Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood by Maureen Stanton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bourgeois Boomer Blues

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Annus Mirabilis
Philip Larkin, 1967

Larkin was right. Something happened to culture, and not just in Britain, in the 1960’s. “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles' first LP” is a reasonable poetic approximation of the timing. And it wasn’t just attitudes towards sex and the other things that sociologists, as well as poets, think about that changed. There was a social revolution within the family itself that redefined what it meant to its members and how it worked. For many years I thought these changes were peculiar to my family and were too idiosyncratic (and embarrassing) to consider seriously. Stanton’s memoir provides some stunning insights which prod not just my memory but my judgment about the generality of my own experiences.

Like Stanton, I was brought up in a large American Catholic family (seven children in hers, six in mine). Both our sets of parents had escaped from respectable but decided urban poverty to relative suburban luxury (hers outside Boston, mine outside New York City). We even both had substantial prisons housed nearby (hers state, mine county). Stanton’s descriptions of the trivial routines and rituals of this new middle-middle class life must be familiar to most members of my generational cohort - weekly church attendance, involvement in the local community events and celebrations, the ‘unchallenging’ (read: non-existent) cultural scene, and the typical entertainments of insipid network television, drive-in movies, backyard pools, and the beach. In short, a caricature of itself as a life of the ‘long 1950’s.’

Where we differ is that I was the eldest in my family while Stanton was a middle child of a slightly younger family. This is significant because, as we both experienced, the social changes which took place occurred within this generation not between this generation and its parents. The parents were as much involved in these changes as their children. Every year counts. The older siblings ended up as the adults their parents might have been if they had maintained a sort of cultural continuity. The parents themselves simply stopped behaving and believing as they had been. And the younger siblings made what have come to be called unusual ‘life style choices.’ There was less a generation gap than a fusion (or confusion perhaps) of generations.*

Stanton describes this process of familial reformulation (or dissolution if you prefer) from the perspective of the middle of the pack; I experienced it from the vanguard. But the pieces fit like parts of a jigsaw puzzle. There is a before and after which are as definite as Larkin’s description. Before was a family system of clear patriarchal hierarchy, the discipline of which was maintained by the threat of physical violence which was administered by the resident male but directed by the female. Relations among family members were established competitively but were always subservient to the relationships among the parents and other adults. The community of adults was supreme.

This implicit structure established a sort of extreme familial vulnerability to the community. It kept the family in check and prevented it from the extremes to which it was tempted. One’s family was not just one’s own business. How one’s children acted and how parents acted in response to criticism of their children’s actions was of paramount importance. One way in which this was signalled to the community at large was church attendance, the equivalent perhaps of the Dutch Calvinist tradition of keeping one’s curtains open in the evening. Trivial misdemeanours, much less authentic crimes were scandals sufficient to rouse community attention and righteous comment. So they rarely occurred.

For good or ill, this was the middle class Paradise I left to go to university in 1965. From conversations with my next younger brother who started university two years later, it appears that his experience is similar, although strains were even then beginning to appear in the fabric of suburban existence. And progressively each of my siblings seems to have inhabited an increasingly strange universe. By the time I finished university in 1969, no one in the family any longer attended church services; my mother was working; my father was still in the picture but almost never at home during waking hours; one sister was living in a tree house somewhere in the mid-West; the other was involved with an abusive partner; one brother was about to drop out of high school; and another was on the verge of being wanted by police in three states for armed robbery. All the younger ones were involved to some extent with drugs.

Clearly there are any number of sociological explanations for such a dramatic transformation. Quite apart from the psychological imbalances that were undoubtedly present (I always knew all the rest were crazy), there were enormous social upheavals underway - the profound changes in the Catholic Church, the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, economic recession... and oh yes the contraceptive pill. But none of these can account for the speed and depth of transformation I observed. Whatever was the root cause of the family reshuffle was internally generated not externally created. And although it was self-generated, it was simultaneously self-generated by other similar families in similar places.

It is my hypothesis that the family succumbed not to the unexpected changes that arrived with the 1960’s but to the very conscious construction of the environment of the past-WWII suburb which was meant to foster it. These places were communities only in the sense that there were numbers of people living in some proximity to each other. Their participation with each other in joint projects and services was expected to establish something like a Jeffersonian self-regulating society of mutual regard. And this seemed to occur, but for a very short time only. Without ‘natural’ or historical ties, this sort of artificial neighbourliness is simply tedious, especially when more and more urgent headlines draw attention way from the vague dream of independence within a caring community.

So my guess is that it is not the deterioration of family that caused the collapse that Stanton and I experienced. It is is the absence of authentic community on which the family depends for its existence that is the driving force, or rather the driving vacuum, to which the family relationships succumbed. The centerless, soulless, cultureless collections of economically and racially homogenous family groups which were really only concerned with their own health and welfare are not sustainable as communities and induce an adaptation in the participating families that appear less than functional.

And here is a thought about the implication of that adaptation: The right-wing political reaction that has been growing in America for decades and that has culminated first in the Tea Party and then in Trumpism is primarily a reflection of this planned destruction of community through these faux suburban expanses. These are inhabited by disappointed people. The world has not worked out as planned. They want the rewards, the family, the community, the world they had hoped and planned for. They feel cheated. The fact that they continue, fifty years on, to build and inhabit the same kind of maladaptive, idealised but unsustainable, communities is not something they really want to consider.

*I am reminded of the wonderful British comedy series (and film), Absolutely Fabulous with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley which features just this kind of generational confusion.

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