The Horn
Kerouac may have coined the term “beat generation,” but John Clellon Holmes was its first novelist, chronicling the frantic lives of way-cool hipsters in 1952 in Go and introducing the world to the beats in a famous 1952 article in the New York Times Magazine. His more talented contemporaries may have gone on to greater success, and certainly Holmes’s death, in 1988, was not accorded anywhere near the press given to the recent demises of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Still, at its best, Holmes’s writing gets into the same gritty, breathy, stream-of-hipness groove that characterizes Kerouac’s best “subterranean” writing.
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Holmes’s prose is a lyrical explosion of beautifully seedy urban imagery and insider hep-cat jazz speak, bopping along to its own syncopated rhythms. Plunging us completely into this hopped-up jazz world, Holmes writes about “the thick-fingered bassists with a bad beat; the whorehouse professors in celluloid collars; the dance-hall elegiasts too drunk to see….The nervous tenors who rushed the drums, and frowned, and blew short choruses; the coked-up clarinets and u-h-h-h groaning piano men and Juilliard theorists….The show-off guitarists in flashy sports shirts, the wind-breaking drummers addicted to Juicy Fruit, the cool flutists tootling six-bar breaks on ‘Fine and Dandy,’ and the severely flanneled trumpeters who were too hip to blow….The girl intermission pianists, resolutely ingenue in chokers and not much decolletage, who invariably played a three-minute version of the ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ and tippled brandy between sets; the belters with a belly, the sexy wenches with whiskey in the voice, the pert silky torchers.”
The reasons Richard was tempted by Holmes’s novel are obvious–this is a classic, and the characters are exceedingly well drawn. The disconnected story line, as the Horn’s friends and competitors recount his history on the last night of his life, suggests in theme and structure August Wilson’s flashback mystery Seven Guitars. Poole is a particularly fine creation, the down-on-his-luck alcoholic genius who’s consistently alienated those around him by always having to have it his way and who “would be a slave to no one, not even the genius inside him.” Victor J. Cole’s performance is breathtakingly realistic, laced with biting humor and desperation, suggesting a more energized version of Dexter Gordon’s world-weary jazzman in Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight. And much of the ensemble, directed by Ron O.J. Parson, is effective as a variety of jazz musicians.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): The Horn theater still by Suzanne Plunkett.
