Britain has never had a left intelligentsia in the mode of Jean-Paul Sartre or Noam Chomsky, vivid public figures living in a state of pure and principled opposition to power.
The British intelligentsia has, indeed, been closer to policy than in many other countries. The great social architecture which was Britain's pride-the NHS, national insurance, the Open University, public service broadcasting, nationally-owned energy and railways, civic schooling-was designed by troops of gas-and-water socialists from the universities and, as often as not, the old working class. Richard Titmuss, Chelly Halsey and Richard Hoggart joined happily with Brian Abel-Smith, Barbara Wootton and Michael Young to make the country a better place in which to live.
The Labour left and those fiercer socialists who refused to compromise with power always remained in comradely, acrimonious and sociable touch. The heroic and handsome triumvirate of nobly lost causes-Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall-kept up their correspondence with the future through their unyielding opposition to nuclear weapons, and to the great she-rhino and her trampling down of all that the Fabians had built up.
These men held on to a demanding picture of the good society: one in which equality replaced exploitation; in which greed would be defeated by co-operation; in which an active democracy would triumph over old corruption. The small surge of social idealism which caught this vision in the 1960s came to be called the New Left.
One of the giants of the New Left, Raymond Williams, died suddenly and prematurely in January 1988, the year before the cold war and "actually existing socialism" collapsed. Before his death he had warned, presciently, of a new, devastating turbo-capitalism, and insisted that the old working class and the new fighters for peace and eco-sanity were our best defences.
A few years after his death I set out to write his biography. I had known Williams for 20 years but never as a close friend. He had made me welcome in his home, had given me his ideas and unpublished papers, was interested and ironic at the expense of my parliamentary candidacies for the Labour party, had graciously accepted the dedication of a book of mine. I deeply admired him, as did so many of my generation. Sixteen years between us meant that he had been through the anti-Fascist war; I had learned about the honour of Old England during the Suez campaign. He had always been so grown-up, so judicious, so senior. Rereading his books for the biography I found myself saying, time and again "God, that's so good." I was moved again to tears by the account of his father's funeral, cheered him on again in his attacks on the pirates of the right, felt bereft once more that I would never again hear that eloquent voice or lean against the warm wall above the Monnow with the sun on our two faces.
Raymond Williams: A Life came out in October 1995. It was reviewed according to present conventions by assorted grandees-Frank Kermode, Roy Hattersley-who reminisced about the subject and mentioned the book amiably in passing.
But a part of the left greeted the book with bitter hostility, much of it personal. A minor egalitarian in the New Left Review, in a spasm of old-fashioned snobbery, criticised it for being the work of "a grammar school English master of the 1960s." So I was. One has to be something. After all, Williams himself was tutor in English literature for many years to housewives in Sussex evening classes.
That was nothing compared to the torrential abuse which appeared in the London Review of Books. In an extended essay, marked by a hectic and personal rancour, the reviewer went well beyond the limits of discourtesy normally found in such literary journals. Condescending to the biographer (me) as "our Fred," he lampooned the author as a leering, winking Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop, a maddening Bob Hoskins from the BT ad, a Vicar of Bray, a father-castrator, a failed author of books sunk without trace, a gossip, a fantasist and a creepy-crawly.
It has to be said, in vindication of his judgement, that the review was written by a man-Raphael Samuel-who literally wore black and wept on the day Stalin died in 1953. What is more, the poor fellow was suffering from a mortal illness. But the letters page of the following three issues of the LRB largely endorsed and elaborated upon Samuel's performance-and all about a book criticising, but also admiring and seeking to commemorate, a small but significant figure in socialist and intellectual history.
Each correspondent was at pains to say that Williams was innocent of all criticism and that the biography was a travesty of the life. (One eager little beaver penned a note to add that he'd reviewed an earlier book of mine and it was awful, too.)
Another fideist took me to task for some mild knockabout after Williams had praised the Maoists in China for turning the professoriat out into the paddyfields. "The requirement to go to the country and do physical work is not, for me, the difficulty," Williams wrote with more than a touch of priggishness. But rotovating a few beds of nettles at the weekend cottage, I added, wasn't what the Red Guards had in mind.
His defender was scandalised and vituperative. Williams's views on the Cultural Revolution were "detailed and complex." In fact, in the indices of Williams's 30-odd books there are a total of nine references to China, summed up in his amazing observation (made in 1971) that "the Cultural Revolution seemed to me one of the most hopeful things that have ever happened in the world." I report this not to score off his misjudgement, but to illustrate how the imperative to solidarity on the left may stop a man thinking and cause him to become inane.
For a season, the left (myself included) has had no imaginable geography upon which to chart utopia. Pain at such a loss, as Christians learned after Darwin, is agonising. "Reason," wrote the gallant Gillian Rose in her last months, "sheds uncontrollable tears at the pain of rearranging its resources." Tears turn to scorn and rage when victims spot a target.
One small illustration of this process will have to do. In the Raymond Williams biography I described the construction and dissolution of a radical political group which named itself after its main publication, May Day Manifesto 1968, which Penguin published with Raymond Williams as editor-in-chief and author of much of it. He wrote it headlong in three months; and it offered a caustic criticism of the Labour government's assorted failures of nerve.
There were plenty of those. But Williams and his henchmen (among whom I was an office-boy-the women made the tea) also recommended, apparently seriously, that the same government should have taken powers in 1964 (with a majority of four) to "control trade and the movement of capital" and to "appropriate British overseas private holdings." The May Day Manifesto conference, having no such holdings itself, fell into a joyful hysteria of applause at the proposal. Williams smiled with grim approval on the platform of St Pancras Town Hall.
No government in 1964 or subsequently could possibly have acted as Williams and his supporters wanted. Dramatising this evasion in the biography and adding to it the unignorable comedy of the Manifesto movement-changing the world by resolutions run off on elderly Gestetner mimeographs-invited another torrent of abuse.
The abuse is a consequence of chiliastic ardour. The left wanted to believe in the politics of feasible socialism because the conduct of capitalism was (and is) so horrible. The belief had always been that to concede anything to the hateful enemies of socialism was to betray solidarity. Even the genteel modification of social democracy had cost deaths and privation and long prison sentences. The coming of socialism would be a much bigger and more terrible upheaval.
The death of socialism, at least in Europe, happened all at once and, thanks to Gorbachev, without bloodshed. It caught the intelligentsia of the left unprepared. It made them bereft.
In a noble elegy, Gerry Cohen, Chichele Professor at Oxford, spoke of valediction over the loss. But he rejects the long familiar world-weariness of those sage old birds who were once believers in the God that Failed but now know that All is Vanity. Cohen says that there are painful feelings to live through, of loss of love and of bitter self-reproach, but that nothing should prevent idealists-and what are intellectuals if not imaginers of the good society?-from clinging to certain self-evident truths: that free markets are unjust, that capitalism is cruel, and that these things must be opposed and may be overcome.
Countless people share these convictions. The overwhelming victory of Labour last year is proof of this. And with the expansion of higher education in the 34 years since Robbins, the intellectual left has grown into a substantial status group, powerlessly studying power, lacking capital of its own, bad at economic theory, fired by fine ideals. These are the curates of utopia, the reporters of the news from nowhere.
Agoraphobic and afraid in the desert places of post-modernism and the withering of doctrine, however, that same left cannot abide the present. Above all, it cannot tolerate the lightest breath of criticism upon those few who came out of the cold war and Thatcherism with their heads up and their integrity intact. Williams was one such unwounded leader; he is, alas, dead. Edward Thompson was another; so is he.
What the French call groupuscules shy away from the new government because they have lost their trust in all futures, together with the future of that socialism to which they gave their hearts. It is a shyness which makes for shortness of temper, uncongeniality, abuse of those who might once have been comrades. It makes for a mood corrosive of precisely those values at the centre of socialism: co-operativeness; equality; brotherly and sisterly love.
But in an interregnum with no fixed allegiances or habits of loyalty to party, class or leader, the intellectual can only trust that old mate, dissent-and friends and scholars in the school of awkwardness and the college of congeniality.
