I Served the King of England

From the back cover of the New Directions edition:

First published in 1971 as a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I served the King of England is a comic novel telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a German woman athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition by building his own hotel. He becomes a millionaire; but with the arrival of communism, he loses everything. Sent to inspect mountain roads, Ditie comes to terms with his dreary circumstances, his place in history, and the inevitability of his death.

Well, yes, but it’s so much more. The height of Ditie’s ambition is his wish to be accepted and respected, especially by other hotel owners. He earns his million and develops his hotel visited by famous guests but never attains the acceptance or respect of other hotel owners. The owners visit his hotel but ignore Ditie and the hotel’s most fabulous attractions. Later, when millionaires are rounded up for jail, Ditie takes offense that he is excluded from their ranks. But the book is about so much more than his ambition. In the background lies the history of Czechoslovakia under Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, the German occupation of Bohemia, German atrocities during World War II (including the destruction of Lidice), and the communist takeover early in 1948.

Everyone longs for something in the book but Ditie moves beyond trying to fulfill physical pleasures and seeks his place in the world, during life and death. He initially learns to “read” people as a pupil of the headwaiter at a Prague hotel, who perceptively understands each patron and his desires. When asked how he correctly analyzes a customer and knows so much in advance, the headwaiter responds “I served the King of England.” Ditie’s experience highlights how meaningless such an honor can be—after serving the Emperor of Ethiopia (accidentally at first, then by the Emperor’s choice) Ditie is suspected of stealing a gold spoon. His honor in ruins, he unsuccessfully attempts to hang himself.

Underneath the comic and dramatic events lies a dark aspect of man. Ditie does not evaluate his acquisition of wealth through the theft of valuable stamps from the Jews until bad things happen to him. He doesn’t think twice about abandoning his autistic son, the product of approved coupling by the Third Reich, until haunted by the boy’s talent. The millionaires’ prison receives Hrabal’s special scorn. Despite describing the behavior in the running of the prison as “real comedy, beyond Chaplin’s wildest imagination”, there lies a depressing aspect of man willing to forego freedom for a soft life. Ditie gives up his freedom because he wants to be accepted as one of the rich (this after his humiliation in order to marry a German woman). Hrabal’s scorn is balanced when Ditie’s work assignments take him to the border, where he begins to understand his place in history. Ditie earns more knowledge of human nature than the headwaiter claimed to have from serving the King of England. Ditie’s knowledge, though, comes through solitude and reflection and demonstrates that the unbelievable really can true.

The moment I looked out and saw, to my surprise, how high the snow had reached, I saw my cottage with the animals in it suspended on a chain hung from heaven itself, a cottage banished from the world and yet full to the brim, just like those mirrors with their buried and gorgotten images, images that could be summoned up as easily as the images I put in the mirrors, as the images I littered and lined my road with, covered now by the snow of the past, so that memory could find it only by touch, the way an experienced hand feels the pulse under the skin, to determine where life had flowed, flows, and will flow. And at that moment I began to be afraid, because if I died, all the unbelievable things that had come true would vanish, and I remembered that the professor of aesthetics and French literature had said that the better person was the one who expressed himself better. And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the falling snow that had half buried the cottage. And so every evening, when I sat in front of the mirror with the cat behind me on the bar, butting her little head against my image in the mirror as though the image were really me, I looked at my hands while the blizzard roared outside like a swollen river, and the longer I looked at my hands—and I would hold them up as though I were surrendering to myself—the more I saw winter ahead of me, and snow. I saw that I would shovel the snow, throwing it aside, searching for the road, and go on, every day, searching for the road to the village, and perhaps they would be looking for a way to get to me too. And I said to myself that during the day I would look for the road to the village, but in the evening I would write, looking for the road back, and then walk back along it and shovel aside the snow that had covered my past, and so try, by writing, to ask myself about myself.
(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

Highest recommendation.

For additional excerpts from the novel:

It was a magnificent sight

Worthy of inseminating an Aryan with dignity

A match saved with his energetic whistle

I’m going to skip reviewing the movie version of the novel (there are many changes from the text, often to good effect) directed by Jiri Menzel, other than to recommend it—very enjoyable.

I Served the King of England: a match saved with his energetic whistle

A Christmas Eve entry in the series of excerpts from Bohumil Hrabal’s fantastic tale, where the unbelievable routinely comes true. At times the plot feels like a rickety framework on which to hang anecdotes such as the following…not that I’m complaining.

While in the prison for millionaires (more on this in the next post), Ditie reminisces about experiences and acquaintances. As the absurd becomes routine, Ditie’s memories focus on events that make sense to the (mildly) insane. This quote starts with a vision of Zdeněk when he was the headwaiter of the Hotel Tichota:

On our day off we’d gone for a walk, and in a grove of birches we saw a small man darting among the trees, blowing his whistle, pointing, holding the trees at arm’s length, and shouting, You’ve done it again, Mr. Říha. One more time and you’re out of the game. Then he ran back and forth among the trees again. Zdeněk found this amusing, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on. That evening Zdeněk told me the man was Mr. Šíba, the soccer referee. At the time, no one wanted to referee a Sparta-Slavia match, because the crowd then always insulted the referee, so Mr. Šíba said that if no one else wanted the job he’d referee the game himself. He went into training for it in this birch grove, running about sowing confusion among the birches, reprimanding and threatening Burger and Braine with expulsion, but mostly yelling at Mr. Říha, one more time and you’re out of the game. That afternoon Zdeněk took a bus full of inmates from an asylum for the mildly lunatic who had permission to go into the village because it was fair time, and they could ride on the merry-go-round and swing on the swings in their striped clothes and bowler hats. Zdeněk went into a pub and bought them a barrel of beer and a spigot, borrowed some half-liter glasses, and took them to the birch grove, where they broached the barrel and drank while Mr. Šíba ran among the birch trees blowing his whistle. The lunatics watched him for a while, then, figuring out what he was doing, they began to shout, cheer, and yell out the names of all the famous players for Sparta and Slavia. They even saw Braine kick Plániček in the head, and they jeered until Mr. Šíba threw Braine out of the game. Finally, after the referee had warned Říha three ttimes, there was nothing he could do but toss him out of the game for fouling Jezbera. The lunatics cheered, and by the time we’d polished off the barrel of beer they weren’t the only ones shouting, because I too saw the striped uniforms and the red-and-white uniforms instead of birch trees as the tiny referee Mr. Šíba blew his whistle. When it was over, the lunatics carried him off the playing field on their shoulders for doing such a beautiful job of refereeing. A month later Zdeněk showed me an article in the paper aabout Mr. Šíba, who had thrown Braine and Říha out of a game and thus saved the match with his energetic whistle.

(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

I Served the King of England: worthy of inseminating an Aryan with dignity

Bohumil Hrabal’s fantastic tale takes a dark turn as World War II begins. Ditie loses his job in Prague when he falls in love with a German. Even as Hrabal describes an absurd setting, an ugly edge creeps in with his humor. I’m providing another long excerpt to give an idea of his blending the two. In this scene, Ditie has proposed to his German girlfriend. Before he can accept, Ditie must get her father’s permission, which also includes a state blessing:

And so the unbelievable came true, because in Cheb I had to undergo an examination by a Supreme Court judge and I submitted a written request in which I listed my entire family, going back beyond that cemetery in Cvikov where Grandpa Johan Ditie lay, and with reference to his Aryan and Teutonic origins I respectfully requested permission to marry Elisabeth Papánek. According to the laws of the Reich, I also had to request a physical examination by an SS doctor to determine whether I, being of a different nationality, was eligible under the Nuremberg Laws not merely to have sex with someone of Aryan Teutonic blood but actually to impregnate her. And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German—which I couldn’t understand, though I got the gist well enough—when some stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb. He added that the gob of phlegm a German woman would spit between my eyes would be as much a disgrace to her as an honor to me. And I knew from reading the papers that on the very same day that I was standing here with my penis in my hand to prove myself worthy to marry a German, Germans were executing Czechs, and so I couldn’t get an erection and offer the doctor a few drops of my sperm. Then the door opened and the doctor came in with my papers in his hand, and he’d probably just read them and realized who I was, because he said to me affably, Herr Ditie, was ist den los? And he patted me on the shoulder, handed me some photographs, and turned on the light. I found myself looking at pornographic snapshots of naked people, and whenever I’d had this kind of picture in my hands before I’d always turn stiff right away, but now the more I looked at them the more I saw those headlines and the stories in the papers announcing that so-and-so and four others had been sentenced to death and shot, and there were more of them every day, new ones, innocent ones. And here I was standing with my penis in my hand and pornographic snapshots in the other, so I put them down on the table, because I still couldn’t manage to do what I was asked. Finally a young nurse had to come in and after a few deft strokes of her hand, during which I didn’t have to think about anything anymore, she carried off two beads of my sperm on a piece of paper, and half an hour later they were pronounced first-class and worthy of inseminating an Aryan vagina with dignity. And so the Bureau for the Defense of German Honor and Blood could find no objection to my marrying an Aryan of German blood. With a mighty thumping of rubber stamps I was given a marriage license, while Czech patriots, with the same thumping of the same rubber stamps, were sentenced to death.

(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

I Served the King of England: It was a magnificent sight

I wanted to pass on this extended quote from Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England because it captures the element of his comic madness. Ditie, a (short in stature) waiter-in-training at the Golden Prague Hotel and Restaurant, asks a traveling salesman representing a tailoring firm from Padubice why he cuts strips of parchment with measurements written on them for the suit jacket. The salesman tells Ditie about the “revolutionary technique” his

boss invented, the first in the republic, maybe even in Europe and the whole world, and it’s for officers and actors and the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands, like yourself, sir. I just measure them and send the measurements to the workshop, where they take those strips and sew them together on a kind of tailor’s dummy with a rubber bladder inside it that’s gradually pumped up until the parchment strips are filled out, and then they’re covered with fast-drying glue so they harden in the shape of your torso. When they remove the bladder, your torso floats up to the ceiling of the room, permanently inflated, and they tie a cord to it, the way they do to babies in the maternity wards so they won’t get mixed up, or the way they tag the toes of corpses in the morgues of the big Prague hospitals. Then when your turn comes, they pull your torso down and try the dresses, the uniforms, the suit coats, or whatever’s been ordered, on those mannequins, and they sew and refit, sew and refit, unstitching the seams and sewing them again, without a single live fitting. Since it’s all done on this inflated stand-in, of course the coat fits like a glove, and we can mail it out postage-free or C.O.D. with confidence, and it always fits, unless the client gains or loses weight. If that happens, the salesman can simply come again and measure how much you’ve lost or gained, and then the mannequin is taken in or let out at the appropriate places, and the clothes are altered accordingly, or a new coat or tunic is made. And a client’s mannequin is up there among several hundred colorful torsos, until he dies. You can find what you’re looking for by rank and profession, because the firm has divided everything into sections—for generals and lieutenants colonels and colonels and captains and lieutenants and headwaiters and anyone who wears formal dress—and all you have to do is come and pull on the right string and the mannequin comes down like a child’s balloon and you can see exactly how someone looked when he last had a jacket or a tuxedo made to measure or altered.

How does Ditie react to this absurdity? With even more silliness:

All this made me long for a new tuxedo made by that company, and I was determined to buy one as soon as I got my waiter’s papers, so that I and my mannequin could float near the ceiling of a company that was certainly the only one of its kind in the world, since no one but a Czech could have come up with an idea like that. After that I often dreamed about how I personally, not my torso, was floating up there by the ceiling of the Pardubice tailoring firm, and sometimes I felt as though I were floating near the ceiling of the Golden City of Prague restaurant.

Ditie orders a tuxedo from the tailoring firm and goes to pick up the suit in person, asking where his

inflated figurine, my torso, was. The boss of the place was as short as I was, and seemed to understand that I wanted to be taller, and how important being up there among the other torsos near the storeroom ceiling was for me, so he took me there to see it. It was a magnificent sight. Up near the ceiling hung the torsos of generals and regimental commanders and famous actors. Hans Albers [the German actor] himself had his suits made here, so he was up there too. A draft from an open window made the torsos move about like little fleecy clouds in an autumn wind. A thin thread bearing a name tag dangled down from every torso, and the tags danced gaily in the breeze, like fish on a line. The boss pointed at a tag with my name and address on it, so I pulled it down. It looked so small, my torso. I almost wept to see a major general’s torso beside mine, and Mr. Beránek the hotelkeeper’s, but when I thought of the company I was in I laughed and felt better.

So far the plot is almost an afterthought, a loose framework for yarns like this one. The spirit of Hrabal’s anecdotes leads the reader to accept the quirky and fantastic as possible.

(Quotes from the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

For another take on the fantastic as possible, watch this scene from the movie version under Jirí Menzel's direction (which takes some liberty with the book, mostly by understating the waiter's reaction):