ANDREW WHITEHEAD
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​Andrew Whitehead's
Blog

Underground - 1966

18/5/2013

18 Comments

 
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Sometimes you can go months without coming across any really great political pamphlets - and then you strike gold. Twice.

I've blogged below about the treasures I came across last weekend ... when I was also was able to buy an early (1890) copy of the Yiddish newspaper 'Der Arbeter Fraint' (The Worker's Friend), and even more spectacular, a copy of Henry Seymour's 'The Anarchist' from 1886.

Today at Walden Books in Chalk Farm, I picked up a handful of much more recent gems - of which this is my favourite.

This is the first - perhaps the only - issue of 'Underground', dating it seems from 1966. Here's what the editorial comment says:

underground's first aim is to print the work of young authors or poets, whether published previously or not, alongside that of older writers whose influence justifies their inclusion in a magazine aimed primarily at the young. Secondly we hope to provide a forum for libertarian ideas without consenting to follow any exclusive party line.

It was published by a group of Oxford students - the editorial board (and forgive me, i don't recognise any of the names) consisted of: Tony Allan, Kris Jastrzebski, Rick Blake, John Edge, Peter Whewell, Barbra Norden and Penelope Cloutte. Anyone able to tell me any more about the editors or the journal?

The cover, of course, caught my attention - very 1960s. I suspect it was designed by Humphrey Weightman. And the contents are also really interesting. Most of the first half of the journal is given over to a republication of Sir Herbert Read's (surely he was the only anarchist ever to accept a knighthood) 'Anarchism in the Affluent Society'. The poems that follow include two by Adrian Mitchell - I've posted one of these below (the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh attended the Canada Centennial in the summer of 1966, which probably provided the cocasion for Adrian Mitchell's verse).


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LATER (May 2014) - This post has attracted comments from three of those who published 'underground' almost forty years ago - and now a scholar at a Canadian university has been in touch about Sir Herbert Read's essay included in this issue, and here explains its significance:



Herbert Read’s ‘Anarchism in the Affluent Society’


Originally written as a speech delivered to the Federacion Libertaria Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1962, Herbert Read’s short article ‘Anarchism in the Affluent Society’ was reprinted in the ephemeral Oxford-based magazine Underground four years later. As writing was Read’s primary source of income, he was a frequent recycler: regularly fusing together shorter pieces, and producing a number of collections of his occasional essays. Despite this, ‘Anarchism in the Affluent Society’ was not included in any of the political collections that Read assembled after he delivered the paper in Argentina. When revising his wartime essay To Hell With Culture in 1963, for instance, for its new life in a lengthier volume examining the commodification of modern culture, Read designed to include ‘Anarchism and the Affluent Society’. It would later appear under the rather pallid title ‘Anarchism and Modern Society’ in Irving Louis Horowtiz’s unorthodox reader The Anarchists in 1964, translated from the Spanish-language periodical Reconstruir.

Given the short-lived nature of Underground, and Read’s failure to revisit the essay, it is a piece of Readian ephemera that scholars have overlooked. I, for one, was unaware of the article until I came across Read’s own copy of the address, written in his neat handwriting in an old exercise book, which is currently part of the collection of his personal papers held at the University of Victoria. Perhaps judging the essay unexceptional, Read decided it wasn’t worth thinking about any more, and set it aside to concentrate on other projects, like the definitive version of his autobiography The Contrary Experience, which was published the following year.

Often, unfinished articles, and those marginal pieces that writers quickly forget, are especially revealing. Lacking the polish of repeated revision, short reflections on particular themes can cast light on the writer’s body of work as a whole, showing the enduring importance of certain ideas, or show a thinker struggling to keep certain sets of ideas relevant in shifting political and intellectual contexts.

Read’s essay is significant for this reason, particularly given the overall framing of the piece as an analysis of the relevance of anarchist politics in the ‘affluent society’. This term, he notes at the outset, is a ‘fashionable’ one, and Read was probably inspired by J.K. Galbraith in adopting it, who had published his famous work The Affluent Society in 1958. Read describes the affluent society as North American and Western European phenomenon, based upon ‘a union between the direct power of the state and the productive organization of monopoly capitalism’ that had attained ‘the highest standard of living that has yet been capable of satisfying the population of these countries’.

Read’s argument is, unsurprisingly, that while the ‘material condition of the working classes’ has improved, their ‘spiritual impoverishment is equally evident’. He goes on to diagnose a lack of ‘principles’ at the heart of contemporary politics, where governments democratic governments ‘change name but not purposes’, resulting in a politics of ‘expediency’ – actions guided solely by the desire to ‘maintain a high standard of living.’

This might seem a legitimate ambition, but for Read the triumph of the politics of expediency had enervating effects, producing a kind of spiritual lassitude. With this in view, in his paper he reasserted the value of anarchist philosophy as an outcry against this fate. Unusually for him, Read developed this theme through a relatively detailed discussion of the articulation of these ideas in the historical anarchist tradition. The form of Read’s argument is interesting, therefore, as it offers a restatement of his conception of anarchism’s core ideas, and the tradition’s key thinkers.

Both of these are idiosyncratic, and would have been met with scepticism by other anarchists. Central to his vision of anarchism is a commitment to non-violence, based on the assumption that the state was the embodiment of violence. He supports this by saying that ‘Lao-tse, Chuang-tze, Jesus Christ, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, and Gandhi’ had all recognised this truth, and that anarchists must never lose sight of the idea that ‘force corrupts the human mind’. The only legitimate action against the state is therefore also non-violent, and he closed his talk by reiterating Gandhi’s ‘enormous’ debt to the anarchist tradition, and concluding that ‘I cannot conceive of an anarchist movement in the world today that does take its departure from the point reached by Gandhi’.

The other central theme of his essay stems from this argument: the idea that the best way to popularise anarchism was to show it in action, as an ethos of peaceful ‘mutual aid’. This idea was based on a tactical assessment that anarchists cannot ‘contradict at least two thousand years of political evolution’ and change this process through ‘direct political means’. Spain, Palestine, and Cuba, he continued, all demonstrated that ‘splits or fissures’ could develop in centralised states, but he added that their ‘tragic’ history should be remembered, and that these examples should ‘not give us false hope’. For Read then, the duty of anarchists was to resist ‘conformity, fixity, and centralization’ in the present, and expound their principles of mutual aid and peaceful cooperation, albeit acknowledging that the road to anarchism would be a long, and perhaps endless, one. But as he said elsewhere, even if this vision proved to be a mirage, ‘we must remember that the mirage gives energy and direction to a man lost in the desert.’

Matthew S. Adams, University of Victoria

18 Comments
Penny
18/3/2014 13:44:26

This posting prompted an email from Penny Cloutte, who was part of the group which published 'underground'. Part of Penny's email is publisher here with her permission:

'Wow! What a surprise! I was delighted to see your blog, and to remember that time. Yes, we were the Anarchist Group at Oxford University at the time. I am still in touch with Barbie Norden but have no idea what has happened to the boys. Chris J gave up physics and took up Sanskrit or something like that, used to wander the town wearing a Jellabia - much to the shock and delight of a visiting friend of my family, an elderly and rather correct widow, who once encountered him thus attired while visiting me with my mother in my final year. It gave her subject for gossip for many months afterwards.
'We put together the mag at the end of our first year, a lovely summer of freedom as I remember it. I remember Adrian Mitchell himself reading that poem among others to us at one of our meetings - which tended to be more literary than political.'

Reply
Penny
18/3/2014 13:46:49

Penny sent a second email with more memories of publishing 'underground', and again part of it is posted here with her permission:

'Your first email prompted me to get out my "Oxford" file, which was an interesting experience. I found a copy of a forerunner or "Underground", called "Speak One", which has a plug for "Underground" on the back. It is rather badly printed - probably gestetner - but just about legible. It contains mainly poetry which gave me pause - did I really admire this stuff when I was 20? And how disturbed most of those poets seem to me now - not to say a touch misogynist! I also found a copy of a folio-sized red pamphlet called "Oxan", with some heavy-duty articles by Laurence Otter and others about anarchist theory. I can't remember if I ever read it! Would you like to see it, possibly add to your collection?

'But I could not find my copy of "Underground"! I can remember having it in my hands recently, in the aftermath of building works and major domestic upheaval, and wondering whether to chuck or keep, so maybe I did chuck it. A friend is coming by this week to help me de-clutter, so maybe it will turn up then. Yes, the cover was good, and yes now you mention it I think it was Humph Weightman who designed it - I had forgotten all about him and the other names except Chris J. I think my role on the "editorial board" was to find some advertising from local businesses, and I still have a copy of a letter I wrote soliciting material - one of the first I ever typed, on Barbie's typewriter. So how did you get Humph's name?

It has brought back a whole world! Before even all those cut-and-paste pamphlets we produced in the 70s, with cow gum and those pasteboards...'

Reply
Tony Allan
28/4/2014 07:17:47

Barbara Norden (now living in Birmingham) mailed me this entry on Underground, which stirred a lot of memories. The editorial board is long scattered, but through hearsay, perhaps unreliable, I understand Pete Whewell became a psychologist (or psychiatrist?) in the north of England, while John Edge got deeply involved in an esoteric movement called The Emin and was last heard of living in Wales. Me, I went on to earn a living as a writer and editor, and currently reside in the Oxfordshire countryside just half an hour or so from Oxford where the magazine was produced. The last time I came across Kris Jasztrebski's name was in Michael Hollingshead's autobiography The Man who Turned On the World, describing his (Hollingshead's) exploits in introducing Timothy Leary and others to the drug LSD in the 1960s. In an introductory note Hollingshead (now dead) acknowledged a 'very great debt to Kristof Jastrzebski-Glinka' for his editorial guidance with the writing. Later in the book he described how he first met Kris, at a hippy ashram somewhere on the outskirts of Kathmandu in the late 1960s: "After we had eaten dinner, the poet Kristof walked across to the record player and switched it off. He returned to his place in the circle. There was a hush, a stillness, a sense of expectancy. Kristof announced that he was going to read a 'love poem', which he had just finished writing. Everyone looked up smiling when Kristof finished; he was assuredly one of their verbal magicians. It was a strange place, this salamandrine Ashram of glassy eyes staring from fiery lakes beside the sound of music through my leafy dreams . . ." Hollingshead and Kristof later jointly edited an Anglo-Nepalese poetry journal called Flow. But after that, nothing; and Vanessa Hollingshead, Michael's daughter now working a stand-up comedienne in New York City, could add no more news when contacted. Any additional info would be welcome.

Reply
barbara norden
28/4/2014 15:54:38

Well. Penny contacted me and I contacted Tony, but it seems unlikely that we can get hold of the others.

I live in Birmingham. I retired a year ago,, having worked on and off in mental health and got a social work qualification, which (fortunately) did not lead to a job in social work.

My last real anarchist connection was in the 80s when I worked at Birmingham Peace Centre, an anarcho-pacifist bookshop.

The cover designer was, indeed, by Humphrey. I still think it's pretty impressive. What also astonishes me is that the whole thing can actually be read -- something that can't be said of all the publications that came out around that time.

I am wondering whether other publications are of interest.

Reply
Bob Weinberg
31/10/2014 13:13:31

To: Barbara Norden in Birmingham
Barbara, Are you the daughter of Heinz Norden and Claire Harper?
Best wishes, Bob Weinberg, Brookline, Massachusetts

Reply
Barbara Norden
5/11/2014 15:11:19

Hello Bob!
Yes I am the very same. Quite astonished to hear from someone who has a connection to my family from so long ago....what is the connection?

Bob weinberg
5/11/2014 18:28:44

Dear Barbara, I guess I tracked you down via the web. I've spent much of the past five decades trying to track down what happened to members of our extended kindred during the Second War and to their descendants. I've learned much but there are bits and pieces that I'd love to ask you about. (In real life I'm a cancer research at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) I'm wondering whether there is a way by which we could communicate by email, as this blog-based communication seems to be a bit balky/dodgy. I'd be most grateful to hear from once again via email. Bob Weinberg weinberg@wi.mit.edu

Jacob Bard-Rosenberg link
22/12/2017 13:19:19

Hi Barbara,

Maybe this message is so long after the event that it won't get to you. I also just came across your name on a lovely little flyer called "A Women's Adventure Playground". I'm guessing from the first years of the 1970s. No details on who it was destributed by (although in the box of materials was a couple of other Notting Hill stuff, including a flyer for a playworkers strike at Notting Hill Adventure Playground for someone called Francis Prideaux who was made redundant (he seems to be a Corbynite now!) These sorts of flyers come to me in strange ways - I run an archive called MayDay Rooms where we archive the histories of social movements/radical politics/experimental culture - and this flyer came to us in a whole box of womens movement things that had previously been at the Workers Film Association in Manchester (which is now closed). So they came back to London. I was asking a friend who was involved in the Mangrove (we're archiving some of their materials at the moment) and they said that if the address you gave was the one they were thinking of on Blenheim Crescent it had been an anarchist squat for a while. Although she said it was so long ago she couldn't quite remember. Anyway, I just thought I'd tell you I thought it was a lovely little text!

Reply
Andy Roberts
11/9/2014 13:11:53

Kristof was certainly alive as of February 2014 when I last heard from him. I interviewed him in October 2013, primarily about his time with Hollingshead, in Nepal and in the commune on the Isle of Cumbrae etc. Kristof hasn't returned any of my emails or phone calls since and I know he was very ill with a heart condition. If you want any further specific info please email me and I'll see if there is anything in the interview of relevance. I am currently writing Michael Hollingshead's biography and there will be quite a bit about Kristof in there. I also have several issues of Flow. Kristof was very active in the free festival movement from the mid 70s onwards.

Reply
Tony Allan
11/9/2014 15:05:06

I'd be very grateful for any information about Kris's whereabouts. We were good friends back in the 1960s, so we've got almost half a century's news to catch up on . . .

Reply
Kami Kanetsuka
15/9/2014 00:55:04

I found this website also trying to trace Kristof. I lived in Kathmandu in the sixties up until 1971, where I knew Michael Hollingshead and Kristof. I was married and quite settled there and was around when Flow came out etc. I am now writing a memoir about that time. Several years ago I tried to find Michael and eventually found that he had died. I would love to communicate with Kristof if he could be found. I saw him once on a visit to London in I think 1975. I live on an island in British Columbia, Canada. Sometimes I feel like I am doing detective work on the computer and I love it when some clues appear. Please if you know of others who lived in Kathmandu during the time from 1965 to 1971, I would be interested in hearing from them.
Thanks.

Tony Allan
15/9/2014 05:46:14

Good to hear from you, Kami. I'd be glad to share news of Kristof. Anyone similarly interested can contact me on tonyallan777@btinternet.com .

Reply
Barbara Norden
15/9/2014 10:19:19

Hi, I just accidentally unsubscribed to this, thinking I was clicking to view a comment...please resubscribe me!!

Reply
Andy Roberts
21/10/2014 11:33:20

Hi,
I've now spoken to Kristof and told him you are trying to get in touch with him. Assuming he agrees I will forward your email addresses to him.
andy

Reply
Tony Allan
23/10/2014 09:46:00

Thanks, Andy. It would be great to re-establish contact.

Kami Kanetsuka
22/10/2014 10:23:01

Thank you Andy Roberts. I'm plodding along with a memoir and wondering who from the glorious Kathmandu days of the mid sixties are still around.

Reply
Andrew Whitehead
22/12/2017 14:37:03

I'm really intrigued to know whether you all got in touch, perhaps even met up ... do let me know!

Reply
Tony Allan
22/12/2017 17:09:29

Yes, the blog mention proved very productive. On the strength of it, I contacted Pete Whewell, whom I hadn't seen or heard from in almost 50 years, and ended up visiting him and his wife Liz in Newcastle. Pete had made a career as a consultant psychotherapist at a Newcastle hospital, where he played a significant part in bringing the problem of childhood sexual abuse to public attention. Sadly he was gravely ill at the time (despite a very active life of fell-walking and running), and died a few months later.
The nearest thing to an Underground legacy that I'm aware of is a casual lunchtime drinking group that meets up every couple of months in various Oxford pubs, currently the Jericho Tavern. A staple of the group is David Kirke (at Oxford known as Dave Potter), who got involved with the magazine in its second issue, and went on to found the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club and to invent bungee jumping, as well as to make the first powered hang-glider flight across the English Channel. Other regulars include David Priestman, a neurogeneticist, Carolyn Wilde, a Wittgenstein expert, Vanessa Baird, co-editor of New Internationalist, and 'Legs' Larry Smith, formerly the drummer with the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band. None of these last had any contact with Underground, but I like to think that in the meetings something of the old anarchistic spirit lives on. if anyone's interested in joining us for a future meeting, please contact me through the blog.

Reply



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