Solid joys and lasting pleasure
Michael Hulse
PRAGUE TALES by Jan Neruda translated by Michael Henry Heim Chatto and Windus, £10.99, pp.346 Jan Neruda (1834-1891) was one of the foremost Czech writers of the 19th-century, a poet and political columnist but above all the writer of over two thousand feuilleton sketches. Like Washington Irving's earlier in the century, Neruda's sketches might include fugitive observations, essays of a critical or whimsical nature, or short sto- ries. The Prague Tales are Neruda's finest achievement, and remain among the most widely read Czech classics over a century after they were written.
Learning that Pablo Neruda adopted his surname from Jan Neruda after reading the Czech writer's story The Three Lilies, I turned to that brief tale first, and read it in the garden by the Staple Inn within min- utes of being handed the book by The Spec- tator's literary editor. How often is a reviewer privileged to make so marvellous a discovery? Since that sunny morning must have read the story a dozen times, and of its kind it is perfect. On 'a warm but dark summer night', with thunder overhead and rain hammering the tiled roof, the nar- rator is sitting in the arcade of The Three Lilies. To one side, through a window of the inn, he watches 'happy, twirling cou- ples' dancing to a vigorous Sunday piano. To the other,
whenever a flash of lightning proved particu- larly vivid, I would see white piles of human bones by the garden wall and at the end of the arcade. There had been a small cemetery here once, and just that week they were dig- ging up the skeletons for reburial. The soil was still in mounds, the graves open.
One beautiful girl attracts the narrator's attention, and he watches her till she is summoned away from the dance. When she returns, at the height of the storm, he learns that her mother has died.
She stood beside me, her eyes resting upon me. I felt her touch my quivering hand... She pressed against me. I felt her wet dress cling- ing to my chest, I felt her soft, warm body, her ardent breath — I felt it was my lot to drain the demonic spirit from her.
Indulging Romanticism and bachelor fantasy in this way is not Neruda's charac-
teristic approach, though. The Three Lilies is sheer poetry, and doubtless it was its sen- suality, coupled with its symbolic direct- ness, that appealed to the Chilean poet; but Jan Neruda's more usual tone is of down-to-earth, humorous realism. The stories in Prague Tales, about the people of the Mala Strana quarter, are shrewd, satirical yet affectionate — Czech portraits and epiphanies penned by a chuckling Chekhov.
We meet Mr Rysanek and Mr Schlegel, who have sat at the same inn table every evening for years without ever saying a syllable to each other. On the day they break their silence we witness Mr Vojtisek the beggar, 'face beaming with health and as radiantly red as a Sunday roast basted with fresh butter', who is ruined by the rumour that he is a closet millionaire. Ten- der-hearted widow Rus, who frequents funerals in her black mantilla and green- ribboned bonnet, scandal-mongers by the coffin once too often. A boy hides out in St Vitus's cathedral to watch the mass St Wenceslas himself supposedly celebrates at midnight in his chapel. Mr Vorel opens a flour shop in a street that already has one; he waits for customers, breaks in his new meerschaum, gives money to beggars, smokes, waits; and after a month or so, Vorel, his flour damned by the street as tasting of pipesmoke, his shop in the hands of creditors, hangs himself. Two 100-page tales frame the collection: A Week in a Quiet House is a comedy of courtship, snobbery and office work, and in Figures the narrator, a Pooter-like law student whose condescension is matched only by his witlessness, fails to get any of the girls.
Neruda's Prague is a place of bonhomie, one-upmanship, Czech (versus German) nationalism, waspishness, savoir vivre and gossip. It is darkened by punitive hierar- chies in social and office life, by anti- Semitism (which Neruda shares), and by disappointments in love and work; but it is always a place of defiant life, the world of a Capek or Hasek rather than a Kaflca. Keen observation, biting indulgence, and unfooled affection, are the hallmarks of Neruda's style, gloriously seen in his por- traits:
Miss Schlegel was supposed to be a beauty. Perhaps she was — but only to an architect. Everything was in the proper place, the cor- rect proportions; one could see the why and wherefore of it all. Yet for anyone but an architect she was a total disaster. Her face was exquisite, but as immobile as a facade; her eyes sparkled, but for no reason, like a pair of newly washed windows; her mouth, though in the shape of a fine arabesque, opened slowly, like a gate, and either remained ajar or, just as slowly, shut again; and her complexion — well, she always looked freshly white-washed.
Jan Neruda's Prague Tales deserve a place with Daudet, Joyce's Dubliners, Chekhov, Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and V S Naipaul's Miguel Street. Chatto's Central
European classics series, under the editor- ship of Timothy Garton Ash, is warmly to be welcomed.
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