Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  As for long-term planning, anyone who enters upon marriage can no longer avoid it even if he or she wanted to. I had already been forced to consider the problem a couple of years earlier, when a child was impending from an earlier relationship – my children’s half-brother Joshua – and only the refusal of the woman concerned to leave her husband had removed him from my life into others’ lives. By the middle of the 1960s I was the father of Andy and Julia, the first-time owner of a small car in which I transported them to a holiday cottage in North Wales and first-time house-owner of a large house in an as yet very incompletely gentrified part of Clapham, divided in two by an austere architect friend, which Marlene and I had bought jointly with the taciturn Alan Sillitoe and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight. ‘Has he won the pools or something?’ the local newsagent asked Marlene, since in those days of full employment he could not understand what an obviously healthy and respectable-looking youngish fellow was doing not going out to work in the morning and coming back of an evening like other men. Though Alan was as much of a workaholic as most writers, this guess was not totally off target: he had, after all, written Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which, thanks to their merits and the enormous growth of secondary education, became two of those contemporary classics which, set for O-level and A-level examinations, generate a lasting flow of royalties. He could afford to live off his books, and could avoid the treadmill of freelance journalism. I, though writing at home, did conform to type, for I went to work at Birkbeck on the Northern Line and came back from there late at night. On the other hand, I remained peculiar, inasmuch as I showed no enthusiasm for gardening, and, unlike the Caribbean electricians and transport workers in the short street that led to the Wandsworth Road outside our front door, I did not spend Sunday mornings cleaning our car.

  Clearly I was well on the way to the everyday life of academic and middle-class respectability. At this point, except for travel, nothing much happens any longer to the subject of autobiography except inside his or her head or in other people’s heads. This is also true for that matter of the subjects of biography, as generations of the writers of intellectuals’ lives have learned to their cost. However towering the achievement of Charles Darwin, once he returned from the voyage of the Beagle and married, there is not much more to be said about the material events in his life for his last forty years than that ‘he passed his time at Down, Kent, as a country gentleman’2 and to speculate about the reasons for his poor health. The life of the respectable academic is not full of professional drama, or rather its dramas, like those of office politics, are of interest only to those directly involved in them. Again, though there is plenty of drama in family life, especially when parents and teenage children confront each other, third parties, such as the readers of biographies, are usually less gripped by the drama of life inside other families than their own. The scenario is familiar. So the years around 1960 form a watershed not only in my life, but in the shape of this autobiography.

  But private lives are embedded in the wider circumstances of history. The most powerful of these was the unexpected good fortune of the age. It crept up on my generation and took us unawares, especially the socialists among us who were unprepared to welcome an era of spectacular capitalist success. By the early 1960s it became hard not to notice it. I cannot say that we recognized it as what I have called ‘The Golden Age’ in my Age of Extremes. That became possible only after 1973, when it was over. Like everyone else, historians are best at being wise after the event. Nevertheless, by the early 1960s it had become evident to my generation in Britain, that is to say the ordinary run of those who had come out of the war in their twenties, that we were living far better than we had ever expected to in the 1930s. If we belonged to the social strata whose male members expected to have ‘careers’ rather than just ‘go to work’ (at that time this was not yet a game played much by women), we discovered that we were doing rather better, sometimes considerably better, than our parents, especially if we had passed more examinations than they had. True, this did not apply to two sections of our generation: those whose careers had reached their peak during the war, and who therefore looked back with nostalgia from the comparative lowlands of postwar civilian life, and the members of the established upper strata, whose parents, as a group, already enjoyed as much wealth, privilege, power or professional distinction as their children could expect to inherit or achieve. Indeed, they might see themselves as also-rans, if they went into the fields in which their fathers had been unusually successful – politics, science, the old professions, or whatever. Who has not been sorry for the political son overshadowed by his father – Winston and Randolph Churchill are the classic example – or the decent but run-of-the-mill natural scientist sons of FRS or Nobel Prize fathers? Like any academic with a Cambridge background, I have known a few.

  But for most of us postwar life was an escalator which, without any special effort, took us higher than we had ever expected to be. Even people like myself, whose career progress was unusually retarded by the Cold War, moved along it. Of course this was partly due to my historical luck in entering the academic profession at a time when it was still fairly small, its status was high, and it was consequently quite well paid by the standards the Benthamite, Liberal and Fabian reformers had established for the public service in Victorian and Edwardian days. For though, unlike in other European countries, university teachers were not civil servants, they were under the wing of the state, which provided the funds for the collective five-year forward planning of the universities, but kept at arm’s length. So long as the profession remained small, and free market ideology was held at bay, it was understood that the salary, like the status, of the averagely successful lecturer should take him or her to the level equivalent to an averagely successful civil servant in the administrative grade: not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but a decent middle-class existence. The costs were still modest, at least for those of progressive views who wanted to send their children to state schools, and could as yet see no reason for not doing so. The welfare state benefited the middle classes relatively more than the workers. Those were the days when, largely for reasons of principle – and not yet discouraged by the experience of the National Health Service in practice – people like me refused to take out medical insurance. The price of houses remained within reach until the boom of the early 1970s, and the rise in their value gave us a natural bonus. Just before they began their move towards the stratosphere, it was possible to buy a freehold house in Hampstead for just under £20,000 gross, or, allowing for the profit on the sale of the previous house, £7,000 net. For those who married and had children young, there were no doubt a few years of relative tightness, holidays on caravan sites and scrabbling for extra income from schools examinations and the like, but a previously childless academic like myself, halfway up the university scale, who remarried in his forties, had no real problem in maintaining a family. Indeed, I cannot recall a time when my bank account was overdrawn. Such problems as arose were eventually eased by rising earnings from royalties and other literary activities, but around 1960 these were still very marginal additions to my income.

  The generations who had become adults before the war could compare their postwar lives to those of their parents, or their own pre-war expectations. It was not so easy for them to see, especially when already facing the unchanging imperatives of bringing up a family, that their situation in the new ‘affluent society’ of the West was different in kind as well as in degree from the past. After all, the permanent household chores were not fundamentally changed but only made easier by new technology. Once married, earning a living, looking after children, house and garden, the washing and washing-up still filled most of a couple’s time and thinking. Only the young and mobile could recognize, and utilize, all the possibilities of a society that for the first time gave them enough money to buy what they wanted, enough time to do what they wanted, or that made them independent
of the family in other ways. Youth was the name of the secret ingredient that revolutionized consumer society, and western culture. This is dramatically evident in the rise of rock and roll, a music which depends almost exclusively on customers in their teens or early twenties, or those once converted to this music at that age. US record sales grew from $277 million in 1955, the birth-year of rock and roll, to more than $2,000 million in 1973, of which 75–80 per cent represented rock music and similar sounds.

  I certainly do not belong to the rock generation. Nevertheless, I was lucky enough to be present at, and to recognize, the birth of that generation in Britain. For, as it happens, in this country a form of jazz created a bridge between the older forms of youthful pop music and the rock revolution. From 1955, when my King’s Fellowship ran out and I returned to live permanently in London, it happened that I found myself professionally involved in the affairs of jazz. Since I now faced paying rent in London, having lived gratis in a Cambridge college, I thought of a way of earning some extra income. It was about this time that the London cultural establishment, stung by the challenge of the so-called ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s, thought it advisable to pay attention to jazz, for which they advertised their passion. The Observer had hired one of them, Kingsley Amis, as a jazz critic. He was already on the way from left-wing youth to conservative old age, but still quite far from the role of reactionary club-bar buffer into which he was later to settle. Having felt inferior to erudite jazz experts since the early 1930s, I knew very well that I was quite unqualified to be one, but it seemed to me that I understood at least as much about the subject as Kingsley Amis and had been familiar with it much longer. I therefore suggested to Norman Mackenzie, an ex-comrade from LSE days, then working on the New Statesman and Nation, that they also needed a jazz critic. The journal was in its glory days under its great editor Kingsley Martin, who neither knew nor cared about jazz, but could see that one had to keep up with this new cultural fashion, at least by a monthly column. He explained to me that in writing for the paper I should bear in mind its ideal typical reader, a male civil servant in his forties, and handed me over to the then commander of the cultural half of the mag, the admirable Janet Adam Smith, who knew almost everything about literature and mountain climbing, and a very great deal about the rest of the arts, but not about jazz. Because I wanted to keep the personalities of the university teacher and the jazz critic apart, for the next ten years or so I wrote under the pseudonym Francis Newton, after Frankie Newton, one of the few jazz-players known to have been a communist, an excellent but not superstar trumpeter who played with Billie Holiday on the great Commodore Records session that produced ‘Strange Fruit’.

  Jazz is not just ‘a certain type of music’ but ‘a remarkable aspect of the society in which we live’,3 not to mention a part of the entertainment industry. Besides, relatively few readers of the New Statesman were likely to go to jazz gigs or buy Thelonious Monk, although I discovered, to my intense pleasure, that the second half of the fifties was a new golden age for the music, whose American stars were now coming to Britain, after being kept out of our island for twenty years by a union dispute. I therefore wrote not only as a reviewer of concerts, records and books but as a historian and reporter. What is more, pretty soon I found myself in contact (probably through my cousin Denis) with the small but culturally hip publishing house of McGibbon and Kee, then financed by a moody millionaire supporter of the Labour Party, Howard Samuel, which had already published books by what was probably the only Old Etonian jazz band leader, Humphrey Lyttelton, and by the difficult, lonely and haunted social explorer of 1950s London, Colin MacInnes, connoisseur of, and guide to, the new black London and the beginnings of the music-saturated teenage culture. They wanted me to write a book about jazz. It appeared as The Jazz Scene in 1959, the same year as my first history book, and was well received though it did not make much money.4 It encouraged me to explore the scene more systematically. This was not hard, for at least some of the jazz aficionados of the early 1930s had gone into the music business as agents or promoters, not least cousin Denis, who was establishing himself as probably the leading British record producer in the field of indigenous jazz and ethnic music. Indeed, his fortunes rose with those of the artists he recorded, such as Lonnie Donegan, whose ‘Rock Island Line’ (a jailhouse song originally recorded by the great Leadbelly) exploded into the big time in the spring of 1956. Fortunately also I was at the time unmarried and, teaching in an evening college which did not lecture until six p.m., I could adapt to the rhythm of life of the late-sleeping night people who make up the entertainment scene. Also I lived in Bloomsbury, within ten minutes’ walk of any action anywhere in the West End. So I found myself dropping without difficulty into my habitual role of ‘participant observer’ or kibitzer .

  The jazz people were by no means teenagers. And yet both my contemporary sketch of the public for ‘trad jazz’ and ‘skiffle’ and Roger Mayne’s photographs for the first edition of The Jazz Scene show clearly that what the music they made inspired was essentially a somewhat older children’s crusade. They were part of the youth culture that was by then becoming sufficiently visible for those of us who roamed on its outskirts for whatever reason to recognize its existence, although only someone like Colin MacInnes with a special private affinity for adolescent rebellion and independence, could tune in on its wavelength. Nevertheless, apart from a distinct relaxation of female sexual conventions in the vicinity of musicians and singers, it had not yet become married to a counter-culture. That did not happen, at least in Britain, until the 1960s.

  Much of what symbolized the youth counter-culture of the 1960s was nevertheless to be taken over from the old jazz scene – notably drugs and the patterns of life of what I once described as ‘the floating, nomadic community of professional black [and white] musicians living on the self-contained and self-sufficient little islands of the popular entertainers and other night people’, the places where the day people got rid of their inhibitions after dark. This was not necessarily a counter-culture in the later sense, for jazz musicians had an almost limitless toleration for any variant of human behaviour, but did not usually make a manifesto of it. The nearest thing to a counter-culture around the jazz scene was to be found on its fringes and among its hangers-on or outside admirers, as among the musicians’ girlfriends on the game who could earn a few hundred pounds in a few hours on the street – good money in the 1950s – and take off for a quick holiday in Morocco, among the conscious rejecters of traditional middle-class conventions, such as Ken Tynan, or among the middle-aged bourgeois insiders asserting outsider status by drinking sessions in the watering-hole of the painter Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club in Frith Street, Soho. Not that Muriel’s mostly homosexual crowd was particularly jazz-oriented, although I was introduced into this shabby first-floor room by an admiring reviewer of The Jazz Scene, and was quite likely to meet Colin MacInnes there, who praised jazz but did not understand it, and George Melly, who sang it and did. Melly was part of a fringe of the British jazz scene made up of refugees from middle-class respectability or people who combined their music with activities in the world of words and images. To the fans he was known as a self-parodying blues singer close to a music-hall act, as Wally Fawkes was known as a clarinet player. In the straight world both were much better known as the joint creators of a highly popular strip-cartoon which gently satirized the recognizable members of what was not yet known as the media world.

  The third change, this one more readily recognized, was the change in the political or ideological mood after 1956. I can now see that the new factor that brought it about was the end of empires, but in Britain this did not become clear until the 1960s.

  The Cold War remained, but, outside western governments, the public’s commitment to an emotional anti-communism began to decline. However much it was denounced, from 1960 the Berlin Wall stabilized the frontier between superpower empires in Europe, neither of which was seriously expected to cross
it. We still lived under the black cloud of nuclear apocalypse. It came close in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and in 1963 Stanley Kubrick produced its definitive version, the film Doctor Strangelove – but by then it could already be played for laughs, however black. But CND, the new Campaign for (unilateral British) Nuclear Disarmament (1959), by far the largest public mobilization of the British left, was not intended to, and plainly could not, affect the USA’s and the USSR’s nuclear arms race, although many Britons were sincerely moved by the idea of setting a good moral example to the world. It was about keeping out of the Cold War or, perhaps more exactly, about getting Britain used to no longer being a great power and a global empire. (The argument that Britain’s own nuclear capability was necessary to deter a Soviet attack made no sense, especially as we now know that the bomb had originally been constructed by British governments to maintain their status and independence against the USA rather than to frighten Moscow.)

  However, looking back, it is clear that what increasingly shaped the post-1956 politics of the left was a by-product of decolonization and, certainly in Britain, of the mass immigration from the Caribbean parts of the old empire. The crisis of the Fourth Republic in France had little to do with the Cold War, and everything to do with the liberation struggle of the Algerians. I still recall a 1958 mass meeting in Friends’ House to protest against the military coup which ended it, addressed by the red-haired and impassioned journalist Paul Johnson, then a maverick left-wing Catholic, who denounced General de Gaulle as the next fascist dictator. It was largely the shocking and widely publicized French use of torture in Algeria that turned Amnesty International (1961), into a western international campaigning body not primarily directed against eastern abuses of human rights.