Customer Reviews

The Sixties: Big Ideas, Small Books

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Jenny Diski gave me more to contemplate in 134 pages of The Sixties than I could manage to willfully squeeze out of the last piece of popular literary fiction I read. It is clear after only a few sentences that Diski is a writer worth her salt, and why she was the one chosen to handle this topic.

Often the sixties are romanticized to the point of obscurity, those who lived through them trying to weave fame, and infamy, out of their psychedelic experiences. But it was also a time of astounding idealism, a time of rethinking and challenging ways of life, while communication between people and cultures flourished in a way previously unheard of before the expansion of global media.

Rebelling against abusive parents and already on the edge, Jenny Diski lived through the sixties in London, experiencing all that it had to offer. From the substances, to the sex, to the music; she helped found an alternative school and actively played her own role in the counter culture. Now, at sixty years old, she can see both the wonder and the naiveté of her generation:

Our youthful cruelty was boundless. Youth does cruelty quite easily, not having the accretions of time to deal with, but I remember a glaring clarity as I looked at the bourgeois life and its compromises...The compromises adults make cause much of the suffering in the world, or, at best, fail to deal with the suffering. Acceptance of one's lot--maintaining a silence about what can't be said, lowering your expectations for your own life and for others, and understanding that nothing about the way the world works will ever change-is the very marrow of maturity--and no wonder the newly fledged children look at it with horror and know that it won't happen to them--or turn their backs on it for fear it will.
She is nostalgic for the energy--and most of all for the music--but she contends that some of the most vital agendas were not only sidetracked, but were even inherently flawed. Free love was made possible by the presence of effective birth control and, she points out, central heating (especially in London). But the freedom of it was only for saying yes. Anyone who ever said no, was considered rude... (rude, can you imagine?). She describes feeling that you had to do it with anyone who asked, and that sometimes that wasn't really so hot for a woman eyeballing her evening's sweaty, overweight suitor. Communal living often failed simply because everyone was there to be free and to do their own thing, but "own thing became highly problematical when one's own thing clashed with someone else's..."

Picador is known for outstanding literature, and their Big Ideas/Small Books series is filled with gems. I am now determined to check out the other offerings, and maybe re-gift them as stocking-stuffers for my more discerning friends and family.

Review by Jen Wilson Lloyd

The Sixties was a rare time in history--remarkably, affluence had been achieved by more people in more societies than at any time previously. As a result, the people of the era could afford to agitate for luxuries like justice, art, and just having a good time. In a time of full employment, you could always go back to school, get a job fairly easily, or get a government subsidy of some sort. It's hard to imagine times like these from this vantage point.

The past, as has been opined, is a foreign country. Jenny Diski is an able guide to the times as experienced through her lens. Rather than a history, though, this is more of a personal memoir based around general themes of the times: drugs, education, the sexual revolution, etc. Her writing is peppered with the neat details which make her writing so delightful to read--in contrasting the period that had come before, she writes "The middle Sixties was that moment when Dorothy stepped through her front door, out of Kansas, onto the undreamed-of yellowness of the brick road on the way to the Emerald City, and the heart burst with pleasureat teh sudden busting out of a full-blown Technicolor world." This is a personal memoir, so the larger themes of the times are interspersed with personal anecdotes. There's a bit of a skew here then, towards her particular interests, such as education, which is fine. There were many Sixties.

One of Diski's concerns is that as the Sixties generation ages, as she ages, she drifts farther from that center of experience, dissolving in uncertain memory, and the present grows more 'baffling'. As a side note, this kind of 'decentering' is a kind of counterpoint to an issue she raises in her book--for most people the Sixties were 'business as usual,' involving 'getting on' in life. In a way, more of an extension of the attitudes of the '50s. One might ask--who 'owns' the Sixties...avant garde artists and 'revolutionaries', or a Nixonian 'Silent Majority?' For people who produce culture, this isn't much of a question, but the Silent Majority is marginalized, sadly, for its silence, as much as for its desire that everybody else would be silent, too.

It's interesting to compare this memoir to that of Mark Rudd, which I also reviewed. 'Underground' hits on many of the same themes of the times, from the perspective of a 'revolutionary leader.' The most immediate difference is the social ferment in the U.S. as compared to the U.K., particularly surrounding the anti-war movement. The analysis of the 'failure' of this historical moment is also similar.

The Sixties is a story with an unhappy ending. The peace and justice movements earlier in the era eventually dissolve into the freewheeling hedonism of the '70s and finally crash into the desperate, meaner '80s--individualism taken to its Toquevillian degree zero, with not nearly enough resources to go around and those that are diverted to a WWF-like military industrial complex, social energy dissipates, sinister new diseases like AIDS arise, and the table for 'winner take all' globalism is set for the '90s, and beyond.