To begin with, I’ve always liked the name of the committee: the Writers in Prison Committee. I like the way it simply describes a concrete reality, and doesn’t lay claim to superior abstractions about the sanctity of the spoken or written word. It deals with the immediate fact: there’s a writer in prison and the committee is on the case. I also like the name because it reminds me that I’m not in prison. This is quite an important fact about me, and normally I don’t give it any thought. Why would I? I live in a country where not being in prison is the state of rest. I don’t even catch myself thinking, ‘There but for the grace of God …’. I don’t think it’s true.
A very small part of what I’ve written would have got me into trouble in a dictatorship, but in a dictatorship I probably wouldn’t have written it. I’m not a confrontational kind of writer.
The words ‘writer in prison’ evoke a stark, dangerous, head-on, stand-up-and-be-counted sort of world, which makes me conscious of the displacement between harsh reality and the way I write about harsh reality. I come at it from an angle; an ironic angle, or an absurdist angle, or even a farcical angle. This is not a plan, it’s the way the writing writes itself. In Russia in Soviet times, a word one heard was ‘Aesopian’, which referred to a way of writing dangerous things more or less safely – by concealing the true subject matter beneath an ostensible ‘Aesopian’ subject matter. But I don’t know if that’s a trick I could have learned. My trick is different, especially because it’s not a trick.
On the few occasions I have approached a truly unfunny ‘harsh reality’, I found I couldn’t change my tone of voice to fit the occasion. The main character in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour shapes up as what you might call a tragic hero, I suppose, but inevitably (in my case) he has to compete with a punning madman and a ludicrous doctor, and the device which ultimately frees him from his prison hospital is a verbal joke, by which time the play has departed from any kind of totalitarian reality. I should make it clear that I’m not apologising, and anyway funny writers go to prison, too, if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when I think about the Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC), when I simply see those words on paper, I am made aware again that whatever my subject matter, my life is life on a bouncy castle.
In 1960, when the WiPC was established, I wrote a play about a writer in prison. At least, I think he was a writer. I can’t really remember, and I hope no one else can. What I do remember is that the play wasn’t much like prison. Its main intention was to feed off, and hopefully into, the cur-rent fashion for absurdist theatre. Then and later I had no urge to be an ‘engaged’ playwright. When my 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was banned from performance (although published) behind the Iron Curtain, I was surprised and bemused. In the end (in 1977, which was officially Prisoners of Conscience Year), I did write two plays which would have earned banning, but I never did, and still have not, could not, write a play from ‘the inside’. My thoughts while writing this piece are closer to an awareness of the inside than while writing fiction, and all the closer on the occasions when I have met imprisoned writers or writers in the firing line.
In my own life, Václav Havel was the most inspiring, partly from love of his plays, which significantly include very funny satires of life under an unfunny regime. I never for a moment questioned his oblique, absurd, ironical angle on harsh reality, because writing from the inside earns the right to any tone you can call your own. Getting to know someone like Havel, or even meeting someone like Wole Soyinka just once (I shared a prize with him about 40 years ago), brings you up against the idea of the writer who is not oneself, and, from the perspective of WiPC, the writer who is oneself is not that interesting, in the way that good fortune is not that interesting.
When you’re safe and sound, you think that being a writer is the most interesting thing about you, and a kind of protection. The simple statement which is the name of the Writers in Prison Committee cuts right through that to a world where it’s sometimes safer not to be one. Out here, it’s debatable whether the writing exerts any leverage on the fate of nations, but when it comes to the fate of individuals, no one, not even a writer, needs to be use-less. Political prisoners are less vulnerable when they are kept in our view and known to be so. Write to the writers in prison. The committee has their addresses. [email protected]
