Boys will be boys SPRING BOOKS 2
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
Most people sense today that we have entered on some kind of phase of transition, moving away from the social, political and psycholo- gical climate which dominated the late 'fifties and 'sixties. There is a mood of reaction, on the whole more quiescent than violent, to all the crazes, excitements and libertarianism run riot of those years. And increasingly the events of the past two or three years, from the nightmares of Vietnam and America's race riots to the dis- illusionment with party politics in England and the weariness many people feel with the self- conscious excesses of permissiveness, begin to. look like the end of a chapter begun with all the promise of a new age ten or fifteen years ago.
One of the most important ingredients in the closing of this chapter was the epidemic of une, rest which in 1968 raged through the world's universities—and which forms the subject of Mr Stephen Spender's The Year of the Young Rebels (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 36s). What ad extraordinary phenomenon it was—blowing up, apparently autonomously, in country after coun-. try : Paris, Prague, Berlin, America, Mexico, Britain, China, Egypt, Italy, Spain. And what on earth will historians of the future make of it all—this sudden explosion of make-believe revolutionaries, chanting their surrealistic' slogans, acting out their fantasies of 'liberation,' beating their fists against all the mighty inertia of the modern state?
Will they look back on it, as it seemed to its participants at the time, as the beginning of a new age, when the 'meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute' began to give way to a more humane society? Will they look on it as simply an outbreak of mass-hysteria, a freak of history comparable with the dancing mania of 1374? Or will they see it, as it begins to look today, not so much as the birth pang of a new era, but—in the wake of the election victories of Presidents Nixon and de Gaulle, the Russian re-entry into Czechoslovakia, the at tempts to restore law and order in China—as the moment when a bubble burst, the forces of cdnservatism found a new strength after fifteen yiars in retreat, and the great fantasy of world- wide youthful revolt finally overreached itself?
Obviously there is, one day, a fascinating book to be written on this particular psychic epidemic. Certainly, whatever emergei in the future, such a book would have to set the events a 1968 in their historical perspective as a kind of climax to all sorts of dreams, follies and neuroses of the 1960s: the worldwide neurosis surrounding the Vietnam war; the hysterias growing out of the Civil Rights movement in America; the policy of so many governments to step up their gross national product of uni- versity graduates, regardless of the provision of proper facilities; the increasing sense of help- lessness in face of the technological, materialist juggernaut; the unreal influence on public life of television and so forth.
But above all, I suspect, the events of 1968 will be seen to have marked somethingeof an 'explosion into reality' for what since the middle 'fifties has, from the affluent West to Mao Tse- tung's China, been perhaps the predominant characteristic of societies all over the world— the cult of youth, the decline in the self-con- fidence of every form of authority, and the auto- matic assumption of young people's innate individuality and moral honesty.
For most of this period, in the West at least, the most conspicuous expression of the 'revolt of youth' has been that of the teenage sub-cul- ture, with its pop music and fancy dress. So long as the youthful fantasy was chiefly ex- pressed in these, largely unfamiliar ways, the great revolt against authority could be accepted as somehow altogether new, a baffling prevision of a new state of the world. Politicians could vie to be photographed with the Beatles, and so forth. But in 1966-67 this particular dream began to collapse, with the apogee of the teenage drugs craze, the decline in interest in pop music, the general exhaustion of teenage novelty. And when the chief focus of youthful revolt ap- peared in its new guise (although rooted of course in that tradition of youthful protest which had grown up with CND and the Civil Rights movement), its wish-fulfilment fantasies - no longer strangely garbed but directly aimed at specific authorities—at provoking the police and professors, at 'taking over universities' and bringing down governments—the make-believe at last became too obvious and destructive to be tolerated. The unreality of psychedelic light shows was one thing; but when that unreality took the form of make-believe revolution, the whole youthful revolt of the 'fifties and 'sixties had at last run up against a brick wall which would not cave in at its slightest push.
At last, in short, a complete gulf has opened up between the youthful avant-garde and the rationally inclined majority, the width of which has been measured in the past year by the con- trast between those accounts of the rebellion which take the students at their own valuation, ailharbingers of a new dawn, and those who have, as it were, been able to step outside the fantasy and see it for what it is.
On the one hand, we have been presented with the curious spectacle of a number of predomin- antly middle-aged intellectuals, who have taken the episode as a sudden, quite unlooked for revival of their own youthful dreams. On the other, one of the more encouraging by-products of the past year has been the sound of people returning, after a long absence, to their rational senses, coupled with a quantity of objective appraisal which has seen the revolt more as a phenomenon of mass-psychology than as strictly political (a good example was the article re- cently published in these columns by Professor John Searle). It is undoubtedly from this latter approach that any truly illuminating book on the events of 1968 will be born : but I fear that this volume by Mr Stephen Spender is not the one we are looking for.
To be fair, Mr Spender is obviously at some pains not to take the students wholly at their own valuation. His book consists of four im- pressionistic accounts of student views and acti- vities in New York, Paris, Prague and Berlin (with titles-such as 'The Columbia Happenings'), concluding with three chapters pursuing a ramb- ling attempt to make sense of it all (under such titles as 'The University as Agora'), interspersed with such irrelevancies as a memento on his bafflement at the Encounter-cIA affair, to illus- trate the 'cynicism of governments.'
The tone of his account is set by an incident at the beginning, where, he describes his dis- covery of some students climbing into the Presi- dent's office at Columbia. On 'being invited to join them, 'fink-like thoughts' battled in his head, such as that 'to support them might in- tensely irritate professors I know.' In the end, he' decides that since he is 'a waiter intending to write about this,' it is his duty to climb in, but having done so, he declines the offer of one of' the President's cigars as 'a sign that I was not taking their side.' With similar semi-detachment, he conjurei up an endearing picture of his gentle, grey- headed figure picking its way through the hysterias of Paris, the Teutonic disillusionment of Berlin, the quiet determination of the students of Prague. Here he corrects the illiterate Eng- list of some students chalking up slogans about Vietnam and kindred topics, including `MOR I ACQUINT MY DOG LESS 1 LIK MY MAN.' Asked to add a slogan of his own, Spender writes 'The better I know my dog, the more I love man.' It is impossible not to feel love for such a man in return! But as an author, he is unfortunately too close to his impressions for his book to leave any impression of its own other than vaguely idealistic confusion. Like others before him, he talks happily of the 'elegance' and 'wit' of the Paris revolutionaries, only to produce examples comparing unfavourably with 'the Wit and Wis- dom of the Duke of Edinburgh. He excoriates the 'hideous technoetronic jargon' of the bureau- crats, only two pages after he has admiringly quoted Allen Ginsberg's definition of wisdom as 'non-verbal, non-conceptual sensory training it expansion of consciousness.' He unquestion- ingly repeats the view that the yOung today are 'less impressionable' thin their parents, because they are `maturer.' And so forth. As I say, for an illumination of the events of The Year of the Young Rebels, this is unfortunately not the book.
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