Prague Pictures

“The opening session of the Writer’s Festival takes place in a small, extremely hot room, filled with cigarette smoke, over a restaurant on the Old Town Square directly opposite the Town Hall with its astronomical clock. 
Despite the organisers’ best efforts, the opening of the session is happily chaotic.  People wander in and out of the smoke-filled stifling room, not only audience members but the participating writers, too.  The atmosphere is at once manic and vague.  I discover to my consternation that I am due to chair one of the discussions.  The topic has something – I never quite succeeded in discovering exactly what – to do with East-West literary influences.

I have no notes, have made no preparations, and since the majority of the panel of speakers are Czech, I spend most of the hour, the very long hour, floundering in linguistic confusion , which the simultaneous translation in my headphone sonly serves to intensify.  One of the writers, a grumpy chain-smoker with a brigand’s heavy black mustache, objects at length to the fatuousness of the topic under discussion, and indeed, if I understand him, to the very idea of the festival itself.  He speaks of the great, gone days of samizdat – much of which, I am fascinated to learn, was financed by George Soros – then lapses into a grumpy silence.

I call, in some desperation, on a Hungarian member of the panel to comment.  He and I have a previous, brief acquaintance, but he seems to have forgotten that he ever met me, or perhaps it is that, when we met – in Budapest, was it, or Vienna? – I somehow managed to offend him.  He talks about a novel I have not read by a writer I do not know, then looks to me in polite expectation of an informed reply.  At this point the chain-smoker gets to his feet with a sigh and ambles out, to the lavatory, I assume, but in fact he was never to return.  Close to panic now, I attempt to ‘throw the discussion open to the floor’, and endure a couple of minutes of shuffling silence as the audience sits and gazes at me in what seems to be barely suppressed resentment.

At last someone asks a question about censorship in the bad old days, which only serves to provoke more shifting of feet and clearing of throats.  Into the restive silence I remark gingerly that the present strength of Czech literature – I mentioned Klíma, Hrabal, Michal Ajvaz – would seem to indicate that writers had not only survived the years of communist rule, but had triumphed.  And then, with the horrified fascination of a fat man feeling himself begin to fall slowly, helplessly and catastrophically down a steep flight of stairs, I hear my voice, seemingly of its own volition, asking if perhaps Gore Vidal’s assertion that Hollywood never destroyed anyone who was worth saving might be adapted to Soviet communism and Czech writers…?  The rest of the session passes for me in a hot haze of cringing embarrassment.  At last, the hour up and my penance served.”