Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  I had no desire to make acid a way of life, or to become completely absorbed in the culture of the underground – where there were as many bores as you might find in the straight world of the Mr Jones they so despised. My occasional trips simply broke up the rhythm of the everyday. In the late sixties and seventies whole stretches of time seemed to be available for contemplation. And I contemplated.

  Being on my own left me more open to making close friendships. I met Roberta Hunter Henderson, who was to play a vital role in the emergence of the Women’s Liberation movement, through the Thompsons when Edward went to work at Warwick University, where Roberta was studying philosophy. Her face had a dark classic beauty belied by her frequent change of expression. She would furrow her brow, arch her eyebrows ironically, toss back her long brown wavy hair with a look of dramatic insouciance, all in quick succession. Roberta, who possessed an exceptional gift for maths and logic, was sometimes so abstract and disconnected that she was more or less unintelligible. I used to joke that I could earth her. She coexisted with her intellect rather uncomfortably and was drawn emotionally to the hippies’ aesthetic playfulness. The year before I met her Roberta had become very famous at Warwick, when John Lennon had come courting her in a sports car just before he met Yoko Ono.

  Another friend who dipped into the counter-culture was John Hoyland, who came to teach at Tower Hamlets College. John was long, blond and skinny, just like his wife, Wisty. They reminded me of two lurchers. John came from a Quaker and Communist Party background, influences which had had a similar effect to my Methodist school. John had edited the Youth CND paper, then he and Wisty had been caught up in tumultuous student uprisings in Latin America. John lived out two opposing extremes: one part of him headed after pleasure and fun, while another was responsible and slightly puritanical. I recognized the dichotomy. In the late sixties we were involved in the same radical networks.

  I came across Vinay Chand at the London School of Economics and he was to guide me through the explosive politics which were brewing there in the late sixties. When his family moved from India to Britain, Vinay had learned how to survive in a London comprehensive where an Indian boy was still a novelty. These were skills he was to adapt to student politics. Very much the politico, Vinay was unimpressed by hippiedom, though even he was wearing black crushed-velvet trousers and a bright-yellow shirt in 1967. He was my first friend from India who had negotiated the everyday racism of growing up in Britain and was a pioneer in what is now described as ‘hybridity’, which he carried off with a carefully disciplined light touch.

  Like Roberta and John, Vinay shared an eclectic approach to left politics and made friends across boundaries. From a Hindu family, he had become a Buddhist and a vegetarian and introduced me to the Indian restaurants behind Warren Street station. He also used to take me to the Marlborough pub, off Tottenham Court Road, where his student friends from southern Africa would gather: real exiles these, drinking beer and speculating about the overthrow of the last vestiges of white colonialism.

  The anti-colonial tradition at the LSE was transmuting into a ‘Third World’ radicalism by 1967 and the left was growing. Various camps were appearing, arguing about whether the revolution was to begin with the working class in the West or in national liberation struggles in the ‘Third World’. Vinay, the diplomat, maintained connections with everyone but formed his own group, the FLN Society (a reference back to Algeria), with Ronnie Kasrils (later to be deputy defence minister in South Africa). Along with the southern African exiles, they included Asian socialists, North American New Leftists and variegated Latin American revolutionaries.

  Since 1966 radical students had been protesting against the choice of Walter Adams, a former principal of a university in white Rhodesia, to be the director of the LSE. In March 1967 they held a sit-in against his appointment. The very act of sitting-in itself became a learning process, not only because it enabled students to talk together continuously but because it broke the pattern of daily life and involved a bodily defiance, not just ideas and words.

  During the late sixties the LSE was to become a clearing house for radical ideas from many countries, influencing people like myself who were only remotely connected to it. Like the counter-culture, this newly emergent radical student milieu related subjective experience to political action. George Sorel’s writings on the educative nature of direct action were being revived and mixed with the work of Frantz Fanon on colonization, while the theories of the French situationists about claiming space combined with the participatory democracy of the student Free Speech Movement which had erupted in Berkeley in 1964. The little band of earnest American New Leftists at the LSE brought with them ideas of the personal as political, along with a nihilism which expressed the vehement, helpless anger of US ultra-radicalism in the late sixties. It was not that the ideas of the late sixties were in themselves new; it was to be the particular mix which proved so explosive.

  The creative consequences from this political whirlpool would send ripples through to the social movements of the next decades and contribute to the long-term attempt to produce a radical alternative to Stalinism. Yet the preoccupation with the transformatory effect of action upon consciousness could also display a negative aspect, wrenching the subjective away from objective circumstances. Then the action, rather than the effect of action, turned into an end in itself. This loss of balance was accompanied by a rhetoric of violence and sustained by an apocalyptic sense of the inevitable degeneration and disintegration of capitalism. For a minority this was to spiral off tragically into real violence in small terrorist groups.

  One of the confusing features of periods of intense cultural and political transformation is the coexistence of opposing attitudes. Both the student radicals and the underground were ostensibly indifferent to the past and assumed that a complete break had occurred with everything that had gone before. Less overtly, this was accompanied by an apparently quite contradictory impulse to discover roots. While the iconoclastic hippies cultivated their romantic medievalism, many of us on the left were finding our bearings through the ‘history from below’ which Raphael Samuel’s Ruskin College History Workshop meetings helped to inspire.

  The political impasse of the New Left had proved the proverbial ill wind that blows nobody any good; socialism’s loss was, ironically, to be radical history’s gain. Several of the leading participants in the New Left, among them Dorothy and Edward Thompson, had returned to writing history. Early in 1967, Raphael’s historical schemes too had begun growing and multiplying at a great rate, as if a surfeit of political energy was steaming backwards. The meeting on working-class education to which he had asked me to contribute had now increased to eight speakers and was to be held the following autumn. The Chartist day school occurred in March. These meetings were soon to be called History Workshops – the name Raphael took from the radical participatory theatre of Joan Littlewood and community politics in the United States.

  The gatherings Raphael organized, like his papers, were always ‘in progress’, defying conventional constraints and endings, and this quality gave History Workshops the feel of the happenings which were part of the underground and meant they were attuned to the emphasis on ‘process’ in libertarian left politics. In fact, underneath the apparent chaos of 1,000 flowers blooming, Raphael, the former Communist, always had a plan – even if the plan was tucked well up in his jacket sleeve and not at all evident.

  The skinny figure with the already thinning hair falling over his face would peer at you intently as if you were a walking social document and appear to be open to suggestion. However, behind the gaze and under the charm ran a tough vein of rigour and zeal, even though this was so esoteric in its expression and so utterly peculiar to Raphael’s idiosyncrasies that it took a while to spot.

  While Raphael the organizer was a benign despot, his creative imaginative leaps and his interest in all and sundry made space: for people, for cultural insights and for original approaches to history. Gen
erous with his time, he read my thesis, which was in handwriting and three times the required length, simply out of friendship, sending me page after page of handwritten notes suggesting more on this and more on that. And for this I felt ever in his debt.

  Urged on by his enthusiasm, I had managed to track down the last living member of Charles Ashbee’s arts and crafts Guild of Handicraft in Chipping Campden and when I went to Oxford for the Chartist day school in March, I visited George Hart, then in his eighties and still at work as a silversmith. Ashbee had been convinced that a rural life would keep the workers’ minds on their craft and away from socialism and revolution. But George Hart told me that most of the men had hated living in a village and drifted away. He had originally come from the countryside and, unlike the cockneys, had been able to adapt to Chipping Campden. The old silversmith was still grumbling about Ashbee’s art nouveau designs being very difficult to execute in silverware, which he put down to Ashbee’s training as an architect rather than as a craftsman in silver. In his youth George Hart had lived for a while in Hackney, playing football on Hackney Downs in the 1890s, just like the boys I used to see kicking away on the scrubby turf – a continuity of ordinary life which intrigued me.

  After the talks on Chartism, Raphael decided to take us to a Chartist land colony at Witney. And it was while he tramped us around amidst mud and pigs that I realized I was fancying a young man with black curly hair and a large luminous face. Fancying is no easier to define than falling in love, which I also did with Steve Balogh, then an undergraduate studying biology at Balliol. It had something to do with his intense, quizzical regard and the way he cocked his head on one side. A little voice in the corner of my head did point out that this might not be the easiest person to organize a love affair with. But then everything whirred rapidly out of hand and passion took hold and swept the warning away.

  The passion struck deeper than lust and lingered because Steve possessed a perceptivity about the power relations of personal behaviour which I had not encountered before in a man. He saw things women comprehended but from the vantage point of a man. He was able to name things that floated around my consciousness in a miasma of confusion, pointing consciously to responses still enmeshed in whorls of unstated half-understood resentment. Recognition did not, however, affect how he acted.

  Not long after we met he took me round to a meal with a friend of his. I felt sidelined as they talked after we had eaten, but this was familiar. Relieved to be alone but also feeling martyred by my self-exile, I did the washing-up. They were both sons of intellectual mothers: Steve’s was a psychoanalyst and his friend’s a writer and broadcaster. As the cutlery rattled angrily in the kitchen, Steve told me later they had looked guiltily at one another.

  Steve’s psychological awareness of the dynamics of male-female relations haunted him like a heavy shadow and he performed elaborate contortions to discard a mindfulness beyond his years. I was to be wrapped up and turned inside out trying to interpret his bewildering emotional moves like a hypnotized rabbit for the next three years until I finally cast off the attraction in a belated but emphatic recoil.

  Destiny had landed Steve with a hard act to follow. His father was the well-known economist Thomas Balogh, who was an adviser to Harold Wilson and a living legend in Oxford for eccentricity. Like other friends whose parents were Oxford academics, Steve had a nonchalance about odd behaviour which I envied and resented because it was impossible for me to emulate. I also marvelled at his lack of awe for the intellectual world of Oxford, which I had entered as an outsider.

  When I first met him, Steve’s consciousness seemed in perpetual flux. Not only did this keep me guessing; it suited the temper of the times, as did his eve-of-destruction mentality. He declared with confident conviction that the world was going to end in ten years’ time, expressing a chiliastic spirit which had been an element in ‘Ban the Bomb’ and was to find its way into the counter-culture and eventually into environmental politics. In Steve’s personal case the sense of inevitable doom didn’t help his tendency to be inattentive about details – like when he was going to show up, for instance. He arrived just often enough for me not to entirely lose patience, appearing suddenly outside my window with the mysterious air of someone who had landed from another planet and therefore could not be held to account for not telephoning.

  Steve was living at 46 Paradise Square, already familiar from my brief stay in 1964. By 1967 Oxford was much more druggy than in my time as a student. A morose gay Canadian junky haunted Paradise Square, cursing me from the kitchen. Town hippies wandered in and out. Upstairs, Welsh and charming and butterscotchy, lived Howard Marks, who was later to be imprisoned for marijuana dealing and emerge to write the best-selling Mr Nice. There was much panic about police raids after Steve had been dragged off by the police and found to be carrying sugar lumps. This proved to be a farcical incident as Steve’s sugar lumps were simply hoarded from Balliol meals for his tea and coffee, containing nothing more sinister than sugar. However, after this scare Paradise Square operated an austere regime of constantly washing ashtrays – a nervous tic I was to retain over the years.

  In the first half of 1967, such paranoia was, however, not unreasonable. When Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and John Hopkins (of the green face and antennae) were arrested and tried on drugs charges, their cases were widely publicized. The police repeatedly raided International Times and drug busts were frequent. Perhaps because the forces of the state did not know how to keep tabs on networks, as opposed to hierarchical organizations, they seemed to be peculiarly rattled by the anti-authoritarian counter-culture, which for its part mainly wished to go off and do its own thing. The meditative euphoria of large numbers of young people who were quite indifferent to the sectarian cadences of the Trotskyist sects was thus repeatedly being invaded by the screech of police sirens and Black Marias. Having gone through the doors of perception, only to be treated as outcasts, they were left feeling profoundly unappreciated. Their personal resentment against the police was to turn into an undirected rage against ‘the system’.

  A politics of anger was already sweeping through the North American New Left and that July it was to clash head on with the vision of inner change which inspired the British underground at an extraordinary series of discussions held at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm called ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’. I went off on the overground train from Hackney to hear Ronnie Laing talk about the ‘institutionalized’ violence of the asylum. Social control was being presented by anti-psychiatry as embedded within the texture of daily life, an idea which the women’s movement was later to adapt. But that night it was posed as the personal versus the politicos, and the long-haired supporters of Laing roamed restlessly around the back of the hall when it was the turn of Stokely Carmichael, the Civil Rights activist who was shifting from non-violence to Black Power, to speak. I can remember the crackling tension in the air and the scorn with which he dismissed a young white woman who questioned separatist politics from the audience. Without any conscious feminism, I recoiled angrily from his refusal to listen to her and his disdain of her political support.

  This first troubling encounter with a separatist politics made me want to understand more about the new black consciousness which was beginning to form outside the existing organizations for racialy ‘understanding’, marking a break from the early-sixties sociological discourses about ‘colour’ and ‘race’. The next day I went to a follow-up meeting at the Roundhouse which was nearly all black. Among the handful of other white people there was Allen Ginsberg, who wandered down the aisle chanting a mantra. The meeting greeted him with a laugh and a clap.

  Long after the meeting ended I sat listening to a small group of black intellectuals arguing. Some stressed the political link with anti-imperialism, others wanted to create an alternative culture, economically or aesthetically, while one man defiantly protested about the oppression of having his artistic work judged in terms of black art. He insisted he wanted to
be regarded as an individual – race was irrelevant. ‘Black power’ acquired more nuanced meanings.

  Nonetheless, it was a very different black politics from the perspectives of the southern Africans I had met through Vinay who discussed strategies against white colonialism as an actuality rather than talking about race in terms of subjectivity or culture. We shared a common perspective sitting together in the Marlborough pub because we were on the left; the defining difference between us was their exile from their own countries, not race.

  I never learned the personal circumstances which had forced them to flee, nor did I hear about their daily lives in Britain. The universalism of our Marxism obscured the specifics from which individuals came and, possessing no language to describe the process of being, it papered over gulfs in experience. ‘Black power’ was a more uncomfortable approach to politics for a left-wing white sympathizer, because you were cast as ‘the other’, yet it expressed an awareness of an apprehension beyond the intellect which struck an emotional chord of recognition. This dimension of understanding which we called ‘liberation’ was to reorientate how I saw politics. Although I continued, like Vinay, to be aware of the strengths of the Marxist emphasis on reason, analysis and strategy, which avoided some of the self-punishing, destructive aspects of separatist identity politics.

  The black radicals I had met through The Dialectics of Liberation’ encouraged me to read more of the American literature on race and black power, and from these I turned to Sartre’s Black Orpheus, the poetry of Aime Cesaire and, of course, Frantz Fanon. On the back of my Grove Press copy of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks in 1967 I scribbled the names of writers he critiqued: Jacques Lacan, Karl Jaspers, Octave Mannoni. Existentialism and psychoanalytic thought appeared to offer a means of interpreting the inner and outer worlds. I was groping towards a new language of politics.