Pomp and quirks

Early in 1990, a BBC crew made a fly-on-the-wall documentary on the attempts of the playwright Vaclav Havel to become president of Czechoslovakia. The film showed deliberations within the dissident Civic Forum of which Havel was a key member as it tried to deal with the machinations of a discredited Communist regime trying to hold on to as much power as it could. But the most striking moment came in a hotel bedroom when Havel and one of his allies sat on the beds and smoked, taking a break from the hurly-burly. The camera caught Havel roaring with laughter and shaking his head at the weirdness of it all, at the peculiar quirk of history that had led an absurdist dramatist and fan of Frank Zappa to the brink of power.

It was a marvellous and utterly endearing image. In those days of hope, it captured the possibility of a new kind of politics, engaged in by people who understood the absurdity of power and who were capable of acting first as human beings and only thereafter as public icons. And when Havel was indeed elected, he lived up to that promise. His eloquence, intelligence and sense of moral purpose made him, along with Nelson Mandela, the most admirable politician of the 1990s.

And yet, as John Keane makes clear in this remarkable biography, humanity is always double-edged and even humane politics will therefore always be full of failures and delusions. The courage that allowed Havel to endure prison at the hands of the Communist regime, the humour with which he lampooned it in his plays, the wisdom with which he has nevertheless done justice to the finer impulses of socialism, are all aspects of Havel's humanity. But so are the evasions, the betrayals and the egoisms that eventually overcame his marvellous ability to laugh at himself and at the pomp of office. For Keane, this is the tragedy of his subtitle. For many of his readers, it will seem no more than a description of the way people - even good people - tend to be.

That tendency to overstate the import of Havel's flaws is one of the difficulties with Keane's book. The other is his interest, not merely in writing a brilliant account of Havel's life and times, but in "questioning and overturning the pseudo-factual form of old-fashioned biography". At times, this amounts to nothing more than a welcome awareness that "facts" are utterly dependent on interpretations and a reminder that a good biography doesn't just record a life, it constructs one. But at other times, it encourages Keane to indulge in elaborate statements of the obvious dressed up as profound philosophical deliberations.

Keane's reflections on Havel's birth, for example, are almost as laborious as the event itself, and much more sententious. "Birth", he writes, "is both a regular and an ineradicable . . . feature of the human condition. The human species is naturally bound and gagged in its absolute dependence upon birth for its survival and reproduction". Since it can safely be assumed that the subject of a biography was actually born at some stage, this seems rather obvious. But Keane, like some demented mediaeval hagiographer who wants to impress on us the fateful moment of the hero's appearance in the world, carries on regardless. The cries of the newborn Havel, he insists, were not just the familiar sound of infant lungs being cleared, they proved "yet again that birth is a vital moment of beginning". And, so, embarrassingly, on.

Yet, the book is, in this as in so much else, faithful to its subject: it transcends its own deepest flaws. Havel's life is, by any standards, extraordinary. Keane brings to it the same kind of sharp political consciousness he showed in his superb biography of another great democratic radical, Tom Paine. He is clear-eyed about his subject's failings, but not interested in merely bringing a great man down to size. He is aware of Havel's personal importance, but also of the epic, impersonal events that shaped him.

In essence, the story that Keane manages to tell is that of the re-emergence of what once seemed a lost tribe - the enlightened middle-class of central Europe driven to the verge of extinction by Hitler and Stalin. Havel was born into the liberal Prague bourgeoisie but was just three years old when his country was, in Hitler's euphemism, placed "under the protection of the German Reich". The "quality democracy" envisaged by Havel's comfortable, well-travelled father was tossed aside, apparently forever. Havel's life was intimately affected by these terrible events. The Havels were suspected of sheltering a Jewish family and his father was threatened by the Gestapo. Vaclav's Uncle Milos, a film producer, was openly gay and therefore, under the Nazis, liable to extermination. When Milos tried to resist Nazi control of his studios, he was threatened with being sent to a concentration camp. Havel, in other words, learned early what it meant to survive in a vicious world.

Relief from this terror came with the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Russians. But deliverance, too, had its cost. Uncle Milos had his studios nationalised and, after he applied to emigrate to Israel, spent two years in a prison camp before escaping to Germany. This, in turn, led to the harassment of the rest of the Havel family. Young Vaclav, although he retained for a while some of the privileges of his class, had little choice but to be at least a silent dissident.

FOR a long time, that dissidence was primarily literary. Havel organised an unofficial writers' group. Having married a tough-minded working-class actress, Olga Splichalova, he became involved in the theatre. His first play, written with a friend when they were both in the army, was, as the friend told Keane, an exercise in being "cheeky to the authorities". Most of what Havel subsequently wrote was in the same vein. A literary journal which he edited was suppressed at the end of 1965.

Havel was flushed out as a political dissident, ironically, by the brief Prague Spring of 1968 when the Communist reformer Alexander Dubcek attempted his ill-fated attempt to give the system a human face. Havel suggested that there should be two parties in Czechoslovakia - the Communist Party and a party that would revive the Czechoslovak "democratic and humanistic tradition". They should, he argued, govern in coalition and work towards a "humane, socially just, and civilised self-realisation of the nation on the way to democratic socialism."

This was neither the standard anti-communism of the Right nor the orthodoxy of Stalinism and Havel's importance is that, broadly speaking, he stuck to this notion that social justice and social inequality could be fused. Under the Communist reaction, it earned him harassment and imprisonment. Under the new post-communist order it earned him the more comfortable but in some ways equally painful position of being the left-wing figurehead of a country undergoing a right-wing transformation. Far more than his personal weaknesses, it is that utter contradiction that explains Havel's slow decline into the mere forms of power.

Keane's access to key people in Havel's life is quite remarkable. As well as his discussions with Havel himself, he has interviewed, for example, one of his father's surviving friends, his brother Ivan, his early companion Viola Fisherova, his lover Jitka Vodnanska, and close political associates in the Civic Forum like Petr Oslzly and Pavel Seifter. As a result, he is able to throw a harsh light on Havel's womanising, his betrayal of Dubcek, and his mishandling of Slovak national sentiment which led to the breakup of Czechoslovakia.

But he also creates a remarkably vivid portrait of a remarkably interesting man. One chapter, describing the hilarious, exuberant, absurd early days when Havel and his band of bohemians first occupied the castle in Prague, is a priceless reminder that history has its wonderfully strange moments as well as its iron laws. For the way it captures one of those great moments, Keane's book is indispensable.

Fintan O'Toole is a critic and biographer and an Irish Times journalist