His best is still to come

By Ashok Chopra

VACLAV HAVEL has written so extensively and is so widely written on, especially after the fall of the Communist Czechoslovakia, that for a biographer, or even a columnist, it is relatively easy to reconstruct his life and times without stooping to hagiography. But to study his works one has to concentrate much more on the period out in the cold and on the formative years of his intellectual development as an essayist and playwright, and later as a student studying "politics as a vocation". Much of this is there in Havel’s own writings, especially in Living in Truth and Letters to Olga about which I wrote in my last two columns.

Even when Havel took over as the President of the country, when politics had overshadowed the playwright, Havel never lost his central European gift for irony and emotion. On his first day in office he wrote: "In my office I haven’t found a single clock. I sense something symbolic in this: For long years, there was no reason for a clock there because time had stood still. History had come to a stop. Not only in Prague Castle but in our whole country. The faster, of course, does it run today, after we have finally freed ourselves from the straitjacket of the totalitarian system. As if time were catching up on what had been neglected. We all — you as well as I — are trying to keep abreast of the times. In this, we are again and again confronted by numerous tasks assigned to us by the inexorable pressure of life. We are astonished by it, commensurate to the size of the lake whose dams had suddenly burst and to the length of the time for which this lake has been forming in a deadened society...In our country time has lost its value — like water, air, soil and energy. We will have to find it again, and learn to protect it."

Once in politics, Havel resolved to build not only a modern democratic state but "an intellectual-cultural state, a humane and socially just state, a state of educated people." In his book Summer Meditations: On Politics, Morality and Civility in a Time of Transition he reflects on his first experience as a democratic politician: "If your heart is in the right place and if you have good taste, not only will you pass muster in politics, you are destined for it. If you are modest and do not lust after power, not only are you suited to politics, you absolutely belong there....As for me, the more I am forced to be active in politics, the more I enjoy doing theatre... theatre that has truly played a great role in the history of this country."

Yes! Theatre, in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), has traditionally involved itself very concretely in politics. It is no bizarre accident that the opposition movement was inaugurated by an actor and threw up as its protagonist a playwright, Vaclav Havel, and had its first headquarters in a theatre — the fantastically named Lantherna Magica.

Answering as to why he wrote letters to Olga, Havel says: "In prison letters was the only form of writing we were allowed. My weekly letter to Olga was the only thing that gave my stay in prison a meaning. These letters gave me a chance to develop a new way of looking at myself and examining my attitudes to the fundamental things in them. I became more and more wrapped up in them. I depended on them to the point where almost nothing else mattered. All week long I would develop the eassays in my head and then on Saturday, amid constant interruption, I would write them out in a kind of wild trance...The letters, in fact, are endless spirals in which I’ve tried to enclose something. Very early on, I realised that comprehensible letters wouldn’t get through, which is why the letters are full of long, compound sentences and the complicated ways of saying things. Instead of writing ‘regime’ for instance, I would obviously have had to write ‘the socially apparent focus of the Non-I’ or some such nonsense."

What disappoints many a reader is the fact that there are no heartfelt, personal passages, specifically addressed to his wife. Says Havel: "Yes, it’s true. And yet Olga is their main hero, though admittedly hidden. That was why Iput her name in the title of the book. Doesn’t that endless search for a firm point, for certainty, for an absolute horizon that fills those letters say something, in itself, to confirm that?"

These letters by Havel also have their place in a long, continuing conversation among Czechs and Slovaks about the fate of their society, of their country, of Central and Eastern Europe, and ultimately, of the modern world. Says he in one of the letters: "I think it is worthwhile to speak the truth, to not be afraid, and to stand up for oneself under any circumstances. Fear weakens people, but it is necessary to face fear with bravey, which, I am convinced, will prevail in the end. In the end, truth and love will win out against lies and hatred."

Havel has been described by some as "That oddball", "the intellectual in politics", "the philosopher-king". That he may be! But for Havel, "the ethics of conviction" is the beginning of all politics. Although he has a low opinion of the nitty-gritty of politics, in his last work Summer Meditations, he returns to the themes of "politics as a vocation" with the painful benefit of the experiences of the 70 cruel years in between. He is deeply convinced of "the moral origin of all genuine politics" and when he says "moral" he means "good" in a simple, almost self-evident sense — humane, civil, decent. Every page of Havel’s writings breathes the spirit that made him the authentic spokesman of the east European revolution of 1989 which was in his words, living in truth. In the last analysis, it is not power that matters, but values: "decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance." Or, as Havel is very fond of quoting Tomas Masaryk, the founder of modern Czechoslovakia, "values too, are facts."

In Summer Meditation, the book that Havel cobbled together just before he assumed office, he recognised that "a dissident intellectual who philosophises in his study about the fate and future of the world has different kind of freedom; a politician who moves among the complicated social realities of a particular time and place, constantly coming up against the intractable and contradictory interests that inhabit that time and space."

The intellectual had recognised the limits of power and there were two concerns that stood out: Constitutional politics and the iniquities of the market economy. The first makes sense for the moralist and intellectual in politics, for the boundaries of normal politics are also the meeting point of morality and pragmatism. From his presidential castle, Havel sent down a string of proposals on the Slovak question, electoral reform and so forth, all of which were turned down but which he accepted as a liberal democrat.

Havel makes no bones about liking harmony and he sees the future of his country as "harmonious" in a "highly decentralised state...with two bakeries, two sweet-shops, two pubs on every main street.

Highrises will have given way to family houses and places will be clean and tidy. And then Havel justifies it by saying that "the state is a product of society, all expression of it, all image of it. It is structure that a society breaks for itself as an instrument of its own self-realisation." Havel, for all his pragmatism, remains a dreamer.

Intellectuals who hold public office are just a handful and those who do get into the hot seats of power usually don’t last long. Havel has been a kind of a survivor. Is it because of his nonconformist state of the spirit and his aversion to philistines? It is rather difficult to say. However, a question being asked in the literary circles is whether we are likely to lose a writer in Havel while having gained a politician. It seems highly unlikely.

Here is a writer, who has become a hero, a hero who came straight out of prison and went into the castle — the largest inhabited castle in the world — of Czech kings and Roman emperors. As his biographer Eda Kriscova wrote, People, saw in him a new hope. In him they saw someone who could lead a confused people out of the errors of their ways. It was like when a person falls in love for the first time: he has new hope, joy and strength. They wanted him to return to them everything the Communists had taken away, including their youth of 40 years ago. And a hope that a magnificent life was awaiting them. But then big hopes lead to bigger disappointments. Human memory is very short — and who would know it better than us Indians who have witnessed everything from hope to despair, tragedy to comedy, joy to frustration, and much more, in just fifty years?

The Czech perceive Havel as a good king — moral, intellectual, soft, democratic. But, not strict enough. Yet, I for one think there is a lot of hope for the Czech republic, for nations too behave like individuals. They take a long time to find their balance. As they grow wiser, they will start to be happy when it rains because they can sell umbrellas, and when the sun is shining, sandals.

And, it is the very hope, that keeps alive in those like me the vision of Havel the writer, rather than Havel the politician, who are still very hopeful that the world may have gained a great democratic politician, but it has not lost a great writer — a writer who has given us great works, works which are classics of the century — but whose best work is still to come.

(Concluded)