That evening, we spoke uninhibitedly with our celebrated colleague about what had befallen Czech culture as well as all of the intelligentsia.
We were probably being monitored, but it was all the same to us.
I think Miller was trying to encourage us when he shared his experiences with McCarthyism; U.S. publishers had refused to publish his book, and films based on his screenplays had to be shot in Europe. But after a few years, all the nonsense about un-American activities had come to naught. Then he told us a story from the time he was chair of the PEN Club. He had been invited by a Soviet-American commission to speak on the significance of freedom for scientific research. In his speech, he criticized the lack of freedom of expression in the Soviet Union and the fact that several outstanding Soviet researchers were not allowed to publish. At this, a Soviet professor, a world-famous specialist in cancer treatment, spoke up. He was offended by Miller’s assertions and denied them outright. There was nothing like that going on in the Soviet Union. In fact, unlike those in America, Soviet scholars enjoyed unprecedented support and absolute freedom in their work.
The following day, a secretary handed Miller an envelope with a gift from the aforementioned Soviet professor. He couldn’t believe the professor had sent him a present after their argument. In the envelope, he found a portrait of Pasternak with two words below it written in pen: Spasibo vam (Thank you) along with the professor’s signature.
*
A few months later, William Styron and his wife visited Prague. Unlike Miller, he was more or less our own age and yet he was one of the most famous American writers. I invited him over along with a few of my friends.
Like most American intellectuals — I’d noticed this from my time in the States — he had a lot of reservations about life in America. Society there would perish of overabundance. Americans, he claimed, will drown in material goods; they will go deaf from the constant roar of commercials and inane television shows. They were losing their taste, their feeling for reality. Deaf citizens lose their discernment; objects become goals in themselves, often the only goals in life. No matter what we might think about Marxism, Marx was right about one thing: Capitalism transforms material goods into a fetish. He thought that we Czechs, along with the entire Eastern Bloc, were different, he explained to our astonishment. For us, money was not the only goal; people were looking for meaning in their lives other than the accumulation of goods. He’d come to this realization from his stay in Russia. The only problem was something that was taken for granted in the United States: the opportunity of free expression.
It was bizarre that a writer, who everyone assumed possessed a heightened sense of perception, could be deceived by Communist propaganda and believe that platitudes concerning the construction of a Communist society could, after all the horrible experiences, offer some kind of higher meaning.
A few days before Styron’s arrival, the trial of a twenty-two-year-old woman named Olga Hepnarová was taking place. She had intentionally driven a truck into a group of people waiting at a tram stop. She had killed eight people and seriously injured twelve. Hepnarová became the largest mass murderer in Czech history. She justified her act by saying she wanted to take revenge on the people who had hurt and wronged her. She was sentenced to death, and because she saw in her sentence only a confirmation of her opinion of human society, did not seek an appeal.
To my surprise, Styron knew about Olga Hepnarová’s trial and brought it up himself. He claimed that the experience of the last war had demonstrated that it was necessary to ensure no one had the right to take another’s life, even a murderer’s. When he saw that some of us were surprised, he added that the woman had clearly deprived several innocent people of their lives, but this did not give us the right to take hers. She was obviously insane and required treatment. She should have been treated before she committed what she did, but even now she deserved medical care and not the gallows. (Indeed, as I later learned, she had tried to commit suicide at thirteen and had spent a long period of time in an asylum. Years later, Bohumil Hrabal said that he had spoken with her executioner. The woman was terribly afraid of her own death and had to be dragged to the scaffold. Apparently, until that moment, she had lived in some sort of dark pall of injury and injustice that detached her from reality.) Someone then objected that murderers were also sentenced to death in the United States. Yes, Styron admitted, but he was decidedly against it. He was horrified that some states were even trying to reinstate the death penalty. Europe should serve as an example; practically every country — he certainly meant the countries to the west of our borders — had abolished the death penalty.
This conversation later influenced me when I had the protagonist of my novel Judge on Trial contemplate the death penalty.
*
Philip Roth, the third American prose writer who visited us several times during the first few years after occupation, seemed to me unlike other Americans in one noticeable way: He was not fond of polite, social conversation; he wanted to discuss only what interested him. Primarily this was Jewish identity and the calamity that had befallen the Jews during the last war. It seemed that Roth had brought his interest in Franz Kafka to Prague. He lectured on him back in the States and had written a fairly long and entirely unrealistic story — in it, Franz immigrated to the United States. He had succumbed to Kafka’s style and dreamlike vision of the world (fortunately only once) in his novella The Breast, in which the protagonist turns not into a bug, but into a breast.
Because Pavel Kohout and I were just then preparing a dramatic version of Kafka’s Amerika, we spoke quite a bit about it. Roth thought it weaker than his other works. He considered it a story about a still immature young man who, in all innocence, comes into direct conflict with a ruthless world. Kafka’s power, however, was in creating an ambiguous hero: simultaneously innocent and guilty. Josef K. also was not aware of his guilt, but he had committed an offense and was condemned.
Roth surprised me by asking if I thought Kafka had been impotent.
I had gathered from his correspondence with Milena that he hadn’t been impotent at all but was simply so fastidious that whenever he was supposed to meet with a woman he was in love with (or tried to convince himself he was in love with), he perceived it as interfering in his daily routine. In order to somehow renew the order of this routine, he would try to think through what he would do and say, how everything would go. He was so disturbed by the planned meeting that he wouldn’t sleep for several nights before. In the climactic scene of The Castle, a tall castle official named Bürgel somewhat absurdly receives the land surveyor in his bed and says all he has to do is express his wish, and it will be fulfilled. But K. is so tired that, at that very moment, he falls asleep. In my opinion, this scene was precisely an image of such a breakdown, which could influence all subsequent encounters.
When we had concluded this somewhat eccentric investigation of the love life of a writer who had been dead for half a century, I realized how unusual this conversation was for me: Our lives in an occupied country, the problems we thought and talked about, were entirely different from those that occupied my colleagues in the freer part of the world.
Of course, Roth was among those who tried to understand our situation. Given his interest in the fate of Jews, of course, he could not ignore one of the most fundamental Jewish experiences: persecution. However much he had managed to evade it in a free country, he harbored a feeling of solidarity with those being persecuted in a country that had been deprived of its freedom. I don’t think any other author has written with such understanding and earnestness about the oppressive fate of Czech writers and Czech culture. He too, however, was denied further entry visas to Czechoslovakia.