Fifty-three: The Walrus was Paul

In the section of my paper, “Empire, Class and Culture,” called “My Dinner with Andre,” I described a visit that I made to another historian’s house, during which I discussed a paper I had recently published. The paper was “The Empire and Mr. Thompson: The Making of Indian Princes and the English Working Class.” It had been published in the Economic and Political Weekly in Mumbai, and it described how empire had been erased from The Making of the English Working Class (now reaching its fifty-year anniversary). It further described the work of E.P. Thompson’s father, Edward, who had lived in India and wrote several histories of the subcontinent, thereby making the erasure that much more ironic (particularly given the titles of the two men’s seminal texts).

My host had been somewhat upset with me during my visit, and he had also been extremely condescending – who was I to say? etc. He, after all, knew E.P.; he had even housesat with him, on the occasion that E.P. had visited India – the occasion that was described by E.P. in Writing by Candlelight. So he knew E.P., and it was completely out of the question that he could have done any of the things that I suggested in my article.

“Empire, Class, and Culture” had become a paper written following this interaction, and it had been presented at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford. It had caused considerable consternation there. David Montgomery and his ilk were apoplectic, as was one of the organizers of the conference – who ensured that the paper did not get included in the volume that would be published from the conference (Racializing Class, Classifying Race).

The one question I was asked again and again, by the younger members of the conference who liked my paper, and who had each had their own experience of being talked down to by more senior members of the profession, was the about the identity of my host. “Who was Andre?” they all wanted to know.

Well, I didn’t want to say, because I was a junior faculty member and didn’t feel secure in my position at the time. The person, Alan Dawley, was an exceedingly nice man, and in retrospect he probably enjoyed the interaction with me – but he was also one of many labor historians who felt what I had to say was not permissible. Pleasant or not, serving cherry pie or not, I didn’t feel comfortable going public with my piece in that kind of way.

I regretted it when I heard he had died later. He was obviously a great historian in his own right. And I was a mere peon who probably didn’t deserve to wipe his boots. But, then we were talking about the making of the English working class, and not the making of Indian princes, so such refinements probably shouldn’t have detained me.

Oh well.