Vaclav Havel's account of his 13 years as Czech president is the work of a supremely observant and thoughtful artist, writes John Waters.
I HAVE NO hesitation in boasting that I once had my photograph taken with Vaclav Havel - 12 years ago when, as president of the Czech Republic, he came here on a state visit. I was holding my then three-month old daughter, and we were in Johnny Fox's pub in Wicklow, where Róisín's mum was singing for the Czech and Irish presidents.
Unfortunately, I have never managed to find any of the photographs and so anticipate future trouble with convincing my daughter that she once met the most eminent and heroic figure never to win a Nobel Prize.
Last weekend I read To the Castle and Back, Havel's account of his years as president, and today simply want to do you the favour of recommending that you do the same. It is not the kind of book one reads purely for information, but for something deeper in the experience of humanity, usually to be found in great novels or plays.
It is the work of a supremely observant and thoughtful artist, reporting on his 13 years in the corridors of power - at once the serious reflections of a great leader at the centre of global events and the whimsical asides of someone too wise to take anything really seriously.
What has made Havel's journey of such vital interest is that he is that extreme rarity in public life anywhere: a dissident and philosopher who was himself called to assume office; a fierce and fearless opponent of communism who declared: "My heart is on the left."
An elaborate manifesto exists from his early writings about power and its dynamics and in particular about the dehumanisation of life under communism. In essays such as "The Power of the Powerless" and "Politics and Conscience", written several years before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, he identified a need in modern society for what he termed "post-political politics", defined as politics not as technology-of-power but as a means of enabling meaningful human lives.
This, he proposed, would require an "existential revolution", engaging mankind in the totality of being, transcending politics and society as conventionally understood. He identified this as being almost as urgent in the free democracies of the West as in the communist zone.
For such a man to have assumed power offers a fascination far transcending conventional curiosities about the workings of politics. Havel is today a more ambiguous figure, having declined in the affections of many Czech people, though for no clear reason rooted in his own behaviour. In part the shift seems to have had to do with a cynicism cultivated by the Czech media, stoked even further following his decision to marry again within a year of the death of his beloved wife Olga in 1996.
Havel is too great a man and too subtle an artist for a simple end-of-term debriefing. At a surface level, this book does not rush to answer obvious questions in obvious ways. Its structure is odd: a mixture of interview material done in collaboration with a Czech journalist; memos from Havel to officials while in office; and linking passages written in the recent past. It is less a coherent chronology of a life in power than a dramatised diary, in which a much deeper sense of things emerges from text and subtext, as in a novel or play.
The author explains: "Everything is related to everything else; anything from a particular period points to the period that preceded it or the period that followed; everything is linked together in all kinds of ways, and one of the ways to touch on the hidden fabric of life is the collage, the combining of things that, on the surface, are unrelated, in such a way that they ultimately tell us more about the connections between them and their real meaning than any mechanical chronology could, or any other ordering principle that suppresses accident."
Even as you have a sense of searching through the book for straight answers to specific questions, and being chronologically frustrated, there is this growing sensation of discovering the answers from the very detail of the personality that emerges.
Overall the sense of the author is of a strange mixture of hope and weariness, a profound mood of frustration combined with acceptance. Havel writes from the faultline between politics and human life, revealing a man whose spirit has been worn down by office and its daily attrition, who is disappointed and hurt by the pettiness and selfishness of his fellow-citizens, but still neither disillusioned nor bitter. Page by page, there emerges a graphic sense of someone in the latter stages of a life lived in pursuit of ideals, but in the persistent awareness of the absurdity of utopianism.
To the Castle and Back isthe story of a man who has been to the mountaintop and confirmed that there, as everywhere else, the human race is capable of greatness, pettiness, heroism and disgrace.
This magnificent book tells us that high office, like life in general, is not just about glory and achievement but more often about deciding between greater and lesser evils. Life is always messy. Nothing is predictable. Everything turns out differently.