The mural in the lobby of the New York hotel where the Algonquin Round Table held forth shows how “self-assured” its members were, the New Yorker recently reported. “Sullenly self-regarding” may be more apt. Edmund Wilson, who knew them all, found the so-called Vicious Circle “rather tiresome,” with a single exception. The one he liked was Dorothy Parker, who appears as Kay Burke in The Higher Jazz, a work of fiction, now published for the first time, that its author started and abandoned almost fifty years ago. For all its flaws, the book is worth a read — although for reasons the author may have never intended.
The Higher Jazz reveals, as few novels about the 1920s do, the snobbery that was as endemic to that gaudy era as booze was. Indeed, drinking served primarily to anesthetize the snobs from the pain of their mutually inflicted wounds. They surely needed some relief.
Despite his approval of Parker and, to a lesser degree, of Robert Benchley (portrayed as “Nick Carter”), Wilson gives both a working over in this roman a clef of the Smart Set. “All that crowd,” Wilson’s almost comically pompous narrator Fritz declares, “are just incredibly provincial. It’s amazing when you consider that they’re known all over the country as demons of sophistication and that even in New York they’re considered devastating wits.”
To Wilson, who was, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, “the opposite of smart, the opposite of frivolous, the opposite of amusing, the opposite of brilliant,” the glib Algonquinites probably did seem silly. Between his birth in 1895 and his death in 1972, Edmund Wilson proved a man of immense literary accomplishment. “The American Plutarch,” in Alfred Kazin’s words, Wilson was not only the greatest critic of his time but a journalist of distinction, a diarist, playwright, and poet. The mentor of F. Scott Fitzgerald and sparring partner of Vladimir Nabokov, he wrote on a staggering range of subjects, and his literary criticism, rooted in history and biography and free of academic taint, represents an awesome achievement.
Wilson “wanted to know it all,” Gore Vidal observed, and so he studied and reported and wrote on the symbolists in Axel’s Castle (1931), on Soviet communism in To the Finland Station (1940), and on the American Civil War in Patriotic Gore (1962). Cantankerous and defiant, he faced down the censors of his short story “The Princess with the Golden Hair” and, in trouble for failing to pay his taxes for several years running, denounced the even more ominous agents of the Internal Revenue Service.
Perhaps it is not surprising that a man who could find George Orwell “not free from a certain provincialism” would regard the Algonquin wits as light-weights. Worse than that, they seemed to lack sophistication. And to a certain kind of intellectual in Wilson’s time (and ours), lack of sophistication is a hanging offense. The irony is that the literati of the 1920s were regarded, and regarded themselves, as the very epitome of sophistication — and none more than Wilson’s own insufferably condescending narrators.
In all his novels — I Thought of Daisy, Memoirs of Hecate County, and now The Higher Jazz — Wilson offers a series of urbane protagonists who do not so much describe their friends and lovers as compare them unfavorably with one another. “Beside Liddie,” Fritz says of Caroline, whom he nonetheless decides to marry, “she seemed blunt, almost coarse; beside Grace, she seemed sensitive and human.”
No one quite measures up to Fritz’s standards, and most of life’s great moments — meaning the cocktail parties he orchestrates with such care — also disappoint. Fritz manages to lure both Cole Porter (“Eddie Frink”) and George Gershwin (“Jehuda Janowitz”) to one such soiree, but still “it wasn’t the party I’d planned.”
Wallowing in disappointment, Fritz manages to seduce his wife on the overcoat of her ex-husband, but even this exercise in one-upmanship doesn’t satisfy. Things went reasonably well, he concedes, but all “was not perhaps precisely in harmony with the kind of thing at which I had been aiming.”
What Fritz has to be so supercilious about is never clear. A buyer of pharmaceuticals, he hobnobs with writers and artists but only “fooled around at writing plays” and talks of composing music.
Fritz yearns for an authentically American music that draws on the vitality of popular song and the originality of jazz, but he seems capable only of expecting others to produce it. What he feels sure he has is a superior sensibility. He defends Schoenberg, despises Paul Whiteman, and (with Charles Ives as “Ed Rockland”) attends Sunday concerts of the League for New Music. Even these he doesn’t much enjoy because, dragging Caroline along, he worries the whole time about whether she will embarrass him. “I was at first afraid that Caroline would see how inferior [a given piece of music] was,” Fritz says, “then more afraid that she might like it.”
If Wilson had used a lighter touch, this could have been exquisite satire. Unfortunately, the author himself takes it seriously. Wilson was a great literary critic, but his longer works of fiction are, at best, interesting historical documents. At worst, they are studies in snobbery whose author seems to have no idea of the origins of the cruelty he catalogues.
His characters could have told him, if he’d have listened. Wilson’s people are, to a man, rootless intellectuals who have left Gopher Prairie or the stuffy confines of some enclave of the Genteel Tradition for raffish Bleeker Street. In that self-conscious flight from convention, they have cast off the bourgeois values of their hometowns and are quite pleased with themselves for having done so.
Transplanted to hipper environs, however, they remain as judgmental as the boobs, bluenoses, and Babbitts they were so eager to escape. Having thrown aside morality, they replace it with aesthetics, about which they are merciless. In their world, bad taste is the grievous sin — quite literally unforgivable. Because the cultivation they seek is almost always the result of education and exposure, class plays a huge role in its development. And wherever Wilson’s characters are from (Fritz is a Pittsburgh “patrician”), they have gone to the best schools and had opportunities those they look down on lack. They are not reluctant to press their advantages. The superciliousness of these preening aesthetes is thus revealed — to the reader, if not to Wilson himself — for the snobbery, pure and simple, that it is.
His Dorothy Parker character Kay “had a distinctly developed social sense,” Fritz observes, which may be why he likes her. He is never completely sold on his Robert Benchley character Nick, however. Nick, Fritz says, “is provincial too: Yale [Skull] and Bones provincial — which is the biggest kind of provincial possible — where it’s impossible to know you’re provincial, so that it’s impossible to escape.”
Surrounded by such rubes, Fritz decides he must take up “a noble stand of disassociation from the age.” By this act alone, Fritz demonstrates just how mired in it he is. This is such amusing material, it’s too bad Wilson couldn’t have played it for laughs.
Alan Pell Crawford is a writer in Richmond, Virginia.
