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TISAN REVIEW
same or evolved at a human pace. But then the Sixties happened. A kind
of fever - Harold Wilson called it the "white heat of technological rev–
oluton" - gripped the country. I first sensed it when many of the
Northeast coal fields shut. One day, it seemed, I was drinking in some of
the liveliest workingmen's clubs in Britain; the next, nothing but ghost
towns. A Labour government had persuaded a whole region to die, with
hardly a peep from the union or the miners who trusted "their" Party.
I barely noticed the other symptoms because they weren't the sort of
"political" issues I was used to protesting about. Like the coal fields
around Newcastle and Durham, whole neighborhoods I'd known in
London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and Birrning–
ham simply "were disappeared," as if they were Latin American dissidents.
A motorway rammed parts of my Notting Hill, where I lived, into the
dust. Ancient city centres were replaced by shopping precincts that give
carbuncles a bad name. The shires were handcuffed to ama lgamated
counties with artificial names and lunatic boundaries (Humberside, Tyne
and Wear, Tameside, etc.). Rutland just vanished. Lord Beeching merrily
slashed away at the railways that had been my lifeline to the regions.
Labour's Harold Wilson, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle (who began
phasing out the brilliantly engineered Routemaster buses for the present
one-person-only disasters), all premature Thatcherites, were out to re–
make Britain in a kind of weird, Dr. Who vision of a think-tanker's idea
ofJohn F. Kennedy's Camelot which never existed anyway.
And it was all so bloody inefficient.
In
the sixties, I changed from being John Reed, the U. S. radical
journalist, to Colonel Blimp. Because that's when I began to realize
how important the best of the old was to me and how much I despised
the unworkable new. Worst of all for a second-generation socialist, it
dawned on me how much Party labels were a nonsense when it came to
real life. Once again I plunged into a political wilderness from which I've
yet to emerge.
Today, I remain a Labour activist in roughly the same way I'm a
Jew. I hardly think about my Jewishness except around anti-Semites. And
Margaret Thatcher has remade me into a fundamentalist socialist because
Labour is the most conservative party around.
It's been a long, long road from Sunset Boulevard to Primrose Hill
N.W.I. Yet, now that I'm gearing up to be an American again, I'm
sometimes not sure which country I'm in. A loony type of
"Americanization" - American greed without Yankee zip, "style" with–
out stylishness, money without a guilty conscience - is taking hold.
A
myth of a flourishing suburban family replaces all the other myths that
held us together. The aspidistra is no longer flying, it's going by Con–
corde.
