Josef Škvorecký's canon is characterized by a spiritual bond with American culture which, since his youth, has played a major part in his professional and artistic development. His personal fate granted him an experience of the greatest importance for a writer, namely life on two continents and complete familiarity with two cultures. The basic feature of his novels is precisely his ability to let various perspectives confront one another, thus creating the entertaining, realistic surface of his work. From The Cowards to The Bride of Texas, this surface has become increasingly transparent, thus revealing more and more of the depths below. Each single realistic episode has become part of a multileveled mosaic that expresses the complexities of reality and perceives life like a Schopenhauerian tragedy where individual details have the character of farces. This is certainly evident in Škvorecký's recent novel, The Bride of Texas, which is more historical and more dominated by Americans than any of his other fiction. Yet Bride is, in the end, a natural continuation of some abiding features of Škvorecký's artistic development.

One of Škvorecký's first completed and published stories, “The Babylonian Event” (1946), is about the meeting of a Czech girl with a soldier from the United States Army. The possibility of their mutual verbal contact is restricted to a few words in English and German. Their communication reminds us of some episodes from The Bride of Texas. The short story is interesting because it reveals Škvorecký's inherently perfect ear for spoken language. Important parts of the story are the dialogue passages in which language is revealed as a source of misunderstanding rather than communication. In fact, the characters' communications are mostly nonverbal. Unlike the reader, neither the girl nor the soldier has the faintest idea about the world of the other, and their imaginings are resolutely dismantled as entirely wrong. Also Škvorecký ironically undermines the stereotyped biases about Americans, for the soldier is an intellectual interested in cultural artifacts, while the girl tries to move their encounter in a direction that—according to all stereotypes—should please her partner:

The stairs were steep. They walked behind each other. The American watched the girl's legs. Europe is full of beautiful things, he thought. Beautiful ones and destroyed ones. He looked at the girl's slim calves. Such legs, the steeple of a cathedral, a secession café, the face of a cat, a flying sea gull with its little legs pressing to its body under the arch of a medieval bridge, a hunter's bloodhound concentrated on the black point of its nose, running along the track of a wounded fox. Europe. And fair hair that glistens with the gold of valueless human curls. He remembered his wife's hair.

And within him suddenly the images of these two different female fates merged, the fates of all those people whom he had met during the last two years, in England, in France, in occupied Germany, the fates of all those people in this terrible unique world, fates welded together by this silent terrible country. It seemed to him that he was still hearing the noise of moving tanks, and the weight of the battle almost smothered his throat when they arrived on the gallery of the tower that was surrounded by the blood-red Western sky, enflamed, as it were, by the endless conflagration of the war.

In Škvorecký's first novel, The Cowards, with its often-noted spiritual and artistic affinity to such famous American works as Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, dialogue is again an important tool for the examination of problematic communication. Škvorecký's distinctly autobiographical novel reflects the author's abiding love for jazz and attraction to American culture. In fact, while writing The Cowards, Škvorecký was studying English, completing his doctorate in 1951 with a dissertation on Thomas Paine.

Sam Solecki convincingly argues that the strong orientation of The Cowards toward America was one of the reasons the political powers reacted so strongly against the book as well as its author:

In the debate which has its roots in the nineteenth century and continues today in Škvorecký's and Kundera's essays over whether Czechoslovakia is an East or a West European country and whether it should look East or West for its cultural models, The Cowards turns emphatically West. Danny's predisposition or bias is indicated when he is shown often perceiving and judging in words and images drawn from American literature and movies. These references and allusions, together with the occasionally Hemingwayesque style and the numerous titles of jazz numbers, are among the constitutive elements of Škvorecký's style and in themselves embody and express both Danny's and Škvorecký's essential attitudes and values.¹

Already in The Cowards there occurs an obvious confrontation of both levels. In the mind of the Czech reader the programmed and provocative nonheroic stance of Danny Smiricky, the novel's first-person narrator, is bound to clash with the ideologically supported myths about the rebellion against the Nazis and the liberation by the Russian Army. As Milan Kundera succinctly states, Škvorecký at the time committed a deadly sin when he wrote from an apolitical perspective about taboo political themes. The counterpoint of this comic perspective is the history of the Second World War and the author's protest against a time that dehumanizes the individual by changing him into a symbol.

Central to the protest is Danny's devotion to jazz, which anticipates the music's central importance in the novella The Bass Saxophone, about which Graham Greene wrote: “To my mind Josef Škvorecký is one of the finest living writers. His two short novels The Bass Saxophone and The Legend of Emöke I put in the same rank as James Joyce's The Dead and the very best of James's shorter novels.”² For the narrator of The Bass Saxophone, jazz also provides the opportunity to escape the oppressing realities of the Second World War, reflecting Škvorecký's fear of pomposity through the novella's lyrical declaration of love for jazz specifically when confronted by a reality that could have emerged from a Hieronymus Bosch picture. Obviously, it is not by accident that the Czech theme of The Cowards is presented in a Hemingwayesque style while the tribute to jazz is written in a Central European, expressionist and existentialist tone:

but there is a memento—an intimate, truthful moment God knows where, God knows when, and because of it I shall always be on the move with Lothar Kinze's orchestra, a sad musician on the mournful routes of Europe's periphery, surrounded by storm clouds; and the somber bass saxophone player, the adrian rollini, will time and again remind me of dream, truth, incomprehensibility: the memento of the bass saxophone.³

One can therefore claim that even before his departure from Czechoslovakia in 1968, American culture was a predominant part of Škvorecký's spiritual world and was integrated into his professional world as a writer. During the 1950s and 1960s, especially when he was not allowed to publish, Škvorecký spent much time translating and writing about American literature. Indeed, between 1959 and 1969 his numerous academic publications included translations and studies of Ray Bradbury, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and William Styron. In the sixties he edited Lewis's selected writings as well as Hemingway's collected works. Igor Hájek draws attention to this valuable aspect of Škvorecký's career: “It was here that Škvorecký earned a repute when in his multiple role of editor, critic, essayist and translator he almost singlehandedly rehabilitated modern American literature, until then represented mostly by Howard Fast.”⁴ Škvorecký himself has stated that during his stay in Czechoslovakia he was occupied mostly with American literature. In contrast, after moving to Canada, he turned to Czech literature; for instance, his first work published there is a history of the Czech film during the sixties.⁵ At the same time, in his regular programs for the Voice of America, he closely followed and continued to introduce contemporary American literature to the Czech reader.

In Canada, during the seventies, beginning with The Miracle Game, Škvorecký began to develop a personal style that characterizes all his later novels. Škvorecký himself characterized it in his Samozerbuvh as the separation of various thematic topics into small episodes, which he then merged into one whole. This resulted in an almost surrealistic composition. In The Miracle Game and The Engineer of Human Souls this form expresses, through the eyes of the narrator, the chaos of the modern world. In Dvorak in Love the composer's stay in North America and the secret of his genius are illuminated through the viewpoint of the various narrators, who, though close to Dvorak, often contradict each other. The author deliberately stresses the fact that each testimony is fragmentary and partial: the fleeting light of truth can be perceived only at the points where the varied perspectives intersect—especially those tied to Dvorak's music. This more fragmented form, however, still relies heavily on the interplay among the author's direct voice, dialogue, and narration marking his earlier works. And, again, his language is a vehicle for expressing the difficulties of communication between people from various linguistic areas.

The author thus places an extraordinarily demanding task not only on the reader but on the translator. He and Bohumil Hrabal belong to those contemporary Czech prose writers who are considered by many as untranslatable. Yet Škvorecký has found in Paul Wilson a translator who performs this difficult task admirably, even if some levels of speech naturally remain inaccessible to the English-speaking reader. This was probably the reason why some Canadian critics considered The Engineer of Human Souls excessively long.

From this novel onward, the confrontation of various narrative perspectives also becomes a confrontation between the Czech or Central European perspective and that of the United States or Canada. The author is obviously aware of the demands that such a method makes on the reader. Therefore he seeks particular points of contact with the reader's associative abilities: in The Engineer of Human Souls he dedicates each chapter to an American author (Conrad being the exception) whose works thus form a context for the North American reader and act as counterweight to the Czech perspective of Professor Smiricky in his discussions with his students. In Dvorak in Love Škvorecký achieves a variety of comic effects by presenting American reality as seen through Czech eyes and vice versa. And in The Bride of Texas Škvorecký counts on the American readers' knowledge of history. He counterpoints the tragic events of the American Civil War against the kaleidoscope of minute, often comical details and always entertaining individualized anecdotal episodes.

As Škvorecký portrays Czech immigrants participating in the Civil War, he also confronts Czech history by having characters repeatedly reminisce and tell tales that scoop certain events from the flow of time: life in Austria-Hungary, the beginnings of Bach's absolutism, the hard life of Czech cottagers. The narrator even leads the reader to the current century and the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic. To make the fragmented structure even more complex, the war, with its historical and political turning points, is described from two perspectives: from below by the Czech volunteers, particularly and most expressively those of platoon commander Kapsa and Jan Amos Schweik (in America Shake), and from above by the generals after platoon commander Kapsa joins the staff of General Sherman. The view from above is also sustained in four individual chapters, the Writer's Intermezzos. This writer, a close friend of General Ambrose Burnside, closely follows and comments upon events occurring in the background of military and political life.

The novel is also challenging because Škvorecký portrays the simultaneous awareness of immigrants whose past in Europe is shared in the new reality of America by only a handful of their fellow Czechs. For Cyril, Sergeant Kapsa, Ursula, Shake, and others, the past emerges gradually through evocations, the memories of the old world that they have carried into their new lives. For instance, their memories of the little hearts and doves of Moravian folklore are suddenly Americanized when connected with the image of a bison—an association symbolizing the mixture of cultural influences on the immigrants. Such influences invariably lend color and humor to the narrative.

These passages, however, almost inevitably have their tragic counterpoint. Among the best parts of the book is the fourth chapter where scenes about the founding of the Lincoln Slavonic Rifles are interspersed with realistic scenes describing the battle at Bentonville. This is also why the only completely fictional character among the volunteers is called Jan Amos Schweik/Shake. The war is frequently commented on by gossip at the campfire, and Schweik is a good story teller. Like The Good Soldier S̆vejk, The Bride of Texas is a novel where the tragic details of war have the character of a farce. But here the similarity ends: S̆vejk is a novel about the absurdity of war; The Bride of Texas tries artistically to come to terms with an important chapter in American history.

Obviously, it is the author's conscious or unconscious aim to represent American themes in a form inspired by Czech and Central European literature that seeks to capture a flash of the truth about life at a point where two opposite poles intersect. For instance, the associations of the name Jan Amos Schweik/Shake bear witness to this, for it is a composite of two well-known very different Czech cultural figures. Jan Amos Komenský, better known as Comenius, is probably the most famous Czech exile of all time, whose contribution to world culture is familiar to all generations of Czech readers. On the other hand, Has̆ek's S̆vejk—despite various popular misleading interpretations—remains an enigmatic figure: the reader knows nothing about his past or his psyche. His stories do not tell anything about him personally but explore the encounter of an individual with war. In contrast the reader learns more about Škvorecký's creation, Jan Amos Schweik/Shake: specifically, that he left the seminary where he was studying to become a priest, and that the experience of the horrors of war has shaken his belief in God. Moreover, Škvorecký gradually undercuts Schweik's image as merely a folksy storyteller, since his stories, together with those of the other Czech volunteers, give the war a human dimension. The English translation of the name Schweik into Shake—again comprehensible to international readership—suggests the shook up, surrealistic kaleidoscope of narrative structure that Škvorecký uses to express reality as an incomprehensible multilevel mixture of opposite viewpoints.

Besides being a novel about the absurdity of war, The Bride of Texas is also a love story. The novel, in fact, begins during the last year of the Civil War with the wedding of a Moravian-American girl, Lida Toupelikova, to an American officer, Baxter Warren II. Škvorecký has borrowed the core of Lida's experiences from a story by the Czech correspondent Josef Bunata, as she becomes in America “wife Linda, formerly de Ribordeaux, born Toupelik from Lhota, Moravia, Austria, Europe.”

In Škvorecký's hands Linda's story raises the question of whether Škvorecký—again consciously or unconsciously—may have used it in order to draw attention to another perspective. Gone with the Wind has sometimes been considered a novel about American history; actually it is a soap opera love story which, with its celebration of the Confederate cause, is the very antipode of Škvorecký's perception. By borrowing part of his plot (the love story) from Bunata's undeniably kitschy model and integrating it into an organic whole, Škvorecký creates remarkable subtexts in The Bride of Texas. For example, Linda's happy destiny finds its counterpoint in the fate of Dinah—a slave girl and mistress of Mr. de Ribordeaux—who disappears without a trace in the chaos of the war. For Linda, Cyril, and the majority of Czech immigrants, America is the land of freedom, where the present secretly harbors the possibility of a promising future. Dinah's fate, on the other hand, is inescapably tragic. Its poetic subtext harkens back to Škvorecký's earlier novella Emöke. The Bride's postscript, a list of the secondary literature he used in the novel, bears witness that Škvorecký studied a great number of sources. The majority of the characters are based on historical models, which possibly explains why the reader sometimes has the impression that less devotion to these models would have resulted in a better fiction. Whenever he reports on historical facts, his style tends to get disproportionately wordy and overloaded. Luckily there are only a few of these instances (a notable one occurs when the daughter and later the granddaughter read to Kapsa accounts of the battles in which he had taken part). In contrast, whenever his power of imagination has free play, Škvorecký's genius for spontaneous storytelling allows him to bring alive the world of America in the last century. The reader, then, admires Škvorecký's ability to breathe life into a situation through minute detail, scraps of dialogue, sharp climactic sketches, and comically exaggerated caricatures.

Škvorecký sees “modern man's turning away from abstraction, from purely verbal solutions, from pretended absolute knowledge and terms, towards concrete facts.”⁶ Thus he leaves it up to the reader to search for the deeper sense of these facts. As in Dvorak in Love, the events of The Bride of Texas are merely fragments of a deeper, more general theme. Dvorak was a lyrical tribute to genius and to the beauty of an art that penetrates beyond the narrow borders of states. It celebrates how Czech culture belongs to the Western world. The Bride of Texas is a tribute to freedom and democracy, a tribute to America: to all those unknown little people who were driven from their homeland by evil economic or political forces; to those who had enough strength to begin again in the New World where they found a better future. In the process it is a tribute to the openness of America with its mixture of various cultural, national, and linguistic traditions.

Consequently, the war of the South against the North is, to Škvorecký, a struggle for the process of democracy. The defeat of the Union would have been, according to him, a defeat of the nineteenth century, for it probably would also have been decisive in the development of Europe. One of the novel's characters puts it this way:

If the war had turned out differently, the old country wouldn't be the American republic it had turned out to be—a dream that had never crossed his mind on that slow sail across the Atlantic, with the wily Fircut, to where a war awaited him and then a long life. Would the expeditionary forces of some Northern States of America have fought in the war that happened much later in Europe? If they had, would the Confederate States of America have sent proud descendants of the victors of '65 to bolster the other side, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy? Even in the new century, officers battling on the side of the imperial armies would have been accompanied by black servants. If his general had lost.⁷

The author himself adds in his postscript to the Czeck edition of the novel:

Despite the fact that it was an army of civilians and therefore around the campfires there blossomed self-depreciating and often more than crude black humor, despite the fact that American ex-servicemen, in contrast with European veterans, did not boast with serious expressions about heroic deeds but rather with an insidious smile about their cowardice, I cannot but give them my sincere admiration. Of course I like America but I do not think I exaggerate.⁸

Škvorecký's profound familiarity with Czech as well as American literature, with culture as well as history has been enriched since 1968 by his experience of life on two continents and has been the inspirational source and the spiritual background of his writings. His talent for capturing a slice of reality with small, realistic details and for entertaining the reader with successions of comic episodes, reveals his aversion toward abstractions and ideological generalizations. Škvorecký counts on his audience's associative abilities, life experiences, and knowledge of history to help them find the key for understanding this complex novel's subtexts. It is not surprising, then, that after the novels inspired by his own experience, he has now turned to themes relating to values that have always been a part of his spiritual world—paying tribute to freedom and to the American democracy which provides it with living space. It is also logical that Škvorecký does this by means of characters who are not romantically heroic. The Bride of Texas is the result of the symbiosis of American and Central European literary traditions in Škvorecký's work.

Notes

1. Sam Solecki, Prague Blues: The Fiction of Josef Škvorecký (Toronto: ECW Press, 1990), 45.

2. Graham Greene, “Greeting to the Laureate,” World Literature Today, Autumn 1980, 524.

3. Josef Škvorecký, The Bass Saxophone (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994), 209.

4. Igor Hájek, “Editor, Translator, Critic,” World Literature Today, Autumn 1980, 574.

5. Josef Škvorecký, All the Bright Young Men and Women: A Personal History of the Czech Cinema, trans. Michael Schonberg (Toronto: Perter Martin, 1971).

6. Josef Škvorecký, The Bride of Texas, trans. Kaca Polackova Henley (New York: Knopf, 1996), 243.

7. The Bride of Texas, 283–84.

8. Neves̆ta z Tezasu (Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1992), 616.