A style for every story
Francis King
THE BRIDE OF TEXAS by Josef Skvorecky Faber, £15.99, pp. 606 Like those dust-jackets which boast that this or that author has been 'nominat- ed' for the Booker Prize, the dust-jacket of this novel boasts that its author, the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, was a 1982 Nobel Prize nominee. Many are nominated but few are chosen. Nonetheless, it is not diffi- cult to see from The Bride of Texas how Skvorecky might still be seen as a Nobel Prize candidate. Here is a book which is `big', not merely in size but also in grandeur, complexity and variety of theme. It is executed with an unflagging energy.
Unfortunately, there are times when, wilting under Skvorecky's route march through the American Civil War as seen largely through the eyes of its 300 or so Czech combatants, one wishes that he had not been quite so eager to present his cre- dentials as a 'great' novelist — rather like those contestants for music prizes who pre- sent their credentials by embarking on all- inclusive programmes of, say, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy and Prokofiev.
Skvorecky tells a huge number of differ- ent stories, about the horror and heroism of battles fought with little regard by the generals for the carnage involved, about the callous treatment of slaves, about love- affairs, usually doomed, both in the New World and the Old, about tyranny and freedom. To tell these stories, his writing is as protean as his subject-matter. There is the lushness of the romantic novel in the accounts of soldiers yearning for the women now lost to them. There is the grotesque humour of Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms in some of the scenes of combat — as when, for example, a Union soldier is commended for having bayoneted a Confederate, when in fact the dead man merely tripped over the bottom of another combatant, assumed to be dead but now beginning to lumber up from the ground, and so bayoneted himself. There is the raw, bleak tragedy of The Red Badge of Courage in the evocations of a war fought, like most wars, in a constant state of physical and mental confusion. There is the cool, steady tone of the historical essay in the discus- sions of the extent to which it was possible for former slaves to enjoy freedom if they did not own property, and of the basic rea- son for the conflict — slavery or, as Marx- ists would prefer to believe, economic rivalry between North and South.
I have always felt that the advantage of being a novelist rather than a biographer or a historian is that it is so much easier to imagine how things happened than to dis- cover how they really did. But Skvorecky has not been content to rely on his formidable imagination. His novel carries a list of his main sources as long as might be found at the close of many a biography or work of history. Of his Czech combatants, only one did not have a prototype in real life.
Two love stories, involving siblings, are central to the novel. Lida (Linda on her arrival in the States) is a beautiful, passion- ate, self-willed girl, who becomes pregnant by the son of a wealthy landowner back in Europe. The landowner, determined that his son should not marry her, pays for her and her family to emigrate to the States. There she heartlessly lays siege to a planta- tion owner's son in the South and eventual- ly succeeds in getting him to marry her. Divorced from him, she marries a rich, gullible Union officer. Her brother, Cyril, falls in love with a black woman who has been the concubine of the plantation owner's son, but the couple are doomed, such is the rigidity of the slave system, never to find happiness together. Another important character is Lorraine Henderson Tracy, author of humorous novels for young women, one-time fiancée of the real-life General Ambrose Everett Burnside, whom she jilts at the altar, and eventual wife of a well-known professor of philosophy. Her novels are highly success- ful; her husband's sole attempt to write one is universally derided. However, when she is a very old woman and her husband is long since dead, her books are forgotten, whereas his novel, with its intimations of Thoreau and Emerson, has suddenly been `discovered' by the academic world. Such is the capriciousness of fame, Skvorecky neat- ly conveys.
As a story-teller there is absolutely no question that Skvorecky is highly gifted.
But he all too often ruins his stories by breaking off in the middle of them, to resume them many pages later, only to break off and resume again and yet again. No doubt to justify these constant digres- sions, he prefaces his book with that well- known quotation in which Sterne confesses that 'I fly from what I am about, as far and as often as any writer . . . yet I constantly take care to order affairs that my main business does not stand still in my absence'. But Tristram Shandy, almost totally devoid of plot, is quite a different proposition from The Bride of Texas, which is crammed with it. Even the most attentive reader is likely to lose the thread of one incident as Skvorecky presses on him more and more threads out of the tangled web which he is weaving with so much energy, self- confidence and resource.
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