MEMOIR: A clear-eyed assessment of the 1960s by a veteran of the decade makes an invigorating read
‘IN VARIOUS ways”, writes Diski, “I was the sixties waiting to happen.” Hailing from a dysfunctional family, already angry and sullen, she was expelled from school at 15 and treated in psychiatric hospitals, before fetching up in London to begin adult life as a dispassionate observer of her own experience. Living with friends of her dealer in Covent Garden where “dropping out, taking drugs, spending time in mental hospitals, demonstrating and having sex” were among the activities on offer, she felt, for the first time, utterly at home. In the 1960s, “home” was often to be found in the strangest of places.
Likening it on one level to children playing house, she suggests that due to England’s economic prosperity and with such easy access to jobs and benefits, a particularly fortunate group from a particularly fortunate generation was suddenly free to embark on the longest gap year in history.
“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.”
This lucid treatise on disillusion and ultimate disappointment with the legacy of the Sixties is intellectually stimulating, refreshing even, particularly as so much writing on the subject comes dipped in nostalgia for the hippie era, an aspect of the Sixties upon which Diski chooses not to dwell. She might have noted en passentthat three of the most seminal books published during the period, Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, Carson's Silent Springand John Seymour's Self-Sufficiency, were the seedlings that went on to give the Green movement such momentum in the 1970s. However she does allow that the self-indulgent hedonism that was to become a hippie hallmark often went hand in hand with a genuine desire for peace and love, even if it was in the naive belief that just to want it was enough to make it happen.
She has a fairly sorry take on the sexual revolution. “My guess, no, my certainty, is that large numbers of people slept with friends, acquaintances, and strangers that they had no desire for.” She also makes the point that the idea that rape was having sex with someone who didn’t want to do it didn’t apply very much in the late 1960s. “On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
At least with the advent of the pill women were in a position to control their own fertility, but the relentless bed-hopping was all rather joyless and seems to have left her cold. She quotes journalist John Lloyd and founder of Ozmagazine Richard Neville to show that men, too, could be as equally confused by the new dispensation as were the young women with whom they consorted.
The spirit of the Sixties also invited exploration of consciousness and Diski argues rather persuasively in this case, that drug-taking then had an entirely different motivation than the drug use of today.
“All along Buddhism had been saying that reality was not what it seemed, and the tribal societies had chewed and smoked natural substances that took them into the dream country and gave them stories and visions with which to blur the edges of reality and shift gear out of the mundane.” A time of spiritual curiosity then, before interest in the self had morphed into monstrous self-interest. No one thought of his or her drug taking as recreational, she notes sharply.
“We were investigating and disturbing the self in order to dismiss self. Transformation was our task, change outside from alteration inside.” A perfectly acceptable reason for the use of mind-altering substances; what upsets now is that drug taking has no cultural aspects and she bitterly regrets the Sixties bequeathing of “heroin and cocaine to the miserable masses, not any kind of psychedelic solution to poverty and injustice”.
That there was never going to be a “psychedelic solution” to society’s ills may seem blindingly obvious but I sense Diski was a bone-fide idealist and all idealists are Romantics at heart. Disillusioned maybe but mercifully free of self-deception, she goes on to cast a cold eye on some of the Big Ideas then in vogue, particularly in the fields of education and psychiatry.
Subjected to RD Laing’s theories in practice whilst herself in psychiatric care, she writes: “When schizophrenics babbled, screamed or wept about their voices and told terrified tales of being spied on by M16 or SMERSH, of being the risen Christ re-crucified, or Satan cast down again, they were, Laing said, to be listened to on their own terms, creatively understood, translated like radio messages from the Resistance, not medicated and institutionalized back to numbness of the so-called sane, now revealed to be a contemptible state of willed ignorance.” A brilliant theoretician, but she notes that in practice his patients were often dumped back into institutions or left to cope for themselves when they became too hard to handle.
She is also a mite disenchanted with Ivan Illich’s theories of education. Once getting stoned stopped feeling like “doing something” she started a school. “But I was not reading Illich very carefully. I (and others) misread his clear statements of libertarianism as liberalism.” Aye there’s the rub. The line between liberty and anything goes opens the doors to chaos and creates endless opportunities for individual self-aggrandisement. “We really didn’t see it coming,” she writes, “the new world of rabid individualism and the sanctity of profit.”
Now the Sixties generation are getting to an age where the world is beginning to look quite baffling and alien. “People don’t notice you in the street, they aren’t very interested in what you have to say. We complain about how things used to be and how they are now – better then, terrible now. And it feels as if this is true. But perhaps it always feels true as the centre drifts away from you.”
Yes Jenny, it’s called not being young any more, and the centre didn’t drift, it fled. As far from a hippie memoir as is possible to travel, Diski’s re-evaluation of the Sixties (one in a series of “Big Ideas” from Profile Books) is a highly invigorating read. As she says herself of the time during which so many of us came of age, “In truth the only thing that is absolutely certain is that the music was better”.
Jeananne Crowley is a writer and actress