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.
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