by Joshua Cohen
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ALCOHOLISM WOULD SEEM AMONG the least concerns of communism. Already boasting one of the highest per-capita beer consumption rates in the world—surpassed in 1989 only by East Germany’s—Czechoslovakia, like every Soviet protectorate, engaged in pro-forma propaganda discouraging drinking, especially in the workplace and during compulsory military service. The state couldn’t actually afford for its citizens to go sober: With the breweries being state-owned, the more intoxicated the people, the richer, in every way, the party. It was ironic, then, that the perfect communist comrade was a dutiful teetotaler—not a man but a fictional character.
Homo socialist realismus—the literature would produce its own readership, indistinguishable from its characters. Socialist Realist literature had to be about and for the proletariat; it had to depict the daily life of that population; that depiction had to be in a realist style, meaning it had to be accurate to the ideal of proletarian life and contain no experiments or formalisms; and, finally, it had to support but not independently further the objectives of the Communist Party (these being the diktats decided upon at the debut meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934). What resulted, in the Sputnik countries of the Warsaw Pact as in the Soviet Union, was a canon of childish unsubtlety—a fabling corpus in which nothing could be plotted without a moral, whether explicit or implied. The goal of this literature [sic] was not to entertain but to instruct, to make the perfect comrade by making a new type of writer—not a poet of inky individuality but rather, as that formidable poet Stalin put it, “an engineer of human souls.”
A mad, maddening tautology: A Socialist Realist writer must write about reality in a realistic style while remaining partisan and at all times reinforcing the party line. When these two impulses came into conflict, the writer risked shading into the realm of irony or satire, and suddenly what had been didactic and simple became complex and revolutionary. This was the literature of those who wrote for oblivion or the drawer, for a dimly free future or for a cynically regarded, because illegal, posterity. Such writers, who remained (mostly) unpublished under communism, who, if they published, did so (mostly) in samizdat, represented the Eastern Bloc’s only authentic international style, but only in retrospect. In its day its practitioners were scattered across too many countries and too many languages, with each responding both to a general Soviet politics and to the particular censorships of their home nations (it appears to have been easier to get away with writing subversively in Yugoslavia than in Russia, for example).
Socialist Realist fiction was too obviously occupied with schematic surface: A man is discharged from the Red Army a hero and returns to reorganize his hometown around a hyperprogressive cement factory (the novel Cement by Fyodor Gladkov). It was all exterior, a series of events or plot points demonstrating fate, synonymous in these books with political calling. By contrast, the corpora of censored or banned writers were usually more interested by the inner life—the mind, the one space from which no citizen can be exiled. Show a veteran working productively in a plant and you have created propaganda, but tell the thoughts of this man, tell us what he feels when he boozes at night and beats his children and wife, and you have an artwork—a dangerous artwork.
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IT WAS HRABAL’S GENIUS to redeem Socialist Realism by taking it literally, to its literal extreme, in the creation of verbatim documents of people trying to conform to societal norms, failing, and still wanting to succeed. Avoiding boring the bar with platitudes about the soul’s oppression by totalitarianism, Hrabal preferred the objective approach of reproducing speech, from which any attentive patron might infer the appropriate conclusions.
In the autobiographies, Hrabal transcribes his own speech but has it pour out of the mouth of his wife, the narratrix Eliška, also called Miss Pipsi. Countess Tolstaya wrote a memoir of her husband that rivals even Gorky’s classic reminiscence of Tolstoy; Anna Dostoyevskaya wrote similar memoirs; Hrabal tweaks that venerable tradition by ventriloquism. He has preempted posthumity by having his wife address the reader directly, when she’s not reporting to Hrabal’s mother, Marie Kiliánová, a failed actress. Hrabal exploits this uxorial distance to parody himself and gently rib his wife. While he has intense discussions about Action Painting and Allan Kaprow’s Happenings with his painter friend, the “Explosionist” Vladimír Boudník, Eliška Hrabalová pretends to content herself with nice needlepoints of Prague’s spired skyline. The trilogy’s first volume, In-House Weddings, narrates the couple’s shy courtship; the second, Vita Nuova, has Hrabal beginning to write and publish; and the third, Gaps, fills in the rest with fame, Hrabal relaxing with his kittens at his dacha in Kersko, and traveling worldwide until, eventually—in a destiny perhaps fitting for someone so liquored—he’s “liquidated,” forbidden to publish.
Dancing Lessons is a wilder affair accomplished with a similar technique: Hrabal transcribed the ranting of his stepfather’s brother, Uncle Pepin, veteran of “the most elegant army in the world,” the Imperial Austrian army. In the novel, Pepin’s “ludibrious” logorrhea (and wordplay) is given to an unnamed man whose metanarrative—he tells a story about how he used to tell stories to a bunch of “beauties,” sunbathers in bikinis—touches on such subjects as Freud, the Czech nationalism of Karel Havlíček, and the transition from the monarchy to the First Czechoslovak Republic. Throughout, this narrator—“as sensitive as Mozart and an admirer of the European Renaissance”—relates and interprets his own dreams in a manner that combines Viennese psychoanalysis with Parisian Surrealism or Dadaism. Artists of every Mitteleuropean city put in time in Left Bank Paris, and the avant-gardities they encountered often found more potent, darker expressions back home: Hrabal’s cutup techniques; the collages of Jindřich Štyrský and Vítězslav Nezval. All this geographic and cultural complication reminded Hrabal’s readership that even as Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, the city’s cinematic streets were filled with extras from Czech history: concentration-camp victims; school chums of T. G. Masaryk, the first Czechoslovak president; wannabe poètes maudits; old deposed gentry who’d flirted with Empress Maria Theresa.
It’s this same panoramic, parabolic view that defines the perspective of the autobiographies: Hrabalová, as her husband has her explain, was Sudeten German by birth and Czech by accident, after her family was split up following WWII when the Beneš government expelled German nationals from western Bohemia. While her relatives lived prosperously in republican Vienna, Hrabalová moved into her husband’s cramped peeling-plaster flat on Na Hrázi Street in the ramshackle Prague suburb of Libeň, where she was distrusted on account of her origins. The personal experience of history serves to refute notions of categorical good and evil, suggesting instead a pan-European complicity in postwar decline. The sheer convolution of alliances and birthrights justifies Hrabal’s principle of historical passivity, which is just another term for a drunkard’s politics.
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IF THE STATE ASSERTED that drinking was bad for work, Hrabal held that without drinking he wouldn’t have been able to work at all, badly or well—either as laborer or novelist of labor. Hrabal’s protagonists are all committed workers, and nobody writes about work with more dignity than he who, like most Czech writers—save those approved by the regime—suffered the lowliest of manual jobbery for decades. The Pepinized palaverer of Dancing Lessons is a cobbler; in the autobiographies, Hrabalová calls her husband “doctor,” and though Hrabal earned a doctorate in law from Charles University, he never practiced. He worked as a railway lineman and train dispatcher (experiences featured in Closely Watched Trains), insurance agent, traveling salesman, metalwork foreman, and sceneshifter in a provincial but influential theater. Hrabalová herself toiled as a waitress, providing her husband with insight for I Served the King of England, while Hrabal’s stint as a baler and compactor informed Too Loud a Solitude
, his most celebrated novel. (In the autobiographies, Hrabal has his wife note that among the many hundreds of books he saved from pulping were copies of his own early volumes—sent for destruction after his work incensed the censors after 1968.)
Only in a city where your garbageman was your greatest novelist, tasked with trashing his own output, could Václav Havel have coined the phrase “the power of the powerless,” which served as the title of a provocative essay and as the commiserable epitaph for a generation of Eastern Bloc artists. Havel, for a time, had been frequenting Hrabal’s local haunts to encourage him to add his signature to Charter 77, the Czech dissidence platform Havel coauthored, but Hrabal repeatedly refused, preferring not to further jeopardize the publication of Too Loud a Solitude—an action, or inaction, perhaps selfish or aloof but consistent with Hrabal’s aim: to continue publishing, if only illegally. It was this very surrender that must have represented, to Hrabal, the essential power of the powerless: the power to opt out, to maintain daily normalcy while daily making vanguard art.
As major writers during the communist era, so minor cultures in the Europe of empire. The Czechs and Slovaks are still peoples at the crossroads, always at the mercy of neighboring nation-states. Mitteleuropa, which, according to Hrabal, terminated in the Russified East at the last Habsburg train station—which would be in Lemberg, now Lviv, Ukraine—was never a toponym to be found on maps but rather a transnational entity founded on the skill of its underclass, the Slavs. Tour any railroad shed, church, palace, or decrepit municipal building in Germany, Austria, Hungary, or Poland and it was, most probably, built by Slav labor—the most mobile of a faction that, in the midst of Europe, was perpetually imperiled by its lesser numbers, lack of technology, and cloistral languages prickly about Germanic calquing. The power of the powerless, as Hrabal realized, was an inheritance much older than communism; Dancing Lessons proclaims this in its epigraph, from the Czech philosopher Ladislav Klima:
Not only may one imagine that what is higher derives always and only from what is lower; one may imagine—given the polarity and, more important, the ludicrousness of the world—everything derives from its opposite: day from night, frailty from strength, deformity from beauty, fortune from misfortune. Victory is made up exclusively of beatings.
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PRAGUE’S CHARLES BRIDGE HOSTS a famous miracle rub: a statue of John of Nepomuk, patron saint of the Czechs, who was dressed in a suit of armor and tossed off the bridge for not divulging the queen’s confessions to her husband, King Wenceslas IV. Give the saint’s bronze plaque a short pat or brush with a cuff and your wish will be granted, the superstition goes: St. John’s pediment is shiny with use, its escutcheon’s embellishments almost entirely worn away by centuries of pilgrims. A decade after publishing his memoirs, Hrabal was a walking, talking statue—a lucky living icon, faded from regular toasting.
The problem with being a notorious imbiber is that everyone wants to have a drink with you: even Bill Clinton made the trek to the Golden Tiger to shake the writer’s shaky hand, a pickled relic. Some Czech critics after the fall of communism thought it their task to argue that Hrabal’s drinking was about drinking; others chose to believe that the author’s consumption was a protest, an attack against the state expressing itself as an attack against the self. It’s this ambivalence that is at the heart, or cirrhotic liver, of Hrabal’s compulsive venture. In this sense, debauchery perversely becomes a method of abstention: Regimes come and go, but alcohol is always legal. (“Reality is alcoholic,” he once wrote.)
One winter afternoon in 1997, leaning out of his hospital-room window to feed the pigeons, Hrabal fell—from the fifth floor; the same floor he noted Kafka lived on and considered jumping from at the Oppelt House on Prague’s Old Town Square; the same floor Rainer Maria Rilke, another Prague native, lived on in Paris and to which he consigned his doomed character Malte Laurids Brigge—not to mention Prague’s enduring penchant for defenestrations. Hrabal, whose fall was rumored to have been a suicide—thanks to quintaphobic allusions to these fates sprinkled like birdseed throughout his later texts—never spotted a coincidence he did not advantage.
As the world watched the Berlin Wall come down on television, East Germans were heading to West Germany to buy televisions. That type of consumerism supported literature for a few years—post-’89 editions of Hrabal’s books sold out quickly—but what seemed at the time like the first drops of unprecedented promise seem now just the final dregs before eurozone homogenization. Books by Hrabal and Ivan Klima and Milan Kundera were bought for the same reasons televisions were: because they could be. Goods were goods, and the free market was good. Hrabal’s manuscripts were always grammatically idiosyncratic because he wrote on a Perkeo Schreibmaschine, a popular model of German typewriter that the author had bartered from some Soviet soldiers during WWII. Being German, it lacked the acutes, haceks, and rings of Czech letters. Today we’re free to interpret this materialist effect on a text as a mechanism of capitalism—the larger country exporting its typewriter to the smaller country, thereby affecting its future literature—just as in Hrabal’s day the effacement of an autonomous culture was a communist concern. The power changes, the drinks remain the same.
* Historically speaking, the word Čech, in Czech, possesses two meanings. It defines both a citizen of today’s Czech Republic and a person from the lands of the former kingdom of Bohemia. The Czech Republic comprises the territories of two crowns: Bohemia and Moravia. A Moravian is a Czech insofar as he is a Czech citizen, but would take exception to being called a Bohemian.
FROM THE DIARIES
MUSEUM FACT (RIJEKA)
The shape of the anchor derives from the shape of the arrow. An anchor is an arrow shot into the sea.
CRITICAL TYPO
“[…] if one considers for a moment the reverse perspective developed by Byzantine ant […]”
HUNG LIKE AN OBELISK, HARD AS AN OLYMPIAN
AN ABECEDARIUM OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PUBLISHING IN PARIS
“A” IS FOR AVANT-GARDE
BEFORE L’AVANT-GARDE CAME TO CHARACTERIZE a movement in the arts, it was a military position: It referred to the front line of an advancing army, the soldiers sacrificed for the progress of the rest. It was in this way that the term was understood by the Napoleons. Over one thousand enemy cannon were captured in the Battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon I defeated the Russians and Austrians in winter 1805. The bronze from this artillery was melted down for an obelisk, erected in the Place Vendôme in Paris. Because of its proximity to the publisher’s offices (16 Place Vendôme), this phallus of French glory became the imprimatur and namesake of the Obelisk Press, an English-language avant-garde and erotica publisher active throughout the 1930s, responsible for issuing works by the likes of James Joyce and Henry Miller. Obelisk’s Napoleon was a Jew from Manchester, Jack Kahane. Following WWII, Kahane’s eldest son, Maurice Girodias, founded the Olympia Press, redoubling Obelisk’s crusade against Anglo-American censorship by publishing the likes of William S. Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov. Olympia financed this vanguard by publishing explicit pornography—referred to in-house as “d.b.s,” “dirty books”—that, like the artistic works of the house’s marquee authors, challenged the obscenity laws of the countries of their linguistic audience: Britain and America. Olympia’s porn also proved popular among American GIs stationed in Paris—men lonely for sex and the language of home.*
“B” IS FOR BATAILLE, GEORGES
Ignored in his own lifetime but posthumously lauded by Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Baudrillard, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a Catholic seminary dropout and a French writer of surrealistically sensualist fiction and poetry, and mystical philosophy. His best novel, Histoire de l’œil (Story of the Eye), today a classic of obscure symbolism and underage sex, was published in 1928 and peremptorily banned. American Austryn Wainhouse’s 1953 translation was called A Tale of Satisfied Desire, a title receive
d from Girodias himself, who hoped to prevent the authorities from noticing any connection between the French and English editions. The English edition was published under the pseudonym Pierre Angélique, while Bataille’s French pseudonym for the book had been Lord Auch, literally Lord to the Shittery, auch being a condensation of aux chiottes, slang used to reprove a person by telling them off “to the toilets.”
“C” IS FOR CHESTER, ALFRED
Alfred Chester, born in 1927 in Jewish Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents, can be regarded as a typical Olympia author: a litératteur who took fiction seriously, and financially supported that seriousness with the hack writing of a pornographic novel. Due to a rare childhood disease, the pasty, pudgy Chester went bald at a young age and took to wearing outlandish, ratty wigs. In 1953, Chester decamped New York for Paris, and in 1955 published his sole Olympia d.b., entitled The Chariot of Flesh (the The was dropped in future editions), under the name Malcolm Nesbit. In 1959, with money from the sale of a story to The New Yorker, Chester returned to New York, where he became one of the foremost critics of the ’60s, writing witty, scabrous reviews for The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and Commentary. But sensing his true calling was in fiction—his novels are Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire and Exquisite Corpse—Chester abandoned journalism and moved to Tangiers, where, with the help of pills and alcohol, he lost his mind and friends. He was deported from Morocco (which, in those tolerant days, was quite the achievement) and found his way to Israel, where he died a probable suicide in 1971. Chester self-defined as homosexual, though he gave Cynthia Ozick her first kiss, once offered to marry Susan Sontag, and seemed not to have difficulty producing heterosexual porn (Olympia’s misogynistic sex world was almost exclusively hetero, plus lesbian). Chariot of Flesh is an excellent example of a rush-job d.b., though it is also notable for scenarios that speak to the author’s personal proclivities:
