The assignment: to conduct a long, carefully prepared interview with the most famous ‘dissident’ in central Europe for London’s Times Literary Supplement. Elaborate preparations have been made. My nom-de-plume — Erica Blair — is to be used. Through the exile news agency Palach Press, permission is sought and received. ‘Tell Miss Blair that I am happy to do it and I am awaiting her visit to Praha.’ Exactly how we will meet — or whether Havel himself will be in prison — is unclear. A few days before the departure, my guide and translator, A. G. Brain — now Gerald Turner — telephones to say he has broken his right leg after slipping on black ice. That is exactly what we fear will happen to us once again after arriving in Prague, crutches in hand, pretending to be tourists. For two days, we split up and try to look inconspicuous, mainly by hiding out in the pubs and shops and safe apartments of the city. Then comes the prearranged moment of our first meeting with the man. Crammed around a dark corner table of a dingy pub on the Vltava embankment, Havel is gracious, offers us beer, cigarette in hand. We make final preparations for the following day. My host looks ill and exhausted from his long spell in prison, but he still manages to show his sense of humour. ‘Umm, I am sorry,’ he says in broken English, ‘I had no opportunity to prepare my remarks because I was not today two hours in a prison.’
Next day’s meeting made me tremble. Havel’s fourth-floor embankment apartment in the heart of art nouveau Prague is a building site, its walls stripped bare in search of concealed microphones. Cigarette smoke blues the air. Havel fidgets constantly with his whisky glass, usually looking at the floor as he speaks. In the era of glasnost, the tapped telephone rings often. Two StB policemen now stand guard across the street. Havel’s dog, whose predecessor had been shot dead by the secret police on the doorstep, paces nervously at the front door, growling at every creak and thud in the building. The ugly atmosphere gets on my nerves, but my fidgety friend — as in our previous meetings — seems willing to speak with measured passion about his concerns, his tired face occasionally breaking into a warm smile. Short and slight with thinning sandy hair and a pouty moustache, he is described in police files as a ‘subversive’ and an ‘anti-socialist element’; in situations like this, struggling to understand my English and random Czech, he seems shy, soft-spoken, sometimes with a slight lisp, the result of a prison beating, courageous, occasionally sanctimonious, and always stubborn under pressure — a rebel, one of the truly dangerous types, a subversive guided by civilized manners and a taste for freedom.
Time is precious. Olga brings Turkish coffee. Havel opens the bottle of Isle of Skye whisky I have brought him as a gift. There is no small talk. I kick off by asking him how, despite everything, he manages to keep his head above water. He quotes Franz Kafka: ‘Why are you watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.’ The watchman explains that totalitarian regimes such as Husák’s Czechoslovakia and Honecker’s GDR, although now on their last legs, are unique in human history. Using more civilized and sophisticated methods of control than the hack dictatorships of the Third World, they are all-embracing and spirit-destroying. ‘These regimes get under society’s skin,’ Havel said. ‘From morning to night, everything ordinary citizens do is in some way interfered with by the system. The regime leaves its mark on everything, from the way housing estates are built to the patterns of television programming.’ The state is employer, policeman, social worker, judge and jailer rolled into one. It therefore pressures individuals to adapt and to capitulate, to reinforce the foundations of the very regime they spend time bellyaching about in the hidden corners of factories, kitchens, pubs and offices. Havel goes on to say that totalitarianism thereby heaps invisible violence upon everybody. It slowly destroys the individuality and basic human dignity of virtually every member of society, rulers and ruled alike.
Havel’s words against the totalitarian regimes of the East are matched — surprisingly — by a deep suspicion of the West. He explains that he is not, and never has been, a professional anti-Communist. Both systems, he tells me, contain huge, faceless organisations which treat people as mere objects. ‘The world is losing its human dimension,’ he insists, Franz Kafka at his side. ‘Self-propelling mega-machines, large-scale enterprises, faceless governments and other juggernauts of impersonal power represent the greatest threat to our present-day world. In the final analysis, totalitarianism is no more than an extreme expression of this threat.’
Havel reaches for another cigarette. Our conversation turns philosophical. We are slowly losing our grip on the world, he explains, precisely because we strive to be the supreme masters of ourselves and our universe. He points out that one of his favourite plays, The Memorandum, satirizes this trend. Office workers are instructed by officials to learn a new ‘strictly scientific’ language, Ptydepe. It is supposed to eliminate misunderstandings by maximising the difference between words, so that no word can be mistaken for another, the length of the word being inversely proportional to its frequency of use (wombat has 319 letters, he reminds me). Ptydepe paralyses the office and baffles everybody who tries to learn it. So the bureaucracy introduces a new language that contains words so simple that they have virtually infinite meanings — and suitably disastrous consequences for the organisation. Havel admits that The Memorandum is intended to be riotously funny — that it plays language games before audiences who are perforce confronted with players caught up in a power struggle for survival and self-recognition. ‘In The Memorandum I saw myself as a free-wheeling pop-art painter trying to take concrete segments of reality and then rearranging them in fantastic form,’ he says. But he also insists that The Memorandum well illustrates one of his most serious themes: our modernist attempt to know and to control everything — whether in scientific research, the development of technology, or politics — is slowly but surely paralysing our capacity as individuals to lead meaningful, independent human lives. Several times during our conversation, he mentions that the world is slipping through our fingers, and that this slippage cannot be prevented by grand leaps of faith into the future. He goes on to denounce Utopian visions, ‘radiant tomorrows’ he calls them. Life is ever-changing and lacking an essence. To try to master it fully, to clamp it down on to a drawing board and to blueprint its reconstruction, therefore always ends up strait-jacketing and destroying life. So Havel highlights a direct link between beautiful Utopias and the concentration camp. ‘What is a concentration camp,’ he asks, ‘but an attempt by Utopians to dispose of those elements which don’t fit into their Utopia?’
Havel’s razor-sharp question reminds me why the West’s enthusiasm for Gorbachev during the era of perestroika was often considered naive, even disheartening, by many people in central and eastern Europe. The disgust produced by failed Utopias is something they feel acutely. Havel agrees that his plays aim to accentuate the aversion to radiant tomorrows. He says that they are inspired by the thought that theatre should question Utopias and encourage people to think and act less dogmatically. They deny that art is a refuge for moral Truth. Havel tells me that he rejects the common complaint of theatre reviewers — repeated at the time in England during Tom Stoppard’s elegant adaptation of Largo Desolato for the Bristol New Vic — that his own plays are tantalizing because they fail to grasp the moral nettles they themselves plant. Theatre, he insists, is an incomplete dialogue, the playwright essentially a witness to the times. Theatre shouldn’t try to thrill or charm playgoers or make things easier for them by providing positive heroes. He admits that his plays provide warnings. But in the same breath he stresses that they don’t arrogantly pretend to portray things as they ‘really are’. They leave such sermonizing to Brecht and instead try to confront people with themselves — to make them think by prising open their awareness of the unresolved questions and problems facing them. Modern times are gripped by a permanent ‘crisis of certainty’, he says. Theatre should not pretend to know what is to be done. ‘I try to fling my audiences into the heart of a problem that they can’t avoid,’ he says, pausing to light another cigarette. ‘I try to push people’s noses into our common wretchedness. Theatre should remind people that the time is getting on, that our situation is bad, and that there’s no time to lose.’
Havel agrees to talk about how this idiosyncratic view of theatre as the adversary of totalitarian illusions has earned him considerable international acclaim. He describes how he began working in the theatre as a stage-hand, and how his ‘bourgeois’ origins excluded him from film school and university. He recalls how he soon became literary adviser at Prague’s famous Theatre on the Balustrade, and how his first play there, The Garden Party, brought him overnight fame in the early sixties with the tale of a regime racked and ruined by the struggle between the perfectionist Office of Liquidation and the modernising Office for Inauguration. Havel tells me that he mistrusts rigid categories, and that he does not like being pigeonholed as a master playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd. He says that his preferred authors are Hašek and Čapek, Beckett and Ionesco (whose influence is strong, he confesses, in one of his first plays, An Evening with the Familý), and he acknowledges Kafka’s decisive influence on his work. ‘When I first read Kafka, I constantly had the feeling that I was writing it myself,’ he tells me. ‘It was as if I’d had a similar basic experience of the world.’ We talk through some of his best-known plays, including The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, an adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera and Temptation, soon to be performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican in London. Havel quickly emphasizes that these accomplishments — he modestly declines to discuss his many literary awards, including the American Obie Prize for the best off-Broadway play and the 1986 Erasmus Prize — had had their painful side. His plays have not been performed in his own country for nearly twenty years, and during that time he has also been banned by the Czechoslovak authorities from producing or directing anything. He reminds me that his work did once slip through the net: an amateur production in 1975 of The Beggar’s Opera in a village near Prague. It led to a police raid, he says quietly, still looking down. All those who took part were interrogated and harassed. Such clampdowns visibly anguish Havel. Theatre needs a home, he says with a wince. A play which remains a mere script is only ever half-finished.
The point helps to explain why Havel, the playwright with an aversion to power-grabbing politicians, has been dragged into politics, apparently against his will, subsequently forcing him to make the best of fate by acting as if he were both playwright and performer in a political opera. He has paid the price: several prison sentences, and more to come. Yet Havel’s taste of total power — remarkably — has not seemed to produce hunger for power over others. He appears to harbour no illusions about party politics and professional politicians. He tells me, reaching for another whisky, that he sees himself as an ordinary citizen, endowed with inalienable rights of self-determination. ‘I favour a politics growing from the heart, not from a thesis,’ he continues, insisting that politics ‘from below’ is indispensable if individual people are to seek and to protect a meaningful existence in a world threatened by impersonal organizations. Havel acknowledges that small-scale, local activity directed at such organizations is often ridiculed by Western politicians, who consider it as fanciful as the Lilliputians’ attempts to tie down Gulliver from below by thousands of small threads. But he strongly disputes this view. ‘It’s becoming obvious,’ he says with Lech Walesa and Solidarnošc in mind, ‘that politics doesn’t have to remain the affair of professionals and that one simple electrician, with his heart in the right place, can influence the history of an entire nation.’
During our five-hour discussion, Havel tries to emphasize several times that he is a reluctant political figure: he says that he wants above all to get back to writing plays and to have them performed in his own country. ‘But whether you like it or not,’ I reply, ‘you are now a star performer in a theatre of opposition.’ I add that political figures normally hate irony, which corrodes their own certainties by revealing the ways in which the world is full of ambiguity, and I remind him that in his play Temptation a character says: ‘I don’t give any specific advice, and I don’t fix anything for anyone. The most I do is to stimulate now and again.’ Havel agrees that that line is his credo as a playwright — and he expresses the hope that it will serve as a future maxim of his own philosophy as a political writer and public figure.
We discuss how Havel’s own civic activities have multiplied rapidly during recent years. He had been a founding spokesman for Charter 77 (‘a community of people acting independently and trying to voice the truth’) and a key figure in VONS, a citizens’ group working for the protection of the unjustly prosecuted. At the end of the 1970s, he had been a key participant in the bacchanalian border meetings between the Czechoslovak and Polish democratic oppositions. In the early 1980s, he had conducted an important dialogue with the Western peace movement, urging its activists to swallow the bitter fact that ‘peace’, a pampered term in the prolespeak of the Communist Party, generated little enthusiasm in central and eastern Europe. This argument, expressed in a number of essays, produced another of the many ironies that had so far defined his life: the prestigious Olof Palme Peace Prize. At the time of our meeting, Havel was also busy with samizdat publishing and the emerging key figure in beleaguered ‘dissident’ circles.
Havel confesses as well that he has come to sympathize with green politics: ‘The green movements have brought to the surface issues — such as whether there is any sense in threatening future generations by the constant drive for increased production — which the traditional political parties have neglected.’ The greens’ ‘non-ideological stance and advocacy of non-violence are close to my own head and heart’. Havel reveals how profoundly he had been influenced as an early teenager by Josef Šafařík’s Seven Letters to Melin, in which an engineer defects to philosophy, blames modern science and technology for the contemporary crisis of humanity, and concludes that conclusions can only ever be tentative, and that each individual is ultimately responsible for co-determining with others how each shall live. We discuss the prominence of ecological images in his writings. He explains that among his strongest is a powerful boyhood memory of walking down a country lane from Havlov to school in the shadow of a huge munitions factory. ‘The chimney spewed dense smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it,’ he says, ‘I had an intense feeling that something was profoundly wrong, that human beings were fouling the heavens.’
Such powerful memories evidently feed Havel’s philosophical conviction that the human will to master the world produces poisonous outcomes and that therefore the human species, to avoid disaster, should abandon our arrogant presumption that ‘Man is capable of knowing everything, describing everything and doing everything’. We should instead let things be, he urges, all the while trying to nurture a sense of wonder and respect for the world. Havel insists that his call for human modesty is not a plea for apathy. At the end of our meeting, he acknowledges the pitfalls of nihilistic despair; he also stresses the inexhaustible strength that flows from sticking to principles and prodding and poking at the world around us. ‘Only by “looking outward” and throwing ourselves repeatedly into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making our voices count — only in this way’, he says, ‘do we really become human beings.’
The words escaping his gritted teeth were poignant, especially considering that for nearly two decades Havel had been living under constant police watch, ever in danger of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. His had been a hard and often discouraging life, as his letters from prison bear witness. He tells me that he has tried hard to master the difficult art of waiting patiently, and that nowadays nothing really surprises him. I reply by reminding him that the power of the unexpected can sometimes exceed that of the most powerful governments and politicians. What neither of us realizes is that in a matter of a few months after our meeting his stubborn, civilized patience was to be vindicated, then tested by the temptations of power. Massive crowds were soon to gather in the frozen rectangle called Wenceslas Square to exercise ‘candle power’ (as he later called it) or, emulating the storming of the Bastille, to jangle keys together — the keys of the Czechoslovak prison — while chanting ‘Give the jesters their cap and bells’. The Party lies of ‘normalization’ would soon begin to collapse into a twisted heap of confusion. The riot police and water cannon would begin to flinch. Chants of ‘Long Live Havel!’ would echo through Prague’s cobbled streets and narrow passageways. A big surprise indeed was just around the corner. Yet Havel’s last words to me remained circumspect on the brink of political success. ‘I’m full of hopes, doubts, determination, uncertainties, plans, fears,’ he says with a wrinkled smile, gripping my hand to say goodbye. ‘For the time being, I’m sure of only one thing: for me it will always be a cliff-hanger.’