Vaclav Havel, the writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Havel himself into power, died on Sunday. He was 75.
When I read this in the New York Times this morning, the sense of loss I felt was beyond what one might expect upon the death of an important and admirable man. It seemed to me as though I had lost a friend, and I had to remind myself that I’d never met or corresponded with Mr. Havel, that we had no friends or acquaintances in common, and that I’d never even read his work or paid more than cursory attention to his political activities.
So why this sense of loss?
Then it came to me. In 1998, after a 28-year hiatus, I published an eighth book about Evan Tanner, called Tanner on Ice. It begins with an explanation of Tanner’s long absence; having run afoul of agents of the Swedish government, he’d been drugged and consigned to a freezer in the sub-basement of a house in Union City, New Jersey. Now, thawed out, he finds himself thrust into an incomprehensibly altered world.
But let me quote a bit from my favorite author:
“So much to find out! So much to catch up on!
“A lot of it was exciting. It had been evident even back in the early Seventies that Europe was in the process of becoming one nation, and that process had continued, but so had its opposite. Yugoslavia was a prime example, having during those same years become five nations, but it was by no means an isolated example. The bad old USSR had become more than a dozen nations, and even Czechoslovakia had somehow found it incumbent upon itself to bifurcate into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Four short years before my personal Ice Age began, Russian tanks had rolled through the streets of Prague. Now Vaclav Havel, whom I’d met once in a garret in Montparnasse, was president of the country. I remembered him as a chain-smoking young playwright, a gentle idealistic dreamer, and now the son of a gun was a head of state.”
Well, that explained it. He wasn’t a friend of mine. He was a friend of Tanner’s. A friend, that is to say, of a figment of my imagination.
I read somewhere that Isabel Allende has come to realize she can no longer trust her memory, that the fabrications of her fiction have become as real to her as her actual experiences, and she finds herself unable to distinguish between them. I don’t think that has happened to me yet, but I’m beginning to see how it could.
Because, although I’m in no danger of believing I met Mr. Havel in Paris, the quasi-recollection of that meeting is surprisingly real to me. The low sloping ceiling, the buzz of conversation, the windows shuttered against the chill night air, the smell of his Gauloises cigarettes…
There are meetings with other individuals, meetings which actually took place, that I don’t recall anywhere near as vividly.
Ah well. Requiescat in pace, Vaclav Havel. The world’s loss is great. I’ll miss your presence in it.
And so, in a rather more personal way, will Evan Tanner.
Possibly the most poignant example I’ve read of that unnameable thing that makes writing magic for writers; why we can’t leave it alone, and why our characters are more real at times than the three-dimensional folk around us. Lovely. Thank you for this.
You’re welcome, Mott.
I’ve always believed reality consists of far more than those things our senses can detect. My characters are an extension of me, so I suppose their memories, real or imaginary, are mine as well.
I assume Evan Tanner’s memories belong to you too.
This Isabel Allende thing is a little scary. Although there will come a time for each of us when it won’t matter what we remember. I do know what she means. There are stories my grandmother told me that are so vivid, so tangible, I feel as if events that happened to her happened to me.
I’m sorry Vaclav Havel died. He was an unlikely politician, maybe the best kind.
By the way, tomorrow I plan to post my Best Reads of 2011. That would be Getting Off.
A friend reminded me of Balzac’s remark to an acquaintance: “But enough about fiction, let’s talk reality–whom will Eugenie Grandet marry?”
My father died of Alzheimer’s disease over a long slow decline of 12 years or so. During that time he became first a simpler man, then boyish, then finally childlike, and in the end near vegetative.
And then, of course, death.
It was a terrible wasting away, and vivid, and in the process that awful progressing reality wiped out most of my memory of him when he was at his full powers – a kind man, a good man, an intelligent man, who loved his family and served as a young father himself in a World War.
I would like to write him back to life for myself, to rebuild the man I can’t remember well. And in that desire, and recognition, I realize, I understand, that much of memory and perhaps even all of it is at least partly a construct, partly a fiction.
I may write that book. Or I may not. It depends, I suppose, mostly on the flow of life.
I will call it, if I do write it: Imagining My Father.
I do hope you write it, Jerry.
I felt the same way when Steve Jobs passed. The hero of my very first published work, a novel for Silhouette, was a computer wizard based mostly on Mr. Jobs. This was twenty years ago when home computers were more of a novelty and the iPad wouldn’t even have been imagined. My research for that book was done at the library. And it was written in longhand, then typed on a Smith Corona. I bought my first computer with the royalties from that book. I wish I’d known him, but maybe I did.
Nice, Susan. Thanks.
I spent a week at my timeshare on St. Pete Beach. Read Such Men are Dangerous, You Could Call it Murder, and The Specialist, all on my Kindle, which reads very well in the sunshine on the beach. All excellent reads.
I may have read all three books 30 or so years ago, but I can’t remember,
In fact, I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night.
Joe, you had the Coconut Shrimp appetizer, a small Caesar salad, and the rack of lamb.
Hats off. Nice piece, Larry. This very topic came up this week as we listened to the Zelig-like personal narrative from a German national, a WWII survivor. Did all those tragedies and horrors actually befall her, or are they an assimilated set of tropes now real to her?
Thanks, Mason. I’ve become skeptical of all those shrinks who specialize in recovering suppressed memories. Do any of their clients ever fail to remember incest? The filing cabinet of the mind is a curious place indeed.
Very nice, Larry. Reality is a fluid thing.
Sometimes I find myself wondering what’s happened in the lives of my characters over the years. Every once in a while I ponder, who’s writing me, a creation that would be so much better with some revisions?
And then the definition of hell in this conceit: am I being taught in a Lit. 101 course? Fiction Inside Out: It’s All in Her Head?
I clutch at a book to read–usually a novel–to get grounded, fiction being the surest conduit to reality that I know.
Yvonne, once at a signing someone asked me what my characters do between books. I thought it was the most wonderful question I’d ever been asked.
Quite a writing prompt, yes?
Happy holidays, sir. I hope you and Lynne enjoy all the joys of the season.