Some Thoughts on Christopher Booker's 'The Neophiliacs'

One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern British history is the real reason for the Cultural Revolution which, in an amazingly short time, changed Britain from one country into another, where the remnants of the former nation can increasingly be found only by a  sort of archaeology, so brief is human memory.

 

 

One of the most moving descriptions of a moment in this change is in my brother’s memoir ‘Hitch-22’ in which he recalls a summer twilight in Cambridge when the Leys School’s apology for a ‘pop group’,  as they were then called, held a concert in the grounds. Attracted by the amplified noise – teenagers from the town slipped into the school grounds to listen.  In those days you didn’t walk through gateways marked ‘private’, and public schoolboys didn’t mix with the town.

 

 

To me the account (I wasn’t there. I suspect it must have been the summer of 1964, before I began my brief period as a public schoolboy) is especially evocative.  The former quietness of England was being rapidly invaded in those times, by the incessant whoosh and sigh of cars on the bypass, and by the rapid encroachment of loud popular music into workplaces and public places. I can fix a summer holiday in the Isle of Wight to September 1961, because of a completely clear memory of that very strange and quite unforgettable song ‘Johnny, Remember Me’ being played over the loudspeakers of the car ferry between Cowes and Southampton as we waited by our Morris Minor 1000 for a delayed homeward departure. 

 

Were they transmitting Radio Luxembourg, or were they playing the actual record, number one in the charts for weeks that summer,  to try to pacify the disgruntled passengers?  I have no idea, but the radio had very little time, back in 1961, for modern popular records. If you wanted to listen to them, you had to buy them from quaint shops which allowed you to listen to them free through headphones, before parting with your seven shillings and fourpence for a 45 rpm ‘single’(the main song and the 'flipside', generally but not always forgettable),   as distinct from an ‘EP’, which cost about ten bob, had a proper stiff cover and featured four songs, or an ‘LP’, which cost thirty two shillings and sixpence and had to be played at 33 rpm, later known as an ‘album’. These prices remained the same for years, until Reggie Maudling abolished resale price maintenance  (also confusingly referred to as ‘rpm’) during the dying months of the 1951-64 Tory government

 

Similarly, I can place a holiday in Jersey in 1963 (I’d otherwise have thought it was two years later) because the evenings were rent by the repeated playings of ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ in what passed for the nightclubs of Gorey, the urgent,  meaningless refrain drifting out over the summer sea.

 

 

Just as Oxford spring mornings are unique, providing a last faint hint of the medieval celestial city amid river and woodland described by Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘ Duns Scotus’s Oxford ‘

 

 

‘Towery city and branchy between towers;

Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook racked, river-rounded;

The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did

Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;’

 

 

….Cambridge summer evenings are also unique, haunted, soft and mysterious, equally in direct touch with a remote past which still persists despite all attempts to drown it out.

 

That little grey town (as J.B. Priestley calls it ‘The Good Companions’) is not like anywhere else I have ever visited or lived, and to this day I cannot go there without feeling I have stepped slightly outside normal time.  It was also the place in which, for me, the ‘Sixties’ ended. Their strange, delusional atmosphere continued long after December 31st 1969 . I will never forget the lovely sun-dappled afternoon I spent on 6th October 1973, punting on the Cam and taking the train back to London, exhausted and happy as one is after a day on the river, to discover abruptly that the Yom Kippur war had broken out, that Egypt and Syria had launched a joint surprise attack on Israel.

 

This was a real war whose outcome was far from certain, which might spread far wider,  and which was bound to have (and did have) huge effects on our economy and on the supply of oil to the western nations. The news instantly dispelled my euphoria, and filled me with a feeling of darkness and cold, entirely justified (as I now know) by the revolutionary change it wrought in relations between the ‘West’ and Saudi Arabia. Not that I would now want to, but I have never recovered the feeling of security and inviolability that I last felt on that afternoon.  I suspect that my apostasy from Marxism, which took place soon afterwards, began that day.

 

 

But let us go back to the insistent drum-beat of the 1960s. In that decade,  the tension between Cambridge’s ordinary inhabitants and the various educational  institutions that stood in their midst must have been very great.  The University was still, just, clinging to the old ways .There were ‘undergraduates’ and ‘Varsity’ rather than ‘students’ and ‘uni’ (I can remember an actual Rag Day in the autumn of 1965 , with undergraduates in silly costumes standing perilously in the empty niches 20 feet above the street on the stone façade of (I think) Corpus Christi college .

 

Most of the time they dressed in sports jackets and wore ties (most of them were male), they all rode bicycles with baskets, and some of them even smoked pipes. Dons were still (just) ‘in loco parentis’ (in the place of the parent) and the age of majority was 21.  My Methodist boarding school was, likewise, still more or less upholding the Edwardian traditions of the public school, with a lengthy rule book, enforced by the writing of lines (‘Few things are more distressing to a well-regulated mind than to see a boy, who ought to know better, disporting himself at improper moments’, transgressors had to write, 20 times, before breakfast, in a large high-ceilinged pre-1914 classroom built to commemorate the Coronation King George V.

 

There was also ‘gating’  - the withdrawal of the (already limited) freedom to leave the school grounds unsupervised. This was a term I’d read about in ’Billy Bunter’ stories in which boys said things like 'yaroo' and leggo', and 'you beast', and was amazed to find still in use in the 1960s.  Oddly enough, the most serious offence in the whole canon of school punishments was being late for breakfast. Commit this offence twice in one term , and you were gated. You could be late for anything else three times before being gated, and you could commit general crimes or misdemeanours of dress, deportment or behaviour five times before being so confined.

 

Given that we were on the southern edge of one of the most beautiful and history-steeped places on the planet, the school had an almost obsessive interest in keeping us away from it. Even by the very different standards of the time this rule was considered so odd that it was given a special mention in a Fabian Siociety pamphlet attacking the public schools of the day.

 

At the top of the library staircase was a map of the town on which the hand of authority had drawn a thick black line, across which we were not supposed to venture without permission except on Sundays and (for some forgotten reason) Wednesday afternoons.  Being a  barrack-room lawyer and column-dodger by nature, I swiftly spotted that the line did not extend all the way to the edge of the map, and so I would legalistically ride my clanking red bicycle round the top of it on forbidden days, happy to point out (if challenged, as I never was) that I had not actually broken the rules.

 

But, yet again, I digress. This is all by way of introduction to a recommendation of ‘The Neophiliacs’. By Christopher Booker, which I recently re-read (The first time I read it, I borrowed it from the Swindon public library. My new copy was personally supplied by the author) after a gap of about 40 years. Alongside Bernard Levin’s ‘The Pendulum Years’,  I much recommend it to those who would understand the 1960s upheaval.

 

Mr Booker’s work is more reflective and less bitterly-enraged than Mr Levin’s. It is crammed with quiet but devastating mockery of the obsession with ‘youth’ and ‘grittiness’ and ‘abrasiveness’ and novelty in general which took hold of the BBC , the media and, increasingly, of politics and the law, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. These obsessions eventually took the form of a sort of large waking dream, of novelty and change in which we are the heroes of the new order,  from which we were repeatedly rather roughly awakened by reality.  Booker uses the term ‘a  froth of expectation’, which accumulated on top of many real moral and material changes, not all of them for the better, which were actually taking place in the economy and society.

 

The book is heavily influenced by the thinking of Carl Jung, who long ago warned of ‘psychic epidemics’ by which man periodically devastates the settled order.

 

If I have understood the argument rightly, these epidemics are rooted in our power of imagination. This power, undisciplined by any deeper understanding of the universe, will often impel us into a sort of dreamworld of impossible, utopian hopes. War and catastrophe - or decline, and the stultifying nature of conservative societies dominated by the old and middle-aged -  stimulate it in certain directions. Powerful new trends in thought, literature, music and the widespread use of drugs carry that stimulus further.  It seems to me that a religious longing, without a  religion to satisfy it, may have much to do with this.   I would say that, wouldn’t I? But Jung seems to sympathise with this view too.

 

In one of the epigraphs to Chapter 12, Booker significantly quotes Jung on the religious question ‘…among all my patients in the second half of life, - that is to say, over thirty-five - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort is not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook'.(C.G. Jung, Psychotherapists or the Clergy’).

 

 

One particular moment of rough awakening from a dream was the Moors Murder Trial . I think I have written before about the effects of this on serious liberal opinion, as shown in Pamela Hansford Johnson’s account of the trial ‘On Iniquity’ and in her husband C.P.Snow’s fictionalised reflection on it, in his novel ‘The Sleep of Reason’. I recommend both books,  taken pretty much together. Snow’s imagined trial of a pair of sexually-motivated child-murderers is one of the best things he ever wrote, containing several moments of real horror, rage and misery all the more potent for being so understated.

 

A forgotten element of this event (now) is that there was no doubt at the time of the connection between Brady’s taste for pornography and the crimes he then committed (The Fleet Street reporters who attended the trial and had to listen to the recordings of Brady and Myra Hindley doing what they did, recordings these murderers themselves had made,  never got over it, hard-bitten old reptiles that they were).

 

As Booker writes : ‘For the child murders by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had shaken the nation as had no crime since the war. With its mixture of Brady’s background as an illegitimate orphan in the slums of Glasgow, and the fantasy world of Sadism and Nazism he had been able to seize on through the offices of Manchester’s thriving pornographic bookshops, for many people the case threw into sharp relief the darker side of the dream into which Britain had been moving’.

 

That dream involved a thoroughgoing rejection of former authority, but without any replacement for what was rejected.

 

Booker suggests that ‘In order to become mature, in short, we must not only reject the authority of our parents  – but, at the same time, in order to replace them, we must also learn to kill off our own fantasy selves. Only by killing this fantasy self can a man become fully mature. Unless he does so, he is still in a state of rebellion, a perpetual state of immaturity’.

 

This seems to me to describe rather well the generation of perpetual adolescents, balding bejeaned Glastonbury-goers in their sixties,  with drug stashes in the high cupboards of their expensive London houses, still in imaginary combat with a crusty establishment which ceased to exist 60 years ago (but which they imagine to be embodied by Margaret Thatcher or that monster,  ‘The Mail’.

 

Booker writes, rather disturbingly for any modern person:  : ‘Ultimately , to overcome his own fantasy-self is the one supreme contribution that a man can make to mankind. All the fantasies that are around us, that infect the collective human organism, are in the end just one fantasy, made up of all the separate unresolved images and acts of self-assertion that are fed into it form each individual fantasy-self of all the thousands of millions of human beings on earth.

 

‘Every man who asserts his own ego against the general framework in any way, however small, or adds to the sum of unresolved imagery, however idly, is playing his tiny part in increasing the sum of the world’s discords and miseries…’

 

He contrasts this with the more commonly-accepted Freudian orthodoxy ‘the supreme expression of that profound revolt against the ‘father-figures’ of Victorianism, tradition and religion which sprang up in the late 19th century, lay in its uncovering of all the temptations to violation of order which comprise the dream-fantasy level of the mind. But instead of recognising them as imperatives of the way the mind must *not*work. Freud interpreted them as symptoms of ‘inhibition’ and ‘repression’, which must be cleared away , in order that the individual may fulfil himself. It would be hard to find a clearer example than this basic confusion of the self-destructive urge at work in the 20th-centrury subconscious.

 

And he concludes:

 

‘However much one wishes to change the outside world, the only thing one can change or have any control over is ultimately oneself. Which is why the greatest good any man can do to change the world is the least dramatic act of all – to withdraw his own contribution from the general sum of evil’ . Which is as good a point as any to end this sermon on Easter Monday.