Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  In fact, except for me, and for my indomitable aunt Mimi, coming to England in 1933 turned out to be yet another of many failed attempts by the Hobsbaum–Grüns to find a landfall in the stormy seas of the interwar world. Gretl died in 1936, a little older than my mother but still in her thirties. In 1939, after a few years of variable success, Sidney, aged fifty, abandoned the struggle to make a living in England and emigrated to Chile, taking Nancy and Peter with him. Santiago, where he remarried, remained his home. Nancy, whose life really began in South America with the war, returned to Britain with her husband, Victor Marchesi, in 1946, but as a naval officer’s wife continued the peripatetic life for some years and ended it as a retired British settler in Menorca. Peter, qualified as a chemical engineer in Canada, spent most of his life as an expatriate oil company executive and ended it in Spain. Only my future was decided for good in 1935 by the decision to sit the Cambridge scholarship exam, and my aunt Mimi’s, not much later, when she fell in love with an available site in an enchanting and protected corner of a South Downs valley a short bus ride from Brighton, on which she realized her life’s ambition, a place of her own, namely the collection of sheds and stalls she built into the Old Vienna Café. There she died herself, defiantly red-haired, in 1975 at the age of eighty-two, leaving the modest proceeds of the sale of her property to Nancy and myself. It was the only money either of us ever inherited from Gruns or Hobsbaums.

  Not that I felt like someone preparing for what turned out to be the long life of a British academic, although I hoped, even at the age of seventeen, that ‘my future will lie in Marxism, in teaching or in both’ (I knew well enough that it did not lie in poetry, although ‘with practice I could develop quite an acceptable prose style’).1 Spiritually, I still lived in Berlin: a newly isolated teenager uprooted from an environment in which he had felt happy and at home, both culturally and politically. My diary keeps referring back to the friends and comrades, the opinions of my old headmaster, the dramatic political experiences I had left behind. That, no doubt, was the chief reason why I began to keep my diary in German. I did not want to forget. In mid-1935 the visit of a recent German socialist emigre ś śwho tried to involve me in the activities of her group – I suspect it was the one called Neubeginnen (‘a new start’) – reminded me of how isolated my life really was. She (‘in short ‘‘the modern woman’’ of my dreams’) was ‘part of a world to which I once belonged for a few months and whose existence, living behind the stage settings of my ideas, I have almost forgotten’.2

  After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a come-down. Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those days, except – in a very different form – the music to which my viola-studying cousin Denis introduced me, and which we played on a hand-wound gramophone in the attic room of his mother’s house in Sydenham, where the family first found shelter in London, and discussed with the intensity of teenage passion over tins of heavily sugared condensed milk (‘Unfit for Babies’) and cups of tea: hot jazz. Not much of it was as yet available, and certainly, given our cash limits, not much at any one moment. The sort of teenagers who were most likely to be captured by jazz in 1933 were rarely in a position to buy more than a few records, let alone build a collection.3 Still, enough was already being issued in Britain for the local market: Armstrong, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and John Hammond’s last recordings of Bessie Smith. What is more, shortly before a trade dispute stopped American jazz-players from coming to Britain for some twenty years, the greatest of all the bands – I can still recite its then line-up from memory – came to London: Duke Ellington’s. It was the season when Ivy Anderson sang ‘Stormy Weather’. Denis and I, presumably financed by the family, went to the all-night session (‘breakfast dance’) they played at a Palais de Danse in the wilds of Streatham, nursing single beers in the gallery as we despised the slowly heaving mass of South London dancers below, who were concentrating on their partners and not on the wonderful noises. Our last coins spent, we walked home in dark and daybreak, mentally floating above the hard pavement, captured for ever. Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better about it than most,4 I experienced this musical revelation at the age of first love, sixteen or seventeen. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolized by words and the exercises of the intellect.

  I did not then guess that in adult life my reputation as a jazz-lover would serve me well in unexpected ways. Then and for most of my lifetime a passion for jazz marked off a small and usually embattled group even among the cultural minority tastes. For two-thirds of my life this passion bonded together the minority who shared it, into a sort of quasi-underground international freemasonry ready to introduce their country to those who came to them with the right code-sign. Jazz was to be the key that opened the door to most of what I know about the realities of the USA, and to a lesser extent of what was once Czechoslovakia, Italy, Japan, postwar Austria and, not least, hitherto unknown parts of Britain.

  What contributed to the ultra-intellectualization of my next years was the fact that I lived constantly with an effective pair of parents, who flatly refused to allow their impassioned sixteen-year-old to plunge into the life of political militancy which filled his mind. No doubt they took the view that concentrating on getting into a university under his own steam was the first priority for an obviously bright boy who could not rely on family cash. They were of the firm opinion that I was too young to join the Communist Party.5 For the same reason, and in spite of family solidarity with Uncle Harry, they were equally opposed to my joining the Labour Party, which I proposed to do in order to subvert it – what later political generations of Trotskyists knew as ‘entryism’. I now know how they must have felt, confronted with my combination of priggishness and immaturity. I cringe as I reread the desperate entries in my diary for 1934 during this episode of family crisis. So, though the ban was slowly relaxed, for the following two and a half years I lived a life of suspended political animation, and correspondingly concentrated on intense intellectual activity and an amount of reading that in retrospect still amazes me. Not that the British revolution seemed to be making much progress with or without me.

  Since for the next three years we lived so closely together, let me recall the two people who had become my sister’s and my new parents. Both Nancy and I agreed that they were fairly useless at this job, but, looking back at my diary of 1934–5, I think we underestimated both the problems of adults forced to face a series of migrations in several countries, and the extraordinary strains of dealing with two difficult orphans whose disrupted lives had had no real chance to settle, not to mention a peripatetic small boy of eight who was always falling ill. Bringing up the two of us must have been a nightmare. Anyway, they made as much of a mess of their own son’s upbringing as of ours, although it did me less harm than my sister, who developed a settled determination to live an adult life which had nothing whatever in common with the continental, emotional, argumentative, intellectual households of her teenage years. Indeed, I can recall her most fondly as a demonstrably conventional Anglican country matron and Conservative Party activist in Worcestershire in the 1960s.

  Unlike her, I had no real reason for blaming them. On the contrary, they struck me not as tyrannical but, as I wrote shortly before my eighteenth birthday, as ‘tragic’. I saw them, especially Gretl, as the victims of the decline and disintegration of the old conventions that had determined the relations between the generations. The Victorian rules about bringing up children were dead. They had been tough on the children – though probably not unacceptable to most – but a great prop for parents. Now nothing filled this gap. Paradoxically I came to analogous conclusions as my sister from the opposite point of view. The future should not bring a society without accept
ed rules and a firm structure of expectations. ‘The socialist state,’ I told my diary, ‘must and will create a new socialist convention which will get rid of the disadvantages of the old conventions while maintaining their advantages.’ One might even say that I developed the instincts of a Tory communist, unlike the rebels and revolutionaries drawn to their cause by the dream of total freedom for the individual, a society without rules.

  I liked my aunt Gretl enormously, and developed a deep respect for her common sense. What is less usual between parents and touchy teenagers, I liked to talk to her about the problems of life, and parts of my reading. Furthermore, I took her opinions seriously, even on such subjects as sex and love, of which I knew nothing. However, obviously, she could not replace my mother.6 As I passed people in the street, I would sometimes stare, shut my eyes for a moment and say to myself, ‘he or she has eyes like Mama’.7 The youngest, prettiest and socially the most successful of the Grün girls, cherished by both her sisters, and the only one never to have had to earn a living, Gretl faced the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of her life and family – and there were plenty – armed with charm, sympathy, an inborn sensibleness and a notable lack of self-pity. ‘Sidney won’t believe it, he is always the optimist,’ she wrote in a brief note to her sister, as she waited for the operation to remove from her stomach a suddenly discovered tumour ‘as big as a fist’, a few months before I was due to go up to Cambridge. She was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. She took things as they came, and she knew, in this instance correctly, that what might come tomorrow was death. Sidney took me to see her corpse in bed in the old Hampstead General Hospital. I pass the site, now the car park of the Royal Free Hospital, most days on my way to and from Belsize Park. Hers was the first dead body I had ever seen.

  I am not sure that I respected Sidney. I did not want to be like him. Indeed I was embarrassed by, and contemptuous of, his self-pity, his temperamental instability, those characteristic swings from outbursts of rage to effusive sentimentality and back again, the one an expression of impotence, the other a cry for help. As we both had the well-developed sense of confrontation (i.e. contrariness) so often found within Jewish families, our conversations at home tended to be loud, dramatic and often absurd. I think he was absolute hell for Nancy, especially after Gretl’s death deprived him of ballast. Fortunately I was by then that much older, and knew myself to be on the verge of independence. And yet, I remember him intensely and with pleasure. We talked, especially in Paris, and on the long journeys when I acted as his chauffeur – for after a year we were prosperous enough to buy a car, which I learned to drive, just in time to pass the newly introduced driving test. He knew about the ways of the world, and what he said about them I took seriously, not least the observation that men should keep quiet about the women they slept with. His tips on what was good in the French cinema of the 1930s came from the horse’s mouth. He gave me what I clearly had not had from my biological father. And he, in turn, hoped that I would compensate for the repeatedly disappointed hopes of his own life.

  For though Solomon Sidney Berkwood Hobsbaum, short, wearing pince-nez below a forehead that (unlike my father’s) folded vertically, was the only one of Grandfather David’s sons to become a full-time businessman, making money was not his dream. He had the salesman’s ability to believe passionately in the product of the moment, the body armour protecting him against the blows of the unreturned phone call and the cancelled order. Years later I recognized much of him in Arthur Miller’s wonderful Death of a Salesman , as must the intellectual sons of so many Jewish fathers. But though he had ambitions – Napoleon was his favourite character in history, Rawdon Crawley of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in fiction – money was not what inspired him.

  What had his ambitions been in his East End youth? Had he been born much later, when there came to be money in the game and the British took to it, he might have made something of his natural talent for chess, which was evidently considerable. Putting up his hand somewhere in France when chess players were asked for had got him from the western front into intelligence (i.e. codebreaking) in the First World War. He seemed to know something about such matters, but then anyone in his position knocking around central Europe in 1919–33 was quite likely to have come across people involved in secret services. He kept out of politics.

  In other respects he was not creative, but he had the self-educated poor Jew’s passion for culture and loved being in the milieu of creative people – musicians, theatre actors and above all movie people. On his and Gretl’s phonograph in Vienna I heard for the first time and many times after that, a still somewhat Victorian selection of the great vocal classics of the first recorded generation – Caruso, Melba, Tetrazzini – and the repertoire of the great, mainly Italian and French, arias: Verdi, Meyerbeer, Gounod. In practice his musical contacts were more modern: Rose Pauly-Dreesen, the most famous Elektra of her day, with whose career he was associated in the late twenties, was the leading dramatic soprano in Klemperer’s Berlin Krolloper, very much at the cutting edge of Weimar music. He tried to mobilize on her behalf Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Edwardian feminist and the most celebrated female composer of her day, with whom he had somehow established a relationship as a young man. But it was the cinema that captured his heart for good. Not so much the atmosphere of bigshots, wheeler-dealers, the entrepreneurial adventurers and confidencetricksters, though he had got to know them in his time with Universal. It was the milieu of the studio floor – the large world-creating hangars, small emigrant Jews around big stages, cameras, lights, make-up and scenery, all drenched in the atmosphere of technique, gossip, bohemian informality and scandal. I drove him there on his visits to Isleworth and Elstree. For him it was where man was in touch with creation. He succeeded in fighting his way back into it in England by convincing a British photographic firm that his contacts in the movie world made him the man to sell their film-stock in competition with Kodak and Agfa. After a few years of losing battle armed with an uncompetitive product (‘Uncle Sidney goes to Budapest tomorrow. Furious telegram from Joe Pasternak. Selofilm apparently poor quality’) he gave up the struggle, emigrated again and, presumably introduced by his brother Berk, invested his small capital in a share of a modest Chilean enterprise producing kitchenware. At the end of the war he left an unexciting but safe business on little more than the hint from an old contact that there might be a place for him on some new film operation to be launched in connection with the new United Nations. Nothing happened. The dream of the creative life was over. He had thrown up a reasonable livelihood in his mid-fifties for a dream. He never succeeded in getting another.

  Still, for a few years in the 1930s he managed to live his fantasy on the edge of the European tragedy and I received some of the benefit. For who else would give him a chance but those on the margins of the film world – the refugees and the radicals? So he found himself involved in political movies financed by the French left in the Popular Front days, notably Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, and in the political news-reels which enabled me to see the great Bastille Day of 1936 from the Socialist Party’s camera truck with a Socialist Party steward’s badge. During the Civil War he took up his Spanish, or rather Catalan, contacts again. He returned from visits to Barcelona in 1937 with stories of conversations with the Catalan leader, Luis Companys (later executed by Franco) and with an upper-class Englishman called Eric Blair. These were losing causes. My uncle, though his sympathies were with the left like the great majority of Jews from poor working-class families, wanted nothing better than to keep out of party politics. The logic of history pushed him into earning his living from and with the battling antifascists, while he and they still could. It was not to be for long.

  II

  The Britain I came to in 1933 was utterly different in almost every way from the country in which I write this at the start of the new century. The history of the island in the twentieth century divides sharply into two halves – to put it in a phrase, before and afte
r the simultaneous shocks of Suez and rock and roll. Almost every generalization about the country to which I came in 1933 ceases to apply after 1956, even the notorious inefficiency of the British system of domestic heating and – one of its consequences – the impenetrable Dickensian fog which, until 1953, still occasionally forced London to a standstill. Britain was no longer a major empire or a world power, and after Suez nobody believed that it was. Popular culture compensated by creating sagas of British heroism and eventual victory against the Germans in the Second World War. In 1933 people thought about the Great War not as a heroic memory, but as a graveyard. However, everyone knew that a larger area of the world map than ever before was coloured pink, and that we were the only global empire, even if intelligent imperialists recognized that our grasp was already much more restricted than our reach. But British skins were still white. In 1933 black and brown faces were far easier to find on the streets of Paris than London and, except for Veeraswamy’s in the West End, the Indian restaurant was still virtually absent. Indeed, foreigners of any kind were rare, since Britain was not a centre of international tourism, which was in any case still tiny by present standards.

  Only Hitler and the war were to bring into Britain a modest number of the sort of middle-class continentals whose reactions the Hungarian George Mikes has described fondly in the little book How to be an Alien . Contrary to the native myth, the country did its best to exclude refugees but, unlike Mikes, the next generation of Hungarian immigrants, the refugees of 1956–7, would no longer have thought of describing Britain as a country where hot-water bottles took the place of sex. It was the 1950s that revolutionized the sexual and social mores of the British young. In the 1930s the idea of London as the international city of style, fun and promiscuity (as in the ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s) was inconceivable. For heterosexual males the action was in Paris or the French Riviera, for homosexual ones – at least until Hitler came – in Berlin. For women the public scope was more limited either way.