3.The Sound Of Jazz To Come
There is only one Nation of Ulysses：the seriously unserious,
reverently irreverent, amoral moralists whose iconoclastic
assault on the received pieties of America place them in the
front ranks of social critics.
What went into the making of the legend？ There was their
erudition, their stock of language, their lore in urban sagas,
their ransacking of every literature, their knowledge of
archaeology and racial history- of kitchen midden and skull
measurements. There was the precision with which they knew the
homely and workday details of culture as well as the big
abstraction, the ease with which they moved about in history
from neolithic times to the report of the latest congressional
committee.
They were, as has been said, 'The last group who knew
everything'- and if they did not know quite everything they
could distract your attention from the gap by a wry witticism.
There were their strange songs, any one of which could have made
a lesser band's career and each of which had the knack of
standing the accepted doctrines on their head. There was their
polysyllabic language and their slow acid style that corroded
the sanctities. There were their conce, with their mumbled
messages which only the better souls understood. There was the
way they looked：shaggy eyebrows, ashen faces with unforgettable
eyes, rough clothes that hung too loosely on their shrunken
bodies, a shell of silence into which they seemed to have
retreated for good and from which only the most persistent
strategy could draw them.
They refused to be patronized or dismissed, turned into a cult
or giggled at. The important thing was to build a social
analysis that would encompass modern culture and make humankind
reckon with it.
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