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 The Age of Revolution, 1789– 1848. Professionally, I was beginning to acquire some international reputation, and therefore to travel outside what had been my habitual range in the 1950s, France, the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. In the 1960s I began my academic trips to the USA and Cuba, I discovered and started to explore Latin America, found myself in Israel and India, and returned to the Mitteleuropa I had not seen since childhood. What is more, I had begun to notice that I no longer lived in the constant expectation of seismic catastrophe as Mitteleuropeans had done in the days of my youth. I began to notice – I do not recall exactly when – that I was operating in a time-frame of decades rather than years or even, as before 1945, months. I did not consciously abandon the basic precautions of the potential refugee which people of my kind learned to observe, whether as Jews or as Reds, against the sudden hazards of economic and political life between the wars: a valid passport, enough immediately available money to buy a ticket to the chosen country of refuge at a moment’s notice, a way of life that permitted quick departures and a rough idea of what to take, if one had to go. In fact, when, shortly after marrying Marlene, and in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, I had to go abroad, I reacted accordingly. I made some financial arrangements, fixed a provisional appointment with Marlene in Buenos Aires, where I was due to be in a week or two, in case things began to look really drastic, and left her enough money for the fare. Nevertheless, though it was quite evident that the Cuban missile crisis was a matter of global life and death, I cannot actually have expected nuclear world war to break out. Had I done so, I suppose I should, logically, have taken Marlene with me immediately, at least to get both of us out of the immediate firing-line. If the worst came to the worst, South America was the least likely battlefield. I already found myself operating on the assumption that the danger to the world came not from the global ambitions or aggressiveness of the USA (the USSR was too weak to have them) but the risks inherent in politicians and generals on both sides playing a game with nuclear bowls which they knew it would be suicide to use – but which might easily slip out of control. In fact we now know that this was precisely the lesson which Kennedy and Khrushchev, neither of whom wanted a war, drew from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In short, as far as I was concerned, from 1960 on the Cold War was not over, but it had become dramatically less dangerous.
As for long-term planning, anyone who enters upon marriage can no longer avoid it even if he or she wanted to. I had already been forced to consider the problem a couple of years earlier, when a child was impending from an earlier relationship – my children’s half-brother Joshua – and only the refusal of the woman concerned to leave her husband had removed him from my life into others’ lives. By the middle of the 1960s I was the father of Andy and Julia, the first-time owner of a small car in which I transported them to a holiday cottage in North Wales and first-time house-owner of a large house in an as yet very incompletely gentrified part of Clapham, divided in two by an austere architect friend, which Marlene and I had bought jointly with the taciturn Alan Sillitoe and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight. ‘Has he won the pools or something?’ the local newsagent asked Marlene, since in those days of full employment he could not understand what an obviously healthy and respectable-looking youngish fellow was doing not going out to work in the morning and coming back of an evening like other men. Though Alan was as much of a workaholic as most writers, this guess was not totally off target: he had, after all, written Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which, thanks to their merits and the enormous growth of secondary education, became two of those contemporary classics which, set for O-level and A-level examinations, generate a lasting flow of royalties. He could afford to live off his books, and could avoid the treadmill of freelance journalism. I, though writing at home, did conform to type, for I went to work at Birkbeck on the Northern Line and came back from there late at night. On the other hand, I remained peculiar, inasmuch as I showed no enthusiasm for gardening, and, unlike the Caribbean electricians and transport workers in the short street that led to the Wandsworth Road outside our front door, I did not spend Sunday mornings cleaning our car.
Clearly I was well on the way to the everyday life of academic and middle-class respectability. At this point, except for travel, nothing much happens any longer to the subject of autobiography except inside his or her head or in other people’s heads. This is also true for that matter of the subjects of biography, as generations of the writers of intellectuals’ lives have learned to their cost. However towering the achievement of Charles Darwin, once he returned from the voyage of the Beagle and married, there is not much more to be said about the material events in his life for his last forty years than that ‘he passed his time at Down, Kent, as a country gentleman’2 and to speculate about the reasons for his poor health. The life of the respectable academic is not full of professional drama, or rather its dramas, like those of office politics, are of interest only to those directly involved in them. Again, though there is plenty of drama in family life, especially when parents and teenage children confront each other, third parties, such as the readers of biographies, are usually less gripped by the drama of life inside other families than their own. The scenario is familiar. So the years around 1960 form a watershed not only in my life, but in the shape of this autobiography.