Books: A Handful of Lust

LIFE IS ELSEWHERE by MILAN KUNDERA Translated by PETER KUSSI 289 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

LAUGHABLE LOVES

by MILAN KUNDERA

Translated by SUZANNE RAPPAPORT 242 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

It is clear now to thoughtful members of the literary apparat that a critic who praises an Iron Curtain writer does so at considerable risk to his reputation as a subtle fellow. Some variant of the skepticism now being directed at Solzhenitsyn is sure to tar the enthusiast. “A great soul, certainly,” it will be said, “with great lumps on his head from those rubber truncheons, but a great writer … ?” The message is stern: under an oppressive state, all artists may be persecuted, but not all those persecuted are artists.

Thus the case of the Czech comic novelist Milan Kundera comes up at a time when to be persecuted in Czechoslovakia is not a clear advantage. Kundera’s work was banned in Czechoslovakia not long after his novel The Joke was published in 1967. It was about a youth who innocently wrote a postcard to his girl friend that teased her about her dedication to Communism. His little joke got him seven years at hard labor. As Philip Roth notes in his introduction to Kundera’s short-story collection Laughable Loves, the author also paid. Now 45, Kundera lives in the provincial city of Brno, stripped of his teaching job at the Prague Film School, without the right to travel abroad and denied all but 10% of the royalties his books earn in Europe.

Roth’s championing of Kundera is not surprising. Both writers can be both savage and painfully hilarious about the tyrannies of politics and sex. At one point in the novel Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera tells of a poetry night at a policemen’s convention. “Yes,” says one of the cops during the question period, “all the poets were first-rate. But had anyone noticed that despite the fact that approximately 33 poems had been presented (assuming an average of three poems per poet), not a single one of them dealt with the national security force, even indirectly?”

There is a Czech tradition of satirizing mindless officialdom that goes back to Kafka’s The Trial and Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk. But this is not Kundera’s main theme, and there is no reason to think that his work would be wholly different if his country’s absentee landlords were still the Habsburgs, not the Soviets.

The novel is a sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism, and it deals with lyric poetry as a species of adolescent neurosis. The hero is an unpleasant young man named Jaromil, whose every childhood uncertainty has been marveled at by his crazed mother as evidence of an artistic soul. Out of resentment of her coarse husband, who hung his smelly socks on her beloved alabaster statuette of Apollo, this monstrous mother determined to make her infant son a poet.

Jaromil indeed becomes a poet. He tries to spy on the maid as she takes her bath, and fails, but produces a vivid poem about his “aquatic love.” The genius of lyric poetry, Kundera observes, “is the genius of inexperience … We can scoff at the poet’s lack of maturity, but there is something amazing about him too. His words sparkle with droplets that come from the heart, and that gives his verse the luster of beauty. These magic dewdrops need not be stimulated by real life events. On the contrary, we suspect that the poet sometimes squeezes his heart with the same detachment as a housewife squeezing a lemon over her salad.”

In this way the romantic prose be comes reality, and a necessary part of this reality, Kundera cheerfully demonstrates, is that the poet be an utter ass.

The novelist is not shy about invoking the names of such famous poetic asses (as he sees them) as Rimbaud, Keats, Shelley and Victor Hugo. In wicked parody of their legends, he kills Jaromil off at 20. The young poet attends a party one cold night and insults another writer, who locks him out of the apartment on a balcony. Jaromil pridefully refuses to beg to be let back in, catches pneumonia and dies of asininity.

Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust. Running through it is some wonderfully comic sexual burlesque—as, for instance, when Jaromil and his girl are making love, and his mother, hearing her moans (and knowing perfectly well what is happening), comes rushing into the room with a bottle of medicine and a teaspoon.

This amused look at eroticism is the business of the story collection Laughable Loves. The book is light, wry and wise. Over and over again, Kundera sets up the classic situation of sexual farce: A realizes intuitively that B is interested, and therefore swells with vanity and lust; in reality, however, B’s interest is in C, whose tender signals are meant for D.

One of the best stories is Edward and God, about a young teacher who pretends to great holiness in order to seduce a churchly girl. It gets him hi trouble with his atheistic school directress, whom he must thereupon seduce. Equally as good is Symposium, a pants-off bow to Plato, which follows several male doctors, a woman doctor and a nurse through a nightlong rigadoon. Everyone is feeling randy, and each soul present, though perfectly satisfied that he knows what is happening, is in fact calamitously mistaken about who wants to do what to whom.

Kundera’s tone in these stories and the novel is that of a detached observer who lifts an eyebrow now and then in mock surprise at the world’s absurdities.

As Roth suggests in his introduction, this ironic detachment is a natural refuge for a writer who must endure the repressive pieties of a police state. It is also a pose achieved at considerable cost. He cites a remark the author makes in one story, that “a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.”

The reader is meant to see the lifted eye brow and to smile. Then he is meant to see the sober truth of the statement be hind its mockery. Then the mockery be hind that sobriety and so on. What lies deeper, the mockery or the truth? It is a rare comic writer who can raise the question, and Kundera is one.”