The Prague Post Online: Tempo: Havel unbound

July 25th, 2008

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Havel unbound

Behind the scenes at the castle with new translations of two political memoirs

June 20th, 2007 issue

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To the Castle and Back

By Václav Havel, translated into English by Paul Wilson
Knopf, 400 pages

By James F. Pontuso

For the Post

Anyone expecting a grand political memoir from Václav Havel’s To the Castle and Back will be disappointed. The book does not read like the tomes of former U.S. presidents or UK prime ministers who write to shape the historical record and validate their years in office. To the Castle and Back is far from a typical biography — it is deeper, more idiosyncratic and complex.

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Originally released in Czech as Prosím stručně (Please Be Brief), To the Castle has three interwoven storylines: an interview with Havel by Karel Hvížďala, which takes up where Disturbing the Peace (1990) left off; fragments of memos sent to his presidential staff from 1993 to 2003 (which Havel claims to have discovered by accident, still stored on his computer); and reflections that Havel wrote mostly during a stay at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., all superbly translated into English by Paul Wilson.

The result is a fascinating, if sometimes bewildering, depiction of his various levels of political thought and action. The memos in particular provide an account of the day-to-day challenges of holding high office: the deadlines, the decisions, the protocols and the tension between political rivals.

As he did in Letters to Olga, Havel reveals himself to be far from the epitome of equanimity. He can be moody, demanding and occasionally petulant, as when he blows up after a state dinner because the potatoes aren’t properly cooked.

He can also be disarmingly charming and funny. He boyishly reports that the state dinner was rescued because the guests mistook the undercooked potatoes for a Czech delicacy.

My favorite memorandum involves a bat found in the closet where the vacuum cleaner was kept. Havel queried his staff about how to remove it, but in the meantime notes that the light bulb had been unscrewed so as not “to wake it or upset it.”

Much of Havel’s energy while president was directed at what he does best: writing. Imagine George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin or even Tony Blair drafting their own speeches. Havel did — and the more than 150 addresses contain more than political pabulum. They provide genuine philosophic reflection on the human condition in the age of globalization.

Hvížďala, an adept interviewer, asks Havel all the questions that those who follow Czech politics would want answered. Havel delivers his views on his major political rivals, men who wielded more formal power, but who could never match Havel’s reputation or authority.

Václav Klaus is “a hardworking, ambitious man … a smart politician who is not overly burdened by scruples.” Vladimír Mečiar established a “quasi-dictatorship” in Slovakia. Miloš Zeman is a “tough customer,” but a “vulgar” one. Among Czech politicians, Zeman is “the best orator”: Even when he said things that were untrue, he “always expressed them wittily … and never uttered a sentence that didn’t have a subject and a predicate.” After the indecisive elections of 1996, Havel favored Joseph Lux, “an honorable man and a good politician,” over Klaus and Zeman for prime minister, hoping to head off what later became the disastrous opposition agreement.

The writer whom the communist Writers Union once tagged the “bourgeois brat” also answers some of the persistent charges made against him. He dealt with the communist Parliament in 1990 instead of dismissing it, he says, not because he favored reform communists, but because the Civic Forum did not control the police, army or bureaucracy. As far-fetched as it seems in hindsight, Havel feared a counterrevolution, and not a velvet one. He appointed Marián Čalfa prime minister, not because Čalfa offered Havel the presidency, but because Čalfa knew how Parliament operated, and the Civic Forum did not. Čalfa realized that communism was dead, and established “a hardworking and constructive atmosphere” to transfer power to the new democracy.

Havel explains that he sold the family-owned Lucerna Palace — with the understanding that it would be restored — because of a long-running dispute with his brother Ivan’s wife. But his sister-in-law retained control of 50 percent of the assets, and resisted any remodeling that was not to her liking. Ultimately, the development company went bankrupt and Havel was charged with profiting from the “velvet corruption” so common during the transition to a free-market economy. But the president had the last laugh: He gave his share of the profits to charity.

Indeed, Havel warned Klaus against a rapid transition to a market economy without an adequate legal structure to support it. Rather than being surprised by “Mafia capitalism,” as his critics have charged, Havel predicted it, although he lacked the power to forestall it.

Here, for the first time, Havel publicly acknowledges beginning an affair in 1990, six years before the death of his wife Olga. After they danced at a ball, Dagmar Veškrnová — the current Mrs. Havel — invited the president for coffee, and he gave his bodyguards instructions “to drive quietly with their headlights off.”

Perhaps because he was in Washington while working on the book, many of Havel’s musings are about the United States. He praises Americans’ patriotism, optimism, self-reliance and voluntary obedience to the rule of law — the effect of the country’s long-established civil society. His criticism, while more subtle, is more telling. He worries about the monochromatic global economy of which the United States is the avatar. He decries the profit-at-any-cost corporate mentality, and fears that large multinational corporations are robbing people of their ability to control their destinies. He opposes the effort to fully control nature through technology, and he even admits to disliking the World Trade Center as a symbol of the “technology of power.”

The book’s subtitle, found only on the copyright page — “Reflections on my life as a fairy-tale hero” — is apt for Havel, a man whose political experience is unique in history. As an artist, a prisoner of conscience and a leader who guided his country through one of its most tumultuous eras, Havel has indeed led a fairy-tale, stranger-than-fiction life. Although his reputation has been tarnished among his countrymen, this shy, self-conscious writer remains one of the world’s most respected public figures. Even in this odd, multilayered book, he continues to inspire hope that freedom is not the foe of responsibility, and that dignity need not be sacrificed in the pursuit of political power.

— James F. Pontuso is Patterson Professor of Government & Foreign Affairs at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and author of Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age. He can be reached at features@praguepost.com.

His Doubtful Excellency

A Canadian Novelist’s Adventures as President Havel’s Ambassador in Prague
By Jan Drabek
Ekstasis Editions, 168 pages

By Frank Kuznik

Staff Writer

Here’s a heartening thought for expats: It’s not you.

Everyone who comes to the Czech Republic is treated with rudeness and suspicion, including the author of this very entertaining memoir, first published in Czech as Po uši v postkomunismu (Up to my Ears in Post-Communism).

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Jan Drabek, 72, is a native who was born in Prague and managed to escape Czechoslovakia in March 1948, one week after the communist takeover. He eventually settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he was enjoying life as a novelist and retired teacher when the Velvet Revolution drew him back to his homeland, eager to help in its transition to democracy.

Drabek’s first point of contact was a Foreign Affairs Ministry official, whom he describes as a “true child of the communist era — distrustful, limited and rude … It was difficult for him to understand that I was actually offering his country the services of our organization.”

That’s the least of it. Through a series of circumstances and connections too complicated to recount here, Drabek was eventually named an ambassador, first to Kenya, then to Albania. His Doubtful Excellency opens with a horrific account of his wife, Joan, stricken with an appendicitis attack in Tirana. The only way to save her life is to airlift her back to a decent hospital in Prague.

But the Czech Foreign Affairs Ministry hems and haws until Drabek, desperate, assures his superior that he will pay all expenses for the flight. Even then, after several hours of waiting with no rescue in sight, Drabek is finally informed that the plane will not leave the ground until he faxes the ministry a written guarantee of payment.

“I was flabbergasted,” Drabek writes. “This for an ambassador of the Czech Republic!”

His wife survived, barely, and the Drabeks returned to the sanity of the Western world. But Drabek’s account of the eight years, off and on, that they spent in the employ of the castle offers a rare and revealing look inside the Czech government — which doesn’t seem to have changed much in the intervening years. The bureaucrats Drabek encounters are petty, jealous, viciously protective of their turf and often on vacation or out drinking instead of working.

Despite the book’s subtitle, Václav Havel remains a distant figure, a childhood acquaintance who is more interested in drama and philosophy than running the government. The dominant political figure in the book is then-Prime Minister Václav Klaus, who apparently hasn’t changed much, either. “The premier never admitted mistakes,” Drabek says in one of many acerbic observations. “His style was to attack in all directions instead, and keep attacking — pointing to what he saw as the incompetence of everyone around him.”

In between ambassadorial gigs, Drabek was named head of protocol at the castle, which meant choreographing the visits of dignitaries such as Queen Elizabeth, Pope John Paul II, the kings of Spain and Sweden and Hillary Clinton, accompanied by Madeleine Albright. The middle third of the book brims with behind-the-scenes accounts of those visits, which are inevitably filled with faux pas. There are also some great scenes of Drabek explaining to pompous ambassadors why, for example, the water main break at one’s residence is not a deliberate provocation, and no, he’s not entitled to a free hotel room until it’s fixed.

But the part of the book that will resonate most with expats is Drabek’s running commentary on Czech society, and how as an outsider he’s constantly baffled and frustrated by it. There is nothing mean or bitter in his observations; on the contrary, as a native son Drabek feels a strong kinship with the Czechs. But in terms of manners, morals and behavior he might as well be from another planet.

An observation that Drabek offers about his employees in the protocol office is classic: “They knew that the present society, like the one before it, was fuelled by graft, lies and disregard for one’s self-respect.”

Keep that in mind the next time you’re standing in line at the Foreigners’ Police or criminal records office, or being treated like dirt at the post office. Or, better yet, buy a copy of this book and bring it with you. It won’t shorten the line or reduce the aggravation. But there is comic relief and comfort in knowing that everyone, high and low, gets the same miserable treatment.

Frank Kuznik can be reached at fkuznik@praguepost.com

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