The World According to Škvorecký

God and history must have been grinning. The tape recorder wouldn’t work. Or, more precisely, it stopped working moments after the prolific Czech writer Josef Škvorecký sat down across from me in his book-filled Toronto home. He smiled through the squeaks of sped-up tape, the snapping and clicking noises of switched cassettes, my muttered entreaties and curses and apologies. Yet it did seem more natural that my conversation with one of twentieth-century Europe’s greatest dissident writers would not be recorded.

Forget grinning: God and history must have been laughing out loud halfway through the ensuing conversation, when I asked Škvorecký to say something about the notes he wrote for his new novel, Ordinary Lives. It’s his first to appear in English since 1996, and, auspiciously, its 2008 publication coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of his first novel’s publication in Czechoslovakia, and the fortieth anniversary of the Prague Spring and the ensuing Soviet invasion. My curiosity came of sensing that the notes offered far more than was suggested by their outward purpose: discursive and playful and cascading like a jazz solo in charting the vast fictional territories of Škvorecký’s oeuvre, they pass seamlessly between history, political analysis, creative reflection, and personal memory.

“I wrote the notes to inform newcomers to my fiction about my characters that travel from novel to novel,” Škvorecký told me. “And also because Canadian readers don’t know much about World War II as seen from the other side of the front lines.” He asked me what I knew of Hannah Arendt. Waving off my answer, he glossed the relevant note from the novel, explaining that she was a Nazi-era test pilot who fell in love with the Führer. In 1945, she flew to Berlin, evading Soviet anti-aircraft fire and intent upon dying beside Hitler. But she was ordered back to the air, captured by the Americans, and went on to a career in aeronautics. Before her death in 1979, she earned world records in gliding and started a series of glider clubs in Africa. Where in all of this, I wondered, was the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt? Was Škvorecký playing some kind of elaborate storyteller’s joke? Was he proving just how scant a thirty-two-year-old North American’s knowledge about wartime Europe might be?

Later, I went back to the novel’s notes and realized that as I listened to Škvorecký tell stories in his raspy, soft, accented English, he had said Hanna Reitsch, not Hannah Arendt. My mistake was mundane, the difference in life stories ridiculous, the actual account of Hanna Reitsch even more ridiculous, and all of it — the history-jarring mis-hear, the ornate endnote, the bemused retelling by an eighty-three-year-old emigrant Czech writer seated in a well-appointed North American living room teeming with polyglot books and old jazz photographs — of a piece with the experience of reading and talking to Škvorecký, with encountering his grandly tragicomic insatiability for telling stories of the world in its every glory.

Born in 1924, in the provincial town of Náchod, Škvorecký began writing fiction in the late 1940s and translating American authors and writing criticism shortly thereafter. While his books were appearing in France, it wasn’t until 1958 that one of his novels was published at home. The Cowards recounts the experiences of Škvorecký’s alter ego, the earthy, jazz-playing, and woman-loving intellectual Danny Smiricky, of living in a Czech village through a jagged shard of historical time: the war was ending, the Germans retreating just as the Soviets were advancing.

Upon its publication, the book was lauded and subsequently banned — it was deemed insufficiently heroic in its representation of Czechoslovakia’s Soviet-aided escape from Nazism. The novel’s editors and publisher were fired, and Škvorecký lost his editorial position at a literary journal and did not publish fiction under his own name for five years. Situations such as Škvorecký’s attested to the starkly different reality for writers working on the far side of the Iron Curtain, as Philip Roth once observed: “The difference was in freedom, and the differences from my point of view were almost comically vivid: in my situation, everything goes and nothing matters; in their situation, nothing goes and everything matters.”

Škvorecký came to Canada in January 1969 with his wife, the singer, actress, and writer Zdena Salivarová, among the 80,000 Czechs who left Czechoslovakia after the August 1968 Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring. He went on to be both a witness and a maker of Cold War cultural history: in 1971, he and Salivarova co-founded Sixty-Eight Publishers, which began to issue, from Toronto, works by such state-banned Czech writers as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, and Škvorecký himself. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that his first translated novel was published in Canada. By that point, thanks to Sixty-Eight’s efforts, the appearance of his novels across Europe, and his commentary on Czech culture and literature for Voice of America, he had become an internationally prominent literary figure.

Comparable acclaim in Canada came when he was awarded the 1984 Governor General’s Award for his epic The Engineer of Human Souls (originally published in 1977). If ever there was a book that testified to the greatness of mind and heart at play in Škvorecký’s work, to the notion that the novel’s efforts at embodying the world in story should be “baroquely complex, and therefore truthful and precise,” it could well be The Engineer. It’s also a prime candidate for the great Canadian novel:

I am in bliss. At the Jarvis Street exit, the three-lane column of cars separates smoothly into two, one of them continuing along the Gardiner Expressway, the other, with me in it, no less smoothly descending the curving ramp and passing through the green light. My eye is caught by an immaculately luminescent billboard for “Breggfast” with a freckled turnip-faced brat stuffing himself with eggs done sunny side up. On an impulse I decide to consummate my feeling of well-being with supper at the Benes Inn, where they cook the best sauerbraten north of the United States border. So I turn onto Richmond and from there unto University Avenue. A few blocks later I stop for a red light, and a group of young Chinese girls in knitted woolen caps, obviously medical students, cross the street in front of me. They have faces like oriental dolls. The green light comes on. A black medical student hurries across after the Chinese and, dazzled by the headlights, she blinks the huge whites of her eyes at me. I feel as though I’m in Paradise. I am in Paradise. Nothing can unsettle me. I don’t remember ever experiencing such an evening back home. I think of Father, who also loved sauerbraten, and poor Nadia, how she would stuff herself. Had they amputated his leg, God knows how Father might have ended up. With one leg missing, Neuthaler, the judge, might simply have considered him the banal victim of an everyday car accident and Father might have gone straight to Belsen. But our absurd God plays beneficial tricks on us.

Canada as bliss, as paradise, the paradise of plentiful food and orderly traffic, of intersections and intersections: bemusement at the ease of watching hurrying pedestrians gives way to wistful, searching recollection. But more: Škvorecký, like Saul Bellow, is given to sudden reaches for higher meanings, as at the end of this passage, where an aphoristic sentence about divine intervention is all the more striking for proceeding from the dark, speculative memory of a father nearly going to the Belsen concentration camp.

Trying to summarize the storyline of this novel would be like trying to imitate a jazz orchestra with spoons. Škvorecký’s own subtitle for the book attests to its sprawling multiplicity: “an entertainment on the old themes of life, women, fate, dreams, the working class, secret agents, love and death.” It’s also a very funny campus novel, an immigrant novel, a cosmopolitan novel of ideas, and a novel shamelessly in love with its literary predecessors, whose names — Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, and Conrad, among others — provide chapter headings and motifs. Narrating again from the centre of this grand swirl is Danny Smiricky. Writer, English professor, young lover, and lover of young women, cool jazzman, clumsy saboteur of Nazi airplanes, and Cold War exile, Danny in effect tries to tell the fullest possible story of self and world out of forty years of private life and political-historical experience. In moving from boyhood to girl-mad adolescence in a small Czech town, and from there to ambivalent middle age in Toronto, from war-wracked Europe to Cold War Europe to multicultural Canada, the novel plays across endless scales of dissonant experience.