war pursued its accustomedncourse: on the twelfth of Augustneight captured American fliersnwere executed (heads choppednoff); the fifty-first United Statesnsubmarine, Bonefish, was sunkn(all aboard drowned); thendestroyer Callaghan wentndown, the seventieth to bensunk, and the Destroyer EscortnUnderhill was lost. That’s a bitnof what happened in six days ofnthe two or three weeks positednby Galbraith. What did he donin the war? He worked in thenOfBce of Price Administrationnin Washington. I don’t demandnthat he experience having hisnass shot off. I merely note thatnhe didn’t.nFussell did.nRecognizing the true horrors of warnas experienced by those actually seeingnRealni SocialismusnJosef Skvorecky, professor of Americannliterature at the University ofnToronto, expatriate Czech novelist,none-time jazz saxophonist, survivornof two lethal dictatorships and severalnchildhood diseases, casualty of then”Prague Spring,” and an immigrantnmuch at pains not to offend thenCanadian anti-anticommunist establishment,nreminds us that Utopiasnmay be unavoidable, but that smiling,nlissome young women can donmuch to make us forget that.nIn his collection of essays, TalkingnMoscow Blues (Toronto: Lestern& Orpen Dennys), Skvorecky nevernlets us forget that he’s anBohemian. The Czechs, once anSlav warrior people of Jan Hus andnJan Ziska fame, fought their lastnarmed battle in 1620, when thenHabsburgs took over their country,ntheir name, and their history.nSince then, their way of standingnup to the world has been unique:nthe Good Soldier Svejk (in the Westnoften inexplicably Germanized tonSchweik), created by beer-swillingnJaroslav Hasek, laughed at both thenGerman and the Russian vision ofncombat, like the American Marinesn”sliding under fire down a shell-pockednridge slimy with mud and liquid dysenteryns—t into the maggoty Japanese andnUSMC corpses at the bottom, vomitingnas the maggots burrowed into their ownnfoul clothing,” he also unveils the brutalitynof war in another way. There is anhaunting photograph in his “Postscriptn(1987) on Japanese Skulls” that wasngiven a full page in Life magazinenduring the war. It is of a well-dressednyoung woman sitting at a desk writingnto a loved one in the Pacific while shengazes upon a Japanese skull he has sentnher as a memento. The picture isnshocking now, but it wasn’t shockingnthen, not because we have changed fornthe better, but because this was war,nreal war, war truly understood, and thisnphotograph is a pedestrian record ofnthe hatred and brutality that accompaniesnwar and that is too often forgottennby the euphemists, dissimulators, andnREVISIONSnthe Glorious Past, the GloriousnPresent, and the Glorious Future.n”When I suggested to the ladyncensor,” writes Skvorecky of hisnown Svejkianism (“I Was Born innNachod”), “that I could replace itn[the lewd non-word ‘bosom’] byn’tits’, as that was what the workingnpeople called it, she threw me out ofnher office.”nNever one to miss a good comparison,nSkvorecky points to thenstrange similarity between Nazismn(which he experienced as a teenager)nand communism (which he hadnto endure and flee as a maturenwriter). His “Two Peas in a Pod”nrecalls the convergence of Nazi andnCommunist marching songs of thenlate 20’s. {Sprung auf die Barikaden,nder Tod/ besiegt uns nur,njar nur!/ Wir sind die Sturmkolonnennder Hitlerdiktatur sang thenSA, to Sprung auf die Barikaden,nheraus zum/ Buergerkrieg, janKrieg!/ Planzt auf die Sowjetfahnennzum blutig-roten Sief. sung by thenCommunists.)nFor a laughing Czech, however,nSkvorecky exhibits little patiencenwhen he asks, “Are Canadians PoliticallynNaive?” In “Natasa and thennnDisneyfiers. Fussell’s discussion of Japanesenskulls is not about atrocities, butnabout truth.nBut if war is brutal and obscene, itndoes not follow that all men whonparticipate in war are made brutal andnobscene by it. Fussell’s essay on “Modernism,nAdversary Culture, andnEdmund Blunden,” is a marvelousncritique, proving the superiority, to myneyes anyway, of the “Moderns” —nthose who “can embrace the past andnnot just feel but enjoy its continuitynwith the present,” such as EdwardnThomas, Robert Frost, Edwin Muir,nLouis MacNeice, Conrad Aiken,nElizabeth Bishop, and EdmundnBlunden — to the destructiven”Modernists” — a category that encompasses,nin various ways, OscarnWilde, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Hulme,nJames Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, T.S.nEliot, William Carlos Williams, e.e.ncummings, Wyndham Lewis, EzranPeacemakers,” he answers by recountingnthe true story of NatasanBayerova, a Czech tourist translatorndenounced to the Communist authoritiesnby a Canadian studentn”peace delegation.” (Ever ready tonsacrifice for the revolution, the Canadiansnfound Natasa’s views ofnrealni socialismus potentially damagingnto the “good relations betweennthe two countries.”) Bayerova,nfortunately, managed to escapento the West—no thanks tonCanadian peacenik Ronnie Evanoff,nor Michael Lucas, the Bohemia-bornnpresident of the Canada-nUSSR Association, who repeatedlynsent information to the Czech police.nCanadians (and indeed manynArnericans) are politically naive. Yetnas Skvorecky so aptly points out, annideological solution to this conditionnis bound to produce cures that arenmuch worse than the disease. Pollution,nracism, social and ethnic strifenare ills, and young people especiallyndo need a framework for their idealismnand their yearning for heroism,nbut creating a synthetic, unfalsifiednconsciousness is a problem yet to bensolved by mere humans. (MS)nDECEMBER 198813Sn