Then, unexpectedly, Bob Rowthorn came striding towards us down the street – a coincidence which transformed the cerebral holiday and my future. When Bob wondered if we would like to go to see Jules et Jim, François Truffaut’s film about a love affair between two men and a woman, played by Jeanne Moreau, Judith’s serious face broke into a mischievous smile, which made her cheekbones even more Bardotesque. Judith knew, though I did not, that Bob fancied me.
Bob was then twenty-three, which seemed to me at nineteen to be immensely old. From a lower-middle-class family in Newport, he had gained a Welsh scholarship to Jesus College and then a brilliant maths degree. Between 1960 and 1961 he had studied the history of science at Berkeley, California, which was just beginning to stir with the first signs of student radicalism. Through the left-wing friends he met there, Bob, who had gone a moderate supporter of CND, had returned a committed socialist.
I have a photograph of him taken in a booth in Paris, looking wild-eyed and existential, but this was most untypical. While Bob was philosophically intense about ideas and possessed a mathematical tendency towards dreaminess, he was not at all interested in bohemianism. Instead he approached ordinary life with ebullience and vigour. He brought a matter-of-fact manner – his parents were originally from Yorkshire – to the kind of abstruse theories which would intimidate most people.
I never saw him afraid of thinking, or afraid to admit ignorance. I admired his intellectual courage and was fascinated by his appetite for learning. Bob would grip concepts that I drifted around within, and create ordered patterns amidst my habitual chaos. He was doing some maths thesis about tying up the loose ends of bits of string which I could not understand at all. Appalled by my maths – he declared I had a maths age of seven – he set about teaching me Pythagoras’s theorem, which had passed me by at Hunmanby.
The big mathematical breakthrough for me, though, was Bob’s capacity to calculate safe periods and his scientific approach to female anatomy. He had methodically read the American sexologist Alfred Charles Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, which promoted the clitoris. This was typical of Bob’s approach to knowledge, which was in a straight and logical line. Need to know about sex? Read Kinsey. Want to learn to cook? Study a cookbook. When we got to know each other better, he decided to find out about nineteenth-century British history, so he went to the library and borrowed an economic-history textbook. ‘You need to read Mill and Coleridge, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot,’ I wailed. But he didn’t like roundabout routes and couldn’t get used to nineteenth-century English.
Back in London, the rational Bob proceeded to organize me into birth control. He found out about Mary Adams, an unusually enlightened Fabian socialist doctor who would fit diaphragms for young, unmarried women. I was so nervous when I arrived for my appointment that they thought I must be pregnant. A brisk, posh-voiced Mary Adams reassured me by chatting away as she demonstrated how to squirt the jelly into the brown rubber diaphragm. Her mother had been a militant suffragette and she had once waited in trepidation because, like Guy Fawkes, her mother had planned to blow up Parliament. Unlike Guy Fawkes, however, she had never been caught. ‘You remind me of my friend Ellen Wilkinson,’ declared Mary Adams, shaking her head and washing her hands. I had not heard of the red-haired, left-wing MP who led hunger marches then. But the idea of a long legacy of rebel women arrived with my diaphragm. Freedom from sexual fear combined with political subversion. ‘Always take it with you,’ Mary Adams admonished me as I turned to go. ‘Even if you just go for a walk in the woods.’
Bob was not only a source of information on politics and birth control, he was a believer in the emancipation of women – an unusual outlook in the early sixties. His mother, a hairdresser, had always worked and at school he had been impressed by Plato; Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had done the rest. The result was to be a reassuringly systematic approach to sexual relationships, which he insisted should be based on reason and honesty.
Bob’s views were a welcome liberation from the guilt and ignorance I had previously encountered. I consequently endorsed his conviction that I must be emancipated, while occasionally finding its application too severe. When Bob took me to visit his friend Robin Blackburn, who was involved in the New Left Review, I started chatting to Robin’s younger sister Lindy, then a glamorous London sixteen-year-old. She gave me valuable advice about putting on mascara. ‘If you do your whole lashes it looks common,’ she explained. (I did my whole lashes.) ‘You put it on lightly on the tips.’ I marvelled how Lindy Blackburn could know stuff already which I hadn’t even learned at nineteen. Bob, however, simply could not understand the importance of such knowingness, and became very upset and bothered that I was going to become all sophisticated and London’. My mascara remained a bone of contention. To my fury, he once threw it out of the window in an argument. Simone de Beauvoir might not wear mascara, but Simone de Beauvoir didn’t have ginger eyelashes.
Bob also equated emancipation with women being athletic and independent. This meant they would accompany him up mountains and on canoe trips, but never make demands on him which would interrupt his work. Never very athletic, I failed dismally on the climbing and Eskimo rolls, but the last thing I wanted was to be dependent and I was happy with Bob’s habit of hard work. That August we went to stay with Tony in a rather chaotic house in Cambridge. Every day Bob and I left the domestic confusion of an erratic geyser and flooded drains to head off to the reference library together. Thanks to Bob, I did most of the work I hadn’t done in the year before. A woman living in the house was desperately trying to give herself an abortion with hot baths and gin. I shuddered to myself. Thank goodness for that diaphragm.
Back in Leeds, I went groggily off to meet Bar in York after having my wisdom teeth taken out by the dentist. I was bewildered by her absence at the station, but recognized an art student I’d met with her in the coffee bar we frequented in the Shambles. He’d found out that I was coming and persuaded her to let him meet me. I laughed so much at his cheek I let myself be seduced.
Dutifully abiding by the policy of honesty, I told Bob, who was furious – particularly because he had not got off with a friend in Newport because of me. ‘It just happened,’ I said in my defence, with an added mumble about wisdom teeth. This made Bob even crosser. Sartre had said you should be responsible for your actions; things didn’t just happen. We were in the London underground, having our first row, and I stared across at the adverts feeling antagonistic to existentialist philosophers and wishing I was somewhere else. Bob’s arguments were always incredibly convincing but I had a tug of resistance. Some things did just happen in my opinion and sometimes emotions didn’t fit the theories.
I had acquired a pessimistic conviction that any man I really liked was destined to disappear. But Bob surprised me by being emphatic that he wanted us to stay together. Gradually I came to accept that this time it was going to go on. Through Bob I moved into a new circle of friends which included Robin Blackburn, his younger brother Richard and Gareth Stedman Jones.
I had already encountered Gareth in my first week at St Hilda’s, when Anne Henderson had organized a blind date at the pictures. He had surprised me then by saying that he had been chalking in Paris – he had a more scholarly air than the typical pavement artist. When I asked him what he had chalked, ‘Victory to the FLN,’ came the committed reply – he had supported the Algerian anti-colonial movement. Whereupon conversation had stopped. Like Bob, these young left-wing intellectuals all possessed much clearer maps of intellectual terrains than my laborious and messy collages, and they set about arguing me into socialism. Gareth informed me it was definitely Sartre not Camus who was politically committed. But what about the individual’s inner conscience, I worried? Gareth let out an exasperated, ‘Pouf!’ I then announced that I didn’t think I could be a socialist because I didn’t love the working class. Gareth replied rather testily that socialism was nothing to do with love. I realized I had said something that sounded s
illy. Of course you couldn’t love a class. What I had wanted to say was that being a socialist must involve different ways of relating and feeling towards people.
On reflection I decided that a lot of my problems with the working class came from my being an outsider. ‘You’re a rough-looking twot,’ said a Leeds voice as I marched through Briggate in my beatnik outfit. I decided I would try and modify my clothes a bit. I couldn’t just be an impersonal socialist.
My other difficulty was that socialists were not interested in mysticism. One day when Richie Blackburn was visiting Gareth, we became embroiled in a long rambling argument about Marx and Blake. Richie, despite being ill with flu, defended dialectical materialism, while I maintained you had to be able to see the world in a grain of sand. I went away deciding I could be a Marxist after all and Richie told me later he was converted to the mysticism of Blake.
Just after I met Bob, I had come across a biography of the American anarchist Emma Goldman by Richard Drinnon displayed in the Leeds reference library. Attracted by the title, Rebel in Paradise, and the connection between her anarchism and personal life, I was delighted by the lesbian writer Margaret Anderson’s comment, ‘In 1916 Emma Goldman was sent to prison for advocating that women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.’ I had found a political justification for being a chatterbox.
Sex, however, proved to be less straightforward than I had thought. I was getting worried as the months went by – no orgasms. Perhaps I was frigid after all. My brain kept monitoring for orgasms; tick-tock. Bob began talking about giving up mathematics, becoming a development economist, doing something useful, going to India. Going to India. I panicked – which meant I became dependent. Things were not going well.
Early in the icy winter of 1963 we went to visit Bar in Bristol. When her outraged landlord discovered we were staying, he threatened to turn us out in the snow. Eventually he relented and let us use a sleeping bag downstairs. All the upheaval made me too flustered to bother about orgasms, when wham! I solemnly recorded this event in a letter to Tony about orange lights.
In the bath back at St Hilda’s, I was horrified to discover a creature on me. The college doctor told me I had crabs – that sleeping bag had been lousy. ‘You don’t look the type to be going with GIs,’ he remarked jocularly. I had to apply a yellow liquid called Suleo, put my clothes in a suitcase and cover them with the lethal disinfectant, DDT, and boil my underwear. That year I had been put in the St Hilda’s hostel, which was more tightly regulated than college. I managed to sneak down into the basement late at night to boil in secret. But the DDT was spotted and I was interrogated. ‘I thought I saw a moth,’ I muttered. ‘It’s not the season for moths,’ boomed my donnish persecutor.
During the crabs scare, the social historian Raphael Samuel, who was teaching at Ruskin College, gave a lecture on the Irish potato famine of the 1840s at the historical Stubbs Society. The small, skinny, dark figure with a lock of black hair falling persistently over his nose had a hypnotic aspect. Raphael kept shifting papers from one great pile to another across the table and, like spectators at Wimbledon, we watched them go faster and faster as his time ran out. His talk was a devastating tour de force in which he described how belief in free trade and opportunism had combined. In the Keynesian ethos of 1963,it seemed incredible to me that ideas of laissez-faire could have been maintained amidst so much suffering. Occasionally, however, my mind would wander into awful speculation. What kind of penalties would there be if you passed on your crabs to a don?
Sitting at the Stubbs Society meeting, I was unaware that I had found the hidden connection between Bob’s socialist circle and my friends from the Monaco. Raphael had established the Partisan coffee bar as a cultural centre for the non-aligned New Left which had developed after Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin’s atrocities in 1956. More cautious members of the New Left had opposed the idea. But Raphael, who was prone to breeding creative but not necessarily democratic bees in his bonnet, had disregarded their advice. Predictably the Partisan had proved to be an economic disaster, even though rebel youths, bums, drifters and folk singers had a very good time there.
After the break with the Communist Party in 1956, it had seemed that a new kind of radical movement was going to emerge and New Left clubs were set up in many towns and cities. The journal the New Reasoner, edited by Edward Thompson and the historian John Saville, provided an important focus. In December 1959 it had merged with the Oxford-based Universities and Left Review, in which Raphael and Stuart Hall were involved, to form the New Left Review.By 1962, however, the New Left Review was fraught with practical and theoretical tensions and its relationship with the left clubs, scattered about the land, had become tenuous and uncomfortable.
One’s point of entry into a body of ideas exerts an important influence, though this is far from obvious at the time. My socialist consciousness was to be crucially affected by the New Left, but in a period when it was being rent by divisions. The people I was meeting, Edward and Dorothy, Raphael and Robin, were in opposing camps and nursing painful wounds. However, the New Left was officially unsectarian, so I would pick up only vague rumbles of schisms and bitterness. For years afterwards I would come across various fragments from the New Left and would slowly reconstruct with whom they had connected or conflicted.
One consequence of being politicized during the break-up of a social movement rather than in a triumphalist moment like 1968 was that, deep in my bones, I never expected the glory days to last. I also learned how to survive amidst disintegration. Newly discovered landmarks would suddenly dissolve without any clear explanation. Bob and Gareth took me to some meetings of the magazine New University, which was a kind of student wing of the New Left. I was no sooner beginning to feel involved than it had gone, followed shortly afterwards by the less glossy paper, the Messenger.
My political awareness was thus to be formed amidst an implicit sense of disappointment about the New Left which I only partially understood. Lawrence Daly, the Scottish miners’ leader, called at the Thompsons’ house in Halifax when I was there one day. He had stood as an independent socialist candidate in his native West Fife and the New Left (the activist bits of it) had campaigned for him. Aged twenty, I found myself in the front room listening to these two extraordinary men talking, only half understanding the implications of what they were saying. Lawrence Daly, dark, burly and balding, sat heavy and still in the armchair, a powerful, purposeful man. Edward, in contrast, spoke and moved quickly, jabbing the air as if he was trying to break through some invisible barrier. They were talking about a break in the New Left, about how they had wanted a very different, much broader movement. Their lives had gone separate ways; Lawrence was preoccupied with the union now. Edward looked down, his head on one side, and said that a chance had been missed. I was too shy to ask what he meant. ‘We failed,’ he remarked to the floor, and then turned and looked at me as if they were including me in the conversation. Did he think I could do something? What could I possibly do? But that annoying little Jiminy Cricket voice said, ‘You’ll just have to try.’ ‘Methodism,’ Edward said to me three decades later, ‘gives you this terrible sense of responsibility.’
A persistent intimation of having arrived just a little too late remained with me. One day when I was visiting the Thompsons Edward gathered a bundle of New Reasoners from the late fifties and gave them to me. The feel of New Reasoner, engaged and enthusiastic, was very different from that of the New Left Review, which inclined towards cool overviews, not the creation of a new politics. ‘What will distinguish the New Left will be its rupture with the tradition of factionalism, and its renewal of the tradition of open association, socialist education and activity,’ Edward had written in May 1959. But where had the damn thing gone? I was to spend the rest of my life on the look-out for a socialist journal like the New Reasoner, where Karl Marx and William Blake could meet between two covers.
For someone my age, 1956 seemed a very long time ago indeed. Khrush
chev’s revelations about Stalinism and the Hungarian uprising were to me memories from childhood. I had watched refugees walking with their bundles to escape the Iron Curtain’ on our new television. Their poverty and uprootedness had affected me in a purely human way, and I had posted off my pocket money to a charity collecting money for the Hungarians who came to Britain. In return they had sent me a picture of a woman with a baby.
The event had made a significant impression upon me, but in terms of the displacement of human beings, not the politics I was now hearing debated around me about the Soviet suppression of the rebellion. The closeness of Hungary was to make joining the Communist Party inconceivable. On the other hand, I didn’t feel the personal sense of betrayal of former Communists. It just seemed self-evident that Communism was a dead end. Moreover, despite the splintering of the New Left, because of what Edward Thompson and the others had done, I took for granted that a non-aligned socialism was a possible political option. The year 1956 was a significant marker. Before then this political reflex would not have been possible.
I might have arrived a little too late for the New Left, but I was there just in time for the Trotskyists. At this time the Trotskyist groups which had survived the Cold War and Stalinism in terrible isolation had split and split again into tiny sects eaten up by spleen. My first take on Trotskyism was at a dull meeting of the Oxford Labour Club when the editor of the Daily Worker, George Matthews, was speaking on the freedom of the press. A dreadful hissing turned into uproar at the back. Venom shot across the room. ‘That’s the Trots,’ smiled Bob with a shrug. My next encounter was with a know-all type in the International Socialist Group who declared, ‘Bob’s in the FI,’ speaking in initials like a member of the elect. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I snapped. To which he replied, ‘You ought to inform yourself about your man’s politics.’ That was it with Trots as far as I was concerned. And Bob was no more a member of the Fourth International than I was.
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