Writer Jan Němec

Would you like to meet František Drtikol?
Of course, curiosity wouldn't let me. Not, perhaps, because in the course of my writing I came across something of extreme interest that I would not be able to find out or verify except directly from the source. But I did, after all, live with Drtikol intensely for a year and a half.

Would you give him your History of Light to read?
I'm not sure I'd want him to read the book. Of course I approached it honestly, especially in the case of Drtikol I felt I couldn't cheat anything. But it's still a novel, and in it František Drtikol as a fictional character. Such images don't always meet reality. I'd probably be a bit shy about it, but otherwise I'd be happy to have coffee with him, of course.

Do you think you have anything in common?
If he didn't fascinate me with something, or if I didn't hint at some clusters of themes in his life that are also important to me, I probably wouldn't spend so much time with him. Actually, from the beginning I was interested in the space that Drtikol occupied, i.e. some borderline between artistic activity and direct inner experience. This is quite an important theme in my life as well. He was a photographer, I'm a writer, he got into Buddhism through various other chapters, I studied religious studies and I've always been interested in Eastern religions... So in that sense we have a lot in common.

I was thinkingmore about character traits...Don't you share some kind of introversion or humility?
I agree that Drtikol was an introvert by some kind of inner foundation. But in life he often acted as an extrovert. He was in contact with a lot of people he didn't know very well, which is natural for a photographer. And Drtikol wasn't completely reserved, he managed both sides well. That's what I'm trying to do, after all. Until I was fifteen, I lived with the idea that I should be an extrovert. I was born on June 21, which in my horoscope is the border between extroverted Gemini and introverted Cancer. But then my mother had my exact horoscope drawn up and I discovered in the middle of puberty that I was actually a Cancer. Because by the time I was born, the sun was already in the other sign...

Itis the story of a man who outgrew his hometown

How would you characterize Drtikol's relationship to Příbram?In his biography, he devoted only two sentences to the local creative period, writing that conditions were not favourable for him and his artistic aspirations in Příbram, so he left...
The relationship was complicated. Just as many other people's relationship to the city where they were born is complicated. And at the same time, it was crucial for him, because everything important happened in Příbram, which then directed him further. Whether it was the experience of being taught by Antonín Matas, or the fact that there was Svatá Hora, where he cultivated his religious sensibility. Although he did not live in Pribram anymore, he returned to Pribram to visit his parents for a long time during the First Republic.

What was complicated about that relationship?
The relationship to his hometown cannot be named, because it is completely different from other towns. It's a natural experience for you, you don't simply choose your hometown, like your parents or your circle of childhood experiences. František Drtikol was active in the Sokol, which the Church was fighting at the time, and he was on the side of the Sokol and on the side of the Czechs against the Habsburgs. Drtikol fought a lot, all his life he actually had a problem with institutions. So whether it was the church or the school. Then he tried to teach in Prague and it didn't go well either.

Maybe it all started in his childhood here in Pribram.
It's true, he cultivated and honed his aversion to the Church there and he remembered it a lot. It's simply the story of a man who outgrew his hometown. I think Drtikol then tended to emphasize that, as you suggest, and as is in that biography. But a lot of his basic experience is connected with Příbram, that's for sure. When I was writing History of Light, at a certain point I wasn't so much addressing Drtikol's relationship to Pribram, but rather Pribram's relationship to Drtikol. It didn't seem to me that the city was pushing him out...

... so when Drtikol in your novel wishes that at least a street in Příbram would be named after him, is that your wish?
I think it came to me when I was walking through Příbram.

How did Příbram strike you?
A little embarrassed. Half of the centre opens up so strangely into a housing estate, but the part of Pražská Street that rises to Svatá Hora is charming. I was obviously impressed with Svatá Hora and I quite understood why it could be such a significant place for Drtikol.

The Happiest Hours of Life

What is more important to you when writing a novel like this?Primary sources, or the fact that you're walking through places that are authentically connected to the person?
Both are essential, each a different kind of information. With History of Light we're talking about a hundred years ago, there's not much to see in those locations anymore. I've been to Munich for Drtikol, for example, and you'll find the Art Nouveau stuff in some galleries rather than in the city itself. To be honest, you get more atmosphere from historical postcards than from today's Příbram. But then again, it's a place you can't afford to miss.

Doesn't it happen that you get more excited about the research than the writing itself?
You gather a lot of information and have an idea, but for me everything interesting comes from the writing. That's natural, actually, because what you gather is interesting information and you try to bring it to life in the novel. And that's what happens in the writing.

And if you compare the preparation and the writing in terms of time?
Writing is definitely more time consuming because you're constantly reading and rewriting the text several times. I'm quite honest in my preparation, and there is a danger that you read a lot, learn a lot, and at the same time you have to be able to stop at the right moment, because you don't want to write a study on art history, you don't want to write a cultural studies paper, or a sociological paper on the transformation of society after the First World War. You just want to write a novel. It's such a difficult balance, to read enough but to be able to detach and let your imagination work.

How much room is there for imagination in this genre?
The book begins with a prologue, a mining disaster that is well-decorated. There is plenty of material on how significant an event it was. There were fewer sources for the Pribram chapter, because not that much is known about Drtikol's childhood. And Munich is basically all fabricated, because there's only one sentence about it in Drtikol's biography and a few letters sent by teachers to his father. I actually like Munich best today, and I think that's partly because I was able to take off and not be constrained by all these facts that you don't want to change.

Fabulating doesn't seem to be a problem for you.
You know it isn't. For me, this type of novel was an aside, I never had any ambition to write a historical novel. I didn't want to cheat the research somehow, because I was fascinated by Drtikol, but I think the magic and power of the prose is actually somewhere else.

You spent a lot of time with Drtikol, did that influence you in any way?Maybe you've adopted some of his ideas or thoughts...
Probably not in the way you've suggested - that I've discovered something through Drtikol that I didn't know before. For me, the experience of the writing itself was crucial, because for the first time in my life I felt like I was doing something I wanted to do and believed in. And then other things in your private life sort of fall into place. František Drtikol said that the happiest hours for him were those he spent in the studio, where the outside world was not touching him and he was creating. That was a kind of commitment for me.

So the happiest hours of your life are when you can write?
It was then. That experience wears off a little bit, and when you have to write something else, there are doubts and fears again that you have to overcome. If you can do that, then the stuff works pretty well.

At the beginning I asked you if you would like to meet František Drtikol.Now at the end I'm wondering what you would ask him?
If I had a chance to spend some time with him, I could talk about a lot of things. But I believe I'd like to have a moment of silence with him. That's what he's come to. So if I were to somehow take advantage of having a man in front of me who has come this far, I guess I would have no choice but to be silent with him for a while.

■ Václav Bešt'ák