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A Tale of a Vanished Poet
I remember watching TV news on the day he died, and out of a sudden an unbelievable, almost a novel-like story caught my attention. A life-story which nearly came to an end in oblivion, were it not for the most surreal coincidence.
Ivan Blatný was born in 1919 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. In his twenties, he was alrady one of the central figures in the cultural avant-garde. He published four books of poetry and two books of poetry for children before he turned thirty. He left Czechoslovakia shortly after the communist coup d’etat in 1948, for a cultural exchange organised by the British Council. On his first night in England, he announced on the BBC that he would not return home, because of the new regime. First came a fury and a hateful campaign against him.
And then, silence.
His name became taboo, his poetry was blacklisted, he was stripped of his citizenship and for the official culture, he was as much as dead. One of the most celebrated young poets of the generation became a non-person. His name was erased from the Czech literature and was meant to be forgotten forever.
The silence lasted for 28 years.
Only his family and closest circle of friends knew his whereabouts, and even those ties gradually faded because of lack of contact.
It was only months after he settled in England that he was hospitalised for mental illness for the first time, although he briefly worked as a journalist for the BBC and Radio Free Europe.
He th
en spent most of the time until his death in various institutions, although it is not even clear whether he needed therapy for specific diagnoses, or whether he was primarily seeking refuge from life ‚out there‘ that became unbearable.
His cousin Dr. Jan Šmarda secretly visited Blatný in 1969, in the brief period of Czechoslovakia‘s reopening. In the same year, a secondary-school teacher from Brno Vladimír Bařina visited him too. He was an admirer of Blatný’s work.
Most of Ivan Blatný’s life in England remains a mystery though, and many questions unanswered.
The personnel knew him as a quiet, lonely man, who hardly ever spoke to anyone, and who spent whole days staring at the wall, or tirelessly scribbling on loose sheets of paper provided to him – it was thought therapeutic. Nobody could ever decipher his scribbles, thought to be in some made up language; not that they cared to, he was a psychiatric patient after all, and quantities of those papers were discarded for hygienic reasons.
Until one person cared.
At this point, we should perhaps rename our story to ‚A Tale of the Nurse and the Poet‘.
Miss Frances Meacham was a nurse at St. Clement’s Hospital in Ipswich, where Ivan Blatný was transferred to in January 1977.
Since school years, Frances Meacham did not care much for poetry. She did not speak any foreign languages either. But she had a connection to Czechoslovakia since WWII, when she served in the Royal Air Force medical corps as part of the Czechoslovak brigade.
After the war, she kept contacts with many friends, ex-patients and, in her own words, ‘marvellous people she got to know in this wonderful country’. And once she even visited Czechoslovakia, Brno more specifically, to see a friend who had served with her in WWII.
By pure chance, she met Vladimír Bařina who told her about his friend, a patient in the very hospital where she worked as a nurse. Frances Beacham was moved by the story and when she returned home, she went to see the man she learnt about.
Despite her colleagues’ discouragement, she gradually managed to bring him out of his silent monotony. He confided in her that he used to do a bit of writing, and still does at times, but that the nurses always throw everything away. Whatever was left of his work, was in a folder of sheets full of his scribblings, hidden in a drawer, that somehow escaped the nurses’ attention. He trusted Frances and let her look at them.
She took everything home with her and the next day, she brought fresh supply of paper. She told the management that the man used to be a famous Czech poet. She made them promise that they will not throw away any more of his scribbles and asked them to give him a typewriter. She photocopied the manuscripts and sent them to Canada, to another Czechoslovak émigré, a great novelist Josef Škvorecký.
Škvorecký replied immediately: ‘Please send me everything he has written.’
He knew immediately, whose work he was looking at, and realized that the poet, long thought deceased, was still writing beautiful, melodical poems.
A first collection of selected poems was published. The book (several copies were sent to the hospital) finally had persuaded the physicians at St. Clement’s that their patient indeed was a real poet, and he was allocated a private room and a typewriter.
And so, the man, who at a terrible personal cost became a total poet, a walking and breathing organ of poetry, has finally had his name returned to him: Ivan Blatný, poet.
Thank you Miss Meacham!
A book of selected Blatný’s poems ‘The Drug of Art’ – with both Czech and English versions:
ISBN 987-1-933254-16-6
For further reading, listening and reference:
https://english.radio.cz/ivan-blatny-strange-story-a-czech-poet-english-exile-8083530
https://www.mujrozhlas.cz/auditorium/1990-zemrel-ivan-blatny
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064228608534059
http://thelondondead.blogspot.com/2017/05/quite-decent-mr-kozderka-astonishing.html
My Piece of History
The evolving installation consisted of 888,246 hand-made ceramic poppies, progressively planted, one by one, over a period of several months, by volunteers from all over the world. The authors were Paul Cummins, ceramic artist & Tom Piper, theatre designer.
Even on that final day, the blood red river of poppies was still growing.
The display was spectacular; the flood of bright red blooms wrapped the Tower of London, poured from its walls, and filled the entire moat.
There were thousands on that day, watching, in silence. Stunning and theatrical as it was, it was also profoundly sad. Each poppy was a poignant reminder of one life lost in WWI.
Later that year, the ceramic poppies were offered for sale to raise funds for several charities supporting ex-military staff. I applied, and, just before Christmas 2014, my own piece of history arrived.
The Codebreakers
Earlier this year, we visited Bletchley Park. A trip long overdue, considering that we live some 30 Minutes away!
I was not quite sure what to expect – apart from ‘the battle against the machines’ of course – and I had no idea at all how powerfully this place would resonate with me. And it still does.
It was in the opening exhibition dedicated to codes and ciphers in wartime communication, when I realised that this place is, first and foremost, about people. The ‘work tools’ on display – the decoding stencils, handwritten notes and transcripts, files, and logbooks – they all spoke of meticulous, exhaustive work. Yes, it was the time when ‘cut and paste’ meant scissors and glue!
Further on, personal items such as hand-knitted mitts, scarves, cardigans and hats, pipes, ashtrays, pencils and notepads, telling reminders of the conditions the codebreakers worked in – in the dim, confined and spartan huts – producing ultra-intelligence that it said to have shortened the WWII by several years.
And afterwards, there was silence.
When the operation at Bletchley Park closed in 1946, the codebreakers packed their belongings and left and returned to their lives, not being allowed to share even within their closest families what it was they were doing there; all information about the operation in Bletchley Park was classified until mid-1970s.
It was such a humbling and emotional experience! These days – and I am certain this applies to both pre- and after the lockdown – we take so much for granted; we feel entitled. Our experiences seem non-existent until shared and acknowledged (read liked) on social media.
It certainly helped me to put things into perspective.
Back home, I decided to find out more about the people of Bletchley Park. As a linguist and practising translator, I felt professional pride and connection to the linguists at Bletchley Park, who were of such importance for the success of the operation.
That is hardly surprising though. I was intrigued what other professionals were there.
At the beginning, the recruitment aimed at ‘Cambridge and Oxford professor types’, and the list of academics indeed contains a historian, a mathematician, an Egyptologist, a logician, and an astronomer. As the operation grew, Bletchley Park welcomed a fascinating mix of professions from different walks of life. As one would expect, there were cryptologists, cryptanalysts, as well as military, naval and intelligence officers. And of course, technical talent such as engineers and topologists.
Interestingly, there were also many creatives – artists, writers, designers, biographers, a poet, a garden and landscaping historian, a journalist, an actress, a composer, a radio dramatist. Also, a solicitor, a schoolteacher, and a philatelist. Not to forget several chess players and chess champions.
What a fascinating mix of skill and talent!
It was only a natural next step that I wanted to find out whether there were any Czechs (or Slovaks) at Bletchley Park at all.
And this is how I found her!
Dorothea Karoline Fuhrmann was born in 1917 in Brno, Czechia, into a wealthy Jewish family of textile manufacturers.
When her parents divorced in mid-1920s, Dorothea and her brother Robert relocated with their mother to Vienna, where she began training as a theatre designer at Kunstgewerbeschule. Their father was the only member of the family to remain in Brno, and later died in Auschwitz.
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. At that time, Dorothea designed stage decorations for the production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, but when she arrived in the theatre for the opening night, the notice on the entrance door said: No Jews.
She never saw her work on the stage.
Dorothea fled to London, which was only possible because she had a Czech passport thus did not need the permission from the Nazi regime to travel.
She continued her studies at the Reimann School in London, but then the WWII intervened.
Dorothea joined the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service, known as the WRENS) and because she spoke foreign languages, she became a radio intelligence officer (‘the listener’). She intercepted coded messages from the German naval forces, thus becoming key part of the broader Bletchley Park Operation.
In 1940 she married Leonard Klatzow, a South African physicist, who tragically died in 1942 in a plane crash.
After the WWII, Dorothea pursued her career as a designer and worked at the design studio of the Central Office for Information, producing government campaign posters, amongst other the famous ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’:
This is when she created her professional name: once asked to sign her artwork, she realised that both her maiden and married names were too difficult to recognise in the UK, decided to use her initials D.K.K. instead and created herself a professional name – Dorrit Dekk. Her mother, a Dickens enthusiast, has always called her Dorrit.
After a brief interlude in Cape Town, she returned to London in 1950 and established herself as a freelance designer, printmaker, and painter.
The milestone commission was a design for the Travelling Section of the Festival of Britain in 1951, a national exhibition and fair that attracted millions of visitors across the UK. Dorrit created a mural representing popular British sports, games and pastimes called People at Play.
With this piece of work, Dorrit entered the British design world. She has always been proud to be part of the 1951 festival.
She gradually built her own successful design practice and in 1956, she became a fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists (today Chartered Society of Designers).
Dorrit became known as the ‘travel queen’ through her work for Air France and P&O. However her work spanned from book covers and illustrations (Penguin and The Tatler were her clients) to advertising for London Transport, British Rail and Post Office savings bank. She considered herself art designer rather than fine artist.
Dorrit Dekk became one of the most influential and successful commercial graphic designers in the post-war UK. Her main medium was collage which she used in her posters as well as paintings. For her quirky landscapes and urban scenes she used gouache.
She continued to create pieces of abstract and figurative art as well as her favourite collages even after a stroke she suffered in 2001. Housebound and on a wheelchair, she enjoyed receiving young students of art in her studio, for whom she was an admired role model. Famous for her eccentric stripy socks, and loved for her infectious spirit, her passion for all things art and architecture, and for her sharp wit, Dorrit Dekk was one of a kind. She died in London in 2014 at the age of 97.
■■■■■
What a journey, what an unexpected discovery! Little did I know that a day’s trip to Bletchley Park will lead me to discover this connection to my hometown Brno, and that I will get the opportunity to ‘meet’ Dorrit Dekk, a brilliant artist and a beautiful person, in and out. I look forward to continuing learning about Dorrit’s career and art, and about her full, eventful life. She was a true fighter; in her own words, she seemed to be completely indestructible!