A mysterious decade
Helen Osborne
IN THE FIFTIES by Peter Vansittart John Murray, £19.99, pp. 256 Ware all too young to know if the Nineties were Naughty, but did the Twenties Roar or the Sixties Swing for you? These tags of journo-history seem about as relevant to daily life as the hoo-ha over the approaching millennium. As our 2000th year slips past, I suspect most peo- ple will be thinking about nothing more cosmic than the electricity bill, their next date or when their teeth will fall out. But of all the decades the Fifties have been least identified, still slumped in the soupy gloom of post-war fatigue.
Then, of a sudden, the Daily Mail announces, 'Nineties Woman Has Got Fifties Fever', and predicts a High Street bonanza of 'proper' suits, pill-box hats and white gloves:
Are You The Perfect Housewife? If you have a good divan bed, do you know how often it should be resprung? Do you go through your husband's clothes each month to check for repairs? Do you then make them? Are the seams of your stockings straight? Do you always serve boiled cabbage?
Anticipating this imminent fever, Peter Vansittart, anthologist and novelist, has compiled In The Fifties. He describes it somewhat evasively:
This is not autobiography, though auto- biography intrudes, not an anthology, nor an academic survey, but rather an impression of how life seemed to me in the Fifties, some- what influenced 'by how it seems to me now . At the start of the Fifties I was 30 ... Yearning to become, at some distant date, a serious writer.
The history of the Fifties has always been something of a mystery to me as I spent the entire ten years, sans pill-box, being 'edu- cated' and girlishly unconcerned by what might be happening out there in the rest of England, let alone the world. Teenagers, if they existed, lived in America or Hamp- stead, the rest of us strained at the shackles of an extended childhood, a status most definitely below the salt, longing only to be `grown-up'.
The cover of In The Fifties is promising, with pictures of a beachful of blissfully overweight trippers in pre-Costa days and some louche young men (out of the reach of one's dreams) blowing cigarette smoke over a sauce bottle in a coffee bar. Alas, the packaging is misleading. There is nothing so robust inside. Vansittart, self- confessed 'small-fry hanger-on' to the coat- tails of Literary London, has an altogether more effete approach. Famous names, and some long forgotten, are dropped unashamedly to furbish an anecdote. On Shaw's death, when St John Ervine intones on the wireless, 'For I loved the man,' Van- sittart weeps. This is seriously uninterest- ing. 'Orwell was kind to me . . . But I felt uneasy with him, not much liking him.' Greene: 'Remote, unknowable, beyond reach'; Waugh: 'I never met him, thankful- ly'; 'I never met Churchill'. Nor Alec Guin- ness. 'I have never spoken to him'. When he reveals that he was working on a novel about the Anabaptists of Munster in 1533, I began to imagine the whole thing as an elaborate spoof. But no, the publisher insists: 'The moral right of the author has been asserted.'
There is a long, long list of people he did meet in a numbingly tedious chapter on `The Wednesday Club', a male literary lun- cheon gathering which, I'm sure, was great fun when you'd had a few but scarcely sets the pages a-roar. In later years I remember wrapping up some of its members on an old sofa at the Observer when they returned in late afternoon to sleep it off. That wasn't a load of laughs either.
The book becomes more embarrassingly perfunctory when Vansittart 'comes over serious' and turns to matters philosophical with the dread plod of the Wellington boot. `For T. S. Eliot, the modern world was an immense paradox of futility and anarchy, a view at least plausible whenever one picked up a newspaper.' Stalin was a Bad Thing. McCarthy not much better, don't you know. Few intellectuals regretted the loss of empire. 'Where was God in the death camps?' Those two overrated icons of the
THE POLTT/CALLY CORRECT
GENGI-ETS KHAN. ! age, Ayer and Spender, are given free footage, although he does admit that Ayer `was seldom silent. If he had nothing to say he still said it'. Much attention is paid to Colin Wilson, of all people, as a fellow Serious Writer.
As well as being a literary groupie, Van- sittart spent much of the Fifties teaching at Burgess Hill, one of those loony schools founded by an anarchist consortium of the Thirties, 'where wealthy parents indulged in fashionable quackeries, unmitigated by common sense'. He implies that sex and drugs were rife among the under-twenties. Not if you grew up in middle-class Northumberland and went to a Yorkshire boarding school. Drugs were a watery G&T at Christmas and an illicit pack of Peter Stuyvesant. As for sex, unmentionable sex, the most voluptuous and awe-inspiring member of my virginal university year, when caught in bed with a naked gentle- man caller, was admonished by the cleaner: `Shame on you! I've never seen George in less than his trousers.' NW3 never was any- thing but a barometer of NW3.
Vansittart admits to the frivolity of mem- ory, but is anxious not to appear frivolous. In his two weighty chapters — 'Questions' and 'Existential Answers' — we are taken on a canter through intellectual waters alongside Camus and Koestler, Beckett and Berlin, Jung and Sartre. I learn that The Entertainer was influenced by Existen- tialism. Stone the crows! The blessed Alan Ross here puts the Big E into some cool perspective:
A misunderstood, vaguely fatalistic absolu- tion from ethics . . . with its echoes of vice and sexual licence, jazz and unkemptness, exercised a fascination over the intellectually unfledged.
Between the lines there are hints of what another book about the Fifties might explore. The new discipline of sociology was on the march; miners refused to work alongside Poles; the Labour government used troops against striking dockers; women were entering professions, 'aban- doning drudgery'. After Suez, Eden sug- gested that Britain's future was no longer as a world power. Priestley wrote: 'It is bet- ter to live in admass than to have no job, no prospect of one.' But Vansittart is hap- pier in his bland, private domain. 'I realise how subjective my view is . . . My wife marched with CND. I did not.' There you have it. 'I remember a pleasant enough decade, with the pitfalls and graces, atroci- ties and hopes inseparable from life in any period.'
I was glad to be reminded that the Queen Mother confused The Desert Song and The Waste Land, delighted to learn that when Pope John Paul XXIII was asked how many people worked at the Vat- ican he replied 'About half' and that a world away Sir George Sitwell branded his cattle with stencils of Chinese willow pat- tern to 'improve the landscape'. Good jokes, but at £19.99 they don't come cheap.