First loves don't just fade away. They usually outlive the significance of the initial object of desire by turning desire into an end in itself. Nostalgia, that passion of memory, proves most powerful when it attaches to an experience of adolescence, as in the case of Josef Škvorecký's infatuation with America. He was sixteen, just like Danny Smiricky in The Cowards (1958), playing tenor saxophone in a jazz band camouflaged as a regular dance orchestra. In Kostelec/Náchod and everywhere else in Nazi-occupied Bohemia, jazz had been outlawed as a racially tainted, debased form of music. But for Danny and his friends, it is the sweet and reckless voice of American freedom, so loose and intimately casual, at hand and still alluring with an endless erotic prospect. Adolescent love in its desperate intensity often mimics some arcane flirtation with death. But Danny's jazz playing was star-crossed by history, which makes the danger real.

The Danny Smiricky persona, entangling a boy's sexual desire with jazz and the fantastic adventure of American freedom, accompanies Škvorecký's literary career from his brilliant debut in The Cowards through other fictions, notably The Miracle Game (1972) and The Swell Season (1975). It reappears one last time in the ambitious, partly retrospective The Engineer of Human Souls (1977), where the narrator is a middle-aged Czech novelist in exile, making his living as a professor of American literature at the University of Toronto.

Danny's fictional existence hangs on the device of the first-person narrative, originally cast in the form of a diary that records a voice caught in the quick of adolescent subjectivity. I remember my first reading of The Cowards shortly after the Czech text had been published in Prague and the stunning effect of Danny's voice on me. His speech felt intensely alive and unrehearsed, and yet I knew that no living Czech could have spoken like that, surely not in Náchod in the last days of the war. It had a throwaway, sexy precision of phrasing, as in jazz, improvising a distinctly American illusion of beauty.

“You spend your life saying the same things over and over again in different ways,” says Škvorecký, borrowing the words of his friend Milos Forman for the epigraph to The Swell Season. This admission applies to the spell America has cast on Škvorecký's fictional world. The magic stuff of Danny's inexperience turns into an object of nostalgia for the aging novelist in exile, whose imagination mixes memory with desire as it cuts back and forth between accumulating patinas of time—America never losing its intrinsic significance for Škvorecký. His passionate engagement with American culture has survived the test of sustained exposure to its realities and grown stronger with years of studying and teaching it. What emerges is a mythopoetic conception of an America identified with the unfinished agenda of human freedom, a value conceived as a quasi-spiritual need to express the potential of the individual self somewhere beyond the given here and now.

As a regular contributor to the Czech section of the Voice of America, Škvorecký reviewed the American cultural scene with scholarly competence and a sharp eye for provocative issues. In October 1989 he went on the air with a gloss on the old Negro spiritual “Oh Freedom!,” a song that originated in 1863, apparently in response to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. With the urgency of pent-up hope, just a month short of the magic moment when the velvet curtain would open on a new Prague, Škvorecký reflected on the various interpretations of the concept of freedom. He pointed out that in the Hegelian formula, prevailing in Marxist thought, freedom is defined as a necessity understood in the grasp of human consciousness. The sublime paradoxicality of identifying the oppressive experience of nonfreedom with its opposite offers the possibility of a mind at play, delighting in its capacity to negate a body mired in the contingencies of material existence. Such mystical cunning once bedeviled the radical Belinsky into a brief reconciliation with the reality of Nicholaevite Russia, a lapse of common sense for which he would apologize. In more heroic terms the paradox of freedom hexed out of a perceived necessity provides the spine for the contemplative regimen that brought an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to the same school bench with the slave, Epictetus, in the age of a declining empire. Škvorecký, broadcasting to the Czechs over a collapsed Berlin Wall, rejects the Hegelian definition of freedom as minimalistic, holding instead to the American notion that all human beings, not just those who can think philosophically, aspire to live freely. He concludes that freedom is the only human necessity.

In 1969, after a disastrous turn in Czech history, Škvorecký traveled across the United States. This would be his last American trip as a Czech citizen. When he returned, he was a writer in exile, an immigrant ready to settle down in North America, leaving behind, among other things, an interrupted series of newspaper feuilletons. This imaginative reporting on America in the throes of the Vietnam War would wait until 1980 to see publication as a book he called a “tall tale” about America. In Czech the title Velká povídka o Americe figures as an original coinage, a deliberately literal translation from English, suggesting something with the magnitude of myth which may, however, be nothing more than a tall tale or a barefaced lie.

In these feuilletons, as he crosses the continent with his wife in an old Pontiac, the Czech novelist and reader of Mark Twain picks up on all the larger-than-life manifestations of American popular culture playing itself out in a year of bared souls and bodies. Škvorecký responds with visceral sympathy, from the occupation of Willard Straight Hall by the black radicals of Cornell, through Mormon land, to the battle for People's Park in Berkeley. At the same time, his distinctly Czech humor, a reflex of his people's stubborn determination not to be taken in, cannot resist the easy targets of American consumerism in the age of excess when moral rhetoric and material wastefulness run equally high. But unlike so many European observers, he is rarely judgmental. Of course, the cruel violence of American life in the shadow of Vietnam does not escape him. Yet he refuses to adjudicate the loud quarrel within the conscience of the young counterculture: between those who spell America with a k and those who hope to rouse its better angels by carrying flowers into the angry streets. Because he looks at the American scene through a lens filtered through the indelible image of Russian tanks in Prague, he cannot share the young Americans' desperate disillusionment with their country, which he calls “The great child of history.” Rather his celebratory impulse finds release in delighting at the prodigious inventiveness of American verbal humor. The serious implications of what he is witnessing, that thrashing of moral imperatives inside the crucible of constitutional rights suddenly grown derisory, would have to wait for much later to be duly considered by him.

Specifically, the problematics of American freedom form the ideational core of The Bride of Texas. Written between 1984 and 1991, it represents seven years of creative labor backed by extensive research. It is the story of Czech immigrants in America experiencing the complex process of acculturation through the ordeal of the Civil War. The action unfolds exclusively on American soil, with selective incidents from the old country relegated to flashbacks or occasional storytelling.

The historical axis of the novel runs through the return leg of Sherman's March to the Sea, moving north from the conquered Savannah through the Carolinas to Bentonville, where the Northern army countered Johnston's attack but, refusing to engage in a major battle, pushed farther north to join Grant against Lee in Virginia. We are on the Union side with the Czech contingent of the Twenty-Sixth Wisconsin Regiment for seven weeks of a strenuous campaign. Škvorecký's eloquent description of the smell of the burning turpentine woods in North Carolina reminds the reader of the human cost and the excruciatingly delayed promise of final victory.

The Bride of Texas consists of five long chapters of war action anchored in third-person narrative, alternating with four intermezzos narrated by a woman. In the “male” chapters the blood and bravado of the seemingly endless combat is relieved by an equally continuous flow of storytelling around campfires, where comic invention gives chase to the pathos of war. The capillaries of myriad plot lines, tangling retrospect with prospect in a narrative manner that commingles fact with fable, deliver the personal histories of a dozen or so Czech and Moravian newcomers into the epic stream of the war.

The first-person narrative may be Škvorecký's natural element, but his uncanny ability to create the illusion of overheard speech triumphs in all forms of skaz. He explains in his postscript that he had no way of knowing how his Czech soldiers actually spoke. In the nineteenth century the distinction between spoken and written Czech was a rigid linguistic convention. People wrote down conversations not as they heard them, but as they thought they should have been spoken. Thus in the absence of reliable models Škvorecký is free to improvise a lived-in, individual Czech or Moravian idiom for each of his characters, an illusion of a real speech breathing through the flow of verbal situations.

The process of acculturation to America is one that involves both loss and gain. In linguistic terms this can amount to such hybrid idioms as the contemporary American-Czech-speak Škvorecký has recorded with his comic pitch, thus provoking ire among his fellow émigrés. In this novel the young men who confabulate by campfires sometimes have to plumb their memories for the missing Czech word or substitute an Americanism when nothing else fits. The effect is more poignant than comic, reminding us that the stories are now merging with the mythical land in which countless newcomers are dying.

Among all the storytellers, the virtuoso voice belongs to Jan Amos Shake, the only one of the Czech Union soldiers who is not based on a documented historical figure. The man's real family name remains in doubt, but in Chicago Marenka Kakus calls him Mr. Schweik, in an anachronistic giveaway that decodes the personage as the paradoxical composite of the historical ambivalence of the Czech national character. Like Comenius, the seventeenth-century philosopher whose baptismal names he bears, Shake has heard the call of a religious vocation and then left his native country to escape persecution. He admits to being a half-baked, defrocked priest who absconded from the seminary because of a love affair with the beautiful daughter of a Prague rabbi. But since he is also a master of the comic lie and a bona fide rogue, we cannot swear to anything he says about his past. On one point he stands quite firm. He may have entered the battle for the freedom of black slaves wearing a metal chest plate under his uniform, but he is not a deserter nor a subversive. Like Škvorecký, this experimental American has a personal investment in large ideas as well as strong convictions about the issues at stake in this war.

In spite of the massive research for the novel, which took him from the private archives of the Czechs in Chicago to those of the U.S. Military History Institute near Gettysburg, Škvorecký denies that he is writing history. He insists on being a fiction writer poaching on the preserves charted out by professional historians. Thus he takes liberties with his sources. He has gathered all his Czech Union soldiers into the Twenty-Sixth Wisconsin Regiment, whereas in reality they were scattered among several units. But he vouches for the authenticity of several details that may strike the reader as fantastic. As in the novel, Breta, a black Union soldier, did speak some Czech, and some Chicago Czech immigrants did indeed petition the Austrian Consulate for the restoration of their Austrian passports out of fear of being drafted. Škvorecký makes effective use of this last incident as part of a satire on the Czech national characteristic to cop out of history, the flip side of its abiding skepticism about governments. This trait comes alive in a vignette showing how the good new citizens, who volunteered in droves to parade in red zouave pants under the banner of the Lincoln Slavonic Rifles, are instantly deflated by the first bugle call. The few Czechs who stand their ground fight under the command of the Hungarian Slovak, Geza Michaloczi, equipped through the bounty of the Bohemian Jew, Pan Ohrenzug.

Škvorecký's approach to history proceeds from the same mind-set as Tolstoy's, who used family memoirs and the reminiscences of ordinary people to correct the optical illusions of leaders and historians viewing war through binoculars. Yet he too understands military strategy and excels at reconstructing the topography, not just the sounds and smells of a battlefield. So he places an observer close to Sherman's command. He is Sergeant Kapsa, a professional soldier who had deserted from the Austrian army when a love affair took a tragic turn.

Škvorecký's American novel is thus rooted in a gesture of piety. His great uncle had fought for the Union, but his name is missing from the archives, obliterated by translation, from Škvorecký to Earwigan or perhaps by distortion to Square. But unlike Tolstoy, who resurrected his parents as central characters in War and Peace, Škvorecký leaves his elusive uncle to a postscript. Instead Škvorecký resurrects and emphasizes a forgotten Czech-American writer by using his fictions as a source for the romance at the heart of The Bride of Texas. Josef Bunata (1846–1934), editor and journalist, recorded the Czech experience in both journalism and fiction, while supplementing his meager income by rolling cigars. A free thinker and utopian socialist, he eventually converted to the values of American democracy during the New Deal. Škvorecký's postscript reveals a lively sympathy for this confrere, whose idealistic effort went to nought when his audience melted away in the proverbial American pot. By recalling a lowbrow storyteller like Bunata, Škvorecký once more shows his fondness for popular genres.

The conflicting claims of high and low literature are also a personal dilemma for the woman who tells her own story in the first person within this larger story of the men at war. She is Lorraine Tracy, a fiery New England abolitionist married to a professor who holds out Thackerey as the norm of novelistic respectability. Driven under cover, Lorraine writes her successful novels using the pseudonym of Laura Lee. They are romances based on the timeworn formula of love's triumph: a race to the altar by an intrepid heroine through a Victorian obstacle course. Lorraine, a disciple of Margaret Fuller, reveals her incipient feminism by making her heroines always more clever than the inevitably handsome men whom they are pursuing. This is Lorraine's literary signature.

Although Škvorecký is anything but politically correct, he has given some thought to the questions raised by feminist criticism. In reviewing Leslie Fiedler's What Was Literature? for the Voice of America, he used gender as a key to reconsider Poe's paradoxical division of literature into the popular strain, whose authors are destined to oblivion even as their works continue to be read, and the elite strain, which warrants immortal renown to the authors while dooming their works to the dust of library shelves. Škvorecký points out that in Poe's time, best-sellers were typically written by women. But he does not follow through with the feminist argument about the need to overthrow a literary canon that elevates the creativity of white males while marginalizing the achievements of women. Like Fiedler, Škvorecký chases a different hare in rejecting the narrow criteria of elitist criticism. He argues that the appeal of such eternal best-sellers stems from their tapping emotionally charged myths, whether the authors are men like Twain and Has̆ek or women like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Margaret Mitchell or just anonymous male/female voices like those who first sang the spiritual “Oh, Freedom!” It is nevertheless significant that Škvorecký has left it to a woman, born and bred in the bone of New England, to articulate the intellectual content of the mythopoetic vision of American freedom that he has made his own.

Lorraine's life adventure begins in Liberty, Rhode Island, with an incident that her fictional formula keeps reversing. She is courted by a handsome young officer named Ambrose Burnside and almost succumbs to the persuasion of his inarticulate love, only to change her mind in extremis, by fleeing from the altar where he patiently awaits her vows. The humiliated suitor goes on to become a Union general while she herself marries a professor, moves to Ohio to keep house, brings up her children, and writes novels. In a twist that lends a Czech tonality to the voice of this American bluestocking, Lorraine has a distinctly maternal foible for all the men in her life. As a respectable matron and mistress of a cultivated Midwestern parlor, she welcomes her rejected suitor back into her life, assuming the role of Burnside's confidante and staunch defender.

It is interesting that Škvorecký placed Burnside, the spurned lover destined to become a failed general, at the core of a novel about a fateful war born in the shame of an American conscience enslaved by the doublespeak of its constitutionally enshrined freedoms. Burnside's name is immortalized because of his remarkable facial hair, while history has stressed how he compiled a record of ignominy as the commander of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg and during the Mud March. Nevertheless, he was a brave soldier. He began well at Bull Run, which made Lincoln select him as a replacement for McClellan. But his bad judgment was proverbial, leading him to commit a political faux pas in the arrest of Clement Vallandigham, the Copperhead Democrat who ran for governor of Ohio in 1863 on a virulently antiwar platform.

Škvorecký presents the Vallandigham affair, which embarrassed Lincoln and became the most notorious civil liberties case of the war, from the partisan perspective of Lorraine, who sees her friend Burnside, now military commander of Ohio, as a hero and Vallandigham as a demagogue manipulating free speech for personal ambition. In this episode both sides of the Civil War claim to fight under the banner of freedom, with the rebels claiming exclusive ownership of the Jeffersonian ideal. Consequently, Lorraine faces the problem of the legal limits of dissent, for she sees Vallandigham as appealing to constitutional principles on behalf of a cause that denies the benefits of such principles to others. This problem, of course, accompanies American democracy from its inception. Tellingly, Škvorecký weighs in on Lorraine's side in his postscript. He offers the key to this episode by defining it in terms of the classical agon that pitted Antigone, the defender of unwritten moral laws, against Creon, who adhered to the letter of the law in an act of spiritual treason. Burnside, like Antigone, has acted in the name of his reverence for the dead. And Lincoln eloquently recognizes the weight of this motive when he commutes Vallandigham's death sentence into banishment.

Lorraine's single literary flop in a lucrative publishing career is her serious novel based on the life of her black maid, Jasmine. Her Carolina Bride mixes abolitionist outrage with romance by leading her black heroine on the underground trail of freedom, from the tribulations of plantation life to the promised land in the North. There she finds happiness by marrying her good-for-nothing but handsome lover, the former house slave Hasdrubal.

There are two brides from Texas in Škvorecký's plot. Both step out of short stories by Bunata where love's heartbreak is healed by reunion. However, Škvorecký devises his own endings. Lida Toupelikova, the daughter of a landless Moravian family that emigrates to Texas, has lost love and innocence in the old country but recoups by twice marrying money in America. The first throw of the dice nets her the young master of de Ribordeaux plantation, who ends as a drunk and a suicide. Next, switching to the winning side of the war, she weds a Union officer, heir to a rising California family. Lida's success story, which takes advantage of the opportunities her adopted land offers for second chances, underlines the materialistic strain in the American pursuit of happiness. Her brother, Cyril, who falls in love with the beautiful house slave Dinah, who is Ribordeaux's mistress, exemplifies the more idealistic aspects of the quest. The two couples with their interlocking fortunes are the stuff the American dream is made of, a rough fabric woven in the woof and web of greed and renewable innocence.

The novel's final scene brings the two narrative streams of the novel together by staging an encounter between Lorraine and some of the Czech soldiers who have survived the war. It is set in a Chicago restaurant run by Jasmine and Hasdrubal, where the Czech veterans are holding their commemorative dinner. The famous writer, for her part, is celebrating her private reunion with Jasmine, whom she has finally located after a long and complicated search. Lorraine socializes with the Czech immigrants and their ladies, some of whom are her devoted readers. As evidenced by their attire and the tenor of the exchanges, these Czechs have done well for themselves in Chicago and on the farm. Sergeant Kapsa, now a family man happily married to the widow of a fallen comrade, achieves a moment of supreme satisfaction when General Sherman, cracking into a smile of recognition, extends his hand and greets him by his Czech name, Kapsa, not the Germanized Tasche, under which he served in Austria.

Cyril Toupelik, a veteran grown rich from his invention of a press that extracts oil out of cotton seed, is in the room with the other celebrants. But his happiness is yet incomplete, as he is still looking for Dinah, who disappeared somewhere down the river from the now-ruined de Ribordeaux plantation where they had secret trysts and where he swore to marry her one day. It is a measure of Škvorecký's success as a storyteller that he engages his reader's emotions in Cyril's project to recover his bartered bride. Still, as the novel ends, that unfulfilled happy ending seems to be at hand, beyond the text's confines, already a prospect on the ever-changing human map of America.