My Favorite Literary Encounters: Václav Havel

September 1993

In the President’s office, Hradcany Castle, Prague

In the Bad Old Days, which is what I sometimes call the years after the publication of The Satanic Verses, the playwright and anti-Soviet activist Václav Havel became the first post-Soviet-Union president of what was still Czechoslovakia. His first state visit was to the UK and he expressed a desire for a public event with me, to show his solidarity against the Iranian fatwa. The Thatcher government, for reasons that remain unclear to me, refused to allow this meeting to occur. I was able to speak to him on the phone, and he said, “So, we will do it in Prague.”

Four years later, in Prague, I was invited to Hradcany Castle and shown into his office. He wasn’t there, but I was asked to wait. So for a while I was alone in the President’s office. I went over to the window and saw, below me, Havel and his wife walking towards the Castle, hand in hand. I gave him a sort of mock-presidential wave, and the sight of me waving to him from his own window cracked him up. After that we chatted as friends. I asked him if he still had time to write plays and he said sadly, “No, now I only write speeches.” I congratulated him on his book of prison writing, Letters to Olga, and he said, “You know, in those letters, I sometimes had to say things to her in code, and the trouble is that now I sometimes can’t remember the code.” And then, like any writer, he added, “You should read my next book. It’s much better.”

He also confirmed what I’d only heard as a rumor: that he and his fellow revolutionaries had named their uprising The Velvet Revolution because of their admiration for the Velvet Underground. “You say you want a revolution,” John Lennon sang, “Well, you know, we all want to change the world.”

The Beatles probably didn’t, I thought. But Lou Reed and the Velvets actually did.