The Sixties

by Jenny Diski

  He was a Republican of the old-fashioned sort... humanitary and idealistic, infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality, and inexhaustibly surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in the land of his exile...he believed that the day was to come when all the nations of the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses, and embrace on both cheeks, and cover the globe with boulevards...where the human family would sit, in groups, at little tables according to affinities, drinking coffee...and listening to the music of the spheres.10

  But even M. Poupin turned out to be more politically active than I was. I was uneasily aware, also, how very different the European resentment of the establishment was from the American resistance against the Vietnam war. For both that war was the core issue, the gravest and most pressing injustice, but my experience with Seymour before and after the Grosvenor Square demonstration made it clear that we post-war Europeans were waging a more theoretical battle than Americans who refused call-up or returned mentally or physically shattered, or who watched their children disappear into the South East Asian morass the United States government had got itself into. Britain, as far as I was concerned, was now a backwater (what Gore Vidal once called one of the ‘lands’ – Iceland, Newfoundland, Greenland), and all the better for it, it seemed to me. While on the one hand, any injustice was my and everyone’s concern wherever it might happen, and we were right to support the opposition in the US and Vietnam, it was in the places where the young were being drafted, where students (in Kent State) were being shot and killed for demonstrating, and in the underground tunnels of Vietnam itself, that the serious business of world-changing was going on. For the life of me I looked and couldn’t believe that the British Left could have more than a mildly irritant effect on those who made the world go on as it ever did.

  Nonetheless, I had a kind of hope. I think many people did. One day, I supposed, our lot would be in charge and then things would be different. It didn’t cross my mind then that ‘our lot’ would not remain our lot, or that there were another lot (and far more of them) in our generation who were as pragmatic about power as the unreconstructed generations before us. Like the young at all times, I imagined that such as us had never happened before, and that nothing was ever going to be the same again once the old had passed into their pottering retirement. What the young don’t get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a phase the old go through. It’s just as well, I suppose, that the young don’t see it that clearly. Best to leave disappointment for later.

  Actually, in line with Vidal’s view of our island, anyone in backwater Britain who wasn’t prepared to travel at short notice was likely to miss the serious battles that were going on in the world – even those quite nearby. In 1968, it looked to those of us peering through the sweetshop window of the English Channel as if the world was catching fire. In Prague, Dubcek was proceeding towards M. Poupin’s more ‘humanitary’ socialism, until the Soviet tanks steamrollered him into submission to the party line in August. In France, for decades a seriously politically active nation, there were a few days in May when the socialist dream looked like breaking into real life, as the unions joined dissenting students and came out in protest on the streets against de Gaulle’s government. The regular citizens of Paris opened their doors and offered sanctuary to the rebels against the fearsome CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) riot police. Cobbles were ripped out of the ground, cars upturned, barricades were built, running battles with the CRS closed the Latin Quarter to all but revolutionary sympathisers, and the Sorbonne was taken by the demonstrators who held great political and philosophical debates. From our side of La Manche it looked astonishing, a reality, as radical politics had never seemed in England, and quite not-undoable – but then even before most of the British radicals could catch the train to the Gare du Nord, it was over. De Gaulle had done a deal, made threats and promises, and with incomprehensible suddenness, the fire died. The revolution was over with no more result than a few missing cobbles on the streets. It was unfathomable, this dying away of the revolution-in-progress. In Italy the Red Brigade and in Germany the Baader-Meinhof gang were taking guerrilla action against individuals, and at the very end of the period, in 1974, in San Francisco, the Symbionese Liberation Army snatched heiress Patty Hearst and turned her into a gun-toting revolutionary while demanding that the Hearst family deliver $6 million of food in trucks to be distributed on the streets in the Bay Area.

  But in the UK it was mostly back to theory, after a little argy-bargy at the London School of Economics – a battle over the destruction of the iron gates – and a takeover of the University of London Students’ Union swimming pool in Malet Street. In 1963 I really did believe that the world would go up in a nuclear conflagration; by the end of 1968, I still thought so, but if the revolution hadn’t taken where it had been serious – in serious Europe and serious America and in very serious Latin America, where the previous year Che Guevara had been killed – what chance was there for it in England, where the students were universally regarded as long-haired layabouts, where civil servants never turned a hair, so sure were they of the reliable conservatism of the generality of the people, and the workers marched in favour of Enoch Powell’s racist call for an end to immigration before the Thames turned to a river of blood? The flame still flickered hopefully in those meetings where varieties of Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist or Maoist comrades maintained their faith in the eventual inevitable revolutionary outcome, but I couldn’t convince myself.

  The obscenity trial against Oz magazine in June 1971, for producing their Schoolkids issue, written and drawn by school-age adolescents, was a marker of the end of British dissidence – a marker, too, of the tone and seriousness of British dissidence. The teenage Vivian Berger’s energetic and priapic Rupert Bear sitting astride an upturned Gipsy Granny was too much for the decent morals of Inspector Luff of the Yard. The three defendants (Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis) chirpily showed up at court in short trousers and gym-slips to show their contempt, but when, even before they were found guilty, and they were held without bail, their long hair was viciously (and illegally) cut short, it should have been a warning that the permissive times were coming to a close and that the grown-ups were out of patience. It was beginning to look as if it wasn’t us who had given ourselves permission, but Them. And the permission was being withdrawn. There were some braver interpretations. From Germaine Greer, for example:

  At last they’ve stopped laughing at us, which means we can go back to laughing at them. We can be illegal. We can conspire. We can come closer together again as the space around us closes. There are more of us now, but that’s nothing compared to how many of us there’ll be tomorrow. Eradication means plucking up by the roots – but our roots are where they’ll never get at, they’re sunk down somewhere inside of every family in the British Isles.11

  This was bold and hopeful, but hopeless. The forces of morality – Mary Whitehouse’s various clean-up organisations, the Festival of Light supported by Lord Longford, DJ Jimmy Savile and pop singer Cliff Richard – called for a Nationwide Petition for Public Decency, and campaigned for ‘traditional values’ to prevail by virtue of the moral majority coming out to be counted, against drugs, sexual and especially gay liberation, and what they called obscenity (which Mary Whitehouse called ‘filth’), wherever it was to be found. Like Germaine Greer, they also believed that they represented every family in the British Isles, and probably with more justification. Though in their separate categories sex (clandestine and in the dark), drugs (cigarettes, alcohol) and even some rock ’n’ roll (that’ll be Cliff again) were popular activities in most families in the British Isles, the more dangerous youth-packaged version Sex-and-Drugs-and-Rock’n Roll, incorporating radical politics and alternative lifestyles, was always only a minority way of life. Except for clan meetings on demonstrations and music festivals, we kept ourselves mostly to ourselves (and only ever joked about spiking the water
system with LSD) and hoped not to be among those whom society chose now and again to make an example of, like the Oz threesome, Mick Jagger12 (The Times’ Leader’s butterfly broken on a wheel) and numbers of unnamed people who went to prison for years for possession of any quantity of hashish.

  So it was a bit of a surprise when bombs exploded from 1968 onwards, at the homes of various politicians, on the threshold of Biba, under a BBC outside broadcast van at the Miss World competition in 1970, as well as a hundred and more other places. Various anarchist groups had promised havoc from time to time, but it being England, neither the establishment, the regular Far Left or the counter-cultural types expected much actually to happen. Some of the bombs came with com-muniqués announcing retributive justice by armed working-class revolutionaries, signed sometimes by ‘The Angry Brigade’. Finally, eight students were arrested, four of them in a house where the police found a children’s John Bull printing kit with the words ‘Angry Brigade’ set up. It was enough, with some dubious forensics, to convict four of them, who were sentenced to ten years in prison. Bombs still went off while the defendants were in custody, and it seems clear that ‘The Angry Brigade’ was more of a brand name than a specific group of the eight people imprisoned, none of whom was convicted of actually causing explosions. But the press rejoiced that the unpleasant business of the Sixties was now being cleared up, though there wasn’t long to wait before the IRA brought to the British mainland some unpleasant business of their own. The Angry Brigade was as far as Britain got in the Sixties towards serious resistance, even if it was by no means as organised as the triumphant forces of law and order wanted the country to believe.

  The admirable David Widgery, lifelong member of International Socialism that he remained, later observed wryly of the radical Sixties:

  There was a general re-discovery of the Russian Revolution and of the various oppositional tendencies in the Soviet 1920s, and a tendency to chuck lumps of Trotsky and the young Marx in with some Reich. At its best it seemed like a gathering of post-electronic Renaissance people, passionately serious but intoxicated by LSD as well as alcohol and exponents of social theory instead of sword fighting.13

  The division between the Underground and the Far Left was sharper than this suggests. The underground press, IT (International Times), Oz and Ink, certainly reported the street fighting, and gave space to some of the theorists of the Left, but usually in a wild variety of overprinted colours and optically challenging patterns, which made it very hard to read if you weren’t actually tripping. They imposed psychedelia over the assumed dullness of Marxist-Leninist theory, giving their readers something pretty to look at without having to bother struggling through the prose. The counter-culture’s credo was rather different from the strict discipline of the comrades:

  It is living by what you believe, with a set of attitudes shared by, but not sacred to, a number of people intent on challenging their society to live up to its promise... It is a movement of social liberation through individual liberation. Everyone must be free to do their own thing. The Underground puts self at the centre of its spectrum. That is, no form of social or political liberation, however desirable, can take place unless its first priority is to allow each individual to determine his own desires, free from psychological, political or conventional pressures.14

  Like the forthcoming socialist paradise I had trouble believing in, this too required more faith than I was able to summon. It was very clear, just from living communally in the Covent Garden flat, that being free to do one’s own thing became highly problematical when one’s own thing clashed with someone else’s thing. Compromise was quite against the spirit of the times and in any case a nonsense where the self was central. When someone else’s freedom seemed inimical to your own, the phrase ‘that’s your problem’ immediately reappeared.

  In the Sixties we were reading all kinds of texts which dealt in large-scale, complete theories, but the actual living experience was altogether more messy and fractured. It ought to have been immediately obvious that liberation and libertarianism were not at all one and the same thing. To be liberated enough to put yourself at the centre of the spectrum and to determine your own desires without reference to ‘psychological, political or conventional pressures’ should have made one helpless with laughter. But it seemed, at first, to make complete sense. Or at least to be seductive enough to allow our intellects to slip away from examining the words very thoroughly. One crucial truth about the Sixties is that the difference between Buckman’s set of beliefs and those of Conservative government of the Eighties was, in practice, very much slighter than we imagined. We wailed during the Thatcher era: ‘No, no, that wasn’t what we meant, at all.’ She was anathema to us, the very opposite of what we had hoped for the future, but perhaps our own careless thinking gave the radical individualism of her government at least a rhetorical foothold. Her founding statement that ‘There is no such thing as society’ could easily be derived from the ‘self at the centre’ that seemed to many of us in the Sixties so unproblematical. We do have some responsibility there, I think, but Widgery was not merely indulging in the nostalgia of defeat when he refused to reject the values of the politically active Sixties, even if, in a way, his words have a final ring of the inescapable self-centredness which may be all that the Sixties generation are left with:

  And despite the manifest lack of success in the larger tasks we have set ourselves, I persist in regarding the commitment I acquired in 1968 as the most fruitful and rewarding of my adult life.15

  There were, of course, those, the great majority, doubtless, who, having finished with their wild youth, put on proper suits come the mid-Seventies and went off to work and a regular life, becoming all their parents could have wished, having just gone through a phase, as the more liberal of the grown-ups had always suggested. But some – these days called, derogatorily, idealists – maintained their former sense that ‘society’ exists, and believe it persists, even beyond the strident years of Margaret Thatcher and the officially approved decades of self-interest and greed that have followed. We are the disappointed remnant, the rump of the Sixties.

  As to the liberation of women – there’s no doubt that, like gay liberation, the second wave of twentieth-century feminism, which had barely got under way by 1970, has had, and continues to have, a powerful influence. Certainly, most women who lived through the early and late Sixties whether as political molls or psychedelic chicks can recall that they were mostly of ornamental, sexual, domestic or secretarial value to the men striking out for radical shores. The Left was never known for its willingness to embrace gender equality, but no more were the ‘heads’ or the entrepreneurs of the counter-culture. In a relatively public way, in relatively specific parts of the world, things have changed for women. Domestic violence is more seriously policed, rape is usually taken to be a major crime, and I would no longer (as I was in 1970) be asked for a (non-existent) husband’s signature when I applied as a single woman to have the gas service turned on in my new flat. But like racial equality, women’s liberation is honoured in legislation more than in the private attitudes of many individuals. Even in the wealthy West women’s pay is on average substantially less than that of men doing equivalent work, and the difficulties and expense of childcare often mean that women are going out to work to pay for childcare in order to work. I don’t think that personal inclinations and opinions in general have changed very much in the vast majority of either the developing or the developed world. Get just a little beyond the educated middle-class enclaves – read red-top newspapers, listen to men talk in bars – and the heart sinks. Young women themselves, not all, of course, consider feminism nothing to do with them. A student standing for office at Newnham College, Cambridge (one of the two last all-women colleges in the University) recently felt able to stand on the platform of not being a feminist. To a Sixties observer, these days the liberation of women on a Saturday night in town looks very like the freedom to get falling-down drunk. Perhaps it isn�
�t for earlier liberationists to have an opinion on what kind of equality women who now can choose should take – it may be just as impertinent as Western nations decreeing that only their kind of democracy is acceptable for ‘liberated’ dictatorships. Women are, of course, much freer than they were in the Fifties, when to be married with children often meant being trapped for life without the possibility of an independent income. But I’m not sure that there aren’t many women who are in a similar position today. A woman in her mid-sixties (just a few years older than me) told me recently that the problem with retirement was that now she had to think about what her husband was going to have for lunch every day, as well as what to buy for dinner. She meant her husband’s retirement from the bank. She had brought up the children and kept the fridge stocked. The Sixties, as I knew them, had entirely passed her by.

  It started much earlier, and, as nearly everything does, in the US. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and founded NOW (the National Organization of Women). In the UK, Sheila Rowbotham wrote an article in 1968 that began, ‘The first question is why do we stand for it?’ in the New Left Review, and as part of the editorial collective persuaded Black Dwarf to follow 1968’s ‘Year of the Heroic Guerrilla’ with 1969’s ‘Year of the Militant Woman’. It wasn’t until October 1970 that Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch came out, but by then there were already numbers of women’s consciousness-raising groups, talking about the limitations of their lives, the need to find fulfilling work outside childcare, equal pay, their experience of men’s contempt and chauvinism, discussing the nature of the female orgasm and helping each other with mirrors to take a first peek at the anatomy of their vaginas (something men had always been doing). No one then thought that a woman prime minister would be in Downing Street within ten years. No one then thought that if such a miraculous event could ever happen in a country where women weren’t even allowed to read the news on television for fear of trivialising it, the situation of women (along with everyone else not grasping at personal gain) would get worse. In the light of the resistance to women’s liberation in the Sixties (Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael famously declared when asked the position of women that it was ‘on their backs’), it isn’t altogether surprising that militant absurdities occurred such as the Sisterwrite Bookshop refusing to let the two-year-old son of a woman just arrived in London into the café with his mother. I watched as she protested, ‘But I can’t leave him alone in the middle of Upper Street, and I want to look at the noticeboard,’ and received a welcoming smile to her but no easing of the anti-male rule. There were theoreticians and practitioners of lesbian S&M, girl-child-only crèches at women’s discos, and a feminist zoologist in Scandinavia who proposed a change of name for the orang-utan – which means in Malay ‘Man of the Forest’ – to the Malay for ‘Person of the Forest’. But it was difficult to laugh too much at the logical-conclusionists – say anything in the early Seventies about the rights of women or men’s patronising attitudes, and there was an instant accusation that you would be one of those women’s libber, bra-burning, unshaven lesbian girls. And aside from the Separatists there were women who worked in unions and lobbied government for equal pay legislation, for childcare assistance, who men had to listen to explaining to them what was wrong with even their liberal views of women’s rights. Right into the 1980s, when my ex picked up our daughter from school two or three times a week, I was told by other mothers when I was in the playground waiting for her how fortunate I was to have such a marvellous man.