#44,
My Dinner with André
“Infamy, infamy, they've go it in for me.”
– “Carry on Cl[i]o”
At an impromptu tutorial with a senior scholar of labor history, I was being questioned about a paper that I had written with Madhavi Kale, entitled “The Empire and Mr. Thompson: The Making of Indian Princes and the English Working Class.” The discussion was a friendly one, even when it became clear that there were fundamental differences of opinion dividing us. I had arrived at this historian’s doorstep believing that I would be attending a meeting of the reading group to which we both belonged. The meeting had been cancelled and for a number of reasons of no great consequence I had not been informed. So I had been invited in for some cherry pie and, while this was not sherry, it was still an offer I could not refuse.
Since I had given my host a copy of the Thompson piece at our previous meeting, I expected that he would have read it and that the conversation would eventually get around to focusing on E.P. Thompson. At our very first meeting about a year previously, he had told me of his own close connection with Thompson: that he had house-sat for him when the latter had gone on his speaking tour of India (the trip that would be the starting point of our essay) and that he had picked up Dorothy and Edward at the airport when they returned. He told me that Dorothy had seemed to be favorably inclined towards Indira Gandhi and the Emergency, and, while he had tried to elicit from Edward his feelings about the both the Emergency and Dorothy’s response to it, he had been unable to do so. He did feel certain that Edward reacted very strongly to the suspension of civil liberties, as was confirmed by the article in Writing By Candlelight (which my host had not read).
On this occasion, I heard again about this relationship. But our initial point of departure was an introduction to his significant other, in the form of: “This is Rob Gregg, he and another historian, have written a harsh attack on Edward Thompson. Have some coffee.” Later he would say (and I should mention that our conversation about Thompson was broken up with other more general and inclusive discussion until, not surprisingly, the third member of our party left to focus on her own reading), “I have read the beginning and the end of your paper, which is very long [it is], and I have the basic idea of what you are doing, but I do not think I will read more. It seems to be an indictment of Edward for not seeing and denouncing the imperialism of his father.” And before I could respond to this statement, we turned to a discussion of the nature of the father’s imperialism. What exactly was it? Wasn’t he pro-Nationalist? Didn’t he convert from Methodism to Buddhism? How did it compare with that of other members of his generation? If E.P. Thompson was raised in this milieu, can we blame him for not transcending it? What really was Edward [the son] supposed to do about this?
Most of these questions were considered in the bulk of the paper so I won’t rehash them in full here. Suffice it to say that the paper was not meant as an indictment of either Edward John or Edward Palmer. It is intended as an indictment of imperialism, and an analysis of the way that anti-imperialists like ourselves can miss the extent to which aspects of imperialism find their way into our analyses. The essay is harsh in places, particularly when it attempts to show how different kinds of Indian nationalism are discredited in Edward John’s sometimes pro-nationalist writings; but imperialism was and is harsh. We cannot pass over it by saying that we are so much better than everyone else, so what we do is fine. Perhaps we can say we are politically justified, that we are endeavoring to expose that imperialist discourse, and that this is an on-going commitment. But still we have to locate ourselves in that imperial landscape. We are not critics, above the fray. And if we think that we are (and to some extent, this is directed at Thompson’s understandings of both empiricism and objectivity), then we are both fooling ourselves and replicating imperial discourses.
Was E.P.
Thompson supposed to denounce his father?
Of course not.
Why would he? What would be the
point of doing this, even if he were able to recognize his father’s “limitations”? No, the point is to understand what E.P.
Thompson’s defensive reaction to criticism of his father, and what his own
impression of his father's “alien homage” to Rabindranath Tagore in particular
and
Up to this point, the discussion had been going relatively smoothly, the fact that the paper remained unread meant that some of the questions were not as penetrating as they might have been. Nevertheless, there was some sparring going on. My senior colleague seemed to be waiting to pounce on a stray comment, should it present itself (which it almost inevitably would).
In the meantime, though, we discussed our own debts to Thompson. I located my own “conversion experience,” as my discussant described that moment when one decides to become a historian, in my reading of The Poverty of Theory. This was clearly a romantic exaggeration of my own intellectual development (the length of unemployment lines in England were equally compelling reasons to apply to study history in the United States), but it did nevertheless speak to the fact that this text had had a profound influence on me. My fellow communicant’s light on the road to Demascus came, apparently, while reading Hobsbawm. I then said something that my soon-to-be adversary thought was going to suggest that I had felt betrayed by Thompson, perhaps accounting for some of our invective against him. I said that this was not what I meant to say/not what I meant to say at all. Rather, I was about to suggest that the fact that I had been started down the road to becoming a historian in part by reading Thompson, there was some degree of freedom to be got from the fact that he no longer seemed to be practiciing history, but was instead engaged in anti-nuclear and other political concerns. Being a disciple of Thompson was not a limiting experience. The same critical thinking that he applied to Althusser, his no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners writing could be used anywhere. All very romantic stuff.
I continued by finally responding, as forcefully as possible, to my colleague's initial point, asserting that this was not a diatribe against Thompson for being an imperialist. For my part (and I only speak for myself here), I was trying to bring to the paper my changing understanding of myself: a former English public school boy brought up on a “healthy diet” of imperial propaganda dressed up in the guise of common sense and proper behavior (rugby not cricket); a member of a middle-class English family, which when one scratches beneath the surface owes much of its coherence to the (one-time?) existence of an empire; an American citizen who has written about African American history and now is proccupied with writing on comparative historical concerns; and, the father of two children who have arguably stronger roots in Maharashtra (Bombay Presidency) than in the Home Counties of England. My strong desire was to examine myself and my own roots and consider the way in which the things that I have taken for granted have their origins in imperial relationships. What better way for a historian to do this than to consider perhaps the “seminal” text in Anglo-American social history?
Inexorably, we
were heading to a disagreement. My
cherry-pie-eating assailant seemed happy enough so far, but he was there
lurking, I felt sure. And then I
stumbled into the present and into the trap.
We wanted to suggest further, I asserted, that if there were these imperial
links hidden in Thompson’s work, perhaps they also lay in the work of those
people who had used his ideas on the American side of the
The trap was laid, but still I was not within it – until, that is, I mentioned the word “privileging”. I must have said something to the effect that one of the problems is that Thompson doesn’t see how his analysis privileges certain groups and still ends up denigrating others. I did say that this had been one of my points of departure in my own interpretation of social history. For it had always seemed to me that the way social historians had studied migration, the area with which I was most familiar, almost always tended to privilege certain groups and narratives over others.
My antagonist pounced. “That is where we part company, I’m afraid. I find the use of that term in critiquing Thompson wholly misguided and unhelpful.” This is not verbatim testimony since I had no pen and my fork was filled with a chunk of pie, but it gets across the intent. I was then treated to a diatribe against some of those who have criticized Thompson along these lines, particularly, I felt (though no names were mentioned), Joan Scott. This had not been Thompson’s intent, I was told. He was trying to get at the history of the inarticulate using those sources that were available to him. He was not trying to elevate the status of the artisans, but was trying to use them to give him access to this world about which the historical record was silent. He was rescuing them from universal condescension. This he felt was clear from his introduction to “The Unknown Mayhew.” Moreover, Thompson was akin to Eugene Debs: when one man is not free, he feels that he is not free. Thompson, he could assure me from his personal interactions with the man, was concerned about opening the doors to everyone. He was very radical. He was not interested in imposing his ideas on others, by privileging some and being condescending to others.
Without
question, the presentation was more impressive than my rendering of it
here. I had been happily eating away
only to realize finally that these cherries were indeed a little sour. I needed time to think and it was already
late. So I replied, “That is an
interesting perspective, and I need time to think about a response, and it’s
getting late. I should go.” But I didn’t budge. Instead I made the mistake of quipping that
Thompson may have felt that way, but he was no Eugene Debs, thereby implicitly
endorsing the formulation as presented to me.
Debs, I argued, was in the prison alongside the convicts who cheered him
as he was released. Thompson, by
contrast, I said (remembering the comment of a member of the history faculty at
Edinburgh University who had suggested that Thompson’s romantic picture of the
working class was typical of an outsider, a member of the middle class), was,
by his own admission (see Writing By Candlelight) more of a patrician,
one of the gentry. This was a side-track,
perhaps stalling for time, and I was only digging the hole deeper. For my adversary’s response was to say that
that kind of critique might have resonance for someone from
The conversation moved on to other topics. Order had been restored. I was pigeon-holed as a misguided English critic of Thompson, Madhavi Kale as a misguided Indian. No more really needed to be said on the topic, especially as American Thompsonians had been immunized from the imperial infection. The last part of our paper (as it was then), trying to make these connections across the Atlantic had been discounted in the acceptance of the exceptionalism of American historians. I tried to resurrect Du Bois for my purposes, but this only took us down that Avenue named “the meaning of W.E.B. Du Bois.” It ended at a roundabout which we circled trying to decide which exit to take (that which would allow us to employ him for our previous discussion), but not surpisingly we disagreed as to which one looked most attractive. And now it was very late, I needed to go and go I did.