by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Literature as Life Preserver
In a previous post I touched on Ivan Klíma as counterpart to Václav Havel, who now has two chairs at Georgetown arranged permanently at the ready for conversation. The release in English of Klíma’s autobiography, My Crazy Century, sent me back to the writer who introduced Klíma to so many of us American readers — Philip Roth:
During the early seventies, when I began to make a trip to Prague each spring, Ivan Klíma was my principal reality instructor. He drove me around to the street-corner kiosks where writers sold cigarettes, to the public buildings where they mopped the floors, to the construction sites where they were laying bricks, and out of the city to the municipal waterworks where they slogged about in overalls and boots, a wrench in one pocket, a book in the other. When I got to talk at length with these writers, it was often over dinner at Ivan’s house.
Fifteen years later, with Czechoslovakia newly open and democratic, Roth sat down for a conversation with Klíma, which he transcribed and later published in the New York Review of Books. In it this master of literary doubles presented Klíma as his real-life double, a contemporary and kindred spirit forced to pursue his literary calling by stealth under Communism:
When I returned to the United States from Prague after my first visit in the early seventies, I compared the Czech writers’ situation to ours in America by saying, “There nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters.” But at what cost did everything you wrote matter so much?
My Crazy Century is Klíma’s answer. For his part, Roth answered the question from the American side:
In a censorship culture, where everybody lives a double life — of lies and truth — literature becomes a life preserver, the remnant of truth people cling to. I think it’s also true that in a culture like mine, where nothing is censored but the mass media inundate us with inane falsifications of human affairs, human literature is no less of a life preserver, even if the society is all but oblivious of it.
