Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Inevitably the breakdown of the Raymonds’ marriage changed the pattern of my visits to Paris. In any case from 1961 on my life was transformed by the partnership of Marlene. However permanent the passion, like jazz, Paris could no longer be the same for a then middle-aged man with wife and, eventually, children. And in any case she had, and made, her own friends in France, quite apart from the ones we had, or from then on acquired together. Moreover, since 1957 I had acquired another couple of close Parisian friends who remain our friends to this day: Richard and Elise Marienstras. The Raymonds and I had decided to travel to a small seaside town in the Gargano peninsula of Italy – the ‘spur’ that sticks out of the ‘boot’ of Italy into the Adriatic – on the strength of a novel set there, La Loi, recently published by the then still communist or recently communist writer Roger Vailland, whom Henri had known since Resistance days. There on the beach were the Marienstrases, he a tall broad-chested blond, she tiny, thin and dark, en route for a spell as secondary-school teachers in Tunisia, by then independent but still educationally linked with the French schools system. Never were French intellectuals more involved in North Africa than in the 1950s, when Tunisia and Morocco won their freedom and the Algerians were fighting for theirs. So we had plenty to talk about. In any case, ever since the early nineteenth century the Maghreb has played a major role in the imagination of French painters and writers, but equally so as an intellectual stimulus to the young agrégés who went there as teachers, that is to say as future academics: Fernand Braudel among historians and Pierre Bourdieu among sociologists, to name but two. The Marienstrases’ academic interests were not Mediterranean or Oriental, but Anglo-Saxon, which provided another link. Richard was to become the major French authority on Shakespeare, and Elise was to establish a reputation as a historian of the USA.

Both were from Polish-Jewish families, fortunate to survive in the unoccupied zone of wartime France. Richard had joined the armed Resistance in the south-eastern hills at the age of sixteen, an experience he recalled as the only time in his life when nobody cared, or even asked, whether he was Jewish. Many years later he was deeply moved when, being the only intellectual among his surviving and now ageing Resistance comrades, he was asked to make the commemorative speech at their fiftieth anniversary dinner somewhere in the Rhône valley. Though they were naturally on the left, Marxism did not attract the Marienstrases, but proud of secular, emancipated, diaspora Judaism, neither did Zionism. Theirs was, or perhaps increasingly became, a minority position among French Jewry which in their lifetime, thanks mainly to the massive exodus from formerly French North Africa, became the largest Jewish community in Europe and, since the end of the USSR, in any country of the old world.

There was a third, more academic, reason why my relationship with Paris changed in the 1960s. The convergence between what the French historians were doing in Annales and we in Past & Present was becoming obvious. From about 1960 I was increasingly drawn into Parisian academic life, and especially towards the new academic empire of Fernand Braudel. Indeed, in the 1970s I joined it for a while officially as an associate directeur de recherche for part of the year at the new Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. In short, from 1960 on academic engagements increasingly set the rhythm of my, or rather our, visits to Paris.

In a way these changes went together. When I first went to Paris after marrying Marlene, whose knowledge of the academic world was negligible, the Braudels, justifiably charmed by her, invited us to lunch at their apartment and Fernand won her permanent goodwill by assuring her that being a good husband was an essential element of being a good historian. On such occasions grandees of French intellectual life are not on oath, but since they know how to make the statements proper to the occasion in a manner suggesting sincerity without condescension, all of us were satisfied. Conversely, she was the hostess in London both to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie when he stayed with us after I had invited him to a seminar in London and, many years later, to the philosopher Louis Althusser in one of his manic phases, not long before he killed his wife in one of the subsequent depressions. As in other academic households, personal and professional relations were not clearly separable.

Unlike in the France of the Third and even the Fourth Republics, I no longer felt at ease in the France of de Gaulle and his Gaullist successors, or in the France of Mitterrand, the France that developed a new kind of public rhetorical jargon where politicians called their country the ‘Hexagone ’, talked of ‘la France profonde’ and showed their energy by forging ahead ‘tous azimuths’, in which Paris became one gigantic gentrified bourgeois ghetto, the largest in Europe, where the street-corner bars were shut at weekends because the old people of Paris could no longer afford to live there, although they worked there on weekdays. Except for the great hole in the centre left by the emigration of the markets and filled by Richard Rogers’s Beaubourg, the city remained more or less recognizable until President Mitterrand filled and surrounded it with his architectural dinosaurs. (The General, knowing that his place in history was secure, had disdained trying to preserve his memory by monumental architecture.) Paris remains as wonderful a city as ever for the tourist, but it is hard for a historian to get used to the fact that the left can no longer elect more than the odd councillor in the home of the Paris Commune, unless the corruption of the right-wing municipal administrations has temporarily become too scandalous. On the other hand, nobody living in Britain could fail to appreciate the advantages of French postwar modernization, which supplemented the unchanging quality and variety of French food-markets and cooking with the TGV and a superb system of public urban and suburban transport.

I learned, at first reluctantly, to appreciate the greatness of the General and to develop a taste for his style. I learned, with even greater reluctance, to respect Mitterrand. Neither could have flourished in the Third Republic. Both came out of the milieu of what the Third Republic would have (rightly) called ‘reaction’. De Gaulle was a man of the right, but one for whom the Republic, including its left, was an essential part of that ‘certain idea of France’ which he recreated after the war. He was the first French politician since 1793 whose France had a place both for the monarchy and the Revolution. Indeed, he was presumably not entirely displeased to be compared with Louis XIV, who would have addressed his servants much as de Gaulle addressed the publisher who edited his memoirs, when the man admitted to a rather un-Gaullist past between 1940 and 1944. ‘I take it,’ said the great man (who may well have had the relevant files looked up), ‘that you have been inside one of my prisons.’ Both the personal pronoun and the plural are very much de Gaulle.¹²

Since his death there has been much criticism of the ambiguities and complexities of François Mitterrand’s career. Yet it cannot be denied that it moved leftwards with surprisingly little discontinuity, from the pre-war ultra-right through Vichy and the Resistance to a political progress that turned him into the builder and chief of a reconstructed Socialist Party which recaptured control of the left not by isolating the communists in the usual Cold War manner, but by bringing him to power in alliance with them. In both Third and Fourth Republics politicians would have moved in the opposite direction. He and de Gaulle belong to an era – no, both were architects of the era – when French politics ceased to be essentially a battle about the great Revolution whose memory divided the left from the right, though both men knew in their bones that the Revolution was as central to the France they ruled as the American Constitution was to the USA. In this they were more realistic than the ideologists of moderate liberalism, immoderate anti-communism and market society, always an untypical minority in France, who came to dominate Parisian intellectual fashions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And yet, if I did not feel at ease in Gaullist and Mitterrandist France, I could understand its continuity with my own France, the blue-white-and-red tricoloured ‘remembered hills’ of the past. In one way or another, the France of the Canard Enchainé was not yet dead. Indeed, the scandals and the growing corruption in the later Gaullist and the later Mitterrand eras revived the fortunes of this publication.

Nor did I feel at ease with the intellectual mood of the time. Like everyone on the global left, I was excited by the rebellion of 1968 but I remained sceptical. True, I was in much closer touch with French historians, who formed the core discipline of the French social sciences until the 1970s, and who supplied so many of Hamon and Rotman’s Parisian ‘intellocrats’. ² Nevertheless, in some ways I had lost touch with many of the currents of French culture and theoretical discussion after the 1960s, and, although any admirer of Queneau and Perec cannot but be sympathetic to the French intellectual tradition of playing games with language, as French thinkers increasingly moved into the territory of ‘postmodernism’ I found them uninteresting, incomprehensible, and in any case of not much use to historians. Even their puns failed to grip.

After the brief 1968 surge, in the 1970s and 1980s the left, both old and new, was clearly on the retreat in France. My opinion of the French Communist Party since 1945 had never been high, and I had long regarded its leadership under George Marchais as a disaster, yet it would be dishonest of me not to admit that its decline from the great mass Party of the French working class to a rump of less than 4 per cent of voters caused an old communist pain. And it would be equally dishonest not to admit that most of what has remained under the label ‘Marxism’ in France is unimpressive. On the other hand, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the increasingly militant and ill-tempered anti-communism of so many of the formerly left-wing ‘intellocrats’ began to complicate my relations with some of them. Though we respected and sometimes liked each other, some of those with whom I had dealings in Paris, intellectual or social, were politically uneasy in my company, and I in theirs. Since I remained what I had been since 1956, a known, though heterodox communist whose work had never been published in the USSR, some, who might have been more Stalinist or even Maoist in their youth than I ever was, resented what they regarded as a wilful refusal to take the same road. I, in turn, found myself more repelled by the Cold War rhetoric and free market liberalism to which some of the ablest and most prestigious were drawn in the 1980s than by the straightforward return of a man like Le Roy Ladurie (a major historian by any standards) to the traditional conservatism of his Norman ancestry. Paradoxically, as Communist Parties declined, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, the tone of anti-communist and anti-Marxist polemic became more embittered, not to say hysterical. The late François Furet, a historian and publicist of great intelligence and influence – perhaps the nearest thing to a chef d’ecole of the tendency – did his best to turn the second centenary of the French Revolution into an intellectual assault on it. A few years later his Le passé d’une illusion presented the history of the twentieth century as that of the process of liberation from the dangerous dream of communism. Not surprisingly, I criticized his views.³ As a by now quite well-known Marxist historian, I found myself for a while a champion of the embattled and besieged French intellectual left.

This complicated relations further, especially since, by chance, my own history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, appeared just before Furet’s book. While it was accepted on its merits and received calmly even by notably conservative reviewers in other countries, in France it was seen – at least by an influential part of the intellocrats – essentially as a work of political ideological polemics directed against anti-communist liberals. Though discussed (in its English version) in intellectual journals, it was not translated, on the ostensible grounds that it was too expensive to translate for its necessarily small market. The argument was implausible, since the book had already sold well in every other western language. Indeed, such was the curious self-absorption of the French intellectual scene in those years that French was for several years the only language of the member-states of the European Union, and indeed the only global culture-language (including Chinese and Arabic) in which the book was not published or contracted to be published. It finally came out in France in 1999, thanks to the initiative of a Belgian publisher and the active help of one of the few unrepentant publications of the left, Le Monde Diplomatique. Perhaps the ideological mood had changed since Lionel Jospin, who put less strain on the conscience of the French left than the dying Mitterrand, took over as prime minister in 1997. It was received well enough by the critics. The potential reviewers of the early nineties kept silent or had buried their hatchets. It sold rather satisfactorily, at least for a while. It brought me more personal letters from unknown readers scattered across the map of France than any of the other translations of this much-translated work. And it enabled an ancient Francophile, whose love affair with the tradition of the French left began on a newsreel truck on Bastille Day 1936, to round it off sixty-three years later with another suitably symbolic experience in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, once the only university of Paris, now the parent of a family, packed with Parisians who had been invited to listen to a debate on my newly published book. Very few of the people who came in sufficient numbers to crowd the enormous auditorium had read any of my books which, as the publishers who refused me always reminded me, had only had a succès d’estime in the hexagonal market. What brought them there was the fact that someone – it happened to be me – spoke frankly, critically, sceptically, but impenitently, and not without pride for those who stood for a left in which the old distinctions of party and orthodoxy no longer counted. I like to think that on this occasion I was present at a sort of re-emergence, however brief, of a Parisian intellectual left from a period of siege.

It is a suitable episode with which to end this chapter of a lifetime affair. For my generation France remains special. I can sympathize with the French sense of loss at the defeat of the language of Voltaire by the world triumph of the language of Benjamin Franklin. It is not only a linguistic but a cultural transformation, for it marks the end of the minority cultures in which only the elites needed international communication, and it hardly mattered that the idiom in which it took place was not widely spoken on the globe, or even – as in the classical dead languages – that it was not spoken at all. I can understand the retreat of a once hegemonic French culture into an hexagonal ghetto, only slightly mitigated by the popularity of ‘postmodern’ French ideologues among American graduate students, who do not always understand them. It is not that this is what Paris wants, but simply that it cannot get used to a state of affairs in which the rest of the world no longer looks to Paris and follows its lead. It is a hard fate to go from global hegemony to regionalism in two generations. It is hardest of all to discover that for most of the world none of this matters. But it matters for my generation of Europeans, Latin Americans and Middle Easterners. And it should matter to younger generations. The stubborn rearguard action of France in defence of the global role of her language and culture may be doomed, but it is also a necessary defence, by no means predestined to failure, of every language, and national and cultural specificity against the homogenization of an essentially plural humanity by the processes of globalization.

20

From Franco to Berlusconi

I

Aspiring novelists are never short of a subject. When all else fails, there’s family and autobiography. Aspiring professional historians have no built-in guide to what part of the past they want to explore, and therefore in most cases what their reputation will rest on – the Tudors, the English Revolution, seventeenth-century Spain or whatever. Usually they acquire a subject at university, give it a title to get a doctorate (or, in my day, when Oxbridge looked down on such titles, a fellowship dissertation) and in most cases stick to their ‘field’ or ‘period’ thereafter. The war had blocked my own attempts to follow this path. So it happened that my first book as a historian, Primitive Rebels, was in a field I had not previously thought much about, and indeed a field nobody else had thought about at all.¹ Essentially, it is a book based on my frequent travels in Spain and Italy in the 1950s, two countries to which my life and the fortunes of my writings have been linked ever since.

Unlike Italy – what antifascist would go there? – Spain, where I began to travel in 1951, had been part of my life for a long time – even before the Spanish Civil War, which made it part of everyone’s life in my generation. In spite of everything, after 1945 it was still a strange country for other Europeans. In the minds of most of us it still belonged to a curious realm where the images of revolution, war and defeat in arid landscapes were superimposed on the images of exoticism – flamenco, castanets, bullfights, Carmen, Don José, Escamillo – and those of a generic ‘Spanishness’ – Don Quixote, honour, pride and silence. My uncle had been there and had got to know people there in his time with Universal Films. The relics of his visits filled odd corners of our house: a banderilla soaked in dry blood, a book on bullfighting, a signed photo of an elderly, military-looking Catalan autonomist leader and the like. After the 1934 insurrection in Asturias, a friend sent him copies of the Spanish illustrated papers, I imagine the monarchist ABC with dramatic pictures. And then, in the summer of 1936, in the first weeks after the generals’ rising, thanks to a curious combination of historical circumstances, for a brief moment I saw it myself.

I was then living in Paris for three months before going up to Cambridge, on a grant from the London County Council to improve my French. One day at the end of July I discovered to my agreeable surprise that I had bought a winning lottery ticket. It did not amount to much – I remember it as 165 Francs or about £2–3. Fortunately the new Popular Front government of France had shortly before introduced one of its rare lasting innovations, les congés payés (holidays with pay) and – thanks to another innovation, an undersecretaryship of sports and leisure – ultra-cheap rail travel to enable the population to enjoy them. I therefore used my lottery winnings to take the train from Orsay station – still half a century away from being turned into a museum of nineteenth-century French art – to the Pyrenees for a fortnight of walking, youth hostelling and camping. Halfway through this superb excursion I was introduced to a more expeditious form of cheap movement by one of those peripatetic young central Europeans who in those days pioneered hitchhiking (‘Tippeln’, ‘Autostop’) on this side of the Atlantic. And so I found myself, carried from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean side of the Pyrenees, in a youth hostel close to the Spanish border near the town of Puigcerda. The occasion was too tempting. I went to the frontier, and was turned back by the young militia man who guarded it. I did not have the right papers. I walked a mile or so to the next crossing, where they let me pass without problems and I spent the day looking round Puigcerda, then for all practical purposes an independent revolutionary commune, dominated by the anarchists, with an admixture of members of POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). (I could see no sign of the communists or the socialists, merged by then into a single party, the PSUC [Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia].) I don’t remember how exactly I communicated with the locals, who were naturally interested in an unannounced, indeed in any, stranger, but this is a corner where Spain and France are very mixed up, and Catalan is in any case as close to one language as to the other. I recall no problems. My most lasting image of this memorable day is of a few trucks parked on the main square. Whenever someone felt like going to the war, he went to the trucks, and whenever one filled up with enough volunteers, I was told, it went off to the front. As I wrote about this experience many years later:

The phrase c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre should have been invented for such a situation. It was marvellous, but the main effect of this experience on me was, that it took me twenty years before I was prepared to see Spanish anarchism as anything but a tragic farce. ²

In fact, Puigcerda did not give the impression of a community geared for war, nor do I recall it as a place full of armed young men in militia outfits, in the manner of later revolutions. (No sign in the Spanish provinces of 1936, for example, of uniformed young women.) If anything, it seemed a town full of politics, talk and arguments, of people standing in groups or sitting at café śtables with newspapers.

Unfortunately, the day ended badly. The young anarchist frontier-guard who had turned me back at my first crossing-point came off duty that evening, saw me eating and chatting on the plaza, and immediately reported me to his commissar. I was interrogated, politely enough but firmly, by an unsmiling man in something like military gear. I am sure that he did not know what to make of my presence there – I did not know what to make of it myself – but clearly, the power of the workers could not be treated so lightly, even if the young Englishman who crossed the frontier not only irregularly, but in flat defiance of the decision to keep him out, had shown no signs of wanting to be a danger to the revolution. To be grilled by trigger-happy amateurs on the lookout for counter-revolutionaries is never relaxing. I confess that I was nervous, late that evening, when I was told to walk along the dark road back to the French frontier, the gun-barrel of an armed militiaman aimed at my back. So my fleeting contact with the Spanish Civil War ended with expulsion from the Spanish Republic.

What was I doing that day in Puigcerda? This is where the historian throws up his hands, faced with the autobiographer. It is not simply that my memory of that day has almost certainly been corrupted by sixty-odd years of mental redrafting, but that even on the day itself my purpose, if that is the right word, in crossing the frontier, cannot have been clear. What would I have done, if my stay there had not been cut short so suddenly? Given the common memory of the Spanish Civil War I should have been considering joining the forces of the Republic in the war against fascism, as several other young English people did in the first weeks of the Civil War. Almost certainly nothing like this was in my mind as I went to have a look at what a revolution was like, in spite of the passionate identification I, like others of my generation on the left, immediately felt with the fight of the Spanish Popular Front government. Did it enter my mind during that day? I cannot say, or if I could reconstruct my feelings perhaps I would want to take refuge behind the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution, because in the light of the subsequent establishment of International Brigades¹³ any answer might be discreditable. If I did not consider it, then why not? And if I did, why did I nevertheless not join up? Supposing there were any sources other than my personal memory, what conclusion might another historian, less personally biased in the matter, come to about the strange case of young EJH in the Spanish revolution? Such are the problems of writing history as biography, or perhaps the wider problems of understanding human nature. At all events, my day in Puigcerda demonstrates the pointlessness of the ‘what if’ exercises in history which now carry the jargon title of ‘counterfactuals’. There is no way we can choose between the countless hypotheses about how my subsequent life might or might not have been affected, if that young anarchist border guard had not refused me entry at that first frontier crossing. And it also demonstrates that nothing serves the historian better than keeping his eyes and ears open, especially if he or she has the luck to be in the right place at the right time. Puigcerda gave me my first introduction to, and a permanent fascination with, that quintessential breeding ground for ‘Primitive Rebels’, namely Spanish anarchism. In the 1950s I found myself pursuing it ‘in the field’, largely inspired by that remarkable work of Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, which I must have read soon after its second edition came out in 1950. I can no longer remember whether I read it before or, more likely, after my first real acquaintance with Spain, which left behind ‘the deep and lasting impression which Spain makes on those who know her’.³ At least two of my visits to Spain were essentially explorations of the anarchist tradition: in 1956, when I found my way to Casas Viejas, the village which had once upon a time (in 1933) tried to make the world revolution on its own, and in 1960, when, deeply moved, I followed the traces of a recently fallen anarchist guerrillero Francisco Sabaté. ⁴

I am no longer sure why I decided in the Easter vacation of 1951 to travel to Spain. It was a country of whose language I was ignorant, give or take the texts of Civil War slogans and songs and the ideological vocabulary which was international anyway. As later in Italy, I had to pick it up in conversation, with occasional reference to a small pocket dictionary – easier in Italy, where talk was mainly in educated Italian, than in Spain, where my informants were hardly ever intellectuals. (If they had been, we would probably have communicated in French.) One way or another, I was to pick up some spoken if ungrammatical fluency in both languages fairly quickly, beginning immediately after my arrival in Barcelona with an evening at the Café śNuevo on the Paralelo (coffee and show, five pesetas) where my neighbour, a mason just arrived from Murcia looking for work, taught me the words for ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘blonde’, ‘brunette’, and other relevant terms by pointing to the corresponding features of the (mediocre) artistes on the tiny stage.

My contemporary notes⁵ suggest I was attracted by the news of the great and successful tramway boycott against higher fares of early March in Barcelona, followed by a general strike, about which I wrote a piece when I returned. I thought, with excessive anticipation, that it ‘broke that crust of passivity and attentisme which (with the lack of effective illegal organisations) is Franco’s greatest asset today…’ ⁶ This was an overoptimistic assessment, although the first cracks in the regime appeared in the second half of that decade. The anti-Franco exiles I came to know then were not only from Republican backgrounds, such as the historian (and eventual head of the post-Franco Spanish cultural services) Nicolas Sanchez Albornoz, son of the man still recognized by the émigrés as the nominal president of a ghost-republic, but children from the families that made up the Franco establishment. One of them, my dear friend Vicente Girbau Léon, had gone to a Franco jail directly from a post in the general’s foreign service. He later shared my flat in Bloomsbury, before helping to establish the publishing house Ruedo Ibérico in Paris, whose contraband titles, including Hugh Thomas’s pioneering book on the Civil War, were to be influential inside Spain in the sixties among the rapidly growing movement of young dissidents. It was he who later put me in touch with the anarchists.

At all events in 1951 I had my first experience of a Barcelona still filled with ‘the field-grey teams of the armed police, with rifles and sub-machine guns sticking out like bristles, every hundred-odd yards in the town-centre, and by the factory gates’ and guarding the characteristically palatial banks, symbol of the downtown street scene of Franco Spain, like fortresses of the rulers who dominated a hungry people. After a few days in Barcelona I made my way by a mixture of trains and hitchhiking down the coast to Valencia, then to Murcia, Madrid, Guadalajara, Zaragoza and back to Barcelona.

Spain was poor and hungry in the early 1950s, perhaps hungrier than at any time in living memory. People seemed to live on potatoes, cauliflower and oranges. Had Tarragona ever been so badly off in its entire history, I asked myself as I looked at that wonderful gold-blond cathedral among the ruins of the Roman Empire. Spain had no public voices. The news from Barcelona reached the rest of Spain through rumour, travellers such as myself, hawkers, truck-drivers, occasional listeners to foreign radio. There were only obscure allusions in the press. Intellectually, the country, most of its talent in emigration, seemed strangled (‘few Spanish works in the ‘‘serious’’ bookshop’ – translations and even Spanish classics mainly in Latin American editions).

Spain was unhappy. Time and again, in cafés, in the cabs of trucks, or on the unspeakably awful correos, the slow but cheap trains stopping at all stations, people would say things like: ‘This is the worst country in the world’ or ‘People in this country are poorer than anywhere else.’ ‘Everything in this country has gone to pot since Primo de Rivera [1923–30],’ said the matriarch of a family of cheapjack traders from Madrid who took me under their wing. Spain had not forgotten the Civil War and the vanquished, though powerless and hopeless, had not changed their mind about it. And yet, time and again, when the subject came up, someone would say: ‘Civil War – nothing is worse. Father against son, brother against brother.’ Franco Spain in the early 1950s was a regime sustained by the argument of Thomas Hobbes that any effective political order is better than no order. The regime survived, in spite of its perceived injustice and massive unpopularity – at all events in the eastern parts of the country, where I travelled – not so much because of its power and readiness to terrorize, but because nobody wanted another Civil War. Perhaps Franco might not have survived if, at the end of the Second World War, the Americans and British had decided that he should not, and allowed the armed resistance units from southern France, largely composed of Spanish Republicans, to invade the country. But they did not.

Above all, Spain was isolated. Its blood-soaked regime was still enclosed in the carapace of anti-modernity, traditionalist Catholicism and self-contained autarchy. The extraordinary industrialization of the country, which was to make it unrecognizable, and even to change the very physical appearance of Spaniards in the next thirty or forty years, had hardly begun. Where else in Europe, except the equally self-sealed Portugal, could one still have found a place like Murcia, indistinguishable from a Habsburg provincial city before 1914: nannies in black-and-white uniforms by the dozen supervising their children along the river promenade, eyed by soldiers from the local barracks; middle-class young women with chaperones; farmers and pig-dealers settling bargains in market cafés? Tourists were counted in hundreds, not in tens of millions. The Mediterranean coasts were still empty. When I recall the costas of Andalusia in the early 1950s, what comes into my mind is a dusty, white-hot, empty road between stones and sea with a view of vultures descending from all parts of the sky to join the mob already eviscerating the cadaver of a mule or donkey. Perhaps it was the absence of that great corrupter of morals, the mass tourism of the rich in the territories of the poor, which allowed the Spaniards of the time to keep their traditional pride. Nothing struck me more in those days than the insistence of poor men and women on maintaining relations of reciprocity: not accepting a cigarette without offering one in return, or refusing a brandy from an evidently better-off Englishman, which was not compatible with equivalence, but accepting a coffee, which was. In my experience foreigners had not yet become essentially sources of income for poor natives, not even when – as in 1952 – they arrived in Seville, as I did with some student friends, in an evidently British yacht and moored in town, just opposite the as yet ungentrified bars of Triana.

Because Spain seemed to be, and likely to remain, frozen in its history, it was unusually dangerous ground for outside observers and analysts. The overpowering presence of an apparently unchanging past – including the recent past – concealed the forces, internal and external, that were about to transform the country more dramatically and irreversibly than almost any other in Europe within the next few decades. I tried to understand its history, but apart from recognizing that Francoism would not last, I clearly had no clue where it was going. As late as 1966 I found myself writing: ‘capitalism has persistently failed in that country and so has social revolution, in spite of its constant imminence and occasional eruption’. It was not yet obvious to me how anachronistic that sentence had by then become. Would closer contact with the anti-Franco opposition or Spanish intellectuals in the 1950s have given me a greater sense of realities? I doubt it, for the only effective opposition party, the Communist Party, was then still resisting the information brought out of the country by its illegal cadres, that there was no prospect of a sudden overthrow of the regime. The anarchists, once so powerful in the Spanish labour movement, had not survived the Civil War as a serious force. Nevertheless, on looking back, I am astonished at how little contact I had in the 1950s with intellectual and politically hip persons in Spain, or, before the 1960s, with the new generation of younger Spanish students and ex-students who came to me in London as someone they had heard of on the left, or as readers of my books, which began to be issued by publishers unknown to me, sometimes in rather bad translations, from 1964 on – a symptom of the slow weakening of the regime faced with the massive cultural and political dissidence of its educated young. The 1960s in Spain were the first of several historic moments when the fading of authoritarian regimes proved beneficial to this author.

II

My discovery of Italy in 1952 differed from that of Spain in almost every respect. For one thing, Italy was neither hungry nor stagnant. Even getting around cheaply – and in the 1950s I usually budgeted for the equivalent of £1 a day all in – I would not expect to find, as in Spain, would-be middle-class travellers with patched clothes. Though the days of the economic miracle did not transform the lives of ordinary Italians until the 1960s, even in the north, the early signs of dynamism were already visible: colourful modern roadside-stations, already more than mere dispensers of petrol, the universal high-tech espresso machines which were about to conquer the world, the crowds of motor-scooters anticipating the eruption of cheap cars. Not that Italy was entirely on the way to western ‘modernity’, especially not in the south and the islands. Indeed, if Primitive Rebels has any single origin it lies in a dinner in the house of Professor Ambrogio Donini in Rome in 1952, or rather conversations after dinner, since, by the egalitarian convictions of the Doninis, family, servants and guests took their meals together. My host ‘told me something about the Tuscan Lazzarettists and the sectarians of Southern Italy’.⁷ For he was both a member of the Italian Communist Party’s Central Committee – indeed a rather hard-line Stalinist – and an expert in the history of religions. He therefore noted with approval that the followers of a Tuscan rural Messiah killed in 1878 had quietly survived to have another try at the millennium by rising in 1948 after the attempted assassination of the Italian CP leader, Palmiro Togliatti. He also told me about the problems arising for the Party leadership from the insistence of several rural Party branches – 1949–50 was a great era of radicalization in the south – on electing as branch secretaries members of the Seventh Day Adventists or similar sects, who would not normally have been regarded as obvious material for the cadres of a Marxist party. Who were these people, who brought ways of thinking which would have been quite usual in the Middle Ages into mid-twentieth-century political movements? Who treated the era of Lenin and Stalin as though it were also the era of Martin Luther? What went on in their minds? How did they, as distinct from the political movements which drew strength from their support, see the world? Why was so little attention paid to them, except by Italian thinkers such as the extraordinary Antonio Gramsci? Italy, it seemed, was full of their traces. Fascinated and moved, I tried to discover them by travelling along Mediterranean back roads for the next few years. Luckily some anthropologists were developing an interest in similar problems they encountered in their enquiries into the anti-colonial movements in Africa. Max Gluckman of Manchester, a man of great originality and a formidable academic chieftain who took his department every week to support Manchester United in the proper anthropological manner, arranged for me to give three lecture-seminars, in the course of which (also followed by his tribe) he gave me my first sight of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and decided I should expand my lectures into a book.

I recall my first visit to Sicily in 1953, where I was taken under the wing of Michele Sala, mayor and deputy of Piana degli Albanesi, a red stronghold since 1893 when the noble Dr Nicola Barbato had preached the gospel of socialism to the inhabitants of what was then Piana dei Greci from the rock in the remote mountain pass of Portella della Ginestra, still known as the Barbato Stone. (In his youth Michele Sala, born in the neighbourhood, had himself heard the good word from the apostle’s lips.)⁸ Rain or shine, war, peace or fascism, some Pianesi had never since then failed on the first of May to send a demonstration to this place. The occasion in 1947 when the bandit Giuliano massacred this May Day meeting has been wonderfully reconstructed in Francesco Rosi’s superb film Salvatore Giuliano. Shortly after this the Party had sent Sala to take charge of this complicated part of Sicily. He had the Sicilian sense of realism. In his youth he had signed up, among others, Giuseppe Berti, a leading communist in the Comintern era, and then a student in Palermo, because having carefully situated the socialist office strategically in an apartment facing the exit to a brothel, he could rely on meeting potential recruits ready for red propaganda in a relaxed mood. He had combined this with the hardnosed political experience of Brooklyn, where he spent twenty years of political emigration and learned enough English to show me the masses of masonry with which he was filling the outskirts of town (‘lotta guys need jobs’), as we criss-crossed it in his mayoral car, greeting citizens to the right and left (‘In this town I know who I gotta say hello to!’).

I was shown the cemetery, or rather the necropolis of the Matrangas, Schiròs, Barbatos, Loyacanos and the rest of the Albanian Christian families who had emigrated to southern Italy and Sicily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every modern gravestone, large or small, had the photograph of the departed. Death, respected and unforgotten, was always present in Piana. I saw what was still taken for granted, the silent black-clad women sitting in the street, but always facing indoors. We were walking along one side of the piazza – the anti-communists and Mafiosi walked on the other side – when he stopped me for a moment. ‘Don’t tell anyone here you are English,’ he warned. ‘There are people here, they don’t like it if they see you with me. I tell them you are from Bologna.’ It was logical enough: even in Sicily they knew that Bologna was red, and it was therefore natural that one communist should visit another. There was only one flaw. We had been together all day audibly speaking English. Sala, who knew his people, dismissed this problem. ‘What do these guys know how they talk in Bologna?’ Indeed, ninety-odd years before, shortly after the unification of Italy, this had been literally true. In 1865 the first schoolmasters sent by the new kingdom to teach the Sicilian children Dante’s Italian language were taken for Englishmen. In this respect nothing fundamental changed in inland Sicily until national television programming. But even less backward parts of Italy still had something of the Third World about them. For the bulk of its inhabitants – even the bilingual ones who spoke it instead of Sicilian, Calabrian or Piedmontese – Italian consisted of two languages: the spoken daily language and the formal language still rooted in baroque usage, in which newspapers and books were written and official speeches were made. It remained a relic of the past even in its public respect for, and reliance on, intellectuals as such. I cannot think of another European country in which an unconcealed intellectual such as Bruno Trentin, child of a family of anti-fascist academic emigrants, would have been acceptable as the leader of a major industrial trade union, and later of the major national organization of labour unions.

Learning about Italy was different in another respect. After 1945 tourism without a bad conscience once again became possible, for art and fun, in a country that had so clamorously broken with its fascist past. I was lucky to have the best possible guides: Francis Haskell, who planned, and Enzo Crea, with his encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts, who revealed the remotest corners and the most celebrated treasures of Italy to his friends with equal enthusiasm. What is more, I rarely went to Italy alone, or, when I arrived there, I was rarely without Italian friends, After I married again, they included the friends of Marlene, who had lived in Rome for several years before we met. Moreover, I had the enormous advantage of introductions by a man whose name opened all doors on the Italian left and a good many others besides, Piero Sraffa. Long established in Cambridge in a wonderful set of rooms in Trinity, opposite the rooms of Maurice Dobb, with whom he was producing a monumental edition of the works of the economist David Ricardo, this small, courteous and grizzled man who avoided loquacity and wrote little, was known as an intellect of formidable critical power. His natural habitat was behind the scenes. Though he was taciturn about his political views, as about everything else, it was known that he had been a close friend of Antonio Gramsci and from 1926 until Gramsci’s death in 1937 the chief contact of the jailed communist leader with the outside world. He had been the conduit through which Gramsci’s prison writings were preserved after his death, with the help of another influential friend in banking. What was not known was the fact that without him Gramsci’s remarkable manuscripts could probably not have been written at all, for, after the arrest, Sraffa (from a well-to-do Turinese family) had immediately opened an unlimited account for the prisoner at a Milanese bookshop. He had been a trusted friend of the current leader of the Party, Togliatti, since their university days. It is said that he had considered returning to Italy after the war, but abandoned the idea after the result of the 1948 election, disastrous for the socialist– communist alliance.

As he knew everybody on the anti-fascist scene – after all, Turin had been the capital of both liberal and communist anti-fascism – Sraffa’s name made me immediately accepted among the Party’s intellectuals. In those days a foreign communist was automatically a member of the brotherhood, a ‘compagno’ addressed as ‘tu’ and not ‘lei’. Indeed the first name on Sraffa’s list I telephoned in Rome, the most senior communist historian at the time, Delio Cantimori, a slow-moving, stout expert on the heretics of the sixteenth century, who had a wicked wit and looked older than his age, immediately invited me to stay with him and his Marx-translating wife, Emma, in their apartment in Trastevere. From there, with his help, I made contact with the Rome-based anti-fascist intellectuals, at that time overwhelmingly communist or Party-sympathizing. One way or another, most of what I learned about Italy – landscape and art history apart – came to me via Italian communists or those Italians still close to them in the early 1950s. It was my luck that my friends among Italian left-wing intellectuals, and especially historians, combining practice with theory, often doubled as observant and analytical journalists.

However, almost anyone who travelled in the remoter rural parts of Italy in the 1950s found people ready to ask and answer questions from foreigners. This was, after all, still a country of oral communication, face to face. In places like Spezzano Albanese (Cosenza, Calabria) such few papers as reached the place still had to be read aloud to the illiterates in cafés, artisan workshops and the PCI ‘Sezione’. In 1955 the telephone had reached San Giovanni in Fiore, the home of the great medieval millennial theorist, Abbot Joachim of Flora, only a few months ago. Strangers, Italian or foreign, brought news – even to people who whether they liked it or not knew that new times were inevitably coming. ‘Things are changing,’ I was told more than once in 1955 Sicily. ‘Our customs are getting like those of the North, for instance women going out. In the end I expect we’ll be like the Northerners.’

At that time the PCI seemed the main gateway into these new times. It had a membership of about two million – about one quarter of the national electorate – which continued to rise with every election until at its peak in the later 1970s it more or less equalled – enthusiasts claimed it was about to pass – the 34 per cent of the party of permanent government, the Christian Democrats. Socially the PCI was a cross-section of Italian society as much as a class party, especially in its massive strongholds in north–central Italy: Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria – regions of culture, prosperity, technological and business dynamism, and honest administration. Italian communism was not the whole of Italy, but a central and a wonderfully civilizing element of it. But, like nonconformity in Britain, it was and remained a minority.

Nevertheless, it was a huge and deeply rooted movement. The popolo comunista (communist people), as the cadres called it, was more than merely a collection of crosses on ballot-papers or annually renewed membership cards. Its major regular manifestation, nominally a way of organizing financial support for the Party’s daily newspaper, L’Unità (which the vast majority of communists read no more than most Italians read any daily paper), was a pyramid of regular popular festivals with its base in every village or city district, which culminated in the annual Festa Nazionale de l’Unità in some major centre. My connection with Italian politics began when I was described as a ‘fraternal delegate’ and had to address such an occasion, God knows how, in 1953 in a village near the Po. The Festa was essentially a collective national family holiday excursion to spend money for the cause and to have a collective good time with wives, children, friends and trusted leaders. It is said that, on the first occasion it was held in Naples, the population of that great city, conscious that the influx of visitors was not tourists to be fleeced, but plain folks and compagni, listened to the appeal of its leaders and for twenty-four hours abstained from its proverbial activities. The Festa was, of course, also a political rally, for in the days before television, political oratory by a visiting star, its merit proportionate to its length, and its technique based on that of open-air thespians, was also the biggest public entertainment likely to be seen by the faithful. Since the ‘communist people’ were also the only part of non-middle-class Italy given to self-improvement and reading, progressive publishers relied on these occasions, especially the national Festa, for a major part of their annual sales, particularly for the multi-volume series of encyclopedias, histories and other intellectual consumer durables. With his usual sense of the national market, my publisher Giulio Einaudi chose to launch the multi-volume Storia del Marxismo (which I co-edited with others) at what was both the peak of the PCI under Enrico Berlinguer and the start of its (unforeseen) decline, the great Genoa Festa of 1978. Unfortunately, like the PCI, the popular interest in Marxism was also about to dwindle, though the first volume of the Storia still sold well. It was the only one translated into English. Nevertheless, this was an unforgettable occasion of oratory in the vast amphitheatre above the blue sea, food-loaded tables in great marquees full of family parties and the greetings of friends, and hopeful communist leaders (except for the quiet Berlinguer), chatting and joking in the hotel lounge.

I was lucky to be guided into Italy by a strikingly impressive group of pre-war and Resistance communists. The full-time politicians among those I knew tended to maintain their standing as intellectuals and writers – Giorgio Napolitano, Bruno Trentin, the large Giorgio Amendola and the small, chubby and universally erudite Emilio Sereni, from one of the most ancient Jewish families of Rome, jailed by the Germans in wartime Rome, who wrote with equal originality about the history of the Italian landscape and the prehistory of Liguria. The academics among them tended also to double as politicians. Several were on the Central Committee. Renato Zangheri, an economic historian, was brilliantly successful as mayor of the wonderfully preserved yet modern medieval city of Bologna, Italy’s greatest ‘red’ metropolis; Giuliano Procacci and Rosario Villari (with his wife, Anna Rosa, our closest friends) had spells in the Italian Parliament.

From the start I found myself getting on exceptionally well with Italian communists, possibly because so many were intellectuals, but also because they were disarmingly kind. Not every national leader would have quietly visited Cambridge, as Giorgio Napolitano did, simply to hold hands with the dying Piero Sraffa, desperately fighting senility; or, for that matter, would have interrupted his work as the country’s Minister of the Interior for a few hours, to take part in a public celebration of my eightieth birthday in Genoa. Within a few years of first arriving I found myself drawn into the penumbra of the PCI establishment as an official patron of, and the only person from Britain present at, the Congress of Gramsci Studies in January 1958, the occasion for the first formal recognition of the Italian communists’ theorist by the watchdogs of ideological orthodoxy in Moscow. It was also the only occasion on which I met the Party’s leader, Palmiro Togliatti, himself. In turn, I took to Italian communism, found its dead guru Gramsci marvellously stimulating, and after 1956 its political position welcome. Unlike in Britain, in Italy it was still worth joining the Party after 1956.

Why was it so easy to get on with the Italians? Unlike the French or the English, Italians are charmed, flattered, and even encouraged by foreigners’ interest in their affairs, even or perhaps especially when these outsiders are visibly unlike themselves, or – as in my case – when their knowledge of the Italian language is shaky and that of the country superficial. It is, I think, partly due to a lengthy history of belonging to a country treated by the outside world as enchanting but not totally serious, a country united since 1860 but underperforming in peace and war. I think this led to an ingrained feeling of marginality and provincialism. Italians had reconciled themselves to the belief that the real historical action, the centres of civilization and intellectual authorities were elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century nobody had actually looked to Italy for models of cultural and intellectual achievement and example outside music; since the nineteenth century not even in opera. Fascism, though in some sense strengthening a feeling of national identity, had tried and failed to cure the Italian sense of political and military inferiority, and certainly did nothing to deprovincialize Italian culture. Post-fascist Italy, it was felt, had an enormous amount of cultural catching-up to do, and, one way or another, the place to look for it was abroad. Translations of foreign authors still remain more prominent on the Italian book market than in any other country of comparable size. And almost any foreign recognition of Italian achievement was welcomed. Giulio Einaudi knew very well what he was doing even as late as 1979, when he launched the publication of Gerratana’s superb critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, not in Rome but in Paris, as he had launched his great multi-volume Storia d’Italia (History of Italy) in Oxford. The stamp of Paris approval or Oxford prestige was still the way to market them in Italy. And of course after the eighteenth century Italian culture was largely provincial, as is evident from Gramsci’s own reading and writing. Even at its best, leaving aside mathematics, opera and a temporary interest in futurism, nobody had taken much notice of Italian productions outside.

Perhaps the most impressive and unexpected achievement of the Italian Republic born of the anti-fascist Resistance was to change all this, and in doing so to demonstrate what was always evident to any unprejudiced foreigner, namely that Italians had not lost any of the intellectual, artistic and entrepreneurial gifts that had produced such amazing and universally admired achievements between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some ways the postwar paths of French and Italian culture have followed opposite directions. While France after 1945 lost the cultural hegemony it had so long taken for granted, and retreated into what was, in effect, a francophone ghetto, the prestige of Italian art, science, industry, design and lifestyle was rising, the image of Italy was moving from the margins to the centre of western culture. Even the talents that had flourished or been tolerated under fascism – such major figures of Italian cinema as Rossellini, Visconti and de Sica were in action well before Mussolini fell – were liberated by Resistance. In the 1950s it would have been inconceivable that the international high-fashion industry would one day look to Milan and Florence rather than to Paris.

Nevertheless, except in completely transnational fields such as the mathematical and natural sciences, Italian thinking found it hard to shake off the provincialism of the past; not least because of the long resistance of the Italian university system, with its deeply ingrained combination of control by national bureaucrats and politicians and the manoeuvres of its own ‘barons’ with their powerful patronage system. Hence the exceptional importance in the Italian intellectual life of the first three or four postwar decades of commercial publishing houses such as Laterza, Einaudi and Feltrinelli. In fact, as in postwar Federal Germany, they largely substituted for the unreconstructed universities as intellectual and cultural powerhouses or, if one prefers the fashionable post-1989 jargon, organs of ‘civil society’.

The prince of these cultural architects of post-fascist Italy was Giulio Einaudi (1912–99), my friend and publisher, son of Italy’s most eminent free market economist and later the country’s first President, who had founded his publishing house at the age of twenty-one in 1933 and led it for fifty years thereafter. Paradoxically, he was not himself a very intellectual figure, but he headed a team of advisers that combined exceptional intelligence, learning, wit, cosmopolitan culture and literary creativity. All were united by anti-fascism and the active Resistance – either in the communist or the liberal-socialist tradition of Giustizia e Libertà – most by the severe and independent intellectual milieu of Turin and they created what was almost certainly the finest publishing house in the world in the fifteen years after 1945.

The word ‘prince’ is chosen deliberately, for in spite of his communist sympathies, Giulio’s style, his magnificent bella figura in town or country, was royal, or at least feudal. Even as a guest in a Hampstead sitting-room, he radiated a seigneurial affability. Even in bathing trunks on a Havana beach, he was recognizable as a patron. The feudal spirit extended to his approach to business debts, including those to his authors, which eventually bankrupted him. (On the other hand, authors were likely to receive as a New Year’s gift cases of Barolo wine from the Einaudi vineyards, a wine so serious that the Einaudi cellars recommended letting it breathe for at least eight hours before drinking.) Like absolute monarchs, he thought of his kingdom as an extension of himself, and in the end it was his refusal to listen to financial advice, or even to consider the post-Giulio future of the house, that broke him. Such was the prestige of the firm that he was more than once saved from bankruptcy as a national treasure by a conjunction of the Italian anti-fascist establishment, co-ordinated by the great banker Raffaele Mattioli (the one who, in 1937, had hidden the dead Gramsci’s manuscripts in the bank safe until they could be passed, via Piero Sraffa, to the foreign HQ of the PCI). In the eighties he finally lost control, and in 1991 Giulio Einaudi Editore was sold to Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire. I cannot remember when I saw Giulio last. Probably at the eightieth birthday party which was organized for me in 1997 by the City of Genoa, old, sad and no longer quite upright, in an Italy very different from the one of his days of glory. Once he and Italo Calvino had formed part of the guard of honour at the coffin of Togliatti, who had recognized both his prestige and his political sympathies by granting to the house of Einaudi the rights to publish the works of Antonio Gramsci himself. Alas, by then what had once been Togliatti’s PCI was also in decline.

Italy between 1952 and 1997 combined dramatic social and cultural change with frozen politics. By the end of the Cold War the inhabitants of a traditionally poor country owned more cars per head of population than practically any other state in the world. The Pope’s country legalized birth control and divorce, taking to the first with enthusiasm, though notably abstaining from the second. It was a different country. But from the start of the East–West confrontation in 1947 it was clear that the USA would under no circumstances allow the communists to come to power in Italy, or even to elected government office. This remained Washington’s basic principle, one might say its ‘default position’, so long as there was a USSR and a PCI, and for a few years thereafter. But it also became equally clear that a mass Communist Party could not be eliminated either by police repression or by constitutional finagling, although the great rural revolt in the Italian south, whose by-products attracted my attention to ‘primitive rebellion’, faded away by the mid-1950s. As realists Christian Democrats accepted this, allowing the PCI political space in its regions, in culture and the media. After all, they had founded the Republic jointly with the communists. Inside Italy the Cold War was not a zero-sum game.

The Italy into which I came had therefore begun to settle down for the foreseeable future, rather like Japan, as a spectacularly corrupt political dependency of the USA, under a single party, the Christian Democrats, maintained in permanent government power by the US veto. When I first arrived in Italy I noted that the modest postwar Sicilian Mafia was still virtually undocumented and undescribed, while the Neapolitan Camorra, perhaps even more powerful today, then appeared to be extinct.⁹ Both are products of the Cold War political system. In the course of the decades after 1950 the Italian Republic became a strange, labyrinthine, often absurd and sometimes dangerous institution, increasingly distant from the actual reality of life of its inhabitants. The joke that Italy showed a country could do without a state, thus proving Bakunin right against Marx, is not strictly true, since Italians spent much of their time sidestepping what was on paper a strong, all-embracing and interventionist state. Italians were and had to be good at this game, since the massive transformation of public power, resources and employment into a nationwide patronage system and protection racket made it increasingly necessary to find ways of circulating the blood of the body politic by a million capillaries bypassing its increasingly clogged arteries. ‘Fixing it’ – by relations rather than simple bribery – became the Italian national motto.

Somewhere between a thriving and ever more confident civil society and the esoteric activities of the state, and covered by layers of silence and obfuscation, lay the field of power. It had no constitution and no formal structure. It was an acephalous complex of power centres which had to come to terms with each other locally or nationally: private, public, legal, clandestine, formal, informal. Everyone knew, for instance, that the ‘avvocato’ – Gianni Agnelli, head of the family that owned FIAT and a lot else – was a national power centre, just as he knew that, while no Italian government could fail to come to terms with him, he in turn had to deal with whoever pushed the buttons in Rome. Part of this field of power was subterranean and secret, half-emerging only in periods of crisis such as the 1970s and 1980s. In those periods Italian politics returned to the operatic or Borgia mode, amid endless arguments not so much about who the assassins of the ‘cadaveri eccellenti’¹⁴ or illustrious corpses were, but who was behind them, how they were linked to discreet but influential masonic lodges and the obscure projects to prevent the PCI from entering the ring of political power, if need be by military coups.

In the 1990s this system collapsed. The end of the Cold War deprived the Italian regime of its only justification and a genuine revolt of public opinion against the really spectacular greed of the socialist prime minister and his party broke its back. All the parties of postwar Italy were wiped out at the 1994 elections except the PCI, whose relatively deserved reputation for honesty saved them, and the Neofascists, who had also been in permanent opposition. Alas, there as elsewhere the 1990s proved that destroying a bad old regime was possible, but did not necessarily produce the conditions for creating a better one.

III

What is the autobiographer to say about a country that has been part of his and his wife’s life for half a century? Some of the people closest to us are or were Italians. We spoke Italian at home when we did not want the children to understand. Italy has been good to us, giving us friendship in beautiful places, the endless discovery of its capacity for creation, past and present, and more of those rare moments of pure satisfaction at being alive than human beings can reasonably expect past their youth. It has given me my themes as a historian. Its readers have been generous to me as a writer.

Yet as I believe that being a historian helps to understand a country, I must ask myself why the Italy of Signor Berlusconi in 2002 is not one I expected fifty years ago. How far did I fail to see where Italy was going because my observation was deficient, or biased, how far because twists in the road were not yet visible? Was it the democratization of consumer society that widened the gap between the minority of the educated and intellectual whose company elderly historians keep, and the rest of a people who read few newspapers and spent less money on books per head than all but the two poorest members of the European Union? Did the sheer speed of economic and hence social and cultural transformation defeat foresight, in Italy as elsewhere?

Certainly few read the signs right in that coup-threatened period of fear and tension, the 1970s, the peak of the PCI’s electoral support nationally and in the big cities. We did not see that dramatic industrial transformation was fatally weakening the PCI’s political influence in the economic core of Italy, the north: the FIAT assembly-line building in Turin now houses the annual Book Fair. The Party did not recognize that after 1968 it had lost its major political asset, namely the accepted hegemony over the Italian left, and indeed over all forces of opposition other than the remainders of fascism. The small instant book I did at the time with Giorgio Napolitano, then on the Secretariat of the PCI, shows no sign of having been written in the decade that culminated in the kidnapping and murder of the Italian Premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, the most formidable European terrorist movement of the left.¹⁰ Perhaps, worst of all, the Party, like working-class movements elsewhere, was beginning to lose touch with its popolo comunista, for whom it had been the party of resistance, liberation and social hope, the defender of the poor. As early as the seventies friends from Turin told me: ‘We are no longer a movement; we are becoming a ‘‘party of opinion’’ like the others.’ How could one talk politics in the same way to the sharp, media-wise youngish journalists who telephoned from the (now struggling) Party daily L’Unità as to the journalist generation of partisans and liberation? Rejuvenating its cadres, the Party found it had changed their character. As it slowly declined, abandoning too much of a great tradition with its name, it prepared to make its way through the 1990s in the uncertain shadow of its newly improvised botanical logos – the oak and the olive tree.

Within five years of Berlinguer’s death the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the PCI, dropping its symbols and traditions, reconstructed and renamed itself vaguely as the Democratic Left (the usual fall-back label of the old Moscow Communist Parties), against bitter internal opposition and the secession of a new Party of Refounded Communism.

So in the long run enjoying Italy proved easier than understanding it. Paradoxically, that was easier to do in the era of the Republic’s crisis. Seen from the private watchtower, Italy in the 1980s was a succession of public occasions and academic conversations in places whose familiarity did not diminish their beauty, of days with friends mostly in or around Rosario and Anna Rosa Villari’s farmhouse in Tuscany. It was an unreal country, in which one stretched out with friends on the terrace overlooking the Val d’Orcia after lunch, listening to the voice of Callas singing ‘Casta Diva’ from a record-player in an upstairs room.

Meanwhile, the collective Italy of the 1980s was a sort of reductio ad absurdum of public life, an era of moderately bloodstained Marx Brothers politics. While Craxi’s men bought up former ‘progressive intellectuals’, high-living socialist ministers stepped out with starlets in nightclubs, their bills paid by managements anxious to attract their entourage, enormous government grants after enormous earthquakes disappeared into thin air, the Vatican’s finances were in disarray because of financial speculations by Mafia-connected bankers, one of them recently discovered hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge, and a Neapolitan professor succeeded in building himself an academic empire in a municipal palace on the strength of his research, refereed by eminent colleagues who failed to notice that every one of his books had been carefully translated word for word from German Ph.D. theses.

My most vivid memory of those years is of a brief overnight trip to Rome, Marxian in both senses. Italian television invited me to take part in a programme on the great man’s centenary under the title An Evening with Karl Marx.

The occasion was surreal, though I unfortunately never saw the programme, thus missing the performance of the ‘Internationale’ by the celebrated classical avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian. Inside a vast RAI (Italian television) hangar an elaborate set had been constructed round a giant papier-mâché head of Karl Marx, the top of which was removable. From it the presenter, a well-known comedian, would from time to time withdraw large cards marked CLASS STRUGGLE, DIALECTICS and the like. Something looking like a dacha on some Chekhovian country estate had also been constructed, on whose veranda I sat with the late Lucio Colletti, a brilliant ex-communist academic, with whom I was supposed to expound THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE for not more than five minutes, when it emerged from Marx’s head. He subsequently supported Silvio Berlusconi, but even he could not yet have known or perhaps imagined this in 1983.

I do not know what happened on the rest of that Evening with Karl Marx, but I left to collect my fee, offered in cash, from a young representative of the Italian state’s public service. She gave me the following advice: ‘You know, you’re not supposed to take so much money out of the country. The best thing, I suggest, is that you pack it between the shirts in your suitcase. They’ll never bother to look.’

I should recall the 1990s with pleasure. Il Secolo Breve ( The Age of Extremes) was a considerable success in Italy. In its public mode the Italian people threw out the most corrupt regime in Europe, utterly destroying the parties of the Cold War Republic. We were in Italy ourselves at the time of the elections of 1994 which reduced those fighting it under the name Christian Democrats and Socialists to thirty-two and fifteen seats respectively in a Chamber of Deputies of 630, a triumph already tarnished by the victory, shaky as it then was, of Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition. And yet, what was particularly disappointing for its old admirers, though no longer unexpected, was the failure of what had once been the PCI. Finally in a position to take its place at the head of a progressive democratic government, it was unequal to the task. As Britain, France and Germany were ruled by governments of the left, Italy entered the new millennium by getting ready for the first government clearly of the right since the fall of fascism.

For most Italians life went on, probably more satisfactorily than ever after the most miraculous half-century of improvement in their history. And yet, would one guess so from what is (at least in my opinion) perhaps the greatest book produced by an Italian in my lifetime, Italo Calvino’s wonderful Invisible Cities? (I recall him still, shortly before his untimely death, on his green roof terrace above the Campo Marzio in Rome, with a sceptical half-smile on his dark face, full of wit and tactful learning.) It is about the stories told to Kublai Khan, the Emperor of China, of cities, real, imagined or both, encountered by Marco Polo on his travels. It is about Irene, the city which can be seen only from outside. What is it like seen from within? It does not matter. ‘Irene is the name of a distant city. Once you get closer, it is no longer the same.’ It is also about the promised but undiscovered cities whose names are already in Kubla’s atlas: Utopia, the City of the Sun. But we do not know how to reach or enter them. And what, asks the Emperor at the end, of the nightmare cities, whose names we also know?

Polo: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if it exists, it is already here, the hell of our daily life, formed by living together. There are two ways of enduring it. The first is what many find easy: accept hell and become part of it, until you no longer see that it is there. The second is risky and needs constant attention and learning: in the midst of hell to look for, and to know how to recognize what is not hell, to make it last, to give it space.

That was not the spirit in which my generation, including Calvino, saw the Italy that had just liberated itself from fascism.

21

Third World

I

In 1962 I persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to give me a travel grant to South America, in order to enquire into the subject-matter of my recent book, Primitive Rebels, in a continent where it could be expected to play a more prominent part in contemporary history than in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Those were the days when foundations still sent their air travellers by first class, by airlines whose names record a vanished past – Panamerican, Panair do Brasil, Panagra, TWA, though, except for Peru, the old national flag carriers still seem to survive. For about three months in 1962–3 I made the circuit of South America – Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia – in this luxurious style, implausible for an enquirer into peasant rebellion. It was the first of numerous visits to continental Latin America in subsequent years, both to Mexico and to various parts of South America, indeed to all countries in that continent bar the Guyanas and Venezuela. Probably the longest unbroken period I have ever spent outside the United Kingdom since 1933 is the half-year or so I spent with my family teaching, researching and writing from Mexico to Peru in 1971. It is a continent on which I have many friends and pupils, with which I have been associated for forty years, and which, I do not quite know why, has been remarkably good to me. It is the only part of the world where I have found myself not surprised to meet presidents, past, present and future. Indeed, the first one I met in office, the canny Víctor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia, showed me the lamp-post on the square outside his balcony in La Paz from which his predecessor Gualberto Villaroel had been hanged by a rioting crowd of Indians in 1946.

After the triumph of Fidel Castro, and even more after the defeat of the US attempt to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, there was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions. Though this also drew me there, my chief reason was practical, namely linguistic. Historians who deal with the activities of ordinary people must be able to communicate with them by mouth, and Latin America was the only part of what was known as the Third World where large numbers of them spoke languages within my reach. For I was not concerned simply with a geographical region, but with a much larger unknown, that is to say the 80 per cent of men, women and children who live outside the zone inhabited until the last third of the twentieth century primarily by people with (notionally) white skin.

For the first half of my life these 80 per cent knew nothing of the world and, give or take a few thousand individuals, the world knew practically nothing about them. Nothing is more impressive to someone of my age than the extraordinary discovery, since 1970, of the First World by the peoples of the Third World or – since these terms themselves belong to the era of the Cold War – of the possibility that poor people from anywhere can change their lives for the better by moving to the rich countries. Of course, with the rarest exceptions, such as the USA since the 1960s, we do not want them to come, even when we need them. A world dedicated to the free global movement of all profit-making factors of production is also a world dedicated to stop the one form of globalization that is unquestionably desired by the poor, namely finding better-paid work in rich countries. We have come to be so familiar with the century’s inhumanity that we no longer distinguish between refugees and the Afghan and Kurd emigrants transported in coffin-ships by emigration contractors, like the Italians and Russian Jews of the 1880s, who had just discovered that they did not have to live and die in the paesi and shtetls of their birth.

For the first forty years of my life it was simply not so. Language – not the ‘national’ languages but what illiterates really spoke, the dense localized dialects or patois almost incomprehensible fifty kilometres away – isolated people from each other. Illiteracy, but even more, the absence of accessible radio and television, isolated them from what we think of as ‘news’, though not from one or two major world events. ‘Where is England?’ a Mexican farmer asked me, even in the 1970s, when I told him that was where I came from. (The first question to strangers in all societies that live by oral communication, including armies, is always ‘Where are you from?’) My explanations did not help. He had probably never thought about the Atlantic either. Finally he narrowed me down to something he had heard of: ‘Is it near Russia?’ I said, not too far. That satisfied him.

Then non-white skins were exceptionally rare in ‘Caucasian’ countries, except for the anomaly of the African-Americans in the USA. Latin American immigration was so small that before 1960 the US census counted South and Central Americans together, without distinguishing between separate countries of origin. So, apart from European settlers such as the French-Algerians (actually largely of Spanish stock) and the Jewish colonists in Palestine, were whites who lived in countries with large indigenous populations. Ordinary whites were very unlikely in the course of normal life to encounter the pluri-racial street-scene of today’s large western cities. Except for small and untypical minorities very few whites not resident overseas were likely to know, and even fewer to be on terms of friendship with, people of other skin colours. Before the 1960s they belonged primarily to two groups: Christians (assuming the label stretches to include Quakers) and communists, both committed, in different ways, to a general emancipatory and egalitarian hatred for racism. And both, but especially the Marxists, on grounds both of practical anti-imperialism and the potential of eastern revolution, had a special interest in the history of non-white humanity. That is what had brought me into the ‘colonial group’ of the Party as a student and drew me into exploring North Africa, and eventually Latin America. And our ‘colonial’ friends, in my case mostly from South Asia, were our first windows into these worlds.

Until much later I did not realize how untypical they were of their societies. Those who got to Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics were the elite of elites of the ‘native’ colonial populations, as soon became evident after decolonization. They also tended to be rather better heeled than us. They were family friends of the Nehrus, like P. N. Haksar of the LSE, who provided cover in Primrose Hill for the courtship of Indira Nehru with Feroze Gandhi and, as civil servant, was the most powerful man in independent India when I visited him in New Delhi in 1968. The man who came to meet my plane on the tarmac was my old friend from King’s Mohan Kumaramangalam, until recently a communist, then in charge of Indian Airlines, soon to be the minister perhaps closest of all to Mrs Gandhi until he died tragically in an air crash in 1973. His younger sister, Parvati, who visited Mohan in Cambridge, had now let her hair grow again, had married the General Secretary of the Communist Party and sat in Parliament. Another brother, an Etonian like his siblings but this time non-communist, had become the commander-in-chief of the Indian army. The Kumaramangalams of Madras were that sort of family. So, in a different way, were the Sarabhais of Ahmedabad, strict Jains who abstained from killing any animal however tiny, whom I came to know through Manorama, a close friend from LSE days of my first wife, who had Le Corbusier build her a house. They were one of the great Congress-supporting Gujarati business dynasties, textiles diversifying into higher technologies. Culture was probably their most visible public activity, but a Sarabhai was to be in charge of the Indian nuclear programme. For the first generation of independence, the affairs of an India of several hundred millions – public and private, government and opposition – were run by an extraordinary anglicized, modern-minded ‘Establishment’ of perhaps 100,000 people drawn from highly educated (that is, mainly wealthy) families, those who had served the Raj as well as those who had built the freedom movement. The bizarrerie of this combination came out at a Christmas dinner in the house of the doe-eyed Renu Chakravarty, by then a communist MP – the Communist Party had not yet split – and powerhouse in Calcutta. After ham and turkey, provided by Renu’s cousin, secretary of the Calcutta Club, which clearly had not abandoned the menu of the days when no Indian would have been allowed into the building except as a servant, came biryani and finally Christmas pudding, also provided by the Club and chewing pan (betel nut). They were anglicized even in the language some of them spoke at home and wrote or read most easily, for I had the impression that only the Bengalis among them, and perhaps some of the more traditional Muslim families whose radical young read the progressive poets in Urdu (admired by my old friends and comrades Victor Kiernan and Ralph Russell) lived their mental lives fully in a vernacular.

There is only so much – actually not very much – that one can learn about a society through personal friendship. Friends may be too deeply rooted in it to recognize its peculiarities, and in any case class is at least as great a segregator of experiences as distance, culture or language. When the Party put him in charge of leading the tramwaymen’s union in Calcutta, and later the juteworkers of (West) Bengal my admirable friend and comrade from King’s, the late Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, subsequently General Secretary of the Communist Party and briefly Minister of the Interior, had as much to learn about the Calcutta working class as any foreigner. What I hope I owe to such friendships, based on the anti-racist comradeship of student communism, is the separation of the sense of equality from the consciousness of skin- or hair-colour, physical appearance and culture. The global village of business, science, technology and universities of the twenty-first century is so multi-coloured that this may no longer be a problem, although I suspect it is. Before 1960 or so the sense of racial superiority among western whites was reinforced by the sheer weight of western power and achievement in all fields except some of the arts, and the sheer bodily superiority of races commonly regarded as inferior, and so psychologically resented, repressed and overcompensated, especially by white males. The Israeli Jews made no secret of their contempt for ‘the Arabs’, especially before 1987, when their intifadas had not yet broken the passive acceptance of Israeli occupation of the Palestinians’ territories. It was a strange but instructive experience to be treated as one of them on my visit to the West Bank in 1984, the only time I have found myself living under the rule of a foreign military.

The enormous advantage of communism, especially when reinforced by friendship, was that one could simply not treat a comrade other than as an equal. The patent self-confidence of the favoured few from the coloured ‘colonial’ elites who made it into pre-war British universities helped. Just as horses sense fear in their riders, so humans sense the expectation of being treated as inferiors in their respondents. Ruling classes and conquerors have always exploited this expectation of superiority. My pre-war ‘colonial’ friends did not expect to be treated as inferiors.

Nevertheless, until I was awarded a travelling grant from the university to go to French North Africa in 1938, I had not been to what was not yet known as the Third World since I left Egypt as a baby. I travelled in Tunisia and east-central Algeria, from sea to Sahara, but never got to western Algeria and Morocco, and I acquired a lifelong scepticism about rural statistics in such places from a lonely French administrator in the field, ready to talk to any educated visitor. (‘When the government asks me for a livestock census, I make very casual enquiries, because the flocks would vanish into the hills otherwise. Then I look up what we said last time round, and put in a figure that looks plausible.’) I also acquired respect for the mountains and people of Kabylia and for the intelligence and erudition of the French Maghrebists and Islamic experts, even though most of them, like British African anthropology in those days, served the relevant empire. I met the leader of the small Algerian Communist Party, exiled into the Sahara after 1939 and killed, but not the then most important revolutionary, Messali Hadj. I have sometimes wondered whether I would have become a better historian if, after the war, I had returned to the research theme of ‘The Agrarian Problem in French North Africa’ which I brought back from my travels. People I admire – the great historian Braudel, my friend Pierre Bourdieu and the late Ernest Gellner – have been inspired by working in the Maghreb, and I can understand why. However, if I had, few would have noticed. Except, curiously enough, in sub-Saharan Africa, the end of empires led to a generation of amnesia about their history. Besides, the bloody Algerian war of the 1950s and the bitterly disappointing record of independent Algeria since would have rather marginalized the field. I note in passing that, while the future of Tunisia under its eventual president Habib Bourguiba was already identifiable in 1938, absolutely nothing discoverable about Algeria in that year would have led anyone to predict, or even to envisage, the force that eventually liberated the country, the FLN (National Liberation Front).

II

Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 led to a sudden upsurge of interest in everything to do with Latin America, a region about which there was much rumour, but at that time little knowledge outside the Americas. With rare exceptions the locally resident Europeans, other than the Spanish war refugees and North Americans, lived in their own worlds like my non-intermarrying Chilean relatives, who still saw themselves as English expatriates or at least European refugees. (I think all my five cousins spent the Second World War serving their country in British uniforms.) Since the continent had been decolonized, it lacked the large, intelligent and documented literature provided by imperial administrators whose business it was to understand countries in order to rule them efficiently. Communities of expatriate businessmen, as the record shows, are almost completely useless as sources of information about the countries they operate in, although the British ones in their time founded the football clubs in which South American patriotism has found its most intense expression.

Latin America was then remoter from the Old World than any other part of the globe – though not, of course, from the imperial power in the north, overseeing its technically independent satellites. It experienced the two world wars only as bringers of prosperity. It passed through the most murderous of centuries without more than a single brief international war on its territory (the Chaco War of 1932–5 between Bolivia and Paraguay), though not, alas, without considerable domestic bloodshed. A continent of a single religion, it has so far escaped the world epidemic of linguistic, ethnic and confessional nationalism.

Latin America was not easy to come to grips with. When I first went there in 1962, the continent was in one of its periodic moods of expansive economic confidence, articulated by the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, an all-continental brains trust located in Santiago de Chile under an Argentine banker, which recommended a policy of planned, state-sponsored and largely state-owned industrialization and economic growth through import substitution. It seemed to work, at least for giant, inflation-plagued but booming Brazil. This was the time when Juscelino Kubitschek, a president of Czech origin, launched the conquest of Brazil’s vast interior by building a new capital in it, designed largely by the country’s most eminent architect, Oscar Niemeyer, a known member of the powerful but illegal Communist Party who, he told me, designed it with Engels in mind.

Its main countries were also in one of the continent’s occasional phases of constitutional civilian government which was soon to end. However, the caudillo or personal chieftain of the old type was already on the way out – at least outside the Caribbean. The regimes of the torturers were to be collectives of faceless and mostly colourless officers. In South America the only country under military dictatorship at that time was the unusually old-fashioned Paraguay under the eternal General Stroessner, a nasty regime, kind to expatriate Nazis, in a disarmingly attractive and charming country, which lived largely by smuggling. Graham Greene’s touching The Honorary Consul is an excellent introduction to it. I am, perhaps, inclined to excessive kindness, for it was the only Latin state officially recognizing an Indian language, Guaraní, and, when I visited it some years later, I discovered that my name was familiar to the editor of the somewhat unexpected Revista Paraguaya de Sociologia published there, as the author of Rebeldes Primitivos. What scholar can resist fame in Paraguay?

Nobody who discovers South America can resist the region, least of all if one’s first contact is with the Brazilians. Nevertheless, what was most immediately obvious about its countries was not so much its spectacular economic inequality, which has not ceased to increase since, as the enormous gap between its ruling and intellectual classes with which visiting academics had contact, and the common people. The intellectuals, mostly from comfortable or ‘good’ – overwhelmingly white – families, were sophisticated, widely travelled, and spoke English and (still) French. As so often in the Third World (to which the Argentines vociferously refused to belong), they formed the thinnest continent-wide social layer, for in their minds, unlike the artificial concept of ‘Europe’ in the minds of the old continent, Latin America was a constant reality. If they were in politics, they almost certainly had a spell as exiles in another Latin American country or a common trip to Castro’s Cuba; if academics, a spell as members of some multinational establishment in Santiago, Rio or Mexico City. Since they were thin on the ground, they knew each other or knew about each other. That is how in 1962, from the start, being passed from one contact to another, a visitor like myself could quickly find his bearings from people whose names meant nothing in Europe, but who turned out to be key intellectual or public figures. But the very fact that such people moved in a world equally familiar with Paris, New York and five or six Latin capitals separated them from the world in which most darker-skinned and less well-connected Latin Americans lived.

Outside the already urbanized ‘southern cone’ (Argentina, Uruguay and Chile) these people were flooding from the countryside into the shanty-towns of the exploding cities, bringing their rural ways with them. Sao Paulo had doubled in size in the ten years before I got there. They squatted on city hillsides as in the country they had dug up unoccupied corners of the big estates and built shelters and shacks, eventually to become proper houses, the way it was done in the village, by mutual help of neighbours and kin, rewarded with a party. On the street markets of São Paulo, overshadowed by the new high-rise buildings, the masses from the parched hinterlands of the northeast bought shirts and jeans on instalment payments and the cheap illustrated booklets of verse ballads about the great bandits of their region. I still have the copies I bought then. In Lima, Peru, there were already radio stations broadcasting in Quechua – in the early morning hours when the whites were still in bed – to the Indian immigrants from the mountains, now numerous enough to constitute a market, in spite of their poverty. The great writer, folklorist and Indianist José śMaria Arguedas took me to one of the music halls where, on Sunday mornings, the highland people came to listen to songs and jokes about ‘down home’. (‘Anyone here from Ancash? Let’s hear it for the lads and lasses from Huanuco!’) In 1962 it seemed almost unthinkable that thirty years later I would supervise the son of one of them for a doctorate at the New School in New York. It is an extraordinary experience to have lived with the first generation in recorded history in which a poor boy with an illiterate wife from a Quechua-speaking village in the high Andes could become a unionized hospital driver by picking up the skills of driving a truck and thus open the globe to his children. I have his long letter still, written in the deliberate handwriting and careful Castilian orthography of the autodidact. Though his life was hard by our standards, by those of the masses of day-labourers, street-sellers, casual and miscellaneous poor he was at the top.

The people who came to the city were at least visible on the streets. The people in the countryside were doubly remote from the middle classes, including their revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, by geographical and social distance. Even those with the greatest interest in having the closest contacts with them found the differences in lifestyle, not to mention expected living standards, a forbidding obstacle. Few outside experts actually lived among the peasantry, though many had fairly good contacts in the countryside, including, as usual, the omnipresent researchers of various international organizations connected with the United Nations.

Most remote of all were those foreigners who relied for their knowledge of the Latin American countryside on the local intellectual left or the international press. The one, as so often, tended to confuse political agitation and Fidelista hope with information, the other relied on what reached its bureau chiefs in the capital city. Thus, when I first went to South America the major ‘peasant’ story, insofar as there was one, was about the Peasant Leagues in Brazil, a movement established in 1955 under the leadership of Francisco Julião, a lawyer and local politician from the northeast, who had attracted the attention of US journalists by expressions of support for Fidel Castro and Mao. (I met him ten years later, a small, sad, disoriented exile from the Brazilian military regime, living under the protection of the dramatic central European ideologue Ivan Illich in Cuernavaca, Mexico.) A few hours at their offices in Rio in late 1962 showed that the movement had little national presence, and that it was clearly already past its peak. On the other hand, the two major South American peasant or rural upheavals which no observer with open eyes could fail to discover within a few days of arriving in their countries were virtually undocumented, and indeed virtually unknown to the outside world at the end of 1962. These were the great peasant movements in highland and frontier Peru and the ‘state of disorganization, civil war and local anarchy’ into which Colombia had fallen since the implosion of what had been, in effect, a potential social revolution by spontaneous combustion set off, in 1948, by the assassination of a nationally famous tribune of the people, Jorge Eliezer Gaitan.¹

And yet, these things were not always utterly remote from the outside world. The vast movement of peasant land occupations was at its height in Cuzco, where even tourists who did not read local newspapers could, when walking round the Inca blocks in the cold thin air of the highland evenings, observe the endless, silent columns of Indian men and women outside the offices of the Peasant Federation. The most dramatic case of a successful peasant revolt at the time, in the valleys of La Convención, occurred downriver from the marvels of Macchu Picchu, known to all tourists in South America even then. Only a few dozen kilometres’ train ride from the great Inca site to the end of the railway line and a few more hours on the back of a truck took one to the provincial capital, Quillabamba. I wrote one of the first outside accounts of it. For a historian who kept his eyes open, especially a social historian, even these first, almost casual impressions were a sudden revelation, rather like the sight of the treasure-room in the Bogotá śGold Museum for my eight-year-old son, when I took him there several years later. How could one not explore this unknown but historically familiar planet? My conversion was completed, a week or two later, among the endless slopes of stalls manned by squat, heavy-braided, bowler-hatted Aymara peasant women in the enormous street-markets of Bolivia. Unable to go to Potosí, I spent Christmas with another temporary loner, a French UN expert on village development, mainly in a hotel bar in La Paz. We drank and he talked, endlessly, passionately, the way a man back from a spell in the cold villages of the Altiplano unloads his experience on the only available willing listener. It was an intellectually and alcoholically rewarding Christmas, though otherwise short on the holiday spirit.

The New Year of 1963 after that Christmas I spent in Bogotá. Colombia was a country of whose very existence hardly anyone outside Latin America seemed to be aware. This was my second great discovery. On paper a model of representative two-party constitutional democracy, almost completely immune to military coups and dictatorship in practice, after 1948 it became the killing field of South America. At this period Colombia reached a crude rate of homicide of over fifty per 100,000, although even this pales beside the Colombian zeal for killing at the end of the twentieth century. ² The browning press cuttings I collected from the local newspapers then are before me as I write. They familiarized me with the term genocidio (genocide), which Colombian journalists used to describe the small massacres in farm settlements and of bus passengers – sixteen dead here, eighteen there, twenty-four somewhere else. Who were the killers and the killed? ‘A spokesman of the war ministry said … no categorical information about the perpetrators could be given, because the districts (veredas) of that zone [of Santander] were pretty regularly affected by a series of ‘‘vendettas’’ between the partisans of traditional political affiliations,’ namely the Liberal and Conservative parties into one of which, as readers of García Márquez know, every Colombian baby belonged by family and local loyalty. The wave of civil war known as La Violencia that had begun in 1948, long officially ended, had still killed almost 19,000 persons in that ‘quiet year’. Colombia was, and continues to be, proof that gradual reform in the framework of liberal democracy is not the only, or even the most plausible, alternative to social and political revolutions, including the ones that fail or are aborted. I discovered a country in which the failure to make a social revolution had made violence the constant, universal, omnipresent core of public life.

What exactly the Violencia was or had been about was far from clear, although I was lucky enough to arrive just at the time when the first major study of it was coming out, to one of whose authors, my friend the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, I owe my first introduction to Colombian problems.³ I might have paid more attention at the time to the fact that the chief student of the Violencia was a Catholic Monsignor, and that some pioneer research on its social fallout had just been published by a spectacularly handsome young priest from one of the country’s founding clans, a great breaker of hearts, it was said, among young women of the oligarchy, Father Camilo Torres. It was not an accident that the conference of Latin American bishops which initiated the socially radical Theology of Liberation a few years later was held in the hilly Colombian city of Medellín, then still known for entrepreneurs in textiles and not yet in drugs. I had some conversations with Camilo and, to judge by my notes at the time, took his arguments very seriously, but he was still a long way from the social radicalism that led him three years later to join the new Fidelista guerrillas of the Army of National Liberation which still survives.

Amid the Violencia the Communist Party had formed ‘armed selfdefence’ zones or ‘independent republics’, as places of refuge for peasants who wanted or had to stay out of the way of the Conservative, or sometimes also the Liberal bands of killers. Eventually they became the bases of the formidable guerrilla movement of the FARC (Armed Forces of the Colombian Revolution). The best-known ‘liberated’ areas of this kind, Tequendama and Sumapaz, were surprisingly close to Bogotá śas the crow flies, but, being mountain country, a long and difficult way by horse and mule. Viotà, a district of coffee haciendas expropriated by the peasants in the reforming 1930s, and from which the landowners had withdrawn, did not need to fight at all. Even the soldiers kept away, while it ran all its affairs under the eye of the political cadre sent there by the Party, a former brewery worker, and sold its coffee peacefully on the world market through the usual traders. The mountains of Sumapaz, frontier terrain for free men and women, were under the rule of a home-grown rural leader, one of those rare peasant talents who escaped the fate patronized by the poet Gray in his famous elegy, that of being ‘some mute inglorious Milton

… some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’. For Juan de la Cruz Varela was far from mute or peaceable. In the course of his varied career as chief of Sumapaz, he was prominent as a Liberal, follower of Gaitan, communist, head of his own agrarian movement and Revolutionary Liberal, but always firmly on the side of the people. Discovered by one of those wonderful village teachers who were the real agents of emancipation for most of the human race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he had become both a reader and practical thinker. He acquired his political education from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which he carried with him everywhere, marking the passages which seemed to him particularly apposite to his own or the political situation of the time. My friend Rocío Londoño, who worked on his biography during her spell of research at Birkbeck College, inherited his copy of the book from him with the rest of his papers. He acquired his Marxism, or what there was of it, rather later via the writings of a now forgotten English clerical enthusiast for the USSR, the late Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury (inevitably confused by everyone abroad with the Archbishop), which he appears to have got from Colombian communists, whose belief in agrarian revolution appealed to him. Long accepted as a person of power and influence, whose region was beyond the reach of government troops, he sat for it in Congress. Sumapaz remained beyond the reach of the capital even after his death, honoured – according to Rocío who attended the funeral – by a display of his armed horsemen. The first negotiations for an armistice between the Colombian government and the FARC were to be held on the hinterland of his territory.

The FARC itself, which was to become the most formidable and long-lasting of the Latin American guerrilla movements, had not yet been founded when I first came to Colombia, although its long-time military leader Pedro Antonio Marin (‘Manuel Marulanda’), another home-grown countryman, was already active in the mountains adjoining the old stronghold of communist agrarian agitation and self-defence in South Tolima.⁴ It was only born when the Colombian government, trying out against the communists the new anti-guerrilla techniques pioneered by the US military experts, drove the fighters out of their stronghold in Marquetalia. Several years later, in the mid-eighties, I was to spend some days in the birthplace of communist guerrilla activity in the coffee-growing municipio of Chaparral, in the house of my friend Pierre Gilhodes, who had married into the locality. The FARC, stronger than ever, were still in the mountains above the township, which was now easily accessible by car from Bogotá śand sufficiently in touch with the outside world and prosperous to sell Vogue in the news-kiosk on the main plaza . The mule-tracks and footpaths still led into the mountains up steep gullies. It was a quiet landscape, in which not surprisingly discretion was the golden rule. Chaparral farmers were about to discover the potential of poppy cultivation, but had not, I think, yet done so.

Colombia, as I wrote after my return, was experiencing ‘the greatest mobilisation of armed peasants (whether as guerrillas, bandits or self-defence groups) in the contemporary history of the western hemisphere, except, possibly, for some moments of the Mexican Revolution’.⁵ Curiously, this fact was either unnoticed or played down by the contemporary ultra left in and outside South America (all of whose Guevarist attempts at guerrilla insurrection were spectacular failures) on the ostensible grounds that it was linked to an orthodox Communist Party, but in fact because those inspired by the Cuban Revolution neither understood nor wanted to understand what actually might move Latin American peasants to take up arms.

III

It was not hard to become a Latin American expert in the early 1960s. Fidel’s triumph created enormous interest in the region, which was poorly covered by press and universities outside the USA. I had not intended to take a specialist interest in the region, although I also found myself lecturing and writing about it in the 1960s and early 1970s in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, adding appendices on the Peruvian peasant movement and the Colombian Violencia to the (first) Spanish edition of Primitive Rebels, and in 1971 spending a sabbatical en famille doing more serious research on peasants in Mexico and Peru. I continued to go there several times in each decade, mainly to Peru, Mexico and Colombia, but also on occasion to Chile, before and during the Allende period and after the end of the Pinochet era. And, of course, I did not even try to resist the sheer drama and colour of the more glamorous parts of that continent, even though it also contains some of the most anti-human environments on the globe – the high Andean Altiplano on the limits of cultivability, the cactus-spiked semi-desert of northern Mexico – and some of the world’s most uninhabitable giant cities – Mexico City and São Paulo. Over the years, I acquired dear friends such as the Gasparians in Brazil, Pablo Macera in Peru and Carlos Fuentes in Mexico, and students or colleagues who became friends. In short, I was permanently converted to Latin America.

Nevertheless, I never tried to become or saw myself as a Latin Americanist. As for the biologist Darwin, for me as a historian the revelation of Latin America was not regional but general. It was a laboratory of historical change, mostly different from what might have been expected, a continent made to undermine conventional truths. It was a region where historical evolution occurred at express speed and could actually be observed happening within half a lifetime of a single person, from the first clearing of forests for farm or ranch to the death of the peasantry, from the rise and fall of export crops for the world market to the explosion of giant super-cities such as the megalopolis of São Paulo, where one could find a mixture of immigrant populations more implausible even than in New York – Japanese and Okinawans, Calabrians, Syrians, Argentine psychoanalysts and a restaurant proudly labelled ‘CHURRASCO TIPICO NORCOREANO’ (Typical North Korean Barbecue). It was a place where ten years doubled the size of Mexico City, and transformed the street-scene of Cuzco from one dominated by Indians in traditional costume to people wearing modern (‘cholo’) clothes.

Inevitably it changed my perspective on the history of the rest of the globe, if only by dissolving the border between the ‘developed’ and the ‘Third’ worlds, the present and the historic past. As in García Márquez’s great One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which everyone who knows Colombia recognizes both the magic and the realism, it forced one to make sense of what was at first sight implausible. It provided what ‘counterfactual’ speculations can never do, namely a genuine range of alternative outcomes to historical situations: right-wing chieftains who become the inspiration of labour movements (Argentina, Brazil), fascist ideologists who join with a left-wing miners’ union to make a revolution that gives the land to the peasants (Bolivia), the only state in the world that has actually abolished its army (Costa Rica), a single-party state of notorious corruption whose Institutional Party of the Revolution recruits its personnel systematically from the most revolutionary among its university students (Mexico), a region where first-generation immigrants from the Third World can become presidents and Arabs (‘Turcos’) tended to be more successful than Jews.

What made this extraordinary continent so much more accessible for Europeans was an unexpected air of familiarity, like the wild strawberries to be found on the path behind Macchu Picchu. It was not simply that anyone of my age who knew the Mediterranean could recognize the populations round the limitless dun-coloured surface of the River Plate estuary as Italians fed for two or three generations on huge pieces of beef, and was familiar from Europe with the prevailing creole values of macho honour, shame, courage and loyalty to friends, as well as with oligarchic societies. (Not until the battles between young elite revolutionaries and military governments in the 1970s was the basic social distinction, so clearly formulated in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, abandoned, at least in several countries, namely that between the ‘torturable’ lower and the ‘non-torturable’ upper classes.) For Europeans those aspects of the continent most remote from our own experience were embedded in, and interwoven with, institutions familiar to historians, such as the Catholic Church, the Spanish colonial system or such nineteenth-century ideologies as utopian socialism and Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity. This somehow emphasized, even dramatized, both the peculiarity of their Latin American transmutations and what they had in common with other parts of the world. Latin America was a dream for comparative historians.

When I first discovered the continent, it was about to enter the darkest period of its twentieth-century history, the era of military dictatorship, state terror and torture. In the 1970s there was more of it in what was described as ‘the free world’ than there had ever been since Hitler occupied Europe. The generals took over in Brazil in 1964 and by the mid-seventies the military ruled all over South America, except for the states bordering the Caribbean. The Central American republics, apart from Mexico and Cuba, had been kept safe from democracy by the CIA and the threat or reality of US intervention ever since the 1950s. A diaspora of Latin American political refugees concentrated in the few countries of the hemisphere providing refuge – Mexico and, until 1973, Chile – and scattered across North America and Europe: the Brazilians to France and Britain, the Argentinians to Spain, the Chileans everywhere. (Although many Latin American intellectuals continued to visit Cuba, very few actually chose it as their place of exile.) Essentially the ‘era of the gorillas’ (to use the Argentine phrase) was the product of a triple encounter. The local ruling oligarchies did not know what to do about the threat from their increasingly mobilized lower orders in town and country and the populist radical politicians who appealed to them with evident success. The young middle-class left, inspired by the example of Fidel Castro, thought the continent was ripe for revolution precipitated by armed guerrilla action. And Washington’s obsessive fear of communism, confirmed by the Cuban Revolution, was intensified by the international setbacks of the USA in the seventies: the Vietnam defeat, the oil crises, the African revolutions that turned towards the USSR.

I found myself involved in these affairs as an intermittent Marxist visitor to the continent, sympathetic to its revolutionaries – after all, unlike in Europe, revolutions were both needed and possible – but critical of much of its ultra left. Utterly critical of the hopeless Cuban-inspired guerrilla dreams of 1960–67,⁶ I found myself defending the second-best against the criticisms of campus insurrectionaries. As I wrote at the time:

The history of Latin America is full of substitutes for the genuinely popular social revolutionary left that has so rarely been strong enough to determine the shape of its countries’ histories. The history of the Latin American left is, with rare exceptions … one of having to choose between an ineffective sectarian purity and making the best of various kinds of bad jobs, civilian or military populists, national bourgeoisies or whatever else. It is also, quite often, the history of the left regretting its failure to come to terms with such governments and movements before they were replaced by something worse.

I was thinking of the junta of reformist militarists under General Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1969–76) who proclaimed the ‘Peruvian Revolution’ on which I reported sympathetically but sceptically.⁷ It nationalized the country’s great haciendas and was also the first Peruvian regime to recognize the mass of Peruvians, the Quechua-speaking Indians from the high Andes now flooding into coast, city and modernity, as potential citizens. Everyone else in that pitifully poor and helpless country had failed, not least the peasants themselves, whose massive land occupation in 1958–63 had dug the grave of the oligarchy of landowners. They had not known how to bury them. The Peruvian generals acted because nobody else wanted to or could. (I am bound to add, they also failed, though their successors have been worse.)

It was not a popular note to strike, inside or outside Latin America, at a time when the suicidal Guevara dream of bringing about the revolution by the action of small groups in tropical frontier areas was still very much alive. It may help to explain why my appearance before the students of San Marcos University in Lima – ‘Horrible Lima’ as the poet rightly calls it – did not go down at all well. For Maoism in one or other of its numerous subvarieties was the ideology of the sons and daughters of the new cholo (hispanized Indian) middle class of highland immigrants, at least until they graduated. Their Maoism, like military service for the peasants, and the ‘gap year’ of European students, was a social rite of passage.

But was there not hope in Chile, the country with the strongest Communist Party and with which I had both personal and political connections? Indeed, my father’s brother Berk (Ike or Don Isidro), a mining expert based in Chile since the First World War, and founder with his wife, a Miss Bridget George from Llanwrthwl in Powys, of the largest extant branch of the family bearing the name Hobsbawn, had had a connection with the ephemeral Chilean Socialist Republic of 1932, led by the splendidly named Colonel Marmaduke Grove. More recently, through Claudio Veliz, then at Chatham House in London, who gave me most of my original introductions for the continent, I had met a patently very intelligent as well as good-looking lady, wife of a prominent Chilean socialist, whom I took round Cambridge, England: Hortensia Allende. On my first visit to Santiago I had lunch at the Allende house, coming to the conclusion that her unsparkling husband Salvador was the less impressive partner of the couple. That, as it turned out, was to underestimate the stature and the sense of democracy of a brave and honourable man who died defending his office. Others remember where they were when President Kennedy died. I remember where I was when I was rung up by some radio programme with the news that President Allende was dead – at an international conference on labour history, looking down on Linz and the Danube. I had last been in Chile in 1971, on a side trip from Peru to report on the first year of the first socialist government democratically elected to everyone’s surprise, including Allende’s.⁸ Nevertheless, in spite of my passionate wish that it might succeed, I had not been able to conceal from myself that the odds were against it. Keeping my ‘sympathies entirely out of the transaction’ I had put them at two to one against. I did not visit Chile again until 1998 when I shared with Tencha Allende and other friends and comrades watching Santiago television the wonderful moment when the British Law Lords announced their epoch-making judgment against the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet on Santiago television. I did not share this joy with my Chilean relatives, who – at least those continuing to live in Santiago – had been supporters of his regime.

Debates about the Latin American left became academic in the 1970s with the triumph of the torturers, even more academic in the 1980s with the era of US-backed civil war in Central America and the retreat of army rule in South America and entirely unrealistic with the decline of the Communist Parties and the end of the USSR. Probably the only significant attempt at old-style armed guerrilla revolution was the ‘Shining Path’, brainchild of a fringe Maoist lecturer at the University of Ayacucho, who had not yet taken to arms when I visited that city in the late 1970s. It demonstrated what the Cuban dreamers of the 1960s had spectacularly failed to show, namely that serious armed politics were possible in the Peruvian countryside, but also – at least to some of us – that this was a cause that ought not to succeed. In fact, it was suppressed by the army in the usual brutal fashion, with the help of those parts of the peasantry whom the Senderistas had antagonized.

However, the most formidable and indestructible of the rural guerrillas, the Colombian FARC, flourished and grew, though in that blood-soaked country it had to deal not only with the official forces of the state but with the well-armed gunmen of the drugs industry and the landlords’ savage ‘paramilitaries’. President Belisario Betancur (1982–6), a socially minded and civilized Conservative intellectual not in the pockets of the USA – at least in conversation he gave me that impression – initiated the policy of negotiating peace with the guerrillas, which has continued at intervals ever since. His intentions were good, and he succeeded in pacifying at least one of the guerrilla movements, the so-called M19, favourite of the intellectuals. (There was a time when every party in Bogota śwas likely to contain one or two young professionals who had spent a season in the hills with them.) Indeed, the FARC itself was prepared to play the constitutional game by creating a ‘Patriotic Union’ intended to function as that electoral party of the left which had never quite managed to emerge in the space between the Liberals and the Conservatives. It had little success in the big cities, and after about 2,500 of its local mayors, councillors and activists, having laid aside their arms, had been murdered in the countryside, the FARC developed an understandable reluctance to exchange the gun for the ballot-box. I was host to one of the militants, en route to or from an international gathering, in the cafeteria of Birkbeck College, far from the wild frontier of banana plantations, battles between FARC and Maoist guerrillas and the local paramilitaries in Urabà, near the isthmus of Panama, where he practised his legal politics. When I next asked friends for news of him, he was already dead.

IV

What has happened to Latin America in the forty or so years since I first landed on its airfields? The expected and in so many countries necessary revolution has not happened, strangled by the indigenous military and the USA, but not least by domestic weakness, division and incapacity. It will not happen now. None of the political experiments I have watched from near or far since the Cuban Revolution has made much lasting difference.

Only two have looked as though they might, but both are too recent for judgement. The first, which must warm the cockles of all old red hearts, is the national rise, since its foundation in 1980, of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT) in Brazil, whose leader and presidential candidate ‘Lula’ (Luis Inácio da Silva) is probably the only industrial worker at the head of any Labour Party anywhere. It is a late example of a classic mass socialist Labour Party and movement, such as emerged in Europe before 1914. I carry its plaque on my key-ring to remind me of ancient and contemporary sympathies, and memories of my times with the PT and with Lula, often touching, sometimes moving, like the stories of the party’s grassroots activists from the São Paulo car factories and the remote inland townships. And as tribute to the democratic and educational zeal of the PT’s prize city, Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), honest, prosperous and anti-globalist, which moved its council to organize and its mayor to preside over an open-air question-and-answer session for the citizenry with a visiting British historian on the main square, amid the noise of the municipality’s efficient trams.

The other, more dramatic, landmark was the end in 2000 of Mexico’s seventy years of unshakeable one-party rule by the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party). Alas, one doubts whether this will produce a better political alternative, any more than the revolt of the Italian and Japanese voters in the early 1990s against the frozen Cold War regimes of their countries.

So the politics of Latin America remain recognizably what they have long been, as does its cultural life (except for the vast global explosion in higher education in which its republics have shared). On the world economic scene, even when not shaken by the great crises of the past twenty years, Latin America plays only a bit part. Politically, it has remained as far from God and as near to the USA as ever, and consequently less inclined than any other part of the globe to believe that the USA is liked because ‘it does a lot of good round the world’.⁹ For half a century journalists and academics have read secular transformations into temporary political trends, but the region remains what it has been for most of a century, full of constitutions and jurists but unstable in its political practice. Historically its national governments have found it hard to control what happens on their territory, and still do. Its rulers have tried to avoid the logic of electoral democracy among populations which cannot be guaranteed to vote the way their betters would want them to, by a variety of methods ranging from control by local grandees, patronage, general corruption and occasional demagogic ‘fathers of the people’ to military rule. All of these still remain available.

And yet, during these past forty years I have observed a society being utterly transformed. The population of Latin America has just about tripled, an essentially agrarian and still largely empty continent has lost most of its peasants, who have moved into giant cities and from Central America to the USA, on a scale comparable only with the Irish and Scandinavian migrations in the nineteenth century, or even, like the Ecuadoreans working on the Andalusian harvests, across the ocean. Emigrant remittances have replaced the great hopes of modernization. Cheap air travel and phone communication have abolished localization. Life-patterns I observed in the 1990s were unimagined in 1960: the New York taxi-driver from Guyaquil who lived half in the USA and half in Ecuador, where his wife ran a local print-shop; the loaded pick-up trucks of immigrant Mexicans (legal or clandestine) returning from California or Texas for the holiday to Jalisco or Oaxaca; Los Angeles turning into a town of Central American immigrant politicos and union leaders. True, most Latin Americans remain poor. In fact, in 2001 they were almost certainly relatively poorer than in the early 1960s, even if we set aside the ravages of the economic crises of the past twenty years, for not only has inequality within these countries soared, but the continent itself has lost ground internationally. Brazil may be the eighth economy of the world by the size of its GDP, Mexico the sixteenth, but per capita they rank respectively fifty-second and sixtieth. In the world’s league table of social injustice Brazil remains at the top. And yet, if one were to ask the Latin American poor to compare their life at the start of the new millennium with their parents’, let alone their grandparents’, outside a few black spots most would probably say: it is better. But in most countries they might also say: it is more unpredictable and more dangerous.

It is not for me to agree or disagree with them. After all, they are the Latin America that I went to look for, and discovered, forty years ago, the one Pablo Neruda wrote about in the marvellous baroque poem of poems about his continent, the section ‘The heights of Macchu Picchu’ in his Canto General. It ends with the invocation of the unknown builders of that dead green Inca city, through whose dead mouth the poet wants to speak:

Juan Cortapiedras, hijo de Wiracocha Juan Comefrio, hijo de la estrella verde Juan Piedescalzos, nieto de la turquesa

(John Stonecutter, son of Wiracocha, John Coldmeals, son of the green star, John Barefoot, grandson of the turquoise.)

‘If you want to understand South America,’ they told me before I left Britain, ‘you must go to Macchu Picchu and read the poem there.’ I had not met the great poet then, a plump man whose natural element was not the mountains but the sea, on which his wonderful house still looks out, and who, asked what he wanted to see in London, had only one wish: the Cutty Sark sailing ship at Greenwich, He died of a broken heart a few days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. I did read his poem in Macchu Picchu in 1962, on one of the steep stepped hills, as the sun went down, in an Argentine paperback bought in a Chilean bookshop. Whether it helped me to understand it as a historian, I do not know, but I know what the poet wanted to say and the big-chested, coca-chewing, brown, quiet men and women whom he had in mind, who scrabbled a living in the thin air of the Andean high country where it is harder to be a human being than almost anywhere else between Arctic and Antarctic. When I think of Latin America these are the people who come into my mind. Not only the poet but the historian should give them their due.

22

From FDR to Bush

I

If all intellectuals of my generation had two countries, their own and France, then in the twentieth century all inhabitants of the western world, and eventually all city dwellers anywhere on the globe, lived mentally in two countries, their own and the USA. After the First World War no literate person anywhere failed to recognize the words ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Coca-Cola’, and very few illiterates could fail to make some contact with their products. America did not have to be discovered: it was part of our existence.

And yet, what most people knew of America was not the country itself, but a set of images mediated essentially by its arts. Until well after the Second World War relatively few people from outside the USA actually travelled there, unless as immigrants, and from the early 1920s to the 1970s US government policy made immigration extremely difficult. I did not step on its shores myself until 1960. We met North Americans elsewhere. I suppose my first real contact with what was not yet called ‘Middle America’ was when the Rotarians chose to hold their international convention in Vienna in 1928 and I, as a bilingual boy, was mobilized as an interpreter. I remember nothing about it, except the lobby of a hotel on the Ring containing herds of men dressed in brighter shirts than Vienna was used to, a kind anaesthetist from somewhere in the Midwest who subsequently sent me stamps for my collection, and puzzling about what exactly Rotary was supposed to be for. The official explanation (‘Service’) seemed to me to be short of content.

I find it hard to reconstruct the image of the USA formed by an anglophone continental boy before the 1930s. Oddly enough – for my uncle actually worked for a Hollywood company – for me it did not come from Hollywood films. The sort of Tom Mix Westerns we saw hardly counted, since it seemed obvious even to children that life in America was not quite like that. (This showed that we knew little of the US.) The Hollywood films set in America were not intended to be about life stateside but about a never-never land of moviegoers’ dreams. If our view of America came from anywhere, it was from technology and music: the one as an idea, the other as an experience. For we also got the technology at second hand. Most of us were unlikely ever to see an assembly line, but we knew that is how Ford cars were made.

On the other hand, the arts reached us directly. My mother and aunts shimmied and foxtrotted, and we listened to recognizably American music even when produced by English bands and vocalists. Radio and gramophone brought us Jerome Kern and Gershwin. ‘Jazz’, as then commonly understood – syncopated rhythmic music with saxophones and lacking bowed strings – was already the sound of urban middle-class leisure in the twenties. It meant America, and because of what the USA symbolized, it meant modernity, short hair for women and the age of machines. The staff of the Bauhaus had itself photographed with a saxophone. And so, when I came to England and was converted to jazz by my cousin Denis, this time to the real thing, the gates opened not only on a new aesthetic experience, but on a new world. Like Alistair Cooke, one of my predecessors as editor of Granta, who was then beginning his career as a lifetime commentator on the US with a radio series I Hear America Singing, I also discovered America by ear.

Jazz was as good an introduction to the USA as any, because in Britain at least the sound and its social significance – a very 1930s phrase – went together. To be a jazz-fan was not only, and for obvious reasons, to be against racism and for the Negroes (this was the era before they wanted to be described as Black and then African-American), but to gobble up all information about the USA even faintly relevant to jazz: and very little about the country was not relevant in some way. So all fans collected an endlessly fascinating bric-a-brac of facts about the USA, from the names of American cities, rivers and railroads (Milwaukee, the wide Missouri, the Aitchison, Topeka and Santa Fe) to the names of gangsters and senators. In the 1930s reputations could be made simply by knowing facts about the USA. Denis Brogan, a hard-drinking and eventually not quite so hard-working Glaswegian, teaching politics in Cambridge, was an expert on two countries, but he made his radio reputation – and he was one of the first media dons in Europe – not as a very knowledgeable historian and observer of France, but as the sort of man who could name all the state capitals of the United States and the title of every song by Irving Berlin.

The image of America is so powerful and all-embracing that it is easy to suppose that it has barely changed over what we now know to have been ‘the American century’. But for those of us who became conscious of it in the 1930s, especially if we were on the left, it was in some respects quite different. For one thing, it was not dominated by envy. We began thinking about America at the only moment when the US economy was not a triumphant model of wealth and productive potential for the rest of the world. In the decade of the Great Depression we no longer saw the world of Gatsby but that of The Grapes of Wrath. In the 1920s and early 1930s America was a by-word for the hard-faced pursuit of profit, for injustice, for ruthless, unscrupulous and brutal repression. But F. D. Roosevelt’s USA not only disclaimed this reputation; it turned it sharply to the left. It visibly became a government for the poor and the unions. What is more, Roosevelt was passionately loathed and denounced by American big business, that is to say by the very people who more than any others represented the evils of capitalism to us. It is true that, as usual, the Communist International, stuck in its ultra-sectarian phase, took its time to recognize what was obvious to everyone else and denounced the New Deal, but by 1935 even it had come round. In short, in the 1930s it was possible to approve of both the USA and the USSR, and most youthful communists did both, as did a very large number of socialists and liberals. Franklin D. Roosevelt was certainly not Comrade Stalin, and yet, if we had been Americans, we would have voted for him with genuine enthusiasm. I cannot think of any other ‘bourgeois’ politician in any country about whom we felt that way. During the more than sixty years since I got to know Arthur Schlesinger Jr in Cambridge, England, we have probably never agreed on any political issue except this one. I shared, and still share, his admiration for FDR.

Although crossing the Atlantic from Cambridge was common enough, I never had the chance to do so before the war – and after 1945 the Cold War seemed to make it impossible. For the United States did not want communists on its soil. It certainly wanted no foreign ones. As a Party member I was automatically debarred from a visa, except by a special waiver of my ineligibility, which I was unlikely to get, unless by meeting the indispensable condition for being received, however temporarily, into the community of the free: confessing and abjuring sin in public, although I do not think denouncing other communists was mandatory for foreigners. These were not formalities. I recall a long talk with Joe Losey, the film director, a victim of the Hollywood witch-hunt, with whom I had struck up a friendship – which did not survive this conversation – on the basis of a common passion for Billie Holiday. For several years he had scuffled round Europe, making movies under pseudonyms or as best he could. At last, in the 1960s, he had broken through. Not only his talent, but his box-office value were about to be recognized. The notorious question (‘Are you now or have you ever been?’) stood in his way. Friends and entrepreneurs suggested that no harm would now be done if he answered it. Should he? he asked me, a question which I took to mean that he was close to doing so. I could not blame him, but was too honest, or too sanctimonious, simply to give him the answer he wanted. Probably I should have. It is not a small thing for a man to consider whether the chance to realize a great talent is worth the sacrifice of his pride and self-esteem. I can still feel the anguish behind his question.

Fortunately I myself did not face any such dilemma. If the US asked me the question and would not admit me when I answered it honestly, then I would just not go there. Of course I wanted to. What is more, the reasons for going there multiplied, if only because the American academic community was even then far quicker to recognize the heterodox than the rather hidebound British.

Just then the opportunity arose to visit the country I had hitherto known only, as it were, as a virtual reality. At one of the early postwar International Congresses of Sociology – in Amsterdam in 1956 or, more likely, Stresa in 1959 – I had got to know the economist Paul Baran, a 1930s refugee from Germany, who claimed to be the only overt Marxist with academic tenure in the USA.¹ I must have got on well with this big, passionate, shambling, soft-eyed man, because he invited me to stay with him and teach for a summer quarter at Stanford University in 1960. We planned to write a paper together attacking Walt Rostow’s recently published The Stages of Economic Growth, a self-described ‘anti-Communist Manifesto’ which was then much talked about. We did so later in a cabin on Lake Tahoe.²

On this occasion the problem of my visa was finessed, thanks to the lack of bureaucratic experience of the US Consulate in London. They forgot to ask me the question. My status as a visitor to the USA was not permanently settled until 1967, when I was invited to take a visiting chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fortunately MIT was used both to dealing with visa applications from backgrounds suspect to FBI and CIA, and to the political operations of Washington. The prestige of the institution and its president, as also the knowledge that it was doing the state substantial service, gave it enough leverage to insist that it must be allowed to judge what foreigners were or were not worth inviting. The office politics of power thus drove MIT to mobilize all its resources to get a visa waiver for an otherwise unimportant British communist academic. I got my waiver, although on condition that I reported to the friendly but determined lady who ‘looked after’ foreigners at MIT every time I proposed to leave the Boston area. ‘You mean I can’t spend the night in New York without your OK?’ I asked. She recognized the absurdity of the situation and did not insist. Nobody subsequently interfered with my freedom of movement in the USA.

I did not realize until very late just how difficult the US authorities must have found the problem of my visa. Like all bureaucracies they reacted in the first instance by silence and evasion. However, in the course of a series of increasingly frantic transatlantic telephone conversations I discovered some of what made my case so tricky. ‘Do you mind,’ said my sponsor in the course of one of them, ‘if I ask you a question, which, I can assure you, does not affect our invitation to you? Are you or have you ever been the chairman of the British Communist Party?’ It was a typical intelligence file entry, combining laziness (for the names of all the Party’s chairmen were certainly within easy reach of the spooks) and confusion. Since 1939 I had, as far as I can recall, never occupied any political function in the Party, not even at branch level. Someone had clearly been unable to distinguish the only thing I had ever been chairman of, in or outside the Party, namely the Historians’ Group of the CP (see chapter 12) from the chairmanship of the Communist Party. Anyway, MIT won out against Immigration. I got my waiver.

From that moment my troubles were almost over. Once there is a precedent, bureaucracies know what to do: the same as last time. From then on I went to the States without real trouble, though initially I was interviewed once or twice by the consular officer in charge of waivers, who might look at my file, say casually, ‘I see you’ve been to Cuba again,’ to prove that Uncle Sam had his eye on me, and arrange for the waiver. I still could not, of course, land in America without a visa, even in air transit, but eventually my applications were routinely made and granted within days, until the a priori ineligibility of communists was finally abolished and British visitors no longer neded visas.

II

So in 1960 the USA as virtual reality turned into the USA as a real country. How? Here, at least initially, my jazz identity proved far more relevant than either my Marxist or my academic contacts. For the truth is that by 1960 the American Marxists of my generation were largely isolated from the world in which they lived and the American academic historians I knew did not know a lot about it in the first place. In New York I could discuss the problems of capital accumulation and the transition from feudalism to capitalism with my friends from Science and Society, the oldest anglophone journal of intellectual Marxism, for which I wrote, but they taught me no more about New York than any other Manhattan lower-middle-class Jews would have taught a visitor from outer space: where the good dairy delicatessens and second-hand bookshops were (not yet reduced to the Strand Bookshop on Broadway and Twelfth), what Dr Brown’s Celery Tonic was and that in the USA pastrami was not what Englishmen called salt beef.

I got rather more through Paul Baran on the West Coast, chiefly because (I think via his then lover, a Californian Japanese lady) he knew the intellectuals who worked with Harry Bridges’ International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union, foundation-stone of the Bay Area left. It organized all Pacific ports from Portland to San Diego and, for good measure, everything that could be organized in Hawaii. To my intense satisfaction I was introduced to Bridges himself, a lanky hook-nosed hero, who had imposed exclusive job hire through the union at Californian conditions on the Pacific Coast employers, no lambs by nature, by means of two general strikes and a sound sense of power and bargaining strategy. He had also fought off several attempts by the American government to deport him as an alien subversive. He was then in the process of reluctantly supervising the euthanasia of the Pacific waterside workers by negotiating the substitution of container and tanker technology for manpower, against ample lifetime pensions for the union members whose jobs disappeared. The union was still strong, and Bridges’ revolutionary convictions, expressed in an Australian accent that made few concessions to half a lifetime as an American union leader, were undimmed. He still dreamed of a general strike of the world’s dockers that would bring the capitalist system to its knees, for in the minds of watersiders the great oceans are bridges between continents, not barriers. Not that he had much time for seamen, all of whom, he thought, were ‘bums’, because they lacked the staying-power of a union on terra firma like the longshoremen, held together by families and regular communities. Nor, as a good Australian, had he much use for pommies. In his youth as a seaman he had once, he told me, kept company with a docker’s daughter in the port of London. This had given him a permanent contempt for the forelock-tugging acceptance of their social inferiority by British workers.

As it was 1960, we discussed the presidential election. Jimmy Hoffa of the teamsters (truck-drivers), the target of Bobby Kennedy and the FBI, was thinking of throwing his union’s vote behind Nixon rather than Kennedy. The teamsters’ goodwill was essential to both labour and capital in California, but Hoffa’s reputation was bad. Bridges, who felt no loyalty to either ‘bourgeois party’, saw this as a purely pragmatic choice. Was Hoffa not, I asked, in the hands of the mob? ‘He may work with the hoods,’ said Bridges sternly and from experience, ‘but he is a stand-up guy and so far as I know he has never sold out his members. What he skims off comes from the bosses, not the workers.’ Nobody ever accused Bridges of either becoming rich or selling out his members. He died not long after I met him, as San Francisco was moving far away from the city of Bridges and Sam Spade. I recall him with admiration and emotion. His union certainly knew about the mob. One afternoon its organizer, who later moved into the academic sphere, gave me what amounted to a seminar on negotiating with the Mafia, with which the IL WU had to coordinate its activities, since, though the Pacific port unions were clean, the mob controlled the unions on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Dealing with the Mafia, it seemed, rested on two basic assumptions and a knowledge of its limitations. The first, mutual respect, could be taken for granted. Both parties operated on the waterside, which was not a children’s playground. They knew its rules, the most important of which was that you didn’t snitch. Stand-up guys didn’t have to trust one another, but they could talk. The second was that no favours, however minor or symbolic, must be accepted from the Mafia, because that would automatically be interpreted as establishing dependence. So, there were always polite but firm refusals to suggestions that the two unions might get together to decide questions of common interest – say, a single date for ending contracts – in an agreeable location such as Vegas.

On the other hand, the knowledge of the Mafia’s limitations gave a politically hip organization like a red union the possibility of demonstrating what to the mob must have looked like power worthy of serious respect. Of course the IL WU had no power, even though, one suspects, the Representatives and Senators from Hawaii treated its views very seriously. It merely had strategies, national political horizons, committed and knowledgeable intellectuals, and it knew how to operate on Capitol Hill. On the other hand, in the experience of the IL WU, the mob’s economic perspectives were short, its political horizons local. ‘They talked to city aldermen and mayors’ offices. We took them round Congress in Washington once,’ the organizer told me. ‘They could see our people, said hello to Representatives and Senators from all parts, we asked them would they like to meet Jimmy Roosevelt Jr, the son of FDR. That impressed them. After that negotiations became a lot easier.’ All this helped to inoculate me against the tendency of US laymen and political campaigners to exaggerate the power and reach of the Mafia. Or even its wealth, although the actual net worth of a Mafia family, rather modest by the standards of real money in New York, was only recorded in the early 1970s, the decade when Italo-Americans came into their own and America conducted its love-affair (via Hollywood) with the godfathers.³ It also gave me a realistic introduction to American politics.

How far did this change my view of the USA? Like all transatlantic US watchers and, as I discovered, a subculture of American intellectuals, I had been fascinated by gangsters. Fortunately in the 1950s a mass of material became available for the first time about the development of organized crime in the USA, which naturally paid attention to the interactions between the mob and labour. (This had not been stressed in the young leftwingers’ image of American labour history.) My studies of the Sicilian Mafia had in any case given me a professional interest in the American side of its operations. So I was sufficiently familiar with it to write a small study on ‘The political economy of the gangster’ as a subvariety of the market economy, that passed completely unperceived, perhaps in part because, for a joke, I sent it to the most ancient, indeed almost prehistoric and unread, Tory journal, The Quarterly Review, which published it without a murmur.⁴ By the time I arrived in the USA I was therefore well clued up on such topics (but, for obvious reasons, not on the Kennedy family’s impending projects to use their mob connections to kill off Fidel Castro). And yet, in some ways I still shared the basic view of primary school or Hollywood morality, in which goodies (honest people) behave as goodies and are therefore better than, and have nothing to do with, the baddies (crooks), even when they have to coexist with them. Even after living a long time in a very imperfect world, I would still prefer to believe this. In the law-abiding and state-governed British Isles of the 1950s, it still seemed not only an aspiration, but a sort of reality. But the USA was neither law-abiding, though it had more lawyers than the rest of the world put together, nor a society that recognized the rule of the state, though to my surprise I discovered it to be much more enthusiastically bureaucratic at all levels.

Politics and professors took me to America, but once again it was jazz which made me feel that I had some understanding of the reality of this extraordinary country. I could hardly have chosen a better moment to visit the USA as a jazz-lover than 1960. At no time before or after was it possible to enjoy the entire range of the music live, from the survivors of the 1920s to the anarchist sonorities of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry which could already be heard by a determined avant-garde on the eastern outskirts of Greenwich Village. Indeed, in spite of the suicidal lifestyle of jazz people, with some notable exceptions the great names on which my generation had been raised were still in operational form. What is more, as we listened to the unique originality of Monk and the absolutely extraordinary Miles Davis Quintet of Milestones and Kind of Blue , we could not help noticing that the second half of the fifties was a golden age of the music, the last as it turned out. Bliss was it in those New York and San Francisco nights to be alive, even if it was too late for a historian in his forties to enjoy the very heaven of Wordsworth’s youth.

Not that jazz was separable from the politics of the left, although in 1960 its place in the professional academy was rather like homosexuality: it was a private taste of some teachers, but not part of their academic activity. That is why New York, notoriously so much less typical of middle America than, say, Green Bay, Wisconsin, was probably the best place to convince someone like myself that it was actually possible to understand, perhaps even to love, that extraordinary country. Le tout Manhattan despised the witch-hunt and, being a city of immigrant Jews and the centre of intellectual publishing, theatre and the popular music and recording business, took for granted the existence among some of its denizens of revolutionary Marxism, past or present. In the Big Apple only the FBI really worried about the precise nature of someone’s political commitment, for by the time I got there it was a city in which even the billionaires were, as likely as not, to be Democrats. Curiously enough jazz did not much appeal to the full-time American Marxists, whose instinctive taste seemed to be for classical music and political folksong. (I still recall the disastrous evening when I took Paul Baran to hear Miles Davis at the Black Hawk in San Francisco.)

Most of my jazz contacts were men, with a few exceptions such as the tough showbiz pro who devoted her life to furthering the career of the wonderful pianist Erroll Garner, and who tried to do me a massive favour by getting me on the Johnny Carson Show with Garner on the assumption that I would publicize the book I had recently published on jazz. (My remoteness from the realities of American publishing in 1960, thirty years ahead of the British scene, was such that I went through the entire four minutes of my interview slot without so much as mentioning the title of my book.) Most of them were in some ways refugees from the conventional American male life of the 1950s, decade of ‘the man in the grey flannel suit’, except the greatest talent-scout and promoter in the history of jazz, John Hammond Jr. No out-of-town visitor, seeing him outside, say, the Village Vanguard, would ever have asked him, as I was asked, standing with a friend outside a place in North Beach, San Francisco: ‘Excuse me, but are you two gentlemen beatniks?’ Of course, nobody needed to ask who he was outside the place to which he took me first, Small’s Paradise in Harlem. John Hammond Jr was almost a caricature of the Ivy League White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class: tall, crewcut, talking in the sort of accent in which one imagines they talked in Edith Wharton novels – he was a Vanderbilt himself – and sporting an unwavering grin. As so often in the USA, this did not indicate a great sense of humour. He was not a man for informality or casual laughs, any more than his one-time brother-in-law Benny Goodman, who had the reputation of freezing his sidemen with a basilisk stare. John remained an unreconstructed and militant 1930s leftwinger to the end, even though the FBI could never tie him down as a card-carrying communist. The history of jazz in the USA before the Second World War and, since he was probably the most important single influence in launching the ‘swing music’ vogue of the 1930s, the history of the USA, cannot be understood without him. I asked him on his death-bed, what he was proudest of in his life. He said it was to have discovered Billie Holiday.

By the time I knew him, he was no longer at the musical centre, though no man who was about to launch Bob Dylan into the big time could be regarded entirely as yesterday’s man. Another former New York jazz-lover who became my best American friend, not merely made it his business as a journalist to keep in touch with all generations within reach, old and young, but did so with a natural, good-tempered, surreal spontaneity that captured them all. This was the man who, among other things, had just discovered Lenny Bruce, and made himself election agent for the great bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s campaign for the American presidency, which neither of them regarded entirely as a joke, namely Ralph Gleason. New York Irish, he had left the city to become showbusiness and popular music columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that prided itself on not belonging to William Randolph Hearst, and on columnists who were not surprised at anything they came across in a wealthy, cool and courteously dissident city. He lived in a modest house on the upper hillside in Berkeley, full of collections of records, tapes, musical projects, print in various formats and (generally young) visitors, all kept in working order by his tough and protective wife Jeanie. I treated it as a refuge from Palo Alto, driving there in the first car I ever owned, a 1948 Kaiser, which I had bought for $100 and sold at the end of the summer quarter to a mathematical logician of world distinction for $50.

For music and showbusiness the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1960 was a hip place, a good market but on the margins. Everyone played the town, but nothing much had come out of there, except the first self-conscious wave of white Dixieland music. It was the sort of place where elderly masters such as the great jazz pianist Earl Hines settled down, secure in a good, solid club public. Even Duke Ellington accepted a club date rather than a concert there, thus providing me with the unforgettable occasion, the first since 1933, of hearing the band in the milieu for which it had been designed, namely a space with social drinkers where the real measure of a band’s impact was not applause, but the sudden silence as conversations ceased at the tables.

San Francisco, though not yet established as the Gay Republic or the hinterland of Silicon Valley, had a national profile and a recognized presence on the American scene, quite apart from the sensational beauty of its bay. It was a liberal city, though less politically radical than its neighbour Berkeley became in the 1960s, proud of its dissidents (not least Harry Bridges). Even then it was relaxed about drugs. By California standards it had freightcar-loads of history, the (then) most famous Chinatown, the memory of the Maltese Falcon, and a reputation as the most prominent centre of avant-garde literature in the 1950s, the ‘beat’ movement, fashionable enough for Ken Tynan to congratulate me on going there. ‘There’ was the area around Broadway, North Beach, a sort of Pacific St-Germain-des-Pres, where I would meet Ralph at the local Flore, and Enrico’s, facing the City Lights Bookstore, greeting and being greeted by the personalities of the city as they strolled past. Unlike the New York Broadway, on this Broadway people strolled. And across the Bay Bridge there was Berkeley. In the middle sixties ‘the white sons of middle class America’ briefly made it the quintessential scene of hippy youth and ‘flower power’, incidentally generating (as Gleason noted) ‘the first American musicians, aside from the country and western players, who are not trying to sound black’. ⁵ Ralph made himself the mouthpiece for the Haight-Ashbury music, groups such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, although he did not by temperament belong on the drug scene. Indeed, he gave up smoking grass. He belonged to the generation of intellectuals who smoked pipes, as I then did also. Never in good health, he died in 1975 aged fifty-eight.

For three reasons he became my window on America. Living in the world of jazz, an outsider music, he caught the vibrations of coming events which escaped others – the changing tone of the sounds that came from the black ghetto, the white kids’ avant-garde which discovered the force of the black city blues beat, the anticipations of the Berkeley student revolt which became national after 1964, global in 1968. These were not things noticed elsewhere in the summer of 1960. Nobody I knew on the faculties of Berkeley, still less the distinguished but stuffy Stanford, suggested I might be interested in going to the political camping weekend which the Berkeley leftwingers were organizing that summer, because none knew it was happening. Ralph did, who had no academic or recognizable political connections, but to whom students talked. Not that Ralph was much into organized political radicalism or moved in the circles of Bay Area leftism. The Symbionese Liberation Army was much more his style, a bizarre reductioad absurdum of Bay Area millennialism, remembered (if at all) for first kidnapping and then converting the daughter of William Randolph Hearst Jr. He applauded and entertained the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech rebels, admired the mass oratory as well as the disorganized sincerity of their leader, the somewhat farouche physics student Mario Savio, and, after his expulsion, sent him and his wife/partner to me at Birkbeck where he hoped we might find something for him. (J. D. Bernal’s physics department obliged, but academic life and scientific research were clearly not his bag, and he returned to life among the cafés and head-shops on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, within reach of his old triumphs.)

The second reason why Ralph was a marvellous introduction to post-sixties America was that, an immigrant into the most culturally utopian corner of California himself, he could understand the aspirations of its young and their cultural revolution. Besides, though the least infantile of men, he was not himself a character to grow old. He could draw on an inexhaustible reservoir of enthusiasm, which I could not share, even for rock groups. Once again, this made him wonderfully sensitive to the vibes of coming times. It was he who helped one of his young followers to start a rock magazine, he who found the title for it from a record of the Chicago blues-singer Muddy Waters, Rolling Stone, he, the least commercial of men, who thanks to it and to what had been a small jazz and fringe satire label Fantasy Records found himself with more money than he had been used to and in a position to send whisky and cigars to old friends.

Last, but not least, by style and temperament Ralph, himself inconceivable anywhere except the USA, made his country easier to understand, even though its civilization was in some respects stranger to Europeans than any other except the Japanese. He had what seems to outsiders the characteristic American combination of sudden loves and hates, sentimentality in feeling (but not in the spoken word). Nevertheless, he appeared to be immune to the three built-in hazards of American cultural life: self-absorption, the tendency to ponder what it means to be American and intellectual heaviness. Bullshit phrases such as ‘American values’ and ‘the American dream’ were not to be found in his dictionary, as they were not yet to be found in the private speech of the USA. He took Americans as they were. Rhetoric belonged only to their public life and the officially approved versions of love. I do not think he would have regarded even an American utopia as complete without a corrupt Chicago alderman here and there, a lecherous millionaire radio-evangelist or two, a few centres of passionate counter-cultural dissidence even from utopia, and establishments like the one I saw outside one of the main casinos in Reno, Nevada, called the Sierra Club: Horse Book and Kosher Delicatessen. On the other hand, living in the world’s great cities of the plain, he would expect God to refrain from destroying this Sodom, because the ten just men required to save it were always to be found there. He was one of them.

Ralph belonged to that unique product of the US, the corps of observers, mostly journalists, the best of them probably the generation of the 1930s–50s, which was also that of the glories of American vernacular song-lyric and musical, who reported on their country with love, contempt and raised eyebrows. He steered me to others like him. I could not have had a better introduction to Chicago, a city which no lover of blues could possibly miss.

I reached Chicago by a drive from the Pacific to the east, recognized since the Beats celebrated it as the initiation rite of the true American rebel. I shared expenses with three very un-Kerouac-like students from Stanford. By European standards there is not enough variety in the vast spaces of mountain and prairie for enjoyment, at least for those not zonked out of their mind. This was difficult when four people drive round the clock in shifts, though it made me sufficiently sleepy to barely avoid crashing the car into an oncoming vehicle on the endless straight highway somewhere near Laramie, Wyoming. Chicago itself, especially when experienced in August from a small YMCA room without any form of cooling, still seems the hottest place I have ever been to. Intolerable in the heat of summer as in the cutting winter winds, it symbolizes the characteristic American belief that physical limitations are there to be overcome by technology and money if the objective – in this case trade and transportation – justifies the effort. Few great cities are less suitable for mere unassisted human living.

This effort was not enough to make Chicago more than the Second City, however hard it tried. Even in jazz, where it started out with the advantage of attracting the best musicians and singers from the Mississippi delta, it lost out to the Big Apple, and in organized crime it lost its primacy after Al Capone, though the mob was still important enough. It did remain the capital of the city blues, but unlike its globally known child rock and roll, Chicago blues, like the gospel sound, belonged to the endless, uniform, run-down black ghettos of the South and West Sides. It was still the art of poor Southern immigrants, created in neighbourhood bars, store-front churches and even the open-air street-market. It had one national chart-topper, Mayor Daley, the last and greatest of the city bosses, who could guarantee the Cook County vote to any Democratic contender, which proved lucky for Jack Kennedy, whose election it determined. As I write, the city is still run by his son.

And yet, just this gave it a certain sense of local community. I cannot believe that my admired Studs Terkel would have built his career in another city. It is characteristic that the first of the marvellous books which established his world reputation as the recorder of ordinary lives was Division Street: America,⁶ a wonderfully designed oral history tapestry of Chicago in seventy voices named after one street in the Near North Side of the city – the pleasantest part in 1960 – commissioned by my friend and publisher Andre Schiffrin as part of a series on ‘the world’s villages’. In some ways I prefer it to his later, more ambitious and better-known multi-voice compositions on Hard Times: The Oral History of the Great Depression, Work, The Good War and the rest. When I met him he was forty-eight and as always, running a daily personal radio programme on a local station, readings, musical commentaries, anything, especially interviews. His unique gift was the capacity to make people forget that they spoke into a microphone and that anyone was listening to their voice except a little clowny guy in a bow tie, who seemed to hear what they wanted to say, and who seemed to know about good times and bad times. As indeed he did, his career as an actor and TV figure having been broken by the anti-communist witch-hunt. After a spell as publicity man for black Chicago musicians, who knew what prejudice was, he found a berth in local radio, where big money was not needed and therefore had less say. Still, thanks to the mutual self-defence pact of Chicagoans against the headline-grabbers outside, nobody raised the spectre of communism against him when he became an established personality. He was, after all, part of that small community that exists in every big city, of reporters, commentators, urban autobiographers and other bar-room philosophers and watchers which recognizes its members.

Was this the best way for the foreigner to discover the USA? The men and women I met with or through people like Ralph Gleason and Studs Terkel were not ‘middle America’. They were people such as the majestic gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, whose press agent Studs had been and who trusted few men and even fewer whites. Religion among African-Americans is both the deepest faith, a public platform, a competitive art and a profit-making industry. Mahalia, an ample woman in her large bourgeois home, secure for the moment from the constant need of showbiz performers to put on an act in public, combined the quiet confidence of the soul close to Jesus with that of the successful pro. They were people such as ‘Lord Buckley’, then in the last months of his life, a plummy-voiced combination of Victorian circus ringmaster, hipster and reciter of Bible and Shakespeare in flawless black street-corner language, who played the two a.m. set at the Gate of Horn. They were people such as Bill Randle of Cleveland, who had introduced Elvis Presley to northern audiences, disc jockey by profession, amateur scholar of radio history, Indians and other Americana by vocation. (Why Cleveland, that endless strip along Lake Erie, has played such a large part in the promotion of rock and roll, still puzzles me.) The least one can say is that the America I got to know through such men and women was not boring.

The academic America which framed my professional experience of the USA over forty years was nothing like as good an introduction to the country, if only because the lives of university teachers, villagers within their small national and global villages, are pretty much alike in most developed countries, and so are the lives of students. American academics establish relationships with newcomers with great ease, since geographical mobility is built into their career structure, as, indeed, it is into the local lifestyle. The USA remains a country of men and women who change places, work and relationships to a far greater degree than elsewhere. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions universities were self-contained communities attached to small and medium-sized cities not much concerned with academic affairs, at least until the last third of the century, when it was discovered that the information revolution had turned universities into major generators of economic wealth and technical progress. They were communities into which immigrants used to university life could be easily, if superficially, integrated, provided they spoke enough English, which by the 1970s had become the usual international second language. An Indian physicist at Cornell, brother of a former student at Cambridge, told me: ‘If I were to take a chair in Britain, I would always feel a foreigner. I don’t feel a foreigner here, because in a sense everyone is a foreigner.’ Permanent communities largely composed of transients develop patterns of instant sociability, neighbourliness and everyday mutual help, but, as communities, do not tend to throw much light on what happens outside.

Looking back on forty years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: to know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though Marlene joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the USA teaching, reading in its marvellous libraries, writing or having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa Monica, but what I learned from personal acquaintance with America was acquired in the course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America , the best book ever written about the USA, was based on a journey of not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the USA the same as his.

III

If written today, de Tocqueville’s book would certainly be attacked as anti-American, since much of what he said about the USA was critical. Ever since it was founded, the USA has been a subject of attraction and fascination for the rest of the world, but also of detraction and disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the Cold War that people’s attitude to the USA has been judged essentially in terms of approval or disapproval, and not only by the sort of inhabitants who are also likely to seek out ‘un-American’ behaviour in their own fellow-citizens, but also internationally. It substituted the question ‘Are you with the USA?’ for the question ‘What do you think of the USA?’ What is more, no other country expects or asks such a question about itself. Since America, having won the Cold War against the USSR, implausibly decided on September 11 2001 that the cause of freedom was again engaged on another life-and-death struggle against another evil but this time spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any sceptical remarks about the US and its policy are, once again, likely to meet with outrage.

And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on approval! Internationally speaking, the USA was by any standards the success story among twentieth-century states. Its economy became the world’s largest, both pace- and pattern-setting, its capacity for technological achievement was unique, its research in both natural and social sciences, even its philosophers became increasingly dominant, and its hegemony of global consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It ended the century as the only surviving global power and empire. What is more, ‘in some ways the United States represent the best of the twentieth century’.⁷ If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by migrants, almost certainly America would be the preferred destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move to a country other than their own, certainly of those who know some English. As one of those who chose to work in the USA, my own case illustrates the point. Admittedly working in the USA, or liking to live in the USA – and especially in New York – does not imply the wish to become American although this is still difficult for many inhabitants of the United States to understand. It no longer implies a lasting choice for most people between one’s own country and another, as it did before the Second World War, or even until the air transport revolution in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e-mail revolution of the 1990s. Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or multicultural lives have become common.

Nor is money the only attraction. The USA promises greater openness to talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds. It is also the reminder of an old, if declining, tradition of free and egalitarian intellectual enquiry, as in the great New York Public Library, whose treasures are still, unlike in the other great libraries of the world, open to anyone who walks through its doors from Fifth Avenue or Forty-second Street. On the other hand, the human costs of the system for those outside it or who cannot ‘make it’ were equally evident in New York, at least until they were pushed out of middle-class sight, off the streets or into the unspeakable univers concentrationnaire of the largest jail population, per capita, in the world. When I first went to New York the Bowery was still a vast human refuse dump or ‘skid row’. In the 1980s it was more evenly distributed through the streets of Manhattan. Behind today’s casual mobile phone calls on the street I still hear the soliloquies of the unwanted and crazy on the pavements of New York in one of the city’s bad decades of inhumanity and brutality. Human wastage is the other face of American capitalism, in a country where ‘to waste’ is the common criminal slang for ‘to kill’.

Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the USA does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world. As the football-coach said: ‘Winning is not just the most important thing, it is all there is.’ That is one of the things that makes America such a very strange country for foreigners. Stopping for a brief holiday with the family in a small, poor, linguistically incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal, on the way back from a semester in New England, I still remember the sense of coming home to one’s own civilization. Geography had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least of these cultural peculiarities is the USA’s own sense of its strangeness (‘Only in America …’), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The question which preoccupies so many US historians of their own country, namely ‘What does it mean to be American?’, is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries. Neither national nor personal identity seemed as problematic to visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s, even those of complex central European cultural background, as they seemed in local academic discussions. ‘What is this identity crisis they are all talking about?’ Marlene asked me after one of them. She had never heard the term before we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.

Foreign academics who discovered the USA in the 1960s were probably more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today, for so many of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of US culture. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville’s day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA. What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors, which may account for the – by our standards – everyday crudeness, even brutality with which power is used in and by the USA to establish who can command whom.

It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country, in ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states simply were not with their own. American reality was and remains the overwhelming subject of the creative arts in the USA. The dream of somehow encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write ‘the great English novel’ or ‘the great French novel’, but authors in the US still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at ‘ the great American novel’, even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually, the man who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but an apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power, of whose significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol’s have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the USA, from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual arts tradition of the old world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of the USA to seize the totality of their country, Warhol’s vision is not that of the successful pursuit of happiness, ‘the American dream’ of American political jargon and psychobabble.

To what extent has the US changed in my lifetime, or at least in the forty-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we are constantly told, is not America and as Auden said, even those who could never be Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes to the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who in her twelve years in the city has never found it necessary to learn English. Like other New Yorkers Marlene and I would give tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the last time they had landed at JFK and where to eat this year, though (apart from a party or two) unlike the permanently resident friends – the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers – we would not entertain at home. Like a real New Yorker I would feel the loss of a favourite establishment like that of a relative, I would exchange gossip at the regular lunches of the New York Institute of Humanities with the mixture of writing people, publishers, show persons, professors and UN staff which makes up the local intellectual scene – for one of the major attractions of New York is that the life of the mind is not dominated by the academy. In short, there is no other place in the world like the Big Apple. Still, however untypical, New York could not possibly exist anywhere except the USA. Even its most cosmopolitan inhabitants are recognizably American, like our friend the late John Lindenbaum, haematologist in a Harlem hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh for a project of medical research, had travelled there with a collection of jazz records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more Jews in New York, and, unlike in large stretches of the US, more people there are aware of the existence of the rest of the world, but what I learned as a New Yorker is not fundamentally at odds with what little I know of the Midwest and California.

Curiously, the experience, what in the sixties they used to call ‘the vibes’, of the USA has changed much less than that of other countries I have known in the past half-century. There is no comparison between living in the Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and those cities in 2002; even Vienna, which deliberately hides its social and political transformation by turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even physically the skyline of London as it can be seen from where I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill has changed – Parliament is now barely visible – and Paris has not been the same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind of social and economic upheavals as other cities – de-industrialization, gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World – it neither feels nor even looks like it. This is surprising when, as every New Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life such as the Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York lower-middle-class institutions as the Gimbel department stores, and the transformation of Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan skyline is still essentially that of the city of the 1930s, especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition has disappeared, the World Trade Center.

Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the USA is part of global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. These changes there looked less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass consumer society which did not arrive in western Europe until the 1950s, was not new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm divided the way Britons lived and thought before and after the middle fifties, for the USA the 1950s were, or at least looked like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of twentieth century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as before, though some sections of its citizens – mainly the college-educated – began to think differently about it, and, as the countries of the European Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which European tourists came into contact began to look less ‘advanced’, and even a bit tatty. California did not seem fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in 1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was London which became one after the 1950s. The details in the great carpet of the USA have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run.

As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its habitus or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an eighteenth-century constitution reinforced by two centuries of talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the USA are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states in 2002. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has also made the government of the USA largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid effective national decision-making, not least by the President, is almost impossible. The US, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough in the twentieth century to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able Presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment’s notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of US and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. This has created the foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the USSR, the USA has quietly prepared to function as the world’s only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the USA today. This is why, as I write this in April 2002, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world.

Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly resistant to following the model of US politics and society. This is probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on the universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic ideology and constitution suggest. So far from being a clear example which the rest of the world can imitate, the USA, however powerful and influential, remains an unending process, distorted by big money and public emotion, of tinkering with institutions, public and private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in the unalterable text of a 1787 constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it. Since puberty I have spent more of my time in the USA than in any country other than Britain. All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also.

Our problem is rather that the US empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living at the apex of the ‘American Century’. As I am eighty-five years of age I am unlikely to see its solution.

23

Coda

I

Biographies end with the subject’s death. Autobiographies have no such natural termination. However, this one has the advantage of ending at the moment of an undeniable and dramatic caesura in world history, in consequence of the attack of September 11 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Probably no other unexpected event in world history has been directly experienced by more human beings. I saw it on a London hospital television screen as it happened. For an old and sceptical historian born in the year of the Russian Revolution, it had everything that was bad about the twentieth century: massacres, high but unreliable technology, the announcements that a global struggle to the death between the causes of God and Satan was now taking place once again as real life imitated Hollywood spectaculars. Public mouths flooded the western world with froth as hacks searched for words about the unsayable and unfortunately found them.

Magnified by the worldwide images and rhetoric of the American age of media and politics, a sudden gap appeared between the way the USA and the rest of the world understood what had happened on that awful day. The world merely saw a particularly dramatic terror attack with a vast number of victims and a momentary public humiliation of the USA. Otherwise the situation was no different from what it had been since the Cold War ended, and certainly no cause for alarm for the globe’s only superpower.¹ Washington announced that September 11 had changed everything, and in doing so, actually did change everything, by in effect declaring itself the single-handed protector of a world order and definer of threats against it. Whoever failed to accept this was a potential or actual enemy. This was not unexpected, since the strategies of US global military empire had been in preparation since the late 1980s, indeed by the people who are now applying them. Nevertheless, September 11 proved that we all live in a world with a single global hyperpower that had finally decided that, since the end of the USSR, there are no short-term limits on its strength and no limits on its willingness to use it, although the purposes of using it – except to manifest supremacy – are quite unclear. The twentieth century is over. The twenty-first opens on twilight and obscurity.

There is no better place than a hospital bed, quintessential locus of a captive victim, to reflect on the extraordinary inundation of Orwellian words and images that floods over print and screen at such a time, all of it designed to deceive, conceal and delude, including those who produce it. They ranged from simple lies to the dynamic evasiveness with which diplomats, politicians and generals – and indeed all of us today – fend off public questions that we do not want or are afraid to answer honestly. They ranged from the patently disingenuous, such as the pretence that Sadam Hussein (admittedly an inviting target) must be overthrown because of Iraq’s world-threatening ‘weapons of mass destruction’, to the justifications of US policy by those who should know better, on the grounds that it got rid of Stalinism in the past. That the policy-makers and strategists of Washington are today talking in terms of the purest politics of power – one has only to listen to them off, and sometimes even on, the record – accentuates the sheer effrontery of presenting the establishment of a US global empire as the defensive reaction of a civilization about to be overrun by nameless barbarian horrors unless it destroys ‘international terrorism’. But, of course, in the world where the borders between ENRON and the US government are hazy, believing one’s own lies, at least at the moment of telling, makes them sound more convincing to others.

As I lay in bed, surrounded by sound and paper, I concluded that the world of 2002 needs historians more than ever, especially sceptical ones. Perhaps reading the perambulations of an old member of the species through his lifetime may assist the young to face the darkening prospects of the twenty-first century not only with the requisite pessimism, but with a clearer eye, a sense of historical memory and a capacity to stand away from current passions and sales pitches.

Here age helps. In itself, it makes me a statistical rarity, since in 1998 the number of human beings in the world aged eighty or above was estimated at 66 millions, which is roughly 1 per cent of the global population. Merely by virtue of long life, the history that belongs to books for others is part of the lives and memories of this tiny minority. For a potential reader just about to enter the age of higher education, that is to say born in the early or middle 1980s, most of the twentieth century belongs to a remote past from which little has survived into actual consciousness except historic costume dramas on film and videotape, and mental images of bits and pieces from the century which, for one reason or another, have become part of collective myth as episodes from the Second World War have become in Britain. Most of it belongs not to life but to the preparation of school examinations. The cold winter day when Adolf Hitler came to power in Berlin, which I remember vividly, is immeasurably distant for twenty-year-olds. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, during which I married, can have no human meaning in their lives, nor indeed in the lives of many of their parents, since no human being aged forty or less was even born when it occurred. These things are not, as they are for those of my age, part of a chronological succession of events that defines the shape of our private life in a public world, but at best a subject for intellectual understanding, at worst part of an indiscriminate set of things that happened ‘before my time’.

Historians of my age are guides to a crucial patch of the past, that other country where they did things differently, because we have lived there. We may not know more about the history of the period than younger colleagues who write about our lifetime in the light of sources not then available to us or, in practice, to anybody. Least of all can we rely on memory, even when age has not eroded it. Unaided by written documentation, it is almost certain to get the facts wrong. On the other hand, we were there, and we know what it felt like, and this gives us a natural immunity to the anachronisms of those who were not.

Living for over eighty years of the twentieth century has been a natural lesson in the mutability of political power, empires and institutions. I have seen the total disappearance of the European colonial empires, not least the greatest of all, the British Empire, never larger and more powerful than in my childhood, when it pioneered the strategy of keeping order in places like Kurdistan and Afghanistan by aerial bombardment. I have seen great world powers relegated to the minor divisions, the end of a German Empire that expected to last for a thousand years, and of a revolutionary power that expected to last for ever. I am unlikely to see the end of the ‘American century’, but it is a safe bet that some readers of this book will.

What is more, those who are old have seen the fashions come and go. Since the end of the USSR it has become political orthodoxy and conventional wisdom that there is no alternative to a society of individualist capitalism, and political systems of liberal democracy, which are believed to be organically associated with it, have become the standard form of government almost everywhere. Before 1914 this was also widely believed, though not as widely as today. However, for most of the twentieth century any of these assumptions seemed quite implausible. Capitalism itself seemed on the edge of the abyss. Bizarre as it may seem today, between 1930 and 1960 level-headed observers assumed that the state-commanded economic system of the USSR under the Five-Year Plans, primitive and inefficient as even the most sympathetic visitors could see it was, represented a global alternative model to western ‘free enterprise’. There were as few votes in the word ‘capitalism’ then as in the word ‘communism’ today. Level-headed observers considered it might actually outproduce it. I am not surprised to find myself once again among a generation that distrusts capitalism, though it no longer believes in our alternative to it.