by John Leonard
From a nonobservant father he inherited a humanism “that has no patience for a religious imagination that asks me to abandon my intellect.” But from his mother’s side he received “a spontaneously felt sense of the sacred” that “engages the whole human being as the intellect alone cannot.” To which add the Yiddish accent of his Bronx boyhood with Tolstoy, jazz, and L. Frank Baum, the Bronx High School of Science where Kafka encouraged him to write a story called “The Beetle,” the big surprise of Kenyon College in Ohio, where he read Matthew Arnold, and mastered the New Criticism at the neat feet of John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell; his stint in the Army, occupying Germany, and his stretch as a reader for a film company where he parsed far too many westerns, resulting at last in that first novel, after which we could count on his sonar readings for dark signs, frigid depths, evil devices, raven droppings, tiny golems, counterterrorists, cuneiform, and hieroglyphs.
In The Book of Daniel, Daniel and Susan are attacked by a “giant eye machine” with insect legs, and dive with open arms into shock therapy and revolutionary space, as if to die “on a parabolic curve.” In Ragtime, in Sarajevo, Houdini fails to warn the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and so the green feathers of his plumed helmet turn black with blood. Whereas in Egypt, on a camel, J. P. Morgan is surprised to find the pennant-winning New York Giants swarming “like vermin” over the Great Sphinx, sitting “in the holes of the face.” While in Mexico, in the great desert “of barrel cactus and Spanish bayonet,” the bomb-making Younger Brother will find Zapata. In Loon Lake, a carny worker contemplates the plutocrat he intends to become: “he was a killer of poets and explorers, a killer of boys and girls and he killed with as little thought as he gave to breathing, he killed by breathing he killed by existing he was an emperor, a maniac force in pantaloons and silk slippers and lacquered headdress dispensing like treasure pieces of his stool, making us throw ourselves on our faces to be beheaded one by one with gratitude.” In Billy Bathgate, Dutch Schultz “lived as a gangster and spoke as a gangster and when he died bleeding from the sutured holes in his chest he died of the gangsterdom of his mind as it flowed from him, he died dispensing himself in utterance, as if death is chattered-out being, or as if all we are made of is words and when we die the soul of speech decants itself into the universe.” In Lives of the Poets, “a dire desolation will erupt from the sky, drift like a fire-filled fog over the World Trade Center, glut the streets of SoHo with its sulfurous effulgence, shriek through every cracked window, stop the ringing voice of every living soul, and make of your diversified investment portfolio a useless thing.”
The Waterworks is both a Gothic and a detective story, about science, religion, and capitalism, but also journalism, politics, and New York. We are reminded of Melville, Poe, Crane, and Edith Wharton, but also Joseph Conrad. In 1871, as today, the spendthrift city, with its temples raised to savage cults, its gaudy display and blind selection, its humming wires and orphaned children, is a Darwinian jungle, a heart of darkness, and a necropolis. In this new industrial park, after a bloody Civil War, imagine a white stagecoach full of old men in black top hats. A freelance book reviewer for one of the city’s many newspapers thinks he sees his dead father in this coach. When this critic disappears, his editor and the only honest cop in Boss Tweed’s corrupt New York will seek him from Printing House Square to Buffalo Tavern to the Black Horse. Meanwhile children who have vanished from the streets or drowned in the reservoir turn up in coffins not their own. We move through the mosaics of daily journalism and routine police procedure toward what Doctorow calls “the limbo of science and money.” There, in an orphanage and a conservatory, in a laboratory and a ballroom, we will be asked questions about sanity and virtue, vampire capitalism and the morality of medicine, historical truth and natural selection—as, from the blood, bone marrow, and spinal fluid of nameless missing children, the Very Rich and Living Dead are rendered “biomotive” and seen to waltz, with deaf-mute caretaker women, under the shameless water, vaulted heavens, and God-stunned stars.
City of God is about, well… everything: both World Wars, the Holocaust, and Vietnam. But also, again, science and religion, reason and faith, prophecy and sacrifice, tellers of stories and watchers of birds. Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Frank Sinatra are characters. And a novelist, looking for his next book in the bare ruined choirs of modern Manhattan. And an Episcopal priest, Thomas Pemberton, who will fall in love with a reform rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, when the cross that has been stolen from the altar of his Lower East Side church mysteriously reappears on the roof of her Upper West Side synagogue. Popular music and Hollywood movies are characters, too, glorious and ominous. Except one can’t imagine City of God on any big screen. How do you adapt a book as messy as the Bible itself, a hodgepodge of chronicles, verses, songs, and sins, a brilliant scissors-and-pasting of Hebrew gospel, Greek myth, Yiddish diaries, quantum physics, surreal screenplays, prose poems about trench warfare and aerial bombing, and an archive of every scrap of witness to the Nazi occupation of Lithuania? Or film the Midrash Jazz Quartet, a rap group of Talmudic interpreters of such pop standard secular hymns as “Me and My Shadow,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me”? What does gravity look like? Or “unmediated awe”? Or “moral consequence”? Or what Einstein calls the “first sacrament, the bending of starlight”? How, finally, do we picture an Episcopal priest who is so fed up with Christianity, and so in love with Sarah, that converting to Judaism is the only way he can think of to redeem himself from knowledge of the death camps?
In The March, that’s what General Sherman does, humming “The Ride of the Valkyries,” from Milledgeville to Savannah to Columbia with sixty thousand Union cavalry and infantry, surgeons and drummer boys, drovers and mules, cattle and cooks, not even counting twenty-five thousand freed slaves following behind, nor the Confederate prisoners needed to troll for landmines, nor the genteel Southern ladies, refugees from ruined plantations, with their buggies, their servants, their needlepoint—everything needed for an “infestation” or a plague, except maybe locusts and a frog. And in this train of go-carts, tumbrels, memory, and death, “as if the sky was being pushed in on itself,” “as if the armies were strung from the floating clouds,” an uprooted civilization is on the hoof. Think not only of the all-devouring armies of Alexander and Genghis Khan, but also of Exodus.
Doctorow has dreamed himself backward from Daniel to Ragtime to Waterworks to Civil War, into the creation myth of the Republic itself, as if to assume the prophetic role of the nineteenth-century writers he admires so much, for whom the Constitution was our sacred text and secular humanism our civil religion. In The March, the American identity of a dozen characters is as fluid as the blood they spill. We spend enough time in the ambulances and medical wards, among army nurses and severed heads, to be reminded of Whitman. And enough in the trenches and swamps to think of Stephen Crane. Matthew Brady comes to mind, stilling life with photographs. And so does William Faulkner, when a corpse needs a hole. And Flannery O’Connor, whose papers and bones are buried in Milledgeville, under peacock feathers. Toni Morrison might have imagined the white-chocolate Pearl child herself, Emancipation’s natural aristocrat. How pomo/meta to meet Coalhouse Walker, Sr., whose son will show up in Ragtime to disquiet J. P. Morgan. And for foreign flavor, see Arly and Will, the cross-dressing Confederates who are waiting for Godot or Stoppard. After such a scrub of blood, this bone-scan and immersion therapy, what’s left in our heads of Gone With the Wind looks more like Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore.
So many avatars! He is channeling our history and literature, even as he creates it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Citizen Doctorow and the Prophet Edgar.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (on Václav Havel)
YOU MAY HAVE missed a headline the other day, in one of the sections of the New York Times that wasn’t about nesting or e-mail: STREET CRIME HITS PRAGUE DAILY LIFE, it told us. Nothing really surprising there. But the subhead to the sa
me story was indeed remarkable: Czech Capital Discovers One Drawback of Democracy.
Democracy! Not, mind you, rampant inflation, staggering unemployment, runaway greed, corrupt politicians, or anything else to do with their new free-market Tinkertoy economy. It was because Czechs could now vote that Japanese tourists and Vietnamese “guest workers” were no longer safe on the baroque streets of the capital of Kafka, and neo-Nazi skinheads were suddenly bashing gypsies. It was because their speech at last was free that they cried for “lustration”—a purge of anyone who ever had a cup of coffee or a Pilsner with a Party apparatchik in the bad old days before Frank Zappa. It was because of self-determination that Slovaks were licensed to hate Czechs, while Václav Havel, the reluctant politician, had to run for another term as president of his very own Republic of Dreams—roughly the size, with roughly the same population, as the state of Pennsylvania—on a platform of “Not So Fast.”
We went to Prague for the first time, in the first place, because of Havel, having discovered in ourselves in the summer of 1990, after years of knowing better, a surprising capacity and an unseemly need to hero-worship. If not a Beckett, he was at least an Ionesco. It had been possible in New York to see Largo Desolato before the Velvet Revolution, and Audience almost immediately afterward, and even allowing for the rose-colored glasses we wore to these performances (the kaleidoscope eyes!), they were thrilling. An intellectual suspicious of his own intellections was at work, while all around him the world wrote another, more surprising narrative.
There is obviously a Czech style, ironic, self-deprecating, and sometimes vulgar, that shows up in Hašek, ˇCapek, Hrabal, and Vaculík, as well as Tom Stoppard’s plays and even Milan Kundera’s pre-Parisian novels. The wonderful thing about Havel was that he had proved to be braver than his own alter egos, that he’d shrugged off ambivalence like a smoking jacket, pointed himself toward a magnetic pole of decencies, and look what happened.
And when we weren’t going to see Havel at a theater, we were reading him in magazines and books—in Letters to Olga (from prison), Disturbing the Peace (a long interview that would be much revised by events) and the New York Review (his correspondence to the world, later published in the volume Open Letters). After writing plays about the breakdown of continuity and identity in the modern world; after starting a human-rights watchdog committee, Charter 77, in Prague; after seeing the magazine he edited censored into silence; after thinking subversive thoughts in front of an observation post, a sort of grandstand on stilts, that the security police built directly across the street from his apartment, after a pair of dress-rehearsal arrests… he was finally sent away for four years of hard labor. His weekly letters to his wife were all he was allowed to write. They began, as you’d expect, asking for cigarettes and socks. They ended as difficult essays on freedom, responsibility, and community. “Whether all is really lost or not,” he said, “depends on whether or not I am lost.” His nation found him.
All right, maybe he wasn’t perfect. From Disturbing the Peace and Open Letters, we gather that he had problems with feminists, though they made him feel guilty. And he misconstrued the peace movements in the West, which had a livelier sense of the possibility of change in Eastern Europe than did many dissidents. But compared to any other successful pol in the modern era, not counting Nelson Mandela, of course, he was downright heroic, an intellectual Ferdinand the Bull. As far back as 1965, he had seceded from what he calls the “post-totalitarian panorama” of “pseudo-history” and “automatism,” the spider web of secret police, anonymous informers, and faceless flunkies. Even when his plays were banned, he chose to behave as if he were free, in a brewery or in jail. He never contemplated leaving his country, although, typically, he wouldn’t hold it against anybody who did choose to emigrate: “What kind of human rights activists would we be if we were to deny people the right that every swallow has!”
His letters, to colleagues in movements like Solidarity and readers of Western magazines, were themselves public examples of “living within the truth,” vivid evidence of the existence of what he called a “second culture” of “free thought” and “alternative values,” a “parallel structure” of underground theaters, shadow universities, and samizdat publishing, that would eventually undermine the police-state “world of appearances,” of “ritual, façades and excuses.” (If the State won’t wither away, Michael Walzer once suggested, we have to “hollow it out.”) By behaving as if we are free—at student protests, on strike, by refusing to vote in the farcical elections, or even by going to a rock concert—we rehabilitate “values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love.” We renew relations with a vanished world where “categories like justice, honor, treason, friendship, fidelity, courage or empathy have a wholly tangible content.” We reconstitute “the natural world as the true terrain of politics,” “personal experience [as] the initial measure of things,” and “human community as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human ‘I.’”
No wonder the last thing Sam Beckett did before dying was autograph a book for Václav. All writers ought to feel better when one of them makes it really big. In his first speech to the new Republic as its new president, in December 1989, Havel struck a characteristic note: “I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.”
Now just look at us in July 1990, on the brilliant cloudless morning of our first full day in Prague, footloose on the Charles Bridge over the swan-strewn Ultava, in the shadow of a gothic tower, swarmed upon by baroque saints, lapped at by Dixieland jazz, levitating to the Castle. Maybe I was full, like Kundera, of too much lightness of being. “Levitating” is an odd word to use when history is so heavy, from the Holy Roman Empire to Stalin’s squat, with time out for Jan Hus to be the first Protestant, for which they burned him at the stake. And it was an uphill hike, as if you had to earn the right to be there, from the Inn of the Three Ostriches and the Leningrad paintpots of the Malá Strana to the ramparts of Hradˇcany and the spires of the Jesuit cathedral of St. Vitus. But Prague exalted. It felt like Mozart.
There was also a fragility I feared for, as Ray Bradbury feared for the fairy towers in The Martian Chronicles, as if the façades were sculpted of smoke. We were traveling through Eastern Europe in a kind of caravan—French journalists with four children, a Washington, D.C., science editor, a delegation of noisy New York opinionizers—that fiddled at each new site with our logarithmic scales, like slide rules. Not all of us loved “Praha” as haplessly as I did. There was too little to eat—no bread after nine at night, no ice cream after ten, no open cafés past midnight—and too much silence, except in our hotel, the Forum, where the Japanese tourists fought it out with the Spaniards for the occasional slice of rare roast beef. But Kafka was everywhere, like Kilroy or McDonald’s. And it seemed to me that in that silence, everyone was thinking, and what I feared for was the dreamscape delicacy of that thought.
Our maps didn’t work. They’d changed the names of subway stops to get rid of “Gottwoldova” and “Cosmonauti.” You probably think the “Defenestration of Prague” was a massacre. What happened was that they tossed a couple of Roman Catholics out of a Castle window onto a dung heap. In one engraving, we saw a pair of feet making their exit, a sideways Assumption. The playwright/president himself has spoken of “the fatal frivolity with which history is made here.”
The night before our levitation to the Castle, we’d gone for a stroll down Wenceslas Square, where three hundred thousand people had taken the keys out of their pockets and rattled them like wind chimes, “like massed Chinese bells,” past the good king’s statue and candles burning for the martyred students, to Staromˇestké námˇesti (Old Town Square), just in time for the changing of the apostles on the famous clock with the bell-ringing skeleton. If Wenceslas Square was a depressing mall of thumping discos and listless moneychangers, Old Town Square was the loveliest urban prospect I have seen in decades of goatlike globe-trudge. We had
a front-row seat on the Jan Hus statue to listen to some mopheaded Beatle mimics sing “She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah).”
More than Mozart, the Beatles were what counted in 1990. We met them again on the Castle ramparts, singing “Penny Lane.” On radios in taxis, in elevators at the Forum, in courtyards, wine bars, beer halls, and on the Royal Procession from Tyn Church to the Ultava, we heard “Eleanor Rigby” and “Help!” We chased the shadow of a young artist who was building a Yellow Submarine to sail under the Charles Bridge that September. At Vyšehrad, where Princess Libuse took unto her a hardy yeoman, and so spawned the kings of Bohemia, we also listened to Led Zeppelin and the Fine Young Cannibals.
What did this mean? Havel, that leprechaun, wrote in Disturbing the Peace of his feelings in prison on hearing of the murder of John Lennon. He seemed to care more about Lennon than he did about Kundera, although, typically, he was kinder to Milan than he needed to be. (Kundera has had nothing to say about the Velvet Revolution. Isn’t this strange? Maybe he is too busy thinking about Stockholm. But if V. S. Naipaul was silent on the subject of Salman Rushdie, and John Le Carré craven, maybe writers aren’t any better than the rest of us, after all.) Havel first became a dissident while defending a censored Czech rock group. Not only had Frank Zappa beaten us to Prague, but, on the eve of our departure, Havel made it a point to show up in Spartakiadni Stadion for a Rolling Stones concert. And opening for the Stones was to be a Czech rock musician who had been elected to the new parliament. So: the world’s first rock ’n’ roll president. After which, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.