You only need one good teacher, it’s sometimes said, and I was lucky enough to have had a great one.
By the time I met her in 1979, Margot Heinemann (1913-92) was a legendary figure of the British left, not just because of her youthful romance with the charismatic young Communist, John Cornford, but for a long life dedicated to teaching, writing and the cause. Others can tell her story better than I can, and that’s certainly not my purpose here.
Instead I want to give some sense of how this remarkable, sometimes intimidating, deeply committed and astonishingly intelligent woman shaped not just my intellectual and creative development, but the way I think about life as a whole. It’s a personal account, if one streaked with politics.
Although Margot had studied at Cambridge in the 1930s, she spent most of her life ‘in the real world’ - in her many years with the trades union movement, as a teacher at Camden School for Girls and at Goldsmith’s in South London. I realise now that I was so lucky to have been at Cambridge during the few years when she was there: it gives me, however tenuously, a link with a remote, but extraordinarily significant movement.
It must have been in the autumn of 1979 that I first attended Margot’s lectures at Cambridge University on how Brecht read Shakespeare. I was interested in the relationship between politics and drama, but my thinking was dominated by narrow aesthetic questions. Mrs Thatcher had just come to power and was rolling out her extraordinarily divisive agenda, but I was more interested in working out how to become a theatre director than worrying about the distribution of wealth.
I have a vivid memory of my first sight of her: a robust, silver-haired woman speaking in a very crisp voice with tremendous precision about drama and politics. Here, immediately, was what I’d been looking for: a way of combining a sophisticated appreciation of aesthetic form with an understanding of political context and content. It was only when I realised that she wasn’t just spouting theory, but had actually lived and breathed this stuff, that I realised what I was confronted with. I soon read everything I could by her and attended as many of her lectures as I could. I instinctively knew that she had something that I needed.
I was unhappy with my Director of Studies who seemed very narrow and introverted, and I plucked up the courage to drop her a note to see if she would ‘supervise’ me. I can’t remember how many terms she taught me, and I get confused between supervisions and social visits, but I do remember her teaching.
Margot’s notes in the margins of my essays were always precise, kindly, but took no prisoners. My favourite was when I said that ‘in the late plays Shakespeare had lost touch with the people’: she circled the words ‘the people’ in red and wrote, ‘Dear, be careful not to use the phrase the people in the way Hitler would have done.’ I don’t remember anything politically partisan, and if she ever referred to the ‘Marxist classics’ it was with humour: ‘Odd, isn’t it, that Marx can be useful when looking at The Comedy of Errors?’
Nor was she ‘politically correct.’ She knew that good and bad, progressive and reactionary, altruistic and self-interested can be found in all sorts of people and groups. And she’d seen the realities of the thirties all too clearly to labour under any illusions about the sanctity of the poor and oppressed. You start from where you are, not from where you’d like to be.
Margot used to attend the (now legendary) Shakespeare in Performance seminars, and I think it was here that she made the greatest impact on me. What I saw there – with my new friend, the 20 year old Tilda Swinton – was a sophisticated reaction to the Shakespeare establishment, and the broader cultural fix as a whole. Margot’s experience, breadth of vision, attention to detail and underlying political analysis, swept all in its way. We all - undergraduates, research students, distinguished fellows, even George Steiner - knew that we’d met our match. She was intolerant of trendiness, and critical of theoretical thinking which ignored the text. But so also was she open minded and forward thinking, dynamic and provocative. Again, it was this combination of moral commitment with scholarly attention which was so inspiring.
At the heart of Margot’s teaching was precision. I remember once arguing that Shakespeare was a ‘reactionary’ and cited all the obvious arguments. Her reply revolved around two key principles:
See things historically. Just because Shakespeare wasn’t calling for revolution didn’t mean he was a reactionary. And without a sense of historical distance all literary approaches (and theatrical ones) descend into prejudice and fantasy.
Read the text carefully and with a feel for its contradictions. Her insistence on detail, on the meaning of the words, on the particularity of what is written, continually challenged sweeping statements.
Above all, Margot was showing us that if you read an old text with some grasp of history, it might reveal itself in ways which were more alive than you could possibly have dreamt of. These are inconvenient truths in a culture – and an industry – obsessed by the contemporary and suspicious of contradiction, but I can’t forget them.
She also used to come to my productions. She saw my student production of Measure for Measure when it played a short season at the Almeida. I think she approved, but she didn’t like my Pompey being barefooted. Of course she was right: under the influence of Peter Brook, I’d caricatured the working class characters. I think she was most impressed with my production (with Tilda) of Athol Fugard’s Statements, a brilliant play about interracial sex in apartheid South Africa. She was rather dismissive of my ever so arty production of All’s Well That Ends Well (quite rightly, I suspect) but more approving of my modern dress, thoroughly Brechtian production of The Comedy of Errors.
On graduating I Margot and I used to correspond about all kinds of things, but above all Brecht and Shakespeare. I remember being flattered when she asked me to read an early draft of her essay on King Lear and the World Turned Upside Down. I can’t remember what I told her, and I can’t imagine my 23 year old opinions would have been of much use, but I don’t think she was simply trying to flatter me.
I was then amazed that she took seriously my suggestion that we should do a book together on Brecht on Shakespeare. I remember we even went for a drink in Hampstead with the great Brecht scholar, John Willett, to talk about the subject. She set me to cataloguing every mention of Shakespeare in Brecht which I promptly did. Margot’s health then went downhill but I’ve still got the stuff on my computer and may well try to do it one day.
And it was in London – away from Cambridge, scholarship and the sixteenth century – that I began to sense something of her life before I met her, and also the depth and sophistication of her politics. I had known about John Cornford’s famous poem dedicated to her (below), but I think it was in London that I started to hear her talk about the Popular Front, her generation’s fight against fascism, as well as her work with the miners and the Communist Party – all against the background of Thatcher rampant.
In the mid 1980s I directed new plays at the Traverse in Edinburgh. The first was Peter Arnott’s White Rose, about Stalingrad (starring Tilda and Ken Stott) which had a fascinating discussion about oppositional politics – the balance between the charismatic star and the patient, unglamorous, worker – and I remember Margot attending a Q&A. I think Peter’s point was that the star was just a star, and quite possibly right wing to boot. Margot tried to bring more balance to the discussion, and I remember thinking that Cornford’s ‘star quality’ might have been at the back of her mind.
I then directed Tilda in Man to Man by Manfred Karge, an avant-garde piece about a woman who’d survived the German nightmare by disguising herself as her dead husband. It was a full on blast of post modernism, and Tilda was astonishing. Margot saw it at the Royal Court and admired what we’d done but was suspicious of its artistic experimentation. Although this wasn’t the last thing I did with Tilda, Margot’s challenge was important: Tilda went off to do (brilliant) art films with Derek Jarman and I tried to work out how to bring some of the political insights I’d learnt from her into the bourgeois theatre I was going into.
I used to go and visit Margot in her flat in London, really for extended seminars disguised as dinners: I’d try to get her to talk about all the stuff I was interested in. I frequently felt stupid, not because we were talking about subjects I didn’t know about (she would just tell me the facts if I didn’t have them), but because my understanding of life and the world seemed shallow. Two moments in particular:
I remember asking Margot why she hadn’t left the Communist Party in 1956. She didn’t snap at me – which I’d feared – but she did look fierce (‘not that bloody question again,’ I could hear her thinking) and said that ‘you don’t abandon your family, however awful they are’. The rights and wrongs of that are endlessly debatable and I’m not interested in coming to a judgment, but it struck home.
On the day of the Brighton bomb in 1984 I went to see her for dinner. It was during the miners’ strike and there had been a lot in the papers about a growth in violence. The IRA didn’t declare immediately that they’d done it, and I remember saying to Margot when I arrived: ‘I just hope it isn’t the miners.’ ‘Of course it wasn’t the miners,’ she snapped, ’you just believe what you read in the papers.’ It was the crossest I’ve ever seen her, and I nearly left. I’m glad I didn’t, because it gave me an insight into a part of her life which I’d never really known about.
Margot’s challenge could be robust. But I don’t resent it, not for a moment, and am grateful to have encountered the depth of her beliefs and the enormity of her experience. Clever young people should be exposed to such things: it’s part of how they learn.
What I never really grasped was that these were, of course, the last years of her life. My final memory is of her lying on a reclining chair while I asked her endless questions about all my favourite subjects. She closed her eyes and said ‘dear, that’s all in the past. What are you doing now? That’s what matters.’ She joked that she was fed up of living in the sixteenth century and she meant it. Like all the best teachers, Margot knew that she learnt from her pupils. ‘What matters is young people.’
I’ve had moments of wondering whether the Margot I knew in the last 12 years of her life was somebody set free. What do I mean by that and how could I possibly know? I suppose it’s something to do with a sense of her alone at last, a grand figure from another age, and no longer the genius’ moll that she sometimes joked she was. What’s more I felt she was involved in a radical and independent minded recasting of the whole socialist project in the face of the end of the Soviet Union and the winding up of the British party. Her remarkable poem, Ringstead Mill (below), looks forward as much as back. Discovered in her papers after her death, Tilda read it at her memorial service: ‘Change is their memorial / Who have changed the world.’
Eric Hobsbawm described Margot Heinemann as ‘one of the most remarkable people of our time and testament to its indestructible hopes’, and certainly her lifelong commitment to working for a better world was exemplary. With the revelations first of Stalin’s crimes and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cause to which she dedicated her life seemed discredited, and her generation of communists were (and still are) vilified, above all for their enduring loyalty to the cause. I prefer to remember her statement, a year before she died, of her political position: ‘The challenge is to take up the shamed, blood-stained cause of the Left and make it what it was meant to be, and not what 65 years of misuse and error have made of it. That’s where I stand.’
Her funeral was astonishing with the great and the good of the British left attending. Hobsbawm gave the eulogy. John Cornford’s famous poem to her (below) was printed on the Order of Service. We listened to a Bach Violin Suite and a recording of Paul Robeson singing Old Man River. I remember noticing an elderly man at the back standing erect and saluting as the coffin slipped away to the sound of a choir of Welsh miners. He must have been an International Brigadier from her youth and the sight spoke to me of a completely different Margot than the one I had known. And yet, I realise now, the extraordinary thing about Margot was that the real world, with all its battles and its losses, its injustices and its despair, its struggles and its triumphs, was there all the time – even when talking to privileged young people like me about Shakespeare.
So, you see, Margot changed me, and she changed my world. I think of her often and wonder what she would feel about what I’ve been up to since she died. Her answer might challenge me, it might even hurt, but it would provoke me into thinking more clearly, not just about the life of the mind, but about the still turning world in which we live.
And that, for me, is what real teaching is about.
*
To Margot Heinemann
Heart of the heartless world,
Dear heart, the thought of you
Is the pain at my side,
The shadow that chills my view.
The wind rises in the evening,
Reminds that autumn is near.
I am afraid to lose you,
I am afraid of my fear.
On the last mile to Huesca,
The last fence for our pride,
Think so kindly, dear that I
Sense you at my side.
And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can:
Don't forget my love.
John Cornford (1936)
*
*
Ringstead Mill
Stranger whom I once knew well,
Do not haunt this house.
Sorrow's but a ravelled thread,
To draw back the active dead,
Nor is pleasure mutable
Such as smiled on us.
Stranger whom I once knew well,
Do not haunt this house.
Idle and low spirits can
Take your name and face:
Old green sweater, battered coat,
Coal-black hair and sleeves too short.
Though I know the living man
Finished with this place,
Idle and low spirits can
Take your name and face.
Here we laid foundations where
Never walls were built.
Faded is the fireside glow,
Things we knew or seemed to know
Blown around the empty air,
And the milk is spilt.
Here we laid foundations where
Never walls were built.
And the hard thing to believe
Still is what you said.
With a bullet in the brain,
How can matter think again?
All things that once live and move
Endlessly are dead.
And the hard thing to believe
Still is what you said.
So from these deserted rooms,
Even memory's passed.
As your closely pencilled screed
Grows more faint and hard to read,
So our blueprints and our dreams,
Torn from time are lost.
So from these deserted rooms,
Even memory's passed.
Mountains that we saw far off,
Sleek with gentle snow,
To the climber’s axe reveal
Ice that jars the swinging steel,
Armoured on a holdless cliff
With the clouds below —
Mountains that we saw far off,
Sleek with gentle snow.
Time bears down its heroes all
And the fronts they held.
Yet their charge of change survives
In the changed fight of our lives —
Poisoned fires they never dreamed of
Ring the unrented field.
Change is their memorial
Who have changed the world.
Margot Heinemann (1960?)
