Angry Young Jazzman

...His objective is not the novel of experience, so popular in this country, but the social novel, a commodity in very short supply with us...

...The fun is further heightened by various gaffes-for some reason most of Jeremy's pianos have 64 keys ("gleaming black and white friends") and his big number, "Memphis Blues," is described as a boogie-woogie piece, which would have surprised its composer, the late W. C. Handy, who disliked the style...

...Listening to these records comes under the heading of forbidden games and takes place at the home of a pal, where they are secretly stored...

...The result is a miasma likely to drive any spunky young man from home, which is precisely what happens to Jeremy...

...But it is not a convincing preparation for the career of the jazz pianist who emerges shortly, after some mildly picaresque adventures: the tuming-on-scene, sex (a near seduction by a young war widow picked up at the local dance hall...

...They work securely within a long, solid, respected and wellunderstood literary tradition...

...The friendship with Percy is the most viable force in Jeremy's life...

...Out of a meager allowance the boy accumulates half a dozen dated records by American jazz pianists (Hines, Sullivan, Waller...

...If Jeremy is not much of a piano player, he can qualify as a kind of genteel, musically oriented Bohemian...

...His writing is better controlled, more selective and mature...

...Not much here for the jazzman certainly...

...For all of their intransigence, the Angry Young Men are actually highly conservative writers, little prone to experiment, and, in varying degrees, masters of the social novel...

...The English writer, who still carries the credentials of the middle class, the public school and the great universities, is not equipped to compete in the area of raw and total experience...

...and a variation peculiar to the English novel, rescue of a farm girl whose virtue is at stake...

...Neither father nor son are prepared to understand each other...

...The adventures of a Jimmy Porter or a Jeremy Coleman may seem timid to an American reader conditioned to the willful and sophisticated delinquency of an Augie March or a Frankie Machine...

...In a British way, he is Beat...

...Here he manages to dodge the draft, falls in with companions who, for an English boy, might be described as odd, and becomes by turn a bar pianist and jazz player...

...the turning-on-scene, alcohol (warm beer in inordinate quantities...

...But his preoccupation might as easily have been with amoral young ladies or non-objective painting...

...These are most often the hero's, sometimes the father's, occasionally that of the maiden aunt, or of Percy Brett, an American Negro whom Jeremy meets in Paris...

...Yet Percy himself is an escapee, from Jim Crow and the musical (bop) revolution in America...

...Jeremy's home life is presided over by a naive spinster aunt and his emotionally arid, disciplinarian father...

...Alfred escaped into agnosticism, an uneasy patriotism and classical concordances, and his tragedy is that he cannot understand his son's need to escape from this substitute set of values...

...The hip reader is apt to find this fable fairly hilarious, if not an unwitting parody of the real jazz life, or perhaps its equally risable British equivalent...

...The protagonist, Jeremy Coleman, is the teen-age son of a widowed professor of classical languages at a British boys' school...

...His relations with women are desultory, shallow and loveless, his chief liaison being with a rootless British girl whom he meets in Paris and with whom he enjoys sex at regular intervals over a period of years...

...Jeremy is in flight from social origins which are provincial, academic and middleclass...

...If Wain is trying for a point, he may be saying that people are all involved in some sort of an escape, and that the old sustaining values -family, marriage, flag, religion, belief of any kind-offer less security than ever...

...Besides too many books in no longer spoken languages, the home contains a piano, upon which Jeremy receives the customary instruction and occasionally tries his hand at a little blues...

...contributor, "Jazz Review," "Record Changer" One might wish that English novelists would stop writing on two subjects that excite and often inflame their imaginations, American gangster life and American jazz, about which they know very little and are painfully ill-equipped to treat...

...Pianistics aside, Jeremy is a credible and sometimes engaging young protagonist...

...They dance the Twist and cry down his cool mainstream jazz with clamors for rock-and-roll...

...Consequently, English novelists seem to develop while ours wear out...

...Jeremy Coleman is a pretty aimless sort of chap, but one very much with us today, and to project him convincingly requires no little mastery of the art of the novel...

...His latest novel succeeds despite the handicap of a weak background and is a minor addition to the literature of social protest (and change) that has come out of Britain since the last War...

...Strike the Father Dead is written in the first person, though from several points of view...

...Clearly, Wain has not set out to document jazzways, explore the mysteries of musical creativity, or arrange surprises...

...The jazzways Jeremy pursues are a necessary escape...

...Outside of the house, Jeremy's life centers around the Spartan regime of a public school, heavy doses of Greek and Latin, and much bicycling...

...Jeremy's father, Alfred, is the focal point of the conflict, and Wain places it nicely in perspective by showing us the father as a victim of his father...

...To pick at factual errors and misinformation, however, is to miss the main point of the book...

...To Jeremy, lying in bed, Percy seems the superior human being, poised, noble, almost princely...

...Jeremy becomes Percy's musical associate and friend, and defends him against a gang of racist Teddy Boys in the climactic action of the book...

...For one thing, he has spent too many impressionable years learning English and acquiring a rounded education...

...When she at last marries a Midlands merchant, Jeremy looks on less with regret than annoyance that his weekly fun will be interrupted and new arrangements made necessary...

...Nor is the general reader likely to learn a great deal about jazz of any variety, domestic or British, or the strange forces within it which seduce young men like Jeremy Coleman...

...Jeremy's final reconciliation with Alfred takes place in the hospital following the street fight with the Teddy Boys, and is at best a truce...

...As the book ends we see Jeremy nearing middle age and out of touch with the new crowd that patronizes the dance halls...

...The latter was a country minister who believed in God and empire, and preached hell and damnation...

...His background is a social no man's land that lies somewhere between the authoritarian climate of the Victorian age and the confusion that began with World War II and continues to our own day...

...With these experiences under his belt, plus a couple of punches on the nose, Jeremy drifts to wartime London...

...At a stretch he might be taken for a cousin to Jimmy Porter of Look Back in Anger or Arthur Seaton of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning...

...The friendship with the Negro strikes Alfred as strange, but his son's defense of the man commendable...

...Neither is he obliged, with each new book, to produce a virtuoso performance wrung from personal experience...

...Fortunately, Strike the Father Dead escapes the fate of such recent English fiction about jazz as If You See Me Comin' and World In a Jug, mainly because of John Wain's considerable competence...