Twoscore Years and Ten

On my birthday in February 1972 I turned 18 years old, and – the age of majority in England having been revised down from 21 in 1969 – thus became an adult. As far as I can recall that distant event, half a century ago, I'm pretty sure I didn't feel like an adult. I was still living at home, sharing a fourth-floor, two-bedroom council flat with my parents, and chafing at the restrictions this brought with it. I was also still at school, in what was then referred to as the "upper sixth", studying for the A-level exams that would get me into university – and out of that flat – but only if I secured the necessary grades: university then being a privilege reserved for the top 15% or so of the ability range. "Ability", at any rate, as measured by the capacity to pass exams.

A large component of my study was "literature"; that is (or was then), the close reading of a small selection of set books from the canon of written work deemed worthy of study from Chaucer onwards, but settling most comfortably on the broad shoulders of Shakespeare and the established pre-20th century "greats" like Milton and Donne, the Romantics, and the nineteenth-century poets and novelists. Following the post-war opening up of higher education to the state-educated and the establishment of new universities to accommodate us, a whole new academic publishing industry had sprung up to support the progress of potential literary scholars up the exam escalator from O-level to PhD, ranging from pocket-sized study notes and collections of critical essays to full-length studies, some aimed at the apprentice, some at the journeyman, but all based on the assumption that the goal was mastery. Mastery of what, precisely, was a question that had yet to be asked with any seriousness: the value of literary study was taken to be self-evident. It was simply one of the mainstream routes that led to a credentialed middle-class life. It was also a darned sight easier than anything requiring mathematics.

I think it would be hard not to be aware that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of some significant "modernist" literary landmarks, not least Ulysses and The Waste Land. The sort of difficult, rebarbative stuff that lends prestige to literary study, and can even make it seem necessary. I must admit, though, that I was rather taken aback this week when (doing the lightning mental arithmetic for which I am (not) renowned) I realised that 1972 sits a neatly symmetrical 50 years after those literary landmarks – works which I was coming to for the first time precisely then – and 50 years before the current day. In other words, 1972 is as antique now, as 1922 was then. As Shakespeare may well have said, and James Joyce certainly did: Fuck!

Now, I may have been getting seriously acquainted with Hamlet and Paradise Lost in 1972, but that is far from the whole story. Very fucking far, to quote Pulp Fiction. It has been incontrovertibly established by reliable authorities that 1971 was a (if not the) peak year for rock and singer-songwriter album releases, and it is a self-evident truth that these albums were still being bought, borrowed, listened to, danced to, analysed, and learned – studied, really – in 1972. Not to say carried around under one arm by some like a foot-square letter of introduction. Why, 1972 itself was to see releases of the magnitude of Ziggy Stardust and two of my personal milestones, one marking the start of a dark but formative adult journey, Joni Mitchell's For the Roses, and one marking the terminus of certain teenage enthusiasms, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick. I think it would be an uncontroversial observation to anyone of a similar age to me that the words and sounds coming out of my record player – a classic mono Dansette – meant, and still mean as much to me as any officially-sanctioned "literature" on my reading list. More, in some cases: I can still recite the lyrics of albums I have not actually listened to for decades.

According to Ezra Pound, literature is "news that stays news". But is, say, Eliot's The Waste Land (in the final published version of which Pound played a significant part) still news? Perhaps not, or less so, after thousands of wannabe littérateurs have been crawling all over it for a century. It was certainly news to me in 1972, however. So how about Joni Mitchell's Blue? Or the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, say? Or even Led Zeppelin IV? All of which were sensational news to me at the time. Still news? Well, Blue seems to have established itself as a stone-cold classic, fifty years – fifty years! – on, but Sticky Fingers... Um. The thoughtful young are queasy about the sexual politics, "blackface" posturing, and narcotised ambience of what has always been considered some of the Stones' greatest music; all of which negatives, if we're to be honest, constituted a large part of the album's attraction back then. It seemed a more "adult" attitude to strike than the shrill optimism of most pop. Nonetheless, once you've figured them out, in 2022 it's hard to forgive the lyrics of a song like "Brown Sugar". But music is not literature, and cannot be judged on lyrics alone: it is surely impossible, on hearing those staccato opening chords, not to want to jump up and thrash about to it. Ditto the urgent pounding drums and crashing cymbals of the intro to Led Zep's "Rock and Roll". Been a long time, been a long time... Go, grandad, go!

The curious thing, seen in the sort of perspective fifty-year leaps can give, is that groups like the Rolling Stones were, at the time, generally thought of as vaguely on the "right" side of history, as far as race relations (as the phrase then was) were concerned, especially when compared with the actual blackface of the likes of Al Jolson in 1922 [1]. Jagger and Richards, after all, genuinely admired Black artists, and the whole point of the "British Invasion" of the United States in the 1960s was that it disrupted the strict musical apartheid of the American charts. Nowadays, of course, this would be seen as a White Saviour intervention, and egregious "appropriation"; but back then, it opened up lines of communication that had previously been kept firmly shut. Time does have a way, to quote Pete Townsend, of making the simple things you see all complicated, doesn't it?

Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes,
And 'tis but just to let 'em live betimes.
No longer now that golden age appears,
When patriarch wits surviv'd a thousand years:
Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost,
And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast;
Our sons their fathers' failing language see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711)

Substitute "Jolson" for "Chaucer", and "Jagger" for "Dryden", and that still just about hits the spot, I'd say. Some truths last rather longer than twoscore years and ten. 

So, fifty years later, did I ever manage to feel like an adult, or has my generation's seemingly permanent attachment to its late-teen affiliations and amusements kept us, to misquote Dylan, forever infantilised? Well, to an extent, yes, but what counts as "adult" is as mutable as tastes in music. For my father, singers like Sinatra or Tony Bennett were the exemplars of grown-up music; sophistication, suits and ties, and studied cool. For my part, I struggle to think of anyone who can play that role for me, other than old friends like Joni, Leonard, or Jackson, perhaps because "my" music doesn't sit comfortably in the grown-up part of my brain – Go, grandad, go! – but also because advancing age has brought partial deafness and tinnitus, and I just don't listen to that much music any more. For me, maturity has come to reside on the page, and primarily in poetry: perhaps those literary studies have had some lasting effect, after all. I cannot read, say, Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, or (as I happen to be doing today) Ian Duhig without feeling a sense of elevation, a coming home into a place where I have always belonged, and somewhere I do not visit as often as I should.

If my generation has been doing "adult" differently from our parents and grandparents, this may only have been because we could. In Britain, at any rate, most of us have had it relatively easy. Just looking at my own family history, for me there has been no lifetime of long hours of hard, dirty, physical labour, only to die, exhausted, poisoned, or broken, before the age of 60. No experience of serial infant mortality, or fear of death in childbirth. No opprobrium for having children outside of marriage. No cowering in muddy trenches, or hoping against hope for rescue from some last-chance beach, all the time waiting to be blown to pieces. Not even much by way of systematic lack of opportunity: any failures, shortcomings, or fuck-ups have been entirely my own doing. The luckiest of us are coming into old age substantially ahead of where we started out: mortgages paid, children raised, and a decent pension paid into the bank every month. There have been trials, setbacks, regrets, and occasions for grief along the way, but it seems that I became a fully-functioning adult without really noticing, and without paying the traditional price of putting away childish things, at least not in full.

Doubtless, many of our children or grandchildren will look back in another fifty years with disapproval, even horror, at some of the things we did, said, and thought. Hey, go easy, we tried our best! Breaking new ground is never without its complications. Just you wait and see... But, note to self: do remember to destroy those youthful diaries. No sense in lending weight to the case for the prosecution.

We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow;
Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.
Alexander Pope, ibid.

1. Or indeed the long-running, prime-time British TV show "The Black & White Minstrel Show". Autres temps... (And, no, if you followed the link, I am not related to George Chisholm... A question that irritated our family for decades.)