Fred Jameson, unceasingly productive to the end, died in September at the age of ninety. His legacy is so large that no short-range attempt to take the measure of it is practicable. I’ve written about parts of it twice, of which repetition would be out of place here. It seems better to confine myself to just saying something—inevitably personal—about a relationship that mattered a lot to me, as it did to nlr, for fifty years.
From the start I was conscious of significant differences between us. Age was not the only one. Four years older, Fred was fluent in more languages, had a wider command of European culture, was a better speaker, and as a thinker and a writer possessed another order of imagination. Affable and informal in style, he was strikingly well-rounded as a human being. He could be intensely serious or buoyantly playful as occasion or mood demanded. His erudition was vast, but his authority was not intimidating. Lesser in mind and character, I never felt subdued by it. Though he was a force of nature, he was too ebullient and egalitarian for that.
Besides differences of that sort there was another pair. Neither of us was much attached to the countries where we were educated and lived, but nor could we escape being in some ways shaped by them; and there was an ocean between the two. Fred rarely set foot in Britain. I was nearing forty before I got to the us as an adult. Over time the traces of that crevasse faded, when I came to work part of every year in the States, though they never disappeared altogether. A more lasting contrast was perhaps temporal rather than spatial. Fred was a product of the American fifties, at college in the era of Eisenhower. Completing a doctorate at Yale, by the end of the decade he was an instructor at Harvard. In England the second half of the fifties was a more tempestuous time for undergraduates. I went up to Oxford in October 1956. Within a month, popular revolt had erupted in Hungary and Anglo-French forces backed by Israeli troops were attacking Egypt to secure the Suez Canal. Eighteen months later the French army seized power in Algiers, and toppled the Fourth Republic in Paris, a few hours from London. For students in the uk the result could be a much more intense, consuming politicization than was common in the us, where a New Left emerged much later than the one in Britain. When in due course Fred sent nlr a draft of his famous essay ‘Periodizing the Sixties’, requesting comments on it, one that he received was that the relevant years were perhaps more accurately 1956–1974 than literally 1960–1970. In that larger sense I was more a product of the sixties than the fifties.
If these were differences between us, what were the commonalties? We were both Marxists, but of a particular sort, since each of us was exploring a kind of Marxism that was unfamiliar in the Anglo-Saxon world and which we hoped to introduce to readers at home. Counterposing it to Soviet versions, Fred termed this ‘a relatively Hegelian tradition’, which produced the dialectical thinkers in Germany and in France who became the focus of his first really influential work, Marxism and Form: Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács and Sartre.footnote1 This was a tradition out of which he hoped the literary criticism in America he taught could develop the ideas it needed, if it was to decipher the forms of aesthetic production of a time when many of the landmarks of the world of these predecessors had been washed away, in the new universe of consumer capitalism. Working in parallel at roughly the same time, and addressing the same figures Fred surveyed, I expanded the roster of relevant thinkers and the lands from which they came to encompass not just Germany and France, but also Italy; adding Korsch and Brecht, Lefebvre, Goldmann and Althusser, Gramsci, Della Volpe and Colletti to his list. In doing so, I concurred with Fred that this was a Marxism fundamentally distinct from the Soviet versions, but departed from him by including theorists who were resolutely anti-Hegelian—terming the whole simply ‘Western Marxism’, and situating its genesis in the defeat of successive attempts to emulate the October Revolution in Europe after the First World War, and the impasse of Communist parties once the Cold War set in.
The result was a more historical and critical account of the kind of Marxism in which we were interested than Jameson had offered, but also far briefer cameos of its thinkers than his treatment of the company he selected. Considerations on Western Marxism was a quarter of the length of Marxism and Form: a lighter coin in the same currency. Its initial draft (1974) ended by arguing that the mass revolts of 1968 presaged an end to the enforced separation of theory from practice in Western Marxism, which had driven it away from questions of power to problems of culture, making possible a renewal of something more like the classical Marxism of the generations that took part in the October Revolution and its abortive sequels in Italy and Germany. This was a conclusion that divided the editorial committee of nlr, so when the text was published as a book a couple of years later, I added an afterword indicating what I thought were the retrospective limits of that prior legacy too.footnote2
So ‘Western Marxism’ was the original link in our relationship. There was a more specific strand within it as well. Marxism and Form led with four German thinkers and one Hungarian, to whom half the book was devoted, followed by an analysis—the longest single chapter—of Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique, in which Fred referred a number of times to his first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, published in 1961, when he was still in his twenties.footnote3 It so happened that the primary influence in my own discovery of what I later came to see as Western Marxism was also Sartre.footnote4 There was even a common secondary source for appreciation of him. Studying French and Russian literature at Oxford, one of my favourite books was The Contemporary French Novel by Henri Peyre, with its chapters on Malraux, Camus, Sartre and others. Peyre was Jameson’s supervisor at Yale, without whose encouragement and advice, he explained in his preface to it, his early book on Sartre would not have been possible.footnote5 In the penultimate book he published before he died, Fred spoke of our common formation by Sartrean existentialism. Together with that—the final thing we shared—went a radical aversion, exemplified by Sartre, to the rote anti-communism of the West in the epoch of the Cold War.
These intellectual affinities existed before there was any personal contact. After reading Marxism and Form, I wrote to Jameson a couple of times, asking if he would write an introduction to the translation of Adorno’s Minima Moralia we were preparing for New Left Books (precursor to Verso), or on Sartre’s work on Flaubert for nlr, without success. In the spring of 1974 we met for the first time when he passed briefly through London, and two years later collaboration was secured when he agreed to write an afterword to the series of exchanges between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno we had prepared for nlb under the title Aesthetics and Politics. Most of the four empirical presentations, historical and political in character, of these texts were written by myself. Fred’s concluding essay, arguing at a higher theoretical and propositional level, reflected on the meanings and metamorphoses of the opposition, as understood by the actors in these debates, between realism and modernism, and possible resolutions of the impasse between the two that had set in after the War. If an example of the difference in our respective ways of working were wanted, this would be as good a case as any.footnote6