Talkin’ Moscow Blues by Josef Skvorecky (review)

HUMANITIES 169 Perhaps the most important chapter for the present purposes is that on Frye's criticism between the Anatomy and The Great Code, entitled 'The Function of Criticism at Any Given Time: Literature, Education, and SOciety.' As Balfour discusses the background of The Critical Path (1979), he refers to some of the occasional talks on education that have since been printed in Northrop Frye on Education - for example, the speech after the People's Park episode, which he quotes from a manuscript in the Pratt Library but forgets to cite. He insists that Frye's criticism is not merely academic, let alone 'aestheticist,' because Frye's commitment to education is a commitment to democracy in the most basic sense. Here we return to Frye's sense of 'habit' as enabling knowledge, and to his dream of that happy day when all the Lord's people are prophets. (THOMAS WILLARD) Josef Skvorecky. Talkin' Moscow Blues. Edited by Sam Solecki Lester and Orpen Dennys. 367. $17.95 paper We read Josef Skvorecky's fiction, written originally in Czech, through the excellent English translations of Paul Wilson. But Skvorecky, who makes his living teaching English literature at the University of Toronto, writes much of his non-fiction in the language of his adopted city, and all but a few of the essays in Talkin' Moscow Blues were written in English, about - as the title page says - 'literature, politics, movies and jazz.' If there is a uniting element, it is the experience of having been a Czech intellectual iri the mid-twentieth century. The real heart of the book, dealing directly with that experience, is the first essay, 'I Was Born in Nachod.' It is really a fifty-page condensed autobiography, written with as much gentle irony as indignation, in which Skvorecky tells of his boyhood and youth in a small Czech town under the Nazi occupation, of his coming to manhood under a different dictatorship - that of the Russian-dominated Communists - and of his attempts to write what he saw was the truth and to live by such writing in a country where all the arts were dominated by a capricious censorship, and the threat of prison or at best of long years of enforced clandestine publication hung over every writer. The narrative ends with the author's escape and his coming to Canada, where he is free to write what he wishes and his wife runs a press that prints books by Czechs that cannot appear in Prague. Readers of Skvorecky's novels, and especially of The Engineer ofHuman Souls, will recognize events they have encountered already in fictional form, and will observe how near Skvorecky's fiction runs to life. But that does not diminish one's respect for his skill as a writer, since the memoir moves to its own non-fictional rhythm as a reflective narrative. Perhaps its most striking feature is the way it shows the joyin life persisting under 170 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 inhuman tyrannies. People, Skvorecky shows, have an amazing way of learning to live their own lives whatever the circumstances. Yet those stubbornly lived lives are inevitably deprived in many ways, and much rage over the fact goes into the essays in Talkin' Moscow Blues, particularly when Skvorecky is discussing those amiable liberals - and especially Canadian ones - who have no experience of Communist states yet assume that left-wing dictatorships are in some way better than right-wing ones. One of the best essays, 'Two Peas in aPod,' shows how Nazism and Communism during the 1930S resembled and even influenced each other in terms of propaganda and organization. And 'Are Canadians Politically Naive?' should be widely read by people who come to easy conclusions about countries they have never visited. The other essays differ in their points of takeoff, but most of them lead to similar conclusions. When Skvorecky celebrates his enthusiasm for jazz or writes appreciatively of the novelists he admires, he is likely to bring the argument round to his own experience, and his experience -which suggests a one-track mind to those who have not shared it - is of the difficulty of sustaining any kind of creative freedom in a...