Doing one's own thing
Robert Taylor
THE SIXTIES by Arthur Marwick OUP, ,E25, pp. 903 As somebody who grew up in the 1960s that tumultuous decade holds fond Memories. Many now curse its influence. It is denounced as a time of self-indulgence and narcissism when authority in all its forms was confronted or mocked. There may have been no videotape but there was allegedly plenty of sex and rock and roll. Conservatives see the Sixties very much as the devil's decade with the arrival of teenage promiscuity, drugs, long hair, mini- skirts, kaftans and flared trousers. The Rolling Stones, more than the Beatles, symbolised spoilt, gilded and rebellious Youth. Moral tradition and stability in fami- ly values were subverted by the growing availability of the pill and the condom. Licentiousness allegedly spread among the Young. Standards were said to have declined. The nemesis came later with an upsurge in venereal disease, broken marriages and Aids. Professor Marwick has written an over- long book about what he describes as the long' 1960s, that he believes began around 1958 and ended in 1974. Despite his hippy appearance — rubicund cheeks, flowered Shirt .___ he keeps his enthusiasms under check, frowning on excess but showing a tolerance of dissent, though not of drugs. He is not an elegant writer, lacking felicity of style. At times his account reads like lec- ture notes. Potted biographies of preten- tious philosophers such as Foucault, Afthusser and Derrida co-exist uneasily with narrative accounts of memorable spec- tacles such as the 1968 American Demo- cratic party convention in Chicago and les evenernents in France that same year. Marwick is rightly dismissive of Sixties architecture, describing it as barren and philistine. Nor does he neglect poverty. But lie has no patience for what he calls the great Marxisant fallacy' of the time, with university students taking over from the Proletariat as the 'new working class' in a fr. ontal assault on bourgeois society. There Is more than a touch of understandable nostalgia in his account of the British 'new ave' of 'angry young men', kitchen-sink Llra.matists and northern working-class Writers with a chip on their shoulders, although he overlooks the role of commer- cial television in popularising lifestyles, not least in Granadaland's Coronation Street.
Marwick was a popular history lecturer in Edinburgh during much of the period, and he writes knowingly about its Paper- back Book Shop and the Traverse Theatre Club as a 'bohemian middle-class enclave surrounded by a very middle-class, puritan- ical and generally hostile city'. His recap- turing of the world of Resnais and Truffaut movies, coffee bars and skiffle, the early days of the New Left Review, brings a wave of nostalgia to this reviewer, though E. P. Thompson's epic Making of the English Working Class and the arrival of New Soci- ety magazine go unmentioned, as does Richard Hoggart's Uses of Literacy whose assertion of working-class values extended in influence into the period from the allegedly soporific but actually vibrant late 1950s. Strangely, Marwick has little to say about the creation of Britain's new plate- glass universities like Sussex and Essex and nothing on the Open University, that fine tribute to the thirst for knowledge but not vocational training among the more earnest section of the middle class.
The book covers France, Italy and the United States as well as Britain, though it is loosely structured and there is not enough comparative analysis. Germany is omitted because Marwick does not read German, which is a pity because some of the worst excesses of the Sixties occurred among the left-wing drop-outs once described as 'Hitler's Children'.
Marwick is wrong to avoid any attempt to provide an economic and political underpinning for his often glittering super- structure of cultural and social happenings. Much of the ephemera he describes stems from the unprecedented and endless upward rise in mass prosperity during the Sixties. In the UK the end of military con- scription and existence of virtual full employment provided unheard of opportu- nities for teenagers to enjoy themselves as a distinctive consumer group with money in their pockets.
In retrospect, much of the period in western Europe looks and sounds embar- rassingly shallow and transient. Pop music is the exception: it still booms out in clubs and pubs. But in the United States the Sixties was perhaps a defining moment. After nearly 100 years of oppression since the abolition of slavery black Americans began to assert their civil rights with some success. Marwick does full justice to this impressive demonstration of courage and fortitude, in the freedom marches in the South of the early Sixties before the col- lapse of order in the ghetto riots in cities like Detroit and Newark near the end of the decade. The immediate political out- come of the Sixties turned out to be the tri- umph of the conservative Right. Out of the wreckage of misguided idealism and excess came Richard Nixon, Edward Heath and Georges Pompidou. Marwick is not so dismissive. He invents a concept called 'measured judgment' which he prefers to the 'repressive toler- ance' of the Sixties guru Herbert Marcuse. This is defined as 'a continued existence and indeed expansion of a liberal, progres- sive presence within the institutions of authority' which apparently provided a 'genuine liberal tolerance and willingness to accommodate to the new subcultures, permitting them to permeate and trans- form society'. Marwick sees the advances in social policy of the period deriving from this. The abolition of capital punishment and legalising homosexuality among con- senting adults were undoubted achievements in a 'permissive' Britain. Multiculturalism made its first appearance as well. Above all, the Sixties were the decade of personal fulfilment. Freed from restraint, more peo- ple 'did their own thing'. Unhappily, after hubris came nemesis.
But Marwick is shrewd enough to recognise that the affluent society brought liberation to millions of people beyond the rich and powerful, especially among women. The spread of washing machines, hoovers and fridges was perhaps much more important than the trendy and 'with it' iconography in what economists, if not social historians, have come to see as the final years of the 20th century's 'golden age'.
Robert Taylor writes for the Financial Times.
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