The Day I went to Brighton and the end of political dreams
This
diary entry (a kind of distant cousin to the last one on 30s poets posted here
on its 50th anniversary: Pages:
June 1976 Memories of Empson, Spender, Gascoyne and Rickword at the University
of East Anglia ) was quite important to me. Although I was a bit of a
self-satisfied prick, I came back to this entry several times over the years to
fictionalise it, or use it, but now it seems interesting in its own right. Some
arguments – about the rise of fascism, about the function of education – don’t
seem to go away. For me personally, it is one of the few representations of my
father and myself talking.
8th September 1976. Wednesday: the Day I went to Brighton to buy some paper... [that would be paper for my duplicator, perhaps to print one of my early pamphlets, probably Triptych and other poems, of which I still have copies!]
Ambling around, I walked into a bookshop in a plush chain store book shop to browse around. I caught sight of Richard Neville’s Playpower, a book I have been wishing to obtain for some time to place with [Jeff] Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, [Iain] Sinclair’s Kodak Mantra Diaries, Palmer’s The Trials of Oz and, of course, my cherished copies of Oz, Other Scenes and Sub ’70. [All of which I still have.] It seems ironical to buy it here and not from the Public House or Symposium, or from Bill Butler’s now three-year defunct Unicorn bookshop, where I bought those ‘underground’ magazines. I would have been 15 then, naively soaking up the cliches of an ‘alternative’ society that was already defeated, betrayed; that is, I was younger then than the school kids who – in the wisdom of public prosecutors’ minds – were possibly perverted by the obscenities they themselves produced! But 1970 seems a long time ago.
I go to sit on the seafront to await my father. Today the TUC are meeting at the Dome. I have just wandered through the aftermath of a demonstration. Only a few people remain arguing; a man carries a portrait of Chairman Mao. Lots of young people are now peacefully walking the promenade, dressed in fluorescent orange jackets that have ‘The Right to Work’ printed on them. ‘Bully boys,’ The Sun calls them. A policewoman in her attractive uniform which makes her look like an air hostess, follows three protesting girls cautiously, whispering into her radio. ‘The underground has abolished work,’ the book says. Somehow in six years the demand for the right NOT to work, to play, to transform work into play, has been superseded by the plea for the right to work. There has been a very distinct angry, political 1930s feeling growing since the end of 1973 when, when unemployment – regarded as a relatively historic institution when I started studying A Level Economics in September of the previous year –had escalated, and Edward Heath was forcing the country to dark streets, power cuts (except over Christmas), three day weeks, in order to confront the miners, finally leading to the election in February 1974. I remember the horror of finding that all my school friends were not staunch labourites, and even I voted Liberal, pissed out of my brains in a hotel room in Whitley Bay, in the middle of an Economics field trip to the then highly politicised Northeast. What happened to the ‘underground’ in that year? The Pink Floyd, the heads’ freak-out band, produced Dark Side of the Moon, their pretentious melange of everything from Thoreau to RD Laing, twee [illegible] of the word ‘bullshit’, and Mike Oldfield produced Tubular Bells, the two hit albums to be found in the rooms of every young person in 1973 who was waiting for somebody to actually offer them a real dope. [I had copies of both albums!] Certain members of the ‘underground’ press turned up at this time, in the offices of IPC’s New Musical Express. Virgin Records, up Portobello Yard, with its out of work model secretaries and hangers-on with transatlantic accents adding to the air of inefficiency, launched pothead music into outer space. [I had visited the headquarters referred to in order to promote the cassette poetry magazine 1983, so this was observed.] Festivals dope exchange for weak tea. [Doubtful reading.]
Of course, ‘things have changed’ because of the 60s, even my mother agrees to that. A black man and a white woman stroll the prom without stares following them, and the gays from The New Hart and Hand are not so ‘weird; as they were. Etcetera. I leave the list to the social historians of the 1960s. But we seem to have stopped, like a ball that has cascaded down one valley wall: we are beginning to roll backwards as we try to ascend the other without fresh momentum. ‘Keep on to the 1980s, Motherfuckers!’ seems a joke. The latent fascism of the hippies who con off straights has the same punch as a policeman beating a black, whether in Johannesburg or Notting Hill, and the ultimate reduction of this is David Bowie’s well publicised claim to wish to be Britain’s first fascist Prime Minister. [Not quite so well-publicised, in fact. It was in an interview in NME, Berlin years.] And he means it. The streets are tougher at night. Beer-bleary unemployed are looking for skulls to crack. Rather than turning to the left, the British public, well trained by Heath and his forebears to rally round the sorry flag, unmoved by any refreshing breeze, against ‘anarchy’, or whatever it calls any force dedicated to destroy the present in order to build a future – they are turning to the right. (NF vote 1974: ). [This note appears without the statistic; it mimes a line or two in Sinclair’s Lud Heat.] The failure to realise that the change going on inside the heads of the hippies was not happening beyond them, led to an acidic complacency. The 1000 demonstrators before the Dome knew they each individually have the power to do nothing. Only together do they push against the gates. That is the first lesson of the next stage to be learned, before it happens. Now. The dream is the architect’s plan not the finished building, furnishings and all. Individually (the Jan Palack thing aside for a while), they are no more significant than the geriatric holiday makers who saunter around here, these people the acid failed to reach, the straights in that mythology, or rather those mythologies. I look into the sallow eyes next to me. We can’t look strangers in the eye and say ‘Hello’, and to do so is only a Dada shock gesture like spitting in their eyes. And who can say now without assurance that two hippie girls met in 1968 would grow up to marry a bank manager?
My father arrives and we head home. I see Jackie, an old school friend, waiting for a bus. Alarmingly, just past their 20th birthdays whole handfuls of old friends are getting married, as if that were the only possible next step in the Monopoly board of life. No ‘chance’ cards (‘You have left the game. Try not to go to gaol!’) It’s a well-rehearsed sequence to follow; it puts so many things into focus. It’s comfortable and it’s a Cornice in Purgatory. Even L, who once cherished dreams of becoming this particular poet’s ‘mistress’, [I bet she didn’t really!] has embraced the middle class life surrogate of matrimony as her inescapable fate. She is not powerful enough to break out of the shell with her own energies, and the necessary catalysts in the outside world, whether that is just a label or a hero, are lacking. Nobody is freaking out in bubble baths or fucking in the streets! I remember her conditioned abhorrence when I told her I’d got high, ‘I didn't think that you would... etcetera...’ It’s pretty certain she’s knitting socks in her semi detached Cornice. It is now 10 years since the early stages of the ‘underground’ revolution and we’re waiting for the next stage to save those of us (and they are ‘us’, not just ‘them’) who can’t break free or free enough of their parents’ expectations, the next battering at the Bastille gates that will quite never quite topple. Nobody’s shivering in the night because of the bomb, and nobody wants to tirelessly play their way to heaven, but where are the dots that we must join together to make the new picture? Is this the FIRST chapter of my generation’s or the next generation’s ‘bomb culture’, to realise what is waiting is the first step to the finding; to search is the second.
We pass My old school, a turquoise and glass box, on our left, Kings Manor School. My father asks me casually if I’d want to be back there, as he sees me peering broadsides at it. I say I wouldn’t, carefully, so as not to stress the absurdity of the notion. At the TUC Congress a delegate has suggested that school children should be taught how to spend their time on the dole. The school system is so geared to employment that play or leisure or self-development or social life (insert your own definition of the vital things you should be doing between 5:00 to 9:00) is viewed by the legions of the fresh work modern maniacs it produces every year as a waste of time, that can only be filled with frustrated destruction. Painting is OK for five year olds, but not for school leavers. Leave the full time dabbling in non productive activities until you retire. [Ironic!] You either have to join the bandwagon or drop out. Most today are joining the bandwagon, a bandwagon that can’t quite support them, despite their crazed affection for it. All I ask is a little sanity to be able to carve out one’s own empire, neither in nor out, neither wholly one nor wholly another.
I say this reminds me of when he picked me up last year when I was working for Sealink in the publicity caravan. [See photo of me here: Pages: Dream Diary Friday 19 September 1975 ]My father tells me that F, the guy who’s doing it this year, for the solace of sunshine and fresh air throughout the summer, [remember: it was a heatwave!] has let girls get promoted above him. He tells me that he’s being paid less than I got, and I am suddenly shocked when I realise that my A Levels allowed me to be paid more than somebody who’d worked for some time, like his father before him, at the port [Newhaven Harbour].
Over
dinner my father suggests journalism as a possible future career for an English
graduate. I try not to choke and mutter something about it being a mug’s game. ‘Spiritually
a bad bag’ is what I'm thinking, but I can't quite quote that across the table.
[That too is in Sinclair’s Lud Heat.] ‘When you get out there in the
world,’ (note work = the world) ‘you’ll find that nearly everything is a mug’s
game! Therefore, the whole of existence is. He knows that's not true! ‘What
are you going to do?’ ‘Library,’ I offer abstractly. ‘Is that well paid?’ he
asks pointedly. I say I don’t know, trying to give the impression that I’m not
even slightly bread-headed, even though I have a pretty good idea about
salaries....
9th of September 1976: Chairman Mao died today. He left no political successor. There is speculation as to whether this was deliberate. Was he hoping for another resurgence from grassroots level, another regenerative Cultural Revolution, as experienced in 1968? the commentators ask.
[Rough
note that seems to belong to this entry:] Tzara had the sense to kill Dada
before the rot set in, before the instrument was blunted, appropriated by those
it should be driven into, like a stake into a vampire’s heart.
