Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [19]
The truth is that for him the years in Vienna were a disaster. In my mother’s words: ‘So much worry, so much misery, so many disappointments, and then for it to end like that.’ With a regular salary from a regular, not too demanding, job he would have been a happy man, a charming companion, an asset in any milieu that appreciated sport, a little music and fun. Such things were available to men without means or professional qualifications in the formal or informal outposts of the British Empire but not in postwar Vienna. Perhaps, in the distant, irrecoverable world before 1914, he would have been found some job in or through the then prosperous network of the grandparents’ families. After all, one has to do something for one’s daughter’s husband, even if he is a bit of a schlemiel. In the 1920s this was no longer possible. He was on his own. Few people I know have been as unsuited to earning their living in a pitiless world as my father. By the end there can have been very little confidence left in him, if only because nobody believed in him any more. After his death his wife took momentary comfort in the thought that ‘it wouldn’t have got better in the future, only worse. He has been spared that.’
He did not leave much behind except his boxing cups, his season ticket, with photo ID, for the Vienna transport system and a substantial collection of English books, mostly the paperbacks produced by the German firm of Tauchnitz for sale exclusively outside Britain, and therefore, I assume, acquired in Egypt. I cannot recall any new Tauchnitzes coming into the house in Vienna, but perhaps that was because there was no money for them. As I recall, they were mostly late Victorian and Edwardian titles, a lot of Kipling stories (but not Kim), which I read avidly but without understanding, some lesser pre-1918 authors and works on travel and adventure, among which I still remember a now forgotten epic of old-time whaling, The Cruise of the Cachalot. There were also some hardbacks, among which I recall Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through. I never opened it. And there was a thick bound volume of Tennyson’s poetry, which looked like a present or school prize. What my father gave to me came through those books, which presumably he (with or without my mother) had chosen or chosen to preserve. Did he himself read to me ‘The Revenge’ (‘In Flores on the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay’) which, with ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Sunset and Evening Star’ and, of course, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ are the only poems I can retrace to that Tennyson volume? If so, it represents the only direct intellectual contact with him that I can remember.
However, I still have one of the few surviving documents of his life. It is a 1921 entry in one of his sister-in-law’s confessional albums, those sets of answers to questions about oneself which were still popular, at least in central Europe. I reprint the questions and answers. They may serve as his epitaph.
FAVOURITE QUALITY IN MAN: Physical strength
FAVOURITE QUALITY IN WOMAN: Virtue
YOUR IDEA OF HAPPINESS: To have all wants fulfilled
YOUR IDEA OF UNHAPPINESS: Unluck
WHAT ARE YOU BEST AND WORST AT: Missing opportunities. Grasping them.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SCIENCE: None
WHAT TENDENCY IN ART DO YOU LIKE: Modern
WHAT SOCIAL LIFE DO YOU PREFER? My family
WHAT DO YOU HATE MOST? Modern society
FAVOURITE WRITER/COMPOSER: —
FAVOURITE BOOK AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENT: Piano
FAVOURITE HERO IN FICTION OR HISTORY: Earl of Warwick
FAVOURITE COLOUR AND FLOWER: Rose
FAVOURITE FOOD AND DRINK: —
FAVOURITE