All this can be seen in the pieces I began to write in the mid 1960s, which later became The Atrocity Exhibition. Kennedy’s assassination presided over everything, an event that was sensationalised by the new medium of television. The endless photographs of the Dealey Plaza shooting, the Zapruder film of the president dying in his wife’s arms in his open-topped limousine, created a kind of gruesome overload where real sympathy began to leak away and only sensation was left, as Andy Warhol quickly realised. For me the Kennedy assassination was the catalyst that ignited the 1960s. Perhaps his death, like the sacrifice of a tribal king, would re-energise us all and bring life again to the barren meadows?
The 1960s were a far more revolutionary time than younger people now realise, and most assume that English life has always been much as it is today, except for mobile phones, emails and computers. But a social revolution took place, as significant in many ways as that of the post-war Labour government. Pop music and the space age, drugs and Vietnam, fashion and consumerism merged together into an exhilarating and volatile mix.
Emotion, and emotional sympathy, drained out of everything, and the fake had its own special authenticity. I was in many ways an onlooker, bringing up my children in a quiet suburb, taking them to children’s parties and chatting to the mothers outside the school gates. But I also went to a great many parties, and smoked a little pot, though I remained a whisky and soda man. In many ways the 1960s were a fulfilment of all that I hoped would happen in England. Waves of change were overtaking each other, and at times it seemed that change would become a new kind of boredom, disguising the truth that everything beneath the gaudy surface remained the same.
In 1965 I met Dr Martin Bax, a north London paediatrician who published a quarterly poetry magazine called Ambit. We became firm friends, and years later I learned that his wife, Judy, was the daughter of the Lunghua headmaster, the Reverend George Osborne. She and her mother had returned to England in the 1930s and spent the war years there. I began to write my more experimental stories for Ambit, partly in an attempt to gain publicity for the magazine. Randolph Churchill, son of Winston and a friend of the Kennedys, objected publicly to my story ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’. Churchill made a song and dance in the newspapers, demanding that Ambit’s modest Arts Council grant be withdrawn and describing my piece as an irresponsible slander, all this at a time when the ordeal of Mrs Kennedy and her courtship by Aristotle Onassis were ruthlessly exploited by the tabloid newspapers, the real target of my satire.
A prime engine of change in the 1960s was the entirely casual use of drugs, a generational culture in its own right. Many of the drugs, led by cannabis and amphetamines, were recreational, but others, heroin chief among them, were intended for use in the intensive care unit and the terminal cancer ward, and were highly dangerous. Moral outrage had a field day, while preposterous claims were made for the transformation of the imagination that could be brought about by LSD. The parents’ generation fought from behind a barricade of gin and tonics, while the young proclaimed alcohol to be the real enemy of promise.
Tired of all this, and feeling that the entire wrangle about drugs was ripe for a small send-up, I suggested to Martin Bax that Ambit should run a competition for the best poem or short story written under the influence of drugs – a reasonable suggestion, given the huge claims made for drugs by rival gurus of the underground. This time Lord Goodman, legal fixer for the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, denounced Ambit for committing a public mischief (a criminal offence) and in effect threatened us with prosecution. The competition was conducted seriously, and the drugs involved ranged from amphetamines to baby aspirin. It was won by the novelist Ann Quin, for a story written under the influence of the contraceptive pill.
Another of my suggestions was staged at the ICA, when we hired a stripper, Euphoria Bliss, to perform a striptease to the reading of a scientific paper. This strange event, almost impossible to take in at the time, has stayed in my mind ever since. It still seems in the true spirit of Dada, and an example of the fusion of science and pornography that The Atrocity Exhibition expected to take place in the near future. Many of the imaginary ‘experiments’ described in the book, where panels of volunteer housewives are exposed to hours of pornographic films and then tested for their responses (!), have since been staged in American research institutes.
I must say that I admire Martin Bax for never flinching whenever I suggested my latest madcap notion. He was, after all, a practising physician, and Lord Goodman may well have had friends on the General Medical Council. Martin responded positively to my wish to bring more science into the pages of Ambit. Most poets were products of English Literature schools, and showed it; poetry readings were a special form of social deprivation. In some rather dingy hall a sad little cult would listen to their cut-price shaman speaking in voices, feel their emotions vaguely stirred and drift away to a darkened tube station.
I wanted more science in Ambit, since science was reshaping the world, and less poetry. Asked what my policy was as so-called prose editor of Ambit, I would reply: to get rid of the poetry. After meeting Dr Christopher Evans, a psychologist who worked at the National Physical Laboratory, not far from Shepperton, I asked him to contribute to Ambit. We published a remarkable series of computer-generated poems, which Martin said were as good as the real thing. I went further: they were the real thing.
Chris Evans drove into my life at the wheel of a Ford Galaxy, a huge American convertible that he soon swapped for a Mini-Cooper, a high-performance car not much bigger than a bullet that travelled at about the same speed. Chris was the first ‘hoodlum scientist’ I had met, and he became the closest friend I have made in my life. In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure. Most scientists in the 1960s, especially at a government laboratory, wore white lab coats over a collar and tie, squinted at the world over the rims of their glasses and were rather stooped and conventional. Glamour played no part in their job description.
Chris, by contrast, raced around his laboratory in American sneakers, jeans and a denim shirt open to reveal an Iron Cross on a gold chain, his long black hair and craggy profile giving him a handsomely Byronic air. I never met a woman who wasn’t immediately under his spell. A natural actor, he was at his best on the lecture platform, and played to his audience’s emotions like a matinee idol, a young Olivier with a degree in computer science. He was hugely popular on television, and presented a number of successful series, including The Mighty Micro. Although running a research department of his own, Chris became an ex officio publicity manager for the NPL as a whole, and probably the only scientist in that important institution known to the public at large.
In private, surprisingly, Chris was a very different man: quiet, thoughtful and even rather shy, a good listener and an excellent drinking companion. Some of the happiest hours in my life have been spent with him in the riverside pubs between Teddington and Shepperton. In many ways his extrovert persona was a costume that he put on to hide a strain of diffidence, but I think this inner modesty was what appealed to the American astronauts and senior scientists he met during the making of his television programmes. He was a great lover of America, and especially the Midwest states, and liked nothing better than flying into Phoenix or Houston, hiring a convertible and setting off on the long drive to LA or San Francisco. He liked the easy formulas of American life. He thoroughly approved of my wish to see England Americanise itself, and hung California licence plates over his desk as a first step.