The Manner Music

Charles Reznikoff And The Manner Music

Many readers have found authors that mean a great deal to them even if they are not widely known. For me, one such writer is the American poet and novelist Charles Reznikoff (1898 -- 1976). I first read Reznikoff long ago and return to him frequently. I had read Reznikoff's posthumously-published novel "The Manner Music" probably in the early 1980s and have just reread it.

"The Manner Music" is a quiet, sad, deeply personal novel set in Hollywood, New York City, and Chicago. The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a hat jobber who works on the West Coast. The major character of the book is the narrator's friend from childhood, Jude Dalsimer, a composer of difficult modern music. The narrator and the composer both represent different sides of the author, as Reznikoff pursued his poetry and took various jobs, including selling hats, in order to earn a living. The two other important characters in the book are Lucy, Dalsimer's unsympathetically portrayed wife, a teacher who has little interest in his music, and Paul Pasha, a Hollywood producer for whom Dalsimer works for a time.

The simple story shows the relationship between Dalsimer and the narrator over the years. The narrator was a poet in his childhood but in adulthood followed the mundane path of earning a living. Dalsimer's life is his music; but it is unintelligible to everyone, including the narrator. He supports himself working for Pasha in Hollywood, but when Pasha must let him go, Dalsimer becomes unemployed and falls into inexorable personal and emotional decline.

Most of the book is a series of conversations and observations between the two men and occasionally the other characters. The two men get into many discussions, separated by years and in different places. The discussions are frequently about Dalsimer's music, which the narrator hears politely but does not understand. The narrator's voice is often interrupted by an intalicized section which represents Dalsimer's own thoughts or experiences as recounted to the narrator. These sections frequently are prose poems. Indeed much of the book shows scenes and people derived from Reznikoff's poetry, for those readers familiar with it. The pacing is slow and deliberate. Although the writing is deceptively simple, the book requires close reading to follow the flow between the sections.

Both Dalsimer and the narrator are inveterate walkers. Both men, and the author, have an eye for simple, descriptive detail. Through the characters', Reznikoff shows the homes and beaches of California, the elevated trains of Chicago, and most importantly the streets and people of New York City. The book shows the poverty and bleakness of the Great Depression in brief vignettes of people and places, of the Automats, and the New York Public Library. The book offers a portrayal of loneliness, both of the two main characters and their environs. In one scene, the narrator, a single man in his late 30's reflects on a potentially missed relationship.

"A somewhat good-looking woman in her thirties was eating dinner by herself. She and I glanced at each other across the restaurant. She stood up to go at last, and I watched her leave, a cumin seed of sadness in my heart."

The novel has heavily Jewish themes and characters and alludes frequently to anti-Semitism in the United States and in Europe. The main theme of the book is about loneliness, the difficulties of creativity, and compromises between the creative life and the mundane. With his friend's self-destruction, the narrator reflects at the conclusion of the novel.

"Jude would have said, I suppose, that the going was for him as important as the goal. I gathered as much from his hymn of Zeno the Stoic -- or whatever Jude called it. I If Jude had wanted to write his music and had not done his best to do so, he might have lived longer and more pleasantly but, as he might have explained, it is as if one enlists in an army or perhaps is drafted: he must fight and may fall but may not desert. Most do, of course. I did, I suppose. And, of course, one may win and then live as victors live. But in the arts, and sciences, as in so many activities, not only of men but even of seeds of flowers and of trees -- excuse the triteness! -- many are called and few chosen. For others, such as Jude, in the line of Tennyson I still remember, "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Until the heart, or worse, the mind cracks."

"The Manner Music" is a rare book that has stayed with me over the years and may also stay with some others. The book deserves to be in print and remembered.

Robin Friedman