Stuart Hall arrived in Oxford from his native Jamaica in 1951 with a trunk so large and unwieldy that the college staff could not manoeuvre it to his first-floor rooms. His mother, who traced her relatively pale skin to an ancestry that included plantation owners, insisted he bring the trunk because its rounded top and steel hoops denoted what she saw as a “colonial version of modernity and sophistication”. In the end, it was decided to leave the monster down in the college basement. Hall removed a few items of clothing from it on that first day, but never opened it again. He wondered, 60-odd years later, if the trunk was there still. “Weighted down with pretentiousness and aspiring to what it could never be,” Hall recalls, “I abandoned it with relief.” Other baggage of the complexities of his growing up proved harder to leave behind, however.
History will perhaps judge Hall, who died in 2014 aged 82, the most significant figure on the British intellectual left over the course of the last 50 years. He was instrumental in creating the idea of multiculturalism – a respect and empathy for different identities within the bounds of nationality – and, as founding editor of the New Left Review, director of the first cultural studies department at Birmingham, and patient after-hours educator on the Open University, offered an inclusive alternative to the politics of division. Much of this understanding came through his interrogation of his own history as a “colonised subject”, a fate that he escaped as far as he could, both socially and in his psychological landscape, but which never entirely went away. He was born into the “emergent brown middle class” that fought for independence in Jamaica, but who had through the legacy of slavery “been inserted into history… backwards and upside down”. Once he arrived in Britain, the nuances of that very stratified society were eclipsed by a broad-brush race-awareness. Hall may have been a Rhodes scholar, but he became above all, in many eyes, a black Rhodes scholar.
This book explores the fallout from that disjunction. Hall never planned to write a memoir. He was in part too modest for such an undertaking, but also refused to countenance the idea of an individual in isolation from society. The book grew out of a series of conversations he had with Bill Schwarz, an English professor at Queen Mary University in London. Hall was a determined collaborator and he preferred the idea of Socratic question and answer to any kind of first person. However, as the conversations ranged more widely, and the transcriptions mushroomed, this different kind of book emerged, a series of autobiographical essays, pieced together to trace the contours of Hall’s intellectual and emotional life. He was never convinced of the possibility of objectivity. “It’s always seemed to me that even the most abstract theories are, to varying degrees, informed by their subjective conditions of existence,” he observes at one point here, during a meditation on “creolised thinking”. His book he hoped, which as his health deteriorated had become a manuscript of 300,000 words which he pored over with Schwarz’s help, annotating and revising, would be “an experiment in drawing out what connections I can between my ‘life’ and my ‘ideas’”. The quote marks in that latter sentence are telling. Though a famously warm and generous man, no aspect of Hall’s life went unexamined.
Some of these intellectual roles were thrust upon him. Having believed he had left Jamaica behind, he found himself, somewhat reluctantly, a kind of spokesman for the Windrush generation that settled in Britain in the late 1950s. In the hall of the home he shared with his wife of 50 years, Catherine Barrett, a Yorkshirewoman, he always kept the reproduction of a photograph taken on Windrush of three Jamaican migrants “in their formal sharp gear ready to step off the boat and make their entrance to the mother country”. In many ways you could view Hall’s career as an attempt to answer the question: “where did they imagine they were going?” and its supplementary “how would they be received when they got there?” It is telling, in his later years, how much of Hall’s thinking snagged and circled around that drama of arrival. His book is subtitled “A Life Between Two Islands” and reading it is to be assailed by the idea of displacement. Though he lived in Britain for 60 years, and became the most subtle of national treasures, he never forgot the fact of transit, or felt quite at home.
I interviewed Hall myself on some of these themes, a decade ago, on the occasion of one of his many contributions to British public life, the opening of the Rivington Place gallery he had campaigned for, devoted to diversity in British culture. Reading this book is to be reminded of the quiet rigour of his conversation, which even over the course of that afternoon ingrained itself. He was struggling physically then, on dialysis and unable to travel far, but you had the sense that he never stopped traversing the cultural trade routes that had brought him to the present moment. Toward the end of that conversation he politely informed me that he “had lived here for 57 years but I am no more an Englishman now than I ever was… In the back of my head are things that can’t be in the back of your head…”
A little frustratingly, the book does not dwell at any length on the challenges and triumphs of Hall’s later career that this remark implies, or the day-to-day texture of assimilation and its discontents. It traces instead some of the tensions and friendships that produced the New Left Review, which brought him into close contact with Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband among others (in whose tweedy company he appears in photographs an impossibly hip interloper) and it examines the motivations that led him to expand his horizons through jazz and the American avant garde. His marriage to Catherine, though, for example, is only explored in the final few pages of the book, even though “it’s not an exaggeration to say that among other things… she rescued me, saved my life”. As a mixed-race couple in Birmingham in the 1960s they were alive both to great optimism – CND rallies and Antonioni films – and subject to nasty prejudice. “I wanted to change British society, not adopt it,” he concludes, bluntly. The manner and means by which he did so – as the most trenchant critic of Thatcherism, for example – are not in the scope of this volume, however, which confines itself to a provocative portrait of the original cult stud as a young man.
• Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall (Allen Lane, £25) is one of the Guardian Bookshop’s Ones to watch this April. To order a copy for £18.75, saving 25%, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
