M. Davenport Československo navštívila už pred vojnou, keď zbierala materiál pre monografiu o Mozartovi, ale J. Masaryka - "playboya západného sveta" - spoznala až v novembri 1941:
I first met Jan Masaryk in my own house in New York. It was in November, 1941, a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. I was brought a message from the Czechoslovak Consulate that the Foreign Minister was in town from London and would like to pay his respects. I thought it very gracious of Jan Masaryk. I sent word that some friends were dining with us on the following Monday, if he should care to join us, and he replied that he would.
Nearly everybody I knew had known Jan Masaryk for years. Time and again, chance or circumstance had effected that we not meet. When it used to be said that 'everybody' was in Salzburg in the great and festive years, he was often there with his old friends George Daubek and his wife Jarmila Novotna, the lovely Czech soprano who sang Pamina with Maestro. Jan was then the Czechoslovak Minister in London, one of the most popular diplomats in England and in Europe. In those days I heard a lot about him, mostly about the charm, the wit, the escapades, the gaiety, some dissipation, and all the other superficialities that had earned him the sobriquet, "Playboy of the Western World." I have never had any attributes interesting to playboys and I may have had a reluctance to risk seeming dull. When I thought about it years later I realized that I had, unconsciously withal, been contriving for a long time not to meet him.
O tom, že šlo o nevšedného muža svedčí už jeho úvodná otázka, ktorú adresoval panej domu:
...he came last of all to me and without any salutation began to speak, in the middle of a sentence, as though continuing an interrupted conversation. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but it was badinage about my enthusiasm and my efforts for his country. In later years he often shook his head and said, "You're crazy, you know," and those first words were in that vein.
Tu sa nachádza aj inkriminovaná informácia o tom, ako T.G.M. opakovane bil syna a tiež exkurzia do rodinného života Masarykových.
Jan Masaryk was twenty-eight years old in 1914. He had been on his own for ten years and he had accomplished nothing. As a youth he must have been a disappointment to his father— scholar, philosopher, professor, politician, at that time unknown outside Austria-Hungary—a parent much troubled about a son who abhorred study and had never attended a university. Jan's school years in Prague where he was born in 1886 had been one escapade after another, his restlessness uncontrollable, his resistance to personal or scholastic discipline unbreakable. He told me that his father beat him again and again, but chastisement neither weakened the deep and tender love between them nor effected any reforms in Jan. He was a wild boy and at the end of his ordinary schooling his father gave up the struggle and consented to let Jan go his own way.
This was a few years past the turn of the century. Tomas Masaryk and his American wife, whom he had met in Leipzig when he was studying philosophy at the University and she the piano at the Conservatory, were intellectuals within the austere circumambience of plain living and high thinking. In both there was a measure of the puritan; but where this was deep-dyed in Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, their son told me that his father was never far in mind and tastes and humor from the earth of his peasant parentage. He was, of course, the son of a Slovak coachman on an Imperial estate in Hodonin, in Moravia, and of his wife, a Moravian girl who had been in domestic service in Vienna....
Nezvládnuteľné dieťa sa rodičia rozhodli poslať do USA a zveriť do opatery americkému priateľovi Ch. Crane-ovi.
He told his father that he wanted to go to America. T. G. Masaryk gave him such money as he could—something under a hundred dollars—and Jan went off on his own. He entered the United States as an immigrant. He did not get into touch with his mother's relations, and he did not seek out his father's only American friend, Charles Crane. Mr. Crane was the head of the Crane plumbing manufacturing company, a rich man who had endowed a School of Slavonic Studies at the University of Chicago. He was a Slavophile and presently a Czechophile at a time when this was so unusual as to be eccentric. He had travelled to Prague in 1902 to invite Professor Masaryk to give a course of lectures at Chicago; thereafter the connection ramified to bring T. G. Masaryk to the United States and into touch with the large communities of Slavic peoples in the middle west; to bring the Crane family into close relations with the eventual Czechoslovak Republic and its founder...
[Jan] went to work in Bridgeport after a chance meeting in the street with Charles Crane. He had arrived broke in New York and taken the first job he could find, filling inkwells and running errands. Mr. Crane substituted for that a job in the Bridgeport foundry of the Crane valve works, at a wage which Jan supplemented by playing the piano in movie houses. He kept his distance from the Crane family, not wishing to presume on his father's friendship and also, he told me, preferring to keep on the farther side of his own independence. He said very little about those years, during which he worked also in Chicago. In a dual sense inherent in Jan himself they were lost years but they were a lasting strain in his personality. He told me that he liked gambling and girls, and that the only serious thing he did was teach English to illiterate immigrants from all over Europe who worked in the brass foundry...
Ch. Crane neznamenal pre Masaryka iba známosti s vplyvnými mužmi...
Realistically we know that neither Washington nor Lincoln could have achieved what he did without a due measure of toughness, shrewdness, and the knack of making the most of opportunities. T. G. Masaryk had his share of these. He was also assisted, in the curious workings of fate, by the personal friendship of Charles Crane with Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. Masaryk had access to Woodrow Wilson not shared by any other leader of an eventual Succession State.
aj budúce rodinné zväzky....
The Czech virus is small and singular and it chooses its subjects cannily. It certainly chose Charles Crane. His son Richard was sent to Prague as the first American Minister to the new Czechoslovak Republic, and his daughter Frances Crane Leatherbee was married in 1924 to Jan Masaryk. The childless marriage lasted less than five years.
Ale vráťtme sa do roku 1914, keď sa Jan práve vrátil domov a onedlho dostal povolávací rozkaz. Vzhľadom na emigráciu otca, neskôr odsúdeného za vlastizradu, životopisci často popisujú ústrky proti mladému Masarykovi v armáde. Z prvej ruky sa dozvedáme:
He arrived in Prague in time to be drafted into the Imperial army shortly before the war broke out. His father was by then a Parliamentary leader in the politics of the dissident peoples of the Habsburg house of cards. There was a Czech question, a Hungarian question, a Croat and a Slovene question, a Slovak question in its own frame of reference to its subject status as a province of Hungary; and the war was only a few weeks old when the activities of T. G. Masaryk came under suspicion and he under surveillance. His son Jan in the army was probably considered a sort of surety for the father's reliability. But that did not deter T. G. Masaryk in December, 1914, from escaping through Italy to the long wanderings and labors which were to end in his return at the end of 1918 as the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic. Because of his father's subversive activities, and because Czech and Slovak soldiers by hundreds of thousands were deserting the Austrian armies to cross over and fight for the other side, Jan was assigned to non-combatant jobs in a Hungarian regiment on the Polish front. He told me he never fired a shot. Except for a series of Schweik-like stories and some colorful additions to his linguistic repertoire he had as little to say about the war years as about the ones that preceded them. In 1919 the Masaryk family were reunited in Hradcany, the castle of Prague, the fortress-palace of the Bohemian Kings. It was one of the great unlikelihoods of European history.
Počas vojny sa M. Davenport stýkala s bývalými Benešovými diplomatmi v USA V. Hurbanom a J. Papánkom.
During the war years I had met most of the Czechs and Slovaks in the Foreign Service of their country who were stationed here, and through them, many other Czechoslovaks and Americans of Czechoslovak descent. I have put so many of these people partially and collectively into novels, along with glimpses of their ways and their views and their speech and their folk-songs and their hospitality and their heavenly cooking, that to go into such details here would be repetitious. My closest friends amongst them were Jan and Betka Papanek and Vladimir and Olga Hur-ban. Vladimir Hurban was the Czechoslovak Ambassador in Washington and Jan Papanek was Minister Plenipotentiary stationed in New York. Both the Papaneks and the Hurbans came of old Slovak Protestant families with traditions of intellectual and social enlightenment very different from the mass of Catholic Slovak peasants. Both men had fought with the rebellious Czechoslovaks in the First World War and both had been in the diplomatic service since the beginning of the Masaryk Republic. They were old and trusted friends of Jan Masaryk.
Povojnové obdobie opisuje Davenportová ako turbulentné a nervózne. Jan Masaryk zápasil so zdedenou psychickou labilitou a prepadával depresiám.
Jan returned on the twelfth of July. It does not matter now what were the details of the Soviet crackdown. Jan told me about them but he did not say to me what Bruce Lockhart and others have quoted him as saying at the time—that he went to Moscow as the Foreign Minister of a sovereign state and returned as a lackey of the Soviet Government. He looked stunned; ill and bloated. He was very nervous. He alternated between spates of talk and long dark silences. I was used to the extremes of his moods, the bursts of emotion, the abrupt withdrawals into aloofness, the sudden wild jokes at the expense of anybody or anything, the silence in which his extraordinary, tragic eyes conveyed what he did not put in words. These were all parts of a whole that I accepted exactly as it was. Like everybody close to him I knew the history of mental instability in his family, said to have been inherited from his mother. She died in 1923 after several years of invalidism in a nursing home, her mind failing. Her sons and daughters were all described as neurotic, or in other terms of the psychological jargon that is the paramount feature of modern life. All my life by stubborn preference I have stayed out of the stream of preoccupation with psychiatry and psychoanalysis. I am an anachronism and a holdout but I cannot be otherwise, I must be me. I can recognize a disturbed person when I see one, but I will not glibly use a term like neurotic or psychotic. I am not sufficiently informed to do so. I would never have done that about Jan—and I never allowed anybody to tell me about him what I was perfectly able to see for myself: that he was extremely unstable. In the last year of his life the pressures on him were savage. I felt, at a range so close that it might be said to be with his own feelings, the intolerable despair and humiliation which wracked him. I felt his judgement weaken and sway and wheel from desperate hope to more desperate hopelessness. I could only help him by accepting him completely, whatever he said or did, his faults and his mistakes alike with his virtues—the greatest of which was loyalty.
J. Masaryk odpovedá na otázku, ako sa mu páčil J. V. Stalin...
After he had returned from Moscow I asked him one evening, "How does Stalin treat you?"
Jan picked a shred of tobacco from his lip. "Oh, he's very gracious," he said. His voice was light, actually casual. "Of course he'd kill me if he could. But very gracious."
Predtucha smrti ho neopúšťala. Málo známa kauza listových bômb takisto naznačovala temné výhliadky...
So often we use death in figures of speech. "I'm tired to death. . ." "This will kill me . . ." "I'd rather die . . ." We are not thinking. But Jan was thinking when he said many times in that same careless tone, "One day they'll kill me."
One day they tried, clumsily. It was the affair of the so-called perfume bombs. Besides Jan the two leading non-Communists in the Council of Ministers were Peter Zenkl, the first Deputy Prime Minister, the leader of Benes"s party; and Prokop Drtina, the Minister of Justice. Zenkl was and is now in his old age in exile a true Czech patriot. He survived six years of hell in Buchenwald, scourged there by the Czech Communists as much as by the Nazis, and returned to his country with his morale unbroken. Drtina was a distinguished jurist, of the same party as Benes and Zenkl. Both men defied the Communists; both, together with Jan, were the personification of the Masaryk Republic. On the eleventh of September all three men received by post packages containing small wooden boxes labelled 'perfume'. Some alert clerk opened the first of the parcels and effected that all three were turned over to the police. They contained explosives.
To bol už ale február 1948 a tragédia sa nezadržateľne blížila ku svojmu finále...
The revolutionary uproar went into high gear. Long and thorough underground preparation erupted in the form of Action Committees which had muscled in on every entity and organization—labor unions, factory works councils, farmers' cooperatives, the newspapers. The Action Committees were gangs bf trained ruffians. They plunged into outright violence days before the coup was completed. I never understood how the Communists had subverted great basic masses of people who had once been the solid humanity of a model democracy. It is not rational to say only because their morale had been destroyed by the Nazis. Millions of them had fiercely resisted the Nazis. Over that weekend of February twenty-first the Reds brought in to Prague from all over the country hundreds of thousands of factory workers. These mobs gathered in the Vaclavsk£ and the Old Town Square to be harangued by Gottwald and Zapotocky and the rest. They were cued to howl and whipped to frenzy and all of it was broadcast on the radio. Mobs are mobs. I had seen them before, in Berlin in 1933. I cannot say that one had no relation to the other.
Up on the hill it was deceptively calm. There is about that quarter the atmosphere of a village, and so it seemed on those winter days and nights. Jan remained in his room. I saw him briefly every day and I knew he was in contact with Benes but I do not know just how. I had not seen Benes for a long time. Jan said that he showed no effects of the July incident except some impairment of his speech; that his mind was unaffected, and he worked full time. I wonder. I remember the despairing appeals of the people that Benes assert himself, appear publicly, give them leadership; above all, speak to them on the radio. Three days dragged by while they hung in suspense waiting for Benes to do that. Nothing happened. Finally I said to Jan, "Does it mean he can't?"
He nodded."
You mean—he can't, physically—or they won't let him?" "Both," he said. His face was ghastly. On Monday afternoon a friend whom I will call Helena was at tea with me. We had heard a rumor that a mass of University students were going to march to the Hrad [23. 2. 1948] to demonstrate their loyalty to Benes and the Republic, to exhort him to appear and address them. From the Loretanska side of the house we heard the tramp of feet and the chanting of voices. I ran to the dining-room windows; the students were marching past. I have no idea how many they were, but the record says thousands, and it seemed so. Eight abreast, they were carrying the national tricolor and they were singing the national anthem, whose tragic refrain is "Where is my home?" They were fine and beautiful young people and they were the last honest open faces I saw in that country. I seized a coat and ran out of the house to go along near them on the pavement; Helena called after me to come back but I paid no attention. Then I heard another noise, a heavy roar, and another kind of tramping; it seemed to come from many directions. The students were nearing the gates of the Hrad. I stood still for a moment as I saw their ranks break and flailing violence falling on them. Then I heard shots. I knew I should not be in the street so I went back to the house. I stood at the window again and saw platoon after platoon of marching men, in ordinary clothes with red rags tied round their left arms, carrying rifles. Workers' Militia is what their Red bosses called them, but I did not know that or care. I clutched the sill and screamed, "Armed civilians! Shame! Shame!" Helena dragged me away from the window. I cannot remember just how I heard about the outrages that went on all day long on Tuesday: Action Committees arresting non-Communists in and out of the Government, barring officials and personnel from their offices and judges from their benches, closing newspapers. That afternoon I turned on the small portable radio when Gottwald was making a drunken, lying, rabble-rousing speech to a mob downtown. All I remember is throwing the radio across the room and smashing it. Tuesday[24.2.1948] evening is a blank.
On Wednesday [25.2.1948] afternoon Jan telephoned. His voice was very strange, breathless and high-pitched as though he were trying to sound nonchalant. He said, "I'm at the Hrad. I'll be along presently. I have something to tell you."
I thought, why has he telephoned? What am I supposed to say? This can only be because he wants them to hear. I tried to answer in the same vein. Like an idiot I said, "I hope it's something good . . ."
In a few minutes he came. He burst into the room, almost falling across the threshold, wearing his overcoat. His face was like a mask, as if it had looked into the pit and was frozen, still staring at the horrors there. I went to him and he said, "Lost. Utterly lost."
Benes had given in. Jan was unable to say more, to go into details, to talk about his own situation. There was nothing I could say. We sat together for a long time. He kept his hand on my shoulder and once or twice murmured something that I do not think he knew he was saying. He must have stayed an hour. I cannot remember the rest of that evening and night. When he left me he stopped to see his sister Alice across the hall, and then went up to the Cerninsky. He was accompanied by his bodyguard, a quiet civilian who had been with him since 1945, a man like our Secret Service men. He always rode in the front seat of Jan's car or walked beside him the short distance to and from the Ministry when Jan went on foot.
Early next morning Pfihoda brought me a small sealed envelope. Inside was a note that Jan had written in pencil on a very small piece of paper. He wrote: "Am staying in this 'govt' for time being. It breaks my heart for you to receive these shocks which you deserve less than anybody in the world. Do not be too sad. Be bitter and be proud—of yourself. I am very proud of you. You believed in a decent hope—so did I. It could not be. But this is not the end."
Thus I learned that Jan was to stay in Gottwald's 'government.' I did not need to ask him why. He stayed—he told me later—because Benes, bludgeoned and without his full faculties, had stayed. Gottwald had insisted on Benes staying to give his putsch the ghastly simulacrum of legitimacy. Gottwald had met every demur of Benes's with threats of civil war: by implication, any war would bring in the Red Army. Munich all over again, said Benes; "you are talking to me like Hitler." Benes said afterwards to Jan, "In 1938 I had to bear the brunt of Munich alone when you were abroad. Now you must stay and help me and the country." Benes was beyond giving help—or receiving it. Jan knew that. He told me that in his mind consenting to Benes's plea was his final fulfillment of his promises to his father. Beyond that, he had to use the device of 'office' in the 'government' to keep his mobility; "if I hadn't, they'd have arrested me."
They were already arresting colleagues of his, and friends of his and mine. Jan interceded for them, I thought at too much risk to himself. While doing that he also made statements to the press whose irony I feared the Communists would see through: "With this government I shall enjoy governing." We were told that the Western press was criticizing him and questioning his motives. He made a certain vulgar noise expressing his contempt. It was not true, as the Communists later claimed, that he was receiving reproachful and abusive letters from Western friends. He stood in the middle of my room and said, "Is it possible that anybody in any Western country who really knows me is so stupid as not to understand what I have to do? How the hell else can I get out? It's my only chance." Panic was sweeping Government people because of the arrests. Abroad some members of Embassies and Consulates were resigning, as the good ones had done after Munich, led by Jan himself in London. I asked him about Janko Papanek in New York and Slavik in Washington. He told me that the day before he left New York he had talked to them both and told them what to do in the event of a Communist putsch. (So he had weighed the full possibility before he went back.) Neither of them was to make a move "until they had received a sign from me," he said. "I can rely on them."
Začali horúčkovité prípravy na evakuáciu M. Davenport a J. Masaryka z Prahy. Prípravy narušili abdikácie čsl. diplomatov v zahraničí. Pre J. Masaryka bola zvlášť nepríjemná abdikácia veľvyslanca vo Washingtone J. Slávika.
So my plan stood until Tuesday, the second of March. Early that morning I was brought another of Jan's little notes. He had written: "Slavik has resigned and denounced this govt. Extremely bad."
When he came in about eleven o'clock that morning he was in a state of panic. Slavik's action had touched off a frenzied hue and cry. I quote here from a letter that I wrote from London to the Papaneks on the twelfth of March:
"You [Papanek at the U.N.] were noble and magnificent in holding your fire for Jan's sake and doing nothing until you had a sign from him. That was what Slavik should have done. The sign Jan gave was not the one he planned, the one with which he sent me out of Prague . . .
"Of course I understand the morality and motives of Slavik's action but the timing was fatally stupid. That morning began the period when Jan looked and acted like a hunted man; I think they must have threatened him in the full fury of their anti-American frenzy ... he had the obsession that Slavik's action had torn the American thing completely and that they would suspect me of being his pipeline to outside. He was so wrong—if I was in Prague incommunicado they could not suspect that, and if I left, they would—but I could not add to his tortures and when he said [as originally] that I must go, I said, very well. I had to give him peace or what he imagined as the lesser of a choice of evils. . . .
"Certainly the last week I was there his situation was changed in respect to the gangsters. Jan came to my house every day but in such tension that I felt he was not supposed to be there . . he never used the telephone again after the Slavik thing. I begged him not to come to see me since it was obviously dangerous for him, and he burst into tears and said if he could not see me he would break."...
The resignation of Slavik and the other events of the weekend produced the shame of two leather-jacketed, seemingly civilian thugs who were assigned to cover Jan; his own man and other security staff were withdrawn. He protested so vehemently to Nosek that some change was made in the orders. His personal guard was restored and Jan thereafter never moved a step without him. He went nowhere on foot except to see his sister Alice and me. But the leather-jacketed thugs were in evidence too. They reminded me of Nazis, dressed the same and looking the same. I found one hanging about in our downstairs hall.
Marcia, ktorú J. Masaryk predtým prinútil spáliť celú ich korešpondenciu a poznámky, odletela z Prahy 8. marca 1948.
When Jan had first said I should go to London he had given me verbal messages that I was to repeat to his old friend Bruce Lockhart whom I had known since he had stayed with Jan in Prague the year before; and to Sir Orme Sargent, the head of the Foreign Office. The messages were about Jan's intentions to escape but made no mention of a time element. On Saturday [8.3.1948] evening, the night before I was to leave, he came at half past eight. He looked absolutely ghastly. All those days he had had an exhausted, claylike pallor, but that evening he was even more grey of face. He had come from Sezimovo Usti where he had lunched with Benes and spent the afternoon. He told me nothing of what had happened there; I learned that later. I saw only that he was distraught. He muttered, "Benes . . ."
He rested for a time. We were silent. I was afraid to speak and upset him the more because I was so wretched about leaving next day. Besides, there was nothing to say. I have no idea how much time elapsed. Finally he leaned forward in his chair and spoke to me, looking into my eyes. He spoke slowly, with emphasis, in a very low voice. He said, "When you get to Claridge's tomorrow, don't go out. Do not go out of the hotel. Do not leave your rooms at all. Stay there all the time until you hear from me."
I said yes. I did not ask him a question. He said, "Very soon . . . few days ..."
I went with him to the door and helped him put on his overcoat, an old loose one that he had been wearing in those last days. I had not seen it before then. It was an odd brown color. He said, "God bless."
A 10. marca prišla správu o samovražde J. Masaryka...
It was my old friend John Foster, who had been immensely helpful in arranging for my arrival in London, and very kind after I got there. His voice was high and choked. There was noise in the background. He said he was at the railway station taking a train to his constituency. He said, "There are newspaper extras just out. I think I had better tell you before you hear some other way." Jan had been found dead in the courtyard early that morning.
Marcia nikdy neuverila oficiálnej verzii o samovražde, uvádza množstvo argumentov, medzi nimi i čisto subjektívne. Podľa nej bol J. Masaryk veľmi delikátny muž a nikdy by nespáchal samovraždu v pyžame...
HEY said, suicide. He had said, "One day they'll kill me." The first idea was imaginable before I knew anything except what they had announced after the hours they took to decide on their story. The story was preposterous. The news of Jan's death had already been telephoned out by the foreign press...
Knihu napísala autorka s odstupom 20 rokov v r. 1967, odkedy uplynulo ďalšich takmer 50 rokov. Ako ukazujú fragmenty uvedené vyšśie, jej spomienky majú čo povedať pre našinca i dnes.
Oto Psenak 
13-05-11 
52,471 
Marcia Davenport (1903-1996) bola americká spisovateľka a hudobná kritička. Pre našinca je zaujímavá tým, že bola dôvernou priateľkou Jana Masaryka, čsl. ministra zahr. vecí, syna T.G. Masaryka.