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 something 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
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
