The peculiarity of the New School’s Graduate Faculty was its combination of heterodoxy and internationalism. The New School for Social Research itself had been founded after the Great War by educational and ideological and politically radical reformers rebelling against what they regarded as the tyranny of examinations. It found first-class people, of whom there was no shortage in New York City, to teach anything for which there was a demand, from classical philosophy to yoga. The Graduate Faculty had been set up in 1933 to provide for the academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany, followed by those from the rest of occupied Europe. It is on record as the first academic institution to give lectures on jazz and almost certainly the first to give a seminar on structuralism (by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson), both during the Second World War. Its reputation for heterodoxy and radicalism attracted unusual students from the USA, and even more interesting and able ones from western and Latin American countries. In the 1980s it developed a relationship with the countries about to shake off their communist regimes. The Poles, Russians, Bulgarians and Chinese joined the Brazilians, Spaniards and Turks in our classes. I once counted twenty nationalities in my own. Since they knew more about their own countries and special fields than I did, I learned at least as much from them as they did from me. There was almost certainly no more varied and stimulating a body of students anywhere.
Communication is the essence both of teaching and of writing. Fortunate the author who likes both, for it rescues him or her from the desert island on which we usually sit, writing messages for unknown recipients in unknown destinations to be launched across the oceans in bottles shaped like books. But the teacher–author speaks directly to the potential readers. Lecturing was probably still the major form of teaching in my academic generation, and in many ways lecturers relate to any room full of students as actors relate to the faces before them in the theatre except that their house lights don’t go out. We are both performers, they are what we perform for. There is nothing like lecturing to tell us when we are losing the attention of the audience. Nevertheless, the lecturer’s task is harder, for he or she expects the audience to carry away a load of specific information and ideas which they should remember and digest, and not only the emotional satisfaction of the occasion. Even a good lecturer communicates only what radiates from any other performer with stage presence, namely the projection of a personality, a temperament, an image, a mind at work – and, with a bit of luck, he or she may strike a corresponding spark in the imagination of some people out there. It is through class discussion that we establish whether we have actually communicated what we wanted to. That is one reason why, during my whole career as a university teacher, I preferred general to specialist courses. Indeed, my books on general historical subjects either grew out of student lectures or, after more specialized origins, were tested in student lectures.
The satisfaction of a teacher’s job comes essentially from relations with individuals, but these form only a small part of the very large body of men and women with notebooks in lecture theatres, the vast pile of examination scripts or term papers that fill a university teacher’s working life in the course of his or her career. And even they are part of a pretty unchanging routine. Experienced from inside, a research seminar may be unforgettable, but seen from the outside it merely looks like – and I am thinking of my own at the Institute of Historical Research in London in the 1970s and 1980 – a couple of dozen people in the late afternoon, surrounded by books, sitting along a table discussing a paper read by one of them or an outside visitor, and then going a couple of hundred yards to a pub for a drink or two. Considered as a potential movie, it is not even art-house material.
In memory the academic autobiographer’s years stretch back like the wagons on those endless freight-trains, observed from some hill as they carry containers across the American landscape. Seen in retrospect, the succession of trucks is less interesting than the changing territory through which they pass. In my case they have passed through cities and campuses in three continents – four, if the Americas count as two – though before retirement mostly on relatively brief visits, except for a semester as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967) and a half-year’s teaching and research in Latin America (1971), both with my family. However, a peripatetic life with small children is not ideal for academics, and eventually their schooling made it impossible. I never tested the anti-communism of the US authorities by accepting a permanent appointment in their country. If I was tempted by visiting spells at one or another of the great North American universities, Marlene’s veto stood in the way: small-town academic life was not for her. Only one such place broke her resistance, the Getty Center – then still at Santa Monica – the nearest thing to paradise for scholars, where we spent some time in 1989. However, Los Angeles can hardly be regarded as the sticks. I too had been immunized against the campus life by my own brief experience in the summer quarter at Stanford, then as now a superb university, one of the half-dozen finest in the world, but embedded in Palo Alto, sensationally boring as a community for living in. For many years afterwards I could not even bring myself to revisit this nowhere space of empty streets in which cars visited each others’ owners in beautiful homes.
The ideal arrangement for both of us was a stable metropolitan base varied by the increasingly available academic trips abroad, which the revolution in air transport made easy from the 1960s. They have taken us from Finland to Naples, from Canada to Peru, from Japan to Brazil. Our times have added the roving professor to the other profession which likes to recall the pleasures, embarrassments and absurdities of a life of changing places, but which still remains essentially the same, namely the foreign correspondent. I have had the luck to teach and live for most of my professional life in or near the centre of the two major cultural cities of the late twentieth-century world: within a stone’s throw of the British Museum in one, in a Greenwich Village office above Bradley’s, the quintessential jazz location of Manhattan, in the other. (Alas, Bradley’s folded in 1996 and New York has not been the same for me since.)
Nevertheless, careers and freight-trains do not roll across the land at an absolutely steady rate. The war had delayed the start of my own career, and the Cold War had slowed it down considerably. It continued in the doldrums, but by the middle 1960s, when other offers in Britain and abroad began to come in, this was so eccentric as to be widely regarded as scandalous. 1 Still, I had begun to publish books only in my forties, and by the time I could actually call myself ‘Professor’ in Britain, I was in my middle fifties, a time of life when most professionals have got as far as they, and the world, expects them to get in their career. At that stage for most of us the promise is in the past, and so is such achievement as it has produced. Professionally speaking, people in this position are left to face half a lifetime of endless tomorrows no better than today, apart from the gowns and ribbons – professional and maybe public honours – which (at least in the humanities) usually signify that the honorand’s future will add nothing to his or her past, except the slow decline of age. World war and Cold War saved me from all this. By an unexpected twist of fortune, they prolonged the period of youth and promise into middle age. At the same time remarriage and children gave a new start to my private life.