The Sixties by Jenny Diski: review
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5648142/The-Sixties-by-Jenny-Diski-review.html
The Sixties...Jenny Diski was there, she can remember them and,
what's more, make sense of them too, says Andrew Lycett
By Andrew Lycett
28 Jun 2009
The Sixties was a decade of two halves the swinging London of mods
and boutiques (an extrovert, indigenous moment), and the
counter-culture of hippies and revolution (a more self-conscious,
Americanised phenomenon).
As a young woman, Jenny Diski lived through both phases, though she
is temperamentally more attuned to the latter. In this stimulating,
short book, she draws on her experiences as consumer, 'head' and
activist from buying miniskirts at Biba, through shooting up
Methedrine (her recreational drug of choice), to joining the 1968
anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Grosvenor Square as she seeks to
explain how her contemporaries tried and failed to change the world.
Her forte is teasing out the long-term significance of her odyssey.
As a veteran, she understands the complex dynamics of the conflict
between her parents' post-war generation, which wanted stability at
any price, and her own, which craved something different and exciting.
Hated capitalism was quick to exploit this demand. At first, it fed
young people's desire for cheap and cheerful clothes. Then it served
up a new popular culture, dominated by music. When drugs were added,
their distribution proved a triumph of pure commercialism.
Mind altering substances created a sense of infinite possibilities.
While the oldies liked to keep things separate and appropriate (Diski
quotes from Leviticus to this end), the young wanted freedom to
experiment and play.
Sex was part of this process. Making love was not new, but enjoying
it was. She recalls how, in liberated circles, it was simply good
manners to sleep with someone if asked. Although she now recognises
drawbacks in 'open relationships', she is clear of their
bloody-minded intent. Newspapers talked of permissiveness, but 'the
permission we gave ourselves was more like a set of orders for
disobeying our elders'.
She is excellent on that sense of wilful rebellion. No one has
written better about the contempt with which the counter-culture
viewed the 'straight' world. Drugs created a paranoid togetherness,
reinforcing the view that the outside world was unreal while one's
own hallucinatory perceptions about society and its discontents were
the only reality.
Gradually, the pall of civil rights and Vietnam spread from the
United States, leading to more direct action. Diski attended
Grosvenor Square with an American, though carelessly cannot remember
if she slept with him. Her aversion to violence and ideological
certainties confirmed she was not a joiner though, recognising that
structures as well as attitudes needed changing, she had the
commitment to run a free school. Cue for a brief rehearsal of Ivan
Illich on de-schooling society. Similarly, a spell in a mental
hospital informs her critique of RD Laing and anti-psychiatry.
This is not a definitive history of the Sixties. She hardly touches
on science (except the Pill). She might have addressed the decade's
positive legacies in the environmental movement, for example. She
does not resolve its central conflict between social and personal
development. Instead, she worries that liberation and individualism
gave way to neoconservative libertarianism and yuppies.
Despite familiar territory, her mixture of hard-won experience and
intelligent reflection sets her study well beyond the clichés.
The Sixties
By Jenny Diski
PROFILE, £10.99, 143pp
--------
The Sixties, By Jenny Diski
Reviewed by Robert Irwin
Friday, 26 June 2009
"In truth, the only thing that is absolutely certain is that the
music then was better". Yes. In the early Seventies, I remember
asking people a year or two younger which of the bands coming up were
going to take over from The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, The
Velvet Underground and The Incredible String Band. It took me years
to realise that this was not going to happen.
Music apart, Jenny Diski's eloquent and probing The Sixties is full
of doubts and queries. This is not one of those books which
celebrates the decade as one long party for the likes of David
Bailey, Richard Neville, Jean Shrimpton, Germaine Greer, Mick Jagger
and Marianne Faithful, and you really had to be there to know how good it was.
Though the music was terrific, Diski suggests that the Sixties in
Britain (her book is only about Britain) produced no great books.
More generally, she sees the decade as one that mostly had the right
ideas, but which failed. Therefore her book, like Tariq Ali's Street
Fighting Years, Sara Maitland's Very Heaven, Sheila Rowbotham's
Promise of a Dream and Henrietta Moraes's Henrietta, reads somewhat
like a memoir produced by a hippyish veteran of a belated and
defeated International Brigade.
As befits a book in Profile's Big Ideas series, Diski has plenty of
serious points. One leading theme is that both the youth culture and
the slow spread of more liberal attitudes and legislation owed an
enormous amount to an enlightened older generation. Young people then
were indulged with university grants, parental subsidies, easy access
to the dole, the pill and even heroin on prescription. It was easy to
find jobs and easy to drop out of them. People like Roy Jenkins, Hugh
Carleton Greene and the Bishop of Woolwich were much better placed to
influence change in social attitudes than were a bunch of
inexperienced and impecunious young people addled on drugs.
Also, rebels were "certainly not in the majority... There were far
more 'straight' young people". The Sixties happened in an environment
mostly shaped by the drab and respectable Fifties. Better Books on
Charing Cross Road, with its stock of books about Beats, drugs and
Zen Buddhism, was a few doors up from a shop displaying surgical
trusses. I recently went through The Times from the summer of 1967.
Apart from the trial of the Rolling Stones for drugs, "the Sixties"
was invisible in its pages, which detailed the launch of battleships,
royal garden parties, councils of bishops and boardroom appointments.
Diski also draws attention to the solemnity of drug taking.
Recreational use hardly existed and one took drugs to discover an
inner self or reveal a hidden mystical truth. She is entertaining and
accurate about encounter groups, and the immense pressure placed on
participants to crack and have - or simulate - public breakdowns.
Like most other accounts of the decade, there is an autobiographical
element. Diski, who was in and out of mental hospitals and spent time
setting up and teaching in a Free School, emphasises mental health
and educational issues. She rather underplays the mystical and exotic
aspects and there is no reference to the hippy trail. She also skips
the retro cults of Beardsley, Mucha and Victorian military uniforms.
She is less interested in style than social responsibility. Were
Sixties people and their attitudes responsible for the late Seventies
and the rise of Margaret Thatcher? Diski has gone back to certain key
texts, such as RD Laing's The Divided Self and Ivan Illich's
Deschooling Society, and finds in their extreme libertarian positions
potential forerunners of right-wing laissez faire attitudes and
Thatcher's denial of society.
In the end, Diski decides that "I'd resist the claim that the Sixties
generation were responsible for the Thatcher years, as I would resist
the notion that the Jewish community in Germany were responsible for
the advent of the Nazis, but sometimes I can't help but see how
unwittingly we might have been sweeping the path in readiness for the
radical Right, preparing, with the best of good intentions, the road
to hell for paving". There is, she thinks, a distinction between
interest in the self (very Sixties and adolescent) and self interest
(more obvious in the Seventies and unattractively adult). Those of us
who were young in the Sixties are now old. There is no point now in
denouncing ourselves for having once been young.
--
Robert Irwin's Sixties novel, 'Satan Wants Me', is published by Dedalus
--------
But who'll do the washing-up?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/28/memoir-sixties-jenny-diski
A brisk and witty take on the 1960s addresses the decade's radical
changes and age-old dilemmas, writes Kate Kellaway
Kate Kellaway
Sunday 28 June 2009
The 1960s have been over-remembered to such a degree that on sighting
the perky, psychedelic cover of Jenny Diski's book you think: why
write it, let alone read it? But the answer is apparent within
minutes. This book at once recalls the decade in a way that those who
experienced it will recognise and is a singular rethink of that time.
Diski is not polemical or doctrinaire. Her writing is calm and wry
and her gift is for thinking about the 60s as if they were happening
now, as if they were an ambiguous present. There are so many fixed
ideas about the era, like badges on a lapel, but she stands by, ready
to tweak slogans as required. She begins with "the personal is
political", insisting that, actually, the personal was also always
"personal". This seems a suitable motto for a personal memoir about
how she inhabited the decade and it inhabited her.
Diski is 61 and often looks back at herself as if she were her own
parent. One of the many pleasures of her writing is that she somehow
manages to be old and young at the same time. She sends herself up
but has respect for the person she was. She never patronises. She
understands, comprehensively, what it means to be young. She
introduces herself - a size-eight sprite, with painfully straightened
hair. Did her appearance matter? You bet it did. As she revisits Biba
(inevitable this: it was the boutique of the time), I became aware of
an oddity: the double nostalgia involved. For Biba's look was mistily
directed at a distant (quasi-medieval?) past (those bell sleeves that
dipped into your soup). Anyway, Diski appears dressed in black (Biba
occasionally permitted this), modelling herself on an ice skater. She
is ready to step out into the 60s and to fall too (she does, at least once).
The book - slender as she is - covers the heftiest subjects: sex,
drugs, politics, madness. She starts with drugs and writes shrewdly
about the way they were often seen almost religiously, by her circle,
as part of an earnest project. Mind-altering was, after all, the name
of a bigger game. Her drug-taking was extensive: dope, LSD,
methedrine and ether (for which she was expelled from school). She
describes washing the syringes of a user friend, like a good
housewife. She is always aware of the ironies - the ways in which
attempts at new living were sabotaged by old questions (not least,
who was going to do the washing-up).
This conflict between old and new is at its most insoluble in the
chapter about sex in which she describes the oppressive aspect of a
"permissive" society. She is funny and unsettling about the need to
say yes out of politeness to offers of sex. She describes the
fatiguing side of "free love". One of her friends, she remembers, was
living in a commune where nightly swapping of sexual partners was
compulsory. He would turn up at her place, exhausted, for "a few
nights' regular sleep".
Diski has a relevant reading list for every occasion and explains
how, as an adolescent, she found a sexual education hard to acquire
via novels. The 60s, in her narrative, turn out to be the Age of
Ignorance. (Perhaps her erotic novel, Nothing Natural, was an attempt
to redress the balance.) For her - but maybe not for the majority -
it was also an age of uncertainty. Writing about politics, she
confesses: "'Other people's certainty always made me uncertain." She
claims not to have been "political", but I question this: she emerges
as political in the deepest, moral sense.
However, as a protester, she hilariously failed to distinguish
herself. In an anti-Vietnam demo, she trips over and ends pinned up
against a tree while the mounted police surge past her. It was the
age of "doing your own thing" - another slogan she unpicks: "...
being free to do your own thing became problematic when one's own
thing clashed with someone else's thing." And she makes a chilling
link between the 60s and the 80s, suggesting that "doing your own
thing" led to the selfishness of the "Me generation".
Diski may not have been much of a marcher, but she did something
remarkably militant: she started "South Villas Comprehensive", a free
school with eight pupils, in her north London flat. The aim was to
keep the children of a feckless neighbouring family - in trouble with
the law - from being taken into care. As ever, Diski is anything but
lofty about her ambitions. She hoped, she says, that the school might
encourage the younger kids to be "more thoughtful criminals". It is a
subject for a book in itself.
Strangely, we don't hear much from women here, but the men more than
make up for it. I especially enjoyed two very different 60s
drop-outs, who appear in the book and then drop out of that as well.
Seymour is an American draft dodger whose pacifism turns him into a
"small, dark invasion force of his own" on the anti-Vietnam march.
Clon looks like a roguish version of Shelley and joins a therapy
group, confessing nothing is wrong with him - he just wants to avoid
the dole. If you removed the "l" from his name, would it spell out
his identity? That is the comic point: no one can decide whether Clon
is mad or not - or whether it matters.
Diski's experience of being treated for depression is fascinating but
brief - as if she had run out of time. And I was startled when this
involving, buoyant, thought-provoking book came to a grumpy emergency
stop as she ponders the future: "Some fine souls are still battling;
most of us who had the good fortune to be part of the 60s are plain
discouraged." I refuse to believe that these are her last words on the subject.
.
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