Not that I felt like someone preparing for what turned out to be the long life of a British academic, although I hoped, even at the age of seventeen, that ‘my future will lie in Marxism, in teaching or in both’ (I knew well enough that it did not lie in poetry, although ‘with practice I could develop quite an acceptable prose style’).1 Spiritually, I still lived in Berlin: a newly isolated teenager uprooted from an environment in which he had felt happy and at home, both culturally and politically. My diary keeps referring back to the friends and comrades, the opinions of my old headmaster, the dramatic political experiences I had left behind. That, no doubt, was the chief reason why I began to keep my diary in German. I did not want to forget. In mid-1935 the visit of a recent German socialist emigre ś śwho tried to involve me in the activities of her group – I suspect it was the one called Neubeginnen (‘a new start’) – reminded me of how isolated my life really was. She (‘in short ‘‘the modern woman’’ of my dreams’) was ‘part of a world to which I once belonged for a few months and whose existence, living behind the stage settings of my ideas, I have almost forgotten’.2
After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a come-down. Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those days, except – in a very different form – the music to which my viola-studying cousin Denis introduced me, and which we played on a hand-wound gramophone in the attic room of his mother’s house in Sydenham, where the family first found shelter in London, and discussed with the intensity of teenage passion over tins of heavily sugared condensed milk (‘Unfit for Babies’) and cups of tea: hot jazz. Not much of it was as yet available, and certainly, given our cash limits, not much at any one moment. The sort of teenagers who were most likely to be captured by jazz in 1933 were rarely in a position to buy more than a few records, let alone build a collection.3 Still, enough was already being issued in Britain for the local market: Armstrong, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and John Hammond’s last recordings of Bessie Smith. What is more, shortly before a trade dispute stopped American jazz-players from coming to Britain for some twenty years, the greatest of all the bands – I can still recite its then line-up from memory – came to London: Duke Ellington’s. It was the season when Ivy Anderson sang ‘Stormy Weather’. Denis and I, presumably financed by the family, went to the all-night session (‘breakfast dance’) they played at a Palais de Danse in the wilds of Streatham, nursing single beers in the gallery as we despised the slowly heaving mass of South London dancers below, who were concentrating on their partners and not on the wonderful noises. Our last coins spent, we walked home in dark and daybreak, mentally floating above the hard pavement, captured for ever. Like the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who has written better about it than most,4 I experienced this musical revelation at the age of first love, sixteen or seventeen. But in my case it virtually replaced first love, for, ashamed of my looks and therefore convinced of being physically unattractive, I deliberately repressed my physical sensuality and sexual impulses. Jazz brought the dimension of wordless, unquestioning physical emotion into a life otherwise almost monopolized by words and the exercises of the intellect.
I did not then guess that in adult life my reputation as a jazz-lover would serve me well in unexpected ways. Then and for most of my lifetime a passion for jazz marked off a small and usually embattled group even among the cultural minority tastes. For two-thirds of my life this passion bonded together the minority who shared it, into a sort of quasi-underground international freemasonry ready to introduce their country to those who came to them with the right code-sign. Jazz was to be the key that opened the door to most of what I know about the realities of the USA, and to a lesser extent of what was once Czechoslovakia, Italy, Japan, postwar Austria and, not least, hitherto unknown parts of Britain.
What contributed to the ultra-intellectualization of my next years was the fact that I lived constantly with an effective pair of parents, who flatly refused to allow their impassioned sixteen-year-old to plunge into the life of political militancy which filled his mind. No doubt they took the view that concentrating on getting into a university under his own steam was the first priority for an obviously bright boy who could not rely on family cash. They were of the firm opinion that I was too young to join the Communist Party.5 For the same reason, and in spite of family solidarity with Uncle Harry, they were equally opposed to my joining the Labour Party, which I proposed to do in order to subvert it – what later political generations of Trotskyists knew as ‘entryism’. I now know how they must have felt, confronted with my combination of priggishness and immaturity. I cringe as I reread the desperate entries in my diary for 1934 during this episode of family crisis. So, though the ban was slowly relaxed, for the following two and a half years I lived a life of suspended political animation, and correspondingly concentrated on intense intellectual activity and an amount of reading that in retrospect still amazes me. Not that the British revolution seemed to be making much progress with or without me.
Since for the next three years we lived so closely together, let me recall the two people who had become my sister’s and my new parents. Both Nancy and I agreed that they were fairly useless at this job, but, looking back at my diary of 1934–5, I think we underestimated both the problems of adults forced to face a series of migrations in several countries, and the extraordinary strains of dealing with two difficult orphans whose disrupted lives had had no real chance to settle, not to mention a peripatetic small boy of eight who was always falling ill. Bringing up the two of us must have been a nightmare. Anyway, they made as much of a mess of their own son’s upbringing as of ours, although it did me less harm than my sister, who developed a settled determination to live an adult life which had nothing whatever in common with the continental, emotional, argumentative, intellectual households of her teenage years. Indeed, I can recall her most fondly as a demonstrably conventional Anglican country matron and Conservative Party activist in Worcestershire in the 1960s.
Unlike her, I had no real reason for blaming them. On the contrary, they struck me not as tyrannical but, as I wrote shortly before my eighteenth birthday, as ‘tragic’. I saw them, especially Gretl, as the victims of the decline and disintegration of the old conventions that had determined the relations between the generations. The Victorian rules about bringing up children were dead. They had been tough on the children – though probably not unacceptable to most – but a great prop for parents. Now nothing filled this gap. Paradoxically I came to analogous conclusions as my sister from the opposite point of view. The future should not bring a society without accepted rules and a firm structure of expectations. ‘The socialist state,’ I told my diary, ‘must and will create a new socialist convention which will get rid of the disadvantages of the old conventions while maintaining their advantages.’ One might even say that I developed the instincts of a Tory communist, unlike the rebels and revolutionaries drawn to their cause by the dream of total freedom for the individual, a society without rules.