Beyond the Blues

THE HORN (243 pp.)--John Clellon Holmes--Random House ($3.75).

His name was Edgar Pool, and he was out of KayCee (Kansas City, that is). Of course, no one but a square called him Edgar or Pool or even Eddie. He was simply "The Horn," and, man, he could really blow. His deeds on the sax and his misdeeds on and off the bandstand made him a legend in his lifetime. The Horn was so hip that he just did not care. He had had all the booze, all the drugs, all the women. And he could blow his horn so marvelously that, through him, jazz achieved a new dimension. But he wound up broke, sodden drunk, embittered; soon he would be dead. In The Horn, way-out Novelist John Clellon Holmes tries to suggest the forces that destroyed Edgar Pool. He does not succeed, but in failing he has still written the most interesting novel about the U.S. jazz world since Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn (1938).

Death of a Poet. Author Holmes, a leading member of San Francisco's Beat Generation, makes the usual novelist's disclaimer: his characters are not real people. Still, reading his book, any sensitive cat might think of someone like Tenor Saxman Lester Young or Charley ("Yard-bird") Parker (who died in 1955 at the age of 35 because he behaved too much like Edgar Pool). The prototype for Geordie. The Horn's No. 1 chick, might be someone like Jazz Singer Billie Holiday. Actually, the resemblances are not important. This is a standard jazz story and, beyond that, basically the standard intellectual's novel about the artist in the U.S. who is somehow made to feel that he is alien corn--or horn. That Edgar Pool is a Negro has little to do with it. Implicit in the book is the notion that Jazzman Pool died the death of a poet who lived in a country that does not give much houseroom to poetry. Author Holmes comes no closer to proving this case than do the little-magazine intellectuals for whom it is routine cocktail-party chatter.

What is good in The Horn is its good try at isolating the serious jazzman's special brand of musical thinking. Like most good jazzmen, The Horn had the stuff in his blood. He taught himself to play because nothing else seemed to him more worth learning. His mother took in washing; his father was a railroad hand who advised his son to get some kind of steady colored man's job that carried a sure weekly wage. But Edgar Pool could hear nothing but the music within him. So he played, badly at first, but doggedly, and at last The Horn became so good that jazz fans and jazz pros alike revered him. There was always too much booze, and when it failed to give him the kicks he needed, the dope pushers showed another way. At the end, Pool lost his virility, his musical control, his desire to live. He was alone, even when the joint was crowded. And he lived just long enough to hear a young newcomer blow him off the stand.

Author Holmes knows his jazz world. One of his scenes -- a band rehearsal -- is as funny and true as any writing about jazz in a long while. The Horn is sententious and overwritten, but it still manages to be a plausible and moving novel.

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