In 1968 I was living the good life with my first wife and first baby in our
first house on the swell of my first play and was beginning to be noted by
my peers as someone who was politically dubious.
It was to be some years before a well known left-wing director, asked to
typify a “Royal Court play”, replied that it was a play not written by Tom
Stoppard, but I was already conscious of a feeling in myself which detached
me from the prevailing spirit of rebellion when bliss was it in that dawn to
be alive but to be young was to be where it’s at.
The feeling I refer to was embarrassment. I was embarrassed by the slogans and
postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris, had moved
on since Wordsworth was young and which seemed to me to be the least worst
system into which one might have been born – the open liberal democracy
whose very essence was the toleration of dissent.
I had not been born into it. You don’t need to be a qualified psychologist to
work out that in England in 1968, 22 years after I arrived, I was much more
disposed to champion my adoptive country than to find fault with it. For all
I knew to the contrary, if my father had survived the war (he was killed in
the Far East) he would have taken his family back to my birthplace in
Czechoslovakia in 1946 and I would have grown up under the communist
dictatorship which followed two years later.
I was as aware as most people were that not everything in the gardens of the
West was lovely and of course we didn’t know – one never knows – the half of
it. But when in August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded and
occupied Czechoslovakia, an act which was simply the ongoing occupation of
eastern Europe writ bold, my embarrassment at our agit-prop mummers’
“revolution” turned to revulsion.
What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different
cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption
and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to
represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses
represented the model in full working order.
A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions
about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship”
after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t
censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for
possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”
Communism’s “normality” relied on the distortion of language and my new hero,
George Orwell, had long since diagnosed the disease in his own society, so I
took this kind of thing very much to heart.
And in 1968 there was Paris, too. By August the smoke of May in Paris had
cleared. There had been pitched battles between thousands of students and
riot police, followed by a five-week occupation of the Sorbonne and a
general strike. These were immense events, not much diminished – from my
viewpoint in a thatched cottage off the M4 – by the coat-tails attachment of
famous philosophers, actors and other luminaries of a generous state
culture.
Even at this 40-year distance les événements of 1968 still
give, by association, our more constrained English version a resonance for
people who are vague about what happened in Prague or why. But I look back
on our “revolution” – the occupation of the London School of Economics,
Horn-sey College of Art and all the excitements of those heady days – as
little more than a saturnalia.
This indeed was one of the things I loved about England. The English version
of continental eruptions suggested a national character in control of
itself. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, political activism at its
extremes included murder, kidnap and bombs. My Italian publisher, one of the
most sophisticated, charming and charismatic people I’d ever met, was later
killed by his own explosives while trying to blow up an electricity pylon
outside Milan.
A few miles away across the Channel, clashes between protesters and riot
police were affairs of burning cars, overturned buses and buildings turned
to rubble. Our own street-fighting man was only rock’n’roll.
There was something self-con-scious about rebellion here. Demos had a carnival
air about them. Our meetings – and I was drawn to a few – were earnest
convocations of squat-dwellers and what would now be called media types
planning to overthrow society by starting a magazine and discussing how to
get “the workers” behind them. Trevor Grif-fiths’s fascinating play The
Party, set in 1968 and performed at the National Theatre with Laurence
Olivier as a working-class activist invited to a meeting in a house in SW7
with an early Hockney on the wall, is for me the perfect time capsule of the
posh end of ’68.
It wasn’t all posh, of course. The “scene”, as we called it, was more
populously located in a shifting underground of art events – exhibitions,
gigs, happenings, poetry readings – in dark places around Covent Garden and
elsewhere and here the word “revolution” takes on some substance, I think.
It was not a social revolution, but there was a sense of a cultural
revolution pivoted on that moment.
Unfortunately I was embarrassed by that, too. I loved the music and the
dressing up but I couldn’t take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of
comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern
religions.
That last phrase I have taken back from a character in my last play,
Rock’n’Roll, which begins in 1968. Ironically, the person who speaks for me
on the subject of that revolution is a Marxist, a Cambridge communist called
Max looking back in 1990 when he is about the same age as I am now.
The way he remembers it is that the 1950s was the last time that liberty
opened up only when you left your youth behind you. By the mid1960s young
people started off with more liberty than they knew what to do with, but
confused it with sexual liberation and the freedom to get high so it all
went to waste – wasted, that is, in a cultural revolution rather than social
revolution. “Street theatre” is what Max calls it.
Altering the psyche was supposed to change the social structure but, as a
Marxist, Max knows it really works the other way: changing the social
structure is the only way to change the psyche. The idea that “make love,
not war” is a more practical slogan than “workers of the world unite” is as
airy-fairy as the I Ching.
I wish I had known this man in 1968. We could have been embarrassed together
as we looked upon the spectacle. He had fought fascism in the slums and in
Spain and when he remarked sarcastically that his hippie daughter “thinks a
fascist is a mounted policeman in Grosvenor Square,” I might have said,
“Right on!” or “My own view exactly.”
He could have also, on the other hand, changed my views about a few things,
starting with the society that I was grateful, and remain grateful, to have
joined. What about those abuses? Are they really egregious or are they
endemic to the system? And where does the job of editing blur into
censorship?
I wouldn’t have asked these questions of myself in 1968, the events of which
are examined in Revolution 68, an edition of The South Bank Show, tonight on
ITV1. But it is not just I who have changed. Society has changed, too.
In 2005 I interviewed a film-maker in Belarus who had been beaten up by state
security for the usual reasons and he said a few things which were
remarkably like a speech I had just written for a Czech Anglophile in
Rock’n’Roll.
What the film-maker in Minsk told me was this: “The fact that you can call
your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not [an attack on] his virtue,
it is your virtue.” The article that I subsequently wrote about
Belarus was published almost on the very day that Walter Wolfgang, an
82-year-old Labour party member, was forcibly ejected from the party
conference for heckling the foreign secretary. I received a gleeful postcard
from Harold Pinter.
The idea of the autonomy of the individual is echoed, I realise, all over the
place in my writing. In The Coast of Utopia I was using 19th-century Russian
philosopher Alexander Herzen’s own words about the English in the 19th
century: “They don’t give asylum out of respect for the asylum seekers, but
out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty without having
any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty.”
If I had known in 1968 what we were going to squander, long before we had the
excuse of 9/11, I might have joined in the fun with less embarrassment, with
less to lose. But at the time all the goings-on seemed frivolous compared
with the freedoms we had invented – or should I say the freedoms you
invented?
I was 31, I had been earning a living for 14 years, I was too old, too
self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love
with England and too hung up to let it all hang out.
Revolution, violence ... and shoes
Bernard-Henri Lévy, French philosopher The 1968 riots marked the
beginning of the antitotalitarian movement in France, which appeared to be
communist but in actual fact was an antiMarxist movement, in support of the
Czech demonstrations. Our hearts beat to the same rhythm and for the same
cause as the people of Prague
Martin Amis, novelist The main pretext for the demonstrations was the
war in Vietnam and a growing antiAmerican sentiment, but my feeling is that
the real reason was the consolidation of the youth movement. The ’68 riots
were a celebration of youthfulness: for the first time in three generations,
young men weren’t being sent off to die at war. And, as a result, the young
celebrated being young
Frank Field, Labour MP Looking back at the newsreels of the Grosvenor
Square protest, I am amazed at how violent it was. It is a lesson in how
easily things can blow up. I had no interest or involvement at the time and
I’m quite amazed that these events took place in my own nation. Although we
have a peaceful nation now, one wonders what’s bubbling under the surface.
It teaches you that being a peaceable kingdom is not necessarily a permanent
state
Emma Tennant, novelist Determined to join the revolution, I was
walking towards the Sorbonne in Paris when my shoes collapsed. There is
little so unrevolutionary as sitting in a shoe shop, awaiting a fitting, as
Madame Guillotine stands outside. And in London, my ambition to join (the
radical activist) Tariq Ali at a demonstration was thwarted again by shoes –
this time, worn by nervous horses. I just ran for it. But I have a cupboard
full of footwear for the next revolution – vive Jimmy Choo
Compiled by Emma Buckle
Cake or death!
Vaughn Marlowe, Burton, USA
I have not yet seen the word "Vietnam" in any of these comments.
I demonstrated in 1968 against American (with implicit UK support) policy in Vietnam. I also supported students who were alert enough to see that most of their teachers were more interested in downing pints at lunchtime than anything about their students. And this was in London.
Mary Martin, Miami, USA
Ah yes, once again the story of how vastly magnanimous the British are, airy pronouncements on their eternal commitment to liberty, freedom, solace for exiles, human rights..
Except for the Irish, whose violent mistreatment over quite a few centuries would seem to contradict these nauseating platitudes.
It's not dissimilar from American flag-waving that way, a kind of self-congratulating, gauzy cliche of British virtue.
Well after 1968, the grand ideals of British freedom and commitment to human rights and dignity were rather scarce in Northern Ireland- massacres in the streets, internment, torture, collusion, state-sanctioned assasination. It's well within Stoppard's rights to celebrate how cozy the UK was for him personally, and how lucky he was to benefit from the authentic good-heartedness of British society. But it comes across as an affluent, successful, celebrated but cranky old man scolding those awful hippies as ingrates . There was worse to come well after 1968.
Deschanel, Southampton,
As the song went, "Puttin' on the agony, puttin' on the style, that's what all the young folks are doin' all the while." The fashion of "pretend agnocy" was very much au courrant in the late 1960s.
As for Marxism, only those who were wealthy enough--Mercades Marxists and Limo Liberals--in the 1960s could even begin to entertain the notion that Marxism had anything to offer anyone of good will. The Ukraine in the 1930s, the gulag, the purge trials, the events of 1953-1956, and what was happening in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos was enough to convince even the slowest thinking person.
J. Edward, Jacksonville,
In 1968 I was 38 years old, have survived both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks and knew at an emotional level that the imperfect liberal democracies were (and remain) districts of paradise. The rioting students could be excused their immaturity, ignorance and idiocy, but the preening middle class left led by their intellectuals have no such excuse: what I have learned the (very) hard way, has already been available to anybody who could read. The "events" of 1968 are unforgettable and unforgivable.
Sever, Sydney, Australia
"At least the students then weren't completely and utterly politically apathetic - as almost the whole of British society seems to be now. It is far more dangerous to have a sedate population than an active one, and unless people realize that - all the 'freedoms' we supposedly have now, are going to vanish rapidly."
So people should yell and scream and get noisey, just in case they might need to in the future? Perhaps folks are just too busy working for a living. I think activism for its own sake weakens your credibility later, when you have something to say.
Jeffrey, Upstate, New York USA
I am 22 now and in speaking with my father and other members of his generation, I have come to their political activism was not special in any way. Faced with one's own demise in a high-casualty bloodbath, the urge to end the war was simply a survivalist tendency, at least in America. In addition to this, there was the fact that Marxism had not yet been disproven as as system. The veneer of the Soviet Union had not yet been peeled away. Communism was still fresh and appealing--not to mention trendy. Political activism was stylish then, as apathy seems to be now.
Ian Greenleigh, Austin, Texas, USA
Although a generalization, it is still obvious that the participants of the '68 demonstrations have been properly tagged as the "Me" generation. Unlike those in prior generations who actually placed themselves in harm's way without crowing about it, the "Me" generation safely brags of "speaking truth to power" without doing either. They are a generation that are entering retirement without leaving behind adolescence.
Josef Puir, san diego, california, USA
At least the students then weren't completely and utterly politically apathetic - as almost the whole of British society seems to be now. It is far more dangerous to have a sedate population than an active one, and unless people realize that - all the 'freedoms' we supposedly have now, are going to vanish rapidly.
Lee, Clifton,
They weren't students, though - or not, at any rate, if you define a student as someone who studies. My son and daughter, iPod owning and binge-drinking (as Mr Payne tells me - thank God I never touched a drop at university, nor had a hi-fi deck in my room) work far harder than I ever did. From what I can tell, all my generation look at our children at university and see them doing better as students than we did. (Except for a few driven lawyers of my generation.)
It is the privilege of middle-aged farts to tell the world how superior in every way they are to their children - and it has been since Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes 7:10.
Simon Levene, Richmond, UK
Students were brave and focused then - they are passive and yes people in todays world !!! A generation thirsting for knowledge and justice in the world -v- the generation of the ipod and next binge drinking session !!!
Ian Payne, WALSALL,