Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Read online

  II

  The bride of Texas is not from Texas at all. Born in the 1830s into a family of tenant farmers in Moravia, Lida Toupelikova ought by rights to marry one of the neighbours’ sons and spend the rest of her life raising children and doing drudge-work. But besides having a pretty face and striking blue eyes, she burns with ambition to climb the social ladder. Her climb begins when she seduces, gets pregnant by, and comes within an ace of marrying, the son of their landlord. Then, when the Toupelik family is packed off to Texas to get her out of the way, she uses her wiles to ensnare Etienne de Ribordeaux, heir to a cotton plantation. Disinherited by his angry father and discarded by Lida as useless to her further plans, Etienne commits suicide. Lida promptly devirginates and marries a vapid young army officer named Baxter Warren II, prospective head of the Warren Bank in San Francisco.

  The philosophy of Lida, bride of Texas, is simple: ‘In this world it’s the strong ones that win out. And love? Well, go for love – but if you can’t get love, then go for anything you can get.’2 In the course of going for whatever she can get, the eyes of this hard, calculating young immigrant lose their cornflower innocence and acquire a chilling, reptilian glaze.

  Lida – or Linda Towpelick as she renames herself on the far side of the Great Waters – and her brother Cyril are among a handful of properly fictional characters in a novel which otherwise takes its stand on the rock of history. In fact the Toupeliks are doubly fictitious: their author has lifted them – as he disarmingly admits – from a story that appeared in a Czech-language magazine in Chicago in 1898. Etienne de Ribordeaux and Warren Baxter II are inventions. Otherwise the stage is thronged with ‘real’ characters from a far greater drama: the latter years of the American Civil War, the restoration of the Union, the ending of slavery.

  The Bride of Texas is only secondarily a romance of ambition and acquisitiveness. It is first of all a war novel, concerned with the progress of the war, battle by battle, and with the fate of some of the humbler soldiers who took part in it. Lida may give the novel its name, but its central character is a man, drawn by Skvorecky from the records of the Twenty-Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers: Jan Kapsa, like Lida an immigrant from the subject lands of Austro-Hungary.

  Kapsa has served in two armies: that of the Habsburg Empire, in which he had been used to suppress the nationalist uprisings of 1848; and now that of the Union, where he has risen through the ranks to become a sergeant on the staff of General Sherman. He has come to America in search of freedom. Having seen imperial Austro-Hungary and imperial Russia at work, he is familiar with one version of what freedom is not. ‘We’re fighting this war [the Civil War] to rid America of everything that’s like Russia,’ he declares. (p. 95)

  Another version of freedom scrutinised and rejected by Kapsa is that put forward by states’ rights secessionists. Kapsa knows at first hand what old-fashioned serfdom entails. In fighting to end slavery in America, he is fighting for the liberation of Bohemia too. When the war is over, he is able to look back with satisfaction on a job well done; in old age he is still ruminating on the ugly shape the twentieth century might have taken had the Union lost.

  Kapsa is thus no good soldier Schweik. On the contrary, he is a sturdy, thoughtful man, a career soldier who reveres his commanding general. Sherman, for his part, emerges as a modern-style strategist, wary of pitched battles, indifferent to glory.

  There is, however, a version of Schweik in the novel, whom Skvorecky has injected into it in order to leaven the life-story of his worthy but otherwise rather plodding hero. Jan Amos Shake is a fellow private, a coward, a ‘gnome with the clever, guileless eyes of a con man’. (p. 193) Broadly funny things keep happening to Shake: a Confederate standard bearer trips over him as he cowers on the battlefield, impaling himself on a bayonet; he falls out of a tree and knocks a Confederate major off his horse. For his exploits he receives a battlefield promotion.

  Whereas Lida has fled the Old World to escape a life of hardship, Kapsa, by dint of some complicated, Balzacian plotting on his author’s part involving a high-born mistress, a crime passionel, a diamond necklace, and flight by night, is endowed with a romantic Old World past and enough money, once the Wisconsin Volunteers are disbanded, to woo the widow of a Czech comrade-at-arms and enjoy the well-earned pleasures of marriage and fatherhood. Two versions, then – Lida’s, Kapsa’s – of successful transplantation.

  III

  Czech settlement in the United States – principally in Texas and the Midwest – dates back to the 1820s, but the great spur to emigration from the Czech homelands was the failed uprising of 1848 and the repressions that followed. Through Kapsa and his comrades, Skvorecky is concerned to pay tribute to the first generation of Czechs in the New World, and in particular to those Czechs who, though they could have avoided conscription (they were, after all, not citizens), chose to enlist and fight as Americans. An odd change of direction, perhaps, for a novelist who made his name as a satirist; yet from an immigrant of a later generation, it can be seen as a way of asserting continuity with North American traditions of democracy and love of freedom.

  During the early 1950s, when Skvorecky began seriously writing novels, he evolved a narrative method that worked well for him and that he has seen no reason to discard. It involves dividing the story into narrative strands and following these strands in parallel, sometimes bringing them together and interweaving them, sometimes intercutting between them. As he has grown more assured in his craft, he has multiplied the number of strands and accelerated the pace of the intercutting, until with The Bride of Texas readers may find themselves flashing between Bohemia and the Carolinas, between 1848 and 1864, between the de Ribordeaux plantation and the battlefield of Bentonville, for no more than a paragraph or two at a time.

  It is a method that owes much to William Faulkner. In his early years in Prague Skvorecky was known as an Americanist, a translator of Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, knowledgeable about American literature and American jazz. There is even a Snopes smuggled in among the minor characters of The Bride of Texas as a homage to Faulkner, just as Shake/Schweik pays tribute to Skvorecky’s great comic forebear Jaroslav Hašek.

  Skvorecky’s battle scenes cannot be said to be grippingly written. There is an air of dutifulness about them, as though the example of Stephen Crane were continually before him, intimidating and discouraging him. For the battles around Bentonville he girds his loins almost palpably and throws in his full resources. Here for the first time he manages to create a degree of suspense and an air of impending disaster. But finally his heart is not in it. For an episode of despairing Southern bravery, he falls back into Faulknerian pastiche; his treatment of the carnage is perfunctory, as though the horror repelled yet did not fascinate him.

  Similarly, the Texas in which the Toupeliks settle is a rather abstract, unrealised place. Skvorecky conveys no sense of the heat and space of the Southwest; there is no Spanish presence. Skvorecky has confessed to having no interest in landscape; his nineteenth-century America is much more convincing when he gets to the big city and can write about how the politics and rivalries of the Habsburg Empire play themselves out among Chicago’s immigrant communities.

  The main strands of Skvorecky’s narrative concern the doings of Lida and Kapsa in their European and American manifestations, and the fortunes of Lida’s likeable younger brother Cyril, who falls hopelessly in love with a slave concubine of Etienne’s only to see her sold from under his nose by Lida. The other main presence in the novel is one of Margaret Fuller’s more cautious disciples, a woman named Lorraine Henderson Tracy, who as ‘Laura Lee’ has made a reputation as the author of novels for young girls.

  Lorraine breaks into the narrative in a series of four interchapters (‘intermezzos’) in which she comments on the progress of the war and in particular on the efforts of Clement Laird Vallandigham, leader of the anti-war Copperhead movement, to bring about the defeat of President Lincoln in the 1864 election. Pitted against Vallandigham is General A
mbrose Everett Burnside, a ‘real’ character whose handsome side-whiskers gave rise to the word ‘sideburns’.

  Burnside, as military commander of Illinois, has the unenviable task of upholding the Constitution and Bill of Rights – to preserve which the war is, after all, being fought – while at the same time ensuring that Vallandigham does not get away with sedition. Lorraine’s function as commentator is to set out the legal and ethical issues at stake, and to chart the manoeuvres of the adversaries as each tries to wrongfoot the other (here Skvorecky draws heavily on Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War).

  One can see why, at an abstract level, Vallandigham’s campaign should interest Skvorecky – it raises questions about the limits of dissent in a democracy – just as one can see why he has created Lorraine – to provide a perspective on the war which extends beyond events on the battlefield. But the issues are inadequately dramatised; Lorraine’s intermezzos are not a fictional vehicle adequate to the weight of political history they must bear. The material remains arid and the lengthy passages in which Lorraine does her desperate best to bring it to life are best skipped.

  Skvorecky has obviously read widely on the Civil War (his novel comes shored up with a two-page list of sources as well as a four-page historical foreword). He drops interesting asides on the arms used by foot soldiers and on developments in armaments technology. He reminds us that this was a war in which the combatants were for the most part literate and enjoyed writing home; the letters of ordinary soldiers are in some respects more trustworthy than the reports of journalists. It was also a war in which farmers got to argue with generals over whether battles would be fought on their land or their neighbours’.

  In particular, Skvorecky is at pains to foreground the role of black Americans in the war, whether as noncombatants actively following the progress of hostilities and aiding the Union forces where they can, or as enlisted men in black regiments. Cyril Toupelik’s inamorata, the slave Dinah, is given a substantial speaking part as a storyteller à la Sheherazade (though her stories, it must be said, have their longueurs), while by the end of the war Lorraine is at work on a novel of her own, to be called The Carolina Bride, about a slave couple who escape to the north on the Underground Railroad.

  IV

  Josef Skvorecky is not a great stylist. Compared with his contemporary Milan Kundera, whose prose is masterly in its elegance and lucidity, Skvorecky is a only an honest journeyman. His strengths lie elsewhere. Kundera himself has singled out Skvorecky for ‘his special way of viewing history from underneath’, as well as for the ‘anti-revolutionary spirit’ of his novels, their ‘critique of the spirit of revolution, with its myths, its eschatology, and its all-or-nothing attitude’.3 ‘I can’t imagine that a spoken certainty can exist without an unspoken uncertainty behind it,’ writes Skvorecky himself.4

  Nonetheless the linguistic texture of Skvorecky’s fiction is anything but simple. Czech readers have reportedly found his post-1968 work heavy going because much of the dialogue is written in a Czech heavily influenced by American or Canadian English. The comic effects that result are by their nature difficult to translate back into English; it is the good fortune of Skvorecky’s English translators – first Paul Wilson, more recently Kacá Polácková Henley – that the author has involved himself in their labours.

  V

  In the same year as The Bride of Texas Skvorecky published a transparently autobiographical fiction in which he appears under the name Danny Smiricky, the hero of several of his novels. Headed for the Blues takes us from the early 1940s to the 1980s, though not as far as the end of the Communist era.

  Skvorecky calls the Czechoslovakia of late Communism a ‘world of exhausted investigators . . . overworked fizls’ (fizl is Czech slang for a security-police operative). The 1950s, in contrast, are epitomised as ‘the time of exhausted executioners’. In neither phase of its existence could the regime inspire loyalty in its subjects or, in its servants, anything but the most cynically self-interested fidelity. (pp. 15, 10)

  Although Skvorecky himself was involved in minor episodes of sabotage against the Nazis (episodes on which he draws in his novels), and although Headed for the Blues opens in 1948 with his Danny persona sending illegal messages to the West and authoring political pamphlets, these activities did not grow out of burning political conviction. Skvorecky’s awakening to the real intentions of his Communist rulers came only in 1950, when to his astonishment a group of idealistic young Boy Scout leaders had sentences of ten to twenty years passed on them for – so the indictment read – furthering the interests of a foreign power (in this case the Vatican). In the aftermath Skvorecky felt the guilt of the survivor: the only reason why he too was not in the dock was that he ‘didn’t believe, didn’t know, wasn’t certain, abstained from belief not out of cowardice . . . but because he just didn’t know’. (p. 63)

  Headed for the Blues presents totalitarianism, and in particular the culture of spying, as a creeping malaise of the soul. A long anecdote traces the complexities of relations with known or suspected fizls in the Czech immigrant community of Toronto. The story reminds Skvorecky – who never falls into self-righteousness – that as a young man he himself almost gave in to pressure from the secret police to write reports on colleagues at the school where he was teaching. Thus he is able to put his finger on what is worst about a society riddled with spying. What spies report is only of secondary importance. By its very nature, institutionalised spying, with the mutual suspiciousness it engenders, corrodes the openness of citizens toward each other. ‘Nobody . . . knows who is who . . . You can’t trust old friends, sweethearts or maybe even husbands.’ (p. 115)

  To the Czech bourgeoisie Skvorecky sings a wholly unironic paean: during its dark years under Communism, he suggests, it shed its worst qualities (smugness, philistinism, moral indifference), these qualities being passed on, by the sleight of hand of history, to its persecutors. ‘How persistently they rose again . . . not for the love of profit, but because they were the bourgeoisie, the underpinnings of the world. Diligent, capable, creative, stubborn, opinionated, incorrigible . . . The only genuine creators of successful economic systems.’ (pp. 12, 45)

  He sets down a profoundly anti-political credo that echoes in spirit not only Confucius but his own eminent contemporary, the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: ‘Treason, betraying one’s homeland, or, in my case, betraying a political conviction . . . is always a lesser sin than betrayal of a friend.’ (p. 44) Jazz is important to him because of ‘the indomitable defiance contained in that beautiful rhythmic music’. (p. 81)

  Looking back over his career, Skvorecky produces a humorously modest obituary: ‘After years of socialist realism . . . he was the first to bring to Czech prose a firsthand, deliberately subjective perception of life, an unfettered treatment of motifs that until then had remained taboo (eroticism, jazz), and a colloquial narrative with slang in the dialogue.’ He believes that each human being should, in the course of a lifetime, create at least one thing that will outlast him. ‘I think . . . The Cowards will outlive me the way my father’s orthopedic shoes outlived master cobbler Zahálka of Kostelec.’ (pp. 86, 87)

  Not a bad attempt, one feels, at the treacherous task of self-evaluation. The Cowards may well outlive its author, though The Miracle Game (Czech 1972; English translation 1990), with its great setpiece scenes (the anguished exchanges between the citizens of Prague in 1968 and the Russian tank troops, the latter no less bewildered by their role than the people they have been sent to liberate; an evening with a famous Russian novelist and his KGB minder in a fashionable Viennese restaurant), is probably a better novel. Yet despite the admirable candour and engaging wryness of Skvorecky’s summing up, it is sad to see so considerable a writer admit, however obliquely, that he reached his peak long ago.

  11 Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years

  I

  SINCE THE 1950s Joseph Frank has been labouring steadily at one of the great biographical projects of our times, a five-volu
me life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The volumes can be read independently; each one makes absorbing reading. The fourth, which appeared in 1997, is of particular interest, covering the ‘miraculous years’ of 1865–71, the years of Dostoevsky’s greatest sustained achievement, when he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and The Devils (1871–2).1

  In 1864 both Dostoevsky’s first wife and his beloved elder brother Mikhail died. Dostoevsky was a dutiful family man. Without hesitation (but also without guessing what he was letting himself in for) he assumed responsibility for Mikhail’s wife and children and for the huge debts Mikhail had left behind, as well as for his deceased wife’s son by an earlier marriage. These dependents exploited his dutifulness without mercy: the next seven years of his life would be dominated by efforts to earn by his pen enough to maintain them in the comfort to which they were accustomed.

  Writing for his daily bread, Dostoevsky was always under pressure of deadlines. One such deadline led to his second marriage. Contracted to produce a complete novel at short notice, he hired a stenographer, a young woman named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. He gave her a dictation test, then offered her a cigarette. She declined, thus unwittingly passing a second test: she had proved she was not a liberated woman and thus probably not a Nihilist. Within a month, with her stenographic aid, Dostoevsky had dictated and revised The Gambler and could return to the project he had interrupted, Crime and Punishment. Three months later they were married. He was forty-five, she twenty-one.

  Dostoevsky disliked living alone. Though Anna was not to know it, he had recently, in quest of the companionship and domesticity he longed for, paid court to several young women, without success. Nor was he cured of his infatuation with Apollinaria Suslova, the young radical with whom he had had a stormy affair in 1863.