Authors: Jenny Diski
The Sixties (9 page)
I wasn’t. The crowd, smarter than I was, streamed to either side of the tree and I slipped away from it. I fled the fighting
and the crowds and took myself home, shaken by the violence of the police and perhaps more by the military organisation of
the demonstrators. I was also astonished and worried about Seymour, whom I’d seen for a moment in hand-to-hand combat outside
the Embassy with a policeman who towered over him, while gentle Seymour threw his fists and feet at him furiously. But somehow
he managed not to get arrested, and turned up at the flat scratched and bruised late that night, utterly different. Dark,
bitter, brooding, furious. He stopped taking drugs and paced around the flat enraged as if he had been incarcerated after
all. He was completely transformed. Either that, or the person he had been suppressing during his period of sweetness, his
smiling and stoned exile, had at last been released. Within a couple of weeks Seymour decided to return to the States. There
were ways of getting back incognito, he’d discovered. He proposed to live in hiding, wild in the woods, doing whatever he
had to do to fight the US government. I had a grey cape that was really part of the uniform of the Greycoat School which I’d
bought in a jumble sale. I gave it to him when he left to help him keep warm in the woods during his resistance. I never saw
or heard from him again.
There were other versions of changing the world. For readers of Marcuse, even such as Tariq Ali, for example:
...the long march did not mean ‘boring from within’ but gaining experience of production, education, computers, mass media,
the organisation of production, while simultaneously preserving one’s own political consciousness. The aim of the long march
was to build counter-institutions.
9
This was a serious preparation for a new order, but I think there were very few young people prepared to forgo the more demonstrative,
emotionally satisfying forms of revolution, or engage seriously if covertly with the ‘straight’ world in the way ‘boring from
within’ (in both senses) required. There were endless meetings, of course, if you had signed up to the VSC (Vietnam Solidarity
Campaign), IMG (International Marxist Group), IS (International Socialists) or WRP (Workers’ Revolutionary Party); you could
keep to agendas, take minutes, debate and make points of order, and feel you were part of the righteous few who were in possession
of the true way. In this sense, too, I was not political. I continued to see and abhor what was wrong, but I wasn’t convinced
by any of the true and mutually exclusive solutions on offer. Other people’s certainty always made me uncertain. I failed
to join anything and merely continued my long-standing inclination for non-engagement. I told myself that smoking dope, dropping
acid, shooting up Methedrine and reading about other ways of being was a form of resistance against the unsatisfactory world.
I settled for outlawhood. Or escape, as others, more politically committed, would reasonably have said. It suited my temperament,
and the interdisciplinary arguments and fractional in-fighting in the meetings I did attend – I made small efforts from time
to time – seemed far too much like microcosmic versions of what went on in the real world that we all so much disliked. I
had the airy idealism of M. Poupin, Henry James’s refugee from the Paris Commune in
The Princess Casamassima
:
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.
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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 Jagger
12
(
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.
