What is it about the 1960s? Bridget Riley called it “the party at the end of
the war”; Jenny Diski suggests “the longest gap year in history”. Certainly
something happened then that makes people either envy or denounce the
decade. So it’s intriguing when writers as different as Lynn Barber and
Diski offer us their own Sixties stories. Plenty happened to each of them,
along not entirely predictable lines.
Barber begins An Education with a startling tale of her teenage years
first told in the pages of Granta and soon to be released as a film.
She tells how in 1960 as a 16-year-old grammar school girl waiting at a bus
stop, she hopped into the car of a cigar-chomping stranger who offered her a
lift, and thus began a two-year affair with someone who turned out to be a
colleague of the notorious 1950s landlord, Rachmann.
“Simon” woos and wins her, charms her parents, seduces her, and finally
proposes. Her parents urge her to seize this promising offer until the whole
thing is revealed to be a massive con. This is the most riveting part of the
book and told with the casual insouciance of Simon Gray’s The
Smoking Diaries or Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End.
Unlike them, however, Barber remains concerned with the surface of things,
never examining her motives or offering any insights into such wayward
behaviour. We never learn what she truly felt about Simon, why she accepted
his advances, never inquired about his life or family; only that she grabbed
the flowers, the restaurant meals, the foreign trips with naive eagerness.
It left her morally damaged, she tells us, and leaves it at that. It makes
for an intriguing but opaque account.
Barber is more generous to herself than she is to her journalistic victims who
have won her fame and numerous awards. She has a shelf-load. But the acerbic
scrutiny she affords her newspaper profile subjects is never turned on her
own life. Instead her savage put-downs are reserved for her family: She
mocks at length her mother’s elocution lessons, how she forced her daughter
to enter poetry competitions and even offer her voice to read letters on the
BBC’s Children’s Hour, a role where she was superseded by
a supremely confident Jane Asher. She is brutal, too, about her father. Yet
these were aspiring parents who had made it from the working class into
lower middle and wanted her to go farther. They even make the mistake of
thinking that the creepy Simon may be a way to the good life. But she takes
another route, via a fee-paying girls’ independent school, then Oxford and
marriage to an Etonian. At the wedding she “dreaded our parents meeting — I
knew I would squirm with embarrassment”. It’s shocking to find the so-called
Demon Barber revealed as a social snob ashamed of her origins.
There is, however, little embarrassment about her sex life. This is the
Sixties, after all. “I was going to be a good time girl, dammit. I was going
to work really hard at this pleasure lark.” The girlish idiom belies a heavy
commitment: sleeping with 50 men in her second year, and having , quite
early on, a Harley Street abortion. She gets a good English degree, then
serves a seven-year stint at Penthouse. There she developed her
interview technique for a series called “Parameters of Sexuality” and went
on to write a book, How to Improve Your Man in Bed. There was a deep
divide in the Sixties between women who thought breaking sexual taboos in
soft-porn publications was a stroke for freedom, and those who thought it
was time women deserved some self-respect. Barber was in the former camp: “I
know it probably seems deluded now, but we really did feel we were part of
the sexual revolution, fighting a crusade against censorship.”
Then the story becomes familiar — a rise through Fleet Street towards that
shelfload of awards. But the mood changes as we travel with her through the
final illness of her husband David. It is only here that we get a sense of
the vulnerable heart beating behind the effortlessly engaging prose.
Diski is altogether more seriously engaged with the concept of the Sixties, a
concept often challenged by the millions who were around at the time but
didn’t notice it happening. Surely it must be some cultural myth, a
construct. Diski acknowledges as much: “We were certainly not in the
majority . . . not even in our own generation. There were far more
‘straight’ young people than those of us living self-consciously outside the
law . . . but most people aren’t actively engaged in what any era is later
characterised by.” How many French fomented revolution in 1789? How many
bright young things went mad in the 1920s?
Diski, however, was in at the deep end, involved with almost all the trends
and fashions: in clothes (Biba); books (Our Bodies Ourselves) and
ideas (R. D. Laing). Her testimony comes as close as any to frontline
reporting of what was going on. And what was going on was serious: “There
was no need to worry, as our parents did on our behalf, about ‘getting on’
because we had no plan to live in a world in which getting on was of any
importance. If there was a plan at all it was precisely to prevent such a
world from structuring our future.” These were serious aspirations that led
to strange paths — drug-taking, squatting, weird clothes, casual sex and
street demos.
Diski’s life catches the full flavour. Expelled from progressive school,
overdoses, psychiatric hospitals — she sustained a reckless curiosity about
all that was new. “I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably
psychotic on acid were very high . . . nonetheless I took it.” She was alert
to everything. She helped to found a free university, and went on the CND’s
Aldermaston marches and Grosvenor Square protests. She even tangled with the
anti-psychiatrist movement of Laing and Esterson. Yet she survived the
mayhem to become a wise and sceptical judge.
She, too, is frank about the sexual revolution. From the inhibited repression
of the Fifties with its ritual of tentative courtship towards conventional
marriage, the young broke loose into a world of casual sexual abandon. For
the first time there was the Pill; and there was no Aids. Sex became a way
of sharing your sense of self with anyone who asked. “It was a way of being
polite to those who suggested it or who got into your bed . . . It was
uncool to say no.” Communes, squats, clubs, became places of writhing
bodies, interchangeable attachments and casual partners. “Part of the
newness of the world we were creating was the abolition of jealousy, and the
idea of possessing other people.” Of course it failed. And the sad legacy of
that so-called sexual revolution is still confusing young people today.
This is as excellent and honest a guide as you will find through the myths and
often misremembered days. Diski not only celebrates the music — who can
match Hendrix, Zappa, the Grateful Dead, the Doors, Pink Floyd, the Who, the
Stones, the Beatles? — she captures, too, the mood of hope and idealism that
fired so many of us then. But she also traces the ideal of personal
liberation that was to evolve so shockingly into Thatcher’s values. “She was
anathema to us . . . but perhaps our own careless thinking gave the radical
individualism of her government at least a rhetorical foothold.” Diski deals
fairly with the flawed achievements of the Sixties, which, despite their
naiveté, left their mark on those who shared them. “Despite the manifest
lack of success in the larger tasks we set ourselves I persist in regarding
the commitment I acquired in 1968 as the most fruitful and rewarding of my
adult life.” Who could say as much for the Eighties?
An Education by Lynn Barber (Penguin, £7.99; Buy
this book; 182pp)
The Sixties by Jenny Diski (Profile, £10.99; Buy
this book; 138pp)
