The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Daladier had opened his defense by boldly prophesying, “We shall see, in the course of this trial, where, by whom, and in what manner France was betrayed,” adding, “The hatred of novelty, the hatred of intellectual daring, the hatred of everything modern led the French Army to its ruin.” Blum, with logic and wit, pointed out in his opening speech that, because of the trial’s peculiar restrictions, “in the debate on the responsibility for the defeat, the war itself will be left out.” Gamelin, charged with having let the Army deteriorate, refused to open his mouth in court. This put the prosecution’s Army witnesses in a stew and thereafter they threw the court into fits of hilarity; General Mittelhauser, of the Superior War Council, confessed that he got his Army statistics from reading the newspapers; General Lenclud admitted that he had not known an air squadron was attached to his corps during battle; a Colonel Perré kept referring to an aviation program which turned out to be an idea he had once had in mind but never got down in writing. The court president was named Caous, which sounded enough like “chaos” to serve. About a month after the trial began, while the court was still in a state of confusion, the Nazi Party’s Völkischer Beobachter clarified the issue by pointing out editorially that the trial which had been intended to pin the war guilt on the Third Republic was actually proving the Men of Vichy guilty of the defeat. Soon afterward, the Frankfurter Zeitung called Riom “a stupid farce” and Hitler angrily declared in a broadcast that the Riom trial made clear that “the French mentality was really impossible to understand.” On March 19th, the German radio announced that M. de Brinon, Vichy Ambassador to Berlin, had notified Marshal Pétain that the Riom trial must be suspended. The tapestries on the Riom Palais de Justice walls were put back into their boxes; the prisoners were put back into their fortress. On April 14th, the Journal Officiel announced Pétain’s law suspending the hearings of the Supreme Court at Riom. On the same day, without any explanation, Pierre Laval was suddenly moved to the top of the Vichy régime with the titles of Chief of Government and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Interior, and Propaganda, and with the right to pick his subordinates. Before a delegation of legionaries, the Marshal suddenly said, speaking of his relationship with Laval, “There are no longer any clouds between us. When M. Laval speaks, it is in agreement with me, and when I speak myself, it is in accord with him.” A few days later, Laval spoke up and said, “I wish for a German victory.”

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  During the night of November 7th that year, the American Army invaded French Morocco. To President Roosevelt’s last-minute direct appeal to Pétain to respect the traditional friendship between France and the United States and to aid our invading troops, the Marshal answered, in his last show of authority, “I have always declared I would defend our empire if it were attacked; you should know that I would keep my word.… We shall defend ourselves: this is the order I am giving.” When Admiral Darlan, in North Africa, attempted to excuse the Marshal’s vain, tragic order by saying that Pétain spoke under dictation, the Marshal proclaimed, in a crescendo, “To dare say that I speak or act under the menace of duress is an insult to me!” On November 11th, twenty-four years to the day after the armistice of 1918, the Germans, in a race to seize the French fleet before it was scuttled in the waters of Toulon harbor, began to occupy Pétain’s Unoccupied France. Pétain, with Dr. Menetrel at his side, dictated to Hitler’s delegate, General von Rundstedt, who came to Vichy with the grave news of the occupation and with an adequate number of troops, a spirited, inflammatory protest. The protest was handed to the Vichy press. For an hour, Vichy titillated with excitement while the German soldiers stolidly waited. At the end of an hour, the Marshal, his animation depleted, gave in. Pétain received that day what was, so far as is known, his last personal message from Hitler: “It is well known to me, Herr Marschall, that you always have been and still are a faithful partisan of the collaboration of France with National-Socialist Germany.” Pétain then disbanded what was left, since the armistice, of the French Army. A week later he announced, in a Vichy radio broadcast, that he was still chef de l’Etat français and “the incarnation of France.” After that there was silence.

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  On November 18, 1943, according to journalists in Switzerland, busiest news centre of unoccupied Europe, Marshal Pétain emerged again as worthy of the European front page. He was reported to have been scheduled to broadcast, on November 13th, an important discourse, which the Germans had called off, and he was said to have refused to deliver a substitute of their own concocting. According to the Swiss papers, the important statements in the Marshal’s suppressed speech were “Frenchmen! On July 10, 1940, the National Assembly confided to me the mission of promulgating…a new Constitution for the French State. I am now about to finish the drawing up of that constitution. [However] We, Marshal of France, Chief of State, decree…that if we die before having been able to attain ratification by the Nation of [our] new Constitution…that the power mentioned in the [Third Republic’s] Constitutional Law of 1875 will return to the Senate and Chamber.”

  In setting up his autocracy in Vichy, the Marshal had first named Pierre Laval as his dauphin, then named Admiral Darlan. Apparently Marianne, the battered figurehead of the Third Republic, was to be his third choice. If this was his final wish, no one on this side of the Atlantic knows precisely why. Having been wrong in thinking that the Allies would lose the first World War, having been wrong about his French Army in the peace between the wars, having been wrong in thinking that the Germans had already won the second World War, perhaps the Marshal wished, now that he could clearly see that the democratic Allies would be victors again, to state that he had also been wrong in believing that an autocracy had been suitable even to a defeated Republic of France.

  A year after Marshal Pétain had become the supreme autocrat, he told a Catholic priest, “I wish to be buried in the ossuary at Verdun, among those French and German dead marked as unknown. There is a chapel in the crypt which stands empty. It is for me. Whatever happens to me, it is there that I shall go to take my last rest, at the head of my soldiers.” At a moment in Vichy when his faith in himself equalled his power over others, Pétain broadcast to the world the words which might well serve as his epitaph: “It is I alone whom history will judge.”

  FROM

  Richard O. Boyer

  JUNE 24 AND JULY 1/8, 1944 (ON DUKE ELLINGTON)

  Duke Ellington, whose contours have something of the swell and sweep of a large, erect bear and whose color is that of coffee with a strong dash of cream, has been described by European music critics as one of the world’s immortals. More explicitly, he is a composer of jazz music and the leader of a jazz band. For over twenty-three years, Duke, christened Edward Kennedy Ellington, has spent his days and nights on trains rattling across the continent with his band on an endless sequence of one-night stands at dances, and playing in movie theatres, where he does up to five shows a day; in the night clubs of Broadway and Harlem and in hotels around the country; in radio stations and Hollywood movie studios; in rehearsal halls and in recording studios, where his band has made some eleven hundred records, which have sold twenty million copies; and even, in recent years, in concert halls such as Carnegie and the Boston Symphony. His music has the virtue of pleasing both the jitterbugs, whose cadenced bouncing often makes an entire building shudder, and the intellectuals, who read into it profound comments on transcendental matters. In 1939, two consecutive engagements Ellington played were a dance in a tobacco warehouse in North Carolina, where his product was greeted with shouts of “Yeah man!,” and a concert in Paris, where it was greeted as revealing “the very secret of the cosmos” and as being related to “the rhythm of the atom.” On the second occasion, Jacques-Henri Lévesque, a Paris critic, professed to hear all this in the golden bray of trombones and trumpets and in the steady beat of drums, bass, and piano, and Blaise Cendrars, a surrealist poet, said, “Such music is not only a new art form but a new reason for living.” A French reporter asked Tricky
Sam Nanton, one of Ellington’s trombonists, if his boss was a genius. “He’s a genius, all right,” Sam said, and then he happened to remember that Ellington once ate thirty-two sandwiches during an intermission at a dance in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. “He’s a genius, all right,” he said, “but Jesus, how he eats!”

  Ellington is a calm man of forty-five who laughs easily and hates to hurry. His movements are so deliberate that his steps are usually dogged by his road manager, Jack Boyd, a hard, brisk, red-faced little white man from Texas, whose right index finger was shortened by a planing machine twenty years ago. Boyd, who has been an Ellington employee for some years, yaps and yips at his heels in an effort, for example, to hurry him to a train which in fifteen minutes is leaving a station five miles away. Boyd also lives in fear that Ellington may fall asleep at the wrong time, and since it usually takes an hour of the most ingenious torture to put the slumbering band leader on his feet, the manager’s apprehension is not unreasonable. In general, Boyd’s life is not a happy one. It is his job to herd about the country a score of highly spirited, highly individual artists, whose colors range from light beige to a deep, blue black, whose tastes range from quiet study to explosive conviviality, and whose one common denominator is a complete disregard of train schedules. Often Duke finishes his breakfast in a taxi. Frequently, driven from the table in his hotel room by the jittery, henlike cluckings of Boyd, he wraps a half-finished chop in a florid handkerchief and tucks it in the pocket of his jacket, from which it protrudes, its nattiness not at all impaired by the fact that it conceals a greasy piece of meat. Not long ago this habit astonished an Icelandic music student who happened to be on a train that Duke had barely caught. The Icelander, after asking for Ellington’s autograph, had said, “Mr. Ellington, aren’t there marked similarities between you and Bach?” Duke moved his right hand to the handkerchief frothing out of his jacket. “Well, Bach and myself,” he said, unwrapping the handkerchief and revealing the chop, “Bach and myself both”—he took a bite from the chop—“write with individual performers in mind.”

  It is in this jumpy atmosphere that Ellington composes, and some of his best pieces have been written against the glass partitions of offices in recording studios, on darkened overnight buses, with illumination supplied by a companion holding an interminable chain of matches, and in sweltering, clattering day coaches. Sometimes writing a song in no more than fifteen minutes and sometimes finishing concert pieces only a few hours before their performance, he has composed around twelve hundred pieces, many of them of such worth that Stokowski, Grainger, Stravinsky, and Milhaud have called him one of the greatest modern composers. There are many musicians who have even gone as far as to argue that he is the only great living American composer. His career almost spans the life of jazz and has figured prominently in the surge which has brought jazz from the bawdy houses of New Orleans to the Metropolitan Opera House and even to Buckingham Palace. King George, who has one of the world’s largest collections of Ellington records, is often found bending over a revolving disc so that he can hear more clearly the characteristically dry, dull thud of the band’s bass fiddle pulsing under an Ellington theme or the intricate sinuosity of a tenor saxophone as it curls in and out of the ensemble. To Ellington devotees in Europe, which he toured in 1933 and in 1939, identifying him as a mere writer and player of jazz (his instrument is the piano) is like identifying Einstein as a nice old man. Some notion of their fervor is apparent in the words of a London critic reporting an Ellington concert at the Palladium. “His music has a truly Shakespearean universality,” he wrote, “and as he sounded the gamut, girls wept and young chaps sank to their knees.” The American counterparts of these European devotees prefer to emphasize the air of gaudy sin that surrounded the birth of jazz instead of likening it to the music of the spheres. They like to dwell on Madam White’s Mahogany Hall in New Orleans, a resort which offered its patrons jazz music, and on Buddy Bolden’s extravagant love life (Bolden was an early jazz cornettist), and they find pleasure in the belief that most jazz musicians smoke marijuana and die spectacularly in a madhouse. They try to ignore the ugly fact that several of Ellington’s musicians learned how to play in Boy Scout bands. In endowing the late Bubber Miley, originator of the growl style on the trumpet and one of the early members of Ellington’s band, with an almost legendary aura, although he has been dead less than ten years, they are grateful for the fact that he at least was a very heavy drinker. Anyone who is now forty-five has lived through the entire history of jazz, but this does not prevent the followers of the art from speaking, for example, of the trumpet player King Oliver, who died in 1938, as if he were a Pilgrim Father. In the jazz world, 1910 is the Stone Age and 1923 is medieval. The men in Ellington’s band, which was playing when Benny Goodman was in short trousers and when the word “swing” was unknown, have aroused such admiration individually that there are many collectors who spend their time searching for old Ellington records not because they want to listen to the band as a whole but to savor the thirty seconds in which their particular hero takes a solo. As he plays, they mew and whimper in a painful ecstasy or, as they themselves put it, they are sent.

  · · ·

  Ellington has, like most entertainers, a stage self and a real self. On the stage, at least when he supplies the “flesh”—the trade term for personal appearances in movie houses—he presents himself as a smiling, carefree African, tingling to his fingertips with a gay, syncopated throb that he can scarcely control. As the spotlight picks him out of the gloom, the audience sees a wide, irrepressible grin, but when the light moves away, Ellington’s face instantly sags into immobility. He has given a lot of thought to achieving serenity and equipoise in a life that gives him neither repose nor privacy. He craves peace. He will not argue with anyone in his band, and his road manager, on whom most of the burdens fall, repeatedly sums up his problem in the phrase “Trouble with this band is it has no boss.” The arguments which Duke refuses to have, and which, to Boyd’s acute distress, he concedes beforehand, usually involve overtime pay or a request for an advance on next week’s salary. When Boyd tries to persuade Duke to take a militant attitude, Ellington usually says, in a tone of wheezy complaint, “I won’t let these goddam musicians upset me! Why should I knock myself out in an argument about fifteen dollars when in the same time I can probably write a fifteen-hundred-dollar song?” Besides, Ellington contends that an argument may mean the difference between a musician’s giving a remarkable performance and just a performance. Furthermore, doctors will tell you that there is a definite relation between anger and ulcers. “Anyway,” he will add, in a final desperate defense of his pacific nature, “why should I pit my puny strength against the great Power that runs the universe?” Ellington wears a gold cross beneath his flamboyant plaids and bold checks, reads the Bible every day, along with Winchell and the comics, and has been known to say, “I’d be afraid to sit in a house with people who don’t believe. Afraid the house would fall down.” He broods about man’s final dissolution, and in an effort to stave his own off he has a complete physical examination every three months.

  Part of Duke’s character goes well enough with the onstage Ellington who periodically throws back his head and emits a long-drawn-out “Ah-h-h!” as if the spirit of hot had forced wordless exultation from his lips. He likes to eat to excess and to drink in moderation. He is also fond of what he calls “the chicks,” and when they follow him to the station, as they often do, he stands on the back platform of his train and, as it pulls out, throws them big, gusty, smacking kisses. (He is married, but he has been separated from his wife for fifteen years.) He has a passion for color and clothes. He has forty-five suits and more than a thousand ties, the latter collected in forty-seven states of the Union and seven European countries, and his shoes, hats, shirts, and even his toilet water are all custom-made. His usual manner is one of ambassadorial urbanity, but it is occasionally punctuated by deep despair. In explaining his moods, he says, “A Negro can be too low t
o speak one minute and laughing fit to kill the next, and mean both.” Few people know that he is a student of Negro history. He is a member of one of the first families of Virginia, for his ancestors arrived at Jamestown in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. He has written music commemorating Negro heroes such as Crispus Attucks, the first American killed in the American Revolution; Barzillai Lew, one of the men depicted in the painting called The Spirit of ’76; and Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and other Negro fighters for freedom. He has also written an unproduced opera, Boola, which tells the story of the American Negro, and a long symphonic work entitled Black, Brown, and Beige, which he says is “a tone parallel to the history of the Negro.” His concern for his race is not entirely impersonal, since he and his band are constantly faced, even in the North, by the institution of Jim Crow. “You have to try not to think about it,” Duke says, “or you’ll knock yourself out.”