Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  But what did it make a western communist feel like about the Soviet Union, whose shadow so patently darkened the German scene? No illusions could survive the immediate postwar contact with the Soviet occupation, direct or indirect, just as the hopes of postwar international amity, which were not confined to communists, had a hard time surviving the postwar frictions between the western and eastern military and officials on the ground. The young Austrian refugees from the London wartime emigration who followed their Party’s instruction to return to rebuild their country amid the smell of hungry people in wintry trams and in high-ceilinged, commandeered offices had expected physical hardships, but few had anticipated the actual pervasive anti-Russian mood. For those who lived under, or even had direct contact with, the realities of Soviet-occupied central Europe, being communist was no longer as simple as before the war. We did not lose our faith and our confidence in the eventual superiority of socialism to capitalism, nor our belief in the world-changing potential of Communist Party discipline, but our, or at least my, hopes were now edged with that sense of inevitable tragedy of Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’.7 Paradoxically, what made it easier or, for many, possible to maintain the old faith was, more than anything else, the crusading global anti-communism of the West in the Cold War.

  II

  But let me return to the time of the Berlin airlift. As the wartime alliance broke up, so did the fading hope of postwar co-operation between the two superpowers. In 1947 the communist ministers in western governments began to be edged out of their offices, and so were the non-communist ministers in the countries under communist rule. For purely European purposes a new Communist International (the so-called Communist Information Bureau or Cominform) was set up, to publish a journal which, even by the exacting standards of the Soviet era, must have been the all-time champion of unreadability. 8 The eastern regimes, deliberately not set up as communist, but as pluriparty ‘new’ or ‘peoples’ democracies’ with mixed economies, were now assimilated to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, i.e. the standard Communist Party dictatorships. And for the West, as confrontation became more overt, communists became fifth columnists.

  In Britain things began to change, but in a relatively low-key, gentlemanly manner. There was no overt purge of Party members from the civil service, though, where known, they were removed from jobs with access to sensitive information. Those in the politically sensitive ‘administrative’ class were discreetly informed that there was no future for them in the service, but there would be no publicity, if they were to choose to leave of their own free will. One who chose to stay served the rest of his career in those remote corners which large bureaucracies reserve for those who can neither be sacked nor given any job of the slightest responsibility.

  There was no actual purge in the universities. Birkbeck College, where I had just begun teaching, was exceptional – at least until the arrival of an ambitious new Master in 1951 – in showing no discernible signs of anti-communism among staff or students. Its students earned their living during the day, and such political tradition as it had was on the left. The mood in the small, crowded and friendly staff common room suggested that it was overwhelmingly composed of Labour voters. Such Tories as there were – I suppose my colleague and later boss Douglas Dakin was one – were hardly typical. He had been secretary of the local branch of the union, the Association of University Teachers, in the intervals of running the entire student side of the college as part-time Registrar (with one secretary), playing cricket and teaching, and handed the union job on to me as soon as I arrived. Moreover, by far the most prestigious member of the college staff was a communist, and employer of Party members in his department, a man closely identified with the USSR, J.D. Bernal, crystallographer and so universal a genius (but for a total blank in music) that he could never concentrate on any topic long enough to win a Nobel Prize, although he was the inspirer of several. Even those who had their doubts about his loyalty to Moscow could hardly forbear to admire this short, bushy-haired man who looked like the essential scientist in a strip-cartoon, walked like a sailor on shore or, as he said, ‘the pobble who had no toes’, and entertained the staff room with well-honed anecdotes about his extraordinarily distinguished time as scientific adviser to Combined Operations during the war. Picasso himself, prevented by the authorities from attending a Soviet-sponsored meeting in Sheffield, had drawn a spirited mural on the wall of Bernal’s flat in Torrington Place, which many years later was to become a sort of logo of Birkbeck. The great artist shared not only Bernal’s communism, but also his legendary polygamy; with the difference only that Bernal genuinely treated the women drawn to him as equal partners, both sexually and intellectually. This reputation for gender equality was what attracted the brilliant Rosalind Franklin to Birkbeck from King’s College, London, dissatisfied with her treatment by the other (male) workers – the ones who got the Nobel Prize – on the famous Double Helix. Though she was notoriously, and understandably, touchy about macho assumptions in colleagues, she was, at least when we talked, full of praise for Bernal as man and scientist, even when she made fun of the Party-line loyalists in his department.

  I was lucky to teach at a college which provided a built-in, unforced protection against the pressures of the Cold War outside. Nevertheless, the academic situation was not good. To the best of my knowledge, all communists who had been appointed to academic posts before the summer of 1948 remained in their jobs, and no attempt was made to dismiss them, unless by the non-renewal of short-term contracts, which were extremely rare in those days. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, no known communists were appointed to university posts for ten years or so from 1948, nor, if already in teaching posts, were they promoted. In the course of that decade, for instance, I was turned down for several posts in economic history in Cambridge – I supervised and examined this subject in the Economics Tripos – and I did not get promotion to a Readership in London until 1959. Even people who had had only a few months’ connection with the Party, such as the economic historian Sidney Pollard, were seriously held back. This was frustrating, but a long way from the American witch-hunting. (No British academic posts, to my knowledge, were made conditional on the formal abjuration of past sin, as happened when the University of Berkeley offered a chair to Pollard several years later – a condition which he refused to accept.) Curiously, there was more of a political purge in parts of Adult Education, a field which attracted a substantial number of reds and other radicals on ideological grounds, notably in the Extramural Delegacy of Oxford University, which had been run for some years by Thomas Hodgkin, a particularly charming member of the British intellectual aristocracy (Quaker branch) who had been expelled from Palestine for joining the Communist Party during his time as aide-de-camp to the British High Commissioner; the Party was the only place where Jews and Arabs mixed as friends and equals. Unfortunately the formidable Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary and still boss of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had accused the delegacy of harbouring red activists who fomented strikes at what was then the major Morris car plant at Cowley – those were the days when Oxford could be described as ‘the Latin Quarter of Cowley’.9 However, even here there was no general purge of communists.

  We accepted that ‘this tacit and often half-conscious discrimination, similar to, though less systematic than, the exclusion of social democrats from German university posts before 1914’10 was relatively mild and concentrated on denouncing American academic McCarthyism – those were the days when the US government refused an entry visa even to the great physicist P. A. M. Dirac – and the dangers that would follow if the American model were to spread to Britain. Nevertheless, in 1950 the historian E. H. Carr was reported as thinking, correctly, that ‘It had become very difficult … to speak dispassionately about Russia except in ‘‘a very woolly Christian kind of way’’ without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement.’ In any case, there is no question t
hat the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media.11

  What made communist intellectuals feel members of a harried minority was not so much official or quasi-official victimization, as exclusion. Naturally we were convinced, and sometimes had evidence, that our letters were read, our phone bugged, and that, in case of real war, we would find ourselves interned, hopefully with plenty of time to read and work, on some suitable smaller island of the British archipelago. We resented it, even as we could not deny that, given the Cold War, it was logical behaviour for the government. We were the enemies of NATO, after all. What made the rhetoric of Cold War liberals so intolerable was their conviction that all communists were simply agents of the Soviet enemy and their denial that any communist could therefore possibly be a member in good standing of the intellectual community.

  Perhaps friendship might have survived politics–after all, I remained on good terms with Mounia Postan, even though I knew that every one of his job references was a poisoned arrow – but it requires more than the small change of social life. And even the taste of genuine friendship could have the bitter tang of Cold War distrust. When I received my first invitation to the USA, anticipating problems, I asked a colleague and friend (a moderate Labour supporter at the time) whether he would be prepared to write a letter testifying to my academic standing. ‘Of course I will,’ he said. I still remember the momentary sense of abandonment as he added: ‘Of course it has nothing to do with it, but could you just tell me – I mean, not that it matters in the least, but are you still in the Communist Party?’

  That is why my most resented memory of the Cold War is not of jobs lost, or letters obviously opened, but of my first book. I had proposed it in 1953 to the publishers Hutchinsons, now long buried in some transatlantic publishing conglomerate, for their University Library, a series of compact texts addressed to students: a short comparative volume on The Rise of the Wage Worker. The proposal was accepted, but when I submitted the finished manuscript, it was turned down on the advice of an anonymous but presumably authoritative reader or readers. It was, they said, too biased, and therefore unacceptable under the contract. No suggestions for modifications were made. I protested. The firm agreed that I had put in a good deal of work, and therefore offered me a good-will payment of 25 guineas.12 What stuck in my gullet was not only the contemptible amount of the sum – even in the mid-fifties it amounted to the proceeds of two or three book reviews – but the knowledge that the book had almost certainly been turned down on the advice of some senior colleague, as like as not – given the subject – a supporter of the Labour Party. And there was nothing I could do about it. I was sufficiently furious to consult my lawyer, the astute Jack Gaster, about suing Hutchinsons. He told me not to think of it. ‘You may find people to testify to your academic standing, but they will find more to testify that you are biased.’ He was right. I never published the book, though I used parts of it in other publications. What makes the incident so typical of that miserable phase of the Cold War is that some years later my then publisher George Weidenfeld, having asked my advice, published a book of the same length on precisely the same subject, and, in my view, ideologically more obviously controversial, as part of one of those global co-production series which he was then promoting.

  Under these circumstances, and even though by 1958 the ideological temperature of the Cold War had become a shade less icy, the decision of George (now Lord) Weidenfeld to commission me to write, for an advance on publication of £500, a volume in a gigantic and still not completed history of civilization he was then planning, was admirable and not without courage. It turned out to be The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 , the first volume of a four-volume history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was quite well known for my identification with the Communist Party. He was a commercial publisher and a person not uninterested in good relations with the social and political establishment. I owe him a lasting debt of gratitude. Who recommended me to him? I can only speculate, since Lord Weidenfeld himself claims not to remember. I suspect it was J. L. Talmon, of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who had been his first choice for the volume in question, but who wanted to drop out. Talmon and I had found ourselves arguing about the nature of democracy and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, and respected each other, though we disagreed on most other things, notably Zionism.

  III

  The darkest period of public anti-communism, the years of the Korean War and, incidentally, of the opening instalment of the great ‘Cambridge Spy’ serial – the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 – coincided with a dark moment in my own life. In the summer of 1950 my first marriage, rocky for some time, broke up in circumstances which left me wounded and for some years acutely unhappy. After I left our flat in Clapham Common, I never saw Muriel again except at the moment of our divorce. Fortunately I had won a Fellowship at King’s the year before, and the college – such things were then possible – at a moment’s notice found me a set of rooms in the wonderful Gibbs Building next to the chapel. King’s was my permanent base for the next five years, though I continued to teach at Birkbeck, either returning to Cambridge by a late train, or staying a night or two in the room I rented in the house of friends in another part of Clapham. Those were black times, both politically and personally. What was more painful: my divorce or the execution of the Rosenbergs, which so many communists at the time felt as a personal defeat and a personal tragedy? It is difficult to separate the two strands that merged in a common mood of determination to survive them: by work, by travel, even by political defiance, as when I invited the physicist Alan Nunn May, just released from jail for nuclear espionage, to a King’s Feast. I may add that, as so often, King’s behaved impeccably on this occasion; and so did Cambridge when a former mayor and owner of the local newspaper demanded the dismissal of the Assistant Schools Medical Officer, the Austrian refugee Hilde Broda, on the grounds that she had married Alan Nunn May since taking her job. The motion was thrown out without a division. Britain was not the USA.

  Looking back, I have mixed feelings about my postwar years at Cambridge. On the one hand I did not take to village life – even in a village of dons – where the range of social relations was both constricted and, to some extent, obligatory. My instincts are and were metropolitan, and in Cambridge there was neither anonymity nor privacy, except in one’s own room behind the closed outer door or ‘sported oak’. (In those days all doors to students’ or dons’ living quarters were left unlocked, unless the inhabitant was either not in Cambridge or wished to indicate that [s]he did not want to be disturbed.) What is more, every day I spent there reminded me of the fact that the university did not want me. The posts for which I applied, then and later, went to others. I applied for them really only out of pride. Neither I nor, after I remarried, Marlene, would have wanted to live permanently in Cambridge, or in any other small university-dominated town. The only lengthy visiting posts we really enjoyed have been in capitals: Paris and, above all, Manhattan. In short, when, after six years of my Fellowship, I moved back to London, I felt I had returned to my proper territory.

  On the other hand, being a single man living in college, Cambridge gave me another bite at the cherry of student life. Of course it was not the life of the 1930s: for one thing, those among my contemporaries who had become dons had changed their views, and the general depoliticization of the undergraduates was acutely depressing. The sort of political student I remembered, and felt at ease with, was now to be found only among South Asians and Chinese – who were admittedly not rare in the economics faculty, for which I supervised and examined: students such as the young A. K. Sen, who had come to Trinity as a graduate from Presidency College, Calcutta, to sit at the feet of Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa, his brilliance already evident. Of course, one saw student life differently as a Fellow, and was treated differently by the undergraduates, even in free-and-easy King’s. (The pre-war atmosphere of cultured homosex
uality was still strong in the college, although from 1952 on the turn to heterosexuality became obvious, with patently woman-oriented new arrivals on King’s fashion scene, such as the future journalist and writer Neal Ascherson, and the transformation of young men such as the future media designer Mark Boxer, who having established themselves in the old mode, transferred to the new.) I did, however, have one asset that brought me closer to the life and mood of the 1950s male student mood than I could otherwise have been, but not – at this time – to the young women (although supervising those studying history and economics in Newnham helped). I was an Apostle, and therefore on close terms with some of them. This may therefore be a suitable moment to say something about this odd Cambridge institution: still extant and flourishing, still keeping its actual active membership secret, although most of its pre-1939 history is by now a matter of public record, and few of its retired members make any secret of their apostolicity. It was and is a small community, essentially of brilliant undergraduates or early postgraduates, co-opting others to maintain itself in being, whose purpose is to read and discuss papers written by its members at weekly meetings. Undergraduates were the core of the Apostles. Indeed, by definition they are ‘the Society’, since those who left ‘the real world’ of its meetings for ‘the phenomenal world’ outside, by graduating or leaving Cambridge (‘taking wings’ and therefore being known as ‘Angels’) necessarily had to defer to the active brethren.