Abstract
Under the helm of George Theiner, Index published some of the most remarkable work from his native Czechoslovakia, including original plays from Václav Havel, documenting the country’s metamorphosis from the straitjacket of Communism, through to the Velvet Revolution and independence
KAREL KYNCL’s article on the poet Ivan Blatny, Czechoslovakia’s first non-person, is an extraordinary story of hope, resilience and the unusual, winding paths of fate
WHEN SHE WAS at school, Frances Meacham liked literature, but as for poetry, she actually hated it. And yet she was fated, in later life, after saving two stage plays for a small European nation, to unearth a rich poetic source which, without her, would doubtless have remained hidden from us, forever silted over by human folly and malice.
‘A small nation’ obviously means that this nation does not speak English. And that brings me to yet another paradox: the only language Miss Meacham really knows is her own.
Love, however, requires no knowledge of foreign languages. And it was love which first aroused her interest in Czechoslovakia. This was after the war, when the young nurse worked there in various hospitals for a year and a half and fell in love with a young Czech professor.
Everything seemed rosy but then the big history took over. In February 1948 the Communists usurped power in Czechoslovakia by means of an overnight bloodless coup, and the secret police began to take an interest in the young English nursing sister. Its agents would turn up in the early hours of the morning, asking many questions: What was she doing in Czechoslovakia? Was she perhaps a spy? And, since she claims she isn’t, would she care to assist the police in their responsible work? After all, she had all these Czech friends, what were they saying about the new regime? Did they perhaps want her to put them in touch with someone in the West?
Miss Meacham did not intend to assist the Communist police by word or deed, and so she decided to return home. In her handbag she carried away the text of two plays which Olga Scheinpflugová, a famous Czech actress and author, and widow of the great Czech writer Karel Capek, had entrusted to her. Plays which otherwise would doubtless have ended up in a furnace or on the shelves of some police archive.
Apart from the plays, Frances Meacham also managed, with the help of others, to smuggle out her young professor who, like so many of his fellow-countrymen, had come to the conclusion that he could not live under the Communists.
But alas, their love affair did not have a happy ending: the anti-Communist professor was to prove a disappointment. While it was true that he opposed Communism, he turned out to be in favour of Fascism, and Miss Meacham then as now considered the one to be as bad as the other, seeing very little difference between the two -isms; and so she and the professor parted company.
As the years passed, the young nurse gradually became, as she puts it, today’s ‘reluctant spinster’. A description that says quite a lot about her sense of humour, her capacity for self-irony, and her remarkable mental equilibrium.
Her experience would have been sufficient for most people to make them despise everything that had to do with Czechoslovakia. Miss Meacham, obviously, isn’t ‘most people’. ‘It’s such a wonderful country, where I got to know so many marvellous people’, she says. ‘How could I ever forget it?’
To this day she corresponds with some of those old friends, and in particular with a former patient of hers, who towards the end of the war gave birth in an English hospital, with Miss Meacham’s assistance. Eight years ago she visited her in Czechoslovakia. During that visit she took part in a conversation which, while seemingly banal, was to have important consequences for Czech literature. No, for European literature.
‘Where in England do you live, Miss Meacham?’ a man asked her, thus beginning the Czech version of the favourite British conversational gambit about the weather. ‘In a small town near Ipswich,’ Miss Meacham replied.
‘Did you say Ipswich? Why, I have a friend there — in a hospital.’
‘Really?’ said Miss Meacham, struck by the coincidence. ‘I work in an Ipswich hospital.’
‘Oh, but my friend isn’t in an ordinary hospital. He has been in a mental institution there for the past 30 years.’
‘You mean St Clement’s?’
‘That’s right, St Clement’s. He is a Czech poet by the name of Ivan Blatny.’
To hate poetry — or at least to take no interest in it —is one thing. The tragic fate of a human being is something else. Miss Frances Meacham was deeply moved as she listened to the life story of a Central European child of our time.
Ivan Blatny was born the year after the First World War ended; as a young man he experienced the Nazi occupation of his country and the Second World War; when that was over he took a deep breath and was ready to enjoy life — but then breathing became difficult and life not very enjoyable following the Communist coup of 1948. He happened to be in Britain at the time, as a member of a delegation of Czech writers, and he decided to stay here. Speaking on the BBC, he gave the following reason for his decision: culture in Czechoslovakia was in the doldrums, the country’s poets were forced to write optimistic rubbish, the Party interfered in both the artist’s life and in his work. This was all true, though perhaps only partially so. In the thirty years that followed, interference in art and culture was only a marginal activity of the Czechoslovak Communist Party: its hammer fell, in one way or another, on every one of Czechoslovakia’s fifteen million inhabitants, its sickle mowing down countless lives. Yet, even if Ivan Blatny could have foreseen all this in the first few months of 1948, he would most probably still have given the same reason for his decision to emigrate: the Party’s assault on Czech literature. For poetry had become the one and only aim of his life, and without it he felt he could not exist. Throughout the next thirty-eight years, right until today, he has really only existed through his poetry… but let’s not anticipate.
Ivan Blatny in 1948
CREDIT: A. Cook/Express/Getty Images
In his second collection of verse the then 23-year-old Blatny expressed his existential feelings as follows:
This life full of unpleasantness
Lost keys quarrels dealings with officials
This rainy life with its procession of
postmen bringing subpoenas
This was written during the greatest war in the history of mankind. When the war finished, our poet was conscious of feelings of great relief and wide new horizons spanned by a rainbow. His fourth collection (if we omit his two children’s books), published in 1947 when Blatny was 28, had the title Searching for the Present. He was never to find it; the present, instead, found and trapped Ivan Blatny.
In his native Czechoslovakia, where more than anywhere else people tend to seek their national identity in literature, he was celebrated as an unrivalled candidate for one of the top places among the country’s younger poets. When he announced his decision to stay in Britain, there followed a storm of abuse, carefully orchestrated by the new ‘leading force’ in the country, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. ‘Blatny’s action is one of political, poetic and human baseness… the suicide of one whom, until recently, we referred to as a Czech poet,’ a group of Prague writers said in their statement. ‘As soon as he stepped on foreign soil Ivan Blatny died forever for Czech literature.’
The Party’s journalists wrote, and said, the same — only slightly less grammatically: ‘traitor’, ‘scoundrel’, ‘Judas’, ‘renegade’, ‘villain’. Amidst the noise generated by the Czech media it might easily have escaped notice that the ‘crime’ the poet had committed was simply that he had refused to return to a country in which he, in all conscience, found he could not live.
Complete silence followed the loud racket of the media. Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, had only just been published, but many of his ‘nonpersons’ had been eking out a meagre existence in the Soviet Union for some years. Ivan Blatny became the first such ‘non-person’ in Czechoslovakia. His books vanished from the shelves of public libraries, his name was erased from the pages of literary journals and from the country’s literary history, no one mentioned him any more. He ceased to exist.
The excommunication and the Old Testament-like curses which befell him had a dire influence on Blatny’s later life. One is almost tempted to say it was a kind of Communist voodoo. Deprived of his roots, spat upon and reviled, he found himself unable to adapt to life in a foreign country. Moreover, the silence which settled upon him once the initial rage had exhausted itself was like the premonition of an evil fate: perhaps they would abduct him and take him back to Prague, imprison him, kill him? Sensitivity and a vivid imagination — these essential qualities in a poet, now turned against him, and there was no one to help and take care of this helpless young man. Less than two years after his arrival in Britain Ivan Blatny was in a mental institution.
Frances Meacham listened to this story and was moved by it, but she did not let it rest there. Shortly after her return home she made her way to St Clement’s hospital in Ipswich to see inmate Blatny.
Her colleagues at St Clements did not disguise their scepticism. ‘He won’t talk to you. He hardly communicates with anybody, just sits and stares into space. Or at the screen of a switched-off TV set.’ It seemed as if Ivan Blatny was irrevocably lost to this world. Not only did he not wish to speak to anyone, an unexpected visit was to him a disturbance of the unchanging, grey routine of his days and revived in his subconscious the very horrors which had, all those years ago, sent him to the institution. His life was an unending, monotonous round of days and nights, interrupted only by the drinking of tea, the swallowing of pills, and a few hazy memories. Anything that broke this monotony seemed to him like a threat, it spelled danger and doom.
Fortunately, Frances Meacham possessed not only compassion but also the experience of many years working as a nurse, and the patience and gentleness without which she could not have carried on her profession. Several visits to St Clement’s, and inmate Blatny began to be Ivan Blatny again, an individual human being ready to believe that this woman, who was the first person in many years to show any interest in him, actually meant him no harm. In the end he confided to her that he had once, a long time ago, done some writing in the mental hospital; and even now he occasionally jotted something down, in the loo, after the lights had gone out in the dormitories and the other patients had fallen asleep. But the male nurses usually threw his stuff out the next day. And why not — what good was it anyway?
Right at the bottom of the drawer which contained all his worldly goods there lay a folder full of his scribblings, sheets of paper which had somehow escaped the attention of the nurses. Of course she would take them and look after them for him. Why not?
Frances Meacham took the manuscript home and put it in a box. Next time she visited the hospital, she brought Blatny a supply of fresh paper. ‘This man used to be a famous poet,’ she told the management committee of St Clement’s. ‘Don’t throw away what he writes. And how about giving him a typewriter?’
She photocopied the manuscript and sent it to a Czech emigre publishing house in Toronto which is run by one of Czechoslovakia’s greatest novelists, Josef Skvorecky. He, too, is a ‘nonperson’ in present-day Czechoslovakia, and he too was a victim of Orwell’s ‘memory-hole’. ‘I thought Ivan Blatny died years ago,’ he wrote back to Miss Meacham. ‘The poems you sent me are marvellous. Please send me everything he has written.’
And thus, 31 years after the publication of Blatny’s Searching for the Present, another collection of his verse, Old Abodes, came out in Canada. Not as a curio, but mature poetry full of an inner strength which can take its place with some of the very best that has been written in Europe in the second half of this century. An exacting critic has praised the volume as ‘one of the finest in modern Czech poetry, a fascinating revelation, one might say a miracle’.
Out of the depths of non-memory there emerged a great poet — or, I should say, was discovered, thanks to an English nurse who couldn’t stand poetry when she was at school.
At the other end of the corridor in St Clement’s Mental Home at Ipswich there appeared a small, thin, hunched figure, obviously clad in his Sunday best. In his hand he held some 50 sheets of paper covered with handwriting, which he handed to Frances Meacham. She will take them home, put them in plastic bags to keep them from getting damp, and store them, together with the other thousands of pages of Blatny’s manuscripts, in her garage.
Miss Meacham’s garage is without a doubt the most literary edifice of its kind anywhere in Britain.
I leaf through Ivan Blatny’s output over the last fortnight: a kind of diary of a Surrealist poet, commenting on daily events, based on Apollinaire’s free association of ideas, the melody of words, snatches of conversation and the sounds of the world outside his windows. Most of the verses are in Czech — a crystal-clear Czech, quite incredible when one realises where and how the poet has spent more than half his life. Here and there, however, a word, sentence or verse appears in English, French, or German. And paradoxically, this too is in the best of Czech poetic traditions: in the Middle Ages what was called ‘macaroni’ poetry enjoyed great popularity in Bohemia — it consisted of a mixture of Latin and Czech or Czech and German.
The forefinger of Blatny’s right hand is so yellow with nicotine it’s almost black. A carton of cigarettes is hardly the most appropriate present for a poet, but Blatny is obviously very pleased to have it. His pocket money doesn’t go too far, and cigarettes and the fortunes of Ipswich Town Football Club are practically the only two follies he can afford. ‘Well, sometimes I also kiss a lady’s hand, but I don’t get any further than that,’ he says, smiling, as if he had made a terrible joke. But it is a joke that sends chills down your spine.
And then the 66-year-old poet, who has spent the last 35 years in mental hospitals, engages in a tussle with Miss Meacham over how many cigarettes he is to take back to his room with him. Sixty, they finally compromise. The rest will be looked after by Frances, who will deal them out to him in small doses.
‘You see,’ Ivan Blatny explains, ‘some patients steal things from you. Mainly cigarettes and sweets. And then there is one chap here who’s fascinated by clean white paper, just like me. Whenever he can he pinches my sheets and scribbles all over them. Just like me.’
Another smile. Another example of black humour.
‘What about the nurses? Do they still throw out your manuscripts?’
‘No, not very often. But even if they do, it doesn’t matter… I can always write some more. But maybe you shouldn’t mention this when you write your piece, it might look as if I’m complaining, and I’m not, really. I’m happy here.’
‘But wouldn’t you perhaps be happier somewhere else? Let’s say somewhere where you would have a view of the sea from your window?’
A startled glance.
‘No, no, certainly not! They sometimes say I don’t belong here in St Clement’s and that they’ll send me to Clacton-on-Sea. That would be terrible… Here we have high ceilings, the park, lots of space…’
The space of the ‘lunatic asylum’
— to give the institution its common name — in which Blatny has now spent the larger part of his life has to him become a true ‘asylum’, having shed its derogative adjective. But it has to be this particular asylum of St Clement’s in Ipswich. Any change is terrible, menacing.
‘You know, I’m still not a British citizen,’ says Blatny. ‘If they were to deport me, do you think I’d end up in jail?’ He looks at me anxiously — the old nightmare looms.
‘Nonsense. Nobody would dare deport you.’
‘Let’s hope so…’
He does not say that only a few years ago it wasn’t nonsense. That he was then in real danger of being deported because ignorant people had actually considered shipping this sick man back to his country of origin. Luckily, they soon dropped the idea — but the anxiety remains: ‘Really, don’t write about those verses they threw out. They don’t matter.’
‘What does matter?’
‘Poetry. Life as such. Being able to get over one’s depression. Never to have to be sad.’
‘Do you succeed?’
‘Not always. Today I do. It’s marvellous that you have come. Today, I’m in seventeenth heaven.’
‘Seventeenth? You have them numbered, do you? And which is the highest?’
‘There isn’t any, no maximum,’ says Ivan Blatny. ‘That converges to the infinite.’ He thinks for a while, then adds: ‘I love life.’ Another pause. ‘I love life. And I realise that I couldn’t commit suicide. You need 20 tablets of Luminal for a mortal dose, but even if I could obtain them, I don’t expect they’d work. And to jump from a high building? What if I were to break my bones and live?’ Another pause. ‘I love life. If one day I stop loving it, I’d like to get euthanasia…’ The longest pause of all, then a sudden smile: ‘For the time being I intend to live according to Shaw’s Back to Methuselah — a long, long life.’
I give Blatny a long essay about him and his poetry which circulates in samizdat in his native country. The old poet shows his excitement: ‘So they haven’t forgotten me… If as you say they keep retyping my stuff like that, they must like me. After all, no one forces them to do it… I’ll read it tonight, after lights out. I’ll take it with me to the loo, it’s quiet there.’ He stops speaking suddenly. ‘It’s embarrassing, isn’t it, that I should be so happy about it. Makes me look like a megalomaniac, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘In any case,’ he continues, smiling, ‘don’t Christians say Love your neighbour as yourself? Surely that means that self-love is the highest form of love.’
The photographer holds out his lightmeter to measure the intensity of light in the darkened room. Blatny looks at the instrument and reads its trademark out loud: ‘LUNASIX.’ Then he says:
‘Light-meter LUNASIX should only be used in the light of the lune…’
The germ of a new poem? In the lunatic asylum?
The 66-year-old poet, who has succeeded at a terrible cost in becoming a total poet, a walking and breathing organ of poetry, returns to his asylum to write more of his unending life’s poem. A damaged violin that has not lost its fantastic sound.
His oeuvre today appears in Czech — both in samizdat at home and in printed form abroad. Some of his work has been published in German, and some has been broadcast in Norwegian on Norwegian television. Perhaps British readers, too, will in time discover Ivan Blatny. If not, they will be that much the poorer.
A fine source of poetry somewhat reminiscent of the inner monologue of James Joyce springs up in St Clement’s Hospital in Ipswich. Joyce, too, was an emigre, living outside his own country. Unlike Blatny he did not have (nor need) Nurse Frances Meacham, who did not care for poetry.