Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [72]
In almost every way except intelligence and political devotion James Klugmann was the opposite of the romantic, heroic, highly colourful image of his partner in leadership, John Cornford. Bespectacled, soft-voiced, with a demure wit, always looking as though he was about to smile, he lived alone in a hotel room just by the Odéon theatre. As far as I know he continued a monastic existence as an unattached man for the rest of his life, surrounded, when the occasion arose, by admiring juniors. I am told he made sexual jokes in the company of intimates – of whom I was never one – and, since he had been at Gresham’s School, the nursery of more than one eminent homosexual of his day, he may very well have been queer, but one never associated him with any kind of sexual activity. His only obvious passion, at least in his postwar British life, when I saw more of him, was book-collecting. His personal remoteness added to the respect in which we, and indeed most of those who had anything to do with him, held him. What did one know about him? He gave nothing away. The only obvious thing about him was his capacity for remarkably lucid and simple exposition, and the air of authority he exuded – until he was ruined by the break between Stalin and Tito. Not that I can recall much political conversation with James in pre-war Paris in the intervals between work, when we sat in cafés playing chess – he was good at explaining why he beat us – or otherwise taking a break from meetings and the duplicating machine in bars playing table football, Jews playing Asians.
Almost certainly it was the RME that laid the foundations for James’s extraordinary wartime career as the key figure in British relations with Tito’s Partisans. Left-wing student movements of significance were rare enough in continental Europe, where the typical political stance of students (but not necessarily of university teachers) in the 1930s was a right-wing nationalism shading over into fascism. The great exception were the communist students of Yugoslavia, and especially the university of Belgrade, one of whose leaders, Ivo (Lolo) Ribar, a central figure in what would become the Partisan movement, was a familiar figure at the RME. Probably no man west of Moscow, and certainly no man in Cairo, knew more about who was who in Yugoslav communism and how to make contact with them.
After Stalin’s break with Tito, James was forced, almost certainly by direct pressure from Moscow, to make his own irreparable break by writing an utterly implausible and insincere book, From Trotsky to Tito . His reputation as the only first-rate intellectual (other than Palme Dutt) to reach the Party leadership, never recovered. From then on he took no risks or initiatives and said nothing, and ceased to be a serious force even within the small CPGB. The Party put him in charge of Education (assisted by our old student organizer Jack Cohen), a job he did brilliantly well, for he was a born teacher. He was far too intelligent and perceptive not to feel the disappointment, indeed the pity of his admirers from the 1930s for a man from whom so much had been expected. He had had the stuffing knocked out of him. Only in 1975 was there a last flash of the old James Klugmann. British intelligence, which had periodically got at him