RICHARD SCHLATTER
609
So I, and some other American students, joined the communist
student organization at Oxford; it was called the October Club. The
membership was supposed
to
be a secret. We did not do much. We
talked and talked and talked, and it was good talk. We joined the Left
Book Club and read some of the books. We went to London to see Paul
Robeson in
Stevedore
and went backstage
to
talk with him after the
performance. I once distributed some leaflets for the Labour-Popular
Front parliamentary candidate in Oxford. John Strachey came with the
leaders of the student group to breakfast in my rooms in Merton. I
remember going
to
hear Maurice Dobb talk about China. All of this
was important
to
me, and I took it seriously although not, I think,
fanatically. I had lots of friends, English and American, who were not
radicals at all. Phillip Toynbee, who was the head of the October Club,
has written well about it and about the effect of the Spanish War on
English students.
My main job in
1936-1937
was to write a doctoral thesis, and
politics was never allowed to interfere with that. I wrote a book that
was published by the Oxford University Press in
1940.
And I continued
to go to concerts and plays and to read novels and poetry and every
good book I could find. I haunted Blackwell's and ran up a bill for
books which took me years to payoff. I bicycled in England and
travelled on the Continent and worked at French and German. I cannot
remember much about meetings of the October Club, but I do remem–
ber hearing Richard Strauss conduct
Rosenkavalier
and doing the
whole of the
Ring
in Munich, visiting Verona because T.S. Eliot said it
had the finest Romanesque church in Europe, rowing (very badly) for
Merton, reading More's
Utopia
with a Merton classics don in order to
improve my Latin, attending Tawney's Ford Lectures and Colling–
wood's lectures on the
Idea of History.
In Germany we did argue, mildly, with young Nazis in beerhalls
and youth hostels. I made a trip to Trier to photograph the house
where Marx was born and thought it a brave gesture because the Nazis
had closed the house to visitors and stationed tough looking Storm
Troopers outside. But mostly I enjoyed myself in Germany, where
cheap money made living easy.
It
seems paradoxical that I found Italy
and Germany pleasant places to visit in spite of the political horrors.
When politics did engage my deepest feelings, as in the Spanish
conflict, my attitude was different. Even in
1956
I still found it a
traumatic experience to visit Spain. Since I had little interest in
Russian culture or Russian internal politics, I never visited Russia in
the thirties.
