Memories of The Great and The Good (16 page)

Eventually the Duke appreciated that what we wanted was not just another performance. He agreed, and we had a long and unforgettable session, in a hired studio on Fifth Avenue, where we recorded the whole process of the number dictated, the roughest run-through with many pauses, trying this fusion of instruments and that, stopping and starting and transferring the obligato from one man to another, the Duke talking and shouting, “Now, Tricky, four bars” and “Barney, in there eight.” And in the last hour, what had been a taste in the Duke's head came out as a harmonious, rich meal.

The Duke was nicknamed as a boy by a friend who kidded him about his sharp dressing. He was an elegant and articulate man and, as I've hinted, strangely apart from the recent turmoil of his race. Not, I think, because he was ever indifferent or afraid. He was a supremely natural man, and in his later years devout, and he seemed to assume that men of all colors are brothers. And most of the immediate problems of prejudice and condescension and tension between black and white dissolved in the presence of a man whom even an incurable bigot must have recognized as a man of unassailable natural dignity. He had a childlike side, which—we ought to remember—is recommended in the New Testament for entry into the kingdom of Heaven. He was very sick indeed in the last few months. He knew, but kept it to himself, that he had cancer in both lungs. A week or two before the end, he sent out to hundreds of friends and acquaintances what looked at first like a Christmas card. It was a greeting. On a field of blue was a cross, made up of four vertical letters and three horizontal. They were joined by the letter O. The vertical word spelled “Love” and the horizontal “God.”

He has left us, in the blessed library of recorded sound, a huge anthology of his music from his twenty-eighth birthday to his seventy-fifth. He began as a minority cult, too rude or difficult for the collectors of dance music. For much, maybe most, of his time he was never a best-seller. He never stuck in the current groove, or in his own groove. He moved with all the influences of the time, from blues to bebop and the moderns, and transmuted them into his own, and at the end his difficult antiphonies and plotted discords, the newer harmonic structures he was always reaching for, were no more saleable to the ordinary popular-music fan than they had ever been. Most people simply bowed to him as to an institution.

In 1931 a college roommate of mine who was something of a pioneer as a jazz critic, on the university weekly, was graduating, and he wrote a farewell piece. He recorded the rise and fall—during his four-year stint—of the Red Hot Peppers and the Blue Four and McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Bix and Trumbauer. He ended with the phrase: “Bands may come and bands may go, but the Duke goes on forever.” Ah, how true! We thought it a marvel that the Duke had ridden out all fashions for four long years. In fact, his good and always developing music lasted for forty-seven years. And we have it all.

So I am inclined to paraphrase what John O'Hara said on the death of George Gershwin: “Duke Ellington is dead. I don't have to believe it if I don't want to.”

B
y November, up here in Vermont, the scarlet and gold landscape of the fall has usually faded into russet, and at regular intervals around winding roads there are pyramids of burning leaves like smoldering camp fires. But Thanksgiving Day 1984 was, by Vermonters' lights, marvelously brilliant and beautiful, a flashback. It was cold, not as cold as it will be by January (“7
A.M
., 23 degrees below zero and all is well”) but sharp, what Dickens called “piping cold.” The sun had risen in an orange glow and would go down later, as the song says, in blood.

In the early afternoon, it was a brisk, almost playful sight: all these hurrying bundled-up people, like a jolly Brueghel festival, dipping over the green mountains and bobbing across the valleys to the great American family feast.

This year's Thanksgiving was special in Vermont, for a special family reason. For once, pride in the death of a famous son went beyond the usual media slop and boilerplate rhetoric into a truth people knew and felt. Even though the day was glittering and most people outdoors seemed as cheerful as they are meant to be on that day, from every public building throughout the state, and from the bedroom windows of the smallest rural cottage, the flags were at half-mast—for a man whose life and character moved in a straight line, from a small farm to a big farm, to the state legislature, to the governorship and then, forty-three years ago, to the Senate of the United States, where he remained a gathering force for many tough good things. A funny, independent, Yankee-shrewd, totally incorruptible man, who went back home to Vermont in his eighty-fourth year. Until only a few months ago, his sense and experience were available to anybody who cared to tap them. Then he failed quickly and died—at ninety-two. Senator George D. Aiken. So, on Thanksgiving Day, at the funeral in the small town he grew up in, there was little cause for mourning at the grave.

George Aiken was a type we like to think will be always with us. Vermont is a mountainous, landlocked state between New Hampshire and upstate New York. Deceptively beautiful, for just beneath its rolling green carpet is very rocky terrain, which—combined with great extremes of temperature—restricts its farming to dairying (lots of cows) and fruit-growing. Indeed, the value of its farm crops is such as to leave it the second poorest farming state in the Union. But, because of its production of fine marble, and building stone; because of a prosperous industry in the syrup that's tapped from its forests of maples; because of a thriving skiing industry; because, also, in a state bigger than Wales, there are only half a million people, there is less poverty than most places.

The Aikens were among the original English settlers on this forbidding soil. The French had set up sparse settlements there in the seventeenth century, but the first English came in in the 1740s, and came for keeps. I go back so far, because in 1773, one Edward Aiken, on a journey far from home, was suddenly taken ill. A stranger who took him in got the word slowly, by mountain scout and stage, to his wife, who thereupon put herself and her youngest child on a horse and rode just on a hundred miles to nurse her husband. This is the sort of family memory that George Aiken would acknowledge but not go on about.

He was born in 1892 and from babyhood on was brought up in the village of Putney, a place unknown outside the state but one that shocked the world in the early 1840s, when a man named John Noyes started a religious movement he called “Perfectionism.” It entailed having property in common, households in common, and wives in common. He called this idea Complex Marriage. He's forgotten now, but he did earn the dubious reward of a compliment from George Bernard Shaw, who described the Putney experiment as “one of those chance attempts at Superman which occur from time to time, in spite of the interference of man's blundering institutions.” Well, Complex Marriage was too complex for the people of Putney. Noyes fled into New York State, and the Vermonters blundered on, and the Aikens kept their one farm, and several children—by one wife.

George Aiken never got beyond high school. After that, he borrowed a hundred dollars and planted a raspberry patch, which five years later he extended to five hundred acres. And it was all his. He went into the commercial cultivation of fruits and wildflowers. He was forty-two before he moved on into state politics, first in the legislature and then on to the governorship. The governors of Vermont have—like members of the United States House of Representatives—only two years in which to leave their mark, and most of them are remembered by the locals, so to speak, for the good or bad things they did
in
the state. Governor Aiken's name, however, attracted much attention outside Vermont when, during the Depression, he proposed that neighboring states ought to band together to build publicly owned generating stations to provide low-cost power, for farmers especially. This was taken as a declaration of war against private industry, and many of his own party were shocked that such a proposal should come from a Republican. You can see how, when Aiken got to Washington, the Roosevelt New Dealers laid down the red carpet for this independent Republican when they launched their offensive against the private utilities, and Congress set up the huge public power project of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Bowing to the compliment but remaining his own man, he was no party's captive. When President Roosevelt started the whole business of subsidizing farmers' crops across the board—across the land—both Republican and Democratic senators from farming states fell gratefully into the president's arms. Aiken thought it a bad principle that would get farmers into the habit of being subsidized in bad times and good, a habit by now so ingrained that even the most free-enterprising Republican presidents have come to assume that farm subsidies are an American birthright.

In the Senate, Aiken made his mark during his first term but for a long time it was, to his party's chieftains, the mark of an unreliable, a loner. For instance, he had the idea that one way to keep scrimping families above the poverty line was to have the federal government give away not cash benefits but food stamps!—a bizarre idea, which took twenty years to become government policy.

To many senators, George Aiken was simply an old-fashioned Yankee eccentric. In one thing eccentric to the point of dementia: promptly at the end of every financial year he sent to the Treasury a check for the part of his office allowance he had never used. Also while it is quite proper and normal for a senator's wife to work in his office as a paid assistant, when Aiken married his administrative assistant, she stayed on in her job but he took her off the payroll. He not only, like legions of Republicans, believed in thrift. He practiced it.

He dearly loved his work on the Senate's Public Welfare Committee, but when the senior Republican post on the Foreign Relations Committee fell vacant, he took it, because otherwise it would have been filled by a man he quietly detested: Senator Joseph McCarthy.

I wish it were possible to quote from the spate of dry, wry one-liners he got off in a lifetime of marvelous, deadpan speeches. But he wrote few of them down. You had to be there when he remarked about Congress that “I have never seen so many incompetent persons in high office.” When he answered the familiar charge against his party that the Republicans were “me-tooers,” it would do what the Democrats did but do it better. “Let's,” he said, “not be afraid of the ‘me-too' charge. If a Democrat comes out for better health, I'm not going to come out for poorer health.”

I recall a dinner speech he made during the presidential campaign year of 1980, when half a dozen Republican aspirants were barging and bellowing through New Hampshire and Vermont There was a rumor went rustling around that one of them, an eminent governor, had blunted charges of looking too old by dyeing his hair. Aiken chided the dinner company: “While he is here as a candidate, political criticism is proper, but he is a guest of the state and personal remarks are out of place.” He paused before a thoughtful aside: “At the same time, I have to admit that in all my years in Washington, I can't remember another politician whose hair turned orange overnight!” In 1966, when America was beginning to get deep into the Vietnam War, he advised President Johnson: “Declare the United States the winner, and get out.” It took eight years for America to do it.

He will be publicly remembered for public power; for the St. Lawrence Seaway; for bucking Joseph McCarthy; for the Food Stamp Act. By three generations of the neighbors who knew him, he will be remembered for his upright walk and ways, his shambling clothes and windblown hair, for his charm, his dry humor, and the fact that he could never be bought. George Aiken of Vermont. Not, let us hope, a vanished type.