In retrospect it seems incredible that this hare-brained project got beyond the initial pitch. And yet it did. Even Raphael’s genius as a salesman could not have raised the very substantial amount of money needed without the prior collapse of the Communist Party’s so-called ‘Business Branch’, which had previously provided much of the CP’s income. Until 1956 they had been a solid bastion of loyal orthodoxy who asked visiting Party speakers (actually, me, on the occasion I talked there) to address them on such subjects as ‘The Paris Commune of 1871’. Now prosperous, some of them even very rich, the revelation of what had been done to Soviet Jews in the last Stalin years was too much for these overwhelmingly Jewish East Enders recruited to the Party during the anti-fascist era. Whoever backed the Partisan must have known that it was not a serious business proposition, but something about the youth and the sheer utopian confidence of Raph must have appealed to middle-aged men whose moral universe lay in ruins around them. Somehow Raph got the money, a house was bought or leased in Carlisle Street, Soho, within sight of Marx’s old residence in Dean Street, and the Partisan Coffee House was installed.
It was a scheme designed for disaster. The then current fashion among architects preferred austere interiors looking like station waiting rooms. These attracted the more demoralized bums and the fringe hangers-on of Soho, who were neither welcomed in nor attracted by establishments with a more elaborate decor, especially at night, as well as the Metropolitan Police in search of drug-busts. The large expensive tables and square chunky seats were designed to encourage drafting thesis chapters and long debates on tactics, while minimizing the space for, and the rate of consumption of, income-generating customers. In any case, the management of the Partisan was not strong on checking cash receipts and keeping accounts. In short, though Raphael attempted to explain all this away to the increasingly gloomy directors, the place went out of business within two years. Only nostalgia and the need to maintain contact between the pre- and post-1956 generations of the left can explain why I found myself involved in this lunatic enterprise. And yet, it was not more predictably doomed than the various other political enterprises of those who left the Party in 1956– 7. Like the Partisan Coffee House the political projects of the ‘New Left’ of 1956 are now a half-remembered footnote.
Intellectually 1956 left rather more behind – not least the remarkable impact of E. P. Thompson, who was to be recorded by the Arts and Humanities Citations Index (1976–83) as one of the 100 most-cited twentieth-century authors in any field covered by the Index. Before 1956 he was little known outside the CP, in which he had spent the years since returning from the war as a brilliant, handsome, passionate and oratorically gifted activist in Yorkshire, and his adult classes, whose members saw him as ‘a tall, rangy sort of fellow’ overloaded with nervous energy, explicating poems by William Blake.12 For his original passion had been for literature rather than history as such, although he was marginally involved in the Historians’ Group. It was 1956 that made him primarily into a historian. His later fame is essentially based on The Making of the English Working Class (1963), an erupting historical volcano of 848 pages which was immediately accepted as a major work even by the world of professional historians, and which captured young radical readers on both sides of the Atlantic overnight, and continental European sociologists and social historians not long after. And this in spite of its almost aggressively brief chronological span and narrowly English – not even British – subject matter. Escaping from the cage of the old Party orthodoxy, it allowed him as well to join a collective debate with other hitherto isolated thinkers of the left, old and new, also often rooted in the adult education movement, notably the other major figure of the first ‘New Left,’ the literary scholar Raymond Williams.
Edward was indeed a person of quite extraordinary gifts, not least the sort of palpable ‘star quality’, which led every eye to turn towards his increasingly craggy good looks whenever he was present on any scene. His ‘work combined passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst. He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but … ‘‘genius in the traditional sense of the word’’ ’,13 and all the more obviously so since he fitted the Romantic image of the genius in looks, life and work – especially with the suitable landscape of the Welsh hills behind him.
In short, he was a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts except two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass. And, with all his warmth, charm, humour and rage, it left him in some ways insecure and vulnerable. Like so many of his other works, The Making had begun as the first chapter of a short textbook on British labour history from 1790 to 1945, and had just got out of hand. Within a few years he suspended the remarkable studies of eighteenth-century society begun after The Making had turned him temporarily into an orthodox academic, which did not fit his style, to plunge into years of a theoretical struggle against the influence of a French Marxist, the late Louis Althusser, who inspired some of the brightest of the contemporary young leftists at that time. At the end of the seventies all his energy was diverted into the anti-nuclear movement, of which he became the national star. He never returned to history until he was too ill to complete his projects. He died in 1993 in his Worcestershire garden.
One could not fault a scholar for giving up writing for anti-nuclear campaigning in the early 1980s, but the Althusserian episode had no such justification. I told him at the time that it would be criminal to turn from his potentially epoch-making historical work to controverting a thinker who would be dead as an influence in another ten years’ time. And indeed, Althusser was already getting close to his sell-by date in the French Marxisant milieu even then. Though he helped at the time to open theoretical debate on the left, he survives today not as a philosopher but chiefly by virtue of his tragic personal trajectory. He was a manic-depressive who was to kill his wife. But even this was not then predictable, although Althusser in his manic phases was already a somewhat disturbing experience. Shortly before the tragedy he came to London, officially for a seminar at University College, unofficially to mobilize support for some hare-brained stratospheric initiative in which he wanted to involve Marxism Today and myself. His host handed him over to us after a night’s hospitality and Marlene looked after him for a morning, during which, inspired by our modest instrument, he insisted on ordering a grand piano from a local store for delivery to Paris. When picked up by his next caretaker he expressed an immediate interest in a Rolls-Royce (or maybe a Jaguar) from a car showroom in Mayfair which he insisted on visiting. It seemed clear that this brilliant mind was already accelerating the ride of his mental motorbike round some wall of death to a fatal climax.
The truth is that Edward suffered bitterly from the failure of the 1956 ‘New Left’. None of the ex-communist generation expected much of the Labour Party. The new generation of the intellectual young, with whom he wanted desperately not to lose touch, were moving in new and, for him, undesirable directions. Had they his (and Raymond Williams’s) feeling for the moral strength of the British working class? The new theoretically minded continental Marxism was not his, and he detected an ‘irrationalist’ ‘revolting bourgeoisie’ behind the new international student movement. He was on the outer margin of politics. It hurt him. I think this was one reason why he threw himself into the anti-nuclear movement with such passion.
Though I remained in the CP, unlike most of my friends in the Historians’ Group, my situation as a man cut loose from his political moorings was not substantially different from theirs. In any case my relations with them remained the same. The Party asked me to change them, but I refused. They sensibly chose not to expel me, but that was their choice, not mine. Party membership no longer meant to me what it had since 1933. In practice I recycled myself from militant to sympathizer or fellow-traveller or, to put it another way, from effective membership of the British Communist Party to someth
ing like spiritual membership of the Italian CP, which fitted my ideas of communism rather better. (The Italian CP returned my sympathies.)
In any case, the individual political activities of none of us mattered much any more. We had influence as teachers, as scholars, as political writers or at best ‘public intellectuals’, and for this – at least in Britain – our membership of Party or organization was irrelevant, except to people who had strong a priori feelings about the CP. If we maintained or acquired influence among the left-wing young, it was because our left-wing past and our present Marxism or commitment to radical scholarship gave us what is today called ‘street cred’, because we wrote about important matters and because they liked what we wrote. From the point of view of this reading public, old or young, the political and ideological differences between Thompson, Raymond Williams and Hobsbawm were less important than that all three belonged to the small minority of ‘names’ – intellectually reputable thinkers and writers – flagged as belonging to the left.
Still, the question remains why, unlike many of my friends, and however much of a dissident, I stayed in the Party. In the course of time I have had to answer this question a number of times. I have been asked it by almost every journalist who has ever interviewed me, for the quickest way of identifying a personality in our media-saturated society is by one or two unique peculiarities: mine are being a professor who likes jazz and who remained in the Communist Party longer than most. I have given substantially the same answer at varying length.14 It represents my justification in subsequent decades of remaining in the Party, and not necessarily what I felt at the time. It is impossible to reconstruct those feelings now, although, then as later, I was strongly repelled by the idea of being in the company of those ex-communists who turned into fanatical anti-communists, because they could free themselves from the service of ‘The God that Failed’ only by turning him into Satan. There were plenty of them about in the Cold War era.
In retrospect, and seeing the person I was in 1956 as a historian rather than an autobiographer, I think two things explain why I stayed in the Party, though, obviously, considering leaving it. I did not come into communism as a young Briton in England, but as a central European in the collapsing Weimar Republic. And I came into it when being a communist meant not simply fighting fascism but the world revolution. I still belong to the tail-end of the first generation of communists, the ones for whom the October Revolution was the central point of reference in the political universe.
The difference in background and life history was real enough. It had been obvious to me and to others even within the Party. No intellectual brought up in Britain could become a communist with the same sense as a central European of
the day the heavens were falling the hour the earth’s foundations fled
because, with all its problems, this was simply not the situation in the Britain of the 1930s. Yet in some ways, having become a communist before 1935 was even more significant. Politically, having actually joined a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to the era of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front. It continues to determine my strategic thinking in politics to this day. But emotionally, as one converted as a teenager in the Berlin of 1932, I belonged to the generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution, and of its original home, the October Revolution, however sceptical or critical of the USSR. For someone who joined the movement where I came from and when I did, it was quite simply more difficult to break with the Party than for those who came later and from elsewhere. In the last analysis I suspect that this was why I allowed myself to stay. Nobody forced me out and the reasons for going were not quite strong enough.
But – and here I speak as autobiographer rather than historian – let me not forget a private emotion: pride. Losing the handicap of Party membership would improve my career prospects, not least in the USA. It would have been easy to slip out quietly. But I could prove myself to myself by succeeding as a known communist – whatever ‘success’ meant – in spite of that handicap, and in the middle of the Cold War. I do not defend this form of egoism, but neither can I deny its force. So I stayed.
13
Watershed
Some moments in history – the outbreaks of the two world wars, for instance – are recognizably catastrophic, like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. There are similar moments in private life, or at all events, as earlier chapters show, there have been such moments in mine. However, if we want to stay with geological similes, there are other moments that can best be compared with watersheds. Nothing very obvious or dramatic seems to be happening, but after you have crossed an otherwise nondescript bit of territory you notice that you have left an epoch in history, or in your own life, behind. The years on either side of 1960 – my early and middle forties – formed such a watershed in my life. Perhaps also in the social and cultural history of the western world. Certainly of Britain. 1 This seems to be a good moment to break my long walk through the short twentieth century for a pause to view the landscape.
The second half of the 1950s forms a curious interim in my life. After the end of my King’s Fellowship I moved back to a permanent base in Bloomsbury, a large, partly dark flat full of books and records, overlooking Torrington Place, which, until my marriage in 1962, I successively shared with a series of communist or ex-CP friends: Louis Marks and Henry Collins of the Historians’ Group, the old Marxist literary critic Alick West and the Spanish refugee Vicente Girbau. Since it was central and had enough spare capacity, it also attracted out-of-town and metropolitan overnight visitors and other temporary attachments. It was, to be honest, much more fun than living in a Cambridge college, even though I lived through the worst periods of the crisis of communism and the tearing of political roots there. It had the additional advantage of being so close to Birkbeck that I could, if necessary, go home between lectures. London was a good place to live in. This was the setting in which I lived through the watershed.
That my personal and professional life changed in these years is obvious enough. I met a Viennese-born girl in an ocelot coat in a setting of world politics. We fell in love. She had recently returned from the United Nations’ vain attempt to intervene in the Congo, I was about to go to Castro’s Havana, and Marlene and I married during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It was three years after publishing my first books, and a few weeks before The Age of Revolution, 1789– 1848. Professionally, I was beginning to acquire some international reputation, and therefore to travel outside what had been my habitual range in the 1950s, France, the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. In the 1960s I began my academic trips to the USA and Cuba, I discovered and started to explore Latin America, found myself in Israel and India, and returned to the Mitteleuropa I had not seen since childhood. What is more, I had begun to notice that I no longer lived in the constant expectation of seismic catastrophe as Mitteleuropeans had done in the days of my youth. I began to notice – I do not recall exactly when – that I was operating in a time-frame of decades rather than years or even, as before 1945, months. I did not consciously abandon the basic precautions of the potential refugee which people of my kind learned to observe, whether as Jews or as Reds, against the sudden hazards of economic and political life between the wars: a valid passport, enough immediately available money to buy a ticket to the chosen country of refuge at a moment’s notice, a way of life that permitted quick departures and a rough idea of what to take, if one had to go. In fact, when, shortly after marrying Marlene, and in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, I had to go abroad, I reacted accordingly. I made some financial arrangements, fixed a provisional appointment with Marlene in Buenos Aires, where I was due to be in a week or two, in case things began to look really drastic, and left her enough money for the fare. Nevertheless, though it was quite evident that the Cuban missile crisis was a matter of global life and death, I cannot actually have expected nuclear world war to break out. Had I done so, I suppose I should, logically, have taken Marl
ene with me immediately, at least to get both of us out of the immediate firing-line. If the worst came to the worst, South America was the least likely battlefield. I already found myself operating on the assumption that the danger to the world came not from the global ambitions or aggressiveness of the USA (the USSR was too weak to have them) but the risks inherent in politicians and generals on both sides playing a game with nuclear bowls which they knew it would be suicide to use – but which might easily slip out of control. In fact we now know that this was precisely the lesson which Kennedy and Khrushchev, neither of whom wanted a war, drew from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In short, as far as I was concerned, from 1960 on the Cold War was not over, but it had become dramatically less dangerous.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 27