Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

I found the atmosphere of the LSE congenial, and its library, then still in the main building, a good place to work. It was full of central Europeans and colonials, and therefore markedly less provincial than Cambridge, if only by its commitment to social sciences such as demography, sociology and social anthropology, which were of no interest on the Cam. Curiously enough, the subject that gave its name to the school was at that time – and indeed had always been – both less distinguished and less enterprising than at Cambridge, though it attracted some very brilliant junior talent, which alas found no lasting posts in Houghton Street.

I must in some ways have felt more at ease in the LSE student atmosphere, and certainly with its women students, for I established a lifetime friendship with two of the girls I met there, and later married another, though less permanently. Three of my LSE communist student contemporaries became lifetime friends: the historian John Saville (then still known as Stamatopoulos or ‘Stam’), his companion and later wife, Constance Saunders, and the impressive James B. Jefferys, who made the transition from a Ph.D. in economic history to wartime convenor of shop stewards at Dunlops, and – less successfully – back again to research, for he became a victim of the Cold War ban on communist academics. It was through another LSE contemporary that I maintained, or rather re-established, links with Austria: the sporting, bushy-haired charmer Tedy Prager, who later got his economics Ph.D. under Joan Robinson in Cambridge, more in tune with his ideas than the LSE’s Robbins and Hayek. Sent by his family out of harm’s way from Vienna, having got into trouble resisting the Austrofascist regime after the civil war of 1934, he abandoned promising careers in Britain and in the ruins of postwar Vienna, to which, like almost all Austrian communists, he returned from British exile.

In the summer vacations the Cambridge student Party militants went to France to work with James Klugmann. With Margot Heinemann, James was my link with the heroic era of Cambridge communism before my time. (Both remained communists to the end of their lives.) Margot, one of the most remarkable people I have ever known, had been John Cornford’s last love, to whom he wrote one of his last poems from Spain, which has since become an anthology piece, and later partnered J. D. Bernal. Through a lifetime of comradeship, example and advice, she probably had more influence on me than any other person I have known.

James had been the Party’s acknowledged co-leader with John. For most of the Cambridge student militants he was and long remained a person of enormous prestige, even a sort of guru. I assume that, of all the student communists of his time, he was the one in closest touch with the International, for after graduation, abandoning an academic future for which he was admirably suited, he moved to Paris as Secretary of the Rassemblement Mondial des Etudiants (RME) (World Student Assembly) a broad, but Party-controlled international student organization. On my way to see him there once I recall crossing the path of one Raymond Guyot, a French heavyweight and for several years the Secretary-General of the Communist Youth International. It operated out of one of those small dusty Balzacian backstairs offices so characteristic of unofficial pre-war politics, in the ill-named Cite s Paradis, a gloomy dead-end in the 10th arrondissement, and later in a more ambitious locale on the Left Bank. Its most obvious public activities were to organize periodic world congresses, which Cambridge and other student volunteers helped to prepare. I acted as translator at the 1937 Congress, which coincided with the great Paris World Exposition, the last before the Second World War, in a marvellous series that began with Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851. I can recall no major spell under James in 1938 – much of that summer I travelled in North Africa – nor can I confirm the report that I was mobilized for a meeting with Arab and Jewish students organized by James in the Easter vacation of 1939, to form a joint front against fascism, Mussolini having just occupied the largely Muslim country of Albania.⁸ I spent all the summer of 1939 working on the technical preparations for what would be the largest of these congresses, which ended a few days before Hitler invaded Poland.

In almost every way except intelligence and political devotion James Klugmann was the opposite of the romantic, heroic, highly colourful image of his partner in leadership, John Cornford. Bespectacled, soft-voiced, with a demure wit, always looking as though he was about to smile, he lived alone in a hotel room just by the Odeon theatre. As far as I know he continued a monastic existence as an unattached man for the rest of his life, surrounded, when the occasion arose, by admiring juniors. I am told he made sexual jokes in the company of intimates – of whom I was never one – and, since he had been at Gresham’s School, the nursery of more than one eminent homosexual of his day, he may very well have been queer, but one never associated him with any kind of sexual activity. His only obvious passion, at least in his postwar British life, when I saw more of him, was book- collecting. His personal remoteness added to the respect in which we, and indeed most of those who had anything to do with him, held him. What did one know about him? He gave nothing away. The only obvious thing about him was his capacity for remarkably lucid and simple exposition, and the air of authority he exuded – until he was ruined by the break between Stalin and Tito. Not that I can recall much political conversation with James in pre-war Paris in the intervals between work, when we sat in cafes playing chess – he was good at explaining why he beat us – or otherwise taking a break from meetings and the duplicating machine in bars playing table football, Jews playing Asians.

Almost certainly it was the RME that laid the foundations for James’s extraordinary wartime career as the key figure in British relations with Tito’s Partisans. Left-wing student movements of significance were rare enough in continental Europe, where the typical political stance of students (but not necessarily of university teachers) in the 1930s was a right-wing nationalism shading over into fascism. The great exception were the communist students of Yugoslavia, and especially the university of Belgrade, one of whose leaders, Ivo (Lolo) Ribar, a central figure in what would become the Partisan movement, was a familiar figure at the RME. Probably no man west of Moscow, and certainly no man in Cairo, knew more about who was who in Yugoslav communism and how to make contact with them.

After Stalin’s break with Tito, James was forced, almost certainly by direct pressure from Moscow, to make his own irreparable break by writing an utterly implausible and insincere book, From Trotsky to Tito . His reputation as the only first-rate intellectual (other than Palme Dutt) to reach the Party leadership, never recovered. From then on he took no risks or initiatives and said nothing, and ceased to be a serious force even within the small CPGB. The Party put him in charge of Education (assisted by our old student organizer Jack Cohen), a job he did brilliantly well, for he was a born teacher. He was far too intelligent and perceptive not to feel the disappointment, indeed the pity of his admirers from the 1930s for a man from whom so much had been expected. He had had the stuffing knocked out of him. Only in 1975 was there a last flash of the old James Klugmann. British intelligence, which had periodically got at him ever since Burgess and Maclean left for Moscow in 1951 suggested that he might at last be prepared to help the British spooks as others had done. Perhaps inducements were offered. ⁹ The idea that British intelligence, which he knew well – he had after all been in it during the war – should have thought him capable of disloyalty to his cause, hurt him. He refused. He died not long after in a nondescript South London house filled with books.

My last term, May–June 1939, was pretty good. I edited Granta, was elected to the Apostles and got a starred First in the Tripos, which also gave me a Studentship at King’s. There was only one downside. In the spring of 1939 Uncle Sidney, too old for any kind of war service, gave up the long struggle to make a living in Britain and decided to emigrate to Chile with Nancy, Peter and the few hundred pounds he had been able to raise to start a new life. There was never any question of my going a few weeks before Tripos, and in any case I was not going to leave the country with a war coming. In those days Chile was still a very long way from Europe. I saw them on to the boat in Liverpool, and took the train back to Edgware, to sleep one last night on the floor of the now totally empty house in Handel Close, where I had left my rucksack. The bottle of good Tokay, which I had saved from the old home, had somehow disappeared in my absence. Then I went back to Cambridge.

I spent the summer living in a grim but well-placed Paris hotel in the rue Cujas on the editorial profits of Granta, working on James’s great Congress. A photograph from the Congress is before