Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [227]
How far did this change my view of the USA? Like all transatlantic US watchers and, as I discovered, a subculture of American intellectuals, I had been fascinated by gangsters. Fortunately in the 1950s a mass of material became available for the first time about the development of organized crime in the USA, which naturally paid attention to the interactions between the mob and labour. (This had not been stressed in the young leftwingers’ image of American labour history.) My studies of the Sicilian Mafia had in any case given me a professional interest in the American side of its operations. So I was sufficiently familiar with it to write a small study on ‘The political economy of the gangster’ as a subvariety of the market economy, that passed completely unperceived, perhaps in part because, for a joke, I sent it to the most ancient, indeed almost prehistoric and unread, Tory journal, The Quarterly Review, which published it without a murmur.4 By the time I arrived in the USA I was therefore well clued up on such topics (but, for obvious reasons, not on the Kennedy family’s impending projects to use their mob connections to kill off Fidel Castro). And yet, in some ways I still shared the basic view of primary school or Hollywood morality, in which goodies (honest people) behave as goodies and are therefore better than, and have nothing to do with, the baddies (crooks), even when they have to coexist with them. Even after living a long time in a very imperfect world, I would still prefer to believe this. In the law-abiding and state-governed British Isles of the 1950s, it still seemed not only an aspiration, but a sort of reality. But the USA was neither law-abiding, though it had more lawyers than the rest of the world put together, nor a society that recognized the rule of the state, though to my surprise I discovered it to be much more enthusiastically bureaucratic at all levels.
Politics and professors took me to America, but once again it was jazz which made me feel that I had some understanding of the reality of this extraordinary country. I could hardly have chosen a better moment to visit the USA as a jazz-lover than 1960. At no time before or after was it possible to enjoy the entire range of the music live, from the survivors of the 1920s to the anarchist sonorities of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry which could already be heard by a determined avant-garde on the eastern outskirts of Greenwich Village. Indeed, in spite of the suicidal lifestyle of jazz people, with some notable exceptions the great names on which my generation had been raised were still in operational form. What is more, as we listened to the unique originality of Monk and the absolutely extraordinary Miles Davis Quintet of Milestones and Kind of Blue , we could not help noticing that the second half of the fifties was a golden age of the music, the last as it turned out. Bliss was it in those New York and San Francisco nights to be alive, even if it was too late for a historian in his forties to enjoy the very heaven of Wordsworth’s youth.
Not that jazz was separable from the politics of the left, although in 1960 its place in the professional academy was rather like homosexuality: it was a private taste of some teachers, but not part of their academic