Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [190]
A few years my junior, Henri came from what he described as a peasant family in the Orléanais, published his own and his friends’ poetry in small plaquettes or pamphlets with drawings by Helène, for which he also made me write a piece on jazz, and at that time worked for the nationalized railways. He followed Lefebvre in studying sociology and urbanism and eventually taught at the Beaux Arts, thus catching up to some extent with his older brother André, a bona fide thesis-producing academic from the start who was to become the world expert on Islamic guilds and a pillar of French oriental scholarship. Helène, both more cosmopolitan and dramatically Parisian, who had spent the war with her family in Brazil, worked hard to make herself a painter. Frankly, she was never much good, but although people did not like to say so to a charming and extremely attractive young woman, I suspect that she was too intelligent not to be aware of her limitations, and suffered accordingly. Meanwhile she earned her living by working at the Brazilian consulate. Her Polish father, with whom relations were tense, was in business, her brother was something in couture, or at least the friend of one of the first of the beautiful Japanese models who anticipated erotic multiculturalism. Perhaps this helps to explain how she managed to wear Balmain at a time when haute couture labels had not yet been licensed to every department store. Like Henri she was a communist, in a cellule in the proletarian 13th arrondissement, but she had begun on the periphery of the Palestine Jewish terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang, or at least the extreme left-wing part of it. She retained an affinity for direct action. During the period of Algerian OAS terrorism she visited me in London, while she was making purchases of timers on behalf of what she said was a left-wing anti-OAS bombing campaign. I asked where she would get them. ‘At Harrods, naturally,’ she said. Of course, where else?
Though some of the people in the Raymonds’ network were to become well known in their fields, essentially it operated on the lower slopes of the Parisian left-wing intelligentsia, although Helène plausibly claimed to be au fait with the scandals on the more elevated peaks, the gossip about literary prizes and who was on the skids in the CP leadership. It read Le Monde and sometimes still L’Humanité, but most of the people we knew (as distinct from gossiping about them) were not likely to be asked to sign those manifestos of intellectuals on public issues which were so characteristic of the times before the eminent ‘media intellectuals’ had their own regular columns in the dailies and weeklies. It was very much a pre-1968 milieu and the 1950s and 1960s saw it gradually crumble as the old left splintered and shifted over Stalin and Algeria, and the old guard of the French CP increasingly found anyone suggesting change uncongenial, especially intellectuals. My communist friends tended to move from the Party to a smaller body, the Party of Socialist Unity (PSU) and when that proved unviable, into full-time research, writing or, if they wanted to remain in politics, the old Socialist Party. Since I did not then know some of the ex-communists who were to move directly into a passionate anti-communism, or had met them only casually, I was unable to follow the tracks of