Gotham Diary:
Soixante-Retard
Today, on my Wednesday errands — a routine that has only recently emerged from the cloud of dust and gas that I’ve been living in since I decided, last October, that I really must put my house in order and keep it there — I stopped in at Crawford Doyle, my neighborhood bookshop. I’m making a point of buying new titles there whenever possible, and today I was after the new Gary Shteyngart. I hadn’t planned to read Super Sad True Love Story; in fact, I had planned not to read it. But I decided to buy the book all the same, as a gesture of support for an author who graces Manhattan’s literary scene with a bubbly naughtiness that I find delightful, even if he writes with a brush that’s a tad broad for my taste. Crawford Doyle had a small stack of Super Sads. What it did not have was any books by Jennifer Egan other than her new hit, A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I’ve got two copies of, having bought the one that I read at right there, at Crawford Doyle, and having bought another for the author to sign at Barnes & Noble. So I asked Dot McCleary to order a copy of Look at Me, and while we were doing that I spied an appealing little book on the counter — little books are always appealing, but this one was by Jenny Diski, so of course I had to have it. Dot thanked me for that; I was sparing her the effort of reshelving it.
The first thing that I do when the London Review of Books arrives is scan the contents for Jenny Diski’s byline. I’m a huge fan. She always makes me laugh, because she’s impatient with importance but charming in exasperation. In the book that I picked up, there are slightly rueful hints that this outlook has given her an unexpected sympathy for the elders whose prim caution she so detested when she was a teenager, in the Sixties. That’s the title of her little book, The Sixties.
The easy availability of social security and the dole are a forgotten but vital factor during the whole of the Sixties, and well into the Seventies. Unconsciously, as it might have been, the welfare system that the newly elected government brought in after the war in order to ensure a fair and just society was also the way in which the older generation were to indulge their post-war children. The Forties turned into the Fifties, the Fifties became the Sixties, and the Sixties seemed to go on forever, but even then, as the old ones gnashed their teeth and tore out their hair at the goings-on of their wild, rebellious young, they continued to pay them a state stipend, unemployment benefit, or a generous student grant, underwriting, as it were, their worst fears.
You have to be something of a curmudgeon to see that. You have to have come to grips with the fact of Thatcher and Reagan in order to understand that gnashing and tearing. At the time, nobody under 30 would or could have bothered to connect the dots.
***
It was in the late Sixties — on a particular day in 1967, I should think — that I first felt the chill of time’s inexorable passage. I was too old, I realized, too old ever to be invited to serve as an escort at a debutante party. There would be no going back, no new cycle of pre-deb dances leading to the real, white-tie deal. This was very bad news indeed, because I was just learning how much I liked escorting girls to debutante balls. I liked the dressing up, and the playing at being grown-up (the drinking, the driving, the smoking). Lust had nothing to do with it, which kept things clear and pleasant, especially since the girls were usually more than a little interested in the other escort. I had crushes on girls, but I was unusually immature, far from developed sexually. I had a nine year-old’s horror of sex well into my college career. (That changed quite suddenly.) I know that this backwardness is unusual, but I wonder how unusual it is; when I think of the Sixties, I resent having grown up in such a rank, libidinous climate. I was a romantic in those days. I liked holding girls tight when we danced the denatured fox-trot of the day, but I liked to move. I liked to cross the floor without appearing to look where I was going, all the while keeping up a stream of talk that, when I was lucky, elicited real laughter from my partner. Fox trots, denatured or not, were on the way out throughout the Sixties: the world that I thought I preferred — the world that I liked the look of, without understanding what it cost — was in a recessional from the moment I realized that I’d miss it.
***
I remember reading Ellen Willis, writing about rock in 1970 or so, in The New Yorker, and pronouncing it dead. Dead? I wondered. But it just got started. She was right, though, and what was dead was specifically what I had disliked about rock: its terrible manners. I gave terrible manners a try in the late Sixties — this would be after the sex change — but the shame of it nearly killed me. I don’t have the body for bad manners; my good manners are all that keep me from seeming overbearingly oafish and self-involved (and of course I’m not entirely sure that they do).
What it came down to was not having the body for youth. I wasn’t cut out for it at all. My childhood was a physical misery from beginning to end, even though nobody mistreated me and I was in fact indulged as a matter of course. Still, I was existentrially itchy until about the age of fifteen. Being comfortable in my own skin (and I’m never quite sure that this has happened, either) was unknown to me until I was nearly sixty. I’m not inclined to look back with nostalgia.
So I’m reading about the Sixties only because I know that Jenny Diski is going to make them far more entertaining on the page than they were in real life.
You really couldn’t be seen wearing a skirt that was a couple of inches too long. It made you feel wretched. On a camping holiday in Assisi I was persuaded to be sensible and to lower my hem two inches, still short enough for me to be refused entry to the Basilica of St Francis, and felt for the entire two weeks like an old woman shuffling about in widows weeds. As far as I was concerned, only a properly minuscule skirt could distinguish me from the nuns queuing up to see the Grotto.
Whereas, as far I was concerned, a woman was never so beautiful as when her skirt bloomed out and grazed the floor. That hasn’t changed.