Laughable Loves and The Guinea Pigs
Muggeridge, John
Book Review/John Muggeridge Nobody Died Here Since Yesterday In his now historic interview with Walter Cronkite, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked on the lamblike behavior of Western investigative...
...Intellectually he belongs to the generation of the fifties and sixties which saw in sleeping around a sign of political and cultural maturity...
...30 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976...
...His treatment of organized religion is markedly free from the mixture of contempt and condescension which so often characterizes writing on the subject over here...
...And so Roth is editor of a series, including Laughable Loves and The Guinea Pigs, called Writers from the Other Europe...
...Hence the dissidents' despair...
...For Vaculik there is no hope...
...At least Kundera and Vaculik have made sure that Czechoslovakia's coffin remains above ground...
...During the Prague Spring of 1968 dissenting leftists came to power, and it looked for a moment as if under the liberal leadership of Alexander Dubcek the language of ideological debate would at last be Westernized and Czech supporters of Soviet power be stuck with the label they deserve: right-wing reactionaries (or, as Neal Ascherson, Vaculik's English leftist editor, hopefully dubs them, "pro-Soviet forces of conservatism...
...By the last two chapters alienation has reached such a pitch that Vaculik's hero can no longer even bring himself to use the first person singular...
...Nevertheless there is a realistic note in Kundera's analysis of the Church's role...
...By rights Central European social democrats should be Wilson's soul, brothers...
...Closely watched trains are no longer running, and Vaculik, author of the famous twothousand-word Manifesto of 1968—which was actually banned by Dubcek for being too progressively anti-Soviet—has now written a novel called The Guinea Pigs, whose pessimism concerning ' human nature makes John Updike's Couples read like a Harlequin romance...
...He is pestered by an author who wants help in getting a worthless article published...
...as if he were watching without seeing or else seeing with all his stocks in, another corporation...
...sexism hadn't been invented...
...The professor uses various devices for getting rid of the importunate writer including accusing him of making a pass at the seamstress...
...This, after all, is exactly what has happened to his Hungarian counterpart, Janos Kadar...
...In this story neither the Communist directress nor the Christian girlfriend appears in a favor- able light...
...Hence we owe a special debt of gratitude to those brave souls like Kundera and Vaculik who keep on telling us what conditions are really like behind the Iron Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera Penguin $3.50, paper The Guinea Pigs by Ludvik Vaculik Penguin $3.50, paper Curtain...
...It is a fact worth knowing...
...According to a publishers' handout, Kundera's contribution has been praised " by literary figures as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre and louis Aragon...
...His curiosity grows more and more scientific until finally it becomes simply an excuse for random cruelty...
...In a militantly atheist state where making the sign of the Cross in public is an occupational hazard and all forms of Christian worship are thought of as being potentially treasonable, the Church is of necessity taken seriously...
...Why shouldn't he be alive...
...The Guinea Pigs is about what happens to a man who forgets to mind his own business...
...indeed the image of that occupant of a murdered man's shoes has been so successfully humanized that there was no audible note of irony in the greeting recently extended to him in Budapest by the British Foreign Secretary: "To understand all is to forgive all...
...At a 1948 news conference in Washington, Jan Masaryk brushed aside the Cold War with the assertion that he could see no Iron Curtain...
...Kundera and Roth have a shared belief in the importance of body surfaces...
...Vasek's attempts to unravel the mystery of the missing bank notes lead him inevitably to more guinea pigs and more random cruelty...
...In "Edward and God" he equates Church membership with hypocrisy...
...But to no avail...
...But I can't believe that stupid people will be kicked out of their influential positions...
...Vasek tries reaching into the affairs of his fellow bureaucrats...
...Here, for example, is Edward's cross-examination by his Communist superiors: " 'I don't want to believe, but I do believe,' Edward quietly repeated his confession...
...In those innocent times mistresses went with symphony tickets and nuclear disarmament rallies...
...His nation's founding fathers were leftists, its founding godfather was Woodrow Wilson, and its leading social class is an urban intelligentsia incurably addicted to avant-garde cinema and the demanding of plebiscites for the national minorities with which their country is so richly endowed...
...I know very well that faith in God leads away from reality...
...Book Review/John Muggeridge Nobody Died Here Since Yesterday In his now historic interview with Walter Cronkite, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked on the lamblike behavior of Western investigative journalists in the Soviet Union...
...On one matter, however, he does not follow Western liberal stereotypes...
...They certainly enjoyed such a fraternal relationship with his predecessors, as the briefest perusal of British academic leftism's house organ, the New Statesman and Nation, indicates...
...But there's a contradiction in that...
...Gumshoeing in the Free World is one thing, but where oh where are the Jack Andersons of Eastern Europe...
...In the end his tormentor unearths the fact that the seamstress is being kept in an unregistered love nest...
...Don't talk to her about Marxist-Christian dialogue...
...Nobody died here since yesterday.' " Where Vasek turns for relief from life's horrors to guinea pigs, Milan Kundera's heroes go to women...
...He is not talking about bare ruined choirs...
...For if the sixty caved in tomorrow, there is no doubt that the Western liberal press would immediately and joyfully let bygones be bygones and begin celebrating a new era in Czechoslovakian national unity...
...Neville Chamberlain can perhaps be excused for betraying the Czechs on the grounds that as a minion of the British ruling class he could scarcely be expected to sympathize with Central European social democrats...
...The teacher laughed...
...It is this leftist cast to Czechoslovakian dissident literature which makes it so profoundly despairing...
...Vaculik, mad as it may seem, actually favors detente, and in a recent newspaper interview expressed the hope that publishing his works in the West (they are, of course, officially unheard of in Czechoslovakia) would encourage "the formation of a pan-European consciousness...
...I am amazed...
...And the interesting thing is that they are doing so in the name of Western left liberalism...
...The less we interact with Him the better...
...Both are members in good standing of the erotic Left...
...Vasek, a clerk at the state Bank, gets interested in guinea pigs...
...Roth says of Kundera' s stories, "What's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy:" That is because neither writer has anything much to hope for...
...We are Chevrolets and God has His money in the United Fruit Company...
...First we try humanely to rear them to the idea of equality and they—having achieved power—flatten everything down to their level...
...Leftism old and new aside, however, Kundera And Vaculik have witnessed the truth about Soviet frightfulness...
...Guinea pig research teaches Vasek only that in the matter of socialization animals have the edge on humans...
...The existence of such a fan club suggests that the series would be better named "Voices from the Same Old Europe...
...Yet given the history, geography, and sociology of Czechoslovia, what else was there for him to have faith in except Communist good intentions...
...or by President Ford with his vacuum-cleanersalesman's smile promising the Soviet dictator yet another grain shipment...
...Such monstrous incompetence on our part cries to Heaven...
...Winter quickly set in again...
...Granted, one misses in their work Solzhenitsyn's joyous transcendentalism...
...It is not surprising, then, that Philip Roth is among Kundera's most ardent Western admirers...
...Less currency is returning to the bank than is leaving it...
...in keeping with the call for security and co-operation in Europe...
...Overnight Husak-Rusak would straightway become the binder of his nation's wounds...
...What would Socialism come to if everyone believed that the world was in God's hands...
...Reverence for life disappears in the laboratory...
...A plot is in the wind to subvert Czechoslovakia's economy by establishing a secret circulation...
...In his stories it is the party man ommonma.: - IMMO F ' • The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 29 who sticks to his wife, and the sensitive and free-spirited who seek consolation elsewhere...
...In "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," the lonely widow says: "In love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the bodysurface of its terrible basic importance...
...Where the Pulitzer prize-winners from the Kremlin's press gallery...
...They are defying their nation's morticians...
...Not even from Above...
...Russian tanks moved in on Prague and the forces of liberation including Ramparts, the New York Review of Books, the New Statesman, nouvelle vague films, some of them actually shot in Czechoslovakia, were driven back to the border...
...Solzhenitsyn calls detente hammering nails into the coffin of Eastern Europe...
...Nor is there much doubt that in England Kundera and Vaculik would vote Labour...
...Not that Kundera is pro-Christian...
...But, alas, socialism was not destined to wear a human face...
...Intervention from what-ever direction ends up, sooner or later, wearing a Warsaw Pact uniform, and being one's brother's keeper is nothing but a first step to becoming his jailer...
...Comrades, I'm telling it the way it is,' said Edward...
...Modern Czechoslovakia is the end of the road for fellow-travelers...
...It was a way of identifying with the antiestablishment Establishment...
...Enlightened patriots in that part of the world look leftwards...
...It is in giving the lie to this sort of ideological softening up that the dissidents' testimony is so valuable...
...The assumptions about sex in his collection of short stories, Laughable Loves, are all pre-Women's Liberation leftist...
...It seems that once on the wrong side of the river Elbe our unsleeping guardians of public morality suddenly succumb to moral drowsiness...
...Indeed, over there preventing the chips from falling where they may not becomes a matter of such overriding concern that the meanest party hack of a P.R...
...Bureaucracy, in other words, triumphs over culture and free love...
...It is apparent," writes Washington Post reporter Dusko Doder, "that the government is determined to win over the intellectuals since their absence from the country's activities is a major obstacle to national reconciliation...
...Detente, tht is something to be paid for in human s fering as well as diplomatic dyspepsia Miller wants Western writers to "ke up a howl so the Czech people don't thi they're completely forgotten...
...The message of the book is perhaps best summed up by the nurse who refuses to answer Vasek's inquiries concerning his hospitalized son...
...For Kundera, likewise, marital faithfulness is suspect...
...No wonder that, according to one political scientist, Czechoslovakia has never managed to produce a conservative party...
...In the West Kundera would surely have testified for Lady Chatterley...
...Passports and special immunities notwithstanding, they lose their appetite for unearthing the truth and letting the chips fall where they may...
...But not Wilson...
...Kundera himself relies on neither socialism nor God...
...God does not help or hinder anything...
...This is what makes Wilson's Helsinki danger ring so loudly...
...Nevertheless Vaculik and Kundera deserve our gratitude, and so for that matter does Roth for, having brought them to us...
...Nobody Will Laugh," for example, is about an art historian who keeps a seamstress...
...Moscow quite unmanned her...
...Try reaching into the manger at Christmas time...
...And the Don Juan (one of Kundera' s stock characters) ends up getting involved with both, making love to thedirectress to save his job, and professing faith in Jesus to the Christian to break down her resistance...
...They put national reconciliation in its proper perspective...
...And since the Mecca of established leftism in Eastern Europe is Moscow, where else are progressive-minded' Czechs to look for inspiration...
...By their conquests ye shall know them...
...Then she spoke: 'Go on for Heaven's sake...
...man is listened to unquestioningly, and we have the spectacle of that fire-eating radical, Karen De Crow, president of the National Organization for Women, meekly changing her speech to suit the Soviet censor...
...After 1948 the path of progress was that of foreign domination...
...We know from the record of arrests, rifled apartments, manuscripts refused publication, and children denied higher education, the true meaning of what Doder euphemistically refers to as "the government's overtures to alienated intellectuals...
...The party committee intervenes and our hero faces the prospect of being busted to doorman in a gallery...
...But th( would literally be nothing to howl abou it were not for the likes of Ludvik Vacu and Milan Kundera who are among 1 sixty Czech intellectuals still dauntles holding out against President Hu: 28 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 19 —Husak-Rusak as he is affectionately referred to by his constituents—and the post-1968 puppet Writers' Union...
...Vaculik recently explained that he allows his works to be published in the West so that the world may know he still exists...
...He has only Eros to fall back on...
...So, when Wilson (pipe-smoking to stress his affinity with pub and pulpit) deliver himself of what must surely be the silli( of all the Helsinki bromides yet, to the fect that the 1968 invasion of Czect slovakia could have been averted had t treaty been signed sooner, it is most sai tary to hear him refuted not only by t Czechs themselves but also by their ci libertarian supporters in the Unit States, the liberal playwright Arth Miller, for example, who reacted to t latest news of cultural- oppression fr( Prague in starkly un-Wilsonic languaf "We owe the Czechs something becau they are paying the price for the C( War's end and detente...
...There was a sudden silence on the phone...
...Where upholding the prohibition against stealing is concerned, even Heaven supports the Regime...
...I can believe," he muses, "that a subnormally clever animal cannot achieve a position of leadership within its pack or herd...
...As for getting involved with people outside our immediate circle—forget it...
...Even bills routinely stolen by the clerks are not coming back to the clearing house as they should...
...matrimony (but not rutting) was something the young needed to be warned against, and Playboy was read for its editorial policy as well as the articles...
...months later he was lying dead on a Prague sidewalk...
...As for Husak, the process of transforming the tyrant into the conciliator is already well under way...
...And Heaven is really functioning...
...No one would do anything and everyone would just rely on God.' 'Exactly,' agreed the Directress...
...We need to be constantly reminded that there is another side to Soviet life than that exemplified by Brezhnev and Harold Wilson horsing around over the latter's dispatch case...
...In desperation Vasek shouts into the phone: "Well, is he alive or dead...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
