The dry martini tone
Rupert Christiansen
THE HIGHER JAZZ by Edmund Wilson
University of Iowa Press, £16.95, pp. 240
In his cool, sharp and tensely erotic col- lection of short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), Edmund Wilson produced what John Updike has described as
a work of exemplary merit, the most intelli- gent attempt by an American male to drama- tise sexual behaviour as a function of, rather than a suspension of, personality.
A significant tribute from someone with strong claims to the same accolade, and one which has been widely endorsed Wilson himself described Memoirs as 'my favourite among my books'.
So why does fiction (aside from the cal- low I Thought of Daisy, published in 1928) otherwise play so small a part in Wilson's amazingly fecund and various half-century of literary achievement? Several answers suggest themselves. One is that he was inhibited by the cautionary tale of Scott Fitzgerald, his more naturally gifted sem- blable and friend, whose chronicles of their youth overshadowed Wilson's own. Anoth- er is that his historical and critical instincts were so much stronger than his faculty of poetic imagination, and he showed no sign of being able to make up material which wasn't drawn directly from life.
But the more immediate explanation is that he was demoralised by the failure of his over-ambitious plan to write a large- scale novel focused on his own experience of the ideological wars of the 1930s. Sketches for The Story of Three Wishes, as he titled it, survive tantalisingly, but his motivation to realise them could not sur- vive either external financial pressures or the outbreak of the second world war, when his interest in the subject became subsumed by the epic survey of socialism published in 1940 as To the Finland Station.
Of the fragments that remain, the most substantial is The Higher Jazz, an unfin- ished, unsatisfactory but fascinating por- trait of fashionable Manhattan in the late 1920s, which was Wilson's attempt to sal- vage at least one of his plot-lines for a novella. Until the appearance of this admirable edition, it has lain neglected, in handwritten manuscript, among Wilson's papers in the Beinecke Library and now that it has reached print it provides an en- gaging appendix to his voluminous oeuvre. Very little is offered in the way of plot: the book is largely a series of loosely con- nected episodes, narrated by Fritz Dietrich, a sceptical, ambitious thirtysomething with a Yale education, a dull job in business and a yen for the new music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Newly but not very happily mar- ried, he moves in the heavy-drinking, fast- living circles of the younger East Coast intelligentsia and feels a Spenglerian sense of doom hanging over his era. The 1929 crash duly arrives, but its destructive effects are not so much financial as spiritual: in the final paragraph a venerable old com- poser (based on Charles Ives) announces: We're all bleeding to death ... we're bled of
our emotion and we're bled of our money ...
every man and every woman has got to hold on to him- or herself in order to staunch the flow.
Here, if anywhere, is the theme or leit- motif, although it is not one that has been coherently or emphatically developed. Such characters and scenario amount to a thinly disguised and lightly scrambled version of Wilson's own life and times. George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jascha Heifetz make appearances. Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley are unmistakably Pictured, in and out of their cups, as are Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (the latter described as 'a sea anemone that looks pretty when the tide's in, but if she didn't have the tide she'd be just a dull little knob of jelly'). Most significantly, Dietrich con- tains a lot of Wilson himself, mixed with elements of his friend, the music critic Paul Rosenfeld, even though there is no hint of Wilson's contemporary sojourn in a sanato- rium, recovering from nervous collapse. There is some brilliant scene-painting (a burlesque show, a weekend house-party, an avant-garde concert), and much wit and acumen in the way these figures and their behavioural tics are presented and dissect- ed. Throughout, the sophisticated dry martini tone slips down a treat. If you've never read a word of Wilson before, you'll be impressed and amused, but the vitiating Problem for his regular readers will be the sense that he dealt with the 'Jazz Age' in so Much more depth in the essays and reviews contained in volumes like The Shores of Light — in comparison, its fictional incar- nation seems two-dimensional, tentative and aimless. No wonder he felt he had to rub it all out and start again for Memoirs of Hecate County. Nevertheless, Wilson's robust and sensi- tive intelligence makes every page of The Higher Jazz worth reading, and its merits have been nobly honoured by the excel- lence of this edition, produced with a care to detail which puts our own slapdash pub- lishers to shame. Neale Reinitz's notes and introduction are lucid and helpful, the type is elegant, the paper creamy. Whatever his ambivalence about the qualities of the text, Wilson himself would surely have approved.
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