the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt four)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

At twelve minutes past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco began to quake. Alice Babette Toklas left her bed and looked, bleary-eyed, out of the window, then ran straight to her father’s bedroom: “Do get up,” she told him. “The city is on fire.” After checking on friends, visiting the bank, and picking up a supply of cigarettes, Toklas packed the family silver into a chest and buried it in the garden—a preservation instinct that would serve her well—then took the ferry to Berkeley to spend the night with a friend, unable to bring herself to look back at her hometown blazing behind her. When she returned, Toklas stopped by a local flower shop: the heat of the flames had stirred hundreds of carnations into immediate bloom.

The San Francisco earthquake—the deadliest in American history—left the city in ruins, and indirectly changed the course of Toklas’s life. Three years younger than Stein, she had grown up in the prosperity of San Francisco, just across the bay from Oakland; her father had arrived in America from Poland in 1865, aged twenty, while her mother had grown up in San Francisco, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Prussia. Like Stein, Toklas traveled in Europe as a child, rolling hoops in the Luxembourg Gardens and watching Victor Hugo’s casket process down the Champs-Élysées; as a teenager, she spent six years in Seattle, where her father’s booming mercantile business had headquarters. A talented pianist, she enrolled in the local university’s music conservatory at sixteen, but her life was put on hold when her mother died in 1897, when Toklas was twenty. Her father took her and her younger brother back to San Francisco to live with her grandfather and great-uncle, and she abandoned a promising musical career to wait on a household of demanding Victorian gentlemen.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt three)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The Steins were soon seeing a lot of Matisse. Sarah joined his art class, and she and Michael rapidly became his major patrons, devoting their own collection exclusively to his latest work. But Gertrude and Leo’s attention had already moved on. A few weeks after the Salon, the dealer Clovis Sagot showed them a painting of a nude girl posed side-on against a dull blue backdrop, clutching a basket of red flowers. Placidly chewing licorice, Sagot informed them that this unknown Spanish artist—who was so destitute he slept on a shared mattress in a run-down Montmartre studio—was “the real thing.” Here, unusually, Gertrude’s and Leo’s stories align. Leo immediately recognized the work of “a genius of very considerable magnitude,” but Gertrude was “repelled and shocked” by the girl’s legs and feet, to the extent that Sagot, anxious to make his sale, offered to guillotine the canvas and jettison the lower half. They bought the (complete) painting for 150 francs. But that dynamic slowly reversed after they were introduced to Pablo Picasso by their mutual friend Henri-Pierre Roché. By the end of their first dinner together, Picasso and Gertrude were play-fighting over the last slice of bread, Gertrude concealing her giggles as Picasso, under his breath, poked fun at curmudgeonly Leo’s clichéd enthusiasm for fashionable Japanese prints. Soon, she was in and out of Picasso’s studio, discussing his work with him, lending him money, and buying his work independently. It was Leo who led the way, but Gertrude who stayed the course. Before the end of the year, Picasso asked to paint her portrait.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt two)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

Holed up in rented rooms at 20 Bloomsbury Square near the British Museum, Stein began to record her thoughts in a notebook—descriptions of her surroundings, quotations from books she was reading, snatches of overheard conversation. Her first entry is an evocative sketch of London’s East End—its greyness, its Indian restaurants, its pubs and music halls, laundries and tea shops—that slowly brings the buildings, and their interiors, to life. Lonely and anxious, she was people-watching intently, observing the way “everybody talks to everybody,” familiarizing herself with social quirks and unspoken rules (how anyone will buy a drink for someone out of work, for example, but regular spongers will be despised). Stein applied for a six-month pass to the British Museum’s reading room, where she devised a scheme to read through English literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century—extending the project she had begun as a teenager in California. She spent entire days at the museum, breaking only to eat: there she read the works of Fanny Burney; Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr. Badman; several books about Chinese history and literature; and various studies of saints, including Mary Francis Cusack’s Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude. Among her notes from her reading, Stein tried out some titles for possible short stories, her first attempts at fiction since the Radcliffe composition classes: “Maggie being the history of a gentle soul”; “The Progress of Jane Sands being a history of one woman and many others”; “The Tragedy of the Wirkin Sisters.” And she jotted down the beginnings of a narrative based on the ill-fated marriage of her older cousin, Bird Stein, who was then in the middle of a high-profile divorce case, involving numerous lawyers and private detectives, that was titillating the New York press.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt one)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein recalled posing for hours in a broken armchair while Picasso sat opposite her on a small kitchen chair, his forehead inches from his easel, brown and grey swirled on his palette. While he painted, she “meditated and made sentences” in her mind. As the months passed, she watched Picasso’s mounting frustration as he redid and scrubbed out her features, before reaching total impasse, painting out the entire head in anger, and vanishing to Spain. The next time they met, six months later, he silently presented Stein with the completed portrait. In the interval, Picasso’s style had transformed. The original, naturalistic features were gone, and the face now resembled a sculptured mask, its features starkly outlined. She looks ageless, androgynous, out of time—and utterly assured in herself. When Stein protested that it didn’t look at all like her—if anything, it bore a closer resemblance to the artist himself—he calmly replied, “It will.”

When, in later life, Gertrude Stein was asked how her portrait came to be painted by the relatively unknown, twenty-four-year-old Pablo Picasso, she simply claimed that neither of them could remember. But—as was clear to visitors to her home, where she held court from a chair placed directly beneath her likeness—the painting became central to her sense of identity: “For me,” she wrote in 1938, “it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.” The aura of mystery around the sittings—which Stein, implausibly, numbered at eighty or ninety—turned the portrait, from its conception, into a myth. For Stein, it provided an origin story which would come to define her image, linking herself and Picasso indelibly as the two supreme geniuses of the twentieth century, in literature and in art. While Picasso was deep in the “long struggle” of her portrait—inventing Cubism in the process—Stein was immersed in writing Three Lives, a trio of stories which she considered “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.” There was, of course, another reason to foreground the connection. By the time Stein wrote the Autobiography, in 1932, Picasso’s work was growing fast in stature, while hers languished in comparative obscurity. By representing their beginnings as intertwined, Stein was making a plea for their futures, too, to be equal.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt eleven)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

It wasn’t the uncertain nature of his livelihood that worried him, nor the police visits, although he had twice been invited to accompany the officers to the station. So far they hadn’t applied for a search warrant to go over the boat, but Maurice didn’t care if they did. Still less did he fear the storm. The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him. It threatened him now, for what Maurice had not been able to endure was the sight of the emptying Reach. Dreadnought, Lord Jim, now Grace. Maurice, in the way of business, knew too many, rather than too few, people, but when he imagined living without friends, he sat down with the whisky in the dark.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt ten)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

‘And how would you describe the way you feel about him now?’ Richard asked.

‘Well, I feel unemployed. There’s nothing so lonely as unemployment, even if you’re on a queue with a thousand others. I don’t know what I’m going to think about if I’m not going to worry about him all the time. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my mind.’ A formless melancholy overcame her. ‘I’m not too sure what to do with my body either.’

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt nine)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Nenna had no more than an animal’s sense of direction and distance, but it seemed to her that the right thing to do would be to try to reach the City, then, once she got to Blackfriars, she knew where the river was, and though that would be Lambeth Reach or King’s Reach, a long way downstream of the boats, still, once she had got to the river she would be on the way home. She had worked in an office in Blackfriars once, before Tilda came.

That meant turning south, and she would have to ask which way she was headed. She began to look, with a somewhat dull kind of hopefulness, for somebody friendly, not too much in a hurry, walking the opposite way, although it would be more reasonable, really, to ask somebody walking the same way. Handfuls of sleet were beginning to wander through the air. Radio shop, bicycle shop, family planning shop, funeral parlour, bicycles, radio spare parts, television hire, herbalist, family planning, a florist. The window of the florist was still lit and entirely occupied by a funeral tribute, a football goal, carried out in white chrysanthemums. The red ball had just been introduced into Soccer and there was a ball in the goal, this time in red chrysanthemums. Nenna stood looking into the window, feeling the melted hail make its way down the gap between the collar of her coat and her body. One shoe seemed to be wetter than the other and the strap was working loose, so, leaning against the ledge of the shop window, she took it off to have a look at it. This made her left foot very cold, so she twisted it round her right ankle. Someone was coming, and she felt that she couldn’t bear it if he, because it was a man, said, ‘Having trouble with your shoe?’ For an unbalanced moment she thought it might be Gordon Hodge, pursuing her to see that she would not come back, and make a nuisance of herself to Edward.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt eight)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

The Bourgeois Gentilhomme was one of many enterprises in Chelsea which survived entirely by selling antiques to each other. The atmosphere, once through the little shop-door, cut down from a Victorian billiard-table, was oppressive. Clocks struck widely different hours. At a corner table, with her back turned towards them, sat a woman in black, apparently doing some accounts, and surrounded by dusty furniture; perhaps she had been cruelly deserted on her wedding day, and had sat there ever since, refusing to have anything touched. She did not look up when the girls came in, although the billiard table was connected by a cord to a cow-bell, which jangled harshly.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt seven)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

She bounded off, as though over stepping stones, from one object to another that would scarcely hold, old tyres, old boots, the ribs of crates from which the seagulls were dislodged in resentment. Far beyond the point at which the mud became treacherous and from which Small Gains had never risen again, she stood poised on the handlebars of a sunken bicycle. How had the bicycle ever got there?

‘Mattie, it’s a Raleigh!’

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt six)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Six months, Willis repeated. It was a long time to wait, but not impossible.

Richard suggested that the intervening time could well be spent in replacing the pumps and pump-wells, and certain sections of the hull. It was difficult for him to realise that he was dealing with, or rather trying to help, a man who had never, either physically or emotionally, felt the need to replace anything. Even Willis’s appearance, the spiky short black hair and the prize-fighter’s countenance, had not changed much since he had played truant from Elementary school and gone down to hang about the docks. If truth were known, he had had a wife, as well as a perdurable old mother, a great bicyclist and supporter of local Labour causes, but both of them had died of cancer, no replacements possible there. The body must either repair itself or stop functioning, but that is not true of the emotions, and particularly of Willis’s emotions. He had come to doubt the value of all new beginnings and to put his trust in not much more than the art of hanging together. Dreadnought had stayed afloat for more than sixty years, and Richard, Skipper though he was, didn’t understand timber. Tinkering about with the old boat would almost certainly be the end of her. He remembered the last time he had been to see the dentist. Dental care was free in the 60s, in return for signing certain unintelligible documents during the joy of escape from the surgery. But when the dentist had announced that it was urgently necessary to extract two teeth Willis had got up and walked away, glad that he hadn’t taken off his coat and so would not have to enter into any further discussion while he recovered it from the waiting-room. If one goes, he thought, still worse two, they all go.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt five)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Once at the Tate, they usually had time only to look at the sea and river pieces, the Turners and the Whistlers. Willis praised these with the mingled pride and humility of an inheritor, however distant. To Tilda, however, the fine pictures were only extensions of her life on board. It struck her as odd, for example, that Turner, if he spent so much time on Chelsea Reach, shouldn’t have known that a seagull always alights on the highest point. Well aware that she was in a public place, she tried to modify her voice; only then Willis didn’t always hear, and she had to try again a good deal louder.

‘Did Whistler do that one?’

The attendant watched her, hoping that she would get a little closer to the picture, so that he could relieve the boredom of his long day by telling her to stand back.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt four)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

The ship’s cat was in every way appropriate to the Reach. She habitually moved in a kind of nautical crawl, with her stomach close to the deck, as though close-furled and ready for dirty weather. The ears were vestigial, and lay flat to the head.

Through years of attempting to lick herself clean, for she had never quite lost her self-respect, Stripey had become as thickly coated with mud inside as out. She was in a perpetual process of readjustment, not only to tides and seasons, but to the rats she encountered on the wharf. Up to a certain size, that is to say the size attained by the rats at a few weeks old, she caught and ate them, and, with a sure instinct for authority, brought in their tails to lay them at the feet of Martha. Any rats in excess of this size chased Stripey. The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt three)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Presumably Father Watson said these things automatically. He couldn’t have walked all the way down to the Reach from his comfortless presbytery simply to talk about Martha’s name.

‘She’ll be taking another name at confirmation, I assume. That should not long be delayed. I suggest Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, since you’ve decided to make your dwelling place upon the face of the waters.’

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt two)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

‘Rochester? Grace? Bluebird? Maurice? Hours of Ease? Dunkirk? Relentless?’

Richard was quite correct, as technically speaking they were all in harbour, in addressing them by the names of their craft. Maurice, an amiable young man, had realised as soon as he came to the Reach that Richard was always going to do this and that he himself would accordingly be known as Dondeschiepolschuygen IV, which was inscribed in gilt lettering on his bows. He therefore renamed his boat Maurice.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt one)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Richard did not even want to preside. He would have been happier with a committee, but the owners, of whom several rented rather than owned their boats, were not of the substance from which committees are formed. Between Lord Jim, moored almost in the shadow of Battersea Bridge, and the old wooden Thames barges, two hundred yards upriver and close to the rubbish disposal wharfs and the brewery, there was a great gulf fixed. The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt sixteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Verchomin took the opportunity to address a serious subject—the pianist’s incessant financial woes—in a lighthearted way. “Hey, Bill,” she said, “what do you think about having a memorial concert to raise money for you?”

“You mean a tribute, my dear, as I’m still alive,” he said, dryly.

The three of them laughed again, and Evans began to cough up blood. In a moment a steady stream was flowing from his mouth; hilarity turned to horror. Evans gave LaBarbera directions to Mount Sinai Hospital. “Lay on the horn, Joe,” he said. “Tell them it’s an emergency.”

Verchomin turned in her seat, keeping a desperate watch on Evans. “He gives me the fear in his eyes,” she writes. “I want to tell him that I need more, that we aren’t done yet. He tells me, ‘I think I’m going to drown.’ I’m not sure a person can lose that much blood.”

They pulled up to the hospital. LaBarbera: “I remember picking him up—he weighed almost nothing—and carrying him into the emergency room.” Evans’s blood was everywhere, leaving a trail through the waiting room. He was laid on a gurney, and doctors and nurses took over. Back in the waiting room, sitting with his jacket on her lap, Verchomin watched a janitor mop up his blood. "A nurse appears and in a soothing voice describes Bill’s condition as something similar to a nosebleed that just needs cauterizing.” A woman sitting next to Verchomin told her, in great detail, about a similar experience her husband had gone through. She spoke of him in the present tense. A young doctor came out and took Verchomin into a small office. “We couldn’t save him,” he said.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt fifteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Yet the stars in Bernhardt’s eyes (and ears) didn’t prevent him from noticing what, in Evans’s home life, went beyond slobby eccentricity. “Elaine looked like she had been in a concentration camp and Bill had tracks all over his hands, et cetera.”

The et cetera covered what was too painful to elaborate on—these were two junkies in love, with each other and, perhaps just as much, with junk. And the pushers loved them: there was nothing like a steady customer. The tracks all over Evans’s hands implied what wasn’t seen: tracks all over his arms, legs, and feet; collapsed veins necessitating a constant search for fresh needle-access points. Keen-eyed admirers in clubs noticed that the left-handed Evans had overinjected his right hand and arm to the point of nerve damage: in early 1963 “he played one-handed throughout a week’s booking at the Vanguard,” Pettinger writes. “With his left hand and some virtuoso pedaling, he was able to maintain harmonic interest in support of treble lines. In morbid fascination, pianists dropped by to witness the phenomenon.”

The bassist Bill Crow witnessed it on another occasion: “He would dangle the dead hand over the keyboard and drop his forefinger on the keys, using the weight of the hand to depress them. Everything else was played with the left hand, and if you looked away you couldn’t tell anything was wrong.”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt fourteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

We’ve seen much evidence of Coltrane’s worldly side. And though he had a powerful need to keep himself to himself (“He was the type of person, he didn’t care for socializing,” Alice Coltrane recalled “and I don’t care for socializing, so that’s sort of the way it was”), he had a domestic existence in Dix Hills, and he savored it. The presence of four young children, Alice’s daughter and their three sons, would have made the household lively; the harp and grand piano in the living room would have made it tuneful. (John combed the TV listings for reruns of Marx Brothers movies: he loved to watch Harpo play.) There was a telescope in the backyard for scanning the night sky. There were shelves full of books on philosophy and spiritualism.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt thirteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

“Does your religion help you in living, in playing?” the writer asked.

“It’s everything for me,” Coltrane said. “My music is a way of giving thanks to God.”

Or of addressing God. Two months after the Birmingham church bombing (and four months after his switch from Naima to Alice), he recorded, for a part-live, part-studio album, Live at Birdland, an original song dramatically different from any he had written before. “Alabama” begins with a kind of invocation, a mournful tenor prelude played over McCoy Tyner’s dramatic, almost menacing tremolo, then shifts to an oddly swinging middle section with the whole quartet, a passage packed with mixed emotions: sorrow, anger, resignation—and then returns to Coltrane’s somber tune within a tune. The total effect is devastating. “If anyone wants to begin to understand how Coltrane could inspire so much awe so quickly,” Ben Ratliff writes, “the reason is probably inside ‘Alabama.’ The incantational tumult he could raise in a long improvisation, the steel-trap knowledge of harmony, the writing—that’s all very impressive. But ‘Alabama’ is also an accurate psychological portrait of a time, a complicated mood that nobody else could render so well.”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt twelve)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Coltrane had been playing the soprano in public since the beginning of the Jazz Gallery stand; he had even performed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” on it that summer. But he’d never recorded with the instrument before October 21, 1960, the day he, Tyner, Davis, and Jonas turned The Sound of Music’s perky song of uplift into a jazz classic.

As written by Richard Rodgers, the melody is a waltz. And while Coltrane refers to his version as a waltz, his rendering quickens the tempo considerably, changing it from ¾ time to 6/8. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original version is written in AAAB form, the A sections contrasting the great lyricist’s sparkling sensuous evocations of the good things—kittens’ whiskers, bright copper kettles, “wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings”—with the bad, spelled out in the B section: dog bites, bee stings, sadness.

It's Coltrane’s genius—inspired by Miles’s impulse to radically simplify the chord structure of his tunes—to base nearly the entirety of his thirteen-minute forty-six-second version of “My Favorite Things” on the two harmonies of the A section: harmonies that, Coltrane later said, “we’ve stretched . . . through the whole piece.” In his version, the B section is given precisely eleven seconds in the entire song, played just second before the track winds up. His improvisation through the A sections is as audacious as any he has recorded to date: at times his lightning runs up and down the E-minor scale, set against the dronelike effect of Tyner and Davis’s pedal point, resemble the Indian ragas played by the great Ravi Shankar that Coltrane was studying at the time.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt eleven)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Termini promised him that between the Five Spot and the Jazz Gallery, he could guarantee Coltrane at least ten weeks’ work a year and match what Miles was paying him. And so, while on a European tour with Davis that spring, the saxophonist gave his notice—with his blessing, Miles later said—and opened at the Jazz Gallery on Tuesday, May 3, 1960, with Steve Kuhn on piano, Coltrane’s old Philadelphia friend Steve Davis on bass, and Pete La Roca on drums. It was an excellent rhythm section, and Coltrane’s name by itself was enough to draw crowds, but the band he opened with wasn’t the band he truly wanted.

The players Coltrane really wanted all happened to be otherwise engaged. McCoy Tyner, not yet twenty-one but Trane’s close friend and musical confident since 1957, was touring with the Jazztet, a group co-led by Art Farmer and Benny Golson. (The band had played opposite Ornette Coleman at his Five Spot opening in November.) The bassist Art Davis was traveling with Dizzy Gillespie. And the great Elvin Jones, recently arrested for possession of heroin, was temporarily residing at Rikers Island.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt ten)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Tired by the time the band came to the third son of the session, “Stella by Starlight,” Cannonball laid out—and then fell asleep in the studio as the five other players went through take after take of the number, stymied at first by a technical difficulty in the control booth and then by a frustrating inability to get the tune exactly right. By take 5, Miles’s patience was fraying: “Paul, what’s wrong with you?” he snapped at Chambers after a false start. Another brief take came to a halt with the intrusion of a loud, startling sound in the studio: Adderley’s snoring. “Hey, man, wake Cannonball up.” Miles said. Someone woke him up. “Don’t snore on my solo, bitch,” Miles told him, as loud laughter broke out.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt nine)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

We have no record of the Colony date of the Philadelphia weekend, but we do know that the Miles Davis Sextet, with Bill Evans on piano, opened on Friday, April 25, 1958, at the Café Bohemia opposite the Jimmy Giuffre Trio. And that Evans found himself thrown into the deep end of the pool—and, to his own surprise, stayed afloat.

“I had always had a great respect for Miles Davis,” he said some years later. “And when he asked me to join him I realized that I had to revise my views about my own playing. If I continued to feel inadequate as a pianist, it would be to deny my respect for Davis. So I began to accept the position in which I had been placed.”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt eight)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

One way of working through his underconfidence—in performance, not on recording sessions—was to use his solos as explorations, blowing for chorus after chorus as he tried to figure out how to play what he really wanted to say. The method wasn’t always popular with his fellow players—or with the bandleader. “Miles would say to him, ‘Can’t you play 27 choruses instead of 28?’” the drummer Jimmy Cobb recalled. When Coltrane explained that he couldn’t figure out how to stop, Miles dryly offered, “You might try taking the horn out of your mouth.” But this was just Miles being Miles: in those early days he seemed to understand, Cobb said “that [Coltrane] was working on something.”

In hiring John Coltrane, Miles knew exactly what he was doing. “In Coltrane’s defense, vertical style, gritty sound, and emotional ferocity, Miles had found the perfect foil for his own sound and style,” Dan Morgenstern writes. “It was a bit like the contrast between himself and Parker—only this time it was the trumpeter who played lead.”

And this time, the leader was a minimalist rather than a maximalist. As for Coltrane, like Charlie Parker, he played a lot of notes. Only unlike Parker, whose improvisations traveled through the chord structure of a blues, standard, or bebop original, searching for harmonies that related to the melody, Coltrane ran all conceivable harmonies of a tune as an end in itself, searching for notes no one had ever thought of using before.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt seven)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

John Coltrane would ultimately become a jazz deity, by virtue of his supreme technical skills, his ceaseless exploration of the far bounds of the music, and the intense spirituality that informed his life and art. But in 1955 he was an awkward outsider, as far as possible from any kind of distinction in his field. (Even his heroin addiction—desperate, furtive, ashamed—didn’t fit into the cool model of jazz culture.) In auditioning for Miles he was virtually coming out from hiding, having spent the past decade freelancing around jazz’s seamy outskirts as he searched musically; yet even as his playing improved, he gained little faith in his own abilities. His ceaseless questing for musical and spiritual enlightenment filled him with questions about everything, especially music. And in reencountering a newly ascendant Miles Davis, he was coming up against the ultimate non-answerer.

“Miles is sort of a strange guy,” he would tell François Postif in 1961. “He doesn’t talk a lot, and he rarely discusses music. You always have the impression that he’s in a bad mood, and that he’s not interested in or affected by what other people are doing. It’s very hard, in a situation like that, to know exactly what you should do . . . .”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt six)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

In 1947 Bill Evans was still four years away from joining Herbie Fields. After graduating high school in Plainfield, New Jersey, that year, he entered Southeastern Louisiana College, in Hammond, forty-five miles northwest of New Orleans, on a music scholarship.

If anything, what the young Evans seems to have been is a gifted musical chameleon. He’d studied (and loved) classical piano from a tender age: “From the age of six to thirteen,” he later said, “I acquired the ability to sight-read and to play classical music . . . performing Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert intelligently, musically.”

And yes, he added: “I couldn’t play ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ without the notes.”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt five)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Davis’s Blue Note recording session of March 6, 1954, was his first record date for almost ten months and his first time working in the Hackensack, New Jersey, home studio of the soon to be legendary optometrist turned recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder. John Lewis had been the pianist on the May 1953 quartet recording; now that Horace Silver was on the piano bench (Percy Heath was back on bass; Art Blakey replaced Max Roach), Miles went in a different direction altogether.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt four)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

“When we first came to New York everyone was so bright and eager,” Irene recalled. “Then suddenly everyone was nodding.” Miles was spending so little time at home, and had so little interest in her sexually, that at first she suspected he was having an affair. Then she found blood on his shirtsleeve and put two and two together. Gregory Davis, just three or four at the time, remembered his mother hiding Miles’s shoes so he wouldn’t be able to go out to score.

In early 1950 he left Queens and moved himself and his young family into the Hotel America on West Forty-seventh Street, one of the few Manhattan hotels south of Harlem designated by The Negro Travelers’ Green Book as hospitable to African Americans, within easy walking distance of Birdland, Bop City, and other Broadway clubs—and closer to sources of drugs. The America was home to a number of jazz musicians, including his old St. Louis friend Clark Terry, and Miles promptly consigned Irene and the kids to the care of another hotel resident, the up-and-coming young singer Betty Carter, who idolized him. Meanwhile he hung out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd, basically a kaffeeklatsch of heroin users who also happened to be great musicians: the teenage altoist Jackie McLean, the pianist Walter Bishops, Jr., the drummers Blakey, Roach, and Art Taylor. Doing drugs with other addicts relieved loneliness; it also made it easier to score. Miles continued to work, even as his addiction dragged him steadily downward.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt three)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Under the smiles, though, was trouble, and Coltrane was at the center of it. He and Jimmy Heath had both been using heroin for a couple of years—snorting it, though Lewis Porter maintains that Coltrane may have started injecting it back in Philadelphia. (Charlie Parker had told Heath, “When you put it in your nose, you’re still a gentleman; when you put it in your arm, you’re a bum, exposed to all the world.”)

Musicians mostly snorted it—unbeknownst to Gillespie, six of the players in his big band had been doing so—and those who put it in their nose rather than in their arm were better able to stop when they wanted. But while the septet played Dayton, Ohio, that fall, Coltrane and Heath, sick and nervous from the diluted heroin they’d had to purchase in the hinterlands, got relief when “Specs Wright brought in a girl named Dee Dee . . . who came in with a set of ‘works’ (needles and supplies), and she helped them all with shooting up, mainlining. That way they all got high instantly.”

It was the beginning of a hellish seven-year addiction for Jimmy Heath. Coltrane’s relationship with self-soothing substances was more complicated. He gobbled sweets, which led to problems with his weight and his teeth. He treated his frequent dental woes with heavy drinking. He also drank when he couldn’t get heroin or was trying to stop. In October 1950, while he was in Los Angeles with the Gillespie group, he passed out in his hotel room after shooting up; Heath found him and revived him.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt two)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

There is a photograph of a young John Coltrane watching Charlie Parker solo. The date is Sunday, December 7, 1947, six years to the day after Pearl Harbor; the place is the Elate Club Ballroom on South Broad Street in Coltrane’s hometown, Philadelphia. The occasion is a benefit concert “for little Mary Etta Jordan, who is 6 years old and lost both her legs in a recent trolley accident.” Some three thousand people are in attendance.

Coltrane, who is sitting on the bandstand as a member of the saxophonist Jimmy Heath’s orchestra, turned twenty-one that September. At first glance it’s hard to see what he’s doing or looking at. But zooming in on the image shows that the young saxophonist, laying out while the great man plays, has a lighted cigarette in his hand, and is staring at Bird so intently that it seems as though the cigarette might burn his fingers any second.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt one)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

There is a watchful sadness about him, a haunted quality, that began in boyhood and persisted until the end of his short life. Few photographs show him smiling. His childhood, in High Point, North Carolina, was broken in two by loss: for his first twelve years, Coltrane, an only child, lived in the bosom of an intact extended middle-class family in his maternal grandparents’ house in Griffin Park, the town’s best Black neighborhood. His grandfather, the Reverend W. W. Blair, was the presiding elder of St. Stephen A.M.E. Zion Church; his father, John R. (the younger John was John William), owned a dry-cleaning and tailor shop. It was a musical household, in a serious way. “My family liked church music, so there was no jazz in the house,” Coltrane remembered. John R. played violin well; he also had a clarinet and a ukulele, and tinkered a little on both. Coltrane’s mother, Alice, had a trained singing voice and played piano. Young John sang in his elementary school chorus and joined the Boy Scouts.

Then, within a few months in the winter of 1938-39, his family suffered a series of deaths—first a beloved aunt, then the Reverend Blair, and then, most devastatingly to John, his father. Suddenly he and his mother were not only bereaved but impoverished. Alice’s sister Bettie Lyerly and Bettie’s daughter Mary moved in with them, and Alice rented the bedrooms to boarders. Alice, Bettie, Mary, and John slept on cots in the dining room. He had always been quiet, with a subtle streak of mischief, but the rupture of his life turned him even further inward.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt fourteen)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

The change in Stanleyville was mirrored by a change in Washington, as liberals in the Kennedy administration slowly found their footing. On March 31, the administration endorsed the reconvening of parliament and said that any new government had to include Gizenga. As part of this policy reset, Kennedy cleaned house. Clare Timberlake’s hysterical cables from Leopoldville, in particular, were increasingly out of step with official thinking in Washington. Ever the stick in the mud, the ambassador continued to rail against Gizenga, failing to grasp the administration’s hope that bringing him into the fold would neutralize, rather than exacerbate, the possible Communist threat he posed. The final straw was Timberlake’s decision, amid unrest in Leopoldville, to radio the commander of the five-ship U.S. naval flotilla off the Angolan coast and order him to head toward the Congo River, without asking permission from Washington. It was a stunningly presumptuous move, and Kennedy, himself a former naval officer, was irate. Timberlake had to go.

Conveniently, Kennedy was able to make the insubordinate ambassador into a sacrificial lamb in a deal with Dag Hammarskjöld: Kennedy would recall Timberlake, who had long been a thorn in the UN’s side, and in return Hammarskjöld would recall Rajeshwar Dayal, who in any case had struggled to perform his duties on account of strong animosity with Kasavubu and Mobutu. Timberlake was put out to pasture in Alabama, at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base—the first in a series of what he considered “pleasant but indifferent jobs with no use being made of what talent I possess.”

Other U.S. officials who had been involved in the Congo drama were on the way out, too. William Burden, the U.S. ambassador in Brussels who had gone so native that he considered Lumumba’s assassination “all to the good,” was removed from his post despite Belgian pleas to Washington that he stay on. At the CIA, Kennedy had decided to fire the top two officials—Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell—after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion dealt the president his first major foreign policy failure.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt thirteen)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

The day Lumumba’s children departed, an American celebrity arrived. Louis Armstrong was playing Africa on a goodwill tour sponsored by the State Department and Pepsi-Cola. At King Baudouin Stadium, ten thousand people—UN soldiers, foreign diplomats, and government officials but mostly everyday Congolese—paid twenty cents for admission. Carried into the venue on a red sedan chair, an honor usually reserved for chiefs, “the King of Jazz” was introduced by Ambassador Timberlake, who had memorized some lines of Lingala for the occasion. The crowd tapped along tentatively to the sounds of “Mack the Knife” and “When the Saints Go Marching In”; this music was new to most. “Give those cats time,” Armstrong remarked to a reporter. “They’ll learn.” Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, had no dinner plans that evening, so the Devlin family hosted a meal. Maureen, who had never heard of the jazz great, reluctantly emerged to say hello.

But the feel-good interlude did not change the fact that the Congo was coming apart. Western diplomats had assumed that Lumumba was the source of the country’s woes; sideline him, and calm would return. In fact, the chaos had only deepened. Leopoldville was the epicenter of the disorder. “Many murders, assaults, rapes, burglaries are taking place without any action by police,” Dayal told Hammarskjöld. It was not unusual in the city to see soldiers pinning families up against a wall and strip-searching them. Gangs of youths, allied with one politician or another, prowled the streets. Lumumba’s supporters beat and stabbed Albert Ndele, a member of Mobutu’s College of Commissioners, outside a hotel. An unknown assassin shot and killed a pro-Lumumba provincial minister visiting from Kasai while he was in a taxi; his body was tossed out the car’s window.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt twelve)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

Hammarskjöld was a reader. (In that, if nothing else, he had something in common with Lumumba.) In the corridors of the UN building, even late at night with the Congo Club, the secretary-general routinely turned the conversation to the arts and letters, not always to the delight of his colleagues, who would much rather listen to him gossip about Jackie Kennedy than endure a lecture on contemporary poetry. For Hammarskjöld, however, the melding was essential, and he made it a priority. Before the Congo crisis, he had been able to set aside two or three hours a day for what he called “serious matters”—namely, literary translation.

As he explained to a French journalist, “I don’t believe that the taste for literature can be reduced to what Americans call a ‘hobby,’ that is to say, to entertainment and relaxation, to a pastime.” He elaborated: “It is an important complement and, for a diplomat, an indispensable one.” Poetry and diplomacy both required a keen sense of the mot juste. More practically, he needed something to pass the time during Security Council sessions while he waited for delegates’ remarks to be translated from languages he already knew.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt eleven)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

By the summer of 1960, President Eisenhower was sixty-nine years old, nearing the end of his second term, and running out of steam. He had survived Cold War crises in Cuba, Korea, Hungary, and the Suez, not to mention a heart attack, a stroke, and intestinal surgery. After the shootdown of a U-2 spy plane over Russia in May scotched an East-West peace summit in Paris, the president largely lost interest in the duties of his job and played golf almost daily. “I wish someone would take me out and shoot me in the head so I wouldn’t have to go through this stuff,” he huffed one day in July, after a National Security Council meeting brought him bad news from Cuba and the Congo.

Eisenhower was cranky to begin with. Dubbed “the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang” by the press, he once launched a golf club at his doctor so forcefully it nearly broke the man’s leg. But the disorder in the Congo made him even more crotchety than usual. In Eisenhower’s view, the “winds of change” in Africa were turning into a “destructive hurricane.” His impression of the Year of Africa was not favorable: “The determination of the peoples for self-rule, their own flag, and their own vote in the United Nations resembled a torrent overrunning everything in its path.”

This distinct lack of enthusiasm for the African nationalist cause was hardly surprising. Given his time leading the invasions of France and Germany in World War II and his service as NATO’s top commander afterward, it was only natural that Eisenhower looked at a postcolonial crisis through a European lens. And just as he dragged his feet on civil rights domestically, he thought the Black population of Africa should move cautiously and under the tutelage of their white former rulers. The raffish Lumumba particularly offended his sense of decorum.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt ten)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

Clare Timberlake also ran into trouble with Lumumba’s guards. On August 18, the U.S. ambassador had an appointment to see the prime minister to complain about another incident in which Congolese troops had harassed and briefly detained six American airmen. Evidently unaware of the appointment, Lumumba’s guards escorted Timberlake across the street from the prime minister’s house and left him waiting on a curb. He returned in a huff to the U.S. embassy, where he had two calls from an apologetic aide inviting him back. When the meeting finally took place, Lumumba bent over backward to declare his admiration for the United States. He told Timberlake that it was obvious he was not a Communist, since he had first asked an American—Edgar Detwiler—to exploit the Congo’s riches. The United States, he said, would have the honor of receiving the first Congolese ambassador to any country. In a short radio broadcast later that day, Lumumba once again praised the friendship of the American people. “We know that the U.S. understands us,” he said.

Even as this charm offensive was under way, however, UN troops once again came under sudden attack. At Ndjili airport, fourteen Canadian signalmen bound for the interior of the Congo were readying for takeoff when a band of Congolese soldiers rushed the plane, raised their guns, and ordered everyone off. The Canadians were forced to lie down on the tarmac, arms splayed, as their blue berets were plucked off their heads. One Canadian was kicked repeatedly in the cheeks. Another was knocked unconscious by a rifle butt. The problem, it turned out, was that several of the Canadians wore paratrooper badges—wings, a maple leaf, and a parachute—and were therefore mistaken for Belgians. The incident underscored not only the problem of Congolese hostility toward the UN but also the uncertain allegiance of the African soldiers serving in the UN force. Ghanaian troops had stood idly by as the Canadians were manhandled, intervening belatedly and only at the urging of their British officers.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt nine)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

He had been thinking about it for weeks. He had threatened it in his ultimatum to the UN. He had perhaps discussed it in hushed tones in the Château Laurier in Ottawa and in the private office of an African ambassador in New York. It was a scheme born of desperation, rather than confidence, the last resort for a man nearing defeat, the only way he could take back Katanga and thus restore the country he was meant to rule. Lumumba was ready to make a choice that would alter the history of the Congo and of Africa: to formally request military aid from the Soviet Union.

The Americans had declined to send him direct assistance. The UN was refusing to help him in Katanga and was even putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Tshombe. Help from the Soviet Union seemed like the only way to retake the breakaway province.

So far, however, Moscow had extended only token support. Soviet leaders had denounced Western imperialism at the UN, in the pages of Pravda, and in their communications with the Congolese, each statement long on Western castigation but short on concrete promises. What tangible help the Soviets did provide—food aid, twenty doctors, planes for the airlift, among other things—was being channeled through the UN mission rather than directly to the government. Yet Moscow had hinted that it might be willing to do more. On August 1, the Kremlin released a statement warning that if the “aggression against the Congo” continued, it would “take resolute measures to rebuff the aggressors.” Four days later, the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, sent Lumumba a letter promising his “friendly and unselfish aid” and assuring him that the Soviet Union would not stand by if the Congo remained under imperialist attack. In the meantime, he gifted Lumumba a twin-engine plane for his personal use.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt eight)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

Nixon, for his part, had gone on a three-week, eight-nation vice presidential tour of Africa in 1957. In Accra, he represented the United States at Ghana’s independence celebrations and quizzed Nkrumah on what the new country’s nonaligned foreign policy would mean in practice. Nixon returned alarmed about the declining European influence in Africa and recommended that Eisenhower lavish newly independent African states with aid. He did not reach this conclusion out of respect for Africans, toward whom he was racist in private, once saying that they had an “animal-like charm.” Rather, he viewed Africa as an emerging battleground between “the forces of freedom and international communism.” The goal was to put as many African states as possible into the Western column. Kennedy criticized Nixon’s Cold War conception of Africa, arguing that its people were “more interested in development than they are in doctrine.”

Kennedy’s support for Algerian independence had helped him win the favor of Michigan’s staunchly progressive governor, G. Mennen Williams, and thus most of Michigan’s fifty-one votes at the Democratic National Convention. But after clinching the nomination in July, Kennedy was in trouble. An August poll put him six percentage points behind Nixon. White southern Democrats were learning from their Baptist preachers that a Catholic president would answer to Rome. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s centrist voting record, including on civil rights, turned off Black voters and the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. He needed to find an issue on which he, often regarded as a cautious, finger-in-the-wind politician, could inspire those voters but without alienating the Dixiecrats he needed to win southern states.

At some point that summer, an idea arose among his advisers: What if Kennedy made Africa a campaign issue?

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt seven)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

The night of his return, Lumumba called an emergency cabinet meeting. By the time it ended the next morning, two major decisions had been made. The first was to declare a nationwide state of emergency. “The army will arrest anyone, be he white or African, who tries to stir up trouble in the Congo,” Lumumba promised at a press conference. “It will show no mercy.”

Under the state of emergency, the government introduced new rules for political associations: henceforth, all such groups had to apply for government authorization. Attending the meeting of an unlicensed group would be punishable by two months in prison. Not long after the announcement, MNC partisans sacked the headquarters of Abako, Kasavubu’s party. Police raided the offices of the Belga News Agency and ordered its staff to stop transmitting reports to Brussels. The editor of the conservative newspaper Le Courrier d’Afrique was thrown in jail. Lumumba, who had built his national profile with large public addresses and once spent three months in jail for holding a political rally, was now himself curtailing freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press.

It was a remarkable authoritarian turn for a man who had once written about Belgian colonial rule, “You do not win the confidence, respect or obedience of a subject people by wickedness, cruelty or harshness, but by good administration, respect for the rights of citizens, and just and humane treatment.” Unable to offer good administration, however, Lumumba opted for harshness. Squelching the free press, in his view, was a matter of survival. His opponents were attacking him mercilessly in the Leopoldville papers, and from across the river, Radio Brazzaville was doing the same. Unknown critics were handing out tracts that warned, “Lumumba is going to sell your women to Russia.”

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt six)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

Most evenings, the apartment really did feel like an abbey. Hammarskjöld rejected nearly all dinner invitations and spent his evenings reading—Joseph Conrad was a favorite—often as Bach or Vivaldi played. Then he would lie down in a spartan twin bed, a phone beside him, ready to ring in the event of some international crisis, and fall asleep alone.

Occasionally, however, an eclectic assemblage of guests turned the place into a lively salon. Hammarskjöld counted among his friends the composer Leonard Bernstein, the poet W. H. Auden, the columnist Walter Lippmann, and the novelist John Steinbeck. Even Greta Garbo, a notorious recluse and the person who confined Hammarskjöld to the slot of second-most famous Swede in New York, sometimes surfaced in his apartment. Amid the worldly curios and guests romped a vervet monkey, a gift Hammarskjöld had been given on his African tour in January, during a stopover in Somalia. He named him Greenback, for the slight tint of his coat, and let him swing on a vine hanging from the banister. Never housebroken, the animal soiled Hammarskjöld’s shoe and wet his collar, but this did nothing to spoil the secretary-general’s affection. “Dag is crazy about the little monkey,” Ralph Bunche, one of the few colleagues to earn an invitation to Hammarskjöld’s, wrote after one dinner just before he left for the Congo.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt five)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

Similar scenes were playing out across the country. In Stanleyville, white residents organized convoys and drove through the bush to reach Sudan or Uganda. In Katanga, some 250 whites spilled over the border into Northern Rhodesia every hour.

The exodus hit the Congo fast, and it hit hard. The white elite that had stayed on after independence—doctors, pharmacists, teachers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, telegraph operators, air traffic controllers—was now leaving en masse, draining the young country of badly needed expertise. Of the Congo’s 175 Belgian postal officials, only one resolved to stay. Of its 542 university-educated agricultural engineers, none did. The national radio fell silent as inexperienced Congolese operators blew through the fuses. At the Ministry of the Interior, two lonely clerks manned an office usually run by dozens of employees. This was white flight on an unprecedented scale: within two weeks of independence, some 60,000 of the 80,000 Europeans remaining in the Congo had left.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt four)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

In Leopoldville, the Belgian ambassador continued, to no avail, to try to get the Congolese government to approve Belgian troop deployments. But with domestic pressure in Belgium mounting, a unilateral military intervention looked more and more likely. By the afternoon of July 9, less than a week after the start of the mutiny and not even a fortnight after independence, Prime Minister Eyskens had made up his mind: if the Congolese government did not give the green light, Belgian troops would intervene regardless.

Before sunrise the next day, they did just that. Early in the morning, ten planes carrying two companies of soldiers took off from the Kamina air base in Katanga and flew to Elisabethville. The copper province’s capital was in jeopardy: an army camp in the city had revolted, and a group of Congolese soldiers had set up a machine gun beside a road and fired into passing cars, killing five white civilians. Welcomed by Tshombe, who saw the mutiny as a Leopoldville plot, the three hundred Belgian troops took Elisabethville’s airport and army camp without firing a shot.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt three)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

In the end, the agency decided against a full-fledged influence campaign, settling instead for a lighter touch. Although it is not clear whether Lumumba ever received any CIA money, the agency did issue small payments to various politicians it deemed promising and pro-Western. The goal was less to influence the elections per se than to develop sources; the bribery was, in the agency’s words, “in the realm of intelligence acquisition, not political action.” It was too soon to pick winners. “In most cases the political leaders of the Congo today have not matured ideologically,” an internal CIA paper argued. Why permanently alienate some of the Congo’s most important politicians just because they might have taken some francs from Moscow?

Lumumba’s electoral campaign continued to gain steam, and the CIA eventually resigned itself to his victory. At a meeting of the National Security Council in May 1960, the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, told President Dwight Eisenhower that Lumumba was likely to lead the free Congo. Dulles did not hide his dislike of the candidate, describing him as an “irresponsible” embezzler, susceptible to bribery and Communist influence.

Eisenhower already had little faith in the Congo’s prospects. A footdragger on civil rights at home, the president was a skeptic of independence in Africa, too. When Dulles pointed out that some eighty political parties were vying for power in the Congo, Eisenhower quipped that he didn’t realize so many people in the colony could read. (In fact, the Congo’s literacy rate, at more than 40 percent, was among the highest on the continent; for all the deficiencies in secondary and higher education, access to primary school was widespread.) It was not the first time the U.S. president expressed his low regard for Africans. At a National Security Council meeting earlier that year, a White House official fresh from a trip to the Congo had told him that “many Africans still belonged in the trees,” and were thus easily manipulated. To that, the president replied in apparent agreement that “man’s emotions still have control over his intelligence.”