Woe betide the writer who finds himself cast as a hero. In the West, where even artists do not take art seriously, we look upon the “dissident” as somehow more authentic than we could ever hope to be, with our word processors and benevolent editors and Guggenheim Foundations. The dissident, of course, is always someone who dissents elsewhere, “over there,” behind the Curtain or the Wall or under Table Mountain. Compared to them, to these brave ones, our rebels seem like noisy children drumming their fists and refusing to be good. How can we be serious, we ask, how can we be truly grown-up, without the burden of political oppression, without a great cause to which we might lend our singing voices? So it is that at times when it was fashionable to be of the soft left, for instance in the Thirties and the Sixties, we paid fealty to figures such as Solzhenitsyn—a brave, perhaps even a great man, but no lover of liberal causes.

And rarely do we wonder what it is like to be regarded always as a dissident—that is, as a dissident first and an artist second. Anyone who has been to any country in what we used to call Eastern Europe¹ will have heard that groan of mingled boredom and resentment when the talk turned to the matter of politics and art: I am sick of being a protester, the writer will cry, I want to write and think about the private world, not the public. And why not? As Kierkegaard has pointed out, there is no such thing as an epic theme; Homer was not great because he had for a subject the Trojan War—on the contrary, it is because Homer was great that this local squabble has taken on the proportions of an epic.

Now that the Wall has fallen and the Curtain has been drawn back, perhaps the writer in Eastern Europe will be allowed, along with other freedoms, the freedom to be discontent not because he is politically downtrodden, but because love fails and hope flags and death awaits him—in a word, because he is human.

The books considered here span a geographical arc from the Baltic down into the heart of Mitteleuropa, yet all three share a remarkably similar tone. It is the tone one might detect in the outpatients' department of a rundown hospital, in the waiting room of some anonymous state bureaucratic institution, in a food queue stretching a hundred meters back from the shop door along a snow-swept pavement. There is despair and desperation in it, an impatience that keeps spilling over into rage, and also a kind of throwaway hilarity that precludes self-pity. These are strong, impressive, sly, and, dare one say it, entertaining voices: there is something wonderfully bracing in the spectacle of a writer indulging in a monumental grouse. …

Once upon a time novelists, especially American novelists, liked to list on the backs of their books the various jobs—lumberjack, soda jerk, chuckerout at a brothel, etc.—they had held in the days before success and creative-writing fellowships came their way. Such a list was the sign of a hard apprenticeship served in the real world, the badge of manliness—of authenticity. Yet when we read on the back flap of Too Loud a Solitude that Bohumil Hrabal, having been conferred with a degree in law, “worked as a stagehand, postman, clerk, and baler of waste paper,” we are fired with indignation.

The circumstances, of course, are different. It is unlikely that Hrabal willingly took all of these jobs. We know from recent history, and indeed from novels (in The Unbearable Lightness of Being the brain surgeon is compelled to become a window cleaner), how these things are, or were, in the East. It is a bitter irony that in a so-called socialist state such as Czechoslovakia, work was used by the authorities as a means of punishing and humiliating a fractious intelligentia.

Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914. He is the author of the novel Closely Watched Trains, which may be better remembered for the fine film that was based on it.²I Served the King of England, a sort of updated Felix Krull, appeared in English last year. A translation of a censored version of Too Loud a Solitude was published in the US in 1986; now, in this excellent version by Michael Henry Heim, we have the full text. The book is easier to follow than [Tadeusz Konwicki's] New World Avenue, yet also more mysterious. The protagonist, Hant'a, has, as he tells us repeatedly, at the opening of almost every chapter, been a compacter of waste paper for thirty-five years. A whole culture, it seems, has come and gone between the grinding jaws of his hydraulic press.

I see heaven-sent horns of plenty in the form of bags, crates, and boxes raining down their old paper, withered flower-shop stalks, wholesalers' wrappings, out-of-date theater programs, icecream wrappers, sheets of paint-spattered wallpaper, piles of moist, bloody paper from the butchers', razor-sharp rejects from photographers' studios, insides of office wastepaper baskets, typewriter ribbons included, bouquets from birthdays and name-days long past.

This is indeed Franz Kafka's Prague.

Along with the city's detritus there falls into Hant'a's basement a flood of books, books of all kinds.

In the flow of old paper the spine of a rare book will occasionally shine forth, and if for a moment I turn away, dazzled, I always turn back in time to rescue it, and after wiping it off on my apron, opening it wide, and breathing in its print, I glue my eyes to the text and read out the first sentence like a Homeric prophecy. …

As we would expect, therefore, Hant'a's story is peppered with quotations from the mighty dead: “My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books. …” So it is that Kant and Hegel, Jesus and Lao-tse pop up on every other page. The method is not as heavy-handed as it might have been, thanks mainly to Hrabal's refusal to take it all too seriously—or too solemnly, at least. The book is funny, in its desperate, knockabout way. Along with Hant'a's incessant reading goes excessive swilling of beer, and the tone throughout is at once strident and woozy, so that the reader has the impression of being trapped in that basement room as the press grinds and the drunken operator rummages through the tatters of a ruined culture.

Hrabal did his stint as a dissident in the black days of the 1950s and 1960s. There is detectable in the frantic, breakneck pace of Too Loud a Solitude a sense of the predicament of a man caught between two worlds, between light and dark, the street and the basement, speech and silence. Toward the close of the book the public world invades his lair:

That morning when I got to work, who should I find in the courtyard but two of the Socialist Labor youngsters in their orange gloves, nipple-high blue overalls, suspenders, green turtlenecks, and yellow baseball caps, as if on the way to a game. My boss took them triumphantly down to my cellar and showed them my press, and in no time flat they had covered my table with a sheet of clean paper for their milk and made themselves at home, while I just stood there humiliated, stressed and strained, knowing all at once, knowing body and soul, that I'd never be able to adapt. …

Hant'a is to be relieved of his job and sent to the Melantrich Printing Works, where “I, who couldn't live without the prospect of rescuing a beautiful book from the odious waste, I would be compacting immaculate, inhumanly clean paper!” The prospect is too terrible, too arid, and he determines that instead of going to Melantrich he will follow the example of Seneca and Socrates “and here, in my press, in my cellar, choose my own fall, which is ascension.”

A corner of the book is lodged under a rib, I groan, fated to leave the ultimate truth on a rack of my own making, folded in upon myself like a child's pocket knife. …

However, despite these hints of a great theme lurking beneath the surface of Hant'a's story, Too Loud a Solitude seems to me chiefly an allegory, conscious or not, of the writing life. Hant'a in his dark pit compacting the world's words into manageable bales, his head buzzed about by flies and sonorous phrases, is a splendid and oddly convincing picture of the literary artist frantically at work.

I pushed my twin beds together and rigged a kind of canopy of planks over them, ceiling high, for the two additional tons of books I've carried home over the years, and when I fall asleep I've got all those books weighing down on me like a two-ton nightmare. …

Yes indeed.

Notes

1. A Hungarian friend of mine, tired of hearing me use this term with unthinking certitude, asked impatiently: Where, do you think, does Eastern Europe begin?—Moscow? Budapest? Prague? Berlin? Vienna? Paris?

2. The book has recently been reissued by Northwestern University Press.