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The Struggle of the Male Self: A New Left Activist and His 1961 Diary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

Celia Hughes
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Abstract

This article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible.

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Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 898 - 925
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

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References

1 The diary of John Hoyland, 18 January 1961, 1, in the private archive of John Hoyland (hereafter JHA).

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 20 January 1961, 4, JHA.

4 See Michael Rosen, “All in the Family,” in Children of the Revolution: Communist Childhood in Cold War Britain, ed. Phil Cohen (London, 1997), 52–54.

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6 Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters, “Introduction,” in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964, ed. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters (London, 1999), 11–13.

7 Hoyland kept a regular diary from his mid-teenage years (with some exceptions) up until his death in December 2014. This private collection is currently in the care of his family and is not available for viewing. I came to view Hoyland's 1961 diary and three other diaries from the 1970s, in the years following an oral history interview with him in November 2008. At intervals throughout his life, Hoyland returned to his diaries as sources for stories, poems, and political articles, and especially to inform his writing on feminism and sexual politics. He also contributed to several historical projects on 1960s left-wing activism, radical theater, and on men's experiences with feminism. I am grateful to Hoyland for giving his permission to use material from his diaries and unpublished novel.

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17 Other individuals who became active in Young Communist Party, New Left, and CND circles have also spoken of the influence wartime Communist Party fathers and friends made on their teenage politics. See Waterman, Peter, “Hopeful Traveller: The Itinerary of an Internationalist,” History Workshop Journal 35, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 165–83, at 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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21 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994), 22.

22 Ibid.

23 The diary of John Hoyland, 27 February 1961, 56, JHA.

24 Early twentieth century New Life Fellows, for example, illustrated this idealism in their vision for cross-class loving comradeship. See Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London, 2008), 99–102.

25 Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London, 2006).

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29 Quoted in Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 77–78.

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31 Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream (London, 2000), 68–69.

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33 Ibid., 21 April 1961, 114, JHA.

34 Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh, 1993); Kenny, The First New Left, 34–37; Nigel Young, An Infantile Disorder: The Crisis and Decline of the New Left (London, 1977), 144–48. Historians have also recently challenged the generational gulf between postwar children and their parents. See Todd, Selina and Young, Hilary, “Baby-Boomers to ‘Beanstalkers’: Making the Modern Teenager in Post-War Britain,” Cultural and Social History 9, no. 3 (September 2012): 451–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Ibid., 4 February 1961, 27, JHA. A 1955 Communist Party of Great Britain title read, “To sacrifice one's personal interests … is the highest manifestation of Communist ethics,” quoted in Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 27.

38 See Sam Carroll, “‘Fill the Jails’: Identity, Structure and Method in the Committee of 100, 1960–1968” (PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2010), 14.

39 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 122.

40 Carroll, “‘Fill the Jails,’” 21.

41 The diary of John Hoyland, 29 January 1961, 9, JHA.

42 Ibid., 21 April 1961 110, JHA.

43 John Hoyland, “The Man with the Bright Red Trousers,” in Fathers and Sons, ed. John Hoyland (London, 1992), 141–42.

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49 Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 13.

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51 Lynn Abrams, “Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the ‘Good Woman,’ in 1950s and 1960s Britain,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianisation in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gavreau (Toronto, 2013), 60–83, at 74; Mary Evans, A Good School: Life at a Girls’ Grammar School in the 1950s (London, 1991); Mary Ingham, Now We Are Thirty: Women of the Breakthrough Generation (London, 1981), David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London, 2008), 566.

52 The diary of John Hoyland, 2 May 1961, 122, JHA.

53 Burkett, “Redefining British Morality,” 199.

54 The diary of John Hoyland, 1 April 1961, 92, JHA.

55 King, “Hidden Fathers?,” 32; Steve Humphries and Pamela Gordon, A Man's World: From Boyhood to Manhood 1900–1960 (London, 1996), 111.

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59 The expression referred to Hoyland's consciousness of tensions inherent in the body as an agent for individual pleasure and to enact social change for the greater good.

60 The diary of John Hoyland, 9 February 1961, 37, JHA.

61 Ibid., original emphasis.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 4 February 1961, 25, JHA.

64 Ibid., 24 January 1961, 7, JHA.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., 6 May 1961, 125, JHA.

67 Ibid.

68 Francis, “Tears, Tantrums and Bared Teeth,” 357.

69 Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 84.

70 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (London, 1962).

71 Sheila Rowbotham, “Women's Liberation and the New Politics,” in Dreams and Dilemmas: Collected Writings (London, 1983), 30–32.

72 See, for example, Michèle Roberts, Paper Houses: A Memoir of the ' 70s and Beyond (London, 2007). Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream; Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics (London, 2007); Hughes, Young Lives on the Left.

73 Song, Shenli, “Alienation and Isolation—Problems of the Modern Society in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook,” Review of European Studies 2, no. 2 (December 2010): 164–66, at 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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76 The diary of John Hoyland, 5 March 1961, 67, JHA.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), 78–79.

80 James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford, 2010), 5.

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83 Peter Bailey, “Jazz at the Spirella: Coming of Age in Coventry in the 1950s,” in Conekin, Mort, and Waters, eds., Moments of Modernity, 22–40.

84 The diary of John Hoyland, 18 August 1961, 215, JHA.

85 Bill Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford, 1994), 33.

86 Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 14; Jackson, Louise A., “‘The Coffee Club Menace’: Policing Youth, Leisure and Sexuality in Post-War Manchester,” Cultural and Social History 5, no. 3 (September 2008): 289–308, at 297–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 The diary of John Hoyland, 12 February 1961, 46, JHA.

88 Ibid., 11 March 1961, 72, JHA.

89 Ibid., 18 August 1961, 215, JHA.

90 Ibid., 11 February 1961, 45, JHA.

91 Ibid., 9 February 1961, 37, JHA.

92 Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of my Autobiography 1949–1962 (London, 1997), 90.

93 The diary of John Hoyland, 21 August 1961, 218, JHA.

94 Sillitoe, Alan, “What Comes on Monday,” New Left Review 4 (July/August 1961): 59Google Scholar.

95 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger: A Play in Three Acts (London, 1957), 89.

96 The diary of John Hoyland, 30 June 1961, 156, JHA.

97 Sheila Rowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (Harmondsworth, 1973), 21–22; Michelene Wandor, Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation (London, 1990).

98 Laura King, “The Perfect Man: Fatherhood, Masculinity and Romance in Popular Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain,” in Love and Romance in Britain, 1918–1970, ed. Timothy Willem Jones and Alana Harris (London, 2015), 41–60; Mort, Frank, “Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons,” Journal of British Studies 38, no. 3 (July 1999): 353–84CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

99 The diary of John Hoyland, 11 April 1961, 102, JHA.

100 Ibid., 14 April 1961, 105, JHA.

101 See John Charlton, Don't You Hear the H-Bomb's Thunder? Youth & Politics on Tyneside in the Late ’Fifties and Early ’Sixties (Pontypool, 2009), 105–13.

102 The diary of John Hoyland, 4 February 1961, 9, JHA.

103 Langhamer, The English in Love, 47.

104 Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1800, 2nd ed. (London, 2013), 138.

105 The diary of John Hoyland, 20 March 1961, 83, JHA.

106 Ibid., 17 May 1961, 134, JHA.

107 Ibid., 101.

108 Kenneth C. Barnes, He and She (Harmondsworth, 1958), 9.

109 Trevor Weston, “Foreword,” in Kenneth C. Barnes, 15+ Facts of Life: Family Doctor Booklet (London, 1961), 2.

110 Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex before the Sexual Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), 363; Cook, Hera, “Getting ‘Foolishly Hot and Bothered’? Parents and Teachers and Sex Education in the 1940s,” Sex Education 12, no. 5 (November 2012): 555–77, at 563CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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112 Michael Schofield found young women much more prepared to tolerate premarital sexual experience amongst men rather than women. Michael Schofield, The Sexual Behaviour of Young People (Harmondsworth, 1965), 108.

113 The diary of John Hoyland, 4 February 1961, 31, JHA.

114 Barnes, 15+ Facts of Life, 8.

115 The diary of John Hoyland, 4 February 1961, 24, JHA, original emphasis.

116 Ibid., 11. Ferdynand Zweig also found his university students subscribing to this code; they demanded “love,” “sincerity,” and “honesty” in sexual relations and condemned “cheapening” or “debasing” sex by “using others as objects.” Ferdynand Zweig, The Student in the Age of Anxiety: A Survey of Oxford and Manchester Students (London, 1963), 206.

117 Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960 (Oxford, 2008), 69.

118 See, for example, Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson, Generation X (London, 1964); Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Basingstoke, 1991), 17.

119 The diary of John Hoyland, 20 February 1961, 53, JHA.

120 Ibid., 4 February 1961, 23, JHA.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid., 8 May 1961, 70, JHA.

123 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (London, 2005), 95.

124 Peter M. Lewis, “Mummy, Matron and the Maids: Feminine Presence and Absence in Male Institutions, 1934–63,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London, 1991), 168–89, at 178.

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126 Marwick, The Sixties, 56–65; Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (Harmondsworth, 1964); idem, England, Half English (London, 1961); Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Permissive Society (London, 2010), 227–28; Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London, 2001), 324–26.

127 Tebbutt, Being Boys, 235.

128 Ibid.

129 Mort, Capital Affairs, 91–92.

130 The diary of John Hoyland, 9 February 1961, 41, JHA.

131 Ibid.

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133 The diary of John Hoyland, 11 March 1961, 75, JHA.

134 For discussion of how the interwar cinema was beginning to influence young people's self-fashioning and ways of relating, see Tebbutt, Being Boys, 127–29; Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–1939 (Aldershot, 2007); Penny Tinkler, Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2006), 9.

135 Charlotte Brunsdon, London in the Cinema: The Cinematic City since 1945 (London, 2007), 46.

136 The diary of John Hoyland, 11 March 1961, 76, JHA.

137 Ibid., 9 February 1961, 36, JHA.

138 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 32.

139 Langhamer, “The Meanings of Home,” 344.

140 Zweig, The Student in the Age of Anxiety, 207.

141 The diary of John Hoyland, 9 February 1961, 36, JHA.

142 Ibid.

143 Reid, Jason, “‘My Room! Private! Keep Out! This Means You!’: A Brief Overview of the Emergence of the Autonomous Teen Bedroom in Post-War II America,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 5, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 419–43, at 422CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

144 Langhamer, “The Meanings of Home,” 358.

145 The diary of John Hoyland, 15 April 1961, 44, JHA.

146 Ibid., 45.

147 Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 111.

148 The diary of John Hoyland, 8 September 1961, 248, JHA.

149 Ibid., 5 February 1961, 31, JHA.

150 Ibid., 13 August 1961, 205, JHA.

151 Laura King, “Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, c. 1918–1960” (PhD diss., University of Sheffield, 2011), 161.

152 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 260.

153 The diary of John Hoyland, 5 February 1961, 31, JHA.

154 Ibid.

155 Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 35.

156 The diary of John Hoyland, 21 August 1961, 220, JHA.

157 Ibid., 18 August 1961, 210, JHA.

158 Ibid., 221, JHA.

159 Ibid., 9 September 1961, 251, JHA.

160 Ibid., 2 September 1961, 225, JHA.

161 Ibid, 3 September 1961, 233, JHA.

162 Ibid., 9 September 1961, 251, JHA.

163 Waterman, “Hopeful Traveller,” 169.

164 Richard Coleman, Ralph Davis, Philip Gillmor, and Robert Gillmor, Leighton Park: The First 100 Years (St. Albans, 1989), 23.

165 Lucy Delap has recently highlighted the prevalence of guilt and shame characterizing antisexist men's politics. Lucy Delap, “Undoing Privilege and Power: Anti-Sexist Men and Guilty Politics” (lecture, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 4 December 2013).