I walked at a leisurely pace back to the castle, overcame my feeling of not belonging, and entered the dining room. It was still half empty. I knew several of the authors who dined here from the publishing house, but I didn’t dare sit down with them. I found the most remote empty table and ordered dinner.
Along the sidewall near the entrance you could not miss a long table at which our most famous authors were sitting. I recognized Jan Drda, then Milan Jariš, on whose concentration camp stories my wife was writing her dissertation. A little later Jan Otčenášek, the author of the prize-winning Citizen Brych, appeared, and then Josef Kainar with his pretty wife. When I was leaving I had to walk past their table, and Jan Drda asked me not to rush off but to have a seat. His wife, Alice, told him I played Mariáš and they needed a fourth.
*
I was getting ready to write my first novel, and I thought I would try to articulate all my opinions on the meaning of life, love, the war, and justice. I was afraid I was not well enough acquainted with life in the provinces where the action of my novel took place, but as I continued writing it came to seem less important. A novel is, after all, an invention associated primarily with an author’s thoughts, with his imagination and his ability to create a world of his own, which can, but does not have to, precisely resemble the real world. I was enchanted by the opportunity to fabricate. I made more than two dozen characters come to life.
A person feels nowhere more free, and at the same time more responsible, than in a world of his own creation. Suddenly I stopped paying attention to what they’d tried to pound into our heads at school, and dismissed the idea that the hero had to be a typical representative of his environment. Even if he was entirely atypical, he could live if I managed to breathe life into him.
Immeasurable poverty and the constant threat of flooding afflicted the countryside. The period of my novel was wartime. It had deprived some of their lives and others of their property. Others were weighed down with guilt or, on the contrary, well-deserved admiration. Then began a period that promised a happy and unfettered life but that actually brought further suffering — all this offered a multitude of extreme and sweeping plots and entanglements. I was learning that people’s fortunes, if described in the key moments of their lives, say more about life, about its values, erroneous faiths, and illusions, than lengthy meditations. I had my engineer join the Communist Party. I chose such a hero not because I had to, but because by depicting his fortunes I could place the repeatedly proclaimed ideals against a reality that was so different.
I spent ten entire days cut off from people and wrote about eighty pages. I concluded with a lament:
It is probably easier to kill everyone, enclose the country with barbed wire; anything is easier than giving people freedom. . We could imagine it all too easily, we discovered the ideal and believed we had found the path to human happiness. But how many times have humans discovered what they believed to be the ideal? And how many times have they managed to make it a reality?
Because the most significant parts of my novel took place in the ’50s, I gave it the somewhat symbolic title Hour of Silence.
*
The post-February government mercilessly forbade authors to publish if they did not support the regime. The Czechoslovak government tried to follow the Soviet model and replaced their work with the production of new working-class authors. Nothing of interest, however, came from it. Thus those in charge of culture (as well as everything else) decided to give new and young writers a chance. Several literary newcomers and their works joined the ranks of official authors, but most of them were against the dogmatism that raged about Socialist themes. Suddenly manuscripts began to appear with nonpolitical prose or even prose that was critical of society. Surprisingly, the overseeing offices allowed their publication (even though Josef Škvorecký’s novel The Cowards provoked furious criticism among the “old and loyal” comrades).
I had only one publishing idea. Until now, perhaps for financial reasons, prose works were not published in book form unless they were at least four signatures long. Years might pass before a short story collection reached the required length. Waiting, however, was dangerous. What could come out this year might be banned the next. I suggested a new series of smaller dimensions, so that a book of perhaps only three stories or a shorter novella could be published. Most of the editors, finally even Pilař, liked my idea. We decided to call the series the Little Library of the World Around Us and soon succeeded in publishing several texts that became harbingers, or even the basis, of the new wave of Czech prose. (Three Kundera short stories under the title Laughable Loves; Bohumil Hrabal’s ingenious single-sentence-long Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age; one of Škvorecký’s best prose pieces, Emöke; and some wonderful pieces by Alexander Kliment, Milan Uhde, and Jan Trefulka.)
At the time, the beginning of the 1960s, when party control was still in place, we were already receiving information about artistic developments beyond our borders. In literature, it was the wonderful review Světová literatura that saw to this. It published the first translations of the French nouveau roman and the works of the foremost authors from around the world. We could read the first examples of magic realism and acquaint ourselves with theater of the absurd.
Experimental texts began to appear, at least in manuscript form, along with their passionate advocates as well as their detractors.
While working at the publishing house, I got to know most of the prose authors from several generations and their opinions about art, which then, unlike those in very recent times, differed sharply. I felt no need to profess allegiance to a certain group or literary trend. If anything brought me together with some friends, it was our opinions on politics rather than any literary credos or formal approaches.
If someone is genuinely endeavoring to create something, he determines what he wants to say and seeks out his own rules, his own arrangement. If he is unable to do this, nothing will come of it. A writer has at his disposal the words of his language, his own experience, and his fantasy. He must possess the ability to perceive the delicate fabric of the work he is trying to usher into existence. External injunctions are worth nothing or are even harmful. It is true that almost every artist who lays hold of a trendy formula and manages to exploit it can not only create an artifact but also achieve recognition or even fame. Fashionable formulas offer success to average and uncreative individuals and even swindlers. According to the example of great artists or the latest exclamations of theoreticians, they line up letters or cobble together a story; pile up tin cans, tiles, or stones; or douse a canvas with paint. Why not? In all branches of human activity, the average has always prevailed over genuine creativity or even genius, and there has never been a dearth of proficient frauds.
*
It was at this time that I was summoned to the secretariat of the Writers’ Union and asked if I’d like to go to Poland. According to a mutual exchange agreement between our union and theirs, one of our authors was supposed to go to Poland, for three entire months if possible. My hosts would pay all my expenses, and I’d receive a daily food allowance as well. My task was to write several reports from my trip — something I knew how to do.