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Havel's English-language reputation was secured with his second play, The Memorandum, in which a society's leaders imposed an artificial language, incomprehensible to everyone but nonetheless required for all transactions. It debuted in Prague in 1965 and reached the U.S. in May 1968 in an award-winning production by Joseph Papp's prestigious Public Theater in New York City. Havel attended the premiere. Three months later, Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. The political and artistic blossoming withered and died. The bureaucrats Havel had mocked were firmly back in charge.
He was soon out of a job at Balustrade. Although he continued to write for publication or production in the West, his public role in Prague shifted to politics. He became a principal organizer of Charter 77, a human rights organization designed to compel Czechoslovakia to honor the commitments in existing treaties and its own constitution. As Havel argued, "If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he or she would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about." Havel was first jailed in 1977. By August 1978, he was "free" under house arrest behind a barricade that said, ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN. When Havel asked police what offense he was charged with, he reported in Technical Notes on My House-Arrest, he "was only told that they had no instructions to pass such information on to me."
Even at low ebb, Havel was protected in some measure by his prominence abroad. Authorities made no effort to uproot him from the handsome granite apartment block built by his father and also tenanted by his brother, where Havel has room after room lined with books and videotapes, the elegance tempered by big beer-hall ashtrays, overflowing with butts, on seemingly every table. The car that the police most often vandalized was a white Mercedes. Although his manner is earthy and direct and his short, dumpy frame and mustache bring to mind a small, playful walrus, Havel still has a touch of the patrician. He is accustomed to center stage and rarely brooks disagreement, even from friends. His marriage has endured a quarter-century and produced one of the century's most touching prison volumes, Letters to Olga, but friends say Havel can be as overbearing to her as to anyone else -- which is very overbearing indeed. If Havel is the embodiment of moral rectitude to his nation, that is even more strongly the way he sees himself. His true passion is not for possessions or power but for giving life a purpose. That is why the people of Czechoslovakia were able to do last week what the government never could: persuade him to move out of the flat built by his father, with its sweeping views of the Vltava River and the Hradcany castle complex, across the river into the castle itself. It is Prague's presidential palace. And it is now, in an era of electric change, the dissident's home.