Читать книгу Rock 'n' Roll - Tom Stoppard - Страница 7

In the first draft of Rock ‘n’ Roll Jan was called Tomas, my given name which, I suppose, is still my name. My surname was legally changed when I was, like Jan, unexpectedly ‘a little English schoolboy’.

This is not to say that the parallels between Jan’s life and mine go very far. He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.

The two-year overlap was the basis of my identification with Jan, and why I started off by calling him Tomas. His love of England and of English ways, his memories of his mother baking buchty and his nostalgia for his last summer and winter as an English schoolboy are mine.

If that had been the whole play (or part of a play I’d often thought about writing, an autobiography in a parallel world where I returned ‘home’ after the war), Tomas would have been a good name for the protagonist. But with Rock ‘n’ Roll the self-reference became too loose, and, for a different reason, misleading, too, because I also had in mind another Tomas altogether, the Tomas of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

In that book there is a scene where Tomas refuses to sign a petition on behalf of political prisoners gaoled by Husák’s ‘government of normalisation’, which followed the invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies. In the play, when Jan is asked to sign what is essentially the same petition at the same juncture, his response is taken directly from Kundera’s Tomas, in distillation:

Jan No, I won’t sign it. First because it won’t help Hubl and the others, but mainly because helping them is not its real purpose. Its real purpose is to let Ferdinand and his friends feel they’re not absolutely pointless. It’s just moral exhibitionism … All they’re doing is exploiting the prisoners’ misfortune to draw attention to themselves. If they’re so concerned for the families they should go and do something useful for the families, instead of—for all they know—making things worse for the prisoners.

However, the primary source for this is not The Unbearable Lightness of Being but a polemical exchange years earlier between Kundera and Václav Havel, which prefigured not only Tomas’s (and now Jan’s) accusation of ‘moral exhibitionism’ but also Jan’s half of his argument with his activist friend Ferdinand, where Jan insists that the Prague Spring was by no means ‘defeated’ by the Russian invasion. ‘The new politics’ had ‘survived this terrible conflict’, Kundera wrote at the time. ‘It retreated, yes, but it did not disintegrate, it did not collapse.’ Intellectual life had not been shackled. The police state had not ‘renewed itself.

Kundera’s essay—titled ‘Czech Destiny’, or perhaps ‘The Czech Lot’—was published in December 1968, four months after the invasion. The fact that it was published at all may have been thought to support its argument—

Jan For once this country found the best in itself. We’ve been done over by big powerful nations for hundreds of years but this time we refused our destiny.

But Havel was having none of it. Disaster was not a moral victory, and, as for ‘destiny’, Havel wrote, Kundera was indulging in a mystical self-deception and refusing to face plain fact. In the play, Ferdinand is briefer and ruder—‘It’s not destiny, you moron, it’s the neighbours worrying about their slaves revolting if we get away with it.’

Kundera fired back a few months later (‘moral exhibitionism’), and it should be said that both writers would have cause for complaint if the play purported to deploy their arguments fairly. Dramatists become essayists at their peril. The play does not take account of Havel’s Parthian shot in an interview years later:

All those who did not sign or who withdrew their signatures argued in ways similar to Tomas in Kundera’s novel… Naturally the president [Husák] did not grant an amnesty, and so Jaroslav Sabata, Milan Hubl and others went on languishing in prison, while the beauty of our characters was illuminated. It would seem, therefore, that history proved our critics to be right. But was that really the case? I would say not. When the prisoners began to come back after their years in prison, they all said that the petition had given them a great deal of satisfaction. Because of it, they felt that their stay in prison had a meaning: it helped renew the broken solidarity … But it had a far deeper significance as well: it marked the beginning of a process in which people’s civic backbone began to straighten again. This was a forerunner to Charter 77 …

The scene between Ferdinand and Jan when Ferdinand has just had a spell in prison is again in debt to a robust exchange of essays, this time between Havel and the novelist Ludvik Vaculik in December and January 1978/9. I moved the conversation forward to 1975 (otherwise it would have had to occur in the interval); is not quite fair to ‘Notes on Courage’ by Vaculik, because the stress for dissident intellectuals must have been worse after the watershed of Charter 77. Vaculik, like Jan, says that he’s afraid of prison. He is looking for a ‘decent middle ground’, and, like Jan, sees himself as a ‘normal person.’ ‘Normal people are not “heroes.”’ Echoing Vaculik, Jan complains to Ferdinand that heroism isn’t honest work, the kind that keeps the world going round: ‘It offends normal people and frightens them. It seems to be about some private argument the heroes are having with the government on our behalf, and we never asked you.’ Heroic acts didn’t spring from people’s beliefs—‘I believe the same as you do’—they sprang from character and ‘It’s not the action of a friend to point out that your character is more heroic than mine.’

A related point was made in another samizdat essay, by Petr Pithart, which made its appearance at almost the same time. This spoke for a ‘passive majority’ of like-believers against an ‘active minority’ of ‘self-anointed activists’. This minority, said Pithart, alluding to the Charter ‘spokesmen’, inevitably became ever more absorbed in its internal problems and quarrels and lost touch with the concerns of the majority.

Havel, again in samizdat (the days of open publication were long past), replied to both Vaculík and Pithart as he had to Kundera ten years before, unrepentantly. All of these deeply pondered, deeply felt exchanges between intellectuals and friends living under pressures hardly imaginable by writers in the West would support a whole play of political and moral philosophy. But that play is not Rock ‘n’ Roll.

If it had been, if the playwright hadn’t had other fish to fry in his allotted time, it would have been Ferdinand’s role to speak for Havel. That’s why I named him Ferdinand. In the first draft, Ferdinand had a surname, Vanek. ‘Ferdinand Vanek’ is the name of a character in three of Havel’s plays—Audience, Private View and Protest—where he stands in for the author. Vanek is a banned playwright. In Audience he is employed in a brewery, just as Havel was in 1974.

I had worked out that, in my play, Tomas (later Jan) would need a foil who would be taking Havel’s viewpoint in the dialectic. All of a sudden I had the inspiration of borrowing ‘Ferdinand Vanek’ for the role. A moment later, in my delight at this idea, I thought of placing one of my Vanek-Tomas scenes in that very brewery and even, perhaps, including the brewmaster who was the second character in Audience.

During a visit to Prague I had the opportunity to ask Havel’s permission to use his character in my unwritten play. He gave it without demur. He said it would be an honour. He didn’t seem especially surprised by my brilliantly original notion. Not until I came to be writing these notes did I discover that I was at last count the fourth author to put ‘Ferdinand Vanek’ into his own play.

Not only that, I had met two of the other three (as well as Havel) when I first went to Prague in 1977. Pavel Landovsky, an actor, was the first to have the idea. His ‘Vanek’ trod the boards in Germany in a full-length play in 1976. (The play failed, Landovsky says, because the title, Sanitation Night, had been translated as Closed for Disinfection, and this fatal phrase turned away anyone disposed to enter the theatre.) Two years later, the playwright and novelist Pavel Kohout wrote his own Vanek play, which was put on the following year in Vienna with Havel’s third Vanek play, Protest, in a double-bill. The third author, Jiśí Dienstbier, not only wrote a Vanek play, he included the brewmaster, too. I had been trumped three times over before I had played my card. (What made it all the more piquant was that I had put Kohout into a play of mine, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, which was staged in London in the same month Kohout’s first Vanek play—he wrote two more—was receiving its premiere in Vienna.)

By the time I caught up on all this,¹ Ferdinand had lost his surname anyway. I didn’t know, when I began, that in the second half of my play it would be Jan, and not Ferdinand, who would be Havel’s spirit. I ought to have realised that I wouldn’t be able to—or wish to—sustain Jan as a cautious dissenter from dissent. Whether or not Tomas (that is, I myself) would have signed the Charter and gone jobless or even to gaol is something I’ll never know, but if, in my parallel biography, I had kept my head below the parapet, it would have been out of fear and timidity, not out of disagreement with Havel’s philosophical and political writing.

Jan, at any rate, changes. He no longer takes his cues from Kundera or Vaculik, or from the bohemian underground, which deprecated the ‘official opposition’ of banned writers, artists and intellectuals (‘a bunch of tossers’). In the second act, he takes over Vanek’s mantle from Ferdinand, at least by implication. In temperament Vanek could not really be either a Ferdinand or a Jan; his nature is too polite and reticent. But Jan now takes his cues from Havel.

The most important sources for the ‘Czech arguments’ in this play are the essays, articles and letters written by Havel between 1968 and the 1990s. I’d had most of them on my shelves since publication but had been lazy about reading them properly. (An exception was a speech, ‘Politics and Conscience’, read out in absentia in Toulouse when Havel was awarded an honorary doctorate from that university but prevented from travelling there to receive it. At his request I represented him on that occasion.) When I did read them all within the space of a few weeks in 2004 I was left with an overwhelming sense of humility and pride in having a friend of such bravery, humanity and clear-sighted moral intelligence; who, moreover, as was clear even in translation, was as complex and subtle in his long paragraphs as he was adroit in his dialogues. The open letter titled ‘Dear Dr. Husák’ (1975) and the long essay, ninety pages in my edition, called ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978) were influential in their own time and place, but transcend both and will continue to be important wherever ‘living in truth’ requires not merely conscience but courage.²

*

Rock ‘n’ Roll manages to allude to only a tiny fraction of Havel’s writing. The Toulouse speech by itself is a mine of timely reminders of the need to put morality above politics, and nature above scientific triumphalism; to return life to its human scale, and language to its human meaning; to recognise that socialism and capitalism in their selfish forms are different routes to global totalitarianism. A later essay, ‘Stories and Totalitarianism’ (1987), provides Jan with his dialogue about there being ‘no stories in Czechoslovakia … We aim for inertia. We mass-produce banality’; and about pseudo-history in pseudo-newspapers. The assertion that Czechoslovakia’s need is deeper than a return to Western democracy is one of a hundred striking moments in ‘The Power of the Powerless’. It is in the same essay that Havel observes that ‘living in truth’ could be any means by anyone who rebels against being manipulated by the Communist regime: it could be attending a rock concert.

*

Even if Rock ‘n’ Roll were entirely about the Czech experience between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, it could only hope to be a diagram. Yet, a diagram can pick out lines of force which may be faint or dotted on the intricate map of history that takes in all accounts. Rock ‘n’ Roll crystalised around one short essay by Havel, ‘The Trial’ (1976), and a few pages in a book-length interview from 1985. (Havel worked on the transcript, which became the first samizdat book to be legally published in post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Translated by Paul Wilson under the title Disturbing the Peace, it was published in England by Faber and Faber in 1990.)

The interviewer, Karel Hvizdala, asked about the origin of Charter 77. Havel’s reply began like this:

For me personally, it all began sometime in January or February 1976. I was at Hradecek, alone, there was snow everywhere, a night blizzard was raging outside. I was writing something, and suddenly there was a pounding on the door, I opened it, and there stood a friend of mine, whom I don’t wish to name, half-frozen and covered with snow. We spent the night discussing things over a bottle of cognac he’d brought with him. Almost as an aside, this friend suggested that I meet Ivan Jirous … I already knew Jirous; I’d met him about twice in the late 1960s but I hadn’t seen him since then. Occasionally I would hear wild and, as I discovered later, quite distorted stories about the group of people that had gathered round him, which he called the underground, and about the Plastic People of the Universe, a nonconformist rock group that was at the centre of this society; Jirous was their artistic director.

Havel goes on to explain that Jirous’s opinion of him ‘was not exactly flattering either: he apparently saw me as a member of the official, and officially tolerated, opposition—in other words, a member of the establishment’.

Havel and Jirous met in Prague a month later: ‘His hair was down to his shoulders, other long-haired people would come and go, and he talked and talked and told me how things were.’

Jirous played Havel songs by the Plastic People on an old tape-recorder. ‘There was disturbing magic in the music, and a kind of inner warning. Here was something serious and genuine … Suddenly I realised that, regardless of how many vulgar words these people used or how long their hair was, truth was on their side; … in their music was an experience of metaphysical sorrow and a longing for salvation.’

Jirous and Havel went to a pub and talked through the night. It was arranged that Havel would go to their next ‘secret’ concert in two weeks’ time, but before that happened Jirous and the band were arrested, along with other members of the underground.

Havel set about getting support for the prisoners, but among the people who might have helped almost no one knew them, and those who did tended to think of them as layabouts, hooligans, and drug addicts. They were at first inclined to see the case as a criminal affair. But for Havel it was ‘an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity’.

Somewhat to his surprise, his contacts quickly got the point: the ‘criminals’ were simply young people who wanted to live in harmony with themselves, and to express themselves in a truthful way. If this judicial attack went unchallenged, the regime could well start locking up anyone who thought and expressed himself independently, even in private.

The Plastic People affair became a cause célèbre. The regime backtracked, and started releasing most of those arrested. Ultimately, Jirous and three others came to trial in Prague in September 1976. Havel attended the trial and wrote about it: this was the other text—‘The Trial’—which was a focal point in the writing of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Milan Hlavsa, who died in 2001, formed the Plastic People of the Universe (he took the name from a song by the American rock musician Frank Zappa) in September 1968 when he was nineteen. The fact that the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia had occurred in August was not immediately relevant: ‘We just loved Rock ‘n’ Roll and wanted to be famous.’ The occupation by the Warsaw Pact armies was background, ‘the harsh reality’, but ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll wasn’t just music to us, it was kind of life itself. Hlavsa made the point more than once in his interviews. The band was not interested in bringing down Communism, only in finding a free space for itself inside the Communist society.

But of course there was no such space, and the story that Rock ‘n’ Roll is telling is that, in the logic of Communism, what the band wasn’t interested in and what the band wanted could not in the end be separated. There were dozens of rock bands in Prague and elsewhere in Czechoslovakia who were ‘not interested in bringing down Communism’, and they prospered according to their lights, in some cases because the ground rules entailed no compromises on their part, in other cases because the ground rules did. The Plastics were among a small number of musicians and artists who wouldn’t compromise at all, so the space for their music and for ‘life itself became harder and harder to find, until it was eradicated.

The Plastic People of the Universe did not bring down Communism, of course. After the trial, Husák strengthened his grip on the country until the end came thirteen years later. What could not be separated were disengagement and dissidence. In the play Jan tells a British journalist, ‘Actually, the Plastics is not about dissidents’. The reporter replies, ‘It’s about dissidents. Trust me.’ And he’s right. The Rock ‘n’ Roll underground, as Jirous said, was an attack on the official culture of Communist Czechoslovakia, and in case he didn’t get the point, the regime sent him to gaol four times during those twenty years: culture is politics.

Jirous is one of the most interesting and least known personalities in the story of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution. He is not a musician; he was trained as an art historian. He joined up with the Plastic People in April 1969 in the brief period before they lost their licence, and he took over as their impresario and artistic director on the long bumpy road from professional status to amateur to outcast. It was his own integrity which he made the distinguishing attribute of the band, and he managed to see their travails as an enviable fate compared with the ‘underground’ in the West,

where … some of those who gained recognition and fame came into contact with official culture … which enthusiastically accepted them and swallowed them up, as it accepts and swallows up new cars, new fashions or anything else. In Bohemia the situation is essentially different, and far better than in the West, because we live in an atmosphere of complete agreement: the first [official] culture doesn’t want us, and we don’t want anything to do with the first culture. This eliminates the temptation that for everyone, even the strongest artist, is the seed of destruction: the desire for recognition, success, winning prizes and titles, and last but not least, the material security which follows.

This comes from Jirous’s ‘Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival’, written in February 1975, a year before he met Havel. It has an epigraph which might have been written by Havel: ‘There is only one way for the people—to free themselves by their own efforts. Nothing must be used that would do it for them … Cast away fear! Don’t be afraid of commotion.’ In fact, it was written by Mao Tse-tung; a long stretch. In Rock ‘n’ Roll, Max the Marxist philosopher says that he is ‘down to one belief, that between theory and practice there’s a decent fit—not perfect but decent’. The equivalence of theory and practice is nowhere harder to achieve than in ‘living in truth’ in a society which lies to itself. In the Czechoslovakia of 1968 to 1990 a Rock ‘n’ Roll band came as close as anyone.