Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [175]
From about 1960 on it became increasingly evident that I was getting beyond a ghetto reputation. My first book, Primitive Rebels (1959), was well received in the USA, both among the historians and the social scientists. Within a few years it had been translated into German, French and Italian. My second book, The Age of Revolution 1789– 1848 (1962), aimed at a broader public, was a success. At least it impressed an established literary agent, the bulky, white-haired and moustached bon vivant David Higham, enough to ask me whether I wanted to join his stable and to offer me periodic lunches at his window table in the Etoile restaurant in Charlotte Street. As I write this both the Etoile (with much the same menu) and the table are still there, under the supervision of another protector of agents and authors, Elena, whose reputation as the queen mother of literary restaurants had been acquired earlier in Soho, and I am still under the wing of old Higham’s successor in the firm still named after him, my friend Bruce Hunter. History may move at the speed of a missile, but some continuities remain. Since The Age of Revolution was part of an international co-production series organized by George Weidenfeld, it would have been translated very quickly anyway, whatever its merits. Nevertheless the seven translations and foreign editions that appeared in the 1960s were helpful, and the book was well received everywhere. I later discovered that a notoriously poor Spanish translation in 1964 was welcomed by the rapidly growing anti-Franco movement in the Spanish universities, since, unlike most Marxist publications, it was legally available.
I published a good deal in the 1960s: a collection of earlier pieces on the history of labour (Labouring Men, 1964), a text on British economic history since the eighteenth century (Industry and Empire , 1968), a small study of the myth and reality of the world’s Robin Hoods, written in Wales as the Russians put an end to the Prague Spring ( Bandits, 1969), and in the same year, jointly with my friend George Rudé, a rather larger research monograph on the English farm-labourers’ rising of 1830 (Captain Swing, 1969). By 1971 when I finally got the official professorial title in the University of London, I was already entering the zone of academies (at least in the USA) and honorary degrees (at least in Sweden).
So by the 1970s I was an academically, if not politically, respectable and recognized figure. That decade reinforced this situation. My membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain was by then seen as little more than the personal peculiarity of a well-known historian, one of that new species the jet-plane academic. Only America refused to forget about Hobsbawm the subversive, for, until the abrogation of the Smith Act in the late 1980s, I remained ineligible for a visa to enter the USA and required a ‘waiver’ of this ineligibility every time I went there, which was more or less every year. I was a founder and active member of the editorial board of one of the most prestigious English-language historical journals, a member of the councils and committees of learned historical societies. Seminars and graduate courses in London, doctoral students, national and international, kept the new professor busy. The invitations to lectures and appointments elsewhere continued and multiplied. In my last year at Birkbeck I was simultaneously attached to establishments in London, Paris (at the Collège de France and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and the USA (as ‘Professor-at-large’ of Cornell University). It was all the more enjoyable, even if slightly absurd, since this take-off in my professional