Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  In January 1968, Alexander Dubček’s government—the political offspring of the reform movement—came to power and immediately set out to dismantle the totalitarian machinery that had been integral to Communist Party rule since the “Revolution of 1948.” According to the inspired slogan of the Dubček government, very soon now in Czechoslovakia there would be “socialism with a human face.” Instead, soon enough, Soviet tanks appeared in Prague’s Old Town Square, and overnight—the night of August 20, 1968—some two hundred thousand Russian and other Warsaw Pact soldiers had occupied Czechoslovakia.

  Six years later an eighty-thousand-man Russian army is still there, largely in the countryside now, hidden from the sight of the demoralized Czechs but close enough to the capital to lend whatever authority is needed to the repressive edicts and punitive decrees of the regime that the Russians have placed back in power. Alexander Dubček is reported to be currently employed as an inspector in a trolley factory in Slovakia. The author of The Joke, and of the stories that follow, also lives in the provinces, in Brno, the city where he was born forty-five years ago. Along with the other leading intellectuals whose speeches and writings helped to make the Prague Spring (and who continue to refuse to “confess” to their “mistakes” so as to receive official absolution), he is excluded from membership in the post-occupation writers’ union (an undistinguished government-approved group bearing little resemblance to the outspoken writers’ union that was dissolved by the government when it refused to comply with Soviet “normalization”); he has been fired from his teaching position at the Prague Film School; he is forbidden to travel to the West;* his literary works have been removed from the nation’s libraries and bookstores; his plays have been banned from the theaters; and as a result of a series of government decrees establishing confiscatory taxes aimed specifically at ten dissident writers, he now receives less than 10 percent of the royalties that his books earn in Europe, where he is a writer of considerable reputation. Recently his new novel, Life Is Elsewhere, received the Prix Médicis as the best foreign novel published in France in 1973; the book cannot, however, be published in the country, and in the language, in which it was written.

  * * *

  The Czech novelist and journalist Ludvík Vaculík, who is perhaps considered an even more dangerous political criminal than Kundera by the current Czech rulers, has remarked in an interview (given to a Swiss journalist visiting Prague, and printed subsequently in several Western magazines) that he considers it “unfortunate … when foreign critics judge the quality of Czech literary work exclusively by the degree to which it ‘settles accounts with illusions about socialism’ or by the acerbity with which it stands up to the regime here. I cannot use the foreign book market to stand up to the regime, nor do I want to.”

  Similarly, the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub let me know, when we were introduced in Prague in 1973, that he did not care to receive attention from foreign literary visitors simply because he was considered by them to be a “poor Czech.” I had just expressed admiration for his Penguin collection of poems, which I’d read at the suggestion of A. Alvarez, the English critic and editor of the Penguin European Poets series. Still, Dr. Holub momentarily bristled, as though it could be that I actually had more sympathy for the predicament in which he and other Czech writers found themselves than for his verse. Only a few months after our first meeting, Holub went on Prague radio and made what was described by the government announcer as a “self-critical confession of the political standpoint he took … in the crisis years of 1968 and 1969…” Reading a transcript of Holub’s confession of error—a windy, clichéd document in no way like the sharp and elegant poetry—I wondered if this sternly intelligent and theoretically minded poet-scientist, with whom I’d developed something of a friendship during my weeks in Prague, might have been moved to denounce himself on the radio not necessarily to curry favor with the authorities, or because he had finally to yield for personal reasons to government threat and intimidation, or even because he had changed his mind about ’68, but rather, perhaps, to discourage once and for all sympathetic judgments about himself or his work that might be thought to arise in response to the conspicuously grave circumstances in which he writes poetry and studies blood.*

  I would think that like Holub and Vaculík, Milan Kundera too would prefer to find a readership in the West that was not drawn to his fiction because he is a writer who is oppressed by a Communist regime, especially since Kundera’s political novel, The Joke, happens to represent only an aspect of his wide-ranging intelligence and talent. To date, Kundera has published, aside from The Joke, two plays; three books of poems (one on the subject of women in love, another on a Czech resistance hero of World War II); a study of the modern Czech novelist Vladislav Vančura; and several volumes of short stories which, like the stories collected here, focus largely on the private world of erotic possibilities, rather than on politics and the state. At present, Kundera, whose father was a pianist and rector of the state music conservatory at Brno, is at work on a study of the composer Leoš Janáček, whose strong interest in Moravian folk music Kundera shares. (An earlier book on Janáček was published in 1924 by Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and biographer.)

  But having written The Joke, Kundera, for all his wide-ranging interests, now finds himself an enemy of the state and nothing more—ironically enough, in a position very much like the protagonist of The Joke, whose error it is as a young Communist student to send a teasing postcard to his girl friend, making fun of her naïve political earnestness. She happens to be away from him for a few weeks, taking a summer course in the strategies of the revolutionary movement, and seems to Ludvík Jahn not to be missing him quite enough. So, playful lover that he is, he dashes off a message to his ardent young Stalinist:

  Optimism is the opium of the people! The healthy atmosphere stinks! Long live Trotsky!

  Ludvík

  Well, in Eastern Europe a man should be more careful of the letters he writes, even to his girl friend. For his three joking sentences, Jahn is found guilty by a student tribunal of being an enemy of the state, is expelled from the university and the Party, and is consigned to an army penal corps where for seven years he works in the coal mines. “But, Comrades,” says Jahn, “it was only a joke.” Nonetheless, he is swallowed up by a state somewhat lacking a sense of humor about itself, and subsequently, having misplaced his own sense of humor somewhere in the mines, he is swallowed up and further humiliated by his plans for revenge.

  The Joke is, of course, not so benign in intent as Jahn’s postcard. I would suppose that Kundera must himself have known, somewhere along the line, that one day the authorities might confirm the imaginative truthfulness of his book by bringing their own dogmatic seriousness down upon him for writing as he did about the plight of Ludvík Jahn. “Socialist realism,” after all, is the approved artistic mode in his country, and as one Prague critic informed me when I asked for a definition, “Socialist realism consists of writing in praise of the government and the party so that even they understand it.” Oddly (just another joke, really) Kundera’s book conforms more to Stalin’s own prescription for art: “socialist content in national form.” Since two of the most esteemed books written in the nation in question happen to be The Trial by Franz Kafka and The Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hašek, Kundera’s own novel about a loyal citizen upon whom a terrible joke is played by the powers that be would seem to be entirely in keeping with the spirit of Stalin’s injunction. If only Stalin were alive so that Kundera could point out to him this continuity in “national form” and historical preoccupation.

  At any rate: that he has received from reality such strong verification for what was, after all, only a literary invention must furnish some consolation to a writer so attuned to harsh irony, and so intrigued by the startling consequences that can flow from playing around.

  * * *

  Erotic play and power are the subjects frequently at the center of the stories that Kundera calls,
collectively, Laughable Loves. Sexuality as a weapon (in this case, the weapon of he who is otherwise wholly assailable) is to the point of The Joke as well: to revenge himself upon the political friend who had turned upon him back in his remote student days, Ludvík Jahn, released from the coal mines at last, coldly conceives a plan to seduce the man’s wife. In this decision by Kundera’s hero to put his virility in the service of his rage, he displays a kinship to characters in the fiction of Mailer and Mishima—the vengeful husband, for example, in Mishima’s Forbidden Colors, who engages a beautiful young homosexual to arouse the passion and then break the hearts of women who have betrayed and rejected him; or the Greenwich Village bullfight instructor, in Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time,” whose furious copulations seem to be aimed at producing pleasure for his partner in the form of punishment. However, what distinguishes Kundera’s cocksman from Mailer’s or Mishima’s is the ease with which his erotic power play is thwarted, and turns into yet another joke at his expense. He is so much more vulnerable in good part because he has been so crippled by ostracism from the Party and imprisonment in the penal corps (compare the limitless social freedom of Mailer’s Americans, O’Shaugnessy and Rojack), but also because Kundera, unlike Mailer or Mishima, seems even in a book as bleak and cheerless as The Joke to be fundamentally amused by the uses to which a man will think to put his sexual member, or the uses to which his member will put him. This amusement, mixed though it is with sympathy and sorrow, leads Kundera away from anything even faintly resembling a mystical belief or ideological investment in the power of potency or orgasm.

  In Laughable Loves, what I’ve called Kundera’s “amusement” with erotic enterprises and lustful strategies emerges as the mild satire of a story like “The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire,” wherein Don Juanism is viewed as a sport played by a man against a team of women, oftentimes without body contact—or, in the wry, rather worldly irony of the Dr. Havel stories, “Symposium” and “Dr. Havel After Ten Years,” where Don Juanism is depicted as a way of life in which women of all social stations eagerly and willingly participate as “sexual objects,” particularly so with Havel, eminent physician and aging Casanova, who in his prime is matter-of-factly told by a professional colleague: “… you’re like death, you take everything.” Or Kundera’s amusement emerges as a kind of detached Chekhovian tenderness in the story about a balding, thirtyish, would-have-been eroticist, who sets about to seduce an aging woman whose body he expects to find repellent, a seduction undertaken to revenge himself upon his own stubborn phallic daydreams. Narrated alternately from the point of view of the thirty-five-year-old seducer and the fifty-year-old seduced, and with a striking air of candor that borders somehow on impropriety—as though a discreet acquaintance were suddenly letting us in on sexual secrets both seamy and true—this story, “Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead,” seems to me “Chekhovian” not merely because of its tone, or its concern with the painful and touching consequences of time passing and old selves dying, but because it is so very good.

  In “The Hitchhiking Game,” “Nobody Will Laugh,” and “Edward and God,” Kundera turns to those jokes he is so fond of contemplating, the ones that begin in whimsical perversity, and end in trouble. In “The Hitchhiking Game,” for example, a young couple off for a vacation together decide on the way to their destination to play at being strangers, the girl pretending to be a hitchhiker and her boy friend just another man passing in his car. The ensuing confusion of identities, and the heightened eroticism this provokes in the lovers, with its scary sado-masochistic edge, is not so catastrophic to either of them as his joke turns out to be for Ludvík Jahn. Still, simply by fooling around and indulging their curiosity, the lovers find they have managed to deepen responsibility as well as passion—as if children playing doctor out in the garage were to look up from one another’s privates to discover they were administering a national health program, or being summoned to perform surgery in the Mount Sinai operating room. What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera’s Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes, games, and pleasure included; what’s laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.

  My own favorite story is “Edward and God.” Like The Joke, it deals with a young Czech whose playfulness (with women, of course) and highly developed taste for cynicism and blasphemy expose him to the harsh judgments of a dogmatic society or, rather, expose him to those authorities who righteously promulgate and protect the dogmas, but do so stupidly and without even genuine conviction or understanding. What is particularly appealing here is that the young schoolteacher Edward, an erotic Machiavelli who feigns religious piety to seduce a pious knockout and so falls afoul of his atheistic school board, gets no more than he gives, and is more of a thoughtful Lucky Jim, really, than a Ludvík Jahn. His difficulties are not come by so innocently, nor are the consequences so brutal or humiliating as they are in The Joke. Indeed, the ugly school directress with a secret sexual need, who sets out to re-educate Edward the believer, winds up, in what is for Kundera a rare moment of thoroughgoing farce, naked and on her knees before him, reciting the Lord’s Prayer at Edward’s ministerial command, an “image of degradation” that, luckily (for his political future) and just in the nick of time, sets the machinery of tumescence in motion. “As the directress said, ‘And lead us not into temptation,’ he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said ‘Amen,’ he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch.” So, where there is something of an aggrieved tone and polemical intent in The Joke—a sense communicated, at least to a Westerner, that the novel is also a statement made in behalf of an abused nation, and in defiance of a heartless regime—“Edward and God” is more like a rumination, in anecdotal form, upon a social predicament that rouses the author to comic analysis and philosophical speculation, even to farce, rather than to angry exposé.

  Not that one should minimize the cost to Edward (and probably to the author as well) of maintaining a detached, “amused” intellectual cunning in the midst of a social order rigidly devoted to simpleminded pieties having little to do with the realities of need and desire (other than the need and desire for pieties). “Yet even if [Edward] was inwardly laughing, and thus making an effort to mock them secretly (and so exonerate his accommodation), it didn’t alter the case. For even malicious imitation remains imitation, and the shadow that mocks remains a shadow, subordinate, derivative, and wretched, and nothing more.” Or, as Kundera comments wearily at the conclusion of Edward’s story, “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.” As the tone suggests, “Edward and God” does not derive from manifesto or protest literature, but connects in spirit as well as form to those humorous stories one hears by the hundreds in Prague these days, stories such as a powerless or oppressed people are often adept at telling about themselves, and in which they seem to take an aesthetic pleasure—what pleasure is there otherwise?—from the very absurdities and paradoxes that characterize their hardship and cause them pain.

  3. Fredrica Wagman*

  (Note to the French Reader: I read Playing House first in manuscript, shortly after a mutual friend introduced me to Fredrica Wagman in Philadelphia, where she lived then in a large, rambling, suburban house with her husband and four children, and wrote novels in a room over her garage. The manuscript was one of several that she had already finished and consigned to a dresser drawer. I thought it was a remarkable thing to keep in a dresser drawer and I told the author as much. I also told my friend and editor, Aaron Asher, then at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, who subsequently read Wagman’s novel and published it in 1973. As an expression of gratitude, and in recognition of the friendship that ensued, Fredrica Wagman graciously dedicated her first published book to me. Whether this dedication or our friendship should have constrained me from accepting her publisher’s invitation to write a preface to the French edition of Playing House is a matter t
hat I expect shall have to be taken up by the Guardians of Literary Standards when next they assemble at a cocktail party in Manhattan. In the meantime, until that court hands down its verdict, here is what I am pleased to say about Wagman’s book.)

  * * *

  It would appear from Playing House that the prohibition forbidding sibling incest is designed primarily to protect impressionable children against sex thrills so intense, and passionate unions so all-encompassing and exclusive, that life after the age of twelve can only be a frenzy of nostalgia for those who have known the bliss of such transgression. It is surely not the loss of childhood’s famous innocence that unleashes this dazed outpouring from a young woman who was, as a girl, her sadistic, bullying brother’s little mistress. Wagman’s nameless heroine madly yearns to recapture her past, but not so she can dwell once more in the pure, untainted world of a Phoebe Caulfield, Holden’s saintly kid sister in The Catcher in the Rye. Rather, some twenty years after Salinger’s famous novel depicting adolescence as the fall from prepubescent grace, it is the lost corruption of childhood that is elegized and the passing of a little girl’s erotic frenzy that is wretchedly mourned. Against the memory of that exquisite hellishness the heroine of Playing House measures the decency of the husband who would rescue her if only she were willing, and judges each impassioned lover who looks somewhat like, but alas is not, the blond and blue-eyed brother who turned her into his sexual slave. The grown woman asks, in one breath, “What was the boredom that made me border madness all the time?” only to answer herself in the next breath, and the next. After the masochistic splendors of girlhood enslavement and depravity, each and every lover who follows the brother is, in the end, “just another pair of shoes.”