Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  By the time I knew him, he was no longer at the musical centre, though no man who was about to launch Bob Dylan into the big time could be regarded entirely as yesterday’s man. Another former New York jazz-lover who became my best American friend, not merely made it his business as a journalist to keep in touch with all generations within reach, old and young, but did so with a natural, good-tempered, surreal spontaneity that captured them all. This was the man who, among other things, had just discovered Lenny Bruce, and made himself election agent for the great bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s campaign for the American presidency, which neither of them regarded entirely as a joke, namely Ralph Gleason. New York Irish, he had left the city to become showbusiness and popular music columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that prided itself on not belonging to William Randolph Hearst, and on columnists who were not surprised at anything they came across in a wealthy, cool and courteously dissident city. He lived in a modest house on the upper hillside in Berkeley, full of collections of records, tapes, musical projects, print in various formats and (generally young) visitors, all kept in working order by his tough and protective wife Jeanie. I treated it as a refuge from Palo Alto, driving there in the first car I ever owned, a 1948 Kaiser, which I had bought for $100 and sold at the end of the summer quarter to a mathematical logician of world distinction for $50.

  For music and showbusiness the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1960 was a hip place, a good market but on the margins. Everyone played the town, but nothing much had come out of there, except the first self-conscious wave of white Dixieland music. It was the sort of place where elderly masters such as the great jazz pianist Earl Hines settled down, secure in a good, solid club public. Even Duke Ellington accepted a club date rather than a concert there, thus providing me with the unforgettable occasion, the first since 1933, of hearing the band in the milieu for which it had been designed, namely a space with social drinkers where the real measure of a band’s impact was not applause, but the sudden silence as conversations ceased at the tables.

  San Francisco, though not yet established as the Gay Republic or the hinterland of Silicon Valley, had a national profile and a recognized presence on the American scene, quite apart from the sensational beauty of its bay. It was a liberal city, though less politically radical than its neighbour Berkeley became in the 1960s, proud of its dissidents (not least Harry Bridges). Even then it was relaxed about drugs. By California standards it had freightcar-loads of history, the (then) most famous Chinatown, the memory of the Maltese Falcon, and a reputation as the most prominent centre of avant-garde literature in the 1950s, the ‘beat’ movement, fashionable enough for Ken Tynan to congratulate me on going there. ‘There’ was the area around Broadway, North Beach, a sort of Pacific St-Germain-des-Pres, where I would meet Ralph at the local Flore, and Enrico’s, facing the City Lights Bookstore, greeting and being greeted by the personalities of the city as they strolled past. Unlike the New York Broadway, on this Broadway people strolled. And across the Bay Bridge there was Berkeley. In the middle sixties ‘the white sons of middle class America’ briefly made it the quintessential scene of hippy youth and ‘flower power’, incidentally generating (as Gleason noted) ‘the first American musicians, aside from the country and western players, who are not trying to sound black’. 5 Ralph made himself the mouthpiece for the Haight-Ashbury music, groups such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, although he did not by temperament belong on the drug scene. Indeed, he gave up smoking grass. He belonged to the generation of intellectuals who smoked pipes, as I then did also. Never in good health, he died in 1975 aged fifty-eight.

  For three reasons he became my window on America. Living in the world of jazz, an outsider music, he caught the vibrations of coming events which escaped others – the changing tone of the sounds that came from the black ghetto, the white kids’ avant-garde which discovered the force of the black city blues beat, the anticipations of the Berkeley student revolt which became national after 1964, global in 1968. These were not things noticed elsewhere in the summer of 1960. Nobody I knew on the faculties of Berkeley, still less the distinguished but stuffy Stanford, suggested I might be interested in going to the political camping weekend which the Berkeley leftwingers were organizing that summer, because none knew it was happening. Ralph did, who had no academic or recognizable political connections, but to whom students talked. Not that Ralph was much into organized political radicalism or moved in the circles of Bay Area leftism. The Symbionese Liberation Army was much more his style, a bizarre reductioad absurdum of Bay Area millennialism, remembered (if at all) for first kidnapping and then converting the daughter of William Randolph Hearst Jr. He applauded and entertained the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech rebels, admired the mass oratory as well as the disorganized sincerity of their leader, the somewhat farouche physics student Mario Savio, and, after his expulsion, sent him and his wife/partner to me at Birkbeck where he hoped we might find something for him. (J. D. Bernal’s physics department obliged, but academic life and scientific research were clearly not his bag, and he returned to life among the cafés and head-shops on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, within reach of his old triumphs.)

  The second reason why Ralph was a marvellous introduction to post-sixties America was that, an immigrant into the most culturally utopian corner of California himself, he could understand the aspirations of its young and their cultural revolution. Besides, though the least infantile of men, he was not himself a character to grow old. He could draw on an inexhaustible reservoir of enthusiasm, which I could not share, even for rock groups. Once again, this made him wonderfully sensitive to the vibes of coming times. It was he who helped one of his young followers to start a rock magazine, he who found the title for it from a record of the Chicago blues-singer Muddy Waters, Rolling Stone, he, the least commercial of men, who thanks to it and to what had been a small jazz and fringe satire label Fantasy Records found himself with more money than he had been used to and in a position to send whisky and cigars to old friends.

  Last, but not least, by style and temperament Ralph, himself inconceivable anywhere except the USA, made his country easier to understand, even though its civilization was in some respects stranger to Europeans than any other except the Japanese. He had what seems to outsiders the characteristic American combination of sudden loves and hates, sentimentality in feeling (but not in the spoken word). Nevertheless, he appeared to be immune to the three built-in hazards of American cultural life: self-absorption, the tendency to ponder what it means to be American and intellectual heaviness. Bullshit phrases such as ‘American values’ and ‘the American dream’ were not to be found in his dictionary, as they were not yet to be found in the private speech of the USA. He took Americans as they were. Rhetoric belonged only to their public life and the officially approved versions of love. I do not think he would have regarded even an American utopia as complete without a corrupt Chicago alderman here and there, a lecherous millionaire radio-evangelist or two, a few centres of passionate counter-cultural dissidence even from utopia, and establishments like the one I saw outside one of the main casinos in Reno, Nevada, called the Sierra Club: Horse Book and Kosher Delicatessen. On the other hand, living in the world’s great cities of the plain, he would expect God to refrain from destroying this Sodom, because the ten just men required to save it were always to be found there. He was one of them.

  Ralph belonged to that unique product of the US, the corps of observers, mostly journalists, the best of them probably the generation of the 1930s–50s, which was also that of the glories of American vernacular song-lyric and musical, who reported on their country with love, contempt and raised eyebrows. He steered me to others like him. I could not have had a better introduction to Chicago, a city which no lover of blues could possibly miss.

  I reached Chicago by a drive from the Pacific to the east, recognized since the Beats celebrated it as the initiation rite of the true American rebel. I shared expenses with three very un-Kerouac
-like students from Stanford. By European standards there is not enough variety in the vast spaces of mountain and prairie for enjoyment, at least for those not zonked out of their mind. This was difficult when four people drive round the clock in shifts, though it made me sufficiently sleepy to barely avoid crashing the car into an oncoming vehicle on the endless straight highway somewhere near Laramie, Wyoming. Chicago itself, especially when experienced in August from a small YMCA room without any form of cooling, still seems the hottest place I have ever been to. Intolerable in the heat of summer as in the cutting winter winds, it symbolizes the characteristic American belief that physical limitations are there to be overcome by technology and money if the objective – in this case trade and transportation – justifies the effort. Few great cities are less suitable for mere unassisted human living.

  This effort was not enough to make Chicago more than the Second City, however hard it tried. Even in jazz, where it started out with the advantage of attracting the best musicians and singers from the Mississippi delta, it lost out to the Big Apple, and in organized crime it lost its primacy after Al Capone, though the mob was still important enough. It did remain the capital of the city blues, but unlike its globally known child rock and roll, Chicago blues, like the gospel sound, belonged to the endless, uniform, run-down black ghettos of the South and West Sides. It was still the art of poor Southern immigrants, created in neighbourhood bars, store-front churches and even the open-air street-market. It had one national chart-topper, Mayor Daley, the last and greatest of the city bosses, who could guarantee the Cook County vote to any Democratic contender, which proved lucky for Jack Kennedy, whose election it determined. As I write, the city is still run by his son.

  And yet, just this gave it a certain sense of local community. I cannot believe that my admired Studs Terkel would have built his career in another city. It is characteristic that the first of the marvellous books which established his world reputation as the recorder of ordinary lives was Division Street: America,6 a wonderfully designed oral history tapestry of Chicago in seventy voices named after one street in the Near North Side of the city – the pleasantest part in 1960 – commissioned by my friend and publisher Andre Schiffrin as part of a series on ‘the world’s villages’. In some ways I prefer it to his later, more ambitious and better-known multi-voice compositions on Hard Times: The Oral History of the Great Depression, Work, The Good War and the rest. When I met him he was forty-eight and as always, running a daily personal radio programme on a local station, readings, musical commentaries, anything, especially interviews. His unique gift was the capacity to make people forget that they spoke into a microphone and that anyone was listening to their voice except a little clowny guy in a bow tie, who seemed to hear what they wanted to say, and who seemed to know about good times and bad times. As indeed he did, his career as an actor and TV figure having been broken by the anti-communist witch-hunt. After a spell as publicity man for black Chicago musicians, who knew what prejudice was, he found a berth in local radio, where big money was not needed and therefore had less say. Still, thanks to the mutual self-defence pact of Chicagoans against the headline-grabbers outside, nobody raised the spectre of communism against him when he became an established personality. He was, after all, part of that small community that exists in every big city, of reporters, commentators, urban autobiographers and other bar-room philosophers and watchers which recognizes its members.

  Was this the best way for the foreigner to discover the USA? The men and women I met with or through people like Ralph Gleason and Studs Terkel were not ‘middle America’. They were people such as the majestic gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, whose press agent Studs had been and who trusted few men and even fewer whites. Religion among African-Americans is both the deepest faith, a public platform, a competitive art and a profit-making industry. Mahalia, an ample woman in her large bourgeois home, secure for the moment from the constant need of showbiz performers to put on an act in public, combined the quiet confidence of the soul close to Jesus with that of the successful pro. They were people such as ‘Lord Buckley’, then in the last months of his life, a plummy-voiced combination of Victorian circus ringmaster, hipster and reciter of Bible and Shakespeare in flawless black street-corner language, who played the two a.m. set at the Gate of Horn. They were people such as Bill Randle of Cleveland, who had introduced Elvis Presley to northern audiences, disc jockey by profession, amateur scholar of radio history, Indians and other Americana by vocation. (Why Cleveland, that endless strip along Lake Erie, has played such a large part in the promotion of rock and roll, still puzzles me.) The least one can say is that the America I got to know through such men and women was not boring.

  The academic America which framed my professional experience of the USA over forty years was nothing like as good an introduction to the country, if only because the lives of university teachers, villagers within their small national and global villages, are pretty much alike in most developed countries, and so are the lives of students. American academics establish relationships with newcomers with great ease, since geographical mobility is built into their career structure, as, indeed, it is into the local lifestyle. The USA remains a country of men and women who change places, work and relationships to a far greater degree than elsewhere. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions universities were self-contained communities attached to small and medium-sized cities not much concerned with academic affairs, at least until the last third of the century, when it was discovered that the information revolution had turned universities into major generators of economic wealth and technical progress. They were communities into which immigrants used to university life could be easily, if superficially, integrated, provided they spoke enough English, which by the 1970s had become the usual international second language. An Indian physicist at Cornell, brother of a former student at Cambridge, told me: ‘If I were to take a chair in Britain, I would always feel a foreigner. I don’t feel a foreigner here, because in a sense everyone is a foreigner.’ Permanent communities largely composed of transients develop patterns of instant sociability, neighbourliness and everyday mutual help, but, as communities, do not tend to throw much light on what happens outside.

  Looking back on forty years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: to know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though Marlene joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the USA teaching, reading in its marvellous libraries, writing or having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa Monica, but what I learned from personal acquaintance with America was acquired in the course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America , the best book ever written about the USA, was based on a journey of not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the USA the same as his.

  III

  If written today, de Tocqueville’s book would certainly be attacked as anti-American, since much of what he said about the USA was critical. Ever since it was founded, the USA has been a subject of attraction and fascination for the rest of the world, but also of detraction and disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the Cold War that people’s attitude to the USA has been judged essentially in terms of approval or disapproval, and not only by the sort of inhabitants who are also likely to seek out ‘un-American’ behaviour in their own fellow-citizens, but also internationally. It substituted the question ‘Are you with the USA?’ for the question ‘What do you think of the USA?’ What is more, no other country expects or asks such a question about itself. Since America, having won the Cold War against th
e USSR, implausibly decided on September 11 2001 that the cause of freedom was again engaged on another life-and-death struggle against another evil but this time spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any sceptical remarks about the US and its policy are, once again, likely to meet with outrage.

  And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on approval! Internationally speaking, the USA was by any standards the success story among twentieth-century states. Its economy became the world’s largest, both pace- and pattern-setting, its capacity for technological achievement was unique, its research in both natural and social sciences, even its philosophers became increasingly dominant, and its hegemony of global consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It ended the century as the only surviving global power and empire. What is more, ‘in some ways the United States represent the best of the twentieth century’.7 If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by migrants, almost certainly America would be the preferred destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move to a country other than their own, certainly of those who know some English. As one of those who chose to work in the USA, my own case illustrates the point. Admittedly working in the USA, or liking to live in the USA – and especially in New York – does not imply the wish to become American although this is still difficult for many inhabitants of the United States to understand. It no longer implies a lasting choice for most people between one’s own country and another, as it did before the Second World War, or even until the air transport revolution in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e-mail revolution of the 1990s. Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or multicultural lives have become common.