Those were the Sixties, were those?

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

What really happened to Britain in the Six- ties? A year ago, I published a book called The Neophiliacs, which could at least claim the dubious distinction of being the first of no doubt many attempts to answer this ques- tion. Everyone is agreed that the decade just ended was a very remarkable one, even if it seems harder for people to agree on just why.

Indeed it even seems hard for people to agree where the Sixties began and ended. According to a colour supplement some months ago, they did not really begin until 1963, when the Fifties apparently ended; although according to Miss Susan Sontag, in a famous Monitor interview some years ago, the Fifties themselves only began in 1956. Actually this confusion is in itself re- vealing, for it raises one of the first con- siderations in making any assessment of the Sixties—the fact that one cannot really con- sider them as a self-contained period, without also including some of the most important roots back in the Fifties from which the climate of the Sixties flowered.

Perhaps, just to give the reader some idea of my personal bias, I may be forgiven for prefacing these comments on someone else's view of the Sixties, with a very brief recapi- tulation of my own. I believe that there was indeed a marked change of social and poli- tical climate around 1956, symbolised by Suez, Look Back In Anger, the rock 'n roll craze and so forth. Britain then entered on a period of ferocious change, characterised by affluence, the cult of youth, and a general growing spirit of revolt against everything which smacked of the past, tradition and convention. This phase, the Macmillan era in Britain, led up to the watershed year of 1963, Proftuno, Macmillan's resignation and all, when the sway of the 'old Britain' came more or less violently to an end—and simul- taneously, a 'new Britain' emerged, symbol- ised by Harold Wilson, the Beatles, and the

general triumph of a sort of progressive and permissive orthodoxy. In the late Sixties, this phase of violent transition between one sort of Britain and another drew to a close, sym- bolised not least by the country's disillusion- ment with a great deal of the 'dynamic', 'swinging' fantasy-England which had been the outward expression of the period of change. And we were left, as we entered the Seventies, with considerable hangover, con- fusion, the progressive orthodoxy being chal- lenged in its turn, and all the signs of a new phase, coinciding neatly with the end of the decade. Such is my own general view of the past fifteen years (although it is only fair to add that it was dismissed out of hand by many critics a year ago as fanciful rubbish).

Now a new attempt has been made to penetrate this confusion, a second book on the Sixties by Mr Bernard Levin.' Mr Levin was, of course, the author of the most cele- brated feature launched in English journal- ism since the war, his political commentary which ran in the SPECTATOR for four years from the beginning of 1957, under the pseudonym Taper (itself a vivid expression of the new spirit emerging in the late Fifties). For this alone, quite apart from the following he has since built up for his television work and his popular journalism, the publication of Mr Levin's first book will be widely re- garded as a considerable event. How does this new but already distinguished author disentangle the same threads?

We begin with an irony. Probably the best- known of all attempts to capture the essence of a decade between the covers of a book is Malcolm Muggeridge's book on the Thirties. Certainly it was the original inspiration for my own effort on the Fifties and Sixties, even though the outcome was very different. But take the opening of Mr Levin's book : 'It was a credulous age, perhaps the most cred- ulous ever, and the more rational, the less gullible, the decade claimed to be. the less rational, the more gullible it showed itself. Never was it easier to gain a reputation as a seer, never was a following more readily acquired'. Imagine those sentences spoken in the familiar, world-weary accents of Muggeridge, and the irony will be clear. For although my own book was dedicated to Muggeridge, and reached a number of con- clusions which he does not find wholly disagreeable, Levin's book, both in style and general approach, is much more akin to, in fact is almost a pastiche of the original Muggeridge model—despite the fact that his philosophy and conclusions could not be more contrary. Indeed Mr Muggeridge is singled out by Levin, in a chapter entitled 'Mugg's Game', for some of the most tren- chant abuse in the book.

Like Muggeridge in The Thirties, Levin sees his decade all of a piece. He does not attempt to discern in it any beginning and end, any overall dramatic shape. He treats it as one, omnipresent, dream-like whole: indeed his book is studded with references to this particular undeniable characteristic of the Sixties (although he nowhere tries to explain it)—`a decade which sometimes seemed to be composed entirely of unreality', 'journalism drifting further and further from reality', 'there was something in the air of the decade that had virtually unhinged the minds of otherwise calm and level-headed men'.

His format is that of a collage—a be- wildering ragbag of people and half- forgotten episodes, thrown together in no particular order, the gambling boom, the Gerald Brooke affair, Cuba, the story of the Concorde, Anguilla, the Moors Murders— all ranked around a number of lengthy set- pieces, such as the Profumo affair, which takes up a tenth of the book, the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960, and studies of various characteristic individuals, such as Muggeridge. Macmillan and Wilson, each with a chapter to himself.

Now, this episodic approach, the fact that Levin has eschewed the temptation to impose even a rudimentary chronological pattern on his book, leads him into a certain amount of trouble. 1 know that the attempt to fit each year of the Sixties into a wider evolving pattern was one of the aspects of my own book which critics thought ludicrously ex- aggerated (and I have no doubt that such critics will find Levin's approach a good deal more sympathetic in every way). It is also true that in a number of places he does seem to recognise at least that the events of that fundamentally important year 1963 formed some kind of watershed to the decade—'the moment when the strain was greatest ... the last struggle of the old standards,.. before a new attitude emerged'. He also seems implicitly to recognise that, in some respects, the period of which he is writing must be dated back beyond the beginning of the Sixties—as when he refers to the en- ormous influence of Look Back In Anger (rather cheatingly described as having taken place `not long before the decade began').

But the lack of an overall sense of time- scale gives his book a somewhat incon- sequential air. The fact that he is without a chronological framework means that, in order to make some new topic seem char- acteristic of the Sixties, Levin must all too often resort to such introductory devices as 'the restless decade shifted uneasily, this way and that, as the earth's crust shifts from time

* The Pendulum Years—Britain in the Sixties Bernard Levin (Cape 50s.) to geological time. From the fissures there emerged strange things, strange attitudes'.

Even more does Mr Levin's lack of time- sense lead him into trouble when he actually gets the chronology wrong. The decade may have been dream-like in character, but not so dream-like as that the death of Dag Hammarskjold in 1961 took place after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Mr Macmillan's 'little local difficulty' with the three Treasury ministers was not in 1960, before the tour of Africa, but in 1958, before the tour of the Commonwealth (another example of an event from the Fifties being smuggled in subconsciously, for the very good reason that it really belongs to the period). Similarly the 'decade of the Flying Saucers', however much they reflected the credulity of the age, was not the Sixties, but the Fifties (Jung's book on the subject came out in I957)—and so forth.

In one sense, I suppose one might argue that this blandly dream-like view, blurring and blending all the events of the decade to- gether, was justified as reflecting the way many people experienced the Sixties. Cer- tainly I have come across many worse ex- amples of such confusion as to dates and sequence, even among people talking of events which directly concerned them. But in Mr Levin's case, it is also part of a more general tendency to wildness.

Other statements, if not directly inac- curate, are at the very least somewhat loose. Is it really true, for instance, that 'the rise of anarchistic thought' among the disaffected young of the late Sixties was 'the most re- markable philosophical development for many years, if not decades'? Or that 'the argument about cannabis had reached deaf- ening proportions by the end of the Sixties'?

(if anything, the din had remarkably sub- sided from its peak of three years before).

And it may only be a matter of opinion, but were the 1830's—the decade which saw the railway architecture of Brunel, his designs

for the Clifton suspension bridge and the conception of the Palace of Westminster, the greatest single monument to Victorian Gothic—indisputably 'the worst, architect- ural decade of the nineteenth century'?

I mention these examples, unimportant in themselves, not simply to quibble over detail, but because they seem to me to spring, in some ways, from what is this book's central flaw—the lack of a true overall theme, the lack of a consistent argument about the nature of the Sixties, which leads Levin only too often into passages of narrative other- wise so plain, that they must be interspersed with sweeping statements and eye-catching asides simply to sustain the reader's interest. For so impressionistic a picture, it is hard not to think that a number of the incidents he recalls are too insignificant, or retold too straight (such as much of his account of the Profumo affair) to be worthy of inclusion; particularly when other things are surpris- ingly omitted or underplayed. Who, four or five years ago for instance, would have thought it possible to write a history of the Sixties relegating the Beatles and President Kennedy to little more than a scattering of mentions, pop music to little more than a three-page sketch (largely taken up with a mere recital of some of the more bizarre names of pop groups), and which omitted Private Eye, the James Bond cult and the 'Swinging London' phenomenon altogether?

Of course Mr Levin does have a theme of a sort, which emerges cumulatively through- out the book—and that is the sense of Britain's bewildering transition in almost every respect during the Sixties from an old world that had become a hollow and per- nicious sham, to a new world that was in many ways equally hollow, and in some even more confusing. Some of the best things in the book, for instance, are his fun and games at the expense of the youthful protest industry, Tariq Ali, Vanessa Redgrave and all. He compares the clamour of protest 'against the American presence in Vietnam with E. M. Forster's description of Beet- hoven's Fifth Symphony: 'All sorts and con- ditions are satisfied by it ... the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings' (althilugh 'making a noise about Vietnam was free').

Also outstanding are the shrewd and en- tertaining set-pieces on Macmillan and Wilson, the 'Walrus and the Carpenter', whom he sees as utterly sham figures, 'soul- mates of the Sixties'. The profile of Macmillan is fuller, although too obviously a total caricature to be quite just (it is, for instance, simply inaccurate to claim that Macmillan was being 'quite untruthful' in saying of his original 'never had it so good' remark that he had not been 'making a boast but giving a warning'; the phrase came as part of a speech warning of the dangers of inflation, at Bedford in 1957). The picture of Wilson, perhaps wisely, ignores all the more familiar disasters, and concentrates, very funnily, on the Torrey Canyon and Anguilla episodes as classic examples of Wilson's Walter Mitty-ism.

But however wittily and mercilessly Levin is prepared to expose some of the new and greater shams erected in the Sixties on the ruins of the shams of the old world they replaced, there is one very important area of life in the Sixties where his venom is re- served strictly for the older world. On 'moral' questions, in the widest sense, which dominate a great part of the book—the set- pieces on Profirmo and Lady Chatterley, for instance—his view is utterly one-sided. He is so eager to savage Lord Hailsham's Pharisaism over Profumo, Muggeridge on 'dope and bed', the self-righteousness of Mervyn Griffiths-Jones, that by sheer force of repetition he must risk the charge of self- righteousness himself. When it comes to the changed climate at the BBC, Sir Hugh Greene is, of course, the hero, Mrs White- house all too predictably the villain, Now, in a sense of course, this is all quite fair. It is easy enough to heap ridicule on such reactionary outbursts—but is it not, in 1970, just a little too easy? Are the hypoc- risies of the old morality so total, that there are none attached to the new? With Oh! Calcutta! staged, the Abortion Act passed, half the cinemas in London advertising er- otic films, almost no book unpublishable, is it really necessary to go on belabouring poor old Griffiths-Jones for talking about 'wives and servants', as if his outraged figure was still at the centre of the national stage (even though he may be a judge)? Surely ten years later, it is not necessary to retell the glorious victory of the Chatterley trial blow by blow (`There was not only silence, but physical stillness; along the rail in the public gallery ... many in the first row had rested their hands; these lay, fingers linked or palms flat on the wood, absol- utely immobile. No head turned, except between Hoggart . and his council . 2.as they played, like a tennis match, this vast and moving rally') as if Lawrence's book really was a flawless masterpiece, on trial for its very life? Does it not strike Levin even for a second as he reads through the trial now that there was something just a little portentous about some of the defence's own claims? After all, it was not the whole book that was on trial—expurgated copies of the greater part of it had been available for years (indeed I read it myself, from the shelves of a girls' prep school, when I Was twelve), What was ultimately at stake vaa really nothing more wonderful than the right to print certain four-letter words (although one may see from the loving way .Levin gives each of them separate entry in his index, that he does attach considerable im- portance to that right). Again, on the Profumo affair, it is ex- cellent that Levin should have done some- thing to resuscitate the reputation of Profumo himself from the kind of priggish outrage displayed by many 'old moralists' at the time—but surely the 'collective insanity which seized Britain' during that curious period was not .solely the work of the Hail- shams and Haleys? Surely the remarkable thing about that episode was that many of the people who most avidly stoked the fires of rumour, longing to believe any wild canard about the sexual behaviour of the Establishment that could possibly be dreamed up, were in fact those sympathetic to the 'new morality'?

All too often, Mr Levin gives the im- pression of a fiery radical of the late Fifties who has derived so much psychological comfort from raging against the iniquities of the Establishment as it was then, that he is reluctant to abandon his old postures and acknowledge that the world has moved on. When he mentions the Abortion Act, for instance (and inevitably the 'wild charges' made by those opposed to it) he seems to be a man who sees these extremely tortuous moral questions simply in terms of a sort of cowboys and Indians battle between total enlightenment and blackest reaction. No one who tried to adjust his moral views to the reality of what has actually followed the permissive trends of the past decade could possibly see the issue quite so black and white, unless he had either led a very shel- tered life, or was breathtakingly naive.

The same strange simplicity affects Mr Levin's extensive treatment of the 'new theo- logians' and the debate over Honest To God. Although at one point he quotes the Arch- bishop of Canterbury's remark that 'there is a large part of the community that is quite indifferent to religion' as 'an understatement of sublime dimensions', it is obviously not true of Levin himself. Without being in any sense a religious man, his constant harping on the subject shows that it deeply intrigues him. Nevertheless, he is not at home in re- ligious matters. He misapplies the parable of the sower. He says of Beethoven that 'it is as certain as anything in history or biography can be that his religion was pantheistic'— which either shows a monumental ignorance of Beethoven, or else a technical misunder- standing of the term 'pantheistic'. And it is therefore perhaps hardly surprising that he should portray the whole debate over Honest To God (of which he shows little sign of having read more than one chapter) once again simply as a battle between the stage army of absurd reactionaries, pharisees outraged colonels and the lady who said 'the Bishop should be stripped to his socks', and an angelic band of radicals, who believed in love, tolerance and freedom, and whose books sold more copies because they were right. This may be how Bishop Robinson himself views it, but it is not a picture that would be recognised by any responsible person with the slightest knowledge of the real issues involved.

All of which brings me to my final res- ervation about Levin's view of the Sixties, and of the world. No one who knows him could doubt for a moment that he is a serious man, of great love and generosity towards his fellows, who cares deeply about many issues of the day. But just how serious does he really allow himself to be? There is such a 'profound shallowness' about some of the serious passages in this book, that even when he claims to be at his most serious, one begs leave to doubt whether he really means what he is saying.

At the end of a fine description of Klem-

These cartoons were drawn by Timothy Birdsall for the SPECTATOR in the early Sixties. He died in 1963, prematurely, of leukaemia. perer's Fidelio, for instance, one of the most moving passages in the book, he mentions the point where the trumpet off-stage signals the approach of Pizarro and Florestan's lib- eration.'G lad tidings of great joy' says Levin, 'the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed' and then adds 'an unfashionable doctrine in the Sixties, but the more welcome for that'. Why should he really welcome it, when it runs contrary to everything he believes about the nature of man and the universe? One is left with the impression that his appreciation of these 'glad tidings' was nothing more than aesthetic and sen- timental.

Again, speaking of two cartoonists, he says 'If then we could see a future Hogarth in Birdsall, it may be that in Scarfe we can recognise the heir of Hieronymous Bosch, and Bosch, moreover, without the didact- icism, which only makes the prospect more disquieting'. Ignoring the questions of art appreciation raised by that sweeping state- ment, I simply do not believe, from every- thing else in the book. that Levin finds the 'lack of didacticism' in Scarfe's caricatures genuinely 'disquieting'.

Again and again in his view of the Sixties, Levin talks of their 'unreality', 'unbearable strain', 'insanity', 'strangeness', 'confusion', Certainly all this makes for entertainment, atmosphere, makes his subject seem more 'interesting'. But if really true, why should these things be so? Why should men have got into such a state of unreality? What psycho- logical and sociological springs in human nature should have combined to produce these strange phenomena, across which his attention has wandered for more than 400 pages? Nowhere in the book do I see the slightest sign that he has really bothered to enquire. It is this which, for all its entertain- ing moments, leaves me ultimately with the sense that it is not so much the essence of the Sixties which has eluded Mr Levin, as that of the deeper recesses of human nature.