This interview with Josef Skvorecky was published in the Iranian literary magazine Golestaneh in 2006. The Skvorecky feature covers 14 pages, including a short story. Thanks to editor and translator Mohammadreza Farzad for permission to publish his interview on this website.
Why do you write novels?
Out of an inner need. I wrote my first novel when I was about nine years of age. At that time I avidly read an American-Canadian writer, James Curwood, who wrote adventure novels set mostly in Canada. He started a trilogy but died after finishing the second part. I finished the trilogy for him. It was titled The Mysterious Cave and was all nineteen pages long.
How do the processes of working on a short story or novel or memoir differ from one another, for you? Is there any difference once you’ve actually sat down and begun to work?
A short story captures an episode - sometimes very short – from life. A novel - the kind I write mostly – is a string of such episodes linked together by some more or less uninteresting but necessary text. The ancients called this sort of thing Pons asinorum – the bridge for donkeys. The difference is that a story, if inspired, and depending on length, can be written in one session. A novel requires months, and often years. I wrote The Bride of Texas, a historical novel about Czech volunteer soldiers in the American Civil War, in seven years.
What role does the reader play in your work? Are you aware of a future reader when you write a novel? Has the reader's taste ever influenced the way you constructed a book?
Like most writers, I attempt to write so that I would enjoy the result myself. If I succeed in this, I submit the result for publication. The gist of the matter is that I don‘t like the result if it is only about myself, in which case I put it in my desk drawer and forget about it. I suspect that my literary taste is that of most more or less intelligent readers. In this sense I am always influenced by the taste of my readers.
In The Bass Saxophone, do you create characters and events that are based on personal recollections or is the story purely fictional?
The basic story of The Bass Saxophone was told to me by a friend of mine who had been lured into appearing with a German band by a promise that he would be able to play their bass saxophone – an instrument at that time absolutely unavailable, almost mythical. My country was occupied by Nazi Germany, so for a Czech young man to play with a German orchestra was unthinkable. The German musicians in the story are a nightmare created by my war experience.
What are the difficulties in changing a real character into fictional?
I have never found it difficult. Probably because that is the experience of every honest writer. Fictional characters are, to quote Goethe, always „Dichtung und Wahrheit“, in other words, Imagination and Reality: that cocktail we mix our characters from. And it‘s not richness, in the sense of many adventures, that makes a great writer. It‘s the intensity of his perceptions.
All of your novels vividly document the Czech experience. I wonder if you feel able at this point to create a fiction within another socio-historical context?
You‘re right: at the centre of my stories there are always Czechs. Only once did I attempt to write a novel devoid of them. It‘s called Pulchra and it‘s a prophetic SF Fantasy.
What was the inspiration for The Engineer of Human Souls?
My personal life experience. Under the Nazis, later under the Communists, and eventually in the personal freedom of democracy.
In addition to your roots in Prague, what other literary loves have shaped you?
As a youngster I used to write novels which contained fairly good descriptions of nature, moonlit nights, bloody sunsets and other similar moods - and abominable dialogues. That‘s because for lyrical vision you need very little life experience; many of the greatest poets died very young when they could not have much experience of life. Then I met my first girl friend, a carrot top of a shopgirl, and I read my first Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. The way the girl spoke was not the way Czech was written in books at that time, and the way Hemingway used his seemingly unimportant dialogue was an eye-opener for me. Somehow the two experiences merged and I was born again as a writer.
What has had the greatest influence on your political life?
The two dictatorships I happened to live under. My father was arrested by the police of both of them, and for the same reason: he was a Czech patriot. So dictatorships became the only object of hate in my life.
How does your concept of Central Europe relate to that of Milan Kundera?
I agree with Milan‘s concept. As writers we are different. He writes in the French, I in the Anglo-American tradition. He is a philosopher, I‘m just a story teller.
Do you feel like an emigre, a Canadian, a Czech, or just a European without specific nationality?
I am a Czech and I am a loyal citizen of Canada. Canada is the country where, for the first time in my adult life, I found freedom, including the freedom to be a Czech and at the same time a Canadian. My real country is the Czech language which is the tongue I learned from my mother.
How would you define “The Spirit of Prague''?
Prague was the idol of my youth when I lived in a small town called Náchod. When I was born, the town was on the Czech-German border, now it is on the Czech-Polish border, without moving from where it was when I saw the light of day there. Prague to me was the city of nightclubs, of jazz, of beautiful film stars. Later I met my wife there with whom I‘ve shared life for almost fifty years now.
With whom do you share a style?
I hope with nobody. As a young writer I was heavily influenced by Hemingway, later by Faulkner, but fortunately I applied what I learned from them on my own stuff. And then that shopgirl, Maggie, the redhead. Literary influences that stayed with me.
Some of your works make me remember Ralph Ellison’s interest in jazz, is he a favorite one ?
I wrote the first jazz novel in Czech literature. Ralph Ellison comes from the people who created jazz. That‘s an unbreakeable link.
What are you working on now?
Since the mid-nineties of the previous century I have been writing detective novels with my wife who, for this purpose, uses her maiden name Zdena Salivarová. So far we have published five, now we are working on our sixth, An Encounter in Toronto, with Murder. The comma is important.
Josef Škvorecký
Mohammadreza farzad, iranian poet and translator, works as world fiction editor of "Golestaneh" literary monthly and has introduced some masters of world literature to iranian audiences for the first time : josef skvorecky, josef heller, stig dagerman, leonard michaels, fernando sorrentino, eduardo galeano and many others. he has compiled and translated two books of short stories by italo calvino, fernando sorrentino.
mohammadrezaf@excite.com
