Professor Leopold Nettles, author of the politically controversial The Ontology of the Human Self. Confronted on one side by supporters who expect him single-handedly to continue his intellectual campaign, on the other by a government trying to make him recant, Nettles lives in constant mental turmoil and fear. Ultimately, the government agents break him down by removing the threat of prison, for Nettles' very identity is defined by his confrontation with the authorities. The play demonstrates on the one hand society's eagerness to have its moral battles fought by an isolated champion, a scapegoat in the restrictive sense of the term; on the other hand, it speaks to the often unbearable burden such a person must take on. And Havel, who has spent much of his adult life as a political prisoner, knows whereof he speaks.

Havel's most recent play to receive English translation is Temptation (1986), a variation on the Faust legend. The central character, Dr. Foustka, experiments with the occult while simultaneously carrying on his career at “the Institute,” where “scientific” research seeks to eliminate “irrational tendencies.” But Foustka plays both ends against the middle; too late does he realize that in compromising moral values for physical salvation, he loses everything. The Doctor's last words are a scathing denunciation of those who would use science as a means of restricting rather than expanding knowledge, but Havel ironically undercuts Foustka's presumed altruism by having the Institute's director pronounce the Doctor's speech “banal.” “In countries without censorship every halfway clever little hack journalist churns out stuff like this these days,” he says. Of course, when Havel was writing Temptation, Czechoslovakia was not “without censorship”: from 1969-89, Havel's plays were banned in his homeland. Havel understands that it is far easier cynically to label a concept “banal” than to fight for it against long odds. Moral and intellectual apathy, in short, are just as restrictive as repressive legislation.

In awarding Havel the Erasmus Prize in 1986, the foundation directors wrote, “It is the search for truth in its purest form that drives him; a truth which is inseparable from a desire for impartiality and which should be looked for primarily in oneself. . . . by its nature, the search for truth does not admit any compromise for external reasons.” Indeed, this search defines Václav Havel, both as playwright and as politician. When Havel mesmerized a joint session of the American congress this February, he did so not because his rhetoric was brilliant (although it was), but because in an era of largely justified cynicism about the ethics of American politicians, here, clearly, was a man who calmly and graciously spoke not only truths, but truth.

Czechoslovakians realize that Havel is no savior, simply an honest and gifted man doing what he can. But they share with their leader a quiet faith in the perfectibility of government and of our species in general. Havel will find some obstacles insurmountable; some members of his administration, possibly even Havel himself, will doubtless fail to achieve reasonable standards of competence, perhaps even of morality. But it strikes me that Czechoslovakia is in very good hands indeed, and that Václav Havel's political career will go on for some time. That's unfortunate, in a way: playwrights of his calibre are as rare as honest politicians, and Havel is unlikely to have much time to write.

A teaching philosophy of sorts

A series of unrelated events over the last few days has reminded me of the Teaching Excellence Award I received four years ago. An office dredge (still in progress) unearthed the plaque from beneath a small mountain of detritus. A good friend from grad school “liked” one of the official photographs of the festivities (not the one shown here, by the way) on my Facebook page. A request from my boss for information about my research agenda sent me to my curriculum vita. And, most recently, a no doubt futile attempt to quell the proliferation of icons on my computer screen led me to the text of my remarks on that occasion—we (the recipients from each of the colleges at the university) were given two to three minutes to discuss our “teaching philosophy.”

I operate under no illusions that such awards actually mean anything. Oh, I found room on my CV to mention receiving it, and I certainly cashed the check. But to suggest that I’m “better” than literally dozens of my colleagues in the College of Fine Arts (or that I wasn’t as good as whoever won the award the five previous years) on this basis is downright silly.

Still, I kind of like what I had to say that day, and I thought I’d share it:

In the past few days I’ve talked about Charles Darwin and Josef Stalin and Don Imus in my theatre classes. Today, I’d like to reverse that paradigm and talk about theatre as a means of discussing something else.

We start with Konstantin Stanislavski, who revolutionized the way actors approach their work by suggesting that an actor, as character, should pursue an objective. But he also said that an objective is playable only if there is an obstacle, something to overcome or circumvent. But teaching without learning is irrelevant; learning without teaching is sufficient. And since there is no obstacle to teaching, my objective (and therefore my philosophy) can’t be about teaching, but about facilitating learning... and I do think this is more than a mere semantic distinction. No one else in the room might agree with me, but I suspect the actors will.

All of which means that for “teaching” to occur, we need learners who are open-minded and curious and unashamed of intellect. Sometimes they come pre-packaged that way. But, for all the fact that we in the School of Theatre get at least our share of starry-eyed post-adolescents, I would suggest that relatively few come to us in the fond hope that someday, somehow, they, too, might become... theatre historians. And what that means is that it becomes my job to inspire, to stimulate, to catalyze engagement. Exactly how we go about accomplishing that is a matter of personal style rather than a “philosophy.” But there is one constant: passion. A former colleague used to say that “teaching is easy. Just find something that you find so interesting that you can’t not tell somebody else.” And, by extension, keep telling them until they “get it.”

Linked to this is the lesson of Max Reinhardt, who was one of the first directors to employ different production approaches for different kinds of plays, an idea that seems self-evident today but was actually rather radical in its time. The lesson for us is not only that different courses require different approaches, but also that different students respond to different strategies, and we have to do what we can to reach them all.

Finally, one more parallel between teaching/learning and acting. A theatre historian isn’t “good” because he knows what year the Dionysian Festival was founded any more than an actor is “good” because he remembers his lines. Those aren’t endpoints, they’re places to start. And that, really, is centerpiece of anything I could reasonably call my “teaching philosophy.” Our job as students and teachers alike isn’t to memorize lists and names and dates and formulae, it’s to problem-solve, to search for the truth, whether that that truth is to be discovered (like a law of physics) or created (like a work of art). We must always be unsatisfied with Conventional Wisdom, and we must remember, in the words of the great playwright Oscar Wilde,“the truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

I seem to have been pretty smart four years ago. There is no accounting for what happened in the interim.

Of Memorial Days Past and Present

When I think of the Memorial Days of yesteryear, I remember three things. The least relevant, although I would argue not the least significant, was listening to the Indianapolis 500 on the radio (we didn’t have a TV) with my Dad. Neither of us knew anything about auto racing, and neither of us paid any attention to other auto races. But the Indy 500 was special because… well, because we listened to it together.

Far more directly related to the day itself was the parade. I watched it for a couple of years as a little boy, then got to march in it as a Cub Scout and subsequently as a Boy Scout. It was a fairly lengthy parade route, starting at the top of the hill in New Paltz, NY, then going down (literally down) Main Street until we took one left turn that led us before long to the fire station, where there were speeches appropriate to the occasion and a 21-gun salute to the brave men who never came back from the war… whatever war.

There were still a couple of veterans from the Spanish-American War and more than a handful from World War I. It made a big impression on me that these men spoke so lovingly of their fallen comrades, all these years later. Most of the vets in attendance, of course, had served in World War II or Korea. The Vietnam conflict had started, but I was an experienced Memorial Day marcher before there were significant American casualties there.

Memorial Day was a time both for somber reflection and for celebration: for a recognition of the sacrifices made by soldiers and sailors past, and for a reckoning of the blessings accorded to the rest of us by their service. The brief ceremony as we stood on the grounds of the fire station, supported by the high school band and pep squad, was more than a little slice of Rockwellian Americana, although it was certainly that. It was a time when we collectively stopped our internal bickering and sought—and found—common ground. For at least a few minutes, we were not Republicans and Democrats, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. We were Americans, with all the joys and sorrows that entails.

But I promised you three memories. The third happened only once. It was 1973, my senior year of high school. By now, the romantic view of America had eroded more than a little in violence at home and abroad. We’d lived through a tumultuous decade, bookended by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the currently mounting evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors associated with the Watergate break-in that would lead to the resignation of another President the following year. We’d seen race riots and police brutality against anti-war protestors, an explosion of drug culture and a new (or at least newly named) phenomenon called the “generation gap.”

Against this backdrop, I, as a 17-year-old just beginning to understand that some of the high school friends I’d made a couple years earlier were now coming home from a war I didn’t support in Southeast Asia in flag-draped boxes, was asked to read the Memorial Day proclamation at the ceremonies in my (new) hometown of Cortland, NY. I had won the American Legion Oratorical Contest for the county that spring, and apparently that made me the appropriate choice for this responsibility. Anyway, I was provided with the speech I was to read—one of the first proclamations of Memorial Day, dating from the period of or immediately after the Civil War.

My recollection is that it was originally written and/or presented by one of the Confederate women often credited with establishing the tradition that became our current holiday. I have tried unsuccessfully to locate the speech. I’m pretty sure I’d recognize it if I saw it, but I don’t remember enough of it to have as much as a keyword to search for. One thing I am certain of is that it wasn’t General Logan’s proclamation (linked below).

What I remember most about the speech was that it was remarkably convoluted. It took me hours of study to figure out what that page-and-a-half-long oration meant, so that my interpretation of it could do it justice. Apparently, the high-schoolers given the same responsibility as mine in years past hadn’t bothered: a number of veterans who had obviously attended these ceremonies for decades thanked me for making that document’s meaning clear to them for the first time. I remember, too, that I had to really project: I was standing behind a makeshift podium in a city park; there was no microphone. It was then, not in the play I’d acted in a few weeks earlier, that I came to realize that there’s a difference between being loud and being heard: a lesson that, at the time, I thought (incorrectly) would never again be relevant in my life.

One thing I found in trying to prepare for that oration was that Memorial Day is one of the most curious of American holidays because no one knows how it really started. There are legitimate claims that the “first Memorial Day” took place in Charleston, SC; in Boalsburg, PA; in Macon, GA; in Carbondale, IL. Indeed, over two dozen towns tout their credentials as the birthplace of the holiday. Officially, i.e., according to a resolution authorized by President Johnson in 1966, the first ceremony took place in Waterloo, NY, a little over an hour from where I stood that May day in 1973. What is clear from all this is the simple fact that, across the country, there was a felt need in the 1860’s for this kind of commemoration: literally dozens of similar ceremonies seem to have sprouted up, completely independent of each other.

The formalization of the observance is generally traced to an 1868 proclamation by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans organization. The selection of May 30 as Memorial Day (prior to the 1971 move to the last Monday in May—a move many traditionalists still disdain) is thought to have come from two sources: a belief that on that day, fresh flowers would be available all over the country (remember, this is nearly a century before Alaskan statehood), and its correspondence to the French “Day of Ashes,” which marked the return to France from St. Helena of Napoleon’s remains.

What is interesting, however, is that many if not most of the legendary stories about “the first Memorial Day” involve two things: women as prime movers, and a respect for the opposition. The story of Columbus, Mississippi can be taken as exemplary. The city’s official website tells the bare-bones version: “According to local historians it is here that Memorial Day got its start when the young women of the town decorated the graves of fallen soldiers on both sides of that great conflict.” There’s a longer description by “Spook86” on the In from the Cold blog:

More than a thousand men died on each side at Shiloh, and many more were wounded. With few hospitals in the area surrounding the battlefield, scores of wounded men were evacuated to the city of Columbus, 80 miles south of Pittsburg Landing. The lucky ones made the trip by train; the rest made the excruciating journey by wagon, across bumpy roads.

Given the limits of military medicine during that era, hundreds of wounded soldiers who survived the battle died days or weeks later in Columbus. Many of them were buried in Friendship Cemetery, which remains a local landmark.

By some accounts, the ladies of Columbus visited the cemetery in late April of 1862, decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers who were killed at Shiloh, or succumbed from their wounds after the battle. They resumed the practice on April 25, 1866. Noticing that the graves of Union soldiers went undecorated, the women of Columbus placed flowers on the burial plots of their former enemies.

Columbus wasn't the only American town to remember the war dead in that spring of 1866. But it could be argued that the Mississippi commemoration had the most impact. The simple act of generosity and reconciliation was noted in Horace Greely's New York Tribune and it inspired [Francis] Miles Finch's poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” which became required memorization for generations of school children.

There are those who, probably correctly, think that much of the meaning of Memorial Day has been eroded in recent years. That is, perhaps, inevitable. Recent wars—Vietnam and Iraq in particular—have been politically controversial, and not everyone is able to separate the warrior from the war. More specifically, the rhetoric that resonated in my mind as a boy seems more strained now. Dying to make the world safe from Hitler remains a noble sacrifice; dying to prevent Saddam Hussein from doing what he couldn’t have done if he’d wanted to seems more pathetic than tragic.

Of course, that changes nothing with respect to how we ought to view our troops themselves, and especially to how we ought to perceive those who made what has tritely but accurately come to be called “the ultimate sacrifice.” But perhaps equally importantly, we need to remember the spirit of those women in Mississippi nearly a century and a half ago. They paid respect to those who fought and died, even those who had been their enemies in doing so. It was a gesture of humility, of grace, and above all of reconciliation. We could use a little of those qualities about now.

I close with a variation on my Memorial Day Facebook status for the past few years. The best way to honor our fallen heroes is to create a nation worthy of their sacrifice: where people matter more than profits; where political battles are won by those with the best ideas, not the best slogans; and where the right to serve is never denied to anyone with the courage, the skill, and the patriotism to do so.

On this Memorial Day, I wish you peace.