Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life by Eric Hobsbawm

Author:Eric Hobsbawm [Hobsbawm, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non.fiction, history, society
ISBN: 9780375422348
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

13

Watershed

Some moments in history – the outbreaks of the two world wars, for instance – are recognizably catastrophic, like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. There are similar moments in private life, or at all events, as earlier chapters show, there have been such moments in mine. However, if we want to stay with geological similes, there are other moments that can best be compared with watersheds. Nothing very obvious or dramatic seems to be happening, but after you have crossed an otherwise nondescript bit of territory you notice that you have left an epoch in history, or in your own life, behind. The years on either side of 1960 – my early and middle forties – formed such a watershed in my life. Perhaps also in the social and cultural history of the western world. Certainly of Britain. 1 This seems to be a good moment to break my long walk through the short twentieth century for a pause to view the landscape.

The second half of the 1950s forms a curious interim in my life. After the end of my King’s Fellowship I moved back to a permanent base in Bloomsbury, a large, partly dark flat full of books and records, overlooking Torrington Place, which, until my marriage in 1962, I successively shared with a series of communist or ex-CP friends: Louis Marks and Henry Collins of the Historians’ Group, the old Marxist literary critic Alick West and the Spanish refugee Vicente Girbau. Since it was central and had enough spare capacity, it also attracted out-of-town and metropolitan overnight visitors and other temporary attachments. It was, to be honest, much more fun than living in a Cambridge college, even though I lived through the worst periods of the crisis of communism and the tearing of political roots there. It had the additional advantage of being so close to Birkbeck that I could, if necessary, go home between lectures. London was a good place to live in. This was the setting in which I lived through the watershed.

That my personal and professional life changed in these years is obvious enough. I met a Viennese-born girl in an ocelot coat in a setting of world politics. We fell in love. She had recently returned from the United Nations’ vain attempt to intervene in the Congo, I was about to go to Castro’s Havana, and Marlene and I married during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It was three years after publishing my first books, and a few weeks before The Age of Revolution, 1789– 1848. Professionally, I was beginning to acquire some international reputation, and therefore to travel outside what had been my habitual range in the 1950s, France, the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. In the 1960s I began my academic trips to the USA and Cuba, I discovered and started to explore Latin America, found myself in Israel and India, and returned to the Mitteleuropa I had not seen since childhood. What is more, I had begun to notice that I no

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