January 2011

In the Spring of 1804, in a heavily loaded keelboat and two oversize canoes, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and nearly four dozen men crossed the Mississippi River and started up the Missouri, fighting its muddy, insistent current. Sent by President Thomas Jefferson, they were embarkins on the United States’s first official exploration into unknown territory, launching a legacy that reaches all the way to the modern space program.

OVER THE LAST SIX YEARS Sony’s Legacy Records has been issuing the complete recordings of Bessie Smith in a series of two-CD sets. The best one-disk (or cassette) introduction to the music is Bessie Smith: The Collection , compiled and annotated by Chris Albertson, on Columbia Jazz Masterpieces. The film St. Louis Blues is now available on video as part of the “Blue Melodies” volume of the series Hollywood Rhythm: The Paramount Musical Shorts, 1929-1941 from Kino Video.

Billie Holiday made me want to listen to Bessie Smith. I heard my first Billie Holiday record when I was studying in Paris in 1969, and I immediately became obsessed with her songs, her singing, and her life. When I read that Bessie Smith was one of got hold of by the woman who is called the Empress of the Blues.

I couldn’t understand at first what Billie thought she’d learned from Bessie. Bessie’s sound was certainly impressive; she had a big rich voice compared with Billie’s small, rough one. Both women had great presence, that special quality of seeming to be right there in the room singing to you, but while Billie crept up on you, Bessie came at you full throttle. Bessie’s earthbound songs of longing for love, sex, money, revenge, home, and better times seemed barren and monotonous to me next to the romantic and sophisticated ones Billie recorded just fifteen years later, and Billie’s band swung while Bessie’s plodded. I understood that Bessie was a key artist in the development of jazz singing; I just didn’t respond to her music.

I think the most frustrating anti-climax in any big movie can be found in the final segment of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones trilogy— Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade —when, after jousting with a Nazi column in the desert, Harrison Ford finds the Holy Grail and it restores life to his father, Sean Connery, before dropping into what looks like a root cellar. Then everyone rides off in a radiance of heavy orchestration and deep self-satisfaction. It seems to me that if you’re going to people a film with Nazi soldiers and put the word Crusade in the title and produce the Holy Grail in the final scenes, a more satisfactory ending might be to show, half the world away, squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes rising to meet Hitler’s bombers. As far as crusades, miracles—and, for that matter, drama—go, very little in human history can match the onset and course of the Second World War.

At one point in his 1988 book The Thirteenth Man, the former Secretary of Education Terrel Bell speaks of the decline of secondary education in America. “If we are frank with our selves,” he writes, “we must acknowledge that for most Americans . . . neither diligence in learning nor rigorous standards of performance prevail. . . . How do we once again become a nation of learners, in which attitudes towards intellectual pursuit and quality of work have excellence as their core?”

We Americans don’t understand very well what it is to live under a dictatorship, so we tend not to become too disturbed when our government helps some general stay in power. A few million dollars to prop up his failing economy, some tanks and planes to promote his domestic tranquillity—we rationalize measures like these because the dictator is friendly to the United States. Usually that means that American business investments appear more secure under the present, known regime than under the unknowable conditions that would result from the dictator’s fall from power.

I am a native-born American who spent his childhood (1928-39) in the Dominican Republic. I grew up thinking that conditions there under Trujillo were the way things were everywhere. I left for school, college, and military service in the United States and went back to the Dominican Republic two decades later. As an American I was insulated from most of the direct effects of Trujillo’s rule, but even so, I felt his presence everywhere. Let me describe a bit of my daily life there.

A call to Bermuda’s tourism office (1-800-223-6106) will produce a raft of enticing brochures. The government carefully regulates hotels and guesthouses; as a result they all are reliable and agreeable. Obviously, the more costly ones offer more amenities, but many of the smaller guesthouses draw an intensely loyal clientele, year after year, generation after generation. I count among my favorites the Hillcrest Guest House, Waterloo House, Palmetto Hotel and Cottages, and the Princess, which is where I stayed last March. (Waterloo House is famous for its kitchen and offers a lovely waterside setting on the outskirts of Hamilton for an al fresco drink.)

Britain’s oldest colony, Bermuda, is a semitropical archipelago comprising several hundred small-to-tiny islands about six hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina. Despite its relative closeness to North America and its four centuries of entanglement with American history, it is also the second most isolated of inhabited islands in the world (after St. Helena) and with some 60,000 residents occupying a space 22 miles long and a mile or two wide, among the most densely populated. From the moment I first visited it, I have found the place fascinating: for its beauty and civility and for its rich history, whose evidence lies everywhere.

If you walk through the business districts of American cities these days, in even the worst of weather, you will see underdressed people huddled in doorways. No, they’re not homeless; they’re smokers. Not since the glory days of Prohibition (that is to say, when it was still a theory, not a fact with consequences) has a widespread American habit been under such sustained assault.

But, curiously, while the consumption of cigarettes has been declining in this country for years, their older, larger, smellier cousins, cigars, are undergoing a renaissance. The oversized, glossy magazine Cigar Aficionado has been a surprise success. Cigar bars are proliferating, although they can’t (at least in New York City) serve much in the way of food. That would make them restaurants, and smoking is banned in New York restaurants. (On the theory that, while two vices are okay, two vices plus food is contrary to good public policy?)