I asked him where he was from. He was from Italy and said he was traveling around, painting, drawing, and visiting galleries. I was truly in another world.
The premiere went over well, but in a few places that had been interrupted with applause or laughter in Prague, here everybody was silent. Instead, the viewers laughed at entirely different points in the play. They lacked knowledge of the actual circumstances and didn’t understand the allusions. Mr. Spiess comforted me during the intermission: In Germany we applaud during a play only when someone gets kicked in the butt, he told me. (I considered this a mere witticism, but two days later I attended the premiere of Brecht’s Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti. At one point Mr. Puntila kicks his servant, who flies to the other end of the stage, and the audience did indeed break out in applause.)
When my play ended, the audience clapped for quite a long time. This was certainly also due to the fact that the curtain whipped about in such quick intervals that they didn’t have a chance to get up from their seats.
Mr. Stroux invited me to a celebratory dinner, and everyone assured me my play had been a tremendous success, but surprisingly I felt no need for success.
When I was finally alone in my overly luxurious hotel room with a television set and six towels, I realized that it wasn’t fame I longed for. I wanted to say something to people at home about what I was feeling and going through with them. If I lived here, I’d probably feel something completely different and therefore write about completely different things that would make an impression on Germans. Perhaps I was mistaken. As long as a person expresses something powerfully, he should be able to make an impact on people anywhere in the world. But I couldn’t believe someone like me was capable of something like that.
There were probably twenty reviews of The Castle, most of them positive, but also cold and unemotional. They compared my play to Mrożek’s marvelous Tango and Kafka’s Castle, something my play had nothing in common with except the title and the name of the protagonist. All the same, I had baffled the German critics (for whom Franz Kafka was usually the only source of knowledge of Czech literature). If my play shared anything with Kafka’s writing it was the attempt to seek out allegorical images. But Kafka, as I learned later when I was writing about him, spoke allegorically because his shyness forced him to conceal the fact that he was writing about his own most intimate experiences and feelings. I sought out allegory because without it, The Castle would never have gotten past the censors. If anyone influenced my writing, at least formally, it was not Kafka but Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
As it turned out, my Castle was somewhat haunted by misfortune. It went well in the famous Düsseldorf theater, but at the American premiere in Ann Arbor, one of the few stages with a permanent professional company, it had its first catastrophe (which I’ll tell you about a little later).
At the Swedish premiere, the avant-garde director decided to improve the play by shifting around the individual scenes in order to demonstrate that the author actually didn’t know what he’d written, and that only the director could give the play a meaningful form.
However, The Castle suffered its greatest calamity in England, where the famous Royal Shakespeare Theatre was getting ready to perform it. The director, Mr. Williams, even came to see me in Prague to go through the production details. Then I received an invitation to the premiere along with a printed program that boasted an all-star cast. But the premiere never took place. A week before it was to be performed, the board of directors met and discovered the unsatisfactory financial situation of the theater and replaced The Castle with a Shakespeare comedy. The director informed me of the situation by telephone and with a great many apologies. With respect to earning capacity and artistic value, the board had certainly acted wisely, but The Castle had indeed been unlucky. If only the board had waited a week longer for their meeting.
*
During the interwar period, but actually near the end of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire when there was an exaggerated interest in literature and freedom of the press (which was only somewhat limited) in the Czech lands, dozens of literary trends and groups began to emerge, primarily due to critics and theoreticians. We had circles of decadents, symbolists, vitalists, impressionists, dadaists, ruralists, and Catholic authors. Vítěslav Nezval professed poetism and later surrealism; Karel Čapek and some of his close friends were considered by some as adherents of pragmatism.
After the February takeover, the only permissible artistic trend was socialist realism, and authors were differentiated, at most, by age, place of residence (there were Brno authors and critics and Ostrava authors, as well as western Bohemians), and the literary journals they subscribed to. Two journals were the most pronounced in their views: in the second half of the 1950s, Květen, with its poetry of the everyday; and beginning in 1964 until its involuntary demise, Tvář. Both were originally intended for young authors just starting out, but the moment they began to unduly resist the current ideological norms, their publications were discontinued upon the orders of the party authorities.
The midsixties, which saw the beginning of Tvář, of course had a drastically different atmosphere from the midfifties, when Květen began. At Květen we tried to write without the ever-present ideological agitation. We sought to focus on ordinary people and ordinary affairs. For the most part, the authors were members of the Communist Party; all the editors were Communists as well; and only with difficulty could we attempt to polemicize openly with the official ideology.
After 1948, authors who had never accepted the Communist Party began to gather at Tvář. They had no need to correct their own errors (not to mention crimes). Along with the remarkable Christian philosophers, several gifted young poets published here, as well as, significantly, critics Bohumil Doležal and Jan Lopatka (they had already published in Květen). With an erudition remarkable for their age, these writers subjected to criticism almost all contemporary literary authorities and meritorious writers. They saw that much of what passed for independent literary production was merely old ideas better articulated.
Again, the Writers’ Union was the publisher of Tvář, and many authors accustomed to admiration and praise — or minor political reproaches, which elevated them in their own eyes — were aggrieved by the criticisms now issuing from Tvář. It was something other than critical essays on literature that troubled the party ideologues. At Tvář, it was as if Marxist ideology did not exist. Its authors had no intention of trying to reform Marxism with quotes by a younger Marx; they didn’t want to try to restore socialism by recalling the ideas of Lenin. They simply didn’t take this ideological rubbish into consideration. Their great philosophers were Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, and, of course, the darling of all rebels and exiles, Ladislav Klíma. Tvář wasn’t even as provocative as Literární noviny. It was just that Tvář ignored the guidelines that the wearied dictatorship kept demanding.