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Raymond Williams stood out against the Cold War machine |
Class warrior who became an academic literary giant
Illtyd Harrington – himself from the
valleys of South Wales – reviews the life of Raymond Williams, the signalman’s son and eminent Cambridge professor
Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale.
By Dai Smith.
Parthian £25.00
RAYMOND Williams was born in the lush area between the mysterious Black Mountains and the rugged beauty of the Brecon Beacons, which lay to the west.
This was where the Ice Age glaciers stopped their southern progress. To the south-east were the valleys of South Wales, where at one time 250,000 workers dug and transported coal.
His father Harry worked in the railway signal box which controlled a section of the GWR near Abergavenny. Harry and Gwen, his wife, lived in nearby Pandy where Williams arrived in 1921.
They followed a strict moral code and the Protestant ethic of hard work – an unlikely peaceful setting for the development of one of the most admired and influential Marxists in Britain during the 20th century.
Pandy was a community where Williams’ political beliefs and literary inspirations sprang from, and which he carried throughout his life.
He knew his neighbourhood and the enduring values of community.
Professor Dai Smith wisely and cogently allows Williams to tell his own story, through his semi-biographical novels Border Country (1960) and People of the Black Mountains (1989/90).
He wrote and taught for most of his life from Pandy and during his student years at Trinity College Cambridge. But perhaps it was his 1961 book The Long Revolution and his seminal Culture and Society, published in 1958, which made most impact. Although his war diary is as vivid as it comes, in death and heroism with no glorification.
A craggy man, often appearing haughty, his commitment to a better society never wavered. He knew where his roots lay and in Culture and Society he roams around from 1780 to 1950. It has become a banner of Enlightenment.
A brief flirtation with the Communist Party did not turn him into a sour, disillusioned disciple after the revelations about Stalin’s Russia.
He stood out against the literary Cold War machine, while others collected dollars funnelled by the CIA to “intellectual” journals. He was zealous and successful as a Workers’ Educational Association tutor; and he ended up as the professor of drama at Cambridge, which was a cauldron of dynamic ideas.
At Cambridge you would find him pushing out the intellectual frontiers of his students, who came in droves. He could be very discursive, and annoyed many – including local playwright Sir David Hare – by his wanderings.
An incident in 1951 demonstrated his moral and physical courage.
It happened when the Korean War broke out and Williams, the former lieutenant in the Royal Artillery with an active service record, was recalled to the colours.
He refused, and appeared before a tribunal in Hammersmith who accepted his plea to be a registered conscientious objector.
It was a brave gesture, because he could have ended up with five years in jail.
Prone to depression, an only child with a possessive mother, his psychological profile did not match up to his crystal clarity actions.
A group of distinguished Communist Party historians, including Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill acknowledged his integrity.
While they struggled to find a way forward after the Soviet dream faded, he was one of the godfathers of New Left Review, which came out of Carlisle Street in Soho and captured the mood of 1960s and the hunger for ideas.
He set great store by the initial success of CND and his mass following. Williams was a strong-minded, strong-willed individual with rare powers of analysis vision.
Challenging the Establishment and the new Orthodoxy, Dai Smith has treated his subject in a manner which can only stimulate interest at a time when the Left desperately needs a compass, guidelines and signposts.
His sudden death at his home on Saffron Walden in 1988 did not end his mission. Posthumously his ghost hangs over Pandy, and his mental invigoration remains for those, to paraphrase Marx, who understand the world, but still want to change it.
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