Outliving his own ideology but not his insight

In the late 1950s, English poet Stephen Spender visited Warsaw under the aegis of the British Council tour. Stalin was dead, but the ruling Polish Communist Party was still operating very much along Stalinist lines. Still, even in these savagely repressive conditions, Spender made a huge success of his visit. Shortly before he was due to return home, a reception was given in his honor. At it, the head of the Polish Writers’ Union rose to thank Spender and to make what was at the time a daring offer. “Tell us whom you want to meet, no matter how controversial, and we’ll arrange it,” he said. “And don’t worry; we won’t say the person’s ill or out of the country.” Spender thought for a moment and replied, “I want to meet a communist.” But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than he heard a voice from somewhere in the crowd -- he never found out who it was, he later told me -- retort in French: “Alas, sir, you’ve come too late.”

I found myself thinking of this story more than once as I read Eric Hobsbawm’s simultaneously brilliantly lucid and perversely obscurantist memoir, “Interesting Times.”

Hobsbawm, one of the most remarkable historians of the 20th century, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917 and grew up in Vienna and Berlin before moving to Britain in the early 1930s. Unlike Spender’s Polish interlocutors, he formally joined the Communist Party as a student at Cambridge University, and he remained a loyal Communist until the demise of the British party in 1991. Although many of Hobsbawm’s colleagues in the legendary Historian’s Group of British Marxist academics, notably the great historian E.P. Thompson, left after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and many younger Marxist academics and intellectuals abandoned the Communist Party after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, Hobsbawm stayed on to the bitter end.

In a sense, Hobsbawm outlived his own ideology without ever having repudiated it -- a curious and doubtless disconcerting destiny, particularly for so ideological a man as Hobsbawm, and one of which he is clearly painfully aware. Indeed, much of the interest of Hobsbawm’s memoir lies in the way he treats (and refuses to treat) his own ideological trajectory.

Instead of titling the book “Interesting Times,” with its reference to the Chinese saying that to live in such epochs is a curse, Hobsbawm might as well have borrowed a title from English writer Christopher Sykes and called it “a study in loyalty” -- in this case, his own. And anyone in any doubt about the truth of the cliche that communism was a secular religion for people of Hobsbawm’s generation need only read his book to have those doubts assuaged.

He writes eloquently of how his experience of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism bound him to the ideals of the Communist-dominated Popular Front and the fight against fascism, but for a writer as sardonic and, above all, as allergic to all forms of sentimentality as Hobsbawm, the passages in his book about his abiding allegiance to the Communist Party have a depressingly sacerdotal ring. One fairly typical passage reads as follows: “the Party (we always thought of it in capital letters) had the first, or more precisely, the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the line’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it, although we made heroic efforts to convince ourselves of its intellectual and political ‘correctness’ in order to ‘defend it,’ as we were expected to.” He goes on to add, in a book that is almost ostentatious in its refusal to go into personal matters, that “to have a serious relationship with someone who was not in the Party or prepared to join (or rejoin it) was unthinkable.”

To be sure, Hobsbawm now describes his post-1956 years in the party as a species of internal exile. But his continued apologia for the party, or, more precisely, for his refusal to leave the party, will strike many readers as putting such claims in doubt. A historian of Hobsbawm’s distinction deserves the benefit of the doubt, but what is one to make of a writer who now concedes the horrors of Stalin’s Russia but nonetheless somewhat blithely insists that he stayed in because “nobody forced me out and the reasons for going were not quite strong enough.” Not quite strong enough! This from a man who freely admits that he was aware of the Stalinist show trials of the late 1940s, of the imposition in the USSR of the bogus scientific doctrine of Lysenkoism and of the anti-Semitic excesses of Stalin’s last years.

And what was on the other side of the ledger, apparently outweighing these crimes?

In Hobsbawm’s account, there is the biographical fact that he had become a communist when communism not only was a central force in the fight against fascism but when communism offered the prospect of a better world. There was also the realization that, in leaving the party, he would give aid and comfort to anti-communists. To make such a decision based on whether one’s choice will give aid and comfort to one’s ideological adversaries is more an aesthetic judgment than a political one and is eerily reminiscent of the reluctance of some left-leaning Americans to credit the Bush administration’s quite defensible assertions about the new and terribly grave dangers posed by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists or rogue states on the grounds that they do not want to be on the same side as the attorney general.

Additionally, Hobsbawm argues that he became a communist when communism not only was a central force in the fight against fascism but offered the prospect of a better world. This argument does carry weight. The execrable reasoning of figures like Martin Amis to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a difference between communism and Nazism, which, simply put, is not one of body counts (Stalin killed more people than Hitler and, between them, Lenin and Stalin killed far more) but rather the difference between a universalist utopia and a racist and exclusivist one. In other words, it was perfectly possible for a decent person to be beguiled by communism and quite impossible for a decent person to be tempted by Nazism.

But these distinctions are useful in accounting for why a person of Hobsbawm’s generation might have joined a communist party and not why he remained loyal to it. As he knows perfectly well from the political trajectory of his fellow Marxist academics, there were many ways to leave the party. As someone who, in his professional life, has valued the facts of the world, it is notable that he never seems to have been drawn to George Steiner’s fine, mournful formulation that decent people should have greeted the bad news about communism by thinking, “damn, another great human hope shot to bits.”

But then, however much he may now think of himself as some kind of post-communist, the old loyalties die hard. How else to account for the fact that in “Interesting Times” the great writer (and communist apostate) Arthur Koestler is treated with scorn, while the Stalinist hacks who led the British Communist Party after World War II, such as Harry Pollitt and Palme Dutt, are described in respectful (though, in fairness, not adulatory) tones?

This seeming double standard and the offensively grudging quality of Hobsbawm’s admissions about the evils of communism (the regimes, that is; for him the communist ideal, no matter how superseded by events, continues to merit respect) draw the reader of “Interesting Times” to those sections of the book that concern Hobsbawm’s communist commitments. However unavoidable, this is a pity, since there is much in the book that is unmarred by Hobsbawm’s lifelong struggle with militancy.

His memoir of childhood in Vienna, with which the book opens, manages the rare literary feat of being both moving and judicious. His extraordinary, aphoristic talents as a narrator -- gifts that make his great synoptic histories of modern Europe, like “The Age of Empire” and “The Age of Capital,” such joys to read, such books for the ages -- are everywhere in evidence. Of the millions of words written about Austria between the end of the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy in 1918 and the Anschluss with Germany in 1938, few have summed up that country’s predicament as well or as briefly as Hobsbawm when he observes that “I spent my childhood in the impoverished capital of a great empire, attached, after the empire’s collapse, to a smallish provincial republic of great beauty, which did not believe it ought to exist.”

Hobsbawm’s account of British academic life -- both his student years at Cambridge and his professional career, mainly at Birkbeck College in the University of London -- is also of great interest and reveals a winning shrewdness, not to mention that it constitutes a useful counterirritant, in its skepticism and lack of sentimentality, to the effusions of writers such as the Oxford don Noel Annan, who covered some of the same ground in a remarkably self-regarding book, “Our Age.” Here, Hobsbawm’s Marxism and, perhaps more important, the way in which his politics seems to have played into his sense of being a perpetual outsider served him (and now serve his readers) well. As he puts it, throughout his life he has been “someone who does not wholly belong to where he finds himself, whether as an Englishman among the Central Europeans, a continental immigrant in Britain, a Jew everywhere -- even, indeed particularly, in Israel -- an anti-specialist in a world of specialists, a polyglot cosmopolitan, an intellectual whose political and academic work was devoted to the nonintellectual, even, for much of my life, an anomaly among communists, themselves a minority of political humanity in the countries I have known.”

There used to be more like him. Indeed, the German refugee intellectuals who contributed so much to invigorating American academic life from the mid-1930s through the early 1960s were cast from very much the same mold. Hobsbawm claims that this vertebral sense of non-belonging, though it may have complicated his private life, constituted a “professional asset.” Unfortunately, in the modern university such a view would be considered heretical, perhaps even nonsensical. Today’s graduate students are expected to know a great deal, but only about an extremely narrow subject.

Starkly put, a young Eric Hobsbawm with the same viewpoint would be unlikely to have much of a future at UCLA or Oxford. Such a person would be judged “unprofessional,” and his colleagues would wonder where, in which department, did he belong. So in a sense, interesting times or no interesting times, Hobsbawm was lucky to have been born when he was, in 1917. To have come of age in the British universities of the 1930s, whatever their other faults, was to have entered a world where nonconformity and seriousness could still go hand in hand. That is true no longer, and in this sense, the elegiac quality of so much of “Interesting Times” is not simply grounded in the emotions that must attend an old man’s summing up but in undeniable material realities.

To be sure, Hobsbawm is a cultural conservative, but this is anything but a function of being a historian in the ninth decade of his age. Nor, whatever some of his more facile critics have alleged, does this conservatism somehow prove the hypocrisy of his Marxism. To the contrary, if anything, the stance seems to be one that is bred in the bone with Hobsbawm. Sections of his memoir range from passages that remind one of Orwell at his most lyrical and patriotic about the innate decency of the British working class to what are probably the most scornful passages ever penned about the student uprisings of May ’68 and of the so-called counterculture by a person of the left. And Hobsbawm’s aside that he would never wear blue jeans under any circumstances seems closer in spirit to the great reactionary poet Philip Larkin than to any Marxist, communist, countercultural or otherwise. But if this is so, then it is a cultural conservatism Hobsbawm shares with Lenin himself, whose taste in literature, it should be remembered, ran almost exclusively to realist writers like Balzac and Zola and whose loathing of the revolutionary Russian avant-garde -- the Tatlins and the El Lissitzkys -- was legendary. (Lenin once threatened to “flog” his cultural commissar, Anatoli Lunacharsky, for supporting the Futurists.)

Where he is not conservative, or sentimental, is in his evaluation of the present and the future. Pessimistic in the extreme -- “the twenty-first [century],” he has written, “opens on twilight and obscurity,” and he refers to the world’s “darkening prospects” -- Hobsbawm’s book ends on a transcendent plea for his discipline of historical writing and investigation that does much to mitigate the unsatisfactory quality of those sections of the memoir that deal with his political commitments. Again echoing the cultural conservatism of so many of the specific judgments he makes in “Interesting Times,” Hobsbawm reminds his readers that “we are the first generation to have lived through the historic moment when the rules and conventions that had hitherto bound human beings in families, communities and societies ceased to operate.” He means his own generational cohort that knew the world both before and after this great upheaval. But lest any reader make the error of mistaking him for William J. Bennett or John Ashcroft, Hobsbawm adds that “if you want to know what [the past] was like, only we can tell you. If you think you can go back, we can tell you, it can’t be done.”

This is vintage Hobsbawm: the historian as dispassionate observer, refusing to let his own preferences cloud his judgments but, at the same time, not fearing the generalization and not settling for the contemporary version of history writing in which the profession is largely dominated by miniaturists rather than generalists of Hobsbawm’s sweep and ambition. To be sure, he does not show these gifts to best effect in his memoir, and in the end the book is at once too subjective and not subjective enough. But Hobsbawm, even at his most inconsistent and even (as in the unconvincing and tortured justifications of his continued allegiance to the communist international) at his most objectionable, is never less than instructive. Whether the book will really “help readers as they go into the new century” (as he puts it) is an open question. What is unquestionable, in my view, is that “Interesting Times” will help readers think about the age we have just passed through, whether they are convinced by Hobsbawm’s account of it or not. And that, surely, is a very considerable achievement.