Batum is a very pleasant little tropical city, a city of beaches and hotels, and an important shipping point on the Black Sea. It is a city of parks and tree-shaded streets, and the breeze from the sea keeps it from being too hot.
The Intourist Hotel here was the finest and most luxurious in the Soviet Union. The rooms were pleasant and newly decorated, and each one had a balcony with chairs. The full-length windows made it possible to open whole rooms to the outside. After the night in an old museum-piece of a coach, we looked longingly at the beds, but they were not for us. We barely got away with a bath. Our time was running short, and we had to see a great deal in a very short time.
In the afternoon we visited several of the rest houses. They are large palaces set in magnificent gardens, and nearly all of them look out to the sea. It would be dangerous to be experts in these things. Nearly everyone who has ever traveled in Russia has become an expert, and nearly every expert cancels out every other expert. We must be very careful in what we say about these rest houses. We must repeat only what we were told in the ones we saw, and even then we'll bet we get an argument from somebody.
The first one we visited looked like a very luxurious hotel. It was at the head of a long set of steps that led up from the beach, and it was surrounded by great trees, and in front of it was an enormous porch overlooking the water. This one was owned by a Moscow branch of the electricians' union, and the people who stayed in it were electricians. We asked how they got to come, and we were told that in every factory, in every workshop, there is a committee which includes not only representatives of the factory workers, but a company doctor. A number of factors are taken into consideration by the committee which designates the people who are to come on vacation. There is length of service, there is physical condition, there is quality of tiredness, and there is reward for service beyond that which is required. And if a worker has been sick and needs a long rest, the medical section of his factory committee designates him for a trip to a rest house.
One part of this rest house was set aside for single men, another for single women, and a third part for whole families, who had apartments for their vacations. There was a restaurant where everyone ate, and there were game rooms, and reading-rooms, and music rooms. In one game room people were playing chess and checkers; in another a fast ping-pong game was going on. The tennis courts were crowded with players and spectators, and the stairs were lined with people climbing up from the beach or going down to swim. The hotel had its own boats and fishing equipment. Many of the people simply sat in chairs and looked off toward the sea. There were recuperating illnesses here, and there were the results of industrial accidents, sent down to get well in the warm air of the Black Sea. The average vacation was twenty-eight days, but in cases of illness the stay might be protracted for as long as the factory committee wished.
We were told that very many of the unions maintain rest houses on the sea for their members. This rest house could take about three hundred people at a time.
We drove a few miles down the coast to a sanatorium, a place that again looked like a giant hotel. And this was a state sanatorium for tuberculars and people troubled with other pulmonary difficulties. It was part hospital and part rest house. It was a very pleasant sunny place. The bed-ridden patients had their beds pulled out on balconies overlooking the gardens and the sea, and the ambulatory cases wandered about, listening to music and playing the inevitable chess, which is a game second only to soccer in importance.
The patients in this house were designated by the medical boards of their districts. This was a place of rest. When we came to it it seemed to be almost deserted, for all of the patients were in their beds. But while we were there a bell rang, and gradually they emerged to stroll about.
We were told that there were many hundreds of such sanatori-ums on the edges of the sea, and driving along the coast road we could see a great many of them among the trees on the hillside slopes.
While we were driving, a heavy tropical rain began, and we went back to our hotel and finally got a couple of hours sleep. We were awakened by an unusual kind of music. There would be a passage of clarinet marmalade, played in unmistakable Benny Goodman style. Then the passage would stop, and a second clarinet would take up the same passage, but not in unmistakable Benny Goodman style. In a half doze it took us some time to realize what was happening in one of the rooms near us. Someone was listening to a passage of a Benny Goodman record, and then trying to imitate it, with only a modest amount of success. It went on and on, one passage repeated again and again and again. It is only when one sees the mess that is made of American swing music by most Europeans that one is able to realize how definite, how expert, and how unique American music is. Perhaps our musicians would have the same difficulty with the intricate rhythms and melodies of Georgian music. Certainly the Russians have plenty of trouble with ours, but they bring great enthusiasm to bear. We had not heard much American swing music in Tiflis, but in Batum there was a good deal. The hotels were filled with it, for many of the visitors had come down from Moscow where it is played more often.
In the evening we were invited to a concert on the seashore by what was called the Tiflis jazz orchestra. In a little band shell beside the beach, the orchestra took its place, and it played its version of American jazz-'Shine,' and 'China Boy,' and 'In the Mood'- always 'In the Mood.' When Capa and I came in to the concert, we were given huge bunches of flowers to hold, and we felt a little silly. Neither of us is quite the type to listen to a concert peering over the edge of fifteen pounds of gladioli. They were big bouquets, and there was nothing we could do with them. We couldn't put them down, we had to peer through the spikes of flowers at the orchestra on the platform.
We realized why they could not play American music well. Our swing music is invented and improvised. The musician puts himself and his imagination into his playing, whereas this Russian orchestra slavishly imitated records that it heard, and such records are not im-itatable. If they wanted to play swing music, they should have taken perhaps the theme of 'Dinah' and improvised on it, in which case they would have had music. It wouldn't have been American swing music, but it might have been Georgian swing music.
It was with relief that the orchestra turned to its own music and played the wild dances of the Georgian hills. And we were relieved too, because they were at home, and it was music. And after it was over, the leader and several of the players came back to the hotel with us to have dinner. The leader was a wiry, enthusiastic man, and with our Tinker to Evers to Chmarsky translation we tried to tell him about the background of American swing, how it had developed and what it was. He was fascinated with its theory, and he and his players would break into explosive explanations in Georgian. The idea that around a simple melody the musicians became creators of music, not to be written down, not to be preserved, but simply to be played, was new to him. And as he and his players listened, they grew more and more excited about the idea. We told them there was no reason why an American theme should be used. A Georgian theme with the same improvisation would be just as good, and probably an idea that they could better carry out. After a while they jumped up, and said good-by, and left us. And we imagine that somewhere in the night, on the shore of the Black Sea, there was some wild experimenting with improvisation in the American manner.
We never seemed to get enough sleep, but it was not entirely that which wearied us. We were on the go all the time, we were never able to settle back and think about things. Capa's cameras had been snapping like firecrackers, and he was getting a lot of exposed film. Maybe it was something like this. We were seeing things all the time, we were having to see things all the time. For us, in a normal inefficient kind of an existence, we'd only see things a little part of the time, and the rest of the time we would just relax and not look at anything. But with our limited time on this trip, we had to see something every minute, and we were getting extremely tired. And there was one other thing too. We were living a life which for virtue has only been equaled once or twice in the history of the world. Part of this was intentional because we had too much to do, and part of it was because vice wasn't very available. And we are fairly normal specimens. We love a well-turned ankle, or even a few inches above the ankle, clad, if possible, in a well-fitting nylon stocking. We are fond of all the tricks, and lies, and falsities that women use to fool and snare innocent and stupid men. We like these things very much-nice hair-dos, and perfume, and beautiful clothes, and nail polish, and lipstick, and eye-shadow, and false eyelashes. We had a definite hunger to be tricked and fooled. We like intricate French sauces, and vintage wines, and Perrier-Jouet champagne, approximately 1934. We like sweet-smelling bath soap, and soft white shirts. We like gypsy music played by a whole bloody battalion of violins. We like the crazy skirl of Louis Armstrong's trumpet, and the hysterical laughter of Pee Wee Russell's clarinet. And we were leading a life of limpid virtue. We were consciously circumspect. The most common attacks on foreigners in the Soviet press are on the basis of drunkenness and lechery. And while we are only reasonably alcoholic, and no more lecherous than most people, although this is a variable thing, we were determined to live the lives of saints. And this we succeeded in doing, not entirely to our satisfaction.
There might have been one other thing that made us tired, and that was our conversation, which had been
