The Higher Jazz.

Edmund Wilson edited by Neale Reinitz University of Iowa Press, $34.95, 239 pp.

David Castronovo

Do we need an unfinished, posthumous novel from a great literary critic and essayist? This one has been brought to life by Neale Reinitz, an emeritus professor of English at Colorado College and an accomplished Wilson enthusiast who found some 207 pages of handwritten draft, dating from 1942, in the Beinecke Library at Yale. Reinitz has made good sense out of the fragment and Wilson's notes, giving the unfinished novel shape, allowing it to live without hiccupping footnotes, supplying it with chapter titles and instructive endnotes - not to mention the present title. The results for the reader are substantial and ultimately satisfying. This is - let's be blunt - no fragment like Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon or Hemingway's Islands in the Stream. But it's a valuable contribution to the American novel of manners - a branch that can always use an addition of quality - and an invaluable book for those who love Wilson's style and his curiosity about the social antagonisms of his time.

The book is a piquant, often sarcastic group portrait of 1920s New Yorkers. The cast includes composers, playwrights, and wits, as well as the old monied crowd who hung out with them in speakeasies, at parties on the East Side, and for weekends at splendid country homes on the Hudson. The protagonist, Fritz Dietrich, is something of a composer himself. A Yalie from a very well-to-do Pittsburgh family, he has easy access to the patrician world with its dissipated reprobates and women in crisp, linen summer dresses. In tracing scenes from Dietrich's life, Wilson is dealing with a kind of shadow self, what he would have been without great literary gifts, mythic labors, and considerable self-knowledge. The oblique autobiographical study presents a frank picture of American status and pleasure-seeking. What is most clear and fine is the solidity of Wilson's descriptions of class indicators - a living room, a man's suit, a rich woman's attitude about fifty dollars. Observations have the precision of social history rather than the fabulousness of a romance like The Great Gatsby; and yet this devotion to actuality is not at all like the empty catalogues of fashion and furniture in glamour-sex-money novels. Wilson is here and elsewhere essentially a reporter, but a reporter with total command of the material details and social context. Wilson supplies only the most resonant detail, be it from a burlesque show or a tony musicale.

The twenties - with its excitement, Prohibition drinking, and animated talk - was Wilson's defining decade and occasion for some of his best writing. His journal The Twenties had a cast of hundreds and the story of a young journalist finding his way. His two masterpieces about the era - The Shores of Light and The American Earthquake - were exhilarating coverage of books, shows, and daily spectacles around New York. His novel I Thought of Daisy, published in 1929, was a recollection about a poetess (Edna Millay), a jazz baby (Daisy), and assorted friends from Wilson's days in the Village and at Princeton. And in 1946 he came out with Memoirs of Hecate County, a sweeping novel about class and politics in the twenties and thirties. The Higher Jazz is often as vivid as Daisy, but not as good as the best section of Hecate County. It lacks a gripping central conflict such as the one between the cultivated art critic and a dance-hall girl in Hecate County. Wilson never writes a bad sentence, but the new book still does not hum in the full novelistic sense. For someone who retold plots so movingly in critical works like Axel's Castle and made the history of socialism into a kind of novel in To the Finland Station, Wilson was generally too discursive in his fiction. Situations, yes; tales, rarely.

Fritz Dietrich, like Wilson himself, loves modernism and wants American creators to rival Europeans by combining the discipline of high art - of the Schoenbergs and Picassos and Joyces - with the flavors of popular culture. Thus "the higher jazz." But many of the well-educated, talented young of the era are undone by conventionality and trendiness. The old pull of class pride, leisure, and comfort stalls careers. And those unaffected by the older, overconfident America of Yale's Skull and Bones and literary amateurism - the children of immigrants - are at the mercy of a newly emerging fun culture: the speakeasy, the wisecrack, the smart ad, the tempo of Broadway and Madison Avenue. Wilson's Dietrich is depicted as the composer who knows what is happening to him and his friends, but he has none of his creator's ability to resist. Upper-class absurdity and pathos are brilliantly served up, but Wilson's protagonist merely observes the dispiriting scene. Married to stylish, pleasure-loving Caroline Stokes, Dietrich meets a hilarious collection of people ruined by their self-indulgence. Wilson goes after these types with his well-known eye for waste and irresponsibility, an eye trained by his own earnest father. Repeatedly warned as a boy about "weltering in a Dead Sea of mediocrity," Wilson uses all his wit and critical sense to evoke an enervated world.

In The Higher Jazz, Wilson, the man of the twenties, shows us the demons that tempted him throughout his life: snobbery, dissipation, ennui, knowingness. While a disappointment as fictional narrative, these pages memorably crystallize Wilson's own fears and aspirations. The social studies in the book are important additions to Wilson's account of a divided and confused nation.

David Castronovo is author, most recently, of Edmund Wilson Revisited and editor (with Janet Groth) of From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson. He is professor of English at Pace University in New York City.