Disturbing the Peace
By Vaclav Havel
A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala
Knopf, 228 pages, $19.95
There is an awful, supercharged moment at the conclusion of Vaclav Havel`s ”Largo Desolato” when the main character, a politically suspect philosopher, abandoned and fearing arrest, stands in his living room and shouts, ”Leave me alone!”
That play is Havel`s most autobiographical. He wrote it in a four-day frenzy in the summer of 1984, a bit more than five years before he was named president of Czechoslovakia. As he says in this series of extended
conversations, it was self-therapy-an examination of ”what happens when the personification of resistance finds himself at the end of his tether.”
That it may not be a great play is irrelevant. Havel`s plays were at the epicenter of an artistic movement that, last November, firmly took the lead in sweeping Czechoslovakia`s communist regime from power with a speed that was breathtaking. This book seeks to describe what lay behind that successful application of artistic temperament to a bare-knuckled political process.
How ”Disturbing the Peace” came into being is itself intriguing. Karel Hvizdala, an exiled Czech journalist, sent Havel a list of 50 questions by clandestine mail in 1985. Havel, nearing 50 and seeking to sort out the meaning of his life, shut himself up in a borrowed flat and taped the answers over 11 hours between Christmas and New Year`s. They appeared in Prague the next summer under Havel`s own underground publishing imprint; a couple of weeks after last fall`s ”Velvet Revolution,” it was the first underground book to be published legally in Czechoslovakia.
So densely woven is the web of personalities and ideas depicted in Havel`s struggle that it`s difficult to find a point of identification for American readers. Maybe it would help, and certainly it wouldn`t be far off the mark, to speak of what happened in Czechoslovakia as a ”rock `n` roll revolution.”
Havel likes rock. Just out of the army in the mid-1950s, he was among a small crowd that jammed late-night performances by Czechoslovakia`s first rock band, Akord Club. Its lyrics, so different from the banal official hits, provided ”a different feeling for life, different ideas, different language.”
The Soviets had invaded Hungary shortly before, and Havel`s vague stirrings of rebellion-unhappiness with the comfortable bourgeois upbringing that had set him aside from poorer children-firmed up in what quickly became his life`s theme: ”that very special, conspiratorial sense of togetherness that to me is what makes theater. That was where it all began.”
He had plenty to feed on for the next three decades. Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, making life even bleaker. In 1976, two rock bands, Plastic People of the Universe and DG-307, were imprisoned for ”anti-Soviet activities and hooliganism.”
Havel, by then a veteran playwright well known in the West for his dissident views, spearheaded a grouping of Czechslovak intellectuals and artists who formed ”Charter 77,” which declared public support for the rockers. The tortuous details of getting all the signatories to act with concerted courage is the spine and the most fascinating section-a detailed textbook for defiance-of ”Disturbing the Peace.” The government recognized it for the declaration of war it was, and for the next 15 years Havel was in and out of prison.
In such grievous circumstances, what sustains a person? In his cell, Havel had time to contemplate the question and reduce it to a series of philosophical conclusions that, when embodied in his popular plays and linked to his surprising zest for politics, makes his selection as the nation`s president unsurprising. A sample:
”Man must in some way come to his senses. He must extricate himself from this terrible involvement in both the obvious and the hidden mechanisms of totality, from consumption to repression, from advertising to manipulation through television. He must rebel against his role as a helpless cog in the gigantic and enormous machinery hurtling God knows where.”
Not a terribly original thought but one hardened in the crucible of anti- authoritarian reform. Last weekend, Havel`s Civic Forum swept to overwhelming victory in Czechoslovakia`s first free elections in more than 40 years. Rhetoric works.
This and similar notions emerge in Havel`s letters from prison to his wife, collected in ”Letters to Olga” and published here in 1988. Though both books are translated with impressive skill by Canadian Paul Wilson, the letters seem a bit bloodless when divorced from a chronicle of how Havel transforms thought into action.
It`s hard to imagine a greater difference than the one between Havel`s hands-on political activism, firmly grounded in a conception of man`s nature in his society, and the Western view of politics that would consider permitting Lithuania to twist in the wind, would work cynically with a Marcos and a Noriega and would effectively look the other way when China slaughtered its young. The whole point of this book is to show that there is a different way.
It`s a sure bet, and an enormous irony, that in this country Havel would be widely viewed as an idealistic crank or a dangerous radical. He takes a dim view of capitalism in practice as ”general manipulation of people`s lives by the system (no matter how inconspicuous such manipulation may be, compared with that of the totalitarian state).” Try this for heresy:
”IBM is flooding the world with even more advanced computers, while its employees have no influence over what their product does to the human soul and to human society. They have no say in whether it enslaves or liberates mankind, whether it will save us from the apocalypse or simply bring the apocalypse closer. Such `mega-machinery` is not constructed to the measure of man.”
When Havel visited the White House, that thinking somehow didn`t come through in the press briefings.
The story is by no means over. President Havel must preside over a tattered economy that needs to deal with the capitalists he so deeply suspects, and he must himself seek to ease the fractiousness between his Czech and Slovak constituencies without the common enemy of a communist regime as a rallying point.
But one chapter has been indelibly written. The novelist E.L. Doctorow summed it up last month in the ceremony marking the annual PEN/Faulkner Awards for Fiction. Assessing Havel and Hungary`s new president, Arpad Goncz, also an often-jailed dissident writer, he observed:
”The credential for the post of president turned out to be the writer`s faculty, which is the faculty of witness, of independent witness with no necessary loyalty to any institution-not the government, or the factory, or the church, or the party. Havel and Goncz both refused to lie. They were true patriots in that they refused to say that something that wasn`t true was true. . . . I know of no better qualification for a president anywhere. Total integrity, and a precious lack of political experience.”
