Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  The librarian never quite left him. He knew where books were to be found and what was to be found in them, and in which chapter. You would not have guessed that his academic training was in the Middle Ages, but you could have guessed that his mind was trained. Gusto masked discipline. In 1941, when Humphry House was away at war, a young Angus corrected proofs of The Dickens World (1941) for him and is thanked as ‘Mr Johnstone-Wilson’ in the preface in the following year, which few if any readers now recognise, since he dropped the hyphenation when he began to publish for himself. There must be many such services made to scholarship now impossible to trace.

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  When he died, in 1991, after a long illness, he left more friends and fewer enemies than authors commonly contrive to do, and his memory lingers.

  Nor, happily, is he forgotten in the great library he once served. A large portrait by Barbara Robinson, presented by his companion Tony Garrett, greets your eye as you enter the white-walled reading room of the new British Library. It is a building he did not live to see. Difficult to think of anything much to regret in his life, apart from his sad end, but then all lives (as he knew) are tragi-comic, and I may have missed something. The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, he once wrote, wedded the cosy world of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford to the blood-reeking house of Atreus in Greek myth. Art is tragi-comic, in short, like life. Angus was not a family man. But who knows what lay behind the affability and the charm?

  The only embarrassment I ever suffered from him was no fault of his. In the 1970s I was invited to give the annual St John’s College lecture at the University of East Anglia, the first lecture ever to be delivered in their sparkling new Sainsbury Centre – an art gallery and staff-club with a lecture-room on a mezzanine floor elegantly poised without side-walls. The lecture was about the new campus novel which, along with Mary McCarthy and Kingsley Amis, Angus had helped to initiate in the 1950s. There he sat, to my consternation, in the front row, beside Malcolm Bradbury – two eminent exponents of the form. It only needed David Lodge to make a full house. The adage about coals to Newcastle seemed too weak for the occasion, and I shall never know what Angus thought of it all, since he slipped away before the party to drive home. I belong to a profession hardened in audacity – it is called the academic – and came to no lasting harm. But there can be no doubt he should have given the lecture, and I listened.

  25. Moses Finley

  He spoke in complete sentences – something the British remark on in Americans who settle among them, their own usage being quicker and more fractured. The first thing you noticed about Moses Finley, apart from the flow of cigarettes to and from his mouth, was the achieved syntax that flooded out of him with hardly a gasp or a gap. He looked and (still more) sounded intense. Sometimes the smoking was part of a theatrical effect, when he would hold an unlit cigarette in one hand and a lighted match in the other – completing a sentence, even a paragraph, as the flame burned perilously closer to his fingers. Then a period would mark the merciful moment he could insert a new cylinder of tobacco and light up.

  His smoking added a drama to his talk it hardly needed. Even if ancient Greece and Rome are not your bag, he was never a bore; even if you think humankind start to be interesting only with the voyages of Christopher Columbus, or with Michelangelo and Shakespeare – there are such people, and I am one of them – you could still listen to him. Moses was a vital force. Like much of the New York intelligentsia of its great age in the 1930s and 1940s he believed that the whole map of knowledge was soon to be reshaped, that the world was watching as it happened, and (most remarkable of all) that the revolution would start in a classroom, most probably his. Of humble upbringing he had been made by academe, after all, and academe would now be remade by him.

  On a long view that may seem less strange. Classics has often been a revolutionary subject, ever since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, as the large domed building of the Capitol in Washington D. C. dramatically illustrates – why else is it a dome, after all, and why else would it be called Capitol Hill?- and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose it was only the hobby of a leisured class. Six years after George Washington laid the foundation-stone of Congress in 1793, designed in the classical style, Napoleon conferred upon himself the Roman title of consul, then emperor, to mark what the French Revolution had done and to carry its name abroad.

  Moses Finley was in a long tradition. He was a revolutionary classicist. Driven out of America in the McCarthy era he sought to revolutionise Oxford, then Cambridge; and by his death in 1986 the man from Syracuse, where he had taken his first degree – Syracuse, New York, that is – was the most famous ancient historian in the world.

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  There will always be those to wonder if he would have amounted to much if he had stayed at home.

  Born Moses Finkelstein in 1912, he changed his name to Finley in 1941 after publishing a solitary article on ancient Greek commerce under his born name. His upbringing, since he was named Moses, is likely to have been orthodox. A prodigy, he graduated with the highest honours at Syracuse University at the age of seventeen and received a rabbinical training; then he took a law degree at Columbia University. There, in the graduate school of classics, he met Mary Moscowitz, whom he married, worked as a law clerk for six months in a big corporation and taught for eight years at City College, beginning in 1934. His students found him witty and relaxed, even if some thought it perverse, when classics meant the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, to study its social and economic affairs. By the time I knew him as a colleague at Cambridge, in the 1950s and after, his own ancient history was seldom mentioned. Apart from his accent, which was unreconstructed New York, he had more or less disowned the past – his own past. America meant nothing to him in any patriotic sense. Nor did his Jewish roots. He had found himself in Cambridge and, always a workaholic, he worked.

  His conversation made you curious, however, about his past, which was so deeply stratified that you wanted to explore it with or without his help. There were so many layers to his mind. The bottom was 1930s-style Marxism, which had been implanted in him as a student at Columbia on hearing it expounded after a long series of boring classes. It had come upon him as a teenage revelation. History is class war. But its simplicity did not satisfy him for long, and in 1937, at Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research, which had moved to Columbia after being driven from Frankfurt-am-Main, he explored its hidden complexities. Later still he was introduced to Max Weber’s theory of social status: status can matter more than class or wealth. That built a new layer to his mind. As both Marx and Weber had perhaps seen, such theories might apply to ancient history, and at Columbia W.L. Westerman had already interested him in slavery in the ancient world.

  In 1939 Moses became executive secretary to a communist-front organisation headed by the anthropologist Franz Boas and called the American League against War and Fascism. It was opposed by a committee founded by John Dewey and Sidney Hook called the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In those days in New York, as Diana Trilling has memorably written in her autobiography, you lived a life of significant contention, and not without risk. In August 1939 Moses organised a statement signed by four hundred intellectuals denouncing the outrageous rumour that Stalin was about to sign a pact with Hitler. It was published, by ill fortune, a few days after a public announcement that Stalin had done just that, and the Boas committee promptly dissolved: an incident that may have enduringly disillusioned Moses with party politics.

  In 1948 he took his first full-time teaching post at Newark College, Rutgers. If he had joined the American communist party in the mid-1930s, which seems likely, his connection with the party may already have been tenuous and was more probably at an end. No doubt the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of August 1939 had helped to shorten it. His passion by then, in any case, was for the complexities of ancient social history, not its dry lines. History is not a diagram. The
Greek economy could not be seen as an early stage of capitalism, he had come to realise, and slavery touched the moral and cultural values of the ancients in ways where modern parallels like an industrial proletariat can only mislead. The past is different.

  Then came Senator McCarthy. In 1952, at the age of forty, Moses was summoned to appear before an investigating state committee for New Jersey on internal security. He denied running a communist cell from his home in New York during his time at the Horkheimer Institute, but declined to answer questions that would incriminate others. Rutgers University accepted his plea; it was overruled, however, by the board of trustees, and by 1953 he was out of work.

  A handful of articles saved him. They had attracted the admiration of Arnaldo Momigliano, an Italian refugee historian of exceptional eminence in London who arranged for him to come to England: first to Oxford, where he found the teaching excessive – the sweatshop, he used to call it – and then in 1955 to a lectureship in classics at Cambridge, followed by a fellowship at Jesus College there. In 1962 he became a British citizen. So he was a refugee in a land already famous for its intellectual refugees like Marx and Freud. He had moved in an opposite direction, however, from west to east. The Statue of Liberty welcomes to America the tired, the unwashed and the hungry. England attracts thinkers who are more or less washed and fed. They have played a vital role. In the 1950s, when Doris Lessing settled in London as a novelist from Rhodesia, she was amused to notice that most people she met in its literary life had been born somewhere else, a proportion that grew as evening drew toward midnight and night toward dawn. They came mostly from the south and east. Moses came from the west, and it was not the only amazing thing about him.

  By his sixties he was a professor of ancient history at Cambridge, master of Darwin College, a knight and, as Momigliano remarked in 1975, ‘the most influential ancient historian of our times.’ He was loved and hated, never ignored. Scathing rather than malicious, he would declare himself openly and bluntly against a colleague or a cause – ‘He’s no good’ or ‘My sympathy is nil’ – so that no one could ever think him devious. His stance was unremittingly devastating. He was against dilettantism, textual criticism (‘the textual-criticism racket’) and amateur enthusiasms. Classics, he would often say, is not a subject. Ancient history is a job for historians, ancient philosophy for philosophers, ancient literature for those whose concerns are literary. Classics is not a subject. That was his mantra, his chosen heresy. I did not know him before he believed it, if there ever was a time. It is certain he never ceased to believe it. It was a view that left the humanistic views of the Victorians absolutely nowhere.

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  The Finleys lived well, and they were generous. When he died he left a post-doctoral research award to his college. On arriving in Cambridge they promptly bought a plot of land in the best suburb and built a commodious villa that expressed her style of life, and their dinner parties, which were events of some dignity, were served by other hands. I cannot say why I thought the money to be Mary’s rather than his, but such was an impression one naturally had. Her accent and manners were perceptibly more middle class than his, and she appeared to take domestic service for granted. A childless marriage, it created the perfect conditions in which he could thrive, and he would sit day by day in a book-lined study wreathed in smoke, writing, talking, listening and above all giving no quarter in historical debate, though ready too with brisk advice about personal problems. In Mary’s last years she was an invalid, and he tended her loyally as once she had tended him. I never heard her express a view about the ancient world, and presume she had left such interests behind her at Columbia. She had built a nest, and together they filled it.

  On politics, however, she could be forthright, and there a slight imbalance might be sensed. It would not have surprised you to be told she was still a communist – or, more probably, one who had let her party membership lapse without shifting her views. While his mind moved, hers was stationary. There was a difference between being pro-Soviet during the Cold War, as she frankly was, and merely thinking the Soviet Union the better side. Moses merely thought it the better side. He would smile gently, perhaps a little sadly, as she put a partisan view, recalling the certitudes of his own lost youth. ‘We’d be deported,’ she said uncompromisingly, when I asked if they had ever been to Israel. During the years in which she taught in English schools she would inveigh against the inequalities of an educational system that allowed selection, and his air, as she did so, implied a certain detachment. The world looked more complicated to him than to her. He seldom read newspapers and could not easily be drawn into modern debates. On the other hand he did not simply desert the Left, though his Marxist friends found his position increasingly equivocal. If he had abandoned many of the certitudes of Marxism, he did not willingly hear it mocked. His hatreds, at least, survived. ‘Rome represents the two things in the world I most detest,’ he once told me, ‘the Vatican and the American dollar’; and on his last visit to the United States, where he was feted and honoured, he publicly refused an honorary doctorate from a university that was offering one to Alexander Haig.

  In short he was mildly loyal to his younger self, and in broad terms he knew where he stood. By then his Marxism was so overlayered with other interpretations that you felt it would take heavy excavating equipment to expose it to view. ‘The evidence propounds no questions: the historian himself does that,’ and Marxism was one ideology among many. Perhaps the best of them, and certainly the most influential. But not enough.

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  That, among the thoughtful, is the history of the century. You start with an adolescent idealism usually garnered from some nineteenth-century source like Marx or Freud. You join a side, have doubts, watch them grow and enter gently into a middle-aged state of mind conscious of complexities and ripe with counter-instances. Isaiah Berlin was fond of the Greek aphorism about the fox who knows many things and the hedgehog who knows one. The classic shift is from hedgehog to fox, and that was the familiar road Moses travelled. A learned man, he knew the multiplying complexities of an historical past. By the end Marxism was little more than part of the detritus of his mind, which by then looked as various and as scattered as the surface of the wandering moon.

  It is a story often told, though not by him. Arthur Koestler has described standing at the window of his cell in a Franco prison during the Spanish Civil War, slowly deciding that the world was a more complicated place than in his youth he had ever imagined; a few years later Iris Murdoch, another student communist, resolved that she was ‘forever at odds’ with Marxism, since reality is not a given whole. There are no laws of history beyond truisms. It is not just the Marxist answer that is wrong. Any single answer is wrong.

  As early as 1954, in The World of Odysseus – a book largely written before he settled in England – Moses had argued, in a manner meant to deflate any simplistic interpretation of the Homeric poems, that Mycenean civilisation in the thirteenth century B.C., just before its destruction, was far more opulent than the Iliad or the Odyssey would suggest; that the lords of Mycenae had owned more land, slaves and cattle than Homer’s heroes even if (as the book cautiously concludes) there was no ‘total discontinuity’ between the two Greek worlds. That puts paid to simple versions of social history. His dogmatic doubts multiplied over the years, and in a late book, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980), which characteristically deals in equal confidence with ancient society and modern intellectual debate, he noted coolly that Marx’s entire writings on ancient slavery amounted to little more than a few pages of notes in the Grundrisse, written in 1857-8. It lay unpublished till 1939 and went unnoticed till the 1950s.

  Profound as Marx’s interest was in the historical process, at no time in his life did he (or Engels) attempt a study of any ancient society or of any ancient economy. Indeed Marx paid little attention to slavery altogether, seeing its American version as no more than an historical anomaly and declin
ing to speak of capital in the ancient world. Such trenchant revisionism left Moses with little credit among latter-day Marxist historians. By his last decades he was an arch-heretic and knew it.

  I once asked him what place in ancient times he would most like to live in, and in what age. He looked reluctant to answer, since commendation was not the most natural activity of his mind. On the other hand it was as irresistible for him to give a view as for any New York cab-driver, and like many cab-drivers he was so used to giving them anyway that it was rather like a birthday present to be asked at all. ‘I’d have to say Athens in the fifth century B.C.,’ he said with some deliberation – provided, of course, you were not a slave. By then life looked less ideology than happenstance, though his fascination with ideology never died. He still loved to perceive patterns in events, and his colleagues could be infuriated when he dismissed inconvenient evidence with a puff of smoke and a wave of the hand. Chance and fortune govern mankind.

  Great events happen by chance, and ‘by some chance’ was his final and considered answer to the celebrated problem of why in 399 B.C. the Athenians killed Socrates. Those three words were pronounced at the end of a lecture with enormous emphasis, as if it had cost him something to accept that momentous events do not necessarily occur in response to universal laws. Athens, in any case, was the idol of the Left, and to the end of his days he stayed loyal to the superstition that the Left, though sometimes sadly mistaken, was ultimately virtuous. How, except by chance, could the Athenian democracy have murdered or martyred Socrates? He had some loyalty left.