CONFESSIONS OF A FOOTNOTE

Martin Kristenson

(This speech was held at the Literarni Akademie´s Conference on Josef Skvorecky´s Life and Work in Náchod, Czech Republic, September 22-24, 2004.

Winter in a Swedish small town

It all began a winter's day, seventeen years ago. I had just moved to a new town and didn´t know anyone, my girl friend had just left me, and I felt that life on the whole was rather hopeless. I was lying on my bed, reading a novel called The Swell Season by an author I hadn't come across before, Josef Skvorecky. The story takes place in Czechoslovakia during the forties, Europe is at war, and the country is occupied by the Nazis. The leading character, Danny Smiricky, lives in a small town. He is in his late teens, plays the tenor saxophone in a jazz band, and is energetically but without much success courting every pretty girl he meets. In each chapter, Danny, with drums beating and flags flying, goes off to win the hearts of the town beauties, but it always comes to a sorry end for him, and every failure adds to his frustration: "What are you punishing me for, God? Why did you make girls in the first place, if a good Christian can't lay a hand on them?"
Still Danny, being the born optimist, maintains his joy of living the book through, and this is what caught me; despite the dark setting, The Swell Season is a happy book. Danny's irresistible enthusiasm appealed to me, and my despair changed into hope.
I threw myself into Skvorecky's first novel The Cowards, also about young Danny. Here I found the lines that, in my mind, best describe Danny's attitude to life, words that still inspire me:

And when I thought about it honestly, it was a good thing, too, that I was in love with Irena and that she was going with Zdenek and maybe I was better off just daydreaming and writing testimonials to my love. Of course it would have been nice, too, if I'd been going with her myself. Everything was nice. Absolutely everything. Actually, there wasn't anything bad in the whole wide world.

Could youthful delight at being alive be better expressed?
I am thirty-six years younger than Josef Skvorecky, and we come from very different backgrounds. I grew up in a democracy, a country which was last at war in the beginning of the nineteenth century. To me, World War II had always been black and white newsreels with Nazi rallies, marching soldiers, and burning cities, a horrible world distant and hard to take in. Skvorecky made this part of European history come alive to me, and I can truthfully say that by reading his novels I gained a better insight into this period than I could from any other source. In The Swell Season, we see life through the eyes of a non-Jewish teenager who was too young to become a soldier. The Nazis were always present, forming a permanent threat, but there were also girls in summer dresses and Duke Ellington And His Orchestra. "The basic characteristic of such youthful jazzbands all over the world was fun, no matter how difficult the times were", Skvorecky wrote to me referring to his story Eine Kleine Jazzmusik. "People joked, did practical jokes, did not take such things as being expelled from school tragically, for everybody knew the war would be over and would not end in Nazi victory."
There was a passage in The Swell Season that really surprised me. One of Danny's favourite movies was Swing it, Teacher!, a Swedish film from 1940 with singer Alice Babs. I have always loved these old, black and white films despite the fact that I wasn't even born when they were made, and it made me particularly pleased to find that a writer from another country had seen and appreciated them. Since Skvorecky's seventieth birthday was coming up, I decided to send him Swing it, Teacher! on video. I assumed that he hadn't seen it since the war, and I thought that he might want to renew the acquaintance. It took me a while to find a copy, and when I finally got hold of one it lacked subtitles, but somehow I don't think it mattered. "Alice Babsian" can be understood everywhere. This my first contact with my favourite writer resulted in a correspondence that has been going on for ten years now.

Alice Babs and the stupid fools

When jazz singer Alice Babs made her break in the early forties, she attracted a lot of attention. Many members of the clergy, parents, teachers, and other representatives of the adult world were horrified at the young singer. The "babsery", as it quickly became known as, was considered a menace to the young minds. A leading representative of the Swedish musical industry wrote in an indignant article that Alice Babs "sounded like a hussey" and that she should "get a smacking and be put back in school". The atmosphere was quite inflamed for a time. One vicar described the Babs cult as "foot and mouth disease to cultural life", and one of the principal morning papers recommended Alice's parents to send her to a reformatory school. All this excitement seems incomprehensible to anyone who have seen a Babs movie because the Babs characters were no rebels. On the contrary, she always played good-hearted, home-loving, almost submissive girls. That she was regarded as a "menace to society" must be explained by her extraordinary feeling for music and the genuine swing feeling in her voice. The adult world feared the dark sexual forces that this kind of music was supposed to unleash. The characters she played were well-behaved, but the songs told another story because they expressed all the vitality of youth, and gave hope to Swedish teenagers.
Not just Swedish teenagers. In her memoirs Alice Babs writes about the appreciation she met within Europe during the war. Sometimes she received letters, telling her what a comfort her music was to many people in the occupied countries. In 1946 she was told about a screening of Swing it, teacher! at the Lido in Prague, how the audience had cheered the scene when Alice and her swing music conquers the hearts of the school board and she escapes expulsion for singing in public bars.
Josef Skvorecky saw Swing it, teacher! at least ten times, actually a few times more than I've seen it myself. He writes about how Swedish jazz music reached him through Radio Stockholm, the only station which could play jazz without being jammed by the Nazis. But the Babs films did not escape censorship. When Swedish film distributors wanted to introduce A Singing Lass in Prague in 1942, it was banned by the Germans because two of Alice's songs were in English which was strictly prohibited. To be able to show the film, the distributors engaged a Czech jazz singer, talented Inka Zemankova, to record the two songs, now with the lyrics translated into Swedish, a language she didn't know a word of. A good example of how absurd situations occur when a totalitarian regime tries to adjust reality to fit their ideology. Unfortunately I have never heard these recordings, but in an interview Inka Zemankova said that she had received letters from Swedish fans who commended her on her "Swedish".
It was of course very different to be a jazz fan in Czechoslovakia than being one in Sweden. Kill-joys in Sweden could make vicious attacks on Alice in the media, but they could not back up their words by force. However much they disliked jazz music, young people in Sweden could go on playing and dancing. In fact, Alice answered her critics in one of her songs (roughly translated):

If they think I'm a hussey
It's all right with me
I don't care about that,
The whole night
I still sing my swing

The situation was different in the occupied countries, where the bigots were in power and were able to harass and imprison any one who opposed them. There will always be bigots, but the important thing, as Josef Skvorecky illustrates in his stories, is not to give them power over our lives.
On the fly leaf to The Swell Season you can read the subtitle: A Text On The Most Important Things In Life. I think it is to the point, beautifully expressed by a writer who knows what it's all about. The Nazis were not important, fighting them was essential, but they were not important in themselves. The sound of a bass saxophone however, all the beauty of this world, love and human relations - that is what matters.
Reading The Swell Season made me think of a scene from Chaplin's Modern times (1936). A flag of warning falls off a passing truck. The little tramp, helpful as always, picks it up and runs after the vehicle, frenetically waving the red flag in order to catch the driver's attention. A procession of demonstrators suddenly shows up directly behind him, and when the police attack they arrest Chaplin, mistaking him for the leader of the demonstration. It surely wasn´t Chaplin's intention, but I think this scene is an excellent metaphor for the difference between a democracy and a totalitarian system. In a democracy, it's your own choice if you engage in politics, like the demonstrators do in the film. In a totalitarian system, it's almost impossible to escape politics and, like Chaplin with the red flag, you end up in a political context whether you want to or not. Everyday life is permeated by politics and every human activity becomes a matter for the state, even the most private.
Before I read The Swell Season I had never read a book that so clearly pointed out the values threatened by totalitarianism; this is what we want to defend, this is what they want to refuse us. Danny's beloved jazz music was termed Entartete Kunst and was banned by the Nazis. It's obvious to anyone who has lived under the oppression of both Nazis and Communists, that it is the desire to express yourself freely which constitutes the biggest threat to the totalitarian society. It is not as obvious to people like me who only have experienced democracy.

The author and his public

I have later come to understand that Skvorecky keeps in touch with many of his readers, and I am not surprised. Many of us have been inspired by the warmth and candour in his books. I don't usually send letters and gifts to writers I admire, but with Skvorecky it felt like the natural thing to do. Something told me that the author of The Swell Season would be a person who took an interest in his public. I think keeping close relations with his circle of readers are an important part of Skvorecky's literary activities. His texts invite you to interact. His stories are full of references to his other books, and everywhere he is nodding to the attentive reader. On the fly leaf of the first edition of The Miracle Game for example, the editor is said to be Karel Leden, i e the main character in Miss Silver's Past. The editor of The Engineer of Human Souls, according to the fly-leaf is Jana Honzlova, his wife's alter ego in Summer in Prague, and in the crime novel The Return of Lieutenant Boruvka the murder is committed in the same street where Skvorecky lives. I could give you many more examples, and no doubt have many references escaped me, but in this way Skvorecky forms a personal contact with his readers (reminding a little of Hitchcock's cameos in his films). Readers respond to this openness in different ways. For instance, British saxophonist Anthony Thistlethwaite fell so desperately in love with Marie Dreslerova from Skvorecky's novels that he not only wrote a song for her but also went to Nachod to visit the real Marie. A good friend of mine refuses to look at real life pictures of Marie and Irena because it would destroy his own images. The women of the books are so alive to him that seeing actual portraits of them would destroy his fictional romance.
I am not a scholar and I am not going to make any literary analysis of Skvorecky's books. I just want to express how much his books mean to me. I can make one small contribution, however. A few years ago I received a thick package with my mail which turned out to be Skvorecky's latest novel, An Inexplicable Story. It was a homage to his favourite writer Edgar Allen Poe, apparently written in a playful mood, full of references and cross references. I recognized some of them. "Professor Howard Phillips Langhorn" at the "Miskatonic University" is for example a reference to Howard Phillips Lovecraft whose horror stories I read as a teenager. The most obvious reference to me made me literally almost fall off my chair. On page 146 I found a character called Michaela Swinkels-Kristenson, and so I had become a participant in Skvorecky´s literary game and a proud footnote in Czech literary history. I know now that Michaela Swinkels is yet another of Skvorecky's readers with whom he keeps in touch and it feels like I've become related to her "by literature".

"That desperate scream of youth"

There are so many things in Skvorecky´s novels that I can relate to. It's not only that we share the same interests, we both love swing music and Golden Age Hollywood, it's also a state of mind which I share with Danny and many other of the characters in Skvorecky's novels. It's difficult to put into words, but to be brief it was the enthusiasm in many of the stories that caught me. Danny allows himself to be bewitched, bothered and bewildered by film, literature and music, and I recognize the feeling of exhilaration that jazz gives him. I also know what Skvorecky meant when he wrote about "the realm of beauty, which is - or should be - an important part of being human", and why he used the following lines from Ezra Pound as an underlying theme in The Bass Saxophone:

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thy lov'st well is thy true heritage

As a boy, Skvorecky learnt English all by himself, not to impress his teachers, but to be able to write a fan letter to his idol Judy Garland. In The Miracle Game, Danny Smiricky visits Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, and in a sentimental gesture puts his finger into the impression of Judy's shoe. Thirty years later, I found myself doing the same thing, literally going in the footsteps of two of my favourites at the same time. You probably have to feel "that desperate scream of youth" within you to be able to understand the need for this kind of gestures.
"To me literature is for ever blowing a horn", Skvorecky once wrote. The music coming from his horn expresses both joy at being alive and sadness about the imperfections of life, as well as wonder at the world with "its uncertain fevers and secret journeys" to quote a Swedish poet.
"A writer's job is to tell the truth" - Skvorecky has always lived by Hemingway's motto, and that is why his novels are so individual and so universal at the same time. What does it matter that Skvorecky and I are thirty-six years and an ocean apart? Great literature bridge over time and space. Why do so many of Skvorecky´s readers find it perfectly natural to write him letters, why do they travel to his hometown in search of Marie and Irena? I think it is because Skvorecky is just the kind of writer described by George Orwell in the following lines:

… you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. 'He knows all about me', you feel; 'he wrote this specially for me.' It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you /…/ with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike."

Vsecko nejlepsi k narozeninam, Josef!

Martin Kristenson
Sweden

(Translated to English from Swedish by Agneta Kristenson)