Richard Hoggart's portrait of “Scholarship Boys” in The Uses of Literacy, first published in 1957, described the psychological tensions and social predicaments that affected many academically gifted working- and lower-middle-class males in early twentieth-century Britain. Drawing heavily upon his own experience, Hoggart argued that “each boy is between two worlds: the worlds of school and home; and they meet at few points.”Footnote 1 Encouraged by some and mocked by others, scholarship boys constantly negotiated the conflicting expectations of parents, teachers, peers, and their own ambitions. Hoggart knew personally that they assimilated these contradictions in complex ways. Their academic achievements separated them from their class origins, which they sometimes imperfectly concealed and other times publicly celebrated. But they never remained fully at home among the cultivated elites whose habits they both imitated and deplored. Class allegiances confounded an evolving personal identity.
The autobiographical elements of Hoggart's work immediately attracted attention. F. R. Leavis thought that he should have written a novel instead of a personally revealing sociological tract.Footnote 2 Raymond Williams, himself the author of an autobiographical novel, endorsed Hoggart's approach in the inaugural issue of the New Left Review. Williams recalled how much his own childhood experience affected his assimilation of high culture.Footnote 3 Yet, as Ben Jones has recently observed, subsequent historians have often remained suspicious of “retrospectively constructed accounts” of social class and upward mobility. Some critics have detected the aroma of nostalgia; others have invoked the postmodern wariness about human agency within more determinate social discourses; still others challenged the distorting biases of masculine narratives. Footnote 4 Jones seeks to re-establish the legitimacy of the personal and the autobiographical that helped shape early cultural studies. In a book that draws upon working-class reminiscences of Brighton in the 1950s and 1960s, he argues that autobiographical memories “need to be reconsidered as radical reclamations of experience.”Footnote 5
Memoirs and autobiographies form the subject of “life writing,” a recent academic concern particularly of literary scholars.Footnote 6 This emerging field reflects in part the popularity of the genre: in 2007, seven of the top ten best-selling nonfiction books in Britain were memoirs.Footnote 7 Historians have of course long included autobiographies and memoirs in their analysis. Their interest in life writing might be twofold. First, not unlike generational studies, it reveals the often neglected intersection between life cycle and historical period. The unique and infinitely complex life worlds of various eras were experienced by its inhabitants at different points in the life cycle. The 1960s, like the 1920s, may have been defined by its youth, but it was inhabited differently by the aged. Victorians shaped the 1920s just as flappers affected the 1960s.Footnote 8 Second, life writing reveals the contradictory subjectivities of individuals that occasionally undermines confident generalizations about class, gender, race, or nation, as Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman nicely demonstrates.Footnote 9 Too easily dismissed as self-serving, memoirs and autobiographies often disclose emotional complexities and existential conflicts that other forms of writing conceal.
For purposes here, the life writing of six prominent British humanists—Eric Hobsbawm, Frank Kermode, A. H. Halsey, Harold Perkin, Bryan Magee, and Hoggart himself—provide a limited and imperfect sample of the broader, deeply varied experience of academically gifted working- and lower-middle-class males in the twentieth century.Footnote 10 Each of these figures was a “self-creation” in a double sense: their successful careers depended upon enormous individual effort and their written reflections upon these lives became itself a self-fashioning. Hoggart, Hobsbawm, Perkin, and Halsey wrote more conventional autobiographies that charted their lives from birth. Magee composed two volumes of vividly detailed reminiscences of his youth and adolescence, as well as Confessions of a Philosopher that selected incidents from his life to illustrate philosophical problems. Kermode fashioned a short, highly selective memoir that self-consciously pursued certain themes in his life.
Why these six scholarship boys in particular? First, they were born between 1917 and 1930, a demographic cohort that benefitted from the 1902 Education Act but missed the reforms of the Education Act of 1944.Footnote 11 For the lower middle and working classes within this cohort, “the special place examination taken at age ten or eleven became the crucial instrument of academic selection.”Footnote 12 Second, each of these figures came to prominence during a period when the enormous expansion of higher education transformed intellectual life in Britain. What Guy Ortolano calls “the meritocratic moment” encompassed the creation of new academic elites that prospered in the mid-twentieth century as new universities were founded and student populations swelled.Footnote 13 Third, each of these males classified themselves in their writing as heterosexual, an identification that became increasingly important as gender developed into a category of political engagement.
Fourth, and most important for purposes here, these six writers defended what might be deemed “academic humanism” during a period when its values proved under siege.Footnote 14 During the late 1960s, youth challenged the social and cultural hierarchies that helped sustain meritocracy: “elitism” became a term of contempt. The rise of “Theory” during the 1970s transformed academic thinking. Marxists influenced by continental thinkers disparaged older, more humanistic versions of their ideology. The many strands of postmodernism proclaimed the “death of man.” Identity politics mocked humanistic notions of disinterest and objectivity as politically engaged critics openly declared their “situatedness” within a contemporary discourse playfully deemed AZZA (“as a black British feminist,” “as a white, liberal male”).Footnote 15 These attacks on humanism came from the Left but it was the Right that proved unexpectedly more potent. In the 1980s Thatcherism made the market, not merit, the arbiter of success and proclaimed a version of emancipatory politics that, among many changes, eviscerated the institutional support that the Left too easily presumed.Footnote 16 University budgets contracted; academic jobs became scarcer.
These complex developments have been extensively investigated.Footnote 17 The Left, in particular, has not been wanting in analysts.Footnote 18 Less studied has been the response of academic humanists who strongly identified with progressive causes but who remained troubled by Theory and cautious about identity politics. They refused to align themselves with reactionaries like Kingsley Amis and the other Angry Old Men who embraced conservatism. But they also refused to abandon the values that they acquired in their youth. Many differences separate Hoggart, Hobsbawm, Halsey, Kermode, Perkin, and Magee. But, as this essay argues, their life writing discloses the social and intellectual origins of their shared humanism, the strategies and predicaments of its defense during the 1970s and 1980s, and the ways these values permeated their final years. From childhood to old age, the two worlds of the scholarship boy kept changing, but some allegiances endured.
SOCIAL CLASS AND THE ORIGINS OF HUMANISM
Each of these memoirs recounted success stories: awards won; scholarships attained; academic promotions; recognition beyond youthful expectations. Hoggart noted with pride his rise in status to a “classless professional” and acknowledged that he enjoyed a “life of privilege.”Footnote 19 Halsey charted his grand journey “from an obscure working class housing estate to a well-known Oxford college.”Footnote 20 Perkin celebrated his “good life” and at one point described relaxed living in his country estate where his children took riding lessons.Footnote 21 Hobsbawm conceded that “it has been an extraordinarily enjoyable life, comfortable, varied by travels . . . combining work, discovery and holiday, novelty and old friendships.”Footnote 22 Though some critics asserted that academic stars, particularly on the Left, rarely confronted their own institutional privilege and power, the life writing of scholarship boys paints a more nuanced picture.Footnote 23 Despite occasional examples of triumphalism, arrogance, and complacency, these writers frequently acknowledged the unique historical context of their upward social mobility. “Post-war life,” Hobsbawm recalled, “was an escalator which, without any special effort, took us higher than we ever expected to be.”Footnote 24
Yet, beyond chronicling the obvious struggles and triumphs of successful careers, the memoirs of scholarship boys also revealed a deeper journey of alignments and allegiances that often complicated their worldly ambitions. Though wary of confessing too much about their inner lives, these writers disclosed intellectual and personal commitments that both fueled and transcended their personal quest for recognition. At some point in their youth, they discovered a humanistic vision or a social cause that deeply engaged them. Sometimes these experiences alienated them from their friends and family. At other times, they provided a vital connection between the personal allegiances of their youth and the professional alignments of their maturity. Each story remained different but each provided a variation on a theme.
Born in 1918, Richard Hoggart lost both his parents before he was eight years old. He lived with his grandmother who encouraged him to study hard and leave “the dreary, without-perspective, working-class life against which she always inwardly and sometimes outwardly raged.”Footnote 25 The first to pass the eleven-plus examination in his school's history, he attained one of the few scholarships offered by Cockburn High School to the students of South Leeds. At first he studied for “tenaciously utilitarian” purposes, but then, by chance, he discovered the poetry of Swinburne: “The rhyme, the alliteration, the assonance, the vowel play, the vivid imagery, the interplay of vowels and consonants, the surge up and the down in a dying fall, the whole run of the thing, all carried you along.”Footnote 26 Hoggart committed himself to the study of literature. After he wrote an essay that began “Thomas Hardy was a truly cultured man,” his headmaster questioned what he meant by the phrase. In response, Hoggart began investigating the connections between literature and culture that would help define his career.Footnote 27 More important, poetry and literature offered him an alternate world whose inner richness and evocative narratives departed radically from the inhibiting customs of his childhood and social class. Listening to conversations of working men, he became profoundly dissatisfied with their “limited enthusiasms and dismissals…the endless repetitive arguments about . . . royalty or sport or show biz . . . the equally endless and conventional sexual chit-chat” that seemed to define them.Footnote 28 In a few extraordinary pages, Hoggart described the inner migration of a scholarship boy from one world to another. Although he claimed not to feel “superior or scornful” to the men of his social class, he remained at best in tension with key elements of their identity.Footnote 29
Early in his life Frank Kermode came to “love words, whatever they meant—not even knowing what they meant—more than the world.”Footnote 30 During his career as a literary critic and in his memoirs, Kermode masterfully evoked the ambiguities of language to inhabit the uncertainties, ironies, and doubts of both literature and his own personal identity. He called his autobiography Not Entitled and throughout the book inserted the phrase in all its multiple meanings to deflect any unequivocal understanding of its definition. The epigraph quoted Shakespeare's Coriolanus: “He was a kind of nothing, titleless.” Born on the Isle of Man, Kermode and his friends would pretend to be wealthy tourists and enjoy “exceptional liberties to which we were certainly not entitled.”Footnote 31 Awkward and temperamental, he “wasn't entitled to be my father's boy.”Footnote 32 Serving in the Navy during the Second World War, he discovered that fines would be docked from pay as “Not Entitled” or “N.E.” in the ledger, which sailors deemed a “North-Easter” or, more often, a “fucking northeaster.”Footnote 33 After he became the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, he discovered “that I had become a sort of nobody, yet a nobody with a title, with a carnival crown.”Footnote 34 Kermode invoked the opacities of language to complicate the narrative arc of his successful career: the binary of Outsider and Insider becomes intertwined in ways that defy each characterization.
Yet, like Hoggart, Kermode recalled a seminal experience—“the great moment of my childhood”—that helped illuminate his allegiance to humanism. One evening as an adolescent he had a vision of “unusual fullness and integrity comprising: the smoke falling from a dense array of chimney-pots into the chilly dark of the street, the lights of Newby's shop brightening from moment to moment, pretty Marion clattering her pails, many possibilities of presence that belong to the word if not to the world.” Kermode noted that this experience “belonged to me alone” and that others “had no notion of the plenitude of which they were part.” It led him to ask other philosophical questions: “did other persons, when they ate oranges, experience the taste I had of orange?”Footnote 35 He soon committed himself to “the long labour of learning how to pretend to know something a little better than I did, and to know how to say it with apparent clarity to others, all similar in certain respects, all knowing how to use the same language as mine to explain their recognitions of smoke and oranges.” Literature connected Kermode to others: it helped collapse the temporal and psychological distances that separated individual subjectivities from each other. It enabled him “to believe that we communicate, that we may be distinct yet not divided.”Footnote 36 For all his elusiveness and deliberated irony, Kermode revealed the logic and inner motivation behind his successful career.
“My inner life,” Bryan Magee recalled in his memoir of childhood Clouds of Glory, “was often in conflict with my outer situation.”Footnote 37 He grew up in Hoxton, one of the poorest areas of London during the interwar era. His father sold men's and boy's clothing; his mother never wanted children and made that clear to both Bryan and his sister. “Her feelings never took on those of a normal mother. . . . She resented the two of us for being a nuisance.”Footnote 38 Once she promised a special birthday present for her son, then deliberately failed to give it to him. She put down his dog, claiming that it ran away.Footnote 39 “She made a habit of hitting me in the face.”Footnote 40 Magee loved his father and grandfather, both of whom returned his affection. Plagued by claustrophobia, a fear of heights, and powerful aversion to needle injections, he found solace in a fantasy life fueled by American films. He also came to love classical music, which his father played on the gramophone. Magee became completely absorbed by the sound, unable to divert his attention to anything else. He discovered Parsifal to be “beautiful beyond words . . . I heard the Fledermaus overture as not only comparably beautiful and profound but also infinitely sad—it brought me to the edge of tears every time I heard it.”Footnote 41 Like Kermode, his isolation from others prompted him to ask foundational philosophical questions. He wondered about the beginning of time and the existence of God. Once, when he closed he eyes and covered his ears, he became overwhelmed by the possibility of solipsism.Footnote 42
Initially Magee did not like school but teachers noticed his high intelligence, and he gained a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, where he thrived. “It imbued me with a different value system: telling the truth, keeping my word, being loyal to friends and also, amazingly, behaving decently to everyone else, never cheating or taking what did not belong to me.”Footnote 43 Yet, when he returned to Hoxton, he became an object of ridicule. “‘Blimey, ‘ark at ‘im! Don’ e talk posh!'. . . Everything I said sounded like something out of a comic, and they said so; housemasters, rugger, Latin, chapel, the incredible uniform.”Footnote 44 Once again, Magee retreated into music. “Music came to me not as if from a different world but actually from a different world, from some order of being and reality unconnected with anything in the space I occupied.”Footnote 45 Magee would not pursue a conventional academic career, in part because he found the formal study of philosophy in Britain to be narrow and blinkered. He wrote books about both music and philosophy, including an interpretation of Schopenhauer, an unfashionable figure among academic philosophers in Britain.Footnote 46 He worked as a broadcaster and became a Labour MP in the 1970s.Footnote 47 In these roles, he sought to connect “the worlds of school and home” described in Hoggart's famous chapter.
Eric Hobsbawm was not a typical scholarship boy. Born in Egypt in 1917 to English expatriates, he moved with his Jewish parents to Vienna when he was two years old. His father died in 1929 and his mother two years later, the family money long since lost. Hobsbawm lived with relatives in Berlin from 1931 to 1933 before enrolling in St. Marlebone Grammar School, an institution founded to serve London's lower-middle class. Describing himself as isolated and remote, Hobsbawm “took to examinations as to ice-cream” and considered his schoolwork “as intellectually on the master's level and superior to the rest.” Rejecting the social pretensions of the school, he was nevertheless grateful to the institution for introducing him “to the astonishing marvels of English poetry and prose.”Footnote 48 He won a major scholarship to Cambridge where he became a member of the Apostles.
Yet, it was his conversion to communism during the 1930s that would define him. Like others in his generation, Hobsbawm was attracted to the comprehensiveness of a doctrine “linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of flux.” The strict discipline of Marxism appealed to him: “if the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so.” The Party “got things done when others did not.”Footnote 49 These characteristics, however, only partially explained Hobsbawm's deep commitment to an ideology that others found disingenuously authoritarian and profoundly destructive. Hobsbawm was in Berlin when the Weimar Republic crumbled. Although he never particularly identified himself as Jewish— “I have no emotional obligations to the practices of an ancestral religion”—the rise of Nazism drove him to the Left where his participation in mass rallies affected him viscerally.Footnote 50
Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, can be prolonged for hours . . . We belonged together. I returned home to Halensee as if in a trance. When . . . I reflected on the basis of my communism, this sense of “mass ecstasy” . . . was one of the five components of it—together with pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, “dialectical materialism”, a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem, and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.Footnote 51
The sensual experience of willful immersion in a crowd—of absorption in a righteous cause—paralleled classic descriptions of religious ecstasy and conversion. It also mirrored, in part, the more secular and modern enthrallment of some Germans during the Nuremburg rallies. Critics of Hobsbawm's autobiography often complained that it neglected his inner life: Stefan Collini deemed it “that curious hybrid, an impersonal autobiography” and Perry Anderson grumbled that it recorded “virtually nothing of his emotional life.”Footnote 52 Yet, as a revolutionary Communist, Hobsbawm rejected the personal life. In theory if not in practice, he considered himself most authentic when he shed the boundaries of self and the preoccupations of bourgeois individualism. The title of his book reflected this ideology: Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life. As a Marxist, Hobsbawm chronicled the intersection between one individual and the larger dialectical forces of history.
A. H. Halsey was born in Kentish Town, one of eight children of a railway worker gassed in the Great War. “Our child's world in the 1920s,” he wrote, “was moneyless.”Footnote 53 Raised in a house without electricity, Halsey never slept in a room of his own until he was an adult. His scholarship in 1933 introduced him to a new world in which “cleverness or performance was the measure.” Halsey learned to lead a “double life” in which the “the school was seen by me as a sustained cultural assault on my family.”Footnote 54 At Kettering Grammar School, a charismatic wounded veteran taught him the value of English, but Halsey initially decided against pursuing scholarship and in late 1939 became a sanitary inspector's boy. The war changed everything. Halsey joined the Royal Air Force though a series of training delays meant that he never saw combat. More important, he decided to go to university “determined to learn fast, not to waste time, especially chasing women.”Footnote 55 Throughout his life, even when unsure of his ambitions, he was infused by a sense of religious mission and a puritan work ethic. “I do prosaically believe that we are sent onto the earth to glorify God's creation by diligent labour at our calling.”Footnote 56
Sociology allowed Halsey to blend his enthusiastic support for democratic socialism with his religious sense of vocation. Upper-class suspicion of the discipline made it all the more appealing. His research into how education improved upward social mobility connected his deepest values with an “objective method of data collection and analysis.” As he could now admit, “in one important sense it was a sociological expression of autobiographical experience—a projection of the country we had learned in our families, schools, and local communities.”Footnote 57 Halsey distrusted Marxists, associating them with middle-class intellectuals who could provide elaborate rationalizations for Stalin's thuggish authoritarianism. “Classical sociology may perhaps be best thought of as the liberal reply to Marxism.” With others that he encountered at the London School of Economics, Halsey made a virtue of his early disadvantages. “Ours was indeed a provincial radicalism.”Footnote 58
Harold Perkin claimed he was born to become a social historian. His father was a skilled building worker and his mother was the illegitimate daughter of an impoverished farm laborer. Other members of his extended family “covered the whole gamut of class except for the landed aristocracy.” Early in his childhood Perkin developed “an acute sense of the inequalities of life . . . It had little to do with ability or intelligence, or with looks or good manners.”Footnote 59 Always self-confident—one reviewer said Perkin “does not do diffidence. He scores zero on self-doubt”—he won all the school prizes. Footnote 60 A new history master helped focus his talents. “I was obsessed with how the world I knew, the visible world industrial world around me . . . and the classes that inhabited it came into being . . . I was filled with that divine discontent that is the driving force of intellectual inquiry.” For Perkin, the writings of Karl Marx did not provide a satisfactory answer to his questions. Marx's proletariat “bore no relation to the actual workers I knew, who were economically split, politically divided and as snobbish towards their supposed inferiors as the bosses themselves.” Like Hobsbawm, Perkin also allowed personal experience to inform his formal study of the past. But Perkin, a democratic socialist, mistrusted “the intolerant, authoritarian streak in the communists and fellow-travellers.” He developed “an antipathy to what I called public school lefties.”Footnote 61
For each of these scholarship boys, the arc from social outsider to cultural prominence involved allegiances and commitments with profound idealistic roots that sometimes compared to religious experience. Poetry revealed an aesthetic alternative to the quotidian bleakness of industrial life. A pantheistic vision created a desire to bridge intractable psychological differences. Music crafted harmonies missing from the home and the street. Mass solidarity erased the boundaries of the personal isolation and provided the visceral motivation to understand a larger dialectic. Religion infused politics with a sense of vocation. The injustices of social class mandated historical explanation. Scholarship boys sought deeper explanations to justify their passages, both external and internal, from one world to another.
THE DEFENSE OF HUMANISM: STRATEGIES AND PREDICAMENTS
The life writing of scholarship boys recorded the strategies and predicaments of humanism in the 1970s and 1980s. Alert to hints of superannuation, these figures often accommodated identity politics even when it challenged their own self-interest. Second-wave feminism in particular resonated with their own experience. Frequently outflanked on their Left, they sought to understand the historical and sociological context of radical change. The ascendancy of Marxism in the 1970 and its decline during the 1980s especially merited comprehensive examination. They offered critiques of postmodernism that sometimes masked their fury at its presumptions about human agency, language, power, and history. Each of these strategies of social accommodation, empirical analysis, and skeptical evaluation came with its own predicament: tolerance and accommodation might be viewed as weakness, an old complaint. Sociological and historical analysis relied upon a “benighted empiricism” no longer in fashion. Criticism confirmed their complicity with tradition and conservatism, even though Thatcherism provoked wide revulsion across the spectrum of progressive thinking.
None of these memoirs discussed second-wave feminism in any detail, though some scholarship boys indicated their personal approval of feminists. Hoggart noted that feminists objected to his chapter on working-class mothers in The Uses of Literacy, though he protested their characterization of it as “inverted male chauvinism.”Footnote 62 Halsey recorded with displeasure the limited opportunities for academic women before the 1970s, though he remained cautious about “the powerful rise of the more strident forms of feminism.”Footnote 63 Still, as he wrote elsewhere, “liberal masculine guilt responded to a just claim for more equality.”Footnote 64 Perkin, in particular, took great pride in his wife's achievements and, in language not entirely appreciative of the movement's goals, recalled that when they met “she was a feisty young woman of wit and intelligence who was a cut above the empty-headed bimbos I had been fruitlessly chasing.”Footnote 65 Most, however, eschewed discussion of their personal relations with women. Kermode lamented that “success with women called for talents I didn't and never would possess.” Of his two wives, he wrote that “they were in their entirely different ways close friends, and the first of them, the correct beauty, the censor, the terrified, gave me the great gift of children.”Footnote 66 Only Hoggart described at length his role as husband and father, recording in evocative detail how the “pleasures of family life express themselves in pictures, rituals, jokes, words, smells.”Footnote 67
Scholarship boys were not unfamiliar with challenges to traditional gender roles. The intellectual preoccupations of their youth frequently alienated them from other boys who mocked their bookishness. As Hoggart put it, the scholarship boy “sits in the women's world.”Footnote 68 None of the six memoirs examined here dwelled upon how these academically gifted boys were bullied by their peers, though none ignored it altogether. Frank Kermode admitted that he could not do normal things as a child, like tie shoelaces, and that as the teacher's favorite he was made a victim. He recalled that “we have not yet abandoned the idea that terror in one form or another is a good preparation for adult life.”Footnote 69 Bryan Magee faced constant violence. Both in his Hoxton neighborhood and at school, he described himself during those days as “high-strung and gabby.”Footnote 70 A. H. Halsey learned the limitations of academic mastery when the headmaster pulled him out of an infant class to demonstrate to thirteen-year-olds how to solve quadratic equations. “Later that morning I was totally immersed by these gentlemen in the playground water butt and so learned a vital lesson about types of cultural virtuosity and the context in they could be safely revealed.”Footnote 71 This presumed effeminacy of learning and academic achievement never entirely disappeared. When Kermode's superior officer in the Navy discovered that he could write well, he “paid me many ironical or obscene compliments. ‘What the hell are you, Cosmos? A fucking poofter?’” Kermode added that “it was fortunate that he did not know I wrote poems and songs and tried to play the violin.”Footnote 72
Scholarship boys often defied stereotypes about traditional gender roles and prefigured a version of post-industrial masculinity that proved more multi-dimensional than residual clichés about “feminized boys.”Footnote 73 As Britain evolved from an industrial to a service economy that placed a premium on education and the ability to manipulate information, the youthful inadequacies of one era might be transformed into the instrumental advantages of another. Bookishness lost its stigma when educational opportunity expanded and the service economy provided good jobs for clever boys. Male toughness and self-discipline expressed itself mentally as well as physically. Mastery and dominance might be applied to an academic subject rather than a game of football. The presumed inferiorities and indignities of working- and lower-middle-class affiliation could be transformed into an aggressive and heroic struggle against social oppression. The informality and vulgarity of the lower orders, once a matter of contempt, might indicate a masculine virility and authenticity lacking within the “effete” upper classes. These autobiographies reveal how stereotypes of gender and class occasionally camouflage the compensatory adjustments made by scholarship boys as they forged their identities over time. Life writing discloses the individual subjectivities of gender roles that have become more prominent in recent histories of masculinity.Footnote 74
Accommodation to emerging cultural antagonisms took other forms as well. At University College in the late 1960s, Kermode created a seminar that “explored the darker jungle of what is now simply called Theory. In these very early days it was regarded by many respected elders as a best a joke, a hobby, or a stunt.”Footnote 75 Some considered Kermode a postmodernist, a characterization that amused him. Throughout his career, he wrote in an ironic style that deceived some readers. It was not always easy to determine whether he came to praise or bury a book, a political philosophy, or a critical movement. He once noted how “valuation is the privilege of Marxists” since only they “have the truth about history.”Footnote 76 He admitted that “the leading deconstructionists are all very learned men, indeed learning is an obvious prerequisite of their practical programme; students will always have to be conducted into some initiatory mist of error before they hope to emerge on the sunlit, ludic uplands of deconstruction.”Footnote 77 Then, too, in 1979, Kermode published The Genesis of Secrecy, a book ostensibly about biblical hermeneutics that implicitly demonstrated how all interpretive strategies, including deconstruction, “practice divination, however intermittently, erroneously, dishonestly or disappointedly; most of all disappointedly.”Footnote 78
The postmodern liquidation of cultural hierarchies provoked a variety of reactions among scholarship boys. Hoggart detested the marginalization of high culture. He could not accept that some regarded the Beatles as seriously as Beethoven. Like John Reith and others before him, he defended cultural subsidies of the arts and disparaged notions that the market, not merit, determined cultural worth.Footnote 79 Others adapted to these changes in their own way. Perkin, and Magee, for example, became “media dons” who employed modern communication to disseminate their ideas. A frequent performer at Cambridge, Perkin discovered that his “exhilarating” appearances on television put him “right in the swim of things, meeting well-known people and interviewing important leaders.”Footnote 80 Magee worked in television throughout his career but became most famous for his fifteen television programs in the late 1970s that “in sophisticated yet easily intelligible English” discussed ideas with leading philosophers, including Noam Chomsky, Willard van Orman Quine, Isaiah Berlin, and Herbert Marcuse.Footnote 81
Perkin, Halsey, and Hobsbawm devoted their professional careers to analyzing the historical context of social change. Their work drew upon protocols of scholarship that Theory discounted: Althusserians rejected Marxist humanism; postmodernists scorned “grand narratives” and “disinterested” inquiry; New Historicists fabricated a past that struck traditional historians as anecdotal and present-minded. Scholarship boys created works that detailed structural changes without jettisoning human agency. They implicitly undermined the transcendent certainties of conviction politics by placing them within an ongoing narrative, though their distaste for some contemporary developments enlivened their writings. Still, unlike thoroughgoing postmodernists they acknowledged personal biases without forsaking the aspiration of objectivity.
Harold Perkin devoted a considerable period of his academic career to understanding the role of social class in British history. As his memoir detailed, his book The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880, first published in 1969, created a new genealogy for the class system during the Industrial Revolution that documented “the triumph of the entrepreneurial ideal, the victory of active capital and competition over both the aristocratic ideal of passive property . . . and the working-class ideal of labour value and cooperation.”Footnote 82 His subsequent book, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880, published twenty years later, chronicled the growing division between two middle classes in the twentieth century: “The business middle class looked to profit and capital gains and resented taxation and interference of any kind by government. The professional middle class, by contrast, earned their living by salaries and fees and . . . saw their livings increasingly dependent on government and therefore on taxation.”Footnote 83 In persuasive empirical detail, Perkin provided deep structural reasons for the “the backlash against professionalism” that emerged in Britain during the 1970s and that would dominate the 1980s, when Perkin taught in the United States, “a country still more dedicated to the free market.”Footnote 84
Yet within the same memoir, Perkin's loathing of Mrs. Thatcher and her policies seemed to discount the historically structured origins of her victories that his scholarship explained dispassionately. Perkin rarely questioned his own deeply held political allegiances. He first met Thatcher in the early 1970s, when she became secretary of state for education and he represented the Association of University Teachers. He acknowledged that she “treated us with favour” proved “quite different from the Thatcher who came to hate us later.”Footnote 85 When she became leader of the Conservatives and then prime minister, he offered more vivid insults of her gender and class. “Sir Keith Joseph and his blue-eyed girl, Margaret Thatcher, hijacked the Conservative Party for the politics of individual self-interest.” “Like her petty-bourgeois father, she hated the working class . . . An Oxbridge scholarship boy . . . myself, I was ashamed to find such an amoral and recklessly anti-social politician . . . coming from a similar background.” Her political success was due, in part, “to an unfeminine bellicosity.” Perkin contrasted the “greed and self interest” of the Conservatives with the “values of the disinterested service providers” that he and other professional academics presumably embodied. Near the end of his memoir, he condemned New Labour as “a gang of Americanized free marketers . . . bearing no relation to the moral, caring, social-democratic party I supported for over fifty years.”Footnote 86 This rhetoric indicated the distress that Perkin and other academic humanists endured as neoliberalism thrived. Old prejudices, remarkable in their intensity, erupted when the ascendancy of professional elites became challenged.
A. H. Halsey supported those at Oxford who opposed awarding Mrs. Thatcher an honorary degree. As a Christian socialist, he rejected her philosophy of individualism and her endorsement of materialistic values. “We must share,” he wrote. “Our greatest difficulty is to recognize the needs of strangers.”Footnote 87 Thatcher and her government contributed to the “fall of social sciences in Britain” by denigrating sociology as a “pretentious mistake.”Footnote 88 Halsey's prolific career helped established the academic legitimacy of his discipline: now this legacy became endangered. Yet, it was not only Thatcherism that threatened his social-democratic fusion of politics and objective academic research. The youth culture of the late 1960s and 1970s made Thatcher's task easier. “Piecemeal social engineering was anathema to the new neo-Marxist and the “new right” radicals. Positivism in the sense of patient counting of heads became a term of abuse, relieving students of the obligation to read the books so labeled.”Footnote 89 Like Hoggart, Halsey scorned the new youth culture though, as he put it, “I was suspicious of my own prejudice.”Footnote 90 By the end of the century he supported Tony Blair, whose politics benefited from the disillusionments of both a “frantic” Thatcherism and the “strategic evils of a failed and discredited Marxism.”Footnote 91
Hobsbawm warned that structural changes in the economy would undermine the Left. In his seminal 1978 lecture, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?,” he argued that the Labour movement would not “realize the historic destiny once predicted for it.” More specifically, he recognized that the militant trade unionism of the 1970s only served narrow economic self-interests and would split the Labour movement. “The illusion,” he wrote in his memoir, “lay in the belief that the Labour Party thus captured by a mixed minority of sectarian leftwingers would somehow remain united, gain in electoral force, and would have a policy capable of standing up the attack of Mrs. Thatcher's class warriors, whose force they systematically failed to grasp.” Hobsbawm liked and personally admired Michael Foot, but he admitted that “the three years of his leadership were a disaster.” A Communist who refused to leave the Party in 1956 when the Hungarian Revolution and the disclosures of Stalin's crimes disillusioned many of his comrades, Hobsbawm proved to be remarkably pragmatic in the 1980s, supporting Marxism Today and endorsing Neil Kinnock's efforts to reform the Labour Party. Still, “things fell apart for moderate reformist social democrats as well as for communists and other revolutionaries.”Footnote 92
Hobsbawm argued that Thatcher succeeded “primarily though not exclusively, on the deep divisions of her opponents.” Like Perkin, his critique involved both an impassioned moralism and a resigned melancholy. Thatcher was a revolutionary, though “not one for the better,” who appealed to “greed and jingoism.” Unleashing the “anarchism of the lower middle class” she “obliterated most of the traditional British values and made the country unrecognizable.” New Labour carried forward her business agenda. “We wanted a reformed Labour, not Thatcher in trousers.” Perhaps signaling his own movement away from collective thinking, he noted that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that “we, or at least I, no longer had many hopes.” Yet, to the dismay of many reviewers of his autobiography, Hobsbawm refused to denounce communism or the ideals that first attracted him to the Party in the 1930s. “The world may yet regret, faced with Rosa Luxemburg's alternate of socialism or barbarism, it decided against socialism.” Critics charged that historically it was socialists who often proved to be the barbarians, but Hobsbawm deflected the accusations. He concluded his book with the reassertion of a basic ethical principle. “Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own.”Footnote 93
Hoggart considered Margaret Thatcher “my Aunt Ethel come back to life. I was brought up with, precisely, hauntingly, that shrill, nagging, over-insistent way of speaking, that bossy-pants way of walking, that remorseless insistence on always being right.”Footnote 94 Calling himself “a once-born socialist,” Hoggart detested the “the relentless economic determinism, the unshakeable assumption that letting the market rip will produce its own justifications.” Yet he admitted that “the Falklands and Gulf campaigns and the attack on certain bad trade union practices were justified; and that the poll tax had some elements of sense to it.”Footnote 95 Magee also broke with orthodoxy. He changed “from being a liberal socialist to being a liberal non-socialist” and in 1982 joined the newly formed Social Democratic Party after serving as a Labour MP for Layton since 1974. He defined his political position as “Thatcherism plus Welfare.”Footnote 96
Kermode once wrote that “it is not easy to act aggressively from a position of moderation.”Footnote 97 As their memoirs detailed, scholarship boys navigated the crosscurrents of post-industrial British culture with the scholarly tools acquired in their youth. Their humanism took many forms but it shared an unwillingness to accept the sophisticated reductions of Theory and the “creative destruction” of neoliberal practice. Their memoirs validate the often concealed subjectivities behind “objective” scholarship and academic success. It was not only the feminists who understood how the personal became political. At the end of the day, however, they faced different, more existential challenges that also illuminated their core values.
Lived Humanism: The Existentialism of Old Men
“I have often written about imagined or fictive endings,” Frank Kermode wrote in his memoir, “and said they are all images of the real one. Fall and cease . . . it makes sense of everything, even if one would prefer a different kind of sense.”Footnote 98 Once again, Kermode absorbed the rich ambiguities of language in ways that others missed. His book The Sense of an Ending, first published in 1966 and aptly reissued in 2000, explored how various writers in Western civilization reflected upon the Apocalypse. Anticipation of the End forced them to ponder the significance of their lives. His book of literary interpretation tried to “make sense” of the ways they accomplished this task.Footnote 99 Kermode's memoir offered another version of this tripartite meaning: it fashioned in language how he as an individual interpreted his approaching demise; it made personal sense of his academic understanding of “a sense of an ending.”
Life writing customarily occupied this complex role though it is too often dismissed as the commonplace reflections of the old, not unlike how women once experienced the casual discounting of their voices. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex took decades to become canonical; perhaps the same fate awaits her The Coming of Age.Footnote 100 For scholarship boys, the sense of an ending took many forms as they reflected on people and landscapes that had disappeared. They struggled to capture in language what no longer existed and what it all meant. They sought to capture affective truths that age illuminates outside the ken of intellect. They came to understand how death defined life, not unlike the existentialists of their youth but with an urgency dictated by an abridged temporal frame.
They all wrote about people who were gone: family, friends, neighbors, teachers. Kermode recalled at length the eccentric officers with whom he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War: “Call to me all my mad captains.”Footnote 101 Hoggart pondered the “forgotten people” of his early life: “they are now out of time and history. They were provincials, they worked in unfashionable institutions.”Footnote 102 Distant characters came alive. Perkin's favorite aunt, Liza, made roast beef and Yorkshire pudding “on an open fire, which had special gadgets to hold the meat dishes and saucepans.”Footnote 103 Magee knew a Miss Rutland, “dressed always in black from head to foot, in clothes appropriate at the time of Queen Victoria's death, in mourning for her fiancé, who had been killed in the Boer War.”Footnote 104 Halsey's Uncle George, denied an expected loan hours before his wedding, borrowed the money from a tram driver who gave him the passenger fares that he just collected that morning.Footnote 105 Elderly men put their lives in perspective. Writing about his mother, Hobsbawm noted that “I am now old enough to be the grandfather of a woman who died at the age of thirty-six.”Footnote 106
People disappeared, but so did landscapes. In The Country and the City, first published in 1973, Raymond Williams demonstrated how longing for vanishing rural landscapes remained a persistent feature of English culture going back hundreds of years. Each generation lamented the loss of a countryside that they presumed timeless but in fact constantly changed. The environment of youth instilled a sense of permanence that time inevitably betrayed.Footnote 107 Even Williams himself did not escape this sense of loss. His autobiographical novel Border Country, first published in 1960, recreated a small Welsh community whose landscapes and social values eroded over time.Footnote 108 Yet, like other radical figures in the British past, Williams partly based his critique of modernity, as well as his vision of a socialist future, on his memories of Pandy and the surrounding Welsh countryside.Footnote 109
For other scholarship boys in post-industrial Britain, it was the urban, not rural, landscape that disappeared. In The Uses of Literary Hoggart celebrated the neighborhoods of his youth that outsiders found “understandably depressing . . . street after street of shoddily uniform houses…mean, squalid and in a permanent half-fog.” Yet to those who lived there, as Hoggart demonstrated in vivid detail, these settings were “small worlds, each as homogeneous and well-defined as a village . . .”Footnote 110 Hoggart warned about “urban renewal” during the 1950s, but only in old age would he fully grasp the transformation of working-class landscapes. When he visited Hunslet he discovered his old house had disappeared, “bulldozed with hundreds of others so they could build Hunslet Grange, one of the worst large housing developments of Sixties Britain. That too has gone, its demolition helped on by building deficiencies and the refusal of people after the mid-Seventies to accept rabbit-hutch housing.”Footnote 111 He approved more of the newer housing, but the places of his youth vanished like the people who once lived there.
In Clouds of Glory Bryan Magee also wrote about “a vanished world” not only of his childhood but of pre-war Hoxton “and all the things it represented.”Footnote 112 Magee excelled at portraying the sights and sounds of this impoverished area of London:
Scattered along both sides of the street, in amongst shops of the other kinds, were cafes and pubs, eel-and-pie shops, fish and chip shops, sausage and mash shops. Mingling with the crowd and living off it were beggars and tipsters, pickpockets and policemen, some people being slipped illegal bets, others carrying placards warning of wrath to come. The sound of it all was multi-layered: a background noise of hundreds of people talking at once in the open air, over which individual voices were heard calling out to one another, and on top at that, overriding everything else, the air-splitting cries of stall-keepers, all shouting at once, each trying to draw attention to his particular goods by shouting either his wares or his prices, the jokers also joshing with the passers-by or with his neighboring stall-keepers.Footnote 113
The Blitz destroyed large parts of Hoxton: the Magees were bombed out of their home. Post-war reconstruction took care of the rest. “Council estates of multi-story apartment blocks have been built over the areas where whole streets were, so that the lines of the streets themselves have been obliterated.” A distinctive corner near their shop where four roads converged became a commonplace roundabout. Old populations left to be replaced by immigrants. Part of Hoxton became an artist's colony. “The Royal Shakespeare Company advertises its courses for drama students as taking place in ‘fashionable Hoxton.’”Footnote 114
Magee knew that when he died a whole world would die with him. Like other scholarship boys he struggled to summon that world from memory and invoke it in words. “What is actually lived, actually felt, actually thought, can never find an equivalent in language.” When once he stumbled across an object from his youth, he wrote that “I cannot put into words the piercingness or depth of the nostalgia I felt.”Footnote 115 Hoggart strained to narrate his life in chronological order because “you are at all moments the boy, the elderly man, the middle-aged man, the youth just setting out; you constantly shuttle between them all as events stir memory.”Footnote 116 Kermode expostulated at length about the mysteries of language and memory. As more years passed, his earlier life became “a time of myth, its world a region of fantasy.” He constantly sought passage into the microclimate of a former time. “What I, what all need is a madeleine or a phrase de Vinteuil, even stumbling on an uneven but memory-packed paving stone might do it . . . exposing the real and not the shadow.” With customary irony, he rejected distilling a complex story to a thematic pattern. “It tempers the prevailing northeaster of time. It is a means of giving life the calm coherence of myth.” He warned that autobiographies became marred not by “mendacity but good writing” which inevitably proved “economical with the truth.” Ultimately the fantasies of both memory and imagination informed the best memoirs. “Writing truthfully of one's life therefore requires what may seem to be a scandalous breach of the promise to be truthful.”Footnote 117 Kermode's paradox underscored the inaccessibility of the past whose disappearance can never be fully reclaimed in memory or in language.
Less enamored of these mysteries, Hobsbawm argued for the responsibility of the historian. He began his autobiography with a group photograph of children and their mothers from 1922 sent to him by a woman he had not seen for over seventy years. “She had immediately concluded that I must be the Eric with whom she and her sisters had played long, long ago.” Hobsbawm deftly offered some background to the picture taken in Vienna, noting that after the two families parted, it was only the extraordinary events of European history that bound their lives together. “A rediscovered common childhood, a renewal of contact in old age, dramatize the image of our times: absurd, ironic, surrealist and monstrous.” Hobsbawm would live in Britain; the woman would become an actress in wartime Berlin “performing under our bombs . . . to an audience some of whom may well have rounded up my relatives . . . for transport to the camps.” History matters even to those ignorant of how it influences them. “It is the autobiographical historian's business not simply to revisit it, but to map it.” With the passage of time, the photograph disclosed five small children unaware that “they would have to make their way through the most murderous as well as the most revolutionary era in history.”Footnote 118
Temporality preoccupied the life writing of many scholarship boys. “I realize more sharply than ever before,” Hoggart observed, “that the sense of aging and of the nearness of death comes to us at markedly different times. Some begin to show it, not physically but in temperament, before they are out of their forties; others in their fifties and yet others only in their sixties.”Footnote 119 Hoggart noted how time “goes faster and faster” as he aged. All the beautiful women that he knew became old. When he looked in the mirror, he no longer saw the person that he imagined. “We don't necessarily have Yeats's rage at being fastened to a dying animal, but know what he meant.” Once again, as in his youth, Hoggart felt a man apart, separated from others by his age and driven to write about his experience. Home and a large family provided him comfort “though I have not entirely lost the sense of loneliness which first struck when our mother died on the clip-rug up in Chapeltown, Leeds.”Footnote 120 Hoggart's three-volume autobiography began and ended with a death in the family. His sense of an ending started early.
By age sixty, Halsey became aware than people treated him differently, “lots of past tense and use of me by younger colleagues as a memory bank.”Footnote 121 Then, during a routine medical checkup, a doctor informed him that he had an aortic aneurysm that threatened his life. Three delays from the National Health did not please him but finally a surgeon replaced his aorta with “a stretch of dacron.”Footnote 122 Powerful anesthetics induced hallucinations about Arabic script on the curtains, confused memories of Hong Kong, the sudden appearance of his mother, and the oppressive insistence “that I produce the answer to three questions, who, where, and why was I.” For a time he thought that he had been wounded in the First World War, not unlike his father. He listened to the howls of a fellow patient nearing death. As Halsey gradually recovered and could return home for further convalescence, he knew what he must do. “I had had my intimation of mortality. The time had now come to record a life.”Footnote 123
From an early age, Bryan Magee feared death. “I didn't want to die . . . I was swept by a sense of unutterable sadness, real grief, true mourning for myself. I was confronting the loss of everything. And there was nothing I could do about it.”Footnote 124 As he matured, he initially put aside these dark thoughts, but then in mid-life once again lapsed into crisis. He spent four years writing a novel, Facing Death, which fictionalized his apprehensions about oblivion. “By the end I had been ravaged by the process but felt I had come through.” Like others of his generation, he embraced the poetry of Philip Larkin, even if he dissented from his politics. “Aubade” captured his dread and resignation: “Death is no different whined at than withstood.” Magee embraced the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre although he acknowledged the obscurity of the former and the superficiality of the latter. Anxiety about death became integrated into choices about life. The sense of an ending enhanced the meaning of the ongoing present, the nunc stans: “I concentrate on my conscious self-awareness and try to understand what it is.”Footnote 125 Magee embraced philosophy not only as an academic subject but as a living guide to understanding. He integrated metaphysics into quotidian existence.
The historian Perkin looked to the future at the end of his autobiography. The last volume of his trilogy, The Third Revolution, charted the role of professionalism in a number of post-industrial societies, including Japan and the United States. It detailed how the business elites and the philosophy of the free market exacerbated the rise of economic inequality as they extracted more and more of the resources for themselves. “Professionals are excellent servants but exceedingly bad masters, and need to be held in check by democratic forces.” With typical forthrightness, Perkin compared himself to Cassandra, and he feared that, like her, no one would listen. He concluded his book with these words: “we can choose to manage our affairs equitably or we can pursue unlimited self-interest to mutual destruction. Let us pray we make the right choice, for the alternative is Armageddon.”Footnote 126 This apocalyptic sense of an ending recalled Kermode's book on the subject. For Perkin, the paradoxical relationship between self and general interest at the heart of capitalism no longer applied: greed was not good.
At the end of his memoir Kermode described himself looking out his bedroom window. When he bought the house in Cambridge, the garden in the rear contained “the head of a fierce lion, broken off from the south wall of King's Chapel during restoration work.” He thought that the space needed something else, “a household god or goddess to assure that I was at home.” Friends gave him a statue of Diana, “an arrow in one hand, a bow in the other.” Kermode looked at her every morning when he rose from sleep. In winter she was covered in frost. “Henceforth she will preside over this garden and the commonplace house in it, and as long as she belongs there, I will belong there also, or be as close to belonging as I am entitled to be, for as long as I am entitled to be.”Footnote 127
The Britain that scholarship boys both inherited and help shape departed radically from the expectations of their youth and early manhood. To proponents of Theory, identity politics, and other postmodern interventions, the humanism of these writers might have seemed residual and diminishing in cultural relevance during the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the global intellectual prominence and institutional placement of figures such as Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Perkin, A. H. Halsey, Bryan Magee, Richard Hoggart, and Frank Kermode suggest an alternate and more complex interpretation. These former scholarship boys were often leading figures in their field and they exerted a widely acknowledged influence over their respective disciplines. Academic humanism remained a continuing though not always dominant strain in post-industrial culture. Its allegiance to values such as disinterested inquiry and empirical historical understanding remained part of British discourse long after figures such as Althusser disappeared from view. Humanism may have seemed to be in decline during this period, especially after Thatcherism undermined its institutional foundations, but alarms about isolation and weakness remain a staple of this resilient tradition going back to the sixth book of Plato's Republic. The life-writing and collective witness of these scholarship boys offers an often neglected subjective element to their intellectual allegiances and testifies to the endurance of values acquired in their youth and sustained through old age.
