New Yorkers call “making it”; and so many left-wingnintellectuals in Britain and elsewhere have made it, in thatnsense, in the last 30 years, that the tale of the socialist fat catsnwill some day justify a volume, and perhaps a series. ThenLondon theater, for example, is full of them — some ofnthem Williams’ pupils. Their moral problems are intriguing.nMost, after all, were bourgeois by birth or upbringing.nRaymond Williams was not, and his perfectly good claim tonproletarian origins is an essential part of his self-image, justnas that highly cultivated self-image was an essential part ofnhis career. His books, as reviewers often noticed, are allnmore or less about himself—a sort of continuous autobiographynlightly masked as cultural history. The critical problemnby the 1960’s, which failed to prove insuperable, was thatncapitalism was actually not failing. There was nothing muchnin domestic policy in that age, as in the ages of WilliamnMorris or R.H. Tawney, to justify the Marxist myth ofnproletarian destitution or inevitable class-war. Nor wasnBritain, or any other West European nation, at war innVietnam.nThese disadvantages were overcome with astonishingnease. The Williams solution was to create a myth of ansuffering being, glancing as he went at William Cobbett ornThomas Carlyle or D.H. Lawrence or George Orwell.nFrom behind the sages of the recent past, a new sage wasnborn. Even Modern Tragedy (1966), critical history thoughnit is, begins with an account of the author’s early life and annobscure reference to the sufferings of his parents in a Welshnvillage, presumably during the Depression of the 1930’s.nHis first novel and his best. Border Country, is similarlynautobiographical. There is no Death of the Author here, nonmistaking intention. A Williams book is always a book aboutnWilliams.nHis justification, perhaps, was that historical objectivitynwas in any case a bourgeois illusion. In a revealing review ofnLionel Trilling’s Beyond Culture (1966) in the April 15,n1966, Guardian, for example, he dismissed Trilling as onenwho had desperately adhered to the discredited “liberal ideanof the self,” in an age where individualism had alreadyndefinitively failed. It had failed, Williams remarks, “becausenby definition it was open to an infinite extension of othernpeople and classes, who then threatened the learned imagenof the self,” meaning, I suppose, a newly conscious workingnclass and the masses of the Third World. The passage isncharacteristically vatic, cloudy, and high-minded, as if ansuperior viewpoint had been effortlessly assumed. Thenbourgeois illusion, as it emerges, is the illusion of objectivenknowledge, and Trilling is bracketed with Nietzsche, Frazer,nConrad, Freud, and other deluded liberals. (Not D.H.nLawrence, since Lawrence was then supposed to be ofnworking-class origins and therefore immune to criticism,nwhatever his debts to Nietzsche and Freud.) Trilling’s follynwas to suppose that individual mind can achieve truth:n”Culture” is the inevitable and hated social process,n”mind” is the individual, scrutinizing and separate.nThere can be no such separation between mindnand culture, except in fantasy; but this fantasy isnneeded [by liberals] to preserve a threatenednidentity.nAnd every attempt since Matthew Arnold to rationalizenliberal humanism, including Trilling’s, “only prolongs thenillusion.”nThat argument already smacks of another age. Indeed thenclaim that liberal humanism is dead—or for that matter thatncapitalism is dying—looks so much less plausible in 1988nthan it did in 1966 that one realizes how fortunate Williamsnwas to live and write in his time. He was a lucky author. Innsome ways he knew it, or suspected it. “That is not the waynthe world is going,” I remember him saying as we discussednwhat Marxists had once supposed to be the inevitablenimmiseration of the working classes under capitalism andnMarx’s famous doctrine that revolution would begin in thenadvanced industrial states. His passionate espousal of HonChi Minh, both in print and in noisy demos outside thenAmerican Embassy in London—Williams wearing a clothncap in the crowd in Grosvenor Square to assert hisnproletarian origins—was not a matter to discuss in his laternyears, after a united Vietnam had conquered its neighborsnand become a Soviet nuclear base. In 1983, when he retirednfrom his chair of drama in Cambridge, in his early 60’s, henretired indeed, and his last years were not the most active asnan author. His books are still in print (or some of them) andnhis name still reverenced by some middle-aged academicncritics like Terry Eagleton who were once his pupils. But thenworld has not gone the way of Marxist prophecy since then1970’s, as he knew. The New Left that sprang into life innthe mid-1960’s, shortly after he came to teach in Cambridge,nand which faded after the U.S. withdrawal fromnVietnam in 1972, had been his theater; he had taken hisnchance in it, and starred there. For Williams was that rarenthing among drama critics: an actor.nThe act had many turns, though they all centered on thenclaim to proletarian origins and the sanctity of a workingclassnfuture announced by Marx and Engels in the 1840’s. Itncalled for some performative skills, since the humility of anremote provincial origin bore a little investigation but not anlot. Williams’ father was a rail-signalman in Wales, indeed,nbut in a village only a hundred yards or so from the Englishnborder—its local town was Hereford, that comfortablencathedral city—and the boy went to Abergavenny School, anhighly reputable place where he was well taught, winning anplace at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1939. ThenCambridge freshman was already a Communist at a timenwhen the Soviet Union was in alliance with Nazism, and hisnactivities in the students’ union were devoted to opposingnthe war against Hitler and supporting the Soviet invasion ofnFinland. At that time, as I have been told by a contemporarynof his, Williams affected an American accent in his unionnspeeches, having seen Hollywood films and fearing that hisnWelsh accent—or was it Western English? — might be ansocial disadvantage. So a histrionic talent appeared early.nAfter Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, he served as annantitank captain in the Guards Armored Division, learningnand forgetting (as I remember his telling) a little Japanese innthe process, though he was never a linguist and made nonclaim to know Welsh. After the war he resumed hisnundergraduate life in Cambridge and completed his degreenat a time when the critical prestige of F.R. Leavis was at itsnheight, to become a total and dedicated Leavisite. It wasnhere that the lasting shift from Party Communism tonCulture Communism was completed. Some eager butnnnJULY 19881 ISn