Thompson Invictus

Fred Inglis - The Nation  - 20 Sept 1993

[The late E.P. Thompson, U.K. correspondent for The Nation, conveyed
his nuclear disarmament message to an American audience via powerful
articles in our pages.  We asked a friend to evoke the stature of the
man.]

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The greatest living historian of the English-speaking world died on
August 28.  Edward Thompson was the son of an American mother and a
British father, a methodist poet-preacher who almost became a Buddhist
and who was a close friend of Nehru as a result of his passionate
advocacy of Indian independence.  Edward's brother, Frank - poet,
scholar, naturalist, hero - was executed while fighting with the
partisans against the Bulgarian fascists at a moement when, as Edward
came to believe the Allied negotiators could have bargained him out
of captivity if only the first frosts of the cold war had not begun to
glint in Sofia.
   

Thompson carried all this history into *his* history: the history
that he wrote and the history that he made.  Seen from down here, his
life was a victory wrung out of many defeats.
  

He was, to begin with, a Communist, like his brother.  His
communism was drawn from that best strain of genteel English idealism,
compounded of more or less equal parts of Marx and William Morris (of
whom he wrote an early biography) and of the great blast of
excellently high-minded and public-spririted generosity that blew from
his father's Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century.  Thompson
stood squarely in that grand tradition, and reached beyond it as
well, to Swift, Wordsworth and Paine, to the Dissenting Academies of
whose quarrelsome and fraternal formation he was so great a
chronicler, and above all to William Blake, whose contradictory and
ardent vision and whose richly comic caricatures of Old Corruption
brought such color and power to Thompson's own imaginative
dramatization of class and world politics.  (Thompson's last work, his
long-pondered book on Blake, comes out this fall.)
   

In 1956, like so many honest Communists in Britain and North
America, he left the party - just before it threw him out (for
continuing to publish what became *New Left Review*) - quietly, and
without any of the breastbeating that attended loss of faith in some
quarters.  Indeed, he didn't lose faith; not in equality, liberty,
fraternity, or faith in the absolute calling of the intellecutal to
oppose coarse old power, Blake's Nobodaddy, and its monstrous rutting
in lies and cruelty.

   

His idealism had taken him already to the scarred and fledgling
nation of Yugoslavia in 1947, where for a year he helped build one of
the railway lines that was to lead Tito's delicate federation into a
prosperous future.  After 1956, it took him to work in that peculiarly
British institution, the extramural department of an industrial
university, where students come in the evenings to voluntary classes
with a curriculum designed in partnership with their tutor and
intended to answer questions about their experience largely ignored by
more official reading lists.
   

Out of that teaching came Thompson's 1963
masterpiece, *The Making of the English Working Class*, an enormous
Marxist-Morrisan history of the years between the French Revolution
and England's modest substitute, the Reform Act of 1832.  The book
spoke like a novel of that great slow surge of feeling and self-making
that both drove along and held together the fissiparous movement of
the poor and the propertyless as they sought to understand and endure
the apocalypse of capitalism in its first headquarters over those four
decades.
   

In the meantime Thompson began his thirty-odd years of devotion to
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.  In 1957 and for a few years
afterward that was a largely British affair, and he fought the fight
on the spot.  He went briefly to head the Center for the Study of
Social History at the newly founded University of Warwick in 1965 but,
discovering that the local businessmen who were so prominent in that
university's affairs had never noticed the propinquity of social to
socialist, resigned in a characteristically principled and noisy way,
and turned full time to the lonely, ill-paid craft of writer and the
dodo role of man of letters.
   

Yugoslavia; communism; disarmament; the labor movement; the
business university.  In 1973, soon after the murder of his comrade
Salvado Allende, alone in the lovely, provinical, almost Palladian
house in which he and his wife, Dorothy, lived these past thiry years,
Thompson reckoned up a few of his defeats in a poem apostrophizing his
old typewriter, "In answer to your call/ I rush out in this rattling
harvester/ And thrash you into type."
   

The biggest defeat was still to come.  In 1979 he published a
little pamphlet with a minority press called *Protest and Survive*
(which he rewrote for a U.S. audience; it appeared in the January 24,
1981, *Nation*). Its title parodied a ludicrous booklet issued to the
country advising its citizens on how to survive a nuclear attack.
("If you have a home fire extinguisher--keep it handy").  The pamphlet
called to action "the people of England" and charged them to refuse th
installation of the new generation of cruise missles in the English
countryside without benefit of parliamentary debate.
   

The second cold war had been declared by Carter, fervently affirmed
by Reagan and ear-piercingly seconded by Thatcher.  Thompson moved
for the opposition of the people.
   

They came.  They came by the millions from all over Europe, and not
a few from North America.  The missles arrived and were reviled.  The
people stayed.  Thompson spoke for them.  In a few pages of
pamphleteering, on a few hundred platforms, in the pages of the
liberal press, tired, tirelessly, he wrote a different account of the
history that had been and the history that might be.  He summoned up
the hideous nightmare of what he called "exterminism," and
counterposed a vision of free peoples refusing to do what the hairy
ogre Nobodaddy told them to do.  And in the end--in Prague, Berlin,
Bucharest and elsewhere--they didn't.  It was even a sort of victory.
A great writer captures the best feelings flowing through a
given historical moment and gives them form.  Thompson caught and held
the feeling of two generations utterly fed up with the mendacity,
waste and pointless cruelty of the cold war; and having held them, he
made the feelings speak and tell.  To do this, he broke off his proper
scholarship and created an idiom for the weeklies that outstrips all
the great journalistic masters.
   

Now, there is nobody left who commands the prose with which to
summon the somnambulist people of England to defend their ancient
liberties.  And there is nobody left who could live the life of writer
and man of letters as Thompson did.  Yet the line of defeats that make
up his life and that, taken together, constitute the triumphant victor
of his life, may still teach us much, on this or that side of the
Atlantic.  What they teach was best spoken in a single poem much
admired by Thompson himself.  Its strong, familiar and stirring
Victorianness has its place in the obituary of such a man: "Say not
the struggle naught availeth...."

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Fred Inglis is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Warwick and author, 

most recently, of The Cruel Peace (Basic).