A Celebrated Czech Writer Turns 100

“Mr. Hrabal was a great lover and ambassador for natural beer. It shows not only in his stories but his whole life, the fragments of which live on in the people who knew him,” says Lukáš Novotný, brand manager for Pilsner Urquell.

Hrabal frequented this pub in the Old Town, so Hulata saw the writer regularly. “He sat here or a little over there at the back of the pub. He had a beer and no one was allowed to talk to him until he had finished it. Once he had finished it, loads of people came,” he said.

Hulata recalled that some Hungarians had come to ask Hrabal to go to Hungary for an interview. He told them to wait until Hrabal had finished his first beer but they insisted.

“I said, ‘So try it but I warned you.’ They took him a beer and then came away. They were standing, crying. He had told them to go to hell. I spoke to them for a while. In the meantime he’d finished his beer and he said, like Captain Nemo, ‘Send them here. Send them here.’ ”

Mr. Hulata was also there when former President Clinton paid a visit.

“About 22 or 25 people were sitting around a table (in the main hall). The secret service gave the journalists a minute only to take photos and then they had to leave. It was only us and three people from the secret service. It felt like a regular day. People were talking among themselves. If somebody wanted to ask a question they did.”

“‘Master, come to us’, they called from the editorial boards and even from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. ‘We will do it over a little and the book will come out.’ Who would dare say ‘Enough!’ when at the time communism was in perpetuity,” Srp said.

However, Hrabal decided to release it in the prohibited and persecuted Jazz Section.

“The book was printed in a run of nearly 6,000. Not one printer or bindery betrayed the truth to the authorities,” Srp said.

“There’s not much to say, except at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I was with him on stage for a reading. What I remember of that event was that he was attacked by Czech exiles in the audience for having caved in to the ‘normalization’ regime in the 1970s so he could continue getting published.”

Wilson goes on to say:

“My first encounter with Hrabal was soon after death of [the Czech poet] Jana Černá (born Jana Krejcarová), the daughter of [Czech writer] Milena Jesenská in a car accident. I consulted with Egon Bondy, who had been Černá’s lover, that I would like to see Hrabal to tell him about it.”

Machovec knew Hrabal would likely be at U Zlatého Tygra, though he was not sure he found the right man.

“At first I imagined a face which would project his great knowledge. In fact he looked like any other habitué of a beer cellar. I thought to myself it must be that old guy, so I asked him if he was Mr. Hrabal. ‘That’s me,’ he said, ‘What do you want?’ I told him I had a message from his old friend Egon Bondy but I would like to deliver it in private,” Machovec said.

Hrabal found a quiet place in the otherwise noisy pub.

“He said he needed to pee anyway. So while he peed, I told him about Jana Černá’s fatal accident. He said, ‘A free spirit in life, a free spirit in death.’”

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