Talkin' Moscow Blues
Skvorecky, Josef
BOOK REVIEWS M usic has been enlisted in the service of many masters, and just as many scoundrels. This lesson of history Josef kvoreckg, the Czech emigre novelist and avid jazz aficionado, knows...
...and polemics—pop -cultural criticism the Evil Empire could benefit from a weighted with something more pro- post-glasnost perspective, though When asked the difference between found...
...A failed saxophonist himself, he delights in musicians' parables of mischief and rebellion...
...Then they de- can manage...
...I never dreamt of writing history—yet perhaps a stranger perusing my saga about the cynical tenor saxophonist would get a more or less continuous picture of the last four decades of Czechoslovakia's history...
...His fierce politics have made him something of a problematic figure in his adoptive country, Canada, where he has lived and taught at the University of Toronto since 1968...
...Few Canadians have had the temerity to challenge him on this score, disagree though they may...
...Twehreenrelatively free and everything was nice...
...The order, kvoreckg (pronounced Shkvoretskt) reports, was in fact aimed at the 6,000 members of the union's verboten Jazz Section...
...originally appeared in Canada's fogeyish conservative organ, the Idler-But it bears more than mere parochial interest...
...T n the book's opening essay, "I Was...
...He taught American literature, while his wife, ZdeAa Salivarova, founded Sixty-Eight Publishers—an outlet for Czech writers ever since...
...If you were lucky enough to live American Spectator, and various Cana- An appraisal of the new regime in during the reign of a good king then you dian literary organs...
...Only sporadically was he censured for the excessive libertinism or decadently un-Marxist behavior of his characters...
...although the bishops of Stalinist obscurantism damned the "music of cannibals," they had one problem...
...So the music lived, as "Negro folklore" among Czech fans, the same fans, kvorec14 avers, who despised the state-approved American Negro Paul Robeson: . . . how we hated that black apostle who sang of his own free will, at open air concerts in Prague at a time when they were raising the Socialist leader Milada Horakova to the gallows, the only woman ever to be executed for political reasons in Czechoslovakia by Czechs...
...He respectfully acknowledges that his author knows of what he speaks, quoting from kvoreckg's extraordinary political history: I have experienced all existing political systems of twentieth century Europe: liberal democracy until 1939, Nazism from 19391945, the uneasy democratic socialism of 1945-1948, Stalinism between 1948-1960, the liberalization of Communism from 19601967, the crazy attempt to square the circle in 1968, and the Attila-the-Hun solution of the panzers in August 1968...
...Then came the grim moment in history he calls "Prague Winter," when Red Army tanks crushed the reforms of the country's tragic optimist Alexander Dub&k...
...This book is his chance to jam, in his acquired English or in translation from the Czech...
...Occasionally his command of English, or perhaps his translator's rendering of Czech, doesn't seem quite up to the fluency of his mind...
...Trials and ten- to fourteenyear sentences for the chief union troublemakers, "shorter terms for minor perpetrators of thought crime...
...A forceful argument for listening to what this author has to say, even when his prose isn't entirely compelling...
...DvoMk in Love—yet so hostile to the Soviet Union, that workers' paradise looked.to with sympathetic longing by countless well-fed Canadians of blandly socialist-convictions...
...He mingled with Milos Forman and other avant garde filmmakers, attracted the attention of playwright Vaclav Havel, and during the pre-1968 thaw had been a "successful and exceedingly popular" scribe of hard-boiled detective stories...
...But I simply don't think he agents, love and death...
...In addition to time, as Hemingway wrote...
...Talkin' Moscow Blues, §kvoreckg's collection of essays and interviews from two decades in exile, promises "literature, politics, movies, and jazz...
...They are a casual Moscow would be even more welcome...
...Skvorecky has seen both in his lifetime...
...1 Born in NachOd ." §kvoreckg identifies himself as a reluctant dissident: I never intended to write satire—yet ended up producing something that is indistinguishable from satire...
...Of course it won't be dif46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 The University of Toronto soon took him up...
...He takes one such nail (a Winnipeg Sun reporter) sternly to task for her glowing account of life behind the Iron Curtain on a visit to the World Assembly for Peace and Life Against Nuclear War held in Prague in 1983...
...His essay "Are Canadians Politically Naive...
...kvoreck)1 knows better...
...If he stays in power long best justly j is he which for , fiction teriorate, as he also wrote...
...Throughout, .he remains Toronto Star, he said of Mikhail years...
...This is the ideal Communism authorities proclaim to exist in Czechoslovakia, the rationale behind all their directives and abuses...
...socialismus, which heapproximates in English as "really existing socialism...
...enough, it's probable that the life of the orhis dinary citizens in the Soviet Union will be known, kvoreckT contributed essays made better, but he's not immortal...
...First came The Cowards (1949), then The Tank Corps (1954, after his discharge from the Army...
...Which is why he likes Canada: "There is no ideology...
...The Orwellian allusion is, of course, deliberate...
...Wonderful, for some minable man...
...It is certainly, as they say, close enough for jazz...
...The division duly having been ordered to stop all activities, they could not carry on any and could not therefore oblige...
...But: since the decree did not explicitly mention the Jazz Section, the section carried on...
...Sam Solecki, the Toronto professor who edited and wrote the useful introduction to Talkin' Moscow Blues, registers §kvoreckg's scorn for "intelleftuals" (as Mario Vargas Llosa calls them) though Solecki is one himself...
...Typical of the Communist-confounding paradoxes that fascinate §kvoreck9 is his account in Red Music of the arrival of Dixieland to Czechoslovakia in the early fifties...
...Its name was Dixieland...
...He's haunted by the specter of realnj Gorbachev: seen too many Ivans...
...Same melodies, lyrics only slightly revised...
...How musicians find ways to defy anybody's rules...
...In August 1968, the annus horribilis, Skvoreckg had just written The Bass Saxophone in a three-day frenzy and was vacationing in Paris with his wife when the radio brought them the news...
...This lesson of history Josef kvoreckg, the Czech emigre novelist and avid jazz aficionado, knows well...
...He cautions misguided idealists against that most dangerous illusion that if they make the revolution it will be different from the ones which so far have always devoured their young...
...He was 14 when Neville Chamberlain signed away Czechoslovakia's freedom to Hitler in the Municlraccord...
...TALKIN' MOSCOW BLUES Josef §kvoreckg/Lester & Orpyn Dennys (Toronto) $17.95 (Canadian) Rick Marin THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 45 the old themes of life, women, fate, ferent, if it is a real revolution...
...Skvorecky has no patience with them...
...I think he's an ad-dreams, the working class, secret are pretty well alike...
...Two Peas in a Pod" deftly shows up the twin sides of the totalitarian coin, "left" and "right," by citing the interchangeability of Hitlerjugend rally songs with those of their Communist counterparts...
...An internationally celebrated literary figure, author of celebrated fiction—The Engineer of Human Souls, The Brass Saxophone, and, most recently, Rick Mann is the television critic for the Washington Times...
...The §kvoreckgs did not return home...
...How easily the Nazis transposed the Internazionale into the Hitlernazionale...
...Skvorecky is not shy about his anti-Communism...
...Although he confesses to a greater interest at the time in jazz and young ladies than the vicissitudes of war, he worked in a Messerschmidt factory during the Nazi occupation and plotted unfulfilled sabotage there...
...In a recent interview with the day, Gorbachev replied, "Twenty translation...
...But eventually he always seems to come around to the last...
...How quickly the Communists adapted their enemy's ten commandments against "so-called swing" and "Jewishly gloomy lyrics" (the so-called blues) once the war was over...
...After the bloodless Communist coup in 1948 that replaced democracy with Stalinism, he spent a desultory year in medical school and began writing seriously...
...along comes Ivan the Terrible and mixture of scholarship, reminiscence, 'Icvoreckfs political ruminations on that's the end of it...
...In Canada he found 'uneventful peace" and resumed his prolific .career, fictionalizing his tumultuous autobiography in The Engineer of Human Souls, an extravagant and hefty novel he billed in its subtitle as "an entertainment of...
...Josef §kvoreckg is not Joseph Brodsky...
...No matter...
...In 1984 (appropriate date) the Prague Division of the Czech Musicians' Union was ordered to "stop all activities...
...Ideological thinking follows paths free from the taint of reality," 'gkvorec14 writes...
...I never thought of myself as a dissident writer—yet I was stripped of my citizenship because of literary dissent...
...A type of the cannibal music with roots so patently folkloristic and often (the blues) so downright proletarian that even the most Orwellian falsifier of facts would be hard put to deny them...
...His favorite theme: the fate of popular music, especially jazz, under the jackboot of German then Soviet tyranny...
...bad kings...
...For his bold use of "common" language—much like Vassily Aksyonov's appropriation of Moscow slang—he gained entree to Prague's underground elite...
...Revolution of any kind, concludes the title of another essay, "is usually the worst solution...
...All good clean bureaucratic fun, Skvoreckg notes, but with its inevitable dark side...
...He writes with equal vim about there's no indication it would change Prague's spring of '68 and glasnost topoets, directors, the perils of literary his mind...
...Born in 1924 in a small town on the northeastern border of Bohemia that would serve as the backdrop for much of his fiction, Skvorecky came of age amid the horrors of World War II and its aftermath...
...After cataloguing this silly woman's insensitivity to the humiliations and oppression suffered by his countrymen, kvoreckg lashes out at her (and anyone else's) blind trust in the great god Peace: "Pacifism, the naive or cowardly efforts to extricate ourselves from our common North American destiny in a world of powerful totalitarianism, is a guaranteedroad to war...
...The annoyed authorities sent an explicit command to the Prague Division to abolish the section immediately...
...Revolutions L don't denigrate him...
...And under his basic test of the term—whether politics is compulsory or can be escaped—it might equally be applied to the United States...
...It's like (collected here) to the New Republic, Nowhere does Ԥkvoreck)1 offer his feudalism, when you had good kings and the New York Times Book Review, The thoughts on the American revolution...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
