Rambling On: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab

Waiter, do you have any more of that splendid goulash?

P. S. As I analyse this text, which was meant as the postscript to the present book, a text that I wrote in the course of five hours in irregular breaks between chopping wood and cutting the grass, a text that has the slackened vertical pulse of an axe and the melody of the horizontal sweep of an Austrian scythe, I must draw a distinction between the sentences that surfaced as the sum of internal experience and sentences that I have acquired through reading. I must identify the sentences with provenance that have so fascinated me ever since I first read them that I’m sorry not to have thought of them myself. ‘I see myself not as a rosary, but as a snapped link in a chain’ is an inversion of Nietzsche’s ‘I am not a link of a chain, but the chain itself’. ‘Every beloved object is the centre point of a paradise’ is straight from Novalis. ‘Verbum caro factum est’ is St John: ‘The word was made flesh’. ‘Dionysos, jocundity given human form’ is Herder. ‘Inter urinas et faeces nascimur’ is probably St Augustine: ‘we are born between urine and faeces’. And yet we’re so wonderful. ‘Our mothers bear us straddling open graves’ is from a Spanish schoolman whose name I’ve forgotten. And yet we’re magnificent and hence we’re here. That’s all.

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AFTERWORD

The present collection of short stories by Bohumil Hrabal dates from the 1970s. From the end of the 1960s, the short story, which had previously predominated in his work, had begun to give way to longer texts (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále [I Waited on the King of England], Příliš hlučná samota [Too Loud a Solitude]), often with a strong autobiographical slant (Postřižiny [Cutting it short], Městečko, kde se zastavil čas [The Little Town Where Time Stood Still], the trilogy Svatby v domě [In-house Weddings]). Thus, given that in the 1990s Hrabal confined himself to reflexive literary journalism, this volume is actually his last collection of short stories.

History is like a see-saw. Nothing complicated, just a plank with a bit of tree trunk in the middle for a pivot. Whoever’s heavier will tilt the plank in his direction. In this duel of weights a small nation doesn’t have much of a chance, unless it were to shift the pivot towards the wrong end, then it wouldn’t need so much strength to win. Something a bit like that occurred in the second half of the 1960s in Czechoslovakia. The plank rose slightly towards the right side until the tanks roared in and the plank snapped. Czechoslovak history began to shift back in the wrong direction and just a handful of individuals tried to carry on upwards along the axis of the remaining splinters. The rest followed the direction of the main plank, in a process known technically as ‘normalisation’.

Bohumil Hrabal was one of the discoveries of the golden 1960s, and after the plank snapped, hard times ensued. In 1970 Mladá fronta published two of Hrabal’s books — Poupata (Buds, 35,000 copies) and Domácí úkoly (Homework, 26,000 copies). Both did come out in the stated print-runs, but both were then banned. The spanking new books were trucked to a state recycling centre and destroyed (except for the small numbers salvaged by Hrabal’s wife Eliška, who was, by a whim of fate, employed at that very centre). Thus did Bohumil Hrabal become (in his own words) a writer to be disposed of. Then came the long five years when no book of his was permitted to appear. Then in October 1975 Postřižiny was allowed to come out, followed in November 1978 by Slavnosti sněženek (The Snowdrop Festival); the latter makes up the bulk of the present edition.

The author dated his original typescript ‘January February 1975’ and it was about then that he submitted it to the publisher Československý spisovatel. The typescript was returned to him with the requirement that three stories (‘Zdivočelá kráva’ [A Feral Cow], ‘Variace na krásnou slečnu’ [Variations on a Beautiful girl] and ‘Vlasy jako Pivarník’ [Hair like Pivarnik’s]) be omitted and the rest reworked. Hrabal was quite quick to produce a new manuscript, but that too went through a series of editorial interventions: ‘Měsíčná noc’ (A Moonlit Night), ‘Beatrice’ and ‘Rukověť pábitelského učně’ (An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab) were left out, while ‘Jumbo’, ‘Nejkrásnější oči’ (The Most Beautiful Eyes), ‘Dětský den’ (Children’s Day), ‘Školení’ (Training Course) and ‘Hostina’ (The Banquet) were greatly altered and mostly renamed. It was almost three years before the book appeared.