I've been re-reading Rafi Zabor's great jazz novel
The Bear Comes Home again, so out of curiosity I decided to see what I could find out about the original serialization of parts of the book. Zabor was a contributor of reviews and articles to the (now defunct) magazine called
Musician, which in its November 1979 issue ran the first installment of his work-in-progress about a talking and jazz-playing ursine. The last installment appeared one year later, at which point a note was appended indicating that "a full novel is intended... and we'll keep you posted." As it turns out, that "full novel" wouldn't appear for another seventeen years.
As it happens, PDFs of most of the serialization are available on the
World Radio History website (a few pages of one chapter seem to be missing) and I've made JPEGs of four of the opening pages. It's amusing that the editors used as an illustration a mock-up of a (fictional) article from the
Village Voice that is referred to in the text.
Although the novel seems to cover a time period of only a few months or maybe a year or two, the musicologist Tim Storhoff has
noted that technologies are described in the final version, published by W. W. Norton in 1997, that either didn't exist in 1979-1980 or hadn't yet become commonplace: compact discs, for example, and laptop computers. (The bear, in the book's first sentence, dances on the sidewalk to "a disco cassette.") In addition, living figures who appear as characters in the opening chapters died during the writing process, notably the drummer Steve McCall, whose death (in 1989) was incorporated into the Norton edition.
Much of the
Musician text made it into the final version substantially unchanged, but there is at least one section, involving a talking lion, that was cut (perhaps wisely). I'm electing not to read it, but it's there for the curious.
