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Bohumil Hrabal’s “I Served the King of England”
What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’
Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote. There is a comedy, and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large (‘for all mankind’) that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the ‘tiny black cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism.
Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence by the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997. The character relieving himself of this little confession is a garrulous cobbler, who admits to being ‘an admirer of the European Renaissance’, and is the narrator of Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age.
And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia – but sometimes he says something wise or prescient, and whenever he is complimented for this, he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’
Hrabal wrote in an expressive, highly visual style. He affected the use of long sentences; in fact his work, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé) (1964) consists of a single sentence! Political quandaries and their concomitant moral ambiguities are a recurrent theme. Many of Hrabal’s characters are portrayed as “wise fools” – simpletons with occasional inadvertently profound thoughts – who are also given to coarse humour, lewdness, and a determination to survive and enjoy oneself despite harsh circumstances.
Much of the impact of Hrabal’s writing derives from his juxtaposition of the beauty and cruelty found in everyday life.
The 2006 Czech film, I Served the King of England, directed by Jiří Menzel and based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal. This film is Menzel’s sixth adaptation of the works of Hrabal for film. The film was released in the UK and in the US in 2008.
A must-see. Here’s the trailer and the review on rottentomatoes.com.
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A. J. Cronin: The Citadel
about 1 year ago - No comments
Robert Donat as Dr. Andrew Manson
A.J.Cronin (1896-1981) was born in Scotland. He wrote over 30 books, several of which were filmed or televised, a recent example being Dr. Finlay’s Case Book. He trained in various hospitals, finding himself a naval surgeon as World War One dragged on, and finally graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1919. He then moved to a mining town in South Wales.
The Citadel, a tremendously popular book from 1937, is semi-autobiographical in its first sections.
It is an episodic sort of novel, unified by the passage of one life over time, and with a trajectory through suffering into a kind of grace. It works as a forum for Cronin’s political, socialistic conceptions of medicine, and has been credited with stimulating the creation of the famed National Health Service of the United Kingdom.
The brand new Dr. Andrew Manson arrives in a bleak Welsh mining town. His first case for Drineffy Haematite Mine and Ore Works is beautifully described, as only an author who has been ‘there’ can do. He soon meets one of his colleagues, Denny, a sarcastic and bitter drunkard who is nevertheless friendly and helpful, like his dog Hawkins.
Cronin uses humor to take the sting out of his story, which is one of almost inconceivable neglect of the workers in a powerfully class-driven society. After only 3 months on the job our restless hero questions the pharmacopoeia.
The fragment below demonstrates two things: the vision and influence of this book; and the considerable time it has taken for the profession to acquiesce. CME (Continuing Medical Education) has only recently been formalised:
“Ignorance, ignorance, pure damned ignorance. There ought to be a law to make doctors keep up to date. It’s all the fault of our rotten system. There ought to be compulsory post-graduate classes- to be taken every five years.“
Eventually Andrew Manson breaks his principles for money, injecting ‘Glickert’s Eptone’ into wealthy and gullible patients. He neglects serious cases among the poor in his practice for easy money from rich neurotics; and his wife Chris dispenses for him now, anything, like the poisons he used to rail against. She withdraws into herself: there is unhappiness creeping in to their lives because of the drive to money.
All these themes make The Citadel as relevant today as it was in the 1930s, and The Citadel is still a “great read”. Much has changed in the practice of medicine since this wonderful novel was originally published; however, what will never change are Cronin’s most basic points: that medicine is not merely a business whose goal is to enrich its practitioners materially; and that the essence of being a doctor is the use of one’s senses, knowledge, and experience to reduce suffering and improve people’s lives.
There has been a radio dramatization by The Campbell Playhouse, starring Orson Welles, and also a movie adaptation. The movie was directed by King Vidor and produced by Victor Saville.
The film was nominated for Oscars and also won the Best Picture Award from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. It is a New York Times Critics’ Pick and is also listed in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.
Here’s the trailer:
