Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [70]
Hence the 1930s were for us very far from the ‘low and dishonest decade’ of the disenchanted poet Auden. For us it was a time when the good cause confronted its enemies. We enjoyed it, even when, as for most of radical Cambridge, it did not occupy the bulk of our time, and we did a certain amount of world-saving as a matter of course, because it was the thing to do. ‘On the other hand we avoided that strain of unhappiness which today frustrates people whose instinct it is to feel about world affairs exactly as we did then, but who find it impossible to translate their feelings into action, as we did.’7
In doing so we ‘distributed our emotions and energies evenly over the public and private sectors of the landscape’, or rather we made no sharp distinction between these two sectors. It is true that we sang, to a Cole Porter-like tune:
Let’s liquidate love Let’s say from now on That all our affection’s For the workers alone. Let’s liquidate love Till the revolution Until then love is An un-bolshevik thing.
Nevertheless, since close comradeship between emancipated men and women was part of the cause, we did not live up to this aspiration, even though Cambridge communists’ private lives, at least among the more specialized politicians, seem to have been less highly coloured than contemporary Oxford ones. The ethos of the CUSC and the Party was, of course, overwhelmingly heterosexual as, indeed, outside theatrical circles and King’s College, it was among the undergraduates generally. In the 1930s even the Apostles had left the era of the Edwardian ‘higher sodomy’ behind. No doubt some of us were not as naïve as Henry Ferns, who claims that ‘I never once encountered a Communist in Cambridge who was a homosexual’, but it is true that inside the Comintern (and still less in the CUSC) one did not advertise membership of the Homintern. It was treated on both sides as a private matter. I can think of at least two friends I first knew in the pre-war Party of whose lifelong homosexuality I was simply not aware until after the war.
There was no sharp division between term and vacation. Students did not do much paid vacation work yet, other than tour-guiding for linguists. The odd grant was available – one of these paid for my study trip to Tunisia and Algeria in 1938 – and I financed the long vacation of 1939 with my share of the profits of editing Granta, which amounted to some £50. (Thanks to the May Week number, summer term was the time to be editor. At the end of each term the editor pocketed what was left after the technical owners, the printing firm of Messrs Foister and Jagg had been paid for production and distribution.
My own vacations, broadly speaking, were divided between the London School of Economics and France. The LSE, or at least its main building in Houghton Street, Aldwych, is still recognizably what it was some sixty years ago, even down to the survival of a small snack-bar immediately to the left of the main entrance, which in those days was known as Marie’s café, where the student activists used to discuss politics or try to win converts, usually observed by a silent lone central European rather older than ourselves, apparently one of those ‘eternal students’ who hang around inner-city campuses, but who was in fact the totally unknown and unconsidered Norbert Elias, just about to publish his great work on The Process of Civilization in Switzerland. Academic Britain