by A. N. Wilson
Though technical and comedic triumphs, nothing much lingered in the air after Orton’s plays were staged. John Osborne, by contrast, was a writer no less refreshingly angry than Orton but his plays are much more closely observed, more morally intelligent. One of the finest of them, Luther–Albert Finney took the title role at the first performance in 1961–dramatises the sense felt by practically all that generation, if they possessed any sensitivity to the state of things, that the status quo was intolerable. Osborne’s Luther could be seen in retrospect as a man of the 1960s. His ‘Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more, Amen’ at the Diet of Worms, 1521, spoke to a generation that, as individuals, felt no personal commitment to the political programmes on offer. Osborne might have been considered an iconoclast with his first play, Look Back in Anger. Some of his contemporaries deemed to be Angry Young Men–Kingsley Amis, John Braine–managed to step seamlessly into the personae of Right-Wing Bastards in what seemed like no time at all. Braine, a librarian from Bingley, wrote a bestseller called Room at the Top which was obsessed by the injustice of the class system. Braine never stopped being class conscious but a single visit to the United States was enough to make him abandon left-wingery. Explaining his change of heart to Donald Soper, a Methodist preacher who identified the teachings of Christ with those of the Labour Party, Braine said that America had come as a revelation. Here was a country where it did not matter if your father was rich or poor. You had a chance to get on, regardless of class. ‘And’, added Soper, ‘provided you aren’t black.’ Braine fixed his frog-like eyes, seen through thick spectacles, on to Soper’s conceited, eager face. ‘Of course I’m not black’, he rasped in his strong Yorkshire accent.
Kingsley Amis’s transition from member of the Communist Party to Garrick Club bore perhaps happened more gradually than Braine’s conversion, but it was no less absolute. The Angry Young Men called themselves Fascist Beasts when they met for their lunches at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street and the jokey application is better than ‘Right Wing’, still less ‘Conservative’. Kingsley Amis remained class-chippy and godless, as did his great friend Larkin, who had never been tempted by any form of leftism. Osborne has much in common with them but was a toweringly more original and interesting writer. Just as Luther, in bold, colloquial language, rescued the Germans from formal religion (giving them back personal religion), so Osborne, greatest of the Angry Young Men, went on being angry as systems overpowered individuals. Where Luther had fought the Roman Church, Osborne punctured the pretensions of politics.
True nonconformity was a quality which Osborne saw as quintessentially English. In the 1960s there were many con artists purveying their Bohemian or anti-Establishment credentials who were in fact fiercely ambitious and cleverly opportunistic. They were the New Establishment in Waiting. Of such were the Beatles, never more New Establishment than when they pompously sent back the MBE which Harold Wilson, in a pathetic attempt to woo the younger voter, had recommended to the Sovereign should be theirs. Of such was John Mortimer, who combined the roles of fashionable QC with that of being a second-rate writer, and who would suck up to the New Establishment by his supposed daring in defending the obscene magazine Oz in 1971.
One of the most astute remarks ever made by Harold Macmillan was a reply to Anthony Wedgwood Benn in the House of Commons in 1960. Macmillan, then Prime Minister, had been persuaded by Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) to stand for election as Chancellor of his old university, Oxford, against the former Ambassador to Washington, Sir Oliver Franks. After much intrigue and plotting of the sort which was Trevor-Roper’s lifeblood, Macmillan won–by 1,976 votes to 1,697. (The electors are the MAs of the university.) A few days later, Wedgwood Benn congratulated Macmillan in the House, ‘on having proved by his own tremendous victory in a ballot held in Latin, open for all to see, that the Establishment has nothing to learn from the Electrical Trades Union’. And here was Macmillan’s brilliant reply–‘Except that on this occasion, I think, the Establishment was beaten.’20 Here, the ‘Establishment’ meant the Foreign Office Mandarin, the Liberal who appealed to the academic world. But Macmillan could see that the 1960s were going to be a time when the Old Establishment was replaced by a rival group of would-be Establishments. England would never be quite the same again.
John Osborne, likewise, could see that the true rebels during the 1960s were not those who grew their hair or made exhibitionistic boasts about their sexual lives, but those who saw the damage being done to the world by town planners, spivs, bad architects, businessmen and politicians who believed in Growth. These were the ones who were ruining England, and being actively encouraged by the political classes to do so. Anyone who objected to a Georgian high street being pulled to bits and replaced with brutalist multi-storey car parks, or who thought that Victorian terraced streets were preferable to asbestos-polluted high-rise blocks on the East German pattern, must bear the label of fuddy-duddy. Of such was the great John Betjeman. When Max Miller, the genius of English music hall, the master of double entendre, died in 1963 (his jokes were all about sex but he never said a ‘dirty word’ on stage), Osborne burst into a threnody: ‘There’ll never be another, as old John Betjeman says, an English genius as pure gold as Dickens or Shakespeare–or Betjeman come to that. What did Trollope say–muddle-headed Johnny? It’s deep honesty that distinguishes a gentleman. He’s got it. He knows how to revel in life and have no expectations–and fear death at all times.’21 Osborne’s most poignant play, The Entertainer, was about a failed music hall entertainer, whose financial and emotional life implodes into chaos at the time of Suez.
Miller’s ethnic origins were Romany. The long-suffering wife of this promiscuous man lived in Brighton but his fellow Anglican and devoted admirer Betjeman liked the fact that Miller was a stout high churchman who attended Saint Bartholomew’s Church, Brighton (the tallest as well as one of the highest churches in the land), on ‘the greater festivals’.22
Betjeman revelled in such jokes, knowing that they were celebrations of a vanishing England. The music halls, and the Church, were doomed, which was why he loved both. And he fought long and often lonely battles for such architectural wonders as James Bunning’s Coal Exchange (demolished 1962) or the Arts and Crafts Bedford Park (which Betjeman saved from demolition in 1963). From his first emergence on to the social scene in the late 1920s, Betjeman had entranced such people as the Mitfords and the Guinnesses and the fading Irish aristocracy. Now, what had been reserved for drawing rooms in country houses, or Maurice Bowra’s rooms at Wadham, could be enacted on the television and everyone in England fell in love with him. But only a few saw how deadly serious was his desire to save what was left of old England before the spivs pulled it down. There was a mindlessness about the 1960s, a sheer silliness, which could not see the consequences of policies such as architectural vandalism.
At Orton’s funeral they played a tape of his favourite song, the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’: ‘I read the news today, oh boy/About a lucky man who made the grade’.23
Many of the Beatles songs were about self-betterment, or about the fantasy, in the case of the Beatles themselves, of outsoaring provincial and class restrictions in order to hit the Big Time (‘Paperback Writer’, for example). No history of the period could overlook Beatlemania, though any history could afford to overlook the Beatles. They beat all records for sales in Britain and America.24 For most of the decade, until in 1969 they announced that they were breaking up the group, they could be sure of mobs of screaming fans every time they checked into a hotel or airport or turned up at a gig. They also had their serious musical admirers. On 23 December 1963, the music critic of The Times praised their ‘fresh and euphonious’ guitars in the song ‘Till There was You’, their ‘submediant switches from C major into A flat major’ and the ‘octave ascent’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. The critic continued, ‘One gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built int
o their tunes, and the flat-submediant key-switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of “Not a Second Time” (the chord progression which ends Mahler’s “Song of the Earth”).’ Yet though the band produced some melodies which pass the memorability test–‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Help!’ once heard stay in the head–the secret of their success is that they are rock music’s easy listening. The Beatles posed as rebels against class conventions and the supposedly stuffy mores of their elders, but their appeal was always to nice boys and girls, who would play their cherished Beatles LPs to their children when they paired off and settled down, enjoying the patronising sentimentality of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.
The four who composed the group came from Liverpool. John Lennon had attended Quarry Bank Grammar School, Paul McCartney was educated at Wilson Hall, Garston. Lennon, with a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, met McCartney at a church fete in 1957. McCartney brought along his friend George Harrison to join the Quarrymen. They went through a number of names–Johnny and the Moondogs, Long John and the Beatles, the Silver Beatles, before settling on the Beatles in 1960. They sometimes used a drummer called Tommy Moore, who was much older than they were. In the end, however, Moore left the band and returned to his work as a forklift truck driver in a bottling factory. Eventually they settled as a quartet when Richard Starkey joined them as drummer, with the name Ringo Starr. Their best career move was when they engaged Brian Epstein as their manager. He failed to sell them to Decca, but he did persuade George Martin, who headed the Parlophone label for EMI, to take them on for a year’s contract. The first recording session was booked on 6 June 1962 at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in St John’s Wood, London.25 This did not produce a single recording which the company wanted to use, but they eventually came up with ‘Love Me Do’, and their career was made. Three months later the song ‘Please, Please Me’, an anthem of the age, would take them to further heights. By 1964 they were so popular that crowds of four thousand waved them goodbye from Heathrow Airport on their first trip to America. The crowds waiting for them at the other end, in the newly renamed JFK Airport, exceeded any that had been seen there.26
It was in New York that they met Bob Dylan, who introduced them to smoking pot. Dylan was in every way a superior artist and performer. His songs, rasped out in that distinctive snarling voice and interrupted by jerky mouth organ recitatives, truly did herald something new in the world–‘The Times They Are a Changin’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and countless others. The sung lyrics of Dylan are very nearly in the league of some of the great songs of the world, such as those of Robert Burns. The Beatles are pappy by comparison.
This fact, obvious to everyone else, was certainly not clear to the Beatles themselves, who, the moment they were famous, became invested with a risible degree of self-importance. Lennon was the most pretentious and self-regarding in this respect; the more he took drugs and made an exhibition of himself, the more he seemed to believe himself to be some kind of poet-sage or philosopher. Lennon’s own self-importance, however, was as nothing to that of his second wife, Yoko Ono. Describing herself sometimes as a sculptress, sometimes as a film-maker, a naked Yoko invited journalists and cameramen into the honeymoon suite of the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam, when the pair married. They lay in bed being photographed, and offering such useful pieces of advice to the world as ‘Stay in bed’ and ‘Grow your hair’. They went further, and suggested that the violence which existed between South and North Vietnam, between the Arabs and Israelis, or between America and the Soviet Union, would evaporate were the politicians involved only to remove their trousers.
The pair’s moral and political announcements, delivered urbi et orbi, were disconcerting. No crooners of a previous age would have considered it their place to make such statements. Dan Leno had not offered his thoughts to the world on the Schleswig-Holstein Question, or the Unification of Italy. Bing Crosby or Harry Belafonte would have been laughed off the stage if they had attempted to share with the audience their views on the legalisation of cannabis or the meaning of life. On 24 July 1967, the Beatles added their names to those of Graham Greene, R. D. Laing and others calling for the legalisation of pot. In August the same year they met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India and became adepts of the wisdom of the East. Their need to impose their ‘ideas’ on the public were perpetuated by McCartney, who continued to be an advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism, long after Lennon had been assassinated (by Mark Chapman, 8 December 1980, in New York City), George Harrison had died of lung cancer (29 November 2001) and Ringo Starr had become a voiceover on animated versions of the Revd W. Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine stories. They bequeathed to the world the annoying legacy that entertainers, rather than being humble enough to entertain, should inflict their half-baked views of economics, meteorology and politics to those who had been gullible enough to buy their recordings.
In an interview with Maureen Cleave in the Evening Standard in 1966, Lennon modestly announced that Christianity was dying out and that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus now’.27 The remark was clearly not intended to be amusing. Many people in America and South Africa paid Lennon the compliment of melting down their Beatles records in protest.
The Rolling Stones from the south London suburbs were the more stylish answer to Liverpool’s most famous quartet. Not just because they were southerners: the Stones were in every way more English than the Beatles, that is to say more capable of irony. Jagger’s contortions on the stage, his overt sexuality, his exploitation of the bisexual signals which he gave out, both on and off stage, were all reversions to Lord Byron.
One legacy of the 1960s was that rock music, rather than being something which was reserved for parties, nightclubs and people who enjoyed that kind of thing, became the anthem and background music of every area of British life. There would never come a time when its music fell silent. People would hear it as the background music at airports and in shops, even in bookshops, where customers by definition want quiet; it would be played at children’s parties instead of ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’. It was not deemed inappropriate at funerals. Trendy vicars of course incorporated it into their maimed liturgies. It provided the backing for films and advertisements. It was the most invasive of aural transformations ever suffered by the human race. And with that liberal tyranny, which was characteristic of that most intolerant decade, anyone who objected to it was labelled a fuddy-duddy.
The most remarkable musical productions to emerge from Liverpool during the decade were the early symphonic works of John McCabe (born 1939), but you would not have thought so if all you had heard of was the Beatles. When McCabe was growing up, Liverpool was a truly cultured place, its Walker Art Gallery, its concert halls, schools, library and university justly esteemed. They all continued, of course, but as the city collapsed around them, and it was redubbed a City of Culture, the kind of culture meant was really ‘Popular Culture’. So, the ‘music of the 1960s’ for many people means the Beach Boys, Freddie and the Dreamers or Gerry and the Pacemakers.
The decade was in fact a memorable one musically. Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony (1962) was a horrifying, moving depiction of the Stalinist Terror, evoked by a haunting bass solo, orchestra and chorus. Poulenc’s Gloria, one of the most beautiful pieces in the whole repertoire of church choral music, was composed in 1959, and to the 1960s proper belong the operatic fantasy ‘Votre Faust’ and the Couleurs croises for orchestra (1967). In England, a great composer, Benjamin Britten, was producing such stupendous work as the Cello Symphony (1963), or the opera of Death in Venice (1973). A new star arose in the sky–John Tavener (born 1944) had the first performance of his extraordinary dramatic cantata The Whale in 1965. Michael Tippett not only continued to compose good work–the Second Piano Sonata (1962) and his opera The Knot Garden–but was a tireless promoter of musical performance. This was the great decade of Solti’s conducting Wagner’s Ring at Covent Garden. Malcolm Sargent was still con
ducting the annual Proms in the Albert Hall, with originality and brio.
In literature, the 1960s were a wonderful decade, too. Anthony Powell continued with his roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time–penning the best three volumes in the sequence, those relating to the war: The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier’s Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968). V. S. Naipaul wrote his funniest and most tender novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961); Geoffrey Hill (born 1932), perhaps the best poet of his generation, published King Log in 1968. John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War of 1965 was rather more than just a spy thriller. In 1967 two brilliant comic miniaturists, Paul Bailey (with At the Jerusalem) and Beryl Bainbridge (with A Weekend with Claude), established their reputations. In 1969, George MacDonald Fraser had the inspired idea to write a series of novels about the British Empire in its heyday, with the Rugby School bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays as its hero. Flashman was published in 1969. But none of this, exactly speaking, was what people meant, in after times, when they spoke of the 1960s. Someone once met the young C. S. Lewis, pacing along Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College, Oxford, his pipe ablaze. When asked the reason for his good humour Lewis replied that he had just discovered that the Renaissance had not happened. What he meant was that there had not been a great cultural break between the so-called Middle Ages and the age of Spenser and Shakespeare. Similarly, is it not possible to read the history of our times without thinking of the 1960s as the great watershed after which everything was different?