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PARTISAN REVIEW
REMEMBERING MAX HAYWARD
WRITERS IN RUSSIA, 1917-1978. By Max Hayward. Edited and with
an Introduction by Patricia Blake.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
$22.95.
Max Hayward, who died in 1979, was neither an academic
nor a man of the political world, though his attainments included
scholarship of formidable expertise and intelligence, on all things
Russian and Soviet, and on much else besides. Yet in the classroom,
in spite of his not altogether unpleasant experiences there, he never
felt quite at home. And as for high politics , he never was a British
Foreign Service type, and the climax to his diplomatic career came
in 1948 when he accompanied the British Ambassador in Moscow as
interpreter to an interview with Stalin and was rendered speechless
for the whole session when he noticed the dictator's polio-stricken left
arm and withered hand so exactly like his own. He never for very
long held any post with specific duties. He never wrote a book. He
was diffident to the point of shyness ; yet also boisterous, unruly and
untidy . He had a long bout with alcoholism , which he bravely but
wanly won. Had it not been for him, our knowledge and understand–
ing of contemporary Russia and of Soviet culture would be rather
more meager and brittle than they are.
He was born in 1924, which means he grew up in the Depres–
sion years, even tougher in Britain than they were here. He was
born in London, but his people came from Yorkshire , and he
sometimes liked to refer to himself as a Yorkshireman , though
sometimes also as cockney, almost always as in some sense "lower
class" and occasionally as a
muzhichok.
When I met him in the 1950s,
I had the impression of a very intense, breathlessly shy person who
looked at me as ifhe wanted to find out everything there was to know
about me with that look, but would have been more comfortable
looking through a telescope from a thousand miles away. His father
is described by Patricia Blake in the warm and imaginative memoir
that introduces this careful selection of Max's essays as an "itinerant
mechanic," or, in terms a bit closer to our own time and place a
migrant skilled-worker. Yet Max wasn't quite working-class either.
In Liverpool, where he grew up, he made it to the Liverpool In–
stitute, a grammar school that put him on a university track but
made him a prominent target for the neighborhood kids, who re–
ferred to his ilk as "pigs ."
