Rock 'n' Roll. Tom Stoppard

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.