By Vaclav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson
Portobello, 400pp, £20VACLAV HAVEL'S MEMOIR IS AN artful, sly and touching self- portrait, cleverly and neurotically disguised as an artless heap of dry, scribbled notes and wastebas
ket throwaways. In a preface to the English edition, the playwright leader of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution nearly advises us not to read it at all. "If you occasionally feel like putting the book aside because it seems to skirt some of the world-shaking events that I lived through ... I urge you to skip ahead." But don't listen to him.
Part of the book was written in Washington in 2005, two years after he stepped down from the presidency of the Czech Republic, and his admiration for America is evident throughout.
He remarks that Hillary Clinton would make a "wonderful president". He adores Madeleine Albright. Occasionally he looks at someone sideways – at George Soros, for instance, "who of course would like to be recognised as a thinker and not merely as a stock market speculator".
He reveals a secret. At an early stage of the Velvet Revolution, well before anyone could have known for sure that Communism was defeated, the last of the Communist presidents, Marian Calfa, summoned him to a one-on-one hush-hush consultation and told him that Havel himself ought to become the new president and usher in a new, democratic market society.
But mostly the flickering anecdotes and commentaries illuminate the implausible incongruities that make up Havel's strange and appealing personality. Self-effacement is his first instinct. He insists he has never entertained political ambitions. And yet, as if to show that his modesty is never false, and that self-effacement is not his only instinct, he goes on to remark that most of the historic statements and documents of the anti-Communist dissident movement in his corner of the world were written by himself, and that his rise to leadership followed simply from his superior talent for cool and orderly thinking.
He began as a playwright and a man of the arts, and his earliest friends in the non-Communist West, back in Cold War times, leaned in pacifist and anti-capitalist directions. Yet those were not his own leanings. He never doubted, for instance, that military action was a good idea against the Serbian nationalism of Slobodan Milosevic.
He worries about what he calls "the old European disease, which is the tendency to make compromises with evil, to close one's eyes to dictatorship, to practise a politics of appeasement". He disapproves of every single aspect of Bush's handling of the Iraq crisis, except for the part about getting rid of Saddam Hussein, which Havel still thinks was a legitimate thing to do.
His sense of right and wrong on the largest of political questions seems to be absolute, as if based on religious convictions – possibly on Christianity in some vague fashion, to judge by some of his remarks. He invokes a philosophical God called Being. Yet he never clarifies or explains these religious and philosophical hints – not in this book, nor in any of his other writings translated into English, nor in his interviews.
Ten years ago I had the opportunity to interview Havel, and I did my best to get him to plumb the depths of Being. He plumbed the depths of NATO instead, and in To the Castle and Back he still natters on about NATO, and he still leaves an impression that Being undergirds his faith in it. Even his political ideals are hard to define, beyond the fundamentals of liberal democracy. Post-Communist society disappoints him, yet he says nothing, not in this book, anyway, about the possible shapes a new and better society might take.
He is inscrutable, and this may be his genius. Inscrutability transforms him into an enigmatic symbol, capable somehow of summoning other people to project upon him their own best hopes and ideals. And yet his own frailties turn out to be his largest theme. A few passing remarks take note of how, over the years, he has found it ever harder to write; and the passing remarks become insistent. He says: "I simply cannot shake the feeling that I don't have much time left." He wonders if his powers of recollection or his ability to avoid repeating himself might be slackening.
Saul Bellow wrote his last novel, Ravelstein, at age 84, and the book is a masterpiece, marred only by the fact that Bellow, in his elderliness, did keep on repeating himself – a lapse his editors could perhaps have prevented, if only they had summoned the courage to confront their author. Havel, too, repeats himself, in token of his weakening powers – repeats himself on topics of household minutiae, the garden hose that needs to be lengthened, the bat inhabiting the vacuum-cleaner cupboard. Only Havel, unlike Bellow, repeats himself as a matter of art, and instead of finding yourself irritated at the editors over these repetitions, you find yourself applauding the faithful labour that Paul Wilson, Havel's English translator, has performed.
One worries about Havel and his health, but also one begins to wonder if the garden hose and the bat in the cupboard aren't emblems of still greater mysteries, an emotion that finally overwhelms anything you might feel about 1989 and the world-shaking events – an emotion that has to do with life and death and with Havel himself, the symbol who is a man who will someday be merely a symbol.
The full article contains 927 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
