Edward was indeed a person of quite extraordinary gifts, not least the sort of palpable ‘star quality’, which led every eye to turn towards his increasingly craggy good looks whenever he was present on any scene. His ‘work combined passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst. He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but … ‘‘genius in the traditional sense of the word’’ ’,13 and all the more obviously so since he fitted the Romantic image of the genius in looks, life and work – especially with the suitable landscape of the Welsh hills behind him.
In short, he was a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts except two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass. And, with all his warmth, charm, humour and rage, it left him in some ways insecure and vulnerable. Like so many of his other works, The Making had begun as the first chapter of a short textbook on British labour history from 1790 to 1945, and had just got out of hand. Within a few years he suspended the remarkable studies of eighteenth-century society begun after The Making had turned him temporarily into an orthodox academic, which did not fit his style, to plunge into years of a theoretical struggle against the influence of a French Marxist, the late Louis Althusser, who inspired some of the brightest of the contemporary young leftists at that time. At the end of the seventies all his energy was diverted into the anti-nuclear movement, of which he became the national star. He never returned to history until he was too ill to complete his projects. He died in 1993 in his Worcestershire garden.
One could not fault a scholar for giving up writing for anti-nuclear campaigning in the early 1980s, but the Althusserian episode had no such justification. I told him at the time that it would be criminal to turn from his potentially epoch-making historical work to controverting a thinker who would be dead as an influence in another ten years’ time. And indeed, Althusser was already getting close to his sell-by date in the French Marxisant milieu even then. Though he helped at the time to open theoretical debate on the left, he survives today not as a philosopher but chiefly by virtue of his tragic personal trajectory. He was a manic-depressive who was to kill his wife. But even this was not then predictable, although Althusser in his manic phases was already a somewhat disturbing experience. Shortly before the tragedy he came to London, officially for a seminar at University College, unofficially to mobilize support for some hare-brained stratospheric initiative in which he wanted to involve Marxism Today and myself. His host handed him over to us after a night’s hospitality and Marlene looked after him for a morning, during which, inspired by our modest instrument, he insisted on ordering a grand piano from a local store for delivery to Paris. When picked up by his next caretaker he expressed an immediate interest in a Rolls-Royce (or maybe a Jaguar) from a car showroom in Mayfair which he insisted on visiting. It seemed clear that this brilliant mind was already accelerating the ride of his mental motorbike round some wall of death to a fatal climax.
The truth is that Edward suffered bitterly from the failure of the 1956 ‘New Left’. None of the ex-communist generation expected much of the Labour Party. The new generation of the intellectual young, with whom he wanted 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
the day the heavens were falling the hour the earth’s foundations fled
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.