Hitch-22

“Hard Rain,” which seemed to encapsulate the way in which I had felt about Cuba. Then there were the loving and less cawing strains of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “She Belongs to Me,” and “Baby Blue”… I’ve since had all kinds of differences with Professor Christopher Ricks, but he is and always has been correct in maintaining that Dylan is one of the essential poets of our time, and it felt right to meet him in the company of Shelley and Milton and Lowell and not in one of the record shops that were then beginning to sprout alongside the town coffee bars.

A more exotic name was also being wafted through the ether and into my head: the name Vietnam. This did not come freighted with fear like the word “Cuba”; it arrived, rather, as a summary and combination of everything one had ever learned, from Goya to Wilfred Owen, about the horrors of war. There was something profoundly, horribly shocking in the odds and the proportions of the thing. To all appearances, it seemed as if a military- industrial superpower was employing a terrifying aerial bombardment of steel and explosives and chemicals to subdue a defiant agrarian society. I had expected the newly elected Labour government to withhold British support for this foul war (and the amazingly coarse and thuggish-looking American president who was prosecuting it), and when this expectation was disappointed I began, along with many, many of my contemporaries, to experience a furious disillusionment with “conventional” politics. A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. Had the study of life and literature and history merely domesticated me to waste and betray my youth, and to gape at a spectacle of undisguised atrocity and aggression as if it should be calmly received? I hope never to lose the access to outrage that I felt then. At Easter 1966 my brother and I joined the annual march of Britain’s “stage army of the good”: the yearly pilgrimage of pacifists and anarchists and rag-tag Reds that tramped from the nuclear weapons factory at Aldermaston to the traditional center of radical protest in Trafalgar Square. I donned the universal symbol of peace and wore in my lapel its broken-cross or imploring-outstretched-arm logo. I also read Bertrand Russell’s appeal to forget about the insipid slogan of “peace” and take the side of the fighting Vietcong. I began to take part in the hot arguments that were latent in these two positions. Singing to the Trafalgar Square crowd, along with various folk-moaners like Julie Felix, was the dynamic, sexy Paul Jones of Manfred Mann. Patrolling the fringes of the demonstration were blue- uniformed figures whom I had been brought up to view as friends and protectors. The first real kick he gets from a cop is often a huge moment of truth to a young member of the middle class…

One should not postpone the raising of a curtain. In my own case, the revelation of “curtain up” was more of a sudden vivid peek from the wings but no less memorable for that. I was back at boarding school, and gritting my teeth to do well in my exams so that I might shed the schoolboy carapace and pupate as a full-fledged “student” at Balliol. It must have been the late summer of 1966, and probably toward the end of term, because otherwise the headmaster wouldn’t have given permission for our very own home-grown school “pop” group, harmlessly enough named “The Saints,” to give a concert on the cricket field. It was one of those warm and still evenings that in ancient Cambridge stay in the memory for a long time. Boys and masters sat or stood as they would have done for a cricket match, the more senior in comfy seats in the pavilion, the others on benches, the rest on the grass. After taking us through a fairly tame Buddy Holly–style repertoire, the respectable “Saints” switched to a passably potent and twanging version of “House of the Rising Sun.” The amplifiers must have been good and, as I said, the night was soft and still. At any rate, the sound must have carried because very suddenly, and very quietly, the cricket ground of our exclusive private school was overrun by a huge crowd of boys (and even girls) from the town. They had heard the strains of rock, even of mild rock, and they knew about Eric Burdon and The Animals, and they also knew by now that there was nothing much their parents or the police could do about it, or about them. They crossed a social and geographic boundary that they had never transgressed before, and suddenly found it to be delightfully easy. Nonetheless, they were civil and quiet and curious, which meant that even my most awful contemporaries were embarrassingly polite and broadminded in return (as well as nervously aware of being surprised and outnumbered). There was even some mild fraternization before the school authorities saw the way things might go and pulled the plugs that had animated the drums and guitars. Then, but too late, the traditional police constables made their appearance.

As one who had already been employing the town against the school for all kinds of private and public purposes, I was still rather slow to see what had just happened to old Britain in front of my very eyes. The first thought I had was derived from my traditional and classical half: surely this was like those other “animals” of the forest who had been shyly drawn to sit, forgetting their own wildness, when Orpheus began to pluck his lute? It was quite some while later that I thought, no, you sentimental fool, what you were seeing, and hearing, was the opening of “The Sixties.”

The Sixties: Revolution in the Revolution (and Brideshead Regurgitated)

Contradiction is what keeps sanity in place.

—Gustave Flaubert

I SUPPOSE YOU KNOW,” said the most careful and elegant and witty English poet of my generation when I first took his hand and accepted a Bloody Mary financed from his slight but always-open purse, “that you are the second most famous person in Oxford.” We were in the unswept front room of the King’s Arms, a celebrated but grim pub which allowed one to wear out the intervals of the day between the drably utilitarian Bodleian Library—open to the public and across the road—and the soaringly beautiful Codrington Library, which was for private members only and formed a part of the sort of upper-crust game reserve that was All Souls. The year was 1969 and I had spent a good deal of time failing to study seriously in either library. I also detected, in James Fenton’s rather pointed if not indeed barbed hello, a sort of reproach that I should have squandered so much of my studentship and still ended up as only the second most notorious person at the university. Time spent on a second-class degree, it was often said, was time wasted even if it was “an upper second.” For this to be said of one’s degree was perhaps understandable, even forgivable. But of one’s thus-far career?[12]

Of course I knew without asking who had won the laurel as the most famous person. This was Mike Rosen, a tall and rangy and bushy and charismatic Jewish Communist who could draw all eyes and who had already had a theatrical piece performed at the Oxford Playhouse. It was said that this same play (its name was Backbone) might have a season at the Royal Court in Sloane Square, which at that date still possessed the frisson that attached to Look Back in Anger and countless other dramas that had unsettled London’s theater-going bourgeoisie. So everybody knew who Mike Rosen was. The experts in children’s literature—that most exacting form of all writing, to which he has contributed whole shelves—still do. But I bridled nonetheless. Rosen was of the Old Left. His family was fatally compromised by Stalinism. During the Oxford Playhouse version of Gunter Grass’s play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, where the actors in a Bertolt Brecht drama become the sudden participants in real events, Rosen had been more or less compelled to go along with the play-within-the-play that satirized the ghastly East German regime and celebrated the workers’ revolt against it that had taken place in 1953. At an early age, then, we all got to know Brecht’s mordant line about East German Communism: that if the People had indeed let down the Party—as had actually been said in a Communist leaflet distributed on the Stalinallee or Stalin Street—then the Party might have to dissolve the People and elect a new one. I went to the play and was impressed to see Rosen take the part of the Berlin worker who—in a premonition of November 1989—ripped the red flag off the Brandenburg Gate. It was said that Mike’s old father had been very distressed to learn of his son betraying the proletariat in this way.

You may ask what kind of Oxford it was in which an ex-Stalinist and a post-Trotskyist vied for the celebrity that had once belonged to Oscar Wilde and Kenneth Tynan, or more fictionally, Zuleika Dobson and Sebastian Flyte, or more realistically, the supposedly serious politicians who had been at my own college and then gone on to be prime minister, foreign secretary, and all the rest of it. The clue, at least in this decade, lay in a very small distinction. There were people of the Sixties, and then there were the “sixty-eighters” or, if you wanted to be more assertively Marxist and internationalist about it, les soixante-huitards. I was one of those who desired to be a bit more assertively Marxist and internationalist about it. After all, to be a mere “Sixties”