I HAD ALWAYS admired Josef Skvorecky but had not met him until we inherited his books from Lester & Orpen Dennys. Josef, who had been used to Louise Dennys’s gentle ways, handled the transition with some suspicion. Not only were we a very different publishing house, but relations between Czechs and Hungarians had not been particularly amicable during the past several centuries. After a long conversation about Central European history, we decided on a new entente that would ignore both their Masaryk and our Kossuth and we got down to trying to decipher his international contracts, an exhausting effort cheered along by the arrival of some late funds from various agents and sub-agents who had imagined Josef had vanished with L&OD and were delighted to find him with us.
I already knew his formidable career as a dissident writer. His first book, The Cowards, published in 1958, was judged “decadent” and “reactionary” by the Czechoslovak censors. He was one of several writers the regime thought were dangerous.
He and his wife, Zdena Salivarova, came to Canada in 1969, shortly after the Soviet army put an end to Alexander Dubček’s “Communism with a human face.” His books banned, the jazz he loved prohibited, some of his friends jailed, Josef could not have continued to live and write in Czechoslovakia, though he was published all over the world. The New Yorker named him “one of the major literary figures of our time.” The Bass Saxophone, his first book translated into English, was a modern classic. “Superb, masterly,” wrote Graham Greene. It was Greene who had first told his niece, the barely twenty-four-year-old Louise Dennys, about Skvorecky and suggested she should try to help him get published in English. Since she couldn’t interest any of the established houses in publishing a Czech émigré writer with no track record in English, Louise ended up creating her own small press with antiquarian bookseller Hugh Anson-Cartwright to publish Skvorecky. After she joined Lester & Orpen, adding Dennys to the marquee, Josef followed.
His The Miracle Game and The Engineer of Human Souls are among the best, most enduring books in world literature. Both are set in Czechoslovakia under occupation, and although Engineer’s Smiricky leaves his native land, he carries his country with him. Both books are deeply rooted in human relationships. Josef’s Lieutenant Boruvka novels were wonderfully realistic, hilarious, engaging, and, for me, full of the daily idiocies that characterized living under Communism. Very Central European. When I was a child, I had read Jaroslav Hašek’s famous satire The Good Soldier Schweik in Hungarian and loved it. Boruvka was the good soldier Schweik’s Soviet army successor.
Josef and Zdena started 68 Publishers in Canada specifically to publish writers who could not be read at home. Josef was soft-spoken but determined, gentle but with a will of iron. When he disagreed with a particular editorial comment, he would become quite taciturn. In one of his letters to me about such comments, he asserted that his way of presenting his story was exactly the way he wished to present it, and while he appreciated our editor’s comments, he was not going to change anything. Naturally, I acquiesced.
In our long, meandering conversations, we used to talk about how the role of writers living in totalitarian countries differs from that of writers who live in democracies, such as Canada. There was, he believed, a moral obligation that writers in Central and Eastern Europe shared: that of being witnesses to the crimes committed by their rulers. However, in order to stay alive, they, though all their readers knew the truth, had to disguise what their characters perceived. Thus they shared perilous secrets with their audience—secrets the regime suspected but couldn’t prove. That’s why writers are considered dangerous in countries with no free speech.
Josef had a talent for being very still and suddenly bursting into laughter. In some ways an anachronism, a light-hearted, jazz-loving Bohemian in the rather barren Canadian university landscape—he taught creative writing—he was a great writer who had landed quietly in our midst and enjoyed not being recognized.
In Prague he would have been stopped in the streets and hugged and begged for autographs, as he was during his infrequent visits after the Iron Curtain was raised in 1989. He showed me a video of his trip to Náchod, Bohemia, his old hometown—meeting people he had known in his childhood, a dinner in his honour, speeches, compliments—but he was suspicious of some of the people who had come to celebrate him. Some of them had been Nazi sympathizers, some had been Státní bezpečnost (Czechoslovakia’s singularly nasty state police) informers. He felt uneasy in Prague even while autographing books for adoring fans. Now he viewed the video with a mixture of pleasure and wry amusement.
He didn’t want to go back. He said he preferred teaching at the University of Toronto, where no one cared that he was a famous Czech writer. There is a hilarious short story, “According to Poe,” included in his When Eve Was Naked. Josef is teaching a class of would-be writers. While listening to their creative work of unvarnished pornography—they mistakenly believed that he had asked for a “lovemaking story,” not a love story—Josef reflects on his own rather more restrained efforts at lovemaking when he was about the age of his students.