The early hot spring and summer of 1968 meant various things to different people, but for Havel it was a time of being surrounded by friends. It all began with a delicious surprise. On his way from Prague to New York in early May, accompanied by his wife Olga, he had a scheduled two-hour stopover at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.167 Taking advantage of the political thaw in Prague, Havel had telephoned in advance a man named Pavel Tigrid, who lived in Paris as editor of the most important Czech émigré literary quarterly journal, Svědectví (Witness). Havel yearned to greet him for the first time. Not only did he want to talk face-to-face with the editor to whose magazíne he had contributed some pieces in recent years. Havel was also busily collecting material for a series of radio programmes on Czech émigrés, and Pavel Tigrid was an important part of the story of the tragic scattering of Czech talent around the world by twentieth-century power politics. The editor of Svédectví had not only seen a good deal of life on both sides of the Iron Curtain. His life was coterminous with the twentieth century. Born in 1917, he had grown up in the new Republic of Czechoslovakia, only to witness its destruction while studying at Charles University. He first went into exile during the Nazi occupation, to Britain, where in London he spent the war years working as a radio journalist for the BBC. Tigrid — affectionately codenamed ‘the old man’ (nestor) by Havel in their subterranean correspondence — returned home in 1945, to become editor of a national weekly. But in 1948, after the coup de Prague, he moved to West Germany, then to the United States, and then finally to Paris, the base from which he devoted his time to spinning the precious gossamer threads connecting otherwise isolated writers who represented what remained of independently-minded Czech and Slovak literary culture. KGB agents described him as a ‘reactionary American agent’; naturally, they kept him under their magnifying glass.168
Havel had no knowledge of the geography of Charles de Gaulle airport. Nor did he have a visa to allow him to exit into the main terminal building. The wise Tigrid had promised Havel on the telephone that he would do everything to ensure that they met. He had instructed Havel to stay in the transit lounge. ‘Make yourself visible to people waiting in the arrivals section of the airport, and keep your eyes open,’ he had said. And suddenly there he stood. Thirty metres away, separated by security barriers, immigration officials and thick plate-glass windows, the short, greying, bearded editor smiled and waved, his delighted eyes fixed on the denim-jacketed, long-haired young playwright. The pair briefly put on a mime show, with the desperate Tigrid gesturing to the Havels to stay put. He then hurried to the nearby Air France sales desk, to join a queue of ticket-purchasers.
Time was preciously short. Only one hour before the Havels were to set off for Prague, perhaps never to return. Tigrid acted fast. He had brought enough cash to buy a ticket to ride — out of the country to nearby Brussels, or to Amsterdam, or Zurich. The destination was irrelevant. So was the price. It was not even a question of paying a price worth paying. Friendship was after all at stake. There is a saying that a friend in the market is better than money in the chest, which is to say that friendship is more and other than a monetary matter. Genuine friendship does not know the rules of selfish calculation. Friends have no interest in profit. Friends prove their friendship in times of need. They share all things in common. Friends are sincere with each other; they are a second self; they are generous; their requests do not wait until tomorrow to be satisfied; they are not vain. Friends are certainly a source of disagreement, sorrow, bitterness. But friendship ends when those qualities triumph; that is to say, friendship is an elixir of civility. Friends are non-identical, pure equals. Friendship is a relationship of mutual empowerment. It is not built on unequal power. ‘Friends are an aid to the young, to guard them from error,’ wrote Aristotle, ‘to the elderly, to attend to their wants, and to supplement their failing power of action; to those in the prime of life, to assist them to noble deeds.’169 And all this is chosen. Relatives are bound together by nature and saddled with fate, but friends make themselves by choice. Friendship is a form of public freedom.
Tigrid moved towards the head of the queue. He would have to explain quickly, cut the chortle, race through immigration, and make a mercy dash to the transit terminal, with luck into the arms of strangers. Imagine then his bewilderment when, at precisely that moment, the officials behind the Air France desk slapped a ‘Closed’ sign on the counter and began turning off lights, locking doors, picking up bags, and walking off the job. So did all the other officials in the nearby airport departments. Even the immigration section stopped guarding the arrival and departure gates. Suddenly the barriers between East and West collapsed. Travellers and well-wishers alike were magically free to move wherever they liked. Borders were meaningless. Identity papers were obsolete. Surveillance was just a word. Nobody asked questions. The distinction between citizen and alien, between insider and outsider, was struck down. Everybody was equal. Havel and his editor were free to lock together in a warm embrace. It was a meeting whose time and place were to be noted and never to be forgotten. It was the early morning of Monday, 13 May in the international transit lounge of Charles de Gaulle airport. It was the first day of a half-planned, half-spontaneous general work stoppage organized by the left-wing parties and such trade unions as the CGT, the CFDT, and the FEN (National Federation of Education). The glorious May Days had begun.
During the next few days, as guest of Tigrid and his wife, Havel breathed the spring air of free and independent Czech culture in exile. It was thrilling to discuss Kafka and čapek and Seifert in exotic circumstances. Paris was in a state of pre-revolutionary upheaval, and through their hosts’ eyes, and with their help as translators from French into Czech, the Havels witnessed breathtaking scenes and events, mainly on television. On the afternoon of their arrival, between 600,000 and 1 million demonstrators (the estimates were always contested politically) marched their way across the city. At various rally points, speaker after speaker denounced the government’s deaf ears and heavy hands and accused the riot police of provoking the worst street-fighting witnessed by Parisians this century. There were graphic descriptions of the use of toxic grenades, of innocents torn from their cars and from cafés and beaten, of several women raped by police in the streets. Speakers described how, in recent days, students had fought back by building the first barricades seen in Paris since 1944, and by forming thousands of comités d’action, whose aim was to establish counter-institutions of grassroots democracy outside the existing political structures. The huge crowds jeered when speakers quoted the week-old words of the Minister of Education, who had claimed that the disorder was caused by ‘students playing at revolution’. Mention in public of the ORTF (the French equivalent of the BBC) produced scowling talk of ignorance and bias. There was wild applause at the announcement that its technicians had just joined the general strike. But — this reaction on the streets was telling of the wider mood of insurrection — the loudest hoots of irreverent laughter were reserved for the oft-repeated words of Georges Pompidou, the Prime Minister. Two days earlier he had addressed the country: ‘Iask everyone,’ he had pleaded, ‘and in particular those who are leaders of representative student organizations, to reject the provocations of a few professional agitators and to co-operate.’ He had added: ‘For my part, I am ready for peace.’
That evening, as the Havels feasted on a home-cooked meal of venison, red cabbage and dumplings with their new friends, students armed with red flags settled into their occupation of the Sorbonne, which was declared open to the people, no longer a hierarchical institution, a place where ‘labourers and workers are invited to come and discuss their common problems with the university students’. From this time the Sorbonne became the shop window of the uprising. It was the front line (as Daniel Cohn-Bendit said) against the France of Aunt Yvonne — enclosed, conservative, unable to understand that the world around it was changing. The Sorbonne housed many of the action committees set up by the general assembly of students, which met nightly in the courtyard to take decisions. Permanent teach-ins, debates and entertainment were organized. The style of action soon spread. During their week in Paris, the Havels witnessed the occupation of nearly every university in the country. Many university administrators threatened to resign unless the government stopped interfering and guaranteed full university autonomy. Two-thirds of lycées in Paris went on strike. Many regional towns experienced the first-ever demonstrations since the Liberation. Comités d’action were set up in the Renault plants, Citroën, Air-France, Rhône-Poulenc and the RATP (Parisian underground). Some workers and trade-union branches began to prepare for a long strike, and street battles with the police became commonplace. The École Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique in Paris were occupied. For the first time, the ORTF workers voted for a total strike against government interference and in support of the principle of public-service broadcasting. And (Havel noted) the Odéon, the national theatre, was occupied by demonstrators who declared it open to the public for discussion and cultural expression and as a meeting place for artists, students, and workers.
Despite the near-paralysis of public transport in strike-bound Paris — the government and CGT-led crackdown on the rebellion was yet to come — Pavel Tigrid managed to get his friends safely to the airport in time to catch their Czechoslovak Airlines flight on to the United States. It was a tearful ending, succoured only by the thought that friendship is more easily kept than it is made. Then came New York. There he walked the streets, listened to ‘beat music’, grew his sandy hair, sported an ‘Elect Robert Kennedy’ badge, and made more friends. In Jackson Heights, he was invited to the apartment of the famous pipe-smoking Czech journalist, Ferdinand Peroutka. They argued about the Prague Spring — Peroutka advised Havel to go slowly, and not to irritate the Russians170 — and attended the première of Havel’s Memorandum. He also gave an interview to The New York Times, in which he called for Czechoslovak legislation ‘to remove censorship and guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of assembly’, and reportedly said that ‘swift political action by liberals in Czechoslovakia is necessary now, while the opportunity exists to make the country more democratic’.171 He followed up these remarks in London a few weeks later in an impressive BBC Late Night Line Up interview with Joan Bakewell. Dressed in a turtleneck jumper, looking well fed and squeaky-clean, he told her that for him personally it was a good period, and that more freedom — probably — was coming to his country.172
Havel returned to Prague during the last week of June, in time for an address to the Fourth Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress, during which he praised the ‘supreme, self-reliant poise’ of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and warned that ‘instead of uttering a thousand bold words, of which a hundred are later gradually retracted, it is always better to utter only a hundred, but to stand behind them to the bitter end’.173 Havel was clearly exhilarated, both by his taste of the West and his return to the East. But he was exhausted by his travels, which is why he wanted most of all to spend the rest of the summer relaxing in the countryside. The previous year Havel had bought a house and some land in the village of Hrádeček, near Trutnov, near the Polish border, 130 kilometres north-east of Prague. Hrádeček took its name from the nearby ruined small castle called Břecštejn. The village comprised a dozen or so houses. The ethnic Germans who had originally lived there were cruelly removed during the pogroms that swept through the country following the military defeat of Nazism. Among the new, Czech occupants was Mr Kulhának, who by 1967 wanted to sell the farmlet, where for four decades he had raised rabbits and goats for local sale. Through Andrej Krob, Kulhának’s next-door neighbour, the deal was struck — with Havel, for the relatively modest sum of 24,000 crowns, some part of which probably was paid out of his foreign-currency earnings.
Havel was keen (perhaps to keep the authorities off his back) to hang the sign of modesty on his new purchase. He always subsequently spoke of his new purchase as a ‘cottage’, but the small castle in name was in reality grander than that. It rather resembled ‘a little country estate’ (said his good friend Jan Tříska, who spent the whole summer of 1968 there). Havel employed a live-in servant, a simple young man named Karel švorčík (nicknamed Kešot), who looked like a bearded Russian peasant, drank rum by the litre, and worked quietly as a handyman, sous-chef, waiter, and loyal Czech bodyguard.174 The little estate also included an orchard, which yielded good crops of apples, plums and pears, and a large stand of century-old beech trees, some of them measuring three hands in circumference. The main house, which included Havel’s study that opened out on to the orchard, was flanked by a robust barn and a good-sized stable, and the whole property was surrounded by rolling wooded hills and, during summertime, meadows carpeted in blackberry and gooseberry bushes, burdock and sweet-smelling flowers.
Hrádeček needed some immediate refurbishment, and that summer, after planting some front lawn with Olga, Havel himself carefully designed and built a flat-stone pathway leading through the garden from the front door — even working by torchlight well into the night so as to complete the job before new guests arrived from Prague. A multitude of friends there was that summer. Friends came as individuals and in groups, in all shapes and sizes, sometimes overlapping so that the property bulged with housewarming well-wishers. Each person arriving was welcomed with a blast from the Hrádeček hi-fi set of the Bee Gees’ love song ‘Massachusetts’. It had been a big hit in America and England, and Václav adored its soft guitar and classical sounds and carefully crafted vocals; perhaps its sentimental talk of love, hitching a ride to San Francisco, and coming home also convinced him to use it as a stirring anthem for the new summer retreat. Havel — the compulsive dramatist — played the role of a generous and charming host who attended to the mise-en-scène.
For some guests, the daily routine began at sunrise. Others preferred to sleep in, and then, encouraged by splendid weather, to sit lazily in garden chairs in front of the house, in the shade, sipping cups of black tea, or coffee, or morning glasses of Pilsener beer, story-telling, laughing, and discussing philosophy, art and politics. During the daytime, there was plenty of tomfoolery. Havel and Tříska, for example, spun elaborate jokes about the fact that their idiosyncratic fathers had each owned a thermometer containing three scales (Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Réaumur); and they decided to found the International Organization for Rescuing René Antoine Ferchauld de Réaumur from the Abyss of Condemnation by Science, with Havel as its elected president. The new incumbent (Havel) jokily pressed the point that Réaumur had been hard done by. ‘Just because water boils at 80 degrees on the Réaumur scale is no reason to discriminate against him,’ he would say, all the while cautioning against conspiracy theories. ‘Celsius was Swedish. Fahrenheit was a German born in Poland. And our Monsieur Réaumur was French. So there’s no reason to suspect that he was the victim of an extreme nationalist plot..,’175
There was reportedly much serious interaction as well. Conversations were ‘sharp, competent, inspiring, noteworthy, even educational’.176 And there was tranquillity. Olga would often appear later than the rest. She would wander outside silently, aloof from the others’ good mornings, unlit cigarette and box of matches in separate hands. During the day, friends chatted with the Havels, helped tidy up, odd-jobbed around the property, played music — a large collection of LPs had been brought back from America and England — drank wine, went swimming in local ponds or walking in nearby woods, or made love quietly in some tight corner.
The evening dinners — Havel called them jolly parties’(veselé večírky) — were definitely the highlight of the day. Havel did most of the cooking — Olga always confessed her preference for theoretical cooking and reading recipe books — and by all reports he tried to show off by preparing ‘interesting’ dishes. Grilled chicken was always popular; his penchant for spicy food, like devil’s goulash and tangy sauerkraut, was the source of some jesting and quipping. There was usually a banquet setting, with a large lace tablecloth, candles, frivolous dressing and mock speeches. The cellar at Hrádeček was stocked full of luscious Moravian wine, and so naturally was the dinner table. There was polite conversation, gossip, loud laughter, drunken prattle, seduction, talk of art. And the guest named politics naturally dined at the table.
After several hard years of writing and literary politicking, Havel felt like a rest from official politics that summer. It wasn’t to be. He shared in the widespread hope that the Czechoslovak Communist Party would show its human face, and, political animal to the core, he was therefore naturally reluctant to ignore the dozens of political stories and rumours delivered first-hand from Prague. He suspected (and top-secret records subsequently showed) that he was under surveillance, that along with Milan Kundera and others he was being described as a conspirator in an ‘underground anti-Party group’ that was hell-bent on undermining the foundations of socialism in the čSSR, and turning ‘the country gradually on to the path of capitalist development’.177 The description resembled the most wooden of lines from one of his absurdist plays, which is perhaps why he found it impossible that summer to ignore the political thunderstorms that became world-wide media events.’ We were self-confident, rebellious and intensely happy... everything seemed so simple’178, recalled his principal guest. But it so happened that this summer of 1968 was the moment of birth of a global public sphere that linked together, for the first time, by means of jet aircraft and print and electronic media like the telephone, radio and television, millions of unrelated people in many different countries. This fledgling public sphere moulded them into interested witnesses of spectacular media events. It endowed them as audiences with the feeling that they were living in the subjunctive tense. It made them feel that the existing ‘laws’ of society and power politics were far from ‘natural’. It even convinced some of them, Havel included, that the future shape of the world was dependent at least in part on current public efforts to contest and refashion it, according to new and different criteria.179
Havel’s sense of living suspended in the subjunctive tense had been reinforced by his travels to France, America and England. It was confirmed by the nightly broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and the BBC World Service. Through these channels, he learned at least some details of the violent disturbances that swept through the United States following the earlier shooting dead in Memphis, Tennessee of Martin Luther King, the man whose funeral eulogy stressed that he ‘gave his life for love’. There was the gathering global controversy produced by the vicious fighting in Vietnam following the NLF Tet Offensive against American forces and their South Vietnamese allies. There was the aftermath of le joli mai in France and continuous stories from London, cast as a sensual, exotic playground where artistic extremes were initiated and driven forwards by an uneasy alliance of hippies, artists, students, youth, rock musicians and political activists, united in their fight against a collective enemy — the supporters of the war in Vietnam. There were also the widely circulated images that quickly turned into clichés: long hair and blue jeans; Dionysian talk of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out; clenched fists at rock concerts; and apprehensive hippies tentatively offering flowers to impassive policemen. There were love-ins and die-ins; Jimi Hendrix waving high his ‘freak flag’; the street chants of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! We will fight, we will win!’ Then there was ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, the mid-summer smash hit by the Rolling Stones. Stories of John Lennon living in India, learning the art of transcendental meditation and composing the song ‘Revolution’. Bob Dylan. The Pope’s public refusal of concessions to liberal opinion on birth control. The first anniversary of the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours. The death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, shot by a Palestinian Arab immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan, only hours after winning the California primary election. And there was Prague.