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279 Chapter 16 THE HORN Edgar Pool blew methodically, eyes beady and open, and he held his tenor saxophone almost horizontally extended from his mouth. This unusual posture gave it the look of some metallic albatross caught insecurely in his two hands, struggling to resume flight. In those early days he never brought it down to earth, but followed after its isolated passage over all manner of American cities, snaring it nightly, fastening his drooping, stony lips to its cruel beak, and tapping the song. It had a singularly human sound—deep, throaty, often brutal with a power that skill could not cage, an almost lazy twirl on the phrase ends: strange, deformed melody. When he swung with moody nonchalance , shuffling his feet instead of beating, even playing down to the crowd with scornful eyes averted, they would hear a wild goose honk beneath the tone—the noise, somehow, of the human body; superbly, naturally vulgar; right for the tempo. And then out of the smearing notes, a sudden shy trill would slip, infinitely wistful and tentative. —JOHN CLeLLON HOLMeS, The Horn1 Often with ambitious novels it is difficult to trace the structure that lies beneath the events of the narrative or the descriptions of each character’s idiosyncrasies. With his brilliant, troubling testament to jazz, The Horn, however, Holmes wrote detailed notes on what he was attempting to do. Any reading of the novel has to be done with an awareness of what he considered its creative intentions as well as his book’s ultimate achievement. Holmes wrote at length about the conception of the novel in a letter on July 25, 1977, to Richard K. Ardinger, who had become interested in the Beats as a student and was compiling Holmes’ bibliography. THE HORN 280 The real origin of the book . . . lay in my feeling that the jazz artist was the quintessential American artist—that is, that his work-hang-ups, his personal neglect by his country, his continual struggle for money, the debasement of his vision by the mean streets, his ofttimes descent into drugs, liquor, and self destructiveness—all this seemed to me to typify the experience of our great 19th Century American writers: Poe’s loneliness, drunkenness and obscurity; Melville’s half-of-life anonymity; Hawthorne’s hermit years; Emily Dickinson’s spinster-bedroom full of immortal poems; Mark Twain’s wastage of so much of his talent on get-rich-quick schemes; Whitman’s decision to stay with the trolley drivers and whores and good old boys from whom his work took so much sustenance. The novel as it evolved, then, was to be about the American-as-artist.2 A month earlier Holmes had also discussed his specific aims in the book with the young academic Tim Hunt. I was working on three levels at the same time. I wanted each of these characters to represent an American writer, which is the only reason why I put those little epigraphs in front of each chapter. But I also wanted him to represent a particular kind of jazz musician, and I had to create a fictional character doing these things, so that Edgar Pool, for instance, is Edgar Allan Poe.3 It was an ambitious concept, and realizing that few of his readers would understand what he was attempting, Holmes structured The Horn as a kind of dual narrative, each of the narrative streams illustrating and complementing the other. each of the major characters was introduced in chapters titled “Chorus,” and the choruses alternated with chapters titled “Riff,” which told the novel’s story. To make his intentions clearer, Holmes preceded each Chorus with a quotation from one of the nineteenth-century American writers who had given him the novel’s theme. With the quotations he was suggesting an identification in each chapter between the jazz musician and the individual writer, and he tied the substance of the quotation as closely as he could to the chapter itself. Although the framework he constructed of Choruses and Riffs could have been difficult to follow, Holmes was very precise in his identification of the subject of each Chorus. The Horn is a very tightly written work. The quotation for the first Chorus is from Thoreau, and the name of the musician is Walden Blue. “Walden” is an obvious allusion to Thoreau’s Walden and “Blue” as clearly identifies him as a musician. He is a young [18.116.62.45] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 04:44...

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