The editorial staff was divided into several sections. One was in charge of poetry, another of specialized literature. I came under prose. I was certainly not a good editor for I did not enjoy advising authors how to write. (The author should surely know this himself; otherwise what kind of author was he?) But dispensing this sort of advice was one of an editor’s primary duties. He was responsible for the quality and the content of the book, perhaps even more than the author himself. I was somewhat better as a copyreader. Sometimes I could recognize talent, even if it was buried beneath a mass of raw text. Soon the Secretariat started overwhelming me with manuscripts from unknown hacks. All this reading seemed like a waste of time, but later I came to see that it was not without its advantages. For the rest of my life I harbored within me a revulsion for all clichés and hackneyed phrases that bad authors and sometimes even otherwise good journalists employ.
Every now and then a truly excellent text would materialize. Once I was presented with a slender partial manuscript by someone named Alexandr Klimentiev. This story, entirely devoid of Socialist rhetoric, was titled Marie and dealt with a deceived and despairing wife. It was written with unusual feeling for both language and narrative. I found the manuscript so engaging that even before anyone else had read it, I took off to see the author to tell him how much I admired his story. Upon the recommendation of the publishing house, Klimentiev (who was only two years older than I was) received a stipend from the Literary Fund in order to complete the novel. He published it under his Bohemized name, Alexandr Kliment, and Marie became one of the most successful prose pieces of the period. I also managed to track down Ludvík Vaculík, the author of a pedagogical diary I had read several years earlier. He too received a stipend, and from his slender bundle of notes emerged the extensive novel A Busy House, one of the works inaugurating the new wave in Czech prose.
Another book of the new wave, Ladislav Fuks’s world-famous Mr. Theodore Mundstock, had a rather bizarre genesis, however.
Several copyreaders had to read each book, and disagreements often arose concerning their quality. In this case, everyone agreed it was an extraordinary manuscript, perhaps a bit morbid, but the war, still in recent memory, was a morbid subject. As one of the copyreaders, I recommended the book for publication and gave it no more thought. About a year later, one of my colleagues came to see me. She’d brought with her Fuks’s manuscript, which looked as if it had swelled to almost twice its original size. She told me she’d received the book to edit, but the author was driving her crazy. Any suggestion Fuks was given, he immediately complied with, and with such verve that the story was gradually losing all sense. I’d been the first to recommend the book, so perhaps I could speak with the author and advise him what to do with the manuscript. I thumbed through the pages and saw that the story did indeed fall apart. Some passages were digressive and meandering. I called the author and asked if he could find a moment to stop by the publisher’s office. He turned up and, even before I could open my mouth, started overwhelming me with thanks and assured me how much he respected me. He had read both my books and hoped I would forgive his presumptuousness in telling me they were simply brilliant. He then made an enthusiastic gesture, and I was afraid he was going to embrace and start kissing me. I thanked him for his praise and asked if he still had the original version of his novel. He said he did but was now ashamed of it. I asked if he could lend it to me. When I reread the text, it seemed so good that nothing had to be changed. I invited the author in again and told him that the original text was excellent. As a sort of apology for all the fiddle-faddle he’d gone through, I added that, of course, there were a few minor things that could be expressed better; for example the figurative phrase “rose-colored dreams” seemed to me a little clichéd. It would be enough to cross out “rose-colored” and replace it perhaps with something like “nice” or “comforting.” Or, on the other hand, he could illuminate or expand upon “rose-colored.” Enthusiastic assent gleamed in the author’s eyes, and I hastily told him not to revise a thing, for goodness’ sake, just to read the text through one more time, and then we’d send it straight to the printer.
About two weeks later, Fuks brought his manuscript in and proudly showed me the changes he’d made. They concerned the rose-colored dreams. He’d added two paragraphs, the first of which read:
He imagined that the boy had a beautiful, bright future in front of him, which was always connected with an enchanting image of fragile rose-colored china — everything was bathed in a curious fairy-tale rosy color. . Three years ago the Germans, however, had with a single kick smashed everything as if they’d all been empty ridiculous fantasies, porcelain figures, and then he stopped going to see the Sterns. But here the image would appear before him, swathing him in the beauty, splendor, and rosiness he had felt three years ago.
In another paragraph, one of the characters, named Frýda, performs a puppet theater version of Sleeping Beauty for the hero, where everything is rose-colored — the dresses, the props, not to mention the roses surrounding Sleeping Beauty. There was something gruesome in the way the author was willing to destroy his own text, and it occurred to me that his hero might even be willing to inhale coal fumes if someone thought it necessary. I asked him as emphatically as I could to cross out both passages immediately. Mr. Fuks insisted on keeping them because they seemed to him appropriate. I think he finally crossed out the Sleeping Beauty scene (I didn’t read the novel a third time, and a colleague edited the final version), but the passage about rosiness in this extraordinary work I undoubtedly have on my conscience.
*
My wife became pregnant less than a year after the wedding. We both looked forward to the child, but the only problem was that Helena was just finishing her degree.
The topic she had chosen for her dissertation (perhaps I had recommended it or she had chosen it because of me) was an analysis of literature about life in concentration camps. I read the books along with her so that we could discuss them.
Soon after the war, authors spewed out their jaw-dropping experiences, often artlessly but in great detail. It amounted to a sort of overview of torture, suffering, boundless cruelty, and attempts to resist by force.
They wrote about doctors who submerged prisoners in icy water until they nearly died; guards who tossed prisoners into stone quarries thirty meters below; mass executions where prisoners were forced to strip naked, climb down into a pit, which they had just been forced to dig, and lie down on still warm and bloody bodies that had been shot before them. They wrote about trucks and uniformed murderers who pumped exhaust fumes into the enclosed truck bed in which they had locked their victims. They wrote about starving to death, about people (called Mussulmen) who weren’t even people any longer, just skeletons slouching toward an early death. It was utterly inappropriate reading for such a delicate being as Helena and even more inappropriate for a pregnant woman, but such was life.
This dismal reading along with the fact we were expecting a child renewed my conviction that I had to do everything I could so that those I loved would never have to experience anything like this. I wrote several utopian or perhaps horror stories in which I tried to give shape to my idea of the impersonality of modern warfare as well as of contemporary relationships, which was affecting mankind and could transform us into instruments capable of almost anything. I called one of the stories “Fairy Tale Machine.” This was about a family who buy a robot to look after their daughter in the place of Grandma. It was supposed not only to look after the child but also to tell her fairy tales. The robot did actually keep an eye on the child and tell her stories, but one day it broke down and kept repeating the same sentence about a burning stove over and over. The girl was seized with fear. She didn’t know where to hide from the inhuman voice emanating from the machine. The robot was programmed not to let her leave the room. The story ended with Grandma coming home, turning off the robot, and consoling the child.