Autobiography: Eric Hobsbawm has defianlty evaded typecasting in his life as in his work, which is why his autobiography is far more absorbing than that of most intellectuals, writes Roy Foster.
THE English like their left- wingers straight from central casting: loony toffs (Bertrand Russell, Tony Benn), mad professors (J.D. Bernal), bovver- boy wreckers (Arthur Scargill, Red Robbo). Even someone who initially breaks out of genre, like Ken Livingstone, ends up as a dead ringer for Mr Kite in I'm All Right, Jack. But Eric Hobsbawm has defiantly evaded typecasting in his life as in his work, which is why his autobiography is far more absorbing than that of most intellectuals. It is also surprisingly moving.
The surprise comes because Hobsbawm's intellectual manner is markedly detached, ironic and unsentimental - unlike the thrilling emotional pyrotechnics of his great friend and contemporary, E.P. Thompson, who with him transformed social history writing in the 1960s. But Thompson was a Blakean visionary, rooted in Albion, and the story Hobsbawm tells here is of a quintessentially displaced Mitteleuropean Jew: half-English, half-Austrian, born in Alexandria, brought up in Vienna and Berlin, arriving in England (aged just 16) in 1933 having lost both his parents to illness. (Though a Brazilian publication later confidently described him as "Irish by birth", this is, alas, not true.)
This wonderfully evoked background of transience, failed entrepreneurship, uncles and aunts forever upping sticks and following new schemes in the cinema industry, is reflected in Hobsbawm's youthful diaries ("Uncle Sidney goes to Budapest tomorrow. Furious telegram from Joe Pasternak. Selofilm apparently poor quality."). Cosmopolitanism inflects the sympathetic but oblique view he has since taken of British history; he thinks the historian, like the poet Cavafy, should stand at a slight angle to the universe. It has also given him a unique position in English intellectual life as a historian of commanding genius, like Braudel in France. This was evidenced in the reception awarded to his history of the 20th century, Age of Extremes, the attention showered on him when he turned 80 (five action-packed years ago), and the honours which have come his way over the last 30 years.
The reason they did not come earlier, as he points out here, had much to do with his lifelong adherence to Communism, embraced as a schoolboy in Berlin against the background of disintegrating Weimar and advancing Nazism. This political faith never narrowed his omnivorous appetite for cultural analysis, which has illuminated not only British labour history but the mores of Sicilian bandits, Chicago gangsters, South American peasants and working-class cultural signifiers like the flat cap and fish and chips; while his personal interests stretch from Mughal painting to birdwatching and, above all, jazz.
He has also taken a major part in debates about the direction of British Labour Party politics in the post-Thatcher generation, powerfully arguing for a broad-left alliance and firmly backing Neil Kinnock against the sectarians. Labour's defeat in 1992, he tells us, was the saddest and most desperate moment of his political life. From a man who has survived the late 1930s and 1956, this gives pause for thought.
Moreover, his life can be plotted against many of the key moments of the last terrible century and, like Graham Greene, he will be found in the right place. He is walking home from school in Berlin when he hears about Hitler coming to power; becomes an undergraduate in Cambridge in the 1930s, surrounded by future spies; sees the freshly painted Guernica at the 1937 Paris Exposition; is on a student holiday in Paris when Germany invades Poland; happens to be staying in the right Havana hotel when Che Guevara needs a translator; takes E.M. Forster to hear a nightclub performance by Lenny Bruce (not a success); hangs out with Mahalia Jackson in Chicago and Italo Calvino in Rome, and is inevitably visiting Salvador Allende's widow in Chile when the television news tells them that the Law Lords have decreed Pinochet be detained in London.
Even commerce with fellow intellectuals is dramatic: Louis Althusser comes to stay chez Hobsbawm while spiralling into manic delusion, tries to buy first a grand piano and then a Rolls Royce and, on returning to Paris, murders his wife.
This is not the way most historians live, and it must affect the history Hobsbawm writes. In one of the most absorbing passages, he points out that British Marxist historians often begin with a passion for literature rather than economics. "My own Marxism developed as an attempt to understand the arts," he writes.
Quotations from student diaries more than 60 years old bear him out. They also show he soon realised the Master could illuminate the past but not predict the future. Hobsbawm delights in the unexpected (perhaps one reason why he has taken up South American history) and is clear-eyed about the somersaults imposed by hardline Communism on its adherents over the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the Hungarian uprising, or the reputation of Tito. He was never one of the "gifted sophists" who could accommodate this, and wrote powerfully against the Soviet line in 1956 and 1968. Yet, as is well known, he stayed in the Party. Those who constantly query why should read this book - not only for the cogent chapter devoted to the subject, but for the implicit evidence between the lines of why it meant so much to one brilliant cosmopolitan Jew, born in the year of the Russian revolutions, orphaned young, necessarily believing above all in a better order of things, both loving and despairing of an England which supplied at once salvation and the muffling comforts of the academic establishment.
Put like this, it is hard not to think of Hobsbawm's friend and slightly older contemporary, Isaiah Berlin, whose name recurs here, and who took a parallel but different path. For Berlin, perhaps, Zionism supplied what Communism gave Hobsbawm. Both men were too clear-sighted to miss the mounting shortcomings and injustices that accompanied the dream's realisation, but their youthful identities had been too closely bound up with the process to abandon or repudiate it. To say Hobsbawm (in the title of Edward Upward's 1930s communist novel) had "no home but the struggle" would be wrong, but Marxism as he has lived it has given him a country and - he himself uses the word - a faith.
At the same time, his brilliant and offbeat intelligence requires more, and so does his irony. In many ways, this book is a record of intellectual camaraderie, and where he has found it - not only in left-wing demonstrations and committee rooms, but among the Cambridge Apostles, the Bohemian solidarity of postwar Bloomsbury and Soho, the cafés of Paris and the clubs of Greenwich Village. Above all, though, the fellowship of politics is invoked with a real and unfashionable seriousness, and lies behind the agonising decisions made in the long disillusionment since the 1950s.
The title of Interesting Times gives fair warning; Hobsbawm tends to evade the more directly personal themes of a radiantly happy second marriage and family life, and the academic experience in London or the US. Still, there are mordant observations of his life as a weekending intellectual ("in our Welsh cottages we voluntarily lived under the sort of conditions we condemned capitalism for imposing on its exploited toilers"), or as a visiting professor at Stanford ("a superb university embedded in Palo Alto, sensationally boring as a community for living in . . . a nowhere space of empty streets in which cars visited each others' owners in beautiful homes").
There are also some wonderful vignettes of colleagues like that "eager vagabond figure", Raphael Samuel, "the absolute negation of administrative efficiency, carrying inside him an explosive charge of energy".
But the story he wants to tell is a broader one. This can undermine the structure of the book as bildungsroman: towards the end it splinters into separate discussions of recent political and intellectual developments in the countries he has known best. These, however interesting, read like chapters from a different book. Nor is curiosity fulfilled about his own processes as a working historian, and how he moved with such authority from - so to speak - the short story (essays such as those in Labouring Men or Primitive Rebels) to the novel (the great tetralogy from The Age of Revolution to The Age of Extremes). But towards the end, even where he delivers a general judgment on international politics, the reader has learned enough about his formation to make a personal connection.
"The history of the Latin American left," he tells us, "is one of having to choose between an ineffective sectarian purity and making the best of various kinds of bad jobs."
One suspects that he is writing about himself: but also that he is radically - and ironically? - understating how brilliant, and influential, that "best" has been.
Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford. His most recent book, The Irish Story, has just appeared in paperback (Penguin), and the second volume of his life of W.B. Yeats will be published by Oxford next year
Interesting Times: a Twentieth-Century Life. By Eric Hobsbawm. Allen Lane, 478pp. £20