Death has made a telling visit to the literary world in the past week: Christopher Hitchens, George Whitman and Vàclav Havel have all died. The appreciation of Hitchens is fast approaching the precedents set by his targets, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa — an irresistible irony that he would certainly have appreciated. The growing beatification is the measure of journalists who aspire to Hitchens’ undoubted courage and style; the greatest possible testament to the man himself.
Next to the fabled Hitchens, Whitman needs further introduction. He restored the Shakespeare & Company English bookshop on the Rue Bûcherie in Paris after the war. But he was rather more than a shopkeeper. Whitman’s acumen was for humanity, a point made by the New Yorker’s memorial. He featured in the lives of luminaries such as Samuel Beckett, as well as providing free board and lodging for every tatterdemalion scribbler who happened to pass through the city. The shop became a tourist institution on the Left Bank, renowned for its disorder. Whitman’s attitude to business was lackadaisical: day-tripping sightseers would drop in to search for forgotten handfuls of francs stuffed behind the foxing books. Whitman’s daughter is altogether more commercial. She has been remedying her father’s deficiencies for twenty years or so, and with great success. Shakespeare and Company now thrives: a couple of hours perusing the shelves for buried treasure yields nothing more than a bill for books one can only find in this outpost of the Anglosphere. It’s a wonderful legacy to have created almost by chance.
Hitchens and Whitman carved their own small place in history, but history claimed Vàclav Havel for itself. The hero of the Velvet Revolution was, first and foremost, a writer of morality plays. Tom Stoppard (another famous Czech dramatist) based much of his critically acclaimed play Rock ‘n’ Roll on Havel’s belief that corrupt politics would be overcome by sustained moral indignation. The ordinary man must not simply accept his circumstances, because to be apathetic is to be complicit; instead, he must set one moral standard in both his public and private life to force general change. This was particularly true for the artist. ‘It is impossible,’ Havel wrote, ‘to write about great causes without living for those causes, to be a great poet without being a great human being.’
Havel’s address to the Czechoslovak people in January 1990 brought those ideas about private integrity to political economy. This passage is particularly striking:
‘The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available.’
As contemporary Europe languishes in a stupor of its own making, Havel’s words seem pertinent once again. The protestors at the various Occupy movements are appealing for greater probity in public life, while some mainstream thinkers are beginning to discuss the West’s debt culture within the context of individual responsibility. Both trends recall, in differet ways, Havel’s famous maxim that none are as powerful as the powerless.
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