Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [174]
Nevertheless, careers and freight-trains do not roll across the land at an absolutely steady rate. The war had delayed the start of my own career, and the Cold War had slowed it down considerably. It continued in the doldrums, but by the middle 1960s, when other offers in Britain and abroad began to come in, this was so eccentric as to be widely regarded as scandalous. 1 Still, I had begun to publish books only in my forties, and by the time I could actually call myself ‘Professor’ in Britain, I was in my middle fifties, a time of life when most professionals have got as far as they, and the world, expects them to get in their career. At that stage for most of us the promise is in the past, and so is such achievement as it has produced. Professionally speaking, people in this position are left to face half a lifetime of endless tomorrows no better than today, apart from the gowns and ribbons – professional and maybe public honours – which (at least in the humanities) usually signify that the honorand’s future will add nothing to his or her past, except the slow decline of age. World war and Cold War saved me from all this. By an unexpected twist of fortune, they prolonged the period of youth and promise into middle age. At the same time remarriage and children gave a new start to my private life.
In fact, only the war had genuinely delayed my career – but probably no more than that of most men in my age group. (In Britain it had actually advanced the prospects of women graduates.) The Cold War of the 1950s blocked jobs and publishers’ contracts, but ‘on the street’, as the fin-de-siècle phrase has it, that is to say among the working historians, my reputation was serious from the start, certainly in the unofficial world of the younger historians. I was clearly a rising star in the rather narrower community of the Marxist ones.
Pride and intellectual vanity made me worry whether my reputation was carried only by the sympathies of the left, or rested only on the relative scarcity of Marxists to fill the niche which, since the Second World War, even conventional history reserved for this version of a recognized ‘opposition’. It is not that I minded then or mind now being identified as ‘Hobsbawm the Marxist historian’, the label which I still carry round my neck to this day, like the decanters circulating after dinner in combination rooms to prevent dons from confusing their port with their sherry. Young historians need to have their attention drawn to the materialist interpretation of history as much, perhaps even more, today, when even left-wing academic fashions dismiss it as in the days when it was being damned as totalitarian propaganda. After all, I have been trying to persuade people for over half a century that there is more to Marxist history than they have hitherto thought, and if the association of one historian’s name with it helps to do so, so much the better. What troubled my vanity was rather the fear of a mere ghetto reputation, such as that from which figures prominent inside another characteristic twentieth-century cultural ghetto, the Roman Catholic community in Britain, have so often found it difficult, even impossible, to escape. G. K. Chesterton, the dimensions of whose talent have been concealed from