Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

relatively more time for their own explorations – and at that age almost everything is there to be discovered. Moreover, an English sixth form demanded less effort than a continental one, if only because one had to choose between the arts and the sciences, and therefore dropped half the continental syllabus. After arriving at a university nobody who takes the degree seriously has anything like the enterprising teenager’s time to read about everything, rapidly, voraciously, and with endless curiosity. But what did I do with all this reading?

The short answer is: I tried to give it a Marxist, that is to say an essentially historical, interpretation. There was not much else to do for an impassioned but unorganized and necessarily inactive communist teenage intellectual. Since I had not read much more than the CommunistManifesto when I left Berlin – action came before words – I therefore had to acquire some knowledge of Marxism. My Marxism was, and still to some extent remains, that acquired from the only texts then easily available outside university libraries, the systematically distributed works and selections of ‘the classics’ published (and translated in heavily subsidized local editions) under the auspices of the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow. Curiously, until Stalin’s notorious Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1939), which contained a central section on ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, there was no formal compendium of Soviet communist orthodoxy in these matters. When this section appeared, I read it with enthusiasm, allowing for its pedagogic simplifications. It corresponded pretty much to what I, and perhaps most of the British intellectual reds of the 1930s, understood by Marxism. We liked to think of it as ‘scientific’ in a rather nineteenth-century sense. Since, unlike in continental lycees and Gymnasia, philosophy was not a central part of higher secondary education, we did not approach Marx with the philosophical interests of our continental contemporaries, let alone with their knowledge of philosophy. This helped to anglicize my way of thinking quite rapidly. What Perry Anderson has called ‘western Marxism’, the Marxism of Lukacs, the Frankfurt School and Korsch, never crossed the Channel until the 1950s. We were content to know that Marx and Engels had turned Hegel the right way up, without bothering to find out just what it was they had stood on its feet. What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. ‘Dialectical materialism’ provided, if not a ‘theory of everything’, then at least a ‘framework of everything’, linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world in constant flux.

As I read my diary of 1934–5, it is perfectly clear that its writer was getting ready to be a historian. What I was trying to do above all else was to elaborate Marxist historical interpretations of my reading. And yet I was doing so in a way I almost certainly would not have done, had I continued my education on the continent. The ‘materialist conception of history’ was, of course, central to Marxism. However, Britain in the 1930s was one of the rare countries in which a school of Marxist historians developed, and I think this was partly due to the fact that on the arts side of British sixth forms literature took the space left vacant by the absence of philosophy. British Marxist historians began, more often than not, as young intellectuals who moved to historical analysis from, or with, a passion for literature: Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan, Leslie Morton, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and indeed myself. This may help to explain the otherwise surprising influence of the anti-Marxist F. R. Leavis on many who became communists. Cambridge communists who read English swore by him.

My own Marxism developed as an attempt to understand the arts. What filled my mind then was not the classic macro-historical problems of Marxist historical debate about historical development – the succession of ‘modes of production’. It was the place and nature of the artist and the arts (in fact, literature) in society or, in Marxist terms, ‘How is the superstructure connected to the base?’ Sometime in the autumn of 1934 I began to recognize this as ‘the problem’, and to worry at it, like a small dog at an excessively large bone, with the help of a lot of unsystematic reading in psychology and anthropology and echoes from the continental days of my biological, ecological and evolutionary readings in the publications of Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde. The theory was ambitious. ‘Marx could predict the socialist system on the basis of a precise analysis of the capitalist system. A precise analysis of capitalist literature, which takes into consideration all circumstances, all connections and relations, must allow us to draw similar conclusions about the proletarian culture of the future.’ I soon thought no more about such global predictions, but the historical question I asked myself at the age of seventeen has permanently shaped my work as a historian. I am still trying to ‘analyse the (social) influences which determine the form and content of poetry [and more generally of ideas] at different times’. But I had learned little more history than what was necessary, together with a little gamesmanship (a word that had not yet been invented) to get through the Cambridge scholarship exam.

V

At the start of 1936 I decided, cautiously – for ‘I live in the twentieth century and … in any case I am not given to optimism’ – to end the diary I had kept for almost two years. ‘I just don’t need it any more,’ I wrote in the last entry.

God knows why. Maybe because I’ve won my Cambridge scholarship, and, if all goes well, at least three years of independence lie ahead. Maybe because S. [whom I had got to know during the scholarship exam, and who became a lifelong friend] is the first acquaintance I have made myself, and not drawn parasitically from the pockets of other people … Maybe because I now have a year of nothing but my own work ahead of me? [i.e. until going up to Cambridge] Because things just look rosier for me? Because, perhaps, just maybe, I shall live a less ‘second- hand’ life?

It seemed the moment to balance the accounts, I hoped without sentimentality and self-delusion. I did so as follows:

Eric John Ernest Hobsbaum, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of eighteen and a half, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which is all the more dangerous and at times effective, as he talks himself into believing in them himself. Not in love and apparently quite successful in sublimating his passions, which – not often – find expression in the ecstatic enjoyment of nature and art. Has no sense of morality, thoroughly selfish. Some people find him extremely disagreeable, others likeable, yet others (the majority) just ridiculous. He wants to be a revolutionary but, so far, shows no talent for organization. He wants to be a writer, but without energy and the ability to shape the material. He hasn’t got the faith that will move the necessary mountains, only hope. He is vain and conceited. He is a coward. He loves nature deeply. And he forgets the German language.

In this spirit I faced the year 1936 and Cambridge University.

7

Cambridge

In a society like that of England in the first half of the last century, moving from the milieu of one class to that of another was a form of emigration. So winning a scholarship to Cambridge in 1935 meant moving into a strange new country – stranger because more unfamiliar than the ones I had settled in before. Except in one respect: after a break of three years I now returned to the politics and the conversations I had been forced to abandon when we left Berlin. I arrived in Cambridge quite determined to join the Communist Party at last and plunge into politics. As it turned out, I was not alone. Mine was the reddest and most radical generation in the history of the university, and I was in the thick of it. It happened that I also arrived in the middle of what, even allowing for a past that contained the names of Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, was probably the most distinguished era in the history of a university that was for some decades virtually synonymous with British scientific achievement. The two were not entirely separated: the 1930s was one of the few periods when an unusual proportion of eminent natural scientists was also politically radicalized. I am bound to add that the achievements of Cambridge science in the 1930s have survived better than those of the political radicalism of Cambridge students. Few of these have left much trace, even on public memory, except for one minor spin-off from 1930s communism, the ‘Cambridge spies’.

Since I was one of the leading Cambridge undergraduate communists in the second half of the 1930s, most readers of this book who belong to the Cold War generations will certainly ask what I knew about them. I might as