2 of 9
It is not that they have stopped talking. In particular, Havel, the younger one by 18 years, trots the globe, compelled, like some Ancient Mariner, to drive his message home to the nations. He could explain our century to us and point out ways to make the next one more hopeful and humane. He keeps talking; his plays and essays now form a substantial body of wisdom. But who is listening? There is not yet a single book-length study of his thinking. There is only one biography, and apart from its scattered stabs at hagiography, it does not always rise to the level of the pedestrian.
Havel's life can be periodized: his work in theater, his role as a "dissident" (the quotation marks follow his preference, since he dislikes the term), and his rise to power as his country's first post-Communist president. This progression is without a scintilla of inevitability, and no one has been more surprised by it than Havel himself. The playwright was a reluctant "dissident"; the "dissident" was a reluctant president. By contrast, his writings display continuity primarily. The plays explore fundamental human problems to which the essays then grope for answers. His basic world-view was established early. Then its themes were developed and expanded. The foundation held firm; the edifice was, and is, under ongoing construction.
Indeed, for the sycophantic, the best thing might be not to study Havel too closely, since disillusionment lurks. Those who would happily claim him for the sixties counterculture have too small a thread for their fabricated view to hold up. True, the spunk of outrageous nonconformity tugged at a free spirit dwelling in a drab, keep-your-head-down land, and (John) Lennon does beat Lenin. But when one, such as Jefferson Morley, so folds Havel into the sixties that even the statesman's vaulting speech to the U.S. Congress is described as "an effort to articulate a mature counterculturalism," he is projecting himself, not characterizing the speaker, whose youthful excitements have become more a fond memory than a guiding light.
Nor do those who claim him for postmodernism, that bastard offspring of the sixties, disclose much family resemblance. Caroline Bayard, trying to link Jean Francois Lyotard's theorizing and Havel's plays, concedes that "it may seem hard to imagine two more different manifestations of postmodernity" than these, and ends up proving not her thesis but her concession. Closer by a mile is Aviezer Tucker, who aligns Havel's values with "Solzhenitsyn's: Christian mercy, sacrifice, responsibility to God and society," and who doesn't like them at all.
The defining event of Havel's life occurred when he was 12. Communism came to Czechoslovakia. Apart from that, he would have grown up to be a very rich man, perhaps the richest man in his country. The paternal grandfather, born a poor laborer, ended his life fabulously wealthy, having made a killing in Prague real estate. Philosophically inclined, he logged a spell as a foreign diplomat under Tomas Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's first democratic president. The father found his entrepreneurial niche as a prominent restaurateur. "Rich boy" Vaclav (Wenceslaus in Latin, as in Good King and his city's main square) was tended by maids, governesses, cooks, chauffeurs—until 1948, when the family's assets were seized.
share this page
RSS Feed
