HEATHER KIERNAN
On the morning of 17 February 2009 I received a note from Eric Hobsbawm:
Dear Heather,
What can I say at this moment? Only that I loved and admired him too, and the world is not the same without him. But that is nothing to what you have lost, who renewed his life.
All love
Eric
I was a Jilly-come-lately, having only arrived on the scene in 1984, but it was clear from the beginning that Eric and Victor enjoyed a very deep camaraderie – a camaraderie formed during the political, economic and social upheavals of the early 1930s, and one that endured for over seventy years, though they rarely saw one another after Victor settled in Scotland.
‘I am glad – I am always glad – to hear from you, if only to confirm that you are still holding your own,’ Eric wrote in an email when they were both infirmed and near the end of their lives. ‘The important thing is that we should keep up the correspondence one way or another while we can.’
Eric Hobsbawm and V.G. Kiernan stood out among the twentieth-century British Marxist historians for their ability to look at history with a global vision. While their contemporaries Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and E.P. Thompson primarily tackled English topics in their mature historical work, Eric and Victor made ambitious forays across time and continents.
Eric admired Victor for a historical imagination that exposed proto-socialist practices among Jesuits in Paraguay, scrutinized the performance of colonial armies in various lands, and distilled the lessons of Urdu, Greek and English literature. He also believed that Victor’s persistent criticism of ideologically orthodox arguments inadequately supported by scholarship had an enormous influence on the early debates of the Communist Party Historians Group, citing Victor as ‘our chief doubter’.
Victor too always enjoyed receiving books and articles by Eric and would send him letters filled with elaborate notes and observations. (Looking at his journal for October 1956 I see that he was going to write Eric ‘a stiff letter’ about one he had written to The Worker.) They shared what they jokingly referred to as a mutual admiration society.
Over the next twenty-five years there was Eric’s invitation to join him in Belfast for the Wiles Lectures, a shared semester at UCLA, Eric’s birthday dinner for the surviving members of the CPHG, and Victor’s 85th birthday celebration at Edinburgh. Then there were the annual Christmas and New Year telephone calls to Woodcroft from Wales.
In late 2011 Eric wrote saying, ‘I’ve been asked to do an entry for Victor in the Oxford DNB – So I’d need to get lots of information from you.’ We corresponded for the next six months despite Eric spending a month in hospital. When the entry was published posthumously, in January 2013, Eric credited Victor for contributing to the immense success of the journal Past & Present (founded by key figures of the CPHG in 1952). Victor was ‘probably refereeing more contributions to it with greater assiduity than anyone else’.
But perhaps the greatest testament to their friendship was the letter Eric wrote for me to read at Victor’s Memorial in Edinburgh University’s Old College. It provides a closing rhetorical flourish about one of his proudest life accomplishments: convincing Victor Kiernan to write The Lords of Human Kind.