The Bass Saxophone by Josef Škvorecký

First published:Bassaxofon, 1967 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Satire

Time of work: A late summer and early autumn during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia

Locale: A fin de siecle hotel in Kostelec, a Czech town in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, an eighteen-year-old jazz enthusiast who seeks political and artistic freedom
• Lothar Kinze, the leader of a small German orchestra that roams through towns and villages along the war’s sidelines entertaining the German communities throughout occupied Europe
• The Girl from Moabit, (Snow White), the vocal soloist in Kinze’s orchestra, a beautiful girl with a Swedish face and blonde hair falling to her shoulders like broken swan’s wings
• Horst Hermann Kuhl, the omnipotent Nazi authority
• The bass saxophone Player, a mysterious sleeping figure in a hotel room, who reclaims his place in the orchestra

The Novel

This novella has an autobiographical significance, for when he was sixteen or seventeen, Josef Škvorecký played a tenor saxophone rather badly fora band called Red Music—modeled after a Prague group called Blue Music.He and his companions, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, did not know that in jazz, blue was not a color. Although the name itself had no political connotations, their music did, for jazz was condemned by the Nazis for being a creation of American black musicians and Jews. Jazz had to go underground, becoming, in effect, a protest against the Nazi’s restrictions on creativity.

In The Bass Saxophone, Škvorecký tells the powerful, apocalyptic story of a jazz-obsessed lad, the narrator, whose passion for this “forbidden music” carries him into the center of an almost hallucinatory experience. Written in the first person, the novella shifts between the present and the past, mixing personal reminiscence with social and political history, fact with symbol, in a stream-of-consciousness dynamic.

As the story begins, at twilight, the young narrator is near a hotel in Kostelec, a town occupied by the Germans. A frail old man struggles off a gray bus with a big black case, and when the clasps fall open, the narrator sees a monstrous bass saxophone. He is urged to help the old man carry the instrument to a hotel room, where a man sleeps with his mouth open. Suddenly, the boy finds himself locked in the room, with nothing for company except the sleeping figure and a solitary fly which is about to die in the bell of the bass saxophone. The boy hears shouts from an adjacent room and recognizes the voice of Horst Hermann Kuhl, the Nazi chief of Kostelec—the very man who had tyrannically confiscated one of the narrator’s American jazz records some time earlier. Unable to contain his curiosity, the narrator plays the bass saxophone, frightening himself with its powerful, primitive, melancholy sound. The voice of Kuhl is silenced, but the sleeping man does not awake.

The narrator is then surprised by a haggard little fat man and a procession of circuslike freaks. These characters turn out to be Lothar Kinze and his traveling orchestra. They offer to allow the lad a practice session with the fascinating saxophone. The narrator accompanies the orchestra to an auditorium, where he discovers in playing with the group that they lack imagination and genius. He is startled when Kinze and the blonde girl, the girl from Moabit, who is the band’s vocalist, plead with him to play in the concert that evening, despite the evident threat this poses to both the narrator and the orchestra should the boy’s real identity become known to the Nazis. Kinze disguises the narrator in the orchestra’s garish green and purple uniform with white shirt and orange bow tie. After the practice, the narrator shares a meal with the orchestra, whose members launch into personal anecdotes which have a strange reality to counterpoint the dreamlike state of their collective appearance as a Spike Jones comic band.

At the concert, packed with Nazi dignitaries, the narrator ruminates about his own presence in this world of absurdity, danger, and disguise. Suddenly, he feels a hand on his shoulder and a loud, hoarse voice ordering him backstage. He recognizes the man as the sleeping figure from the hotel room. This stranger is the real bass saxophonist, come to reclaim his position in the orchestra. The boy listens as the bass saxophonist plays and is transported into a jazz hallucination, from which he is awakened by the abrupt arrival of Kuhl. The boy is recognized by Kuhl, who orders him to leave.

Upon arriving at the hotel room, the narrator experiences another mysterious vision. Left without a key to this puzzle, he walks the dark streets, acknowledging the reality of his own experiences and reaffirming his spiritual alliance with Kinze’s orchestra as it moves across war-torn Europe. Dream, truth, and incomprehensibility are his mementos.

The Characters

Taken in the context of Škvorecký’s foreword, the anonymous male narrator is evidently a projection of the author. He is a youth with a romantic imagination for whom jazz is both a form of radical protest against political and artistic censorship and an expression of his youthful vitality and liberation from fear and self-pity. He knows the perils of indulging himself with the music, but he cultivates this indulgence with the same sort of deliberate air that he adopts for his foppish dress.

Škvorecký creates the myth of youth. When the narrator remembers his sister Anna, he remembers, too, the young Nazi soldier who would write her poems in a blue notebook as he sat on a riverbank. When the narrator thinks of his love of jazz, he recalls his jeopardy at the hands of tyrannical Kuhl and all those European jazz-players who were swept underground by the laws against this “impure” music. The narrator is alert to the rurality of his home, which robs youth of its softness. There is also a strong note of fatalism in him, for his outlook on life is a bleak reconciliation to the idea of butchery. The specters of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek hover over Europe, and nothing in life appears to be certain, except oppression. Nevertheless, there is jazz—a euphoric release from the gathering storm clouds over Europe.

The other characters reinforce an apocalyptic vision of the evil consequences of dictatorship. Kinze and his fellow musicians are “types” of grotesque dehumanization. Kuhl is a monstrous personification of tyranny. The bass saxophone player is simply one more sad musician on the periphery of a disturbed world.

Because of its palpable, surreal effect on the story, the huge bass saxophone becomes one of the most vital characters. It is both fact and symbol, forcing others to struggle with its primitive power while leaving behind abstract waves of testimony to man’s proud spirit of survival and creativity. The instrument is monstrous, yet seductive; grotesque, yet hauntingly beautiful. It is marked by physical decay, yet is a sort of polyrhythmic phoenix—ominous, tragic, incapable of extinction. It grows in the imagination while generating memories of the troubled history of man.

Critical Context

An Editor’s Choice of The New York Times Book Review and Book of the Year of The Guardian, The Bass Saxophone was Josef Škvorecký’s first North American success in translation. Its satire is acute, its sense of atmosphere vividly compelling. Surreal images proliferate as the story grows before fading like music.

In a broad sense, Škvorecký can be placed in the category of emigre writers, for he is a writer in exile from his native land, who uses a foreign language by which to express his preoccupations. Although The Bass Saxophone is set in a Czech town, it does catch the feeling of social and political displacement—a theme that is enlarged in Zbabelci (1958; The Cowards, 1970) and Pribeh inzenyra lidskych dusi (1977; The Engineer of Human Souls, 1984), for in these two novels, Škvorecký describes conditions in a small town in northeast Bohemia during periods of German Fascism and Soviet Communism. Other connections exist as well: The narrator and protagonist of The Cowards is Danny, a twenty-year-old zoot-suited, idealistic but innocent tenor saxophonist; the same character, now a middle-aged academic living in Canada, narrates The Engineer of Human Souls.

In all of his fiction, Škvorecký proves to be a realist—though not the type of social realist normally associated with East European writing, because he refuses to create an apocalyptic hero who sets a prescription for moral or political action. Škvorecký is against dogmatic ideas, and although he can sometimes be smug about his own vision, he does not believe in programs for human action or nature.

The grotesque elements of The Bass Saxophone bear affinities with the black comedy in The Engineer of Human Souls and are derived from a European tradition that encompasses Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and Gunter Grass. In the novella, the grotesque takes the form of characters, situations, and props that are both pleasantly ridiculous, as well as bizarre, frightening, and monstrous. The grotesque elements constitute a structure of estrangement for the narrator, who is strongly affected by a world that ceases to be reliable and which instills in him a fear of life rather than of death. The surreal moments fuse the fantastic and the satiric aspects of the grotesque, so that, while the narrator experiences moments of provocative vitality, he is also pushed along the borders of terror and loss.

Bibliography

Balliett, Whitney. Review in The New Yorker. LV (October 22, 1979), p. 193.

Davies, Russell. “Dreams of Dixieland,” in The Times Literary Supplement. No. 3977 (June 23, 1978), p. 694.

Maloff, Saul. “Music and Politics,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIV (January 14, 1979), p. 7.

Prescott, P.S. Review in Newsweek. XCIII (January 22, 1979), p. 76.

Škvorecký, Josef. “Some Problems of the Ethnic Writer in Canada,” in Canadian Literature. Supp. 1 (May, 1987), pp. 82-91.

Windsor, Philip. “Jazz as Truth,” in The Listener. C (August 17, 1978), pp. 220-221.