Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  Plaster casts of lizards and reproductions of other animals in silver, Meermuscheln, turtle shells, nacres, coconuts, statuettes of coloured wax, figurines of Egyptian clay, elegant mirrors of glass and steel, spectacles, corals, 'Indian' boxes filled with gaudy plumes, 'Indian' containers of straw and wood, 'Indian', that is, Japanese paintings, burnished silver and gilt 'Indian' nuts and other exotic objects the great carracks brought from India under full sail, a skin-coloured plaster-cov- ered female torso of the kind the Prague Surrealists so loved, amber and ivory boards for playing dice, a skull of yellow amber, amber goblets, bagpipes, 'landscapes' of Bohemian jasper, a small table of enamelled silver, shells of agate, jasper, topaz and crystal, a silver picture in an ebony frame, a bas-relief in oriental alabaster, painted stones, mosaics, a small silver altar, a crystal goblet with a silver lid, a topaz carafe given to Rudolf by a Muscovite delegation, a carafe of 'starstone', a glass jug of Bohemian agate with a gold handle, a large topaz drinking vessel in the shape of a lion, ruby-inlaid gold tableware, clay pitchers (some of which are covered with red velvet), a coral ship with figurines, a ship of gilt wood, a tiny ship of silver-plated Cocus de Malediva, a jewel casket of rock crystal, a casket of mother of pearl, a silver lute, lamina of lapis lazuli, rhinoceros horns, ivory hunting horns, gaudy knives inlaid with gold and gems, porcelain, scraps of silk, globes of various guise including a silver one atop a hypogryph, armillary spheres, measuring instruments, Venetian glassware, an ancient head of Polyphemus, Deianeira and the centaur in silver, medals, maiolica in many colours, anatomical specimens, harnesses, spurs, bridles, rough wooden saddles, domed pavilions, doublets and other booty left by the Turks during their mounted forays, hunting gear, banners, muzzles and collars, every kind of plate, ostrich-egg goblets, sabres, cut-throat daggers, muskets, stilettos, sword cases, mortar pieces, pistols and verdu-gas. And automata and musical clocks. Clocks, clocks and more clocks.

  Mopping our brow, we take a step back from the glare of Ripellino's coruscating romanticism and consult a cooler source. In his authoritative study of Rudolf, the historian R.J.W. Evans identifies three distinct versions of the Emperor which have come down to us. First there is the 'feeble, unstable and impoverished monarch' whose reign began in glory but ended with him humiliatingly deposed by his brother Matthias and cowering in terror within the fastness of Hradcany; second, the great connoisseur and patron of the arts and sciences; and third, the 'wizard Emperor' in thrall to magicians such as John Dee and Edward Kelley, an adept of astrology, Hermeticism, the Cabala, 'and plain old-fashioned superstition'. While not wholly dismissing any of these versions - a man may be a multitude, after all - Evans sets out to show not only how they overlap one upon the other, but that beneath the multifariousness of Rudolf's character there was an underlying unity. 'However hazardous it may be to speak of the philosophy of an age, there was nevertheless an underlying atmosphere, a climate of thought in later sixteenth-century Europe, which was particularly characteristic of the Imperial court in Prague . . . Part of the evidence for this is the universalist striving itself, an effort to preserve the mental and political unity of Christendom, to avoid religious schism, uphold peace at home, and deliver Europe from the Ottoman menace.' Even Rudolf's dabblings in magic may be viewed not as a vulgar delving after dark powers but part of a great stirring of intellectual curiosity and adventurousness which led directly to the Enlightenment.14 Even John Dee, for so long viewed as a fraudulent opportunist and Quack-salb, has been radically reassessed, notably by the Renaissance scholar Frances Yates. Certainly Dee was an alchemist and necromancer, but he was also a geographer and mathematician, a bibliophile, a teacher of Sir Philip Sidney, and published books on mathematics, navigation, and the calendar.

  'The occult striving,' Evans writes, 'was in essence an attempt to penetrate beyond the world of experience to the reality which underlay it, and as such it paralleled or overlapped with the artistic use of symbol and emblem. At the same time it belonged in a central way to the whole apprehension of nature during Rudolf's age, for the natural philosophers of the period were men who studied the forces at work in the world around them, not as discretely observed patterns of cause and effect, but as motive spirits acting through a divine scheme of correspondences.' Thus it is possible to regard Rudolf's band of alchemists in their laboratories in lane not as black magicians but as something like today's quantum physicists, probing the mysterious and contradictory reality of the world. Like the alchemists before them, modern physicists work in far deeper darkness than the layman realises, trusting their instincts and making judgements as often on aesthetic as on purely 'scientific' grounds. Evans: 'The object of such a philosophy [alchemy] was not only to describe the hidden forces of nature but also to control them, since the initiate who understood their powers could also apply his knowledge.' At the outset Evans points out that Rudolf held to the traditional, earth-centred cosmology, and 'the notions to which he and so many of his contemporaries subscribed were in their very essence magical. They believed that the world of men and the world of nature were linked by hidden sources of knowledge, and that the problems of alchemy, astrology, or the Hermetic texts were proper subjects for learned investigation.' Against this, more than one of Rudolf's contemporaries insisted that there was nothing high-minded about his obsession with magic, and that all he wanted from his alchemists was that they should discover how to transmute base metal into gold so that he might replenish the imperial coffers that his crazed collecting was constantly threatening to empty.

  The overseer of Rudolf's collections was the Italian antiquary Jacopo Strada, a resourceful and cunning scholar who not only amassed a huge treasury of coins, medallions and precious books for the Emperor, but also flattered his imperial pride by writing a number of texts on the royal lineage, including the Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, tracing Rudolf's forebears back to Julius Caesar. Strada was genuinely learned, however, and compiled an eleven-language dictionary, and produced works not only on antiquarianism but also on mechanics. His high position at court - Titian painted a very grand portrait of him - was no doubt sustained in part by the fact that his daughter Katarina was the bachelor Rudolf's long-time mistress, and bore him half a dozen children.15

  As the years went on Rudolf sank deeper into melancholy and paranoia, and the courtiers tussling for position behind his throne took on much of the running of the Empire. Foremost among these was Wolfgang Rumpf, who as Chamberlain and then High Steward and President of the Privy Council made most of the Emperor's decisions. In 1599, however, Rudolf began to suspect that Rumpf was working against him, perhaps in league with the Spanish throne and its Prague faction, and dismissed him, then took him back, then fired him for good. Rudolf's favourite punishment for those he considered betrayers was to fling them into a dungeon and throw away the key. Poor Rumpf was to spend the rest of his life in prison, where a decade later another fallen courtier, the splendidly named Philipp Lang z Langenfelsu, a converted Jew and a dabbler in alchemy, was to die a mysterious and violent death. It does not do to cross a Habsburg.

  With Rumpf's abrupt and final departure the business of government virtually ground to a halt. Rudolf was given increasingly to sudden, unprovoked and terrible rages, which alternated with profound depressions. He kept entirely to the castle now, where he had the walkways and promenades covered in so that he might move about his twilight world unobserved. In his poem, 'Prague', Seifert writes:

  Night towers over all

  and through the box-trees of evergreen cupolas

  the foolish emperor tiptoes away

  into the magic gardens of his retorts

  and in the halcyon air of rose-red evenings

  rings out the tinkle of the glass foliage

  as it is touched by the alchemists' fingers

  as if by the wind.

  In 1611 Rudolf's younger brother Matthias, whom he had always treated appallingly, called a meeting of the family in the Hofburg in Vienna. There were fears of a Protestant takeover
of the imperial throne which Rudolf's slow decline had left unprotected. Matthias was named head of the House of Habsburg and declared Regent. He marched with an army to the gates of Prague, and on November 11th forced Rudolf to abdicate, leaving him with a pension, the castle on Hrad­cany, and, of course, his collections. Very soon, to his horror, Rudolf's tame African lion died, an event which according to an oracle would presage the death of its master. Rudolf submerged himself in drink, developed dropsy, and expired, no doubt painfully, on January 20th, 1612. For all his personal strangeness and the haplessness of his reign, the city on the Vltava mourned him, recognising him as a true spiritual son.

  Who can guess the judgement of posterity? Searching the Internet for information on Rudolf, I was offered not Ripellino or Evans or Yates, but, mysteriously, the memoirs of an SS Kom-mandant at Auschwitz, the Eddeades IV et V of Plotinus, three taped episodes of the Teletubbies, and seven versions of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Thus does the glory fall.

  12 And we wonder at the bizarre nomenclature of Kafka's characters!

  13 Joanna was Queen of Castile and Leon, wife of Philip I of Spain, and mother of Charles V. After the death of her husband, poor Joanna lost her mind, and apart from a brief period of joint rule with Charles, spent the rest of her life shut up in the castle of Tordesillas. Ah, those crowned heads of Europe . . .

  14 In this regard it is instructive to recall that the great rationalist mathematician Sir Isaac Newton devoted much of his later life to alchemical studies, not to mention biblical exegesis and, in his position as controller of the Royal Mint, hunting down forgers and seeing them hanged.

  15 Their son, christened Julius Caesar after Rudolf's illustrious forebear, and variously known as Don Julius, Don Cesar de Austria or Marquis Julio, was one of history's numerous Bluebeards. He found a mistress in the daughter of a barber-surgeon from Krumlov, but within a few months took seriously against her, so much so that after administering various beatings to the poor girl he flew into an uncontrollable rage one night and killed her and chopped up the body, afterwards ordering that the pieces be collected and wrapped in linen and given a solemn funeral. He is said to have died at Krumlov Castle at the age of twenty-three, already a wasted debauchee. How these monsters enliven history's duller pages!

  3

  THE PRAGUE ORGY

  When I was a boy I fell in love with Eva Bartok. Eva was a film actress of the 1950s, whose real name was, or is - for all I know she may still be vigorously alive, over there in Budapest, or Beverly Hills, and I hope she is - Eva Ivanova She was married four times, once to the actor Kurt Jiirgens but never once to me, and was said to have had numerous lovers, among them Frank Sinatra - who denied he was the father of her only child - and, somewhat startlingly, the Mar­quess of Milford Haven. In 1959 she published her autobiography, Worth Living For, which I am disloyal enough not to have read. Her films include The Crimson Pirate (1952), the interestingly titled Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957), and the one in which I best remember her, Operation Amsterdam (1959), with Peter Finch. Eva's dark and soulful brand of beauty was very much the look of her time; to me, she was a rich man's Juliette Greco. In Operation Amsterdam I recall very black, shoulder-length hair and a thrillingly severe, straight fringe, a black polo-neck sweater tight enough across the bosom to make my adolescent gonads sizzle, and an equally tight skirt, of black leather - worthy of Marta, the Professor's wife - or so my fevered recollections insist. For a boy watching a matinee showing in a smoky cinema in the eternal afternoon of 1950s provincial Ireland, she was everything that the great world promised. To me, she was worth dying for.

  Years later, when I began to travel beyond what was then the Iron Curtain and into Eastern Europe, I discovered that Eva was not unique. In fact, there were Eva Bartoks all over Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and probably all over the other Eastern Bloc countries I had not yet visited. Everywhere one looked, on the streets, in the trams, behind the counters of dowdy shops, there they were, Eva's sisters or cousins, just as dark and soulful and nearly as lovely as she, with that same faraway look in their sloe-black eyes, dreaming, as surely she must for long have dreamed, of the West and all its wonderful decadence. In my first days in Prague I moved through the streets in a state of low-grade anguish at the spectacle of so many beautiful women, not the glossy, soot-and-silver wraiths of the cinema screens of my youth, but palpably real persons, walking about unconcernedly, or hurrying to an assignation, or standing at a bus stop hunched over a cigarette, or, indeed, sitting together in a pair at a table under a plastic palm tree in a hotel lobby on the look-out for custom.

  The first one of these fascinating creatures I got to speak to in circumstances that could be called in any way intimate was I have forgotten her surname, if I ever knew it - a freelance editor working at the time for a small Prague publishing house. I met her on my second visit to the city, again in winter. I had been to Kutna Hora to view, among other interesting sites, the famous Bone Chapel,16 and when I came back in the afternoon there was a note waiting for me at my hotel from an old acquaintance, a Czech journalist named Jan. He wrote that he had heard I was in town - how, I wondered? - and that by coincidence another friend was also here, Philip, an American poet who ran a little magazine in a city in upper New York state, Syracuse, I think, or perhaps it was Albany. The three of us had first encountered each other some years before in wintry Madison, where we were attending a literary gathering at the University of Wisconsin. I liked Jan, a tall, thin, bearded, nervous young man with a tremor in his hands and a permanently worried expression - 'haunted' is the epithet that springs to mind. He was funny, in his sombre Czech way. I wondered then, as I do still, how he had managed to get a visa to travel to America, seemingly without difficulty, in those Cold War days of the Andropov interregnum. Was he an apparatchik, or its Czech equivalent? - not that I would have disapproved, particularly, for who can say what accommodations one might come to, given the circumstances and the necessity? He was witheringly critical of Gustav Husak's horrible regime, yet, as I discovered one drunken night at a party in someone's house overlooking one of Madison's many lakes, he was nevertheless a doctrinaire Marxist. In the freezer in the kitchen we had found a bottle of Stolichnaya, Jan and Philip and I, which we had liberated from its Siberian cell - Jan declared it the People's Vodka; we were already fatuously tipsy - and as we sat in the gloaming at a picture window, looking out at the frozen lake glimmering in ghostly moonlight and passing the bottle of gelid, steely liquor from hand to hand and mouth to mouth, Jan made a passionate speech in praise of dialectical materialism, delivered, however, in a low, urgent murmur, as if he were worried that he might be overheard and arrested by the campus police, a not irrational fear, come to think of it. The moment recalled for me other, similar moments which I could not immediately place. Next morning, though, feeling my way cautiously through the fog of a vodka hangover, I realised that what Jan reminded me of most was those Irish Catholic priests of the post-Conciliar 1960s who had been to John XXIII's Rome and come back to Dublin burning with reformist zeal. One encountered them, these liberal zealots, at parties much like this one, thrilled with them selves in the new dispensation; they too would drink too much, and late at night back one into a corner and, in tones similar to Jan's, breathe into one's ear the hot good news from the Vatican Council that Christ the Aquarian was in the ascendant. Of course, press them on dogma contraception, sex before marriage, that kind of thing - and one struck against the old, iron rules. As many have remarked, Catholicism and Communism have much in common.

  So now here we were again, the three of us, meeting up in another snowbound city. I had telephoned Jan and asked him to come to my hotel. He and Philip arrived together, but when I suggested a drink in the hotel bar Jan glanced about the lobby and shook his head and walked back into the street and hailed a taxi. It was twilight, and snow flurries were swirling in the pallid light of the street lamps. What was wrong with the hotel bar, I asked? Jan shrugged. 'Russians,' he said, reminding me o
f my first meeting with the Professor, and then made that odd, snuffly sound that I remembered from our previous acquaintanceship, half joyless laugh, half snort of pure disgust, which in turn, eerily, reminded me of Marta. According to Jan, I had managed to choose the hotel in Prague most favoured by Russian businessmen, Russian army officers, and Russian spies. In the taxi Jan sat in the front seat, talking to the driver - they seemed to know each other - while in the back Philip and I warily reminisced about that week we had spent in each other's company in the Midwest. Philip, Big Phil, was a large, unsteady man, hard-breathing, bespectacled, with a footballer's shoulders and thick, touchingly unhandy hands. He had been more Jan's friend than mine - I think they had known each other before Madison, for Philip in his role as magazine editor had been a frequent traveller to Prague and points east - and I always felt he held me suspect in some never defined way. Curious, these intermittent and far-flung encounters into which life insists on leading us. I have never been an adept of international relations. I envy those travellers who can drop in on friends in all corners of the world at a moment's notice and be at ease in their company as if they had parted from them only yesterday. It was said of Sir Alfred Beit, the diamond magnate and art collector, that he kept his houses in England, America and Ireland fully staffed and functioning all year round, with food in the kitchens and freshly laundered clothes in the wardrobes, so that he and Lady Beit could travel luggageless and walk in their front doors and take up their Irish, English or American lives without breaking stride. In a similar way, but without needing all that money, how nice it would be to meet up with old pals in New York, or London, or Prague, and not have to unpack the years that have passed since we last met. I always feel a constricting shyness when I encounter someone after a long absence, as if all that had happened to both of us in the intervening years had somehow to be accounted for, like a clandestine love affair discovered by one's spouse. So as Philip in his stertorous mumble interrogated me about my doings over the previous three years I felt myself as usual squirming evasively, with the result that we quickly fell into a silence that was aggrieved on his side and shamefaced on mine.