Singing the European Blues

Josef Škvorecký is a prolific writer, but there is no doubt that his major body of work is contained in the seven semi-autobiographical novels he wrote during the past 60 years. The Cowards, dealing with the end of the Second World War and written during the early years of the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, was the first; Ordinary Lives, a remains-of-the-day elegy looking back at a disastrous century, is the most recent and doubtless the last. Like several of its predecessors, Ordinary Lives has been sensitively translated by Paul Wilson, whose several collaborations with Škvorecký constitute a significant contribution to our literary culture.

Roughly chronological, the self-contained volumes in the series encompass the history of his nation from the 1920s (Škvorecký was born in 1924) to the years after the Velvet Revolution. If we add Dvorak in Love (1986) and The Bride of Texas (1995), his novel about Czechs in the American Civil War, we have a body of work that engages a century and a half in the life of a people. It may not be a unique accomplishment—Gore Vidal and Hugh Hood have done something similar—but it is nevertheless an impressive act of what might be called national proprietorship: a national epic in a postmodern era that claims not to believe in epics.

Škvorecký’s focus throughout the sequence has been on the lives of ordinary people who find themselves prevented by extraordinary historical forces—call them Hitler, Stalin, Gottwald—from having the mundane lives they (and we) desire. The books written before his arrival in North America emphasize the tragicomic absurdity of everyday life under Fascism and Communism. Politics, understandably, is dealt with obliquely, even in code. What is impressive, however, is how rarely the reader has the impression that Škvorecký has conceded anything to the censor. In Prague, Škvorecký’s alter ego, Danny Smiricky, is a bachelor and a moderately successful dramatist more interested in women and friends than in the political events beyond his control; he is a perceptive and compassionate observer and an ironic flâneur. Two of the books from this period, The Cowards and The Bass Saxophone (1963), are among the author’s finest.

The novels written after the author’s exile show a darkening of the fictional palette. Writing in Canada, Škvorecký deals more explicitly with historical events such as the rigged trials of the early 1950s, persecutions of various groups and the 1968 invasion. Although Danny remains as detached and skeptical as ever, the two great novels of the 1970s, The Miracle Game (1972) and The Engineer of Human Souls (1977) bring to mind Faulkner’s comment that “there is a dimension of mission in the writer’s vocation.”

Another way of putting this would be to recall François Truffaut’s not altogether facetious suggestion that World War Two was a struggle for the soul of Europe between Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin. The novels now show an exiled writer trying to preserve in fiction what Solzhenitsyn calls in his Nobel Prize speech “the living memory of a nation … a spent history … safe from deformation and slander.” I would make the same point about the work in exile of Czesław Miłosz and Solzhenitsyn himself. This is writing that both engages us in a variety of complex ways and intervenes in contemporary history. After 1968, Škvorecký’s fiction looks in two directions—East in Czech and West in translation. His canvas is no longer just his homeland. The novels now move back and forth among countries and different eras. As the scope of his vision expands, his style and form become more venturesome, even experimental, though his transitions between scenes and the intricacies of his plots are as subtle and smooth as the montage in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Škvorecký’s ever-present undogmatic Christian humanism, grounded in charity and forgiveness, begins to be felt more strongly.

The series was put on hold after The Engineer of Human Souls, the first translated novel to win the Governor General’s award for fiction in English. Although Škvorecký was as prolific as ever during the 1970s and ’80s, I have the impression that he did not have anything new to say either about Smiricky or the situation in Czechoslovakia which, under Gustáv Husák, seemed frozen in time.

Then came the miracle of 1989. Like Milan Kundera, Škvorecký took his time writing the novel of return. His first effort was Two Murders in My Double Life (1999), a complex and intriguing thriller mixing fact and fiction, but it was not part of the Smiricky cycle. Only in 2004 did he finally publish in Prague the conclusion to the ambitious series that is his masterpiece and will be his monument. Ordinary Lives (Obyejne zivoty) is a compelling group portrait of a generation whose lives were poisoned by the mustached man with the pockmarked face and his followers. The novel is structured around two class reunions in Kostelec, a small town on the Polish border. The first is held in 1963, the second 30 years later. The characters—the ironic ordinary lives of the title—graduated in 1943 and, as one would expect, there are more ghosts at the second reunion than the first. The mood in 1963 is grim as the former classmates divide into those who have been party members (complicit in the party’s crimes) and those who have not and have suffered as a result. Although the 20 or so characters are clearly individuated in speech and appearance, they also represent the different kinds of “ordinary lives” that people lived during the years covered by the fiction.

By 1993 the political situation has changed, but the mood is, if anything, even more morose as the sad remnant of a betrayed generation looks back on lives of remorse and quiet despair while anticipating illness and death. As Smiricky remarks, “We were all old folks.” To ask either How have you been? or How are you? is to risk hearing a litany of different kinds of public and private suffering. They are at an age when it is hazardous either to look back or forward. All would agree with Faulkner that in some cases “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The novel is written in what might be called Škvorecký’s late style—a minimum of description, laconic dialogue, more implied than explained, and a narrator almost as neutral as a camera. Several of the scenes and even some of the lines are taken from earlier volumes in the series as if the author— like Proust in Le Temps retrouvé—is reinforcing continuities and unobtrusively weaving the separate volumes into a single tapestry. Continuity in Ordinary Lives is established by simple juxtapositions of thematically or dramatically related scenes, and the character-driven plot develops inconspicuously and incrementally on the basis of the several subplots that are the characters’ lives.

Alhough he observes everything, Smiricky has been away too long—“you can’t go home again”— to judge his classmates. He leaves that up to the reader and to God. The paternoster, which aptly ends the series on a note of mystery, suggests that this particular dark night of the Czech national soul is over.