FROM UNDERGROUND

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31500, 14 October 1967, Page 4

FROM UNDERGROUND

Living and Partly Living. By Jiri Mucha, Translated by Ewald Osers. Hog:irth Press. 223 pp. Jlrl Mucha, a member of John Lehman’s group associated with “New Writing” during the war, is no stranger to European literary i circles. The son of a re- ; nowned “art-noveau” artist, - he has completed two bio- ’ graphics of his father and published a number of his own works. i In 1951, during the post- . war purges that swept through ! many East. .European couni tries, Mucha, was arrested by . the Caere regime for alleged : espionage activities. Characi (call; the group om . ho was to have organised, 1 he had never heard of. Mucha was sentenced to six years’ S Imprisonment. After a year of solitazy confinement he was ;■ transported to a slave labour t amp to serve .out his sen- >, tence as a coal miner. This : book Is the result of a diary ■’ composed by the light of a collier’s lamp during his year underground in forced J labour; a year of comparative t comfort measured against his . prison experiences: “When a man has spent months on end in complete solitude ... so hungry that he saved up a crust of bread as a special delicacy, when for months he has seen neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor trees or grass . . . when he has been surrounded by a stone wall of hopelessness, then this camp bere is bliss,”

Mucha's emphasis is not—as one might expect—so much on his fellow inmates but more on that interior world of self given over to examination in the face of the crushing realities of loneliness and deprivation. However genuinely anguished he was by the plight <rf fellow convicts, Mucha realised he was unable to share in their “camraderie” —a confined pace inhabited by hardened and habitual criminals, ex-SS and Gestapo thugs, innocent victims of revenge and slander, and the inevitable unbalanced pariah. That Mueha was able to relieve the periodic and unfounded rumours of a general amnesty, constant physi-

cal danger from cave-lna and subterranean explosions, and mental anguish, by re-dis-covering the landscape of self and by writing humorously on literature (at one point he speculates on composing a story of Ovid to exile), seems evidence of a remarkable will to survive and a relentless need for self-expression. Although translated from the Czech, the sense of endurance, that “this form of partly-living is, after all, life,” and the insistence of hoping against hope, renders Mucha’s account a moving one. The poetry Is in the suffering, the knowledge ef it, and that out of the abysethe sense of life can prevail.