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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane 2002)
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| DO NOT JUDGE this book by the cover. An elderly man stares at you disparagingly. He is dressed in jacket, tie, and thick pinstriped shirt, looking more like a retired corporate lawyer or banker than the most well-known and widely-read Marxist historian in the English-speaking world. The lifted corner of his lip seems to be saying, "I am Eric Hobsbawm and you're not." |
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The Eric Hobsbawm of these 400-plus pages is not that man on the cover. His autobiography is extraordinary both for its candour and its scope, offering the reader an account of experiences that begin with a Viennese childhood, then school in Weimar Germany and later London, onto Red Cambridge in the 1930s, wartime London, and on and on. Historian that he is, Hobsbawm also reflects on his memories and the way that time so often distorts them. The second chapter, "A Child in Vienna," opens with the following sentence: "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." Then in two paragraphs he summarizes Austria's political situation and its social currents. Hobsbawm pauses, admitting: "But this is a historian's retrospect. What was a middle-class childhood like in the Vienna of the 1920s?" (8–9) As with his books on the four "ages" subdividing the past two centuries, his offhand observations are as illuminating as his treatment of large themes. Thus he notes that a stamp-collecting child such as himself subconsciously absorbed the tangled political history of post-1914 Europe, for stamp collecting "dramatized the unchanging continuity of George V's head on British stamps and the chaos of overprints, new names and new currencies elsewhere." (9) Later, describing the collapse of the Weimar republic — Hobsbawm was already a teen-age communist sympathizer — he again pauses to question his own account: "Reconstructing my experience of the last months of the Weimar Republic, how can I disentangle memory from what I now think after a lifetime of political reflections and debates about what the German left should or should not have done? ... In any case, I did not really react to the news politically or critically, but as a romantic partisan, or a football supporter." (71) |
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Hobsbawm has never disguised his political allegiance and not surprisingly the autobiography provides an insider's account of communism's trajectory from the 1930s to its collapse. The chapter, "Being Communist," deserves to be read by anyone with even the slightest interest in that passionate commitment: "It is easy in retrospect to describe how we felt and what we did as Party members half a century ago, but much harder to explain it. I cannot recreate the person that I was. The landscape of those times lies buried under the debris of world history." (136) And yet he is never solemn and his account does not lack its improbable figures and ironic connections. He describes a visit to Hungary in 1960 and his insistence on meeting George Lukács: " Lukács had been seized and exiled after the 1956 revolution and now sat in his apartment above the Danube once again like an ancient high priest in civilian clothes, smoking Havana cigars." (144) And a visit the following year to Cuba "with a British left-wing delegation of the usual composition: a left-wing Labour MP; unilateral nuclear disarmers; a hardnosed, usually Party-line union leader, not without an interest in foreign nooky; the odd radical conspirator; CP functionaries and the like.... All I can remember about [the delegation] is that I found myself translating for Che who (in Fidel's place) received us for lunch in the former Hilton hotel." (255–56) Che, he notes, had nothing much of interest to say, and Hobsbawm was happy to escape to the barrios of Havana, listening to the music that has been one of his passions. I had always wondered how Hobsbawm became a jazz afficionado and why he wrote under the pseudonym, Francis Newton, a puzzle he explains here. It turns out that he chose the name because of Frankie Newton, "one of the few jazz-players known to have been a communist, an excellent but not superstar trumpeter who played with Billie Holiday." (225) Perhaps the most improbable of his political vignettes is the account of an Italian television show in which he participated on the occasion of Marx's centenary. An enormous papier-maché head of Marx dominated the set, from which the host of the show would pull "large cards marked CLASS STRUGGLE, DIALECTICS and the like.... I was supposed to expound THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE for not more than five minutes." (360) |
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It is also an easy book to read. Hobsbawm's tone is conversational and his manner engaging. Nor has age dimmed his formidable intellect, which ranges across the past century. He has some intriguing comments on the radical ferment of the 1960s, especially in his comparison of that period with his own radical youth in Weimar Germany. (70) In an aside about the cultural milieu of the 1960s, he reveals his awareness of that context, with its connections between the personal and the political: "Mick Jagger wrote 'Street Fighting Man' after a dramatic Vietnam Solidarity demonstration in 1968 and published it in the flamboyant Pakistani Trotskyite Tariq Ali's new radical paper, The Black Dwarf. (252) And yet Hobsbawm admits that for people such as himself, the period was less exciting: "We, or at least congenitally pessimistic middle-aged reds such as myself, already bearing the scars of half a lifetime of disappointment, could not share the almost cosmic optimism of the young." (253–54) He warns us that this comes from a man who never wore jeans, although in yet another aside he suggests that their growing ubiquity during the period was a sign of profound social change that — in his view — approached a cultural revolution. But jeans, he notes, are the badge of youth: "By then I was no longer young ... nor could I see myself as credibly performing the role of the oldest teenager on the scene." (261–62) |
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Readers of this journal may be most interested in the two chapters, "Among the Historians" and "In the Global Village," where he describes the changes in intellectual practice during his career. Interestingly enough, some of the more personal moments in the book come in the latter of these two chapters: "In my case it has been an extraordinarily enjoyable life.... It has given me more private happiness than I ever expected. Has it been the life I had in mind when I was young? No. It would be pointless, even stupid, to regret that it has turned out this way, but somewhere inside me there is a small ghost who whispers: 'One should not be at ease in a world such as ours.' As the man said when I read him in my youth, 'The point is to change it'." (313) |
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The chapters that follow touch on his experiences in Europe (notably France, Spain, and Italy), in Central and South America, and in the US. Canada barely rates a mention. About the only significant reference comes when he describes Cambridge colleagues and mentions H.R. Norman and H.S. Ferns, whom he lists as among the handful of scholars who forced Hobsbawm to think about the extra-European world. (292) |
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Although I rarely read autobiographies — the genre seems to stimulate the pens of those in whom I have no interest whatsoever — I found this a compelling book. That stern gentleman gazing out from the cover is an extraordinary historian, which doubtless helps to explain my fascination with the story of his life. But there is something else as well; it is hinted at in the two short sentences that end the book, an injunction of sorts: "Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own." |
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Jeremy Mouat
Athabasca University |
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