Perhaps friendship might have survived politics–after all, I remained on good terms with Mounia Postan, even though I knew that every one of his job references was a poisoned arrow – but it requires more than the small change of social life. And even the taste of genuine friendship could have the bitter tang of Cold War distrust. When I received my first invitation to the USA, anticipating problems, I asked a colleague and friend (a moderate Labour supporter at the time) whether he would be prepared to write a letter testifying to my academic standing. ‘Of course I will,’ he said. I still remember the momentary sense of abandonment as he added: ‘Of course it has nothing to do with it, but could you just tell me – I mean, not that it matters in the least, but are you still in the Communist Party?’
That is why my most resented memory of the Cold War is not of jobs lost, or letters obviously opened, but of my first book. I had proposed it in 1953 to the publishers Hutchinsons, now long buried in some transatlantic publishing conglomerate, for their University Library, a series of compact texts addressed to students: a short comparative volume on The Rise of the Wage Worker. The proposal was accepted, but when I submitted the finished manuscript, it was turned down on the advice of an anonymous but presumably authoritative reader or readers. It was, they said, too biased, and therefore unacceptable under the contract. No suggestions for modifications were made. I protested. The firm agreed that I had put in a good deal of work, and therefore offered me a good-will payment of 25 guineas.12 What stuck in my gullet was not only the contemptible amount of the sum – even in the mid-fifties it amounted to the proceeds of two or three book reviews – but the knowledge that the book had almost certainly been turned down on the advice of some senior colleague, as like as not – given the subject – a supporter of the Labour Party. And there was nothing I could do about it. I was sufficiently furious to consult my lawyer, the astute Jack Gaster, about suing Hutchinsons. He told me not to think of it. ‘You may find people to testify to your academic standing, but they will find more to testify that you are biased.’ He was right. I never published the book, though I used parts of it in other publications. What makes the incident so typical of that miserable phase of the Cold War is that some years later my then publisher George Weidenfeld, having asked my advice, published a book of the same length on precisely the same subject, and, in my view, ideologically more obviously controversial, as part of one of those global co-production series which he was then promoting.
Under these circumstances, and even though by 1958 the ideological temperature of the Cold War had become a shade less icy, the decision of George (now Lord) Weidenfeld to commission me to write, for an advance on publication of £500, a volume in a gigantic and still not completed history of civilization he was then planning, was admirable and not without courage. It turned out to be The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 , the first volume of a four-volume history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was quite well known for my identification with the Communist Party. He was a commercial publisher and a person not uninterested in good relations with the social and political establishment. I owe him a lasting debt of gratitude. Who recommended me to him? I can only speculate, since Lord Weidenfeld himself claims not to remember. I suspect it was J. L. Talmon, of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who had been his first choice for the volume in question, but who wanted to drop out. Talmon and I had found ourselves arguing about the nature of democracy and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, and respected each other, though we disagreed on most other things, notably Zionism.
III
The darkest period of public anti-communism, the years of the Korean War and, incidentally, of the opening instalment of the great ‘Cambridge Spy’ serial – the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 – coincided with a dark moment in my own life. In the summer of 1950 my first marriage, rocky for some time, broke up in circumstances which left me wounded and for some years acutely unhappy. After I left our flat in Clapham Common, I never saw Muriel again except at the moment of our divorce. Fortunately I had won a Fellowship at King’s the year before, and the college – such things were then possible – at a moment’s notice found me a set of rooms in the wonderful Gibbs Building next to the chapel. King’s was my permanent base for the next five years, though I continued to teach at Birkbeck, either returning to Cambridge by a late train, or staying a night or two in the room I rented in the house of friends in another part of Clapham. Those were black times, both politically and personally. What was more painfuclass="underline" my divorce or the execution of the Rosenbergs, which so many communists at the time felt as a personal defeat and a personal tragedy? It is difficult to separate the two strands that merged in a common mood of determination to survive them: by work, by travel, even by political defiance, as when I invited the physicist Alan Nunn May, just released from jail for nuclear espionage, to a King’s Feast. I may add that, as so often, King’s behaved impeccably on this occasion; and so did Cambridge when a former mayor and owner of the local newspaper demanded the dismissal of the Assistant Schools Medical Officer, the Austrian refugee Hilde Broda, on the grounds that she had married Alan Nunn May since taking her job. The motion was thrown out without a division. Britain was not the USA.
Looking back, I have mixed feelings about my postwar years at Cambridge. On the one hand I did not take to village life – even in a village of dons – where the range of social relations was both constricted and, to some extent, obligatory. My instincts are and were metropolitan, and in Cambridge there was neither anonymity nor privacy, except in one’s own room behind the closed outer door or ‘sported oak’. (In those days all doors to students’ or dons’ living quarters were left unlocked, unless the inhabitant was either not in Cambridge or wished to indicate that [s]he did not want to be disturbed.) What is more, every day I spent there reminded me of the fact that the university did not want me. The posts for which I applied, then and later, went to others. I applied for them really only out of pride. Neither I nor, after I remarried, Marlene, would have wanted to live permanently in Cambridge, or in any other small university-dominated town. The only lengthy visiting posts we really enjoyed have been in capitals: Paris and, above all, Manhattan. In short, when, after six years of my Fellowship, I moved back to London, I felt I had returned to my proper territory.
On the other hand, being a single man living in college, Cambridge gave me another bite at the cherry of student life. Of course it was not the life of the 1930s: for one thing, those among my contemporaries who had become dons had changed their views, and the general depoliticization of the undergraduates was acutely depressing. The sort of political student I remembered, and felt at ease with, was now to be found only among South Asians and Chinese – who were admittedly not rare in the economics faculty, for which I supervised and examined: students such as the young A. K. Sen, who had come to Trinity as a graduate from Presidency College, Calcutta, to sit at the feet of Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa, his brilliance already evident. Of course, one saw student life differently as a Fellow, and was treated differently by the undergraduates, even in free-and-easy King’s. (The pre-war atmosphere of cultured homosexuality was still strong in the college, although from 1952 on the turn to heterosexuality became obvious, with patently woman-oriented new arrivals on King’s fashion scene, such as the future journalist and writer Neal Ascherson, and the transformation of young men such as the future media designer Mark Boxer, who having established themselves in the old mode, transferred to the new.) I did, however, have one asset that brought me closer to the life and mood of the 1950s male student mood than I could otherwise have been, but not – at this time – to the young women (although supervising those studying history and economics in Newnham helped). I was an Apostle, and therefore on close terms with some of them. This may therefore be a suitable moment to say something about this odd Cambridge institution: still extant and flourishing, still keeping its actual active membership secret, although most of its pre-1939 history is by now a matter of public record, and few of its retired members make any secret of their apostolicity. It was and is a small community, essentially of brilliant undergraduates or early postgraduates, co-opting others to maintain itself in being, whose purpose is to read and discuss papers written by its members at weekly meetings. Undergraduates were the core of the Apostles. Indeed, by definition they are ‘the Society’, since those who left ‘the real world’ of its meetings for ‘the phenomenal world’ outside, by graduating or leaving Cambridge (‘taking wings’ and therefore being known as ‘Angels’) necessarily had to defer to the active brethren.