Charles Reznikoff's The Manner Music: A Book of Not's

Charles Reznikoff's The Manner Music is out-of-print. A posthumously published novel, forgotten amidst the wealth of his poetry, and undervalued (in terms of readership and critical examination), the opportunity to read the novel is a privilege. The circumstances by which the publisher of Black Sparrow Press John Martin discovered the book in 1976 makes a greater difference in the reading:

I have recently gone through Charles Reznikoff's lifetime accumulation of manuscripts, and was thunderstruck to find a carefully typed, completed novel, which he apparently never mentioned to anyone, or submitted for publication. It was, I think, composed in the early 1950's…

I believe this novel was written in response to a letter William Carlos Williams wrote Charles in the late 1940's, at a time when Charles' career was at a low ebb, urging him to continue writing at any cost, and if possible to write a novel…

It is a novel about practically nothing. There is no protagonist, no antagonist; the accepted diagram of rising action-conflict-denouement as presented in Fichtean curve is rejected. What we have are two central characters who meet over the years. An unnamed narrator who sells clothing between the coasts and composer Jude Dalsimer, who at the novel's beginning works in Hollywood writing movies for music, and who, as the novel progresses, loses his job, returns to his wife in New York, writes music privately in their cramped apartment, and ultimately by the end, wifeless and homeless, no music at all. It is as much a "Hollywood Novel" as it is a "Clothing Distribution Novel" (The Manner Music, as a point of interest, may be the only novel set in Hollywood that is completely unfilmable). Reznikoff resists the plotting points of overdrive, resists the overdramatic manipulations of coincidental materializations or character in emotional penury or even the regurgitated clichés of the struggle of friendship, commitment, loyalty. And there are many opportunities for these contrivances of tension, the scene-and-summary, volley-and-serve, expectations, but they are all resisted: The loss of Jude's job in Hollywood, the failure of musical recognition, the break-up of his marriage, the infrequent and casual manner in which the narrator meets Jude, or the former's plain dislike of the music:

"Jude Dalsimer may have been a great musician. I can't say for I know little about music. I know the great names, of course, that everybody knows and listen to their music with respect and sometimes with pleasure. But Jude Dalsimer's music just puzzled me." (13)

"Jude seated himself at the piano and played a few notes of as disagreeable music, if it could be called that, as I ever heard. "(95)

"When it became clear that nothing I would hear could move me much, I stopped listening and amused myself by watching Jude's face as he played." (89)

So what is this novel, then, if it is not so many things? It is a novel about seeing, about the raw, random and seemingly impressionistic psycho-sociological pieces that make men whole. The Manner Music is a accumulation of Jude's experiences as told to, and filtered through, the narrator; experiences which inform his music, experiences which excite his sensibilities as a composer; experiences which seem to translate well into a self-referential mode of writing for the author as stated in an interview with L.S. Dembo:

"This discussion about testimony and events being lived through brings me to a warning I'd like to make. I suppose I'm an "objectivist" and I have my own "formula" for writing, but no formula can be a guarantee for good writing. I think behind any poem there's a background of experience and emotion that explains its moving quality. Sometimes even the poet himself may have forgotten the background. It's a mystery."

Of course, the artfully artless aesthetic in which Reznikoff employs, the bald exactitude of description, the lack of judgment, the clarity in the words, the fact of the matter, makes for difficult reading. If no one description or action subordinates the other, the reader realizes, after so long enduring the easy falsification of "reality" in fiction, that this method of seeing, experiencing, causes a strain - not because the prose is shoddy, poor, or even wooden, but for all the reasons the reader's sensibilities have been calibrated into accepting and expecting the fantastic. Wayne C. Booth declares, "To pass judgment where the author intends neutrality is to misread. But to be neutral or objective where the author requires commitment is equally to misread, though the effect is likely to be less obvious and may even be overlooked except as a feeling of boredom" (Booth, 144).

In his review of Reznikoff's novel By the Waters of Manhattan, Lionel Trilling sees this style, or lack of style, as more effective:
Certainly it is not great prose in the sense that it is exciting or compelling. It makes no pretensions to this. Perhaps it is merely prose as we should expect at the least from every writer - each word understood and in its right place; each word saying exactly what it should say and not forced beyond its meaning. It has a quality of privacy which is startling. It has been written by a mind that… stays with itself, unintimidated by stale ways of seeing, makes public objects fresh in the freshness of its privacy.