I found the atmosphere of the LSE congenial, and its library, then still in the main building, a good place to work. It was full of central Europeans and colonials, and therefore markedly less provincial than Cambridge, if only by its commitment to social sciences such as demography, sociology and social anthropology, which were of no interest on the Cam. Curiously enough, the subject that gave its name to the school was at that time – and indeed had always been – both less distinguished and less enterprising than at Cambridge, though it attracted some very brilliant junior talent, which alas found no lasting posts in Houghton Street.
I must in some ways have felt more at ease in the LSE student atmosphere, and certainly with its women students, for I established a lifetime friendship with two of the girls I met there, and later married another, though less permanently. Three of my LSE communist student contemporaries became lifetime friends: the historian John Saville (then still known as Stamatopoulos or ‘Stam’), his companion and later wife, Constance Saunders, and the impressive James B. Jefferys, who made the transition from a Ph.D. in economic history to wartime convenor of shop stewards at Dunlops, and – less successfully – back again to research, for he became a victim of the Cold War ban on communist academics. It was through another LSE contemporary that I maintained, or rather re-established, links with Austria: the sporting, bushy-haired charmer Tedy Prager, who later got his economics Ph.D. under Joan Robinson in Cambridge, more in tune with his ideas than the LSE’s Robbins and Hayek. Sent by his family out of harm’s way from Vienna, having got into trouble resisting the Austrofascist regime after the civil war of 1934, he abandoned promising careers in Britain and in the ruins of postwar Vienna, to which, like almost all Austrian communists, he returned from British exile.
In the summer vacations the Cambridge student Party militants went to France to work with James Klugmann. With Margot Heinemann, James was my link with the heroic era of Cambridge communism before my time. (Both remained communists to the end of their lives.) Margot, one of the most remarkable people I have ever known, had been John Cornford’s last love, to whom he wrote one of his last poems from Spain, which has since become an anthology piece, and later partnered J. D. Bernal. Through a lifetime of comradeship, example and advice, she probably had more influence on me than any other person I have known.
James had been the Party’s acknowledged co-leader with John. For most of the Cambridge student militants he was and long remained a person of enormous prestige, even a sort of guru. I assume that, of all the student communists of his time, he was the one in closest touch with the International, for after graduation, abandoning an academic future for which he was admirably suited, he moved to Paris as Secretary of the Rassemblement Mondial des Etudiants (RME) (World Student Assembly) a broad, but Party-controlled international student organization. On my way to see him there once I recall crossing the path of one Raymond Guyot, a French heavyweight and for several years the Secretary-General of the Communist Youth International. It operated out of one of those small dusty Balzacian backstairs offices so characteristic of unofficial pre-war politics, in the ill-named Cité ś Paradis, a gloomy dead-end in the 10th arrondissement, and later in a more ambitious locale on the Left Bank. Its most obvious public activities were to organize periodic world congresses, which Cambridge and other student volunteers helped to prepare. I acted as translator at the 1937 Congress, which coincided with the great Paris World Exposition, the last before the Second World War, in a marvellous series that began with Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851. I can recall no major spell under James in 1938 – much of that summer I travelled in North Africa – nor can I confirm the report that I was mobilized for a meeting with Arab and Jewish students organized by James in the Easter vacation of 1939, to form a joint front against fascism, Mussolini having just occupied the largely Muslim country of Albania.8 I spent all the summer of 1939 working on the technical preparations for what would be the largest of these congresses, which ended a few days before Hitler invaded Poland.
In almost every way except intelligence and political devotion James Klugmann was the opposite of the romantic, heroic, highly colourful image of his partner in leadership, John Cornford. Bespectacled, soft-voiced, with a demure wit, always looking as though he was about to smile, he lived alone in a hotel room just by the Odéon theatre. As far as I know he continued a monastic existence as an unattached man for the rest of his life, surrounded, when the occasion arose, by admiring juniors. I am told he made sexual jokes in the company of intimates – of whom I was never one – and, since he had been at Gresham’s School, the nursery of more than one eminent homosexual of his day, he may very well have been queer, but one never associated him with any kind of sexual activity. His only obvious passion, at least in his postwar British life, when I saw more of him, was book-collecting. His personal remoteness added to the respect in which we, and indeed most of those who had anything to do with him, held him. What did one know about him? He gave nothing away. The only obvious thing about him was his capacity for remarkably lucid and simple exposition, and the air of authority he exuded – until he was ruined by the break between Stalin and Tito. Not that I can recall much political conversation with James in pre-war Paris in the intervals between work, when we sat in cafés playing chess – he was good at explaining why he beat us – or otherwise taking a break from meetings and the duplicating machine in bars playing table football, Jews playing Asians.
Almost certainly it was the RME that laid the foundations for James’s extraordinary wartime career as the key figure in British relations with Tito’s Partisans. Left-wing student movements of significance were rare enough in continental Europe, where the typical political stance of students (but not necessarily of university teachers) in the 1930s was a right-wing nationalism shading over into fascism. The great exception were the communist students of Yugoslavia, and especially the university of Belgrade, one of whose leaders, Ivo (Lolo) Ribar, a central figure in what would become the Partisan movement, was a familiar figure at the RME. Probably no man west of Moscow, and certainly no man in Cairo, knew more about who was who in Yugoslav communism and how to make contact with them.
After Stalin’s break with Tito, James was forced, almost certainly by direct pressure from Moscow, to make his own irreparable break by writing an utterly implausible and insincere book, From Trotsky to Tito . His reputation as the only first-rate intellectual (other than Palme Dutt) to reach the Party leadership, never recovered. From then on he took no risks or initiatives and said nothing, and ceased to be a serious force even within the small CPGB. The Party put him in charge of Education (assisted by our old student organizer Jack Cohen), a job he did brilliantly well, for he was a born teacher. He was far too intelligent and perceptive not to feel the disappointment, indeed the pity of his admirers from the 1930s for a man from whom so much had been expected. He had had the stuffing knocked out of him. Only in 1975 was there a last flash of the old James Klugmann. British intelligence, which had periodically got at him ever since Burgess and Maclean left for Moscow in 1951 suggested that he might at last be prepared to help the British spooks as others had done. Perhaps inducements were offered. 9 The idea that British intelligence, which he knew well – he had after all been in it during the war – should have thought him capable of disloyalty to his cause, hurt him. He refused. He died not long after in a nondescript South London house filled with books.
My last term, May–June 1939, was pretty good. I edited Granta, was elected to the Apostles and got a starred First in the Tripos, which also gave me a Studentship at King’s. There was only one downside. In the spring of 1939 Uncle Sidney, too old for any kind of war service, gave up the long struggle to make a living in Britain and decided to emigrate to Chile with Nancy, Peter and the few hundred pounds he had been able to raise to start a new life. There was never any question of my going a few weeks before Tripos, and in any case I was not going to leave the country with a war coming. In those days Chile was still
a very long way from Europe. I saw them on to the boat in Liverpool, and took the train back to Edgware, to sleep one last night on the floor of the now totally empty house in Handel Close, where I had left my rucksack. The bottle of good Tokay, which I had saved from the old home, had somehow disappeared in my absence. Then I went back to Cambridge.
I spent the summer living in a grim but well-placed Paris hotel in the rue Cujas on the editorial profits of Granta, working on James’s great Congress. A photograph from the Congress is before me: a mixture of whites (mostly from Cambridge) with Indians, Indonesians, the odd Middle and Far Easterner and a solitary African. I recognize that well-meaning girl from Amsterdam – she was later killed in the Dutch Resistance. There, among the crowd of forgotten youthful faces, is the handsome Javanese Satjadjit Soegono, who became a major trade union leader in Indonesia after the war until he was killed in the 1948 communist insurrection in Madiun. There, next to James, is Pieter Keunemann, the future General Secretary of the CP of Sri Lanka and P. N. Haksar, the future chief-of-staff of Mrs Gandhi. There are the Spanish refugees – little Miggy Robles, who worked so hard at the duplicator with Pablo Azcarate of the Spanish Communist Party. There is the small, intense, Bengali face of Arun Bose. It was a successful Congress except for one thing: the Second World War began less than two weeks later.
I needed a rest and hitchhiked for a few days to Concarneau in Brittany. I returned on 1 September. A well-dressed but somewhat preoccupied Frenchwoman in a sports car gave me a lift somewhere past Angers. Had I heard? Hitler had marched into Poland. We drove to Paris, stopping to discover the latest from the radio somewhere, with random conversation about the coming war. As this was France, it is inconceivable that we did not stop for lunch, but on such a day that does not stay in the memory. Some Parisians were already going the other way in loaded cars. We wished one another good luck as she dropped me off. I made for the Westminster Bank on the Place Vendôme and queued with the rest of the Brits. A bad-tempered man with a notably retreating chin was ahead of me, whose passport made him out to be the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis. There was not much to pack before going to St Lazare to get tickets, if I could, for the night train to London. It was full of tall, long-legged blondes: the English dancers from the Folies Bergère and the Casino de Paris were returning to their homes in Morecambe or Nottingham. If I remember it right, I came out of Victoria Station on the last morning of peace having underslept, but into a sunny London. I no longer had a home there, but I think I spent the last night of peace in the flat of, or shared by, Lorna Hay, a Scottish graduate from Newnham about to look for a career in London journalism. She had just been told by Mohan Kumaramangalam, returning to India, that his future as a professional revolutionary made it impossible to take her with him.
That is how the 1930s ended for me.
9
Being Communist
I
I became a communist in 1932, though I did not actually join the Party until I went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1936. I remained in it for some fifty years. The question why I stayed so long obviously belongs in an autobiography, but it is not of general historical interest. On the other hand, the question why communism attracted so many of the best men and women of my generation, and what being communists meant to us, has to be a central theme in the history of the twentieth century. For nothing is more characteristic of that century than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the twentieth century: political passion’. And the quintessential expression of this was communism.
Communism is now dead. The USSR and most of the states and societies built on its model, children of the October Revolution of 1917 which inspired us, have collapsed so completely, leaving behind a landscape of material and moral ruin, that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start. Yet the achievements of those inspired by this conviction, and the associated belief that ‘there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot conquer’, were indeed quite extraordinary. Within little more than thirty years of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, one third of the human race and all governments between the Elbe and the China Seas lived under the rule of Communist Parties. The Soviet Union itself, defeating the most formidable war machine of the twentieth century, which had pulverized Tsarist Russia, emerged from the Second World War as one of the world’s two superpowers. There had been no comparable triumph of an ideology since the (slower and less global) conquests of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries of our era.
This was achieved by small, often by relatively or absolutely tiny, self-selected ‘vanguard parties’ for, unlike the working-class parties which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, also mostly inspired and encouraged by the ideas of Karl Marx, communism was not designed as a mass movement, and became one only by historical accident, as it were. In this respect it contrasted with, and indeed rejected, the classic approach of Marxist social democracy, which expected everyone who recognized themselves as a ‘worker’ to identify with parties whose essence, often expressed in their very name – Labour Party – was that they were parties of workers. To support the party of labour seemed to them not so much an individual political choice as the discovery of a person’s social existence, which necessarily had certain public implications. Conversely, their least political activities were imbued with the sense of what defined a person’s social existence, so that the clubs which met in the back rooms of pubs in ‘Red Vienna’ – I recall seeing such notices there as late as the 1970s – practised their hobbies not as stamp collectors but as Worker Philatelists, or as Worker Pigeon Fanciers. Such parties were sometimes also to be found in the communist movement, as notably in postwar Italy. There the Party, rooted in family and local community, combined the tradition of the old socialist movement with the organizational efficiency of Leninism and the moral authority of a secular Catholic Church. (As Palmiro Togliatti put it in 1945: ‘in every household a picture of Marx next to the one of Jesus Christ’). It was the kind of Party in which a young woman from Modena could quite naturally ask her Party Federazione to make enquiries to the Padova Federazione, to discover whether the young carabiniere from that city who courted her was ‘serious’ (Alas, he turned out to be already married in Padova.)1 Here public and private, becoming a better person and building a better world, were considered indivisible.
The Communist Parties of the Comintern era were of an entirely different kind, even when they claimed, sometimes correctly, to be rooted in the working class and to express its interests and aspirations. They were Lenin’s ‘professional revolutionaries’, that is to say necessarily a relatively or absolutely small selected group. To join such an organization was essentially an individual decision, and was recognized as life-changing both by those who invited a ‘contact’ to join the Party and by the man or woman who joined it. It was a double decision, for remaining in the Party (at least outside countries of communist rule) implied the continuous choice not to leave it, which was possible easily and at any time. For most of those who joined, membership of the Party was a temporary episode in their political life. Nevertheless, unlike the 1968 generation, few interwar communists went into the revolution as into a political Club Med (which, by the way, was founded as a holiday mini-utopia by a young Communist Party exresister after the Second World War).
Giorgio Amendola, one of the pre-war generation of Italian communist leaders, called the first volume of his beautifully written autobiography Una scelta di vita, ‘A Chosen Life’. For those of us who became communists before the war, and especially before 1935, the cause of communism was indeed something to which we intended to dedicate our lives, and some did so. The crucial difference turned out to be between communists who spent their lives in opposition and those whose Parties took power, and who therefore became directly or indirectly responsible for what was done in their regimes. Power does not necessarily corrupt people as individuals, though its corruptions are not easy to resist. What power does, esp
ecially in times of crisis and war, is to make us do and seek to justify things unacceptable when done by private persons. Communists like myself, whose Parties were never in power, or engaged in situations which call for decisions on other people’s life or death (resistance, concentration camps), had it easier.
Membership in these Leninist ‘vanguard parties’ was thus a profound personal choice, but not an abstract one. For most interwar communists joining the Party was a further step on this road for someone who was already ‘on the left’ or, in the parts of the world where this was appropriate, ‘anti-imperialist’. It was, of course, easier for those who came from politically homogeneous environments of the right kind – say, in New York, where, as I once overheard one contributor to The New Yorker say reflectively to another, ‘One actually never meets any Republicans,’ rather than in Dallas, Texas. It was even easier for those who came from communities, generally marginal to the larger society, whose situation placed them outside the national political consensus. Conversely, vast as is the number of ex-communists of my generation, it is uncommon to encounter among them people who have swung to the extreme political right. The exit-route of the politically disillusioned communist usually led either, if young enough, to some other branch of the political left, or, generally by stages, mainly to a militant anti-communist Cold War liberalism. Even in the USA a generation had to pass before the (anti-Stalinist) intellectuals of the New York left abandoned the old family loyalties and frankly declared themselves ‘neo-conservatives’.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 16
