Dissident To President

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

A few months after the 1968 Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring of intellectual freedom in his homeland, Czech playwright Vaclav Havel joined many of his countrymen lining up at the U.S. embassy in quest of a visa. Like most of those in the queue, he had something to flee from: the hard-line new government wanted him out and had banned his works from production or publication. Unlike most of the others, Havel had someplace to go: three of his plays had won acclaim in the West, and he had been offered both a job at New York City's prestigious Public Theater and a foundation grant to underwrite him in the U.S. for a year. But when a friend in the queue asked Havel if he really intended to leave, he said, "No, I don't think so. I think things will get very interesting here."

Interesting the past two decades have been. Also turbulent, irritating, at times humiliating and occasionally frightening. As one of a handful of prominent Prague intellectuals who chose neither to flee nor to fall silent but to fight back, Havel was jailed three times for a total of almost five years on the flimsiest of charges. One four-month stretch was served in a cell 12 ft. by 7 ft., which he shared with a burglar. A second imprisonment ended when he nearly died of pneumonia that was neglected, perhaps deliberately, by prison doctors. His last internment, four months of a scheduled eight, was in 1989 for participating in a flower-laying ceremony in memory of a student who set himself afire to protest the 1968 invasion.

When nominally free, Havel endured nonstop surveillance; friends who came to visit were sometimes turned away and harassed for the attempt. His homes and car were repeatedly and imaginatively vandalized, doubtless by ever present security forces; repair workers whom he hired were threatened with police reprisals. The country cottage where he celebrated his 40th birthday was officially ordered vacated, one day later, as unfit for human habitation. Havel was never physically tortured, although on at least one occasion a policeman threatened, "Today you're going to get so beat up that you'll have your trousers full."

Through it all, Havel kept writing, kept publishing, kept denouncing the communist system as a concatenation of lies, no less corrupting for being universally recognized as lies. He spurned every chance to redeem his fortunes by recantation or silence. When the system made him suffer, his suffering became the subject of his art. Forced for a time to work stacking empty beer barrels, he turned even that into two brief satires. Although the obvious villains in his writings were communist leaders, whom he sometimes denounced by name, his ultimate targets were fellow citizens, whose crime lay in getting along by going along. His moral courage was accompanied, as is often the case with self-selected martyrs, by flashes of stiff-necked arrogance. He seemed to mirror himself in the descriptive name of his most autobiographical character, Nettle, pricking the complacency of what he saw as a materialistic nation.

Zealous idealists rarely get a chance to lead, and when they do, they rarely show much aptitude for the give-and-take of politics, the careful timing, the restraint. Yet in an irony more exquisite than any he ever envisioned for the stage, Vaclav Havel became not only the conscience but also the commonsense leader of the mass movement that led to Czechoslovakia's orderly ouster of its communist leaders. Having inspired fellow citizens by his rhetoric and unrelenting example, he heard them demand that he take over as head of state. That was not for him, he said. He was a writer. In fact, his work so depended on being an outsider that he joked about asking the new government to put him back in jail two days a week. But the more he denied interest in the presidency, the more insistently his fellow citizens marched and sloganeered on his behalf.

Last Thursday the Parliament amended the presidential oath of office to eliminate the customary pledge of loyalty to socialism, a vow that the nonsocialist Havel likely would have refused to take. In the same session, Parliament honored Havel's determination to have "close by my side" another revered ghost from 1968. Alexander Dubcek, the former leader who launched the Prague Spring, was restored to a post of power, after two decades of internal exile, by being elected the legislature's new presiding officer. The stately transition was completed on Friday, when Prime Minister Marian Calfa, whose Communist Party colleagues so long denounced Havel as a slanderer of the state, praised him as "a man who is faithful to his beliefs despite persecution." After Havel was unanimously elected, he emerged to tell supporters, "I will not disappoint you, but will lead this country to free elections. This must happen in a decent and peaceful way so the clean face of our revolution is not sullied. It is a task for us all."

Havel insists he will serve only until elections for a new Parliament are held, probably in June. Like the political figure he is increasingly compared to, Poland's Lech Walesa, he seems to prefer being kingmaker to being king. But in the brave new world of Eastern Europe, all axioms have been reduced to theorems and all vows rendered interim. Many Czechs think Havel will seek a more permanent role in politics, a pursuit he seems to love -- at least for this heady period of symbolizing freedom and basking in praise, before the hard task of transition sets in. He acknowledges that he does not know much about the intricacies of international economics or the Warsaw Pact, and some skeptics see him as susceptible to manipulation by other leaders of the Civic Forum revolutionary movement. But in times of philosophical upheaval, Plato may have been right: the philosopher makes the best king. Havel has written acutely about the psychological and metaphysical impact of the communist years and about how the change to a free, capitalist society requires the restoration of a sense of individual responsibility. Without that lesson's being learned, details of governance will not matter.

As an artist, Havel has always been a political prophet, prone to jeremiads. In Largo Desolato, the hero faces unspecified tortures, which he can avert if he changes his name and declares himself not to be the author of his works. Although he ultimately says no, he wavers for a moment, and that is enough to satisfy the state. In Temptation, Havel retells the Faust myth in terms of the ego-driven distortions of truth committed by his compatriots. In the essay The Power of the Powerless, he lambastes an archetypal grocer who places a poster saying WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE in his shopwindow to prove himself orthodox and ensure his comfort. Dissecting the web of hypocrisies and self-deceptions that formed the social fabric of communist life, Havel argues for "living within the truth." He writes, "You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."

If Havel, 53, actually were an enemy of the society in which he grew up, it would be understandable. Long before he was singled out for his outspoken politics and insurrectionist art, he was subjected to discrimination because he was born to wealth. His father was a real estate developer. An even richer uncle owned hotels and the Barrandov movie studios, which remain the center of Czechoslovak filmmaking. One of his English-language translators, Czech emigre Vera Blackwell, has said, "If Czechoslovakia had remained primarily a capitalist society, Vaclav Havel would be just about the richest man in the country." Instead, by the time Havel was a teenager, the communists had dispossessed the family. More painful still, Stalinist rules barred youths of upper-class descent from full-time education beyond early adolescence. Undaunted, Havel took a menial job in a chemical laboratory and went to night school in an attempt to qualify for university study, but his application was rejected time and again. Intrigued by the theater, he signed on as a stagehand.

Finally, talent won out over bureaucracy. Within a few years he worked his way up to literary manager of the Theater on the Balustrade, Prague's principal showcase for the avant-garde. That made him a prominent part of the Prague Spring, which was not just a fleeting season but several years of increasing freedom, ferment and hope. Havel's first script, The Garden Party, a surreal satire of communist pedanticism, was produced at home in 1963 and in at least seven other nations -- in 18 separate theaters in West Germany. British critic Kenneth Tynan lauded the play as "absurdism with deep roots in contemporary anxieties." The perspective in that and subsequent plays often reminded critics of Samuel Beckett, the Irish-born playwright of diminution and despair whose death was announced last week. Havel considered himself a disciple of Beckett's, although his work rarely shared the older writer's paralyzing hopelessness, and Beckett returned the compliment: his 1984 one-act Catastrophe, portraying the inquisition of a dissident, was an explicit tribute.

Havel's English-language reputation was secured with his second play, The Memorandum, in which a society's leaders imposed an artificial language, incomprehensible to everyone but nonetheless required for all transactions. It debuted in Prague in 1965 and reached the U.S. in May 1968 in an award-winning production by Joseph Papp's prestigious Public Theater in New York City. Havel attended the premiere. Three months later, Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. The political and artistic blossoming withered and died. The bureaucrats Havel had mocked were firmly back in charge.

He was soon out of a job at Balustrade. Although he continued to write for publication or production in the West, his public role in Prague shifted to politics. He became a principal organizer of Charter 77, a human rights organization designed to compel Czechoslovakia to honor the commitments in existing treaties and its own constitution. As Havel argued, "If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he or she would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about." Havel was first jailed in 1977. By August 1978, he was "free" under house arrest behind a barricade that said, ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN. When Havel asked police what offense he was charged with, he reported in Technical Notes on My House-Arrest, he "was only told that they had no instructions to pass such information on to me."

Even at low ebb, Havel was protected in some measure by his prominence abroad. Authorities made no effort to uproot him from the handsome granite apartment block built by his father and also tenanted by his brother, where Havel has room after room lined with books and videotapes, the elegance tempered by big beer-hall ashtrays, overflowing with butts, on seemingly every table. The car that the police most often vandalized was a white Mercedes. Although his manner is earthy and direct and his short, dumpy frame and mustache bring to mind a small, playful walrus, Havel still has a touch of the patrician. He is accustomed to center stage and rarely brooks disagreement, even from friends. His marriage has endured a quarter-century and produced one of the century's most touching prison volumes, Letters to Olga, but friends say Havel can be as overbearing to her as to anyone else -- which is very overbearing indeed. If Havel is the embodiment of moral rectitude to his nation, that is even more strongly the way he sees himself. His true passion is not for possessions or power but for giving life a purpose. That is why the people of Czechoslovakia were able to do last week what the government never could: persuade him to move out of the flat built by his father, with its sweeping views of the Vltava River and the Hradcany castle complex, across the river into the castle itself. It is Prague's presidential palace. And it is now, in an era of electric change, the dissident's home.

With reporting by William Mader/London