INTRODUCTION
On 18 January 1961, nineteen-year-old John Hoyland began his diary for the year by reminding himself of two key ideas he had rediscovered in rereading an essay written during his last year at Reading's independent Quaker school, Leighton Park. The essay addressed his hopes for life after school, and he copied onto the opening page of the new diary two extracts to guide his conduct in the year ahead. The first was his desire to learn “to reconcile the great with the small, the uncommon with the common.” The second was to remember that “all kinds of things might happen.”Footnote 1 His sense of anticipation surrounding the new decade was signaled in his opening sentence, “Well … I feel like coughing nervously and adjusting my tie.” He attached meaning to the numeric end of his teenage years and, as if to enforce the weight of expectation, had purchased a significantly larger diary than “the cosy little [Letts] diaries” he had hitherto kept. Vowing to recapture his adolescent “gusto” and realize the decade's possibilities, he determined to focus “on the vast tasks ahead”—work he foresaw to transform himself and society. This meant “no more lazy afternoons in the Union lounge, hoping that Pam will suddenly fall out of love with Martin & into love with me.” He had “to do things.”Footnote 2 Barely two afternoons later, though, his failure to impress Pam with deep conversation left him grappling with feelings of “tiredness and vagueness.” Sexual desire overwhelmed ambitions for fulfilled adult living, as he reflected despondently: “I need sex badly, my body, my mind, all of me needs it. … It's like being blind, perhaps, or paralysed.”Footnote 3
In 1961 Hoyland was a second-year undergraduate at London's University College reading English Literature and devoting much of his time to activity in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He was chairman of the college's CND society and coeditor of the youth CND newspaper, Youth Against the Bomb; in between lectures and on most weekends he attended organizing meetings, wrote and distributed leaflets and newspaper articles, and traveled up and down the country speaking at public meetings. His was an intensely political world. Like several other young CND members, Hoyland came from a family with a history of Communist Party activism and had joined the party.Footnote 4 His stepfather, Jack Sutherland, worked for the Daily Worker; in the family's Highgate home in north London, everyday domestic patterns went hand in hand with debates, organizing, and political meetings. In 1961, the escalating Cold War made the threat of the bomb and the condition of the British Left pressing concerns for men and women in Hoyland's circles. The Communist Party of Great Britain had begun to participate in the CND from 1959 to 1960, but by the autumn of 1960 the progressive left coalition that had been forged around the CND was breaking up. The New Left was increasingly fraught with practical and theoretical conflicts that would see its disintegration two years later.Footnote 5 One might expect to see such issues littering the pages of Hoyland's diary. Yet interior, rather than exterior, life preoccupied his young adult world. The question of how to live was about how and what to be, and for Hoyland the infinite possibilities he sensed in the world made this an oftentimes confusing and troublesome question that plagued his every day.
This article explores Hoyland's 1961 diary to reflect on the ways in which one lower-middle-class radical activist engaged with postwar social, cultural, and political scripts to shape himself as a young man. Hoyland was a self-reflexive subject in a period that historians agree marked a watershed for the making of the truly modern self, but he experienced himself as fragmented. Footnote 6 His diary reflects a series of conflicts between duty and desire; action, intellect, and feeling; and self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. He also felt a division between his public and private personas. Spanning nine months, from January to September 1961, Hoyland's often lengthy diary entries were written to provide a conscious record of experience for scrutinizing and rereading. In the late 1950s New Left intellectuals endowed the concepts of experience and the everyday with political meaning as new sites for agency and socialist transformation. Expanding conventional meanings of “the political,” they placed emphasis upon ordinary people organizing around issues of immediate experience beyond the point of production to realize new ways of living and relating. Hoyland ascribed these terms with individual emotional weight and used them to inform his efforts of personal maturation. Hyperconscious of his internal life, he used his diary to chart his feelings and monitor his emotional condition in relation to his and others' behavior, activities, places, and narratives. This was an act of self-deliberation for the purpose of self-improvement.
The value of Hoyland's diary as a historical, unedited source of the young male self is that it offers unique insight into the hidden thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a formative moment of political, personal, and social change. The diary shows a young male subjectivity in the process of careful construction.Footnote 7 The rigor with which Hoyland recorded his sense of self reveals that new modern political, cultural, and social scripts existed in sometimes uneasy dialogue with images and fantasies from the past. The dilemma that propelled his personal narrative was the question of what it meant to be a good man and how to reconcile this pursuit of goodness with sexual and emotional fulfillment. Like many other postwar men and women, Hoyland saw the experience of love as vital to the realization of authentic selfhood.Footnote 8 More unusually, he understood his capacity for shaping political and social change as dependent on winning “some marvellous girl's heart,” and on realizing himself as an ordinary, loving subject.Footnote 9 The task of social, emotional, and sexual maturation was integral to his self-making as a “true Socialist” as he conceived it.Footnote 10 Being an honest, emotionally open and respectful male partner was analogous to being an engaged world citizen. But on the edges of north London's early sixties beatnik scene, Hoyland's personal and political life existed in tension. Opportunities to capitalize on meetings with the opposite sex posed a moral dilemma about whether to sacrifice potential love and mutual respect to sexual thrills with beatnik girls.
Hoyland's struggle of the male self may be partly understood against the postwar transition of gendered social and emotional codes. Historians are in general agreement that the mid twentieth century saw the transition of gender roles and relations, in which men and women began to work out “new ways of living within a historically-distinct family framework.”Footnote 11 In this period men were presented with images of a “family-oriented” masculinity that stressed involved fatherhood and a happy home life in ways that were compatible with the preservation of male authority as culturally constructed for the British heteronormative, white male subject.Footnote 12 Yet, alongside the ideal of the involved family man, postwar culture continued to provide a psychic space that accommodated an imaginative male “flight from domesticity.”Footnote 13 This transition occurred as part of a wider shift in emotional culture from restraint to self-expression, which began to be observed across the full spectrum of political and cultural male life, from high politics to youth culture.Footnote 14 However, little is understood about what these shifting discourses meant for individual young men trying to compose themselves as social, emotional, and sexual subjects at this historical moment in time. Hoyland's narrative indicates the difficulty of negotiating cultural images and lived experiences of masculinity when it came to achieving a coherent sense of self or subjective composure. What we know about socialist culture in the 1950s—the resurgence of moral and ethical concern in response to affluent society—suggests that the fractures he experienced in his identity, and the language he used to account for himself, derived from the specific historical landscape that he inhabited as a member of a new radical generation on the Left, shaped in a particular time, and place, and by particular relationships.
In the early 1960s, Hoyland belonged to a minority of young men and women who came to political consciousness in a left world on the point of transition, part of the Western European postwar generation that created a new democratic Left.Footnote 15 Championing the struggles of oppressed social groups, theirs was a politics predicated on a distinctly modern sense of selfhood. Underlying all these struggles from CND to the tenants' and race campaigns to the anti–Vietnam War movement and the new politics of Women's Liberation, underlying all these struggles was the conviction that the free human agent exercised individual choice, pursued individual desire, and lived out authentically felt relationships. This New Left politics called for the realization not only of the dignity and basic material entitlement of the modern laboring self, but for postmaterialist values of self-expression, self-fulfillment, and self-development that emerged as new modes of selfhood from the midcentury onwards. For seasoned young activists like Hoyland, this presented difficulties in negotiating emotional attachments to older political cultures and identities that emphasized conformist thinking and ways of being. It meant trying to reconcile his attraction to the hedonistic commercial youth culture that privileged aesthetics, pleasure, and the self with a socialist ethic that elicited committed service from its followers and a moral code for everyday living.Footnote 16 Hoyland's busy political and social life saw him moving freely across a variety of sites, traversing class and cultural boundaries as part of the more liberal social and sexual mixing that defined early sixties metropolitan youth experience. On any given day he traveled from his comfortable lower-middle-class home, across north London's suburban streets, visiting East End Methodist halls, underworld streets and pubs, squalid bedsits and mock-Tudor country houses in towns on the capital's edge. In a climate where meanings about legitimate male emotional expression were far from uniform, this spectrum of cultures and classes presented Hoyland with a confusing array of models for selfhood.
Hoyland's diary reveals these different areas of Hoyland's life and identity and how he experienced himself at home, on CND marches, in political meetings, and in the youth spaces he inhabited with his male and female peers. Further, the private act of self-writing informed Hoyland's self-making: his diary was intended to aid his social and political agency, and it was a confessional space to voice feelings, sensations, and opinions that were difficult to tell, and to compose and perform selves and relationships he wished to realize. Simultaneously a site of fantasy and reality and a tool for psychic self-composure, for Hoyland the diary became a way of managing the uneasy business of becoming a modern dissident man.
HOYLAND THE SOCIALIST
Many of the inner tensions that Hoyland recorded in his diary resulted from the duality of his adolescent world. In 1961 he felt himself split between international Cold War politics and the ethic of socialism and the everyday concerns of the postwar teenager. The idealistic imprint of his male forebears propelled Hoyland's entry into the Communist Party and the nuclear disarmament movement.Footnote 17 His parents' cross-class marriage had been framed by life within the party. A London shop assistant and Young Communist League member, his mother had met his father in the late 1930s at a Labour League of Youth summer camp. Hoyland's father, Denys Hoyland, joined the Communist Party as an undergraduate at Oxford. He was killed fighting in Italy in September 1944, when Hoyland was three years old, leaving his son with only impressionistic memories of a man who sent letters and drawings from the front.Footnote 18 However, his mother's grief heightened Hoyland's sense of loss, a loss that haunted Hoyland's adolescent thoughts and colored his relationships to place, people, and class. On 17 May he reflected, “it's strange knowing nothing of your father. I found myself quite simply wishing he was still alive.”Footnote 19 Following her husband's death, Hoyland's mother raised Hoyland and his younger brother in Highgate and remained active in her local Communist branch. Hoyland grew up surrounded by party members, including the Holloway bus men his mother recruited. No doubt his mother and stepfather's decision to stay in the party after 1956 following the Soviet occupation of Budapest and Khrushchev's revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party influenced Hoyland's own decision to join when many were leaving. His choice, however, was also informed by the romantic memory of his Communist father; Hoyland's diary shows his socialist commitment to the common good was shaped as much by desire to live up to the idealized masculinity his father represented as it was by belief.
Carolyn Steedman has argued that narrative is an “interpretative device” that acknowledges and expresses the disjuncture between social and psychic life, such as the possible and the impossible, the wished for and the feared.Footnote 20 Building upon this framework, but influenced by Kleinian theory, Graham Dawson has highlighted the role of narrative fantasies as “a screen through which the social world and social relations are experienced.”Footnote 21 Real-life events and experiences can become interwoven with the narrator's fantasies in which imaginary scenarios or scenes “represent a range of possible selves situated in the social world.”Footnote 22 Hoyland's diary reveals the range of masculine constructs within the Left sites he moved across. His absent father was akin to what Klein has described as an internal fantasy figure, or “imago,” against which he scrutinized and measured himself as a socialist man. In late February, for example, arranging “a CND weekend of activity” with comrades from around Stepney and Cable Street, the young men's shared stories of “Fascists & the 30's” evoked a more intimate history of his father's 1936 battles with Moseley's Black Shirts and his parents' courtship.Footnote 23 Seeking solace in the East End Streets, Hoyland felt his political agency revived; in this “grimy, exciting part of the world,” he saw in the working class the idealized possibilities and authenticity that had traditionally marked the socialist imagination.Footnote 24 Indeed, throughout the diary we can hear echoes of that loyal 1940s British Communist Raphael Samuel memorialized in The Lost World of Communism.Footnote 25 The notions of human experience as a great force for social progress, and the proletarian virtues of discipline, solidarity, and selflessness kept Hoyland active during bouts of “tiredness and worry.”Footnote 26 The retrospective climate of the Left supported Hoyland's introjections into past socialist landscapes. Lawrence Black has noted how in the 1950s the “ghosts of the past were an everyday presence”; even the New Left shared the 1930s “leitmotiv in socialist thought.”Footnote 27
Yet unlike the young Ralph Samuel, Hoyland was not a “true believer.”Footnote 28 He wished to connect to his parents' Communism but he felt alienated from members' conformist thinking and the monolithic official culture that condemned rock ‘n’ roll as a “depraved offshoot” of authentic popular music, frowned upon drinking and smoking, and decried the lifestyle fetishism of fifties teenagers.Footnote 29 These pastimes were important to Hoyland and many of his younger New Left cohort and the wider generation; he liked “good clothes,” alcohol, and cigarettes because they made him look and feel “in with other young people,” and “sexy.” He was conscious of how he used them—”In tune with many of my generation I make a religion of that first cigarette in the morning”—to fashion a generational identity that asserted youth's “independence” from the past and disguised insecurities that came from the affluent society—“the old keeping-up-with-the-Joneses.”Footnote 30 Although sometimes uncomfortable with this “decadent” identity, his beatnik world felt at odds with the discipline of party bureaucracy that insisted on hierarchy, regulation, and control over members. In a world where growing cultural industries allowed young people to fashion their own environments and identities, CND's direct action, parties, and possibilities for sexual adventure strengthened young members' taste for an alternative politics that favored networks and movements over party meetings.Footnote 31 Certainly Hoyland never expressed the commitment to the Communist Party that he made to CND; he only twice recorded attending party meetings, noting on 24 March that “[i]t's all so surreptitious and apart, like a secret religion. … The funny serious way they analyse everything, and work out the correct line.”Footnote 32
In 1961 this “feeling of separateness” from the older Communist generation comprised one dimension of the fragmentation Hoyland felt as a political subject.Footnote 33 Relationships between the old and new left generations were more nuanced than sociologists and historians have acknowledged.Footnote 34 For young activists like Hoyland, emotional loyalties and personal relationships cut across ways of seeing and being to complicate the process of self-composure on the Left.Footnote 35 For Hoyland, the problem was partly a disjuncture between intellectual and emotional life and between reading and feeling. The difficulty was how to incorporate a rational intellectual reading of Marxism with his subjective emotional perspective. On 21 April, he explained that “[a]t the moment nearly all the Marxist literature I read comes as a burst of light to me tho’ I often dislike the way it is said. … Like Brecht's hero I'm worried that Marxism has the answer to everything.”Footnote 36 It was also a matter of feeling torn between the service older socialist members displayed and his strong identification with the pleasure-seeking antics of “the beat generation.”Footnote 37
HOYLAND THE CND ACTIVIST
Hoyland's attraction to CND, as with many young members, came from its possibilities for combining moral responsibility towards humanity with the pleasures of early sixties youth culture.Footnote 38 Unlike the Communist Party, the CND gave Hoyland a space in which to claim a different kind of belonging as a postwar youngster asserting a distinctive sense of self-belief and entitlement, the psychological security of social citizenship rights that 1940s welfare and educational policies conferred upon his generation.Footnote 39 Yet Hoyland's heightened sense of generational identity also spoke of a collectivity that the youthful bomb culture fostered, and was particularly associated with the anarchist, “do-it-yourself” politics of the Committee of 100.Footnote 40 He and his comrades were conscious of themselves as a distinctive cohort of postwar youngsters whose tireless campaigning for nuclear disarmament set them “apart from the rest” of their contemporaries.Footnote 41 They shared the profound sense of moral conscience the bomb aroused in them as postwar citizens. As the “crowding obscurity” in a “dark and tragic century,” the bomb haunted Hoyland, who considered it “the most hideous challenge to mankind's conscience and self-respect.” In these humanitarian terms he was in no doubt of the “importance” and “necessity” of his efforts.Footnote 42 Yet the motivation to invest himself in the CND was also more personal. Up to the end of the 1950s his paternal grandfather, John S. Hoyland, had been chairman of the Friends Peace Committee, speaking at meetings and demonstrations up and down the country. As a boy, Hoyland had regularly stayed at his grandfather's Birmingham home; his pacifism was an influential force behind Hoyland's involvement in CND from 1959.Footnote 43
For Hoyland, CND opened up political and cultural spaces in which to pursue the model of socialist manhood his father and grandfather had embodied. In the late 1950s, the CND continued the engaged citizenship that had propelled many prewar and wartime middle-class left progressives.Footnote 44 CND rhetoric championed traditional British values of respectability, moderation, and moral virtue. Its leaders and grassroots supporters enacted a way of being as good social citizens that reinforced the messages of honesty, decency, and hard work for the common good that were a legacy of the “People's War” Hoyland would have heard about in childhood and in his Quaker public school and dissident family home.Footnote 45 His diary reveals that during his social and emotional transition into adulthood, the CND guided his conduct as a good man in a manner that anticipated moral improvement. He endowed the CND with personal as well as political importance; it was, a “testing ground” for the self.Footnote 46 Dialogue with his diary shows that CND became a site for fantasy, desire, and self-performance, a place in which to imagine and live out the future self he wished to inhabit. Hoyland was a committed activist and narrated himself using socialist moral language. Representing himself striving towards duty and renouncing pleasure for the greater good, he implicitly measured himself in that narrative process. Leading male members, old and young, provided a mirror against which to measure himself as a good activist, citizen, and private adult man. On the weekend of the Aldermaston March, he recorded the anxiety he felt to “prove” and “justify” himself when CND's chief marshal, Ted Hilley, trusted Hoyland to act as his deputy for the day. Hilley inspired in him an earnest and self-disciplined model of masculinity that echoed the photograph Hoyland held of his Quaker grandfather on the speaker's platform at Trafalgar Square.Footnote 47 Recording his response to Hilley's instructions, he noted, “I … like working, providing I feel I'm fully in control & achieving something.”Footnote 48 This pursuit of moral goodness was a constant thread of Hoyland's writing: responsibility, hard work, self-discipline, honesty, self-sacrifice, and kindness were the unifying traits he aspired to live out in every aspect of his life.
In 1950s Britain, these ethics were at large across the political and social spectrum. Affluence prompted a revival of moral and ethical discourse, especially on the Left; socialists were concerned about how the masses were living in the expanding wake of American mass culture, rising purchasing power, and consumer choice.Footnote 49 But anxiety about the destabilizing impact that the Second World War had wrought on marital fidelity, gendered roles, and “normal” family life also resonated more widely in the conservative moral narratives that promoted traditional gender roles that oriented women around the home.Footnote 50 Feminists and historians have noted that prewar conservative Christian discourse continued to provide instruction on how to be a “good woman” by upholding the values of respectability, self-sacrifice, and service.Footnote 51 Girls growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s have recalled the challenges of negotiating this narrative in efforts to move away from the model of womanhood their mothers and teachers embodied. Yet little is known about how young sixties men were reading narratives of moral goodness in relation to masculinity, particularly at the level of the interiority of selfhood, and how this was shaped by class, culture, and place. For Hoyland, we can see how, in the context of the CND, he negotiated notions of moral goodness to inform his individual project of selfhood. As with other areas of his life, he scrutinized his performance as an activist to create a permanent record of self-development he could see over time. His diary shows that he often reread old entries with a view to tracking change and generating self-knowledge. On 2 April he noted,
An important thing has emerged from this reading of the diary. The fluctuations in my moods are extreme—but I think I detect a definite pattern in them. My periods of unhappiness are usually accompanied by laziness and abstracted thought. … Then I relax, remember ordinary things … and apply myself to a number of different jobs. I must look into this more closely, & see if I can't draw some fairly definite conclusions.Footnote 52
In this entry we see Hoyland using his diary to detect patterns in his depressive moods and resolve to immerse himself in ordinary, everyday activities as the best way to ward off unhappiness. In this respect, CND offered Hoyland possibilities for self-growth as a site for ordinariness. Jodie Burkett has highlighted the tropes of “ordinary” British citizens “lauded” in CND's newspaper Sanity, “the hard-working Britons, willing to sacrifice bodily comfort, who could be counted on for a hard slog.”Footnote 53 During 1961, there were moments when Hoyland clearly identified self-transformation in process, and drew upon this CND rhetoric to narrate himself as a dedicated, self-sacrificing citizen. Over the Aldermaston weekend, his role as deputy chief marshal enabled him to overcome his insecurity and feel a sense of self-development. Rallying the wet, tired marchers with cheerful forbearance, he performed the stoic British citizenship that informed the CND's collective narrative and felt affirmed by his ability to live up to his responsibilities:
So I rushed up & down the march on motor-bikes, with my loud-hailer slung against my side, & I worked myself to death, & found a fantastic source of energy in myself. … I was helpful & self-sacrificing. … The extraordinary thing was I changed completely & cracked jokes through the loud-hailer & got people to do things without resentment & was liked. All this came as a surprise to me. I loved it. And when the evening came I was exhausted & entirely happy.Footnote 54
Hoyland's above entry shows how, in the context of the CND, the postwar ethics of self-service and self-sacrifice took on specific moral and political meaning. But the entry also points to the gendered subtext these ethics held for Hoyland. In midcentury Britain, the figure of the diligent worker remained central to cultural narratives of desirable masculinity that, although played out differently according to class, region, and occupation, venerated the hard-working male provider and the skilled worker respected in his field.Footnote 55 In this entry Hoyland links his ability to work “himself to death” with the respect he earns from fellow marchers and with the self-development, maturity and self-actualization he feels at the end of his day of labor. What might be inferred within this passage is the sense of adult masculinity Hoyland achieves through the identity of the skilled, committed worker that his leadership role afforded him. Thus, his diary shows that when absorbed in the responsibilities of organizing and living out CND's moral example, he experienced the CND as a landscape for individual as well as collective agency. On “good” days CND activity had the capacity to make him feel “accomplished … good & involved & part of the process of mankind,” inducing a sense of “satisfaction, and an even greater & more exhilarating feeling of potential.”Footnote 56 The diary enabled Hoyland to achieve the subjectivity of the “good” male citizen because of the way in which “the act of writing created an “enduring account of reality” that confirmed him living out this socially desirable identity.Footnote 57
Yet the CND also contributed to Hoyland's psychological struggle of the self. He held a “love-hate relationship” with CND and complained of it “destroying my soul.”Footnote 58 The pressures of trying to maintain a selfless commitment could be wearing when, however hard he strove against it, he liked being a carefree, young man. In early February, faced with “a helluva lot of organising” in the run up to Aldermaston, Hoyland cancelled a much-anticipated weekend trip to Paris with three male friends. He was particularly disappointed because he had hoped “to indulge the body thing”Footnote 59 with Parisian girls, and he vented his frustration against the CND: “I felt as miserable as hell … at the discipline it imposes on you, & the way it conflicts with your enjoyment.”Footnote 60 This complaint was immediately followed by guilt-induced admonishment, but the weight of duty prevailed: “Of course it is a matter of discipline, and you can organise your life so that all these things—politics, writing, people—fit in.”Footnote 61 The account captured an unfolding inner conflict between the dutiful socialist and hedonistic youth. It showed Hoyland “miserable,” “thoroughly worried & worn out” by the “trapped feeling,” tied to the CND, and prisoner to his own conscience.Footnote 62
The discourse of the CND conflicted with Hoyland's emotional needs as a sensitive, introspective young man. On several occasions guilt over diverting attention away from the cause compounded his anxiety that he was “too self-centred.”Footnote 63 Guilt concerning his preoccupation with subjectivity was implicit in his call to Aldermaston to “lift the mantle of my self-consciousness from me.”Footnote 64 Endowing “experience” with moral agency, he urged it to “free me from my twisted consciousness—burn the dishonesty out of it.”Footnote 65 From the example of his socialist forebears to the revolutionary Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Hoyland took “true self-forgetfulness” to be the mark of the “true Socialist.”Footnote 66 On 6 May, reading “a book about Castro's Cuba,” Hoyland reflected on his life in relation to Castro, “a man concerned with building [socialism],” and felt “ashamed” for “piddling about with useless ideas and useless kicks.”Footnote 67
Hoyland's insecurity and guilt were not exclusive to his early activist life; these emotions continued to haunt his later adult diaries, even after he became involved in men's consciousness-raising groups. We might understand the 1961 diary entries as responses to national institutional cultures that promoted self-abnegation and emotional control.Footnote 68 In the context of the Left, Hoyland's guilt spoke of a political culture that privileged the body to enact social change, where doing equated being. For the committed, it was understood in the 1950s, “disregard for personal issues was characteristic of the socialist condition.”Footnote 69 This created tensions between political participation and interior life that troubled other socialists, too. In her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing explored the individual fragmentation that afflicted party member Anna Wulf. An artistic, sensitive, and independent young woman, Wulf felt unable to reconcile the demands of the party with the needs of her own internal life.Footnote 70 By the end of the 1960s, the younger generation of New Left activists were no closer to resolving this conflict. Instead, the women's revolt against an oppressive socialist culture that denied emotional life would addressed this issue. The “new politics” of Women's Liberation sought to legitimize subjective exploration and self-fulfillment—personal transformation had to prefigure social change.Footnote 71 And yet as feminists' memoirs and oral history interviews testify, the new politics was unable to protect some activists of either sex from the pain of feeling oneself torn between political commitment and individual psychological need.Footnote 72 Hoyland's was the enduring dilemma of the postmodern activist about how to achieve a unified life that allowed for both meaningful political commitment and internal fulfillment.
HOYLAND THE WRITER
Like Lessing's protagonist, Hoyland often experienced his identities as author and poet in conflict with his activist self. For him too, the diary served as a place in which to experiment with narrative and to locate a vocabulary for a new kind of being; he looked to it to resolve the sense of fragmentation that resulted from the conflict he experienced between his participation in the CND and the hedonistic desires of a young man.Footnote 73 Hoyland saw himself contributing to the renewed postwar world as a contemporary writer as much as an activist. He looked to his writing to anticipate the social and emotional resources to connect with humankind; only through narrative could he be fully in touch with his internal life and realize his agency: “We only understand the world when we are active in it. And we only have feelings about the world when we are emotionally involved in it.”Footnote 74 His diary thus functioned alongside other modern technologies of the youthful self that inspire introspection, such as popular music, magazines, cinema, and television.Footnote 75
Hoyland's need to write felt real and urgent; anything that hampered his ability to do so caused great anxiety. Fearful of losing the consciousness necessary for writing, he once dramatically declared, “if it did go, and I found I could no longer write, I'd kill myself”.Footnote 76 Finding sufficient time for writing was often problematic because of the hours Hoyland devoted to the CND. In the run up to Aldermaston, he worried about the dangers of becoming “a political animal” because of the way in which “consciousness can be blunted and dulled by too much political activity.”Footnote 77 The dilemma about how best to realize his agency was a question of how to achieve a balance between political, intellectual, and emotional life, insisting “on variety as essential to my being.”Footnote 78 The diary held an important purpose as a reflective space in which to attempt to resolve his conflict between politics and interiority, the social and the subjective.
The drama with which Hoyland expressed his need to write reflected the investment he made in writing as a psychological activity. Walter Ong has described writing as a narrative technology that “heightens consciousness.” Removed from the “real, existential present,” the narrator is protected from direct challenge to thoughts and feelings, in a context that opens “the psyche as never before.”Footnote 79 More than any other technology of the self, the diary offers the narrator a way of managing the “internal chaos” that comes from everyday experience of the external objective world. A private solitary space that James Hinton has likened to the “room behind the shop,” diary writing for Hoyland was about understanding the whirlwind of his insecurities, desires, and depressions as well as a way of coping with the guilt his very self-consciousness aroused.Footnote 80 The urgency that propelled his writing spoke of his struggle to balance the many selves he performed. He placed faith in written narrative to help bring about unity and coherence to an unstable internal life.
But Hoyland also used his diary to help realize his agency as a member of the postwar generation challenging social and moral norms. Sharing the optimistic faith many social commentators placed in postwar youth, he felt compelled to speak for them, to defend them from accusations of superficiality, and to understand them and himself more fully.Footnote 81 His sense of civic responsibility stretched over into his feelings for his contemporaries: “One has a strange sort of duty to one's generation, it's true.”Footnote 82 Hoyland empathized with and shared some of the nonconformist behaviors fifties and sixties teenagers displayed. His generational consciousness testified to the cultural visibility of postwar youth that informed youngsters' own sense of selfhood.Footnote 83 On 18 August, for example, he reflected on his “rather cynical & worldly-wise attitude” when he attracted “girls in a short time,” considering this “typical of a lot of young people who strive for a cloak of sophistication & independence because they are unsure of themselves.”Footnote 84 But his narrative also spoke to the continued weight that late-fifties social conservatism and moral debates bore upon him, as he saw successive days of drinking and smoking as “depraved” behavior. Implicit in Hoyland's use of the adjective “depraved” is his understanding of the moral condemnation middle-class reformers were making of the pleasure-seeking consumer lifestyle of working-class youth that postwar affluence had made possible.Footnote 85 The excessive drinking and smoking that were often associated with decadent youth culture were seen to be morally objectionable, not least because they challenged the model of the hard-working, self-serving citizen that was championed by socialists and conservative critics alike.Footnote 86 Hoyland was fascinated with his contemporaries, and with the sociological and psychological narratives surrounding them because they offered insights into his confused moral conduct and feelings.
Aware that teenagers' lifestyles were troubling adult commentators, on 4 February Hoyland declared his intention “to write a book about our generation.” Quoting Shakespeare, he would call it “‘Not poppy, nor Manadragora’” based on “the idea that our insecurity drives us to seek satisfaction in kicks, but that though this is necessary & rewarding, ultimately, it is a search, not an end, and our sleep remains troubled.”Footnote 87 He used his diary to experiment with literary form, anxious to locate the appropriate authorial voice to speak for his male contemporaries. In the style of late-fifties kitchen-sink authors such as Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne, John Braine, and Stan Barstow, Hoyland storied himself and his friends as anarchic, amoral heroes. Attentive to these authors' literary devices that made for the telling of a good story, his diary frequently recorded dialogue. He retold conversations—real and perhaps imaginary—between himself, comrades, and the humorous characters they met during their nightly metropolitan adventures:
Suddenly a door opened. A bespectacled face peered out, saw the three of us standing outside, and slammed the door “You're all bloody communists! Banging that door all through the night! Well I've got the police watching you! You bloody communists!” “Well I hope you go down the plug!”Footnote 88
In these accounts, we sense Hoyland writing not simply to himself, but to an imaginary literary audience who would one day read his novels and poems, an author with a social purpose—representing the experiences and dilemmas of the postwar nonconformist male generation—and showing that the “new way of life” they were “building” was “an improvement on the old.”Footnote 89
These were also stories written about the self for the self. Through these fictional young men, Hoyland sought to come to terms with his own troubled sense of “duality” that by the end of the first week in February had seen him smoke “marijuana on Wednesday night,” get “drunk all Thursday,” do “CND all Friday,” and on Saturday play “happily with the baby [his sister] at home.” Although he considered such a lifestyle to reflect his broadmindedness and “interest in life,” he worried he might simply be mentally “unstable.”Footnote 90 Smoking marijuana for the first time induced particular guilt; the following morning he telephoned (anonymously) the police to report the man who had sold it to him. His moral conscience overrode his loyalty to his generation, and he reasoned that “[t]he temptation to dismiss the drug racket as ‘kicks' is ultimately wrong, because it's a filthy business—people making vast sums out of other people's degradation & slavery.”Footnote 91
We can only suggest what discourses Hoyland's puritan guilt evokes—that “puritan, pleasure hating strand of British socialism” Lessing referred to.Footnote 92 He only ever described how he experienced this guilt; he never named its causes. Any explanations he gave drew upon progressive sociological and psychological readings that emphasized young people's alienation from modern society. On 21 August, for example, he opined as “fatuous” the way in which the film Rebel without a Cause “cast blame on the shoulders of the parents.” For Hoyland, society with its restrictive philosophy of personal aggrandizement was to blame. Young people “sensed the dishonesty of it.” They were “confused,” “aimless,” “with no sense of participation,” and forced to “seek their own morality.”Footnote 93 Inflected in this narrative one can hear the antiestablishment tones of the angry young writers whose male protagonists rebel against the “double-faced society”Footnote 94 that denies them any “good, brave causes.”Footnote 95 Yet Hoyland was not angry or aimless; the CND and socialism gave him hope for creating a more loving, equal world: “We must understand how our century has changed the human heart, and then the heart must beat and breathe again, in tune with the new world.”Footnote 96 He was confused about his experiences of affluent society and the pleasure-seeking, youthful lifestyle it made possible, uneasy with his pursuit of “kicks” and uncertain about how to reconcile notions of goodness with his different experiences of self. He experienced this anxiety most acutely in his relationships with young women.
LOVE, SEX, AND SUBJECTIVITY
It was in his attitude towards the opposite sex where Hoyland came perhaps closest to the misogynist masculinity displayed by fifties working-class male heroes, though this was far from straightforward. Feminists have identified the mixture of fear and contempt with which New Left men responded to them as intelligent, socially, and sexually independent young women.Footnote 97 While recent emotional histories of midcentury masculinity have uncovered more nuanced representations of male identity, emotional expression, and subjectivity, relatively little is known about how young men like Hoyland saw and experienced young women or himself in relation to them.Footnote 98 Hoyland was undoubtedly troubled by his relationships with the beatnik girls in metropolitan subcultures. In common with most midcentury Britons, he believed that romantic love was critical to realize an authentic, fulfilled self. Convinced of its ability to elevate him as a good man, as he did the CND, he identified a loving relationship with a woman as part of moral improvement. His diary illustrates the influence of the CND on his understanding and experience of love; over the Aldermaston weekend it gave him a language for subjectivity when he met Kika, a female member he was eager to impress. “Full of doubt … not knowing what side of me it is she likes,” his role as deputy chief marshal provided a metaphor to articulate the kind of subjectivity he sought to achieve. His uplifting experience on the march inspired new understanding of love's agency: “I've always imagined Love was something you drift into & get elevated by. I think I'm beginning to see that part of the elevation consists in your disciplining & changing yourself.”Footnote 99 Within this framework Kika became for Hoyland “a sort of Chief Marshal … someone who places trust in you, & expects you to rise to the occasion accordingly, plus sacrifices & a change of the usual attitude.” Love became something to be worthy of, and Kika became someone “to make myself into something good” for. Expecting her, as an “intelligent girl,” to want a boyfriend with “intelligence and maturity,” he vowed to “change, accommodate, [and] do some giving as well as receiving.”Footnote 100 This expectation probably reflected Hoyland's experiences of campaigning, studying, and socializing with the educated middle-class girls in his circles; these comradely relationships informed his views of equality between the sexes.Footnote 101
Hoyland's faith in love to bring “out the good in me” evoked midcentury discourses of human equality, mutuality, and the Christian ethic, which anticipated the kind of companionate relationship he outlined above. However, his narratives of love were infused uncomfortably with sex. For Hoyland, true love and sexual desire often seemed incompatible, because of the way in which desire threatened to corrupt how he saw and related to girls as individual human agents; a shameful subtext informed his sexual subjectivity. On 4 February, he wrote, “The desire for the experience of the body-thing in me is so strong it is eclipsing the rest, the whole relationship … I feel I can't achieve any decent relationship with a girl until I've had this experience. Of course I should be able to control myself, concentrate on the other sides. But it's no good.”Footnote 102 In a society in which discussions about sexual morals focused overwhelmingly on premarital sexual activity and the dangerous tensions between love and sex, the conflict Hoyland recorded raises interesting questions about the kinds of social and moral codes young men encountered in the early 1960s and how they read themselves in relation to them.Footnote 103 At a time when social commentators charged young women with responsibility for guarding the moral status quo because of the sexual double standard, Hoyland's diary shows that this new left young man also grappled with the dilemma about how to control his emotions in the presence of the opposite sex; implicit was the way in which sexual desire threatened to destabilize his composure as a “good” socialist man.Footnote 104 His sexual narrative offers insights into the confused inner dialogue behind the misogynistic behavior Hoyland often exhibited as a nonconformist young man.
As the opening extract indicated, Hoyland experienced sexual desire as a burden that affected his entire physical and emotional state. He felt his “cross of virginity” as a dark corrupting force, “black across me, its shadow obscuring the light,” so that at times “I can't cope at all.”Footnote 105 “Always acutely conscious of girls,” journeys across the landscape were “blurred by lust.”Footnote 106 He was troubled by the way in which desire distorted how he saw and related to the thoughtful, intelligent girls he admired. In January Hoyland felt his moral honor tested when he became attracted to Pam, who was “all but engaged” to his best friend, Martin. He confessed that erotic thoughts of Pam had affected his conduct towards Blake, the girl he had taken to the party: “Pam struck me as unbearably beautiful. I got more and more drunk, & was foul to Blake, disowning her completely, in favour of idolising Pam at a distance.”Footnote 107
On 4 February Hoyland recorded extensive reflections on passages from a pamphlet by the progressive teacher and sex-education writer Kenneth C. Barnes, 15+ Facts of Life: Family Doctor Booklet. Barnes's popular 1958 text He and She addressed the “unhappy nature of the sexual adventures of boys” he heard about from various universities and colleges.Footnote 108 In February 1961, this second pamphlet was issued free with the medical journal Family Doctor, with an endorsement by its editor of the importance of explaining “openly and fully” to adolescents the “meaning, mechanics and emotions of sex” to prepare them for its “understanding and enjoyment.”Footnote 109 Hoyland noted that his mother had given him the pamphlet and advised him to read it. In the early 1960s she was unusual in broaching what was for respectable wives and mothers an uncomfortable and little alluded to topic.Footnote 110 Her gesture seems indicative of a warm, close, and relatively open relationship between this lower-middle-class Communist mother and son. Hoyland obviously felt sufficiently comfortable to talk to his mother about some of Barnes's ideas, albeit “vaguely and rather embarrassed,” and was pleasantly surprised when she told him, “I don't mind you having sex before marriage. In fact I thoroughly approve of it.”Footnote 111 Her attitude testified to the sexual double standard that women continued to uphold throughout the decade, in which the value of virginity on marriage remained higher for women than for men.Footnote 112 This mother–son exchange seemed to validate his understanding about the permissiveness of premarital sexual experience. His response to her words was brief but suggestive: “Ah.”Footnote 113
Hoyland's reflections on Barnes's advice are noteworthy for what they reveal about how as an individual he negotiated midcentury moral discourses. It shows the inner dialogue of this new left man at pains to resolve the tension between sexual desire and moral conscience. That Hoyland was struck by Barnes's widely shared convictions on sex, love, and companionship—the “sex act at its best” was “an expression of a whole relationship”—was evident from the lengthy passages he copied out over four pages, with occasional sentences underlined.Footnote 114 Points that made him particularly uncomfortable were those that addressed boys' sexual urges and reminded them of the importance of being a respectful companion to a girl. Barnes cautioned boys: “A girl does not normally look forward with urgency to the sex act in the same way as the boy does. She wants to be cared for in a host of different ways. … She wants to be valued as a person.”Footnote 115 In theory, Hoyland agreed. He condemned what he referred to as “the ‘skirt’ attitude” he observed in some male friends, and described “the sort of sex that goes on at parties as short-sighted & a bit vicious.”Footnote 116 And yet his diary shows that when he was with young women, opportunities for sexual pleasure overrode his sensitivity to them as individuals. On holiday in Sestri, Italy, in August, Hoyland described rescuing Laura, “from an odious little man who was pestering her like a dog.” Yet he “felt easy at heart” as he took advantage of the naive affections of her younger friend, rationalizing to her the honesty and exclusiveness of his physical affection, and to himself reading her apparent acceptance of his explanation as a sign of consent and even happiness:
I told Josephine to go in with Laura, & then come out again in five minutes. She did, & we went down to the beach. We kissed & cuddled. … “You are still teaching me,” she said. It was her first time. The first time she'd been kissed by a boy. … When I held her breasts she was scared; so I told her it was only for her, & then she let me. She was timid & happy; it was good.
This kind of sexual narrative and the misogynistic language with which he reduced girls to sexual objects—”Myra was … equipped with one helluva delicious little body”—may be explained by the importance Hoyland and his male peers continued to attach to the acquisition of sexual experience for adult masculinity. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, although sexual knowledge and forms of premarital sexual intimacy had been structured by class, gender, and region, sexual experience had commonly marked the transition from boyhood to manhood, as reflected in the sexual double standard; working-class young men, in particular, presented sexual awareness to demonstrate a normative masculinity.Footnote 117 The dialogue and antics Hoyland recorded of his male peers and himself confirm the endurance of such behaviors, also marked in the sexual posturing and misogyny of early sixties subcultures such as the mods.Footnote 118 Wishing to be seen as well versed in the mechanics of sex, Hoyland recorded several incidents of heavy petting with girls in which he took the initiative. The diary functioned as an additional space in which to present knowledge and experience of sex, a means of performing the subcultural heterosexual identity associated with the kitchen-sink male hero. Narrating this kind of male heterosexuality offered a means of offsetting the insecurity Hoyland felt as a sexually inexperienced young man negotiating the sexually promiscuous cultures of London's youth venues. At a college party in Chalk Farm, for example, he was eager to dispel any hint of his inexperience to Jill and other partygoers: “I took a mattress & bedclothes downstairs … I put the light out, & my hopes high, took my contraceptives out of my pocket & put them on a chair within reach in case.”Footnote 119
The difficulty for Hoyland was the way in which this presentation of sexual maturity conflicted with the emotional maturity Barnes upheld in the companionate relationship. The extent to which loveless sex troubled his conscience was evident from his urgent engagement with Barnes's ideas: “I agree, I agree, I agree sex is more beneficial if it's the climax of a complete relationship.”Footnote 120 But ultimately desire for sexual experience overrode his respect for the female individuality to which Barnes drew attention. He tried to resolve his inner struggle by reconciling Barnes's model of maturity with his understanding of experience as a route to self-development. Questioning Barnes's argument that the danger of “casual sexual intercourse” was the risk it presented to an individual's integrity, he emphasized instead its potential to enhance his “capacity for tenderness and loving.” “It would be backed by the self-assurance and knowledge and compassion that experience brings.”Footnote 121
Yet though often crude, disrespectful, and self-seeking towards young women, Hoyland did not share the anger, aggression, and mistrust that young angry protagonists like Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton displayed. He enjoyed their company as friends and comrades he could talk with about politics, poetry, and sex. But he was afraid of the guilty sexual feelings they aroused in him. On 8 May he noted how he had been “rather disturbed” by Katie, “a bony, pale [and] … very beautiful” girl he had met in the university refectory. “She looks at me with slightly raised eyebrows.” “Scared” that she would make “my eyes say things I don't mean,” he vowed to keep away from her.Footnote 122 Throughout the diary Hoyland referred to the “uncleanness,” “unhealthiness,” or “depravity” inside him that induced his sexual obsessions and spoke of the need to be “purged,” made “clean,” or to “control” himself. The strong puritan undertone of his sexual narrative suggests the extent to which puritan discourses of sex unsettled the conscience of this new left man and shaped his subjectivity. His narrative evoked “the Victorian obsession with the health, purity, and cleanliness of the male body”Footnote 123 still prevalent in the postwar male boarding school where the “sexual metonymy of tit and bum, penis and orgasm separated physical gratification from emotional feelings.”Footnote 124 However, the specific pathology of Hoyland's sexual language also suggests how it may have been colored by the metropolitan context of his sexual desires and encounters.
THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
Hoyland wrote as a young man of different places as well as cultures. He was alert to the conflicting moods his varied landscapes could arouse. The kind of sexual subjectivity he created as a young man about town seems to have been specifically shaped by his experiences of London's street life. In recent years, social historians have become attentive to the ways in which the articulation of emotion is “spatially mediated” and influential in how people construct narratives of their personal history and identity.Footnote 125 Hoyland's sense of self-division between “goodness” and “depravity” was enhanced by his emotional responses to the people and places he explored in the company of his beatnik friends. The social patterns of these young men embodied the young Londoners commentators and historians have identified as a feature of the postwar affluent city.Footnote 126 Socially and sexually mobile, economically affluent and distinguishable by their own style of dress and culture, they made London's streets their personal platform for youthful self-expression. Hoyland highlighted the continued relevance the streets held as sites for “relaxation,” friendship, and adolescent male identity in much the same way as they had for urban working-class boys in the interwar period, “a living” place also for “spectacle, observation and overlooking others.”Footnote 127 The new venues of London's early sixties nightlife provided ample opportunities for the latter. In cafés, pubs, cinemas, and coffee bars, Hoyland and his friends rested after the exertions of campaigning, heavy drinking, and dancing. Over cheap meals, cigarettes, coffee, or further alcohol, they talked, read aloud each other's poems, listened to music, and teased the down-and-out, eccentric characters they encountered on their journeys.
Sexual innuendo, bravado, and voyeurism were an important part of the masculinity these young men performed to each other, passersby, and themselves. At the end of a Monday night out with Alf and Paul in early February, Hoyland recorded how, in a coffee bar called the Witch's Cauldron, “Paul played the blues on the piano & got going with a pseudo-nymphomaniac bitch.”Footnote 128 The sexual hinterland of London's street nightlife colored the crude heterosexuality that bonded them. This was the world in which Hoyland's pathological descriptions of his sexuality found particular resonance and where his guilt and shame muddied his hedonism. Alongside the excitement of London's pleasure-seeking youth with its distinctive dress, live blues music, and modern juke boxes blaring out rock ‘n’ roll, Hoyland noticed the darker picture of prostitution, dipsomania, poverty, and loneliness, and felt tainted by association. His descriptions of the social outcasts inhabiting this underworld resonate with the same puritanical discourse that expressed midcentury anxieties about dysfunctional or problematic areas in the capital where xenophobic press reports about murder trials and sexual intrigue alerted the nation to the dangers of prostitution, foreign pimps, and deviant sexuality.Footnote 129 Such language told the guilt and shame of Hoyland's sexual urges. The week following his introduction to the Witch's Cauldron, for example, he accompanied Paul, Nick, and Noel “to a couple of clubs below Euston Road, the ‘Parisiana’ and ‘La Bohème.’”Footnote 130 Early in this first venture into the private nightclubs flourishing around postwar Soho, Hoyland was initially impressed by the clubs’ “superior jukebox” and the absence of closing hours that distinguished them from the pubs he knew. But by about half-past five in the morning, he “got suddenly nauseated by it all. The … drunks & no-hopers. Women grown fat and ugly, but dancing & trying to be sexy … stunted & disgusting … Ugh!”Footnote 131 Hoyland was disturbed by the isolation, ugliness, and desperation that the clubs’ early morning clientele presented; these metropolitan outcasts undermined the possibilities for pleasure-seeking, fashionable display, and sociability that the city's nighttime commercial cultures offered him and his friends. What is striking is the way in which Hoyland's revulsion centered on the corruption of the alluring young feminine sexuality that was integral to his experience of London's new leisure venues as spaces for experimentation, freedom from moral and social constraint, and the pursuit of male heterosexual desire. He saw in the women's aging bodies images of the grotesque; he recognized in them his own youthful male world and felt his own heterosexual desire tainted by the women's desperation.
Hoyland situated his heterosexuality within the long narrative tradition of the capital as a morally dangerous place, drawing upon “the pathological forms of masculinity and sexually wayward femininity” alive in the social and political debates of the period.Footnote 132 Unsurprisingly, he narrated the city as a feminine space. Its different social worlds aroused in him a range of emotional states and provided possibilities for new subjectivities. As a stage for performing the young man about town its fashionable sites and venues leant an allure; this was London as a temptress. The city's deserted roads and vibrant nightlife enabled him to experiment with alternative temporal modes and to experience heightened sensations of being. In early March, he recorded driving
home through the mist in Dom's Messerschmidt, with the top off, the wind streaming through our hair. … Completely alone in the night, surrounded by mist. Free! It was marvellous. … The best plane of existence, an entirely different rhythm you get into, without food or sleep, just cigarettes and coffee, a sort of elevated stupor.Footnote 133
The film-like quality of this scene told a metropolitan adventure story; mist or fog was a cinematic signifier of the postwar city often used to evoke the Victorian capital.Footnote 134 Providing “a liminal temporality,” it had the capacity to obscure familiar landmarks and was often also used to indicate danger.Footnote 135 In this experiential context it suggested Hoyland's uncertain state of mind; on the one hand the excitement of this new temporal urban experience, on the other hand the danger this new subjectivity represented to his responsible self. The scene portrayed a young man existentially elevated by new material cultures and fast modes of living, but fearful, too, of what it meant for his understanding of goodness. The following day Hoyland wrote a poem referring to his previous nighttime experiences that seemed to confirm the danger he perceived behind the city's seductive charm:
This was the story of a sexually inexperienced young man fearful of affluent London's power to corrupt. It expressed the discomposure that belied the carefree masculinity Hoyland presented to his peers. When read together with the seedy sexuality he observed in the nighttime city, the poem can be interpreted as giving expression to the threat this metropolitan underworld posed to the upright ordinariness he enacted through the CND. Composed amid the secure, everyday rhythms of the family home, the poem signifies the importance of place in shaping Hoyland's fragmented sense of selfhood.
THE YOUNG MAN AT HOME
Hoyland's insecurity as a heterosexual metropolitan man was in stark contrast to the more secure, family-oriented masculinity he performed in his parental home. Occasions when he was most content and at ease with himself were those when he emulated the example of his stepfather and performed the responsible, loving, “ordinary” family man. On 9 February he went to the butcher to buy some chicken and noted the “warm glow” he had felt when “the butcher's woman asked me if my wife was ill.”Footnote 137 The incident suggests how, through introjection, Hoyland incorporated the woman's words into his narrative fantasy to imagine his future self as the family man budgeting, shopping, and supporting the domestic responsibilities of a wife.Footnote 138 This was the private dimension of the good citizenship that was a central motif of British national identity in the years after 1945. Historians have highlighted the importance women and men attached to the home and family life as a site of identity in the postwar period. Claire Langhamer has described it as a place of “actual physical comfort and a psychic space within which to develop personal and family identities.”Footnote 139 Postwar social researchers identified its appeal among young and old alike. In his 1963 survey of Oxford and Manchester students, Zweig noted the “romanticised image of family life” the predominantly male student body held as “a haven and a refuge” from the social and economic anxieties caused by the revolution in university education and the atomic age.Footnote 140 In this respect the home functioned for Hoyland, as it did for many of his university contemporaries, as a site of ordinary everydayness and fantasy, a place in which to imagine his future self removed from the political and sexual stresses and strains of his adolescent world.
Hoyland found pleasure in the “stabilising” effect the tranquility of the home had on him.Footnote 141 His accounts of mowing the lawn, assembling supper, tidying his bedroom, or washing up are notable for his methodical attention to detail, which reflects the way in which he invested himself in these tasks. These everyday activities were a welcome release from his constant round of campaigning, parties, and late nights in the city. Amid the internal and external chaos he struggled to control, the physical order of the modern lower-middle-class home mattered to Hoyland. His bedroom was his particular space, where he performed a domestic identity and crafted a physical sense of order: “My room is great, I love it. It's getting more & more organised, & already looks tidy & becoming & stabilising.”Footnote 142 Jason Reid has identified the postwar adolescent bedroom as an “exclusive, almost sacred space” in which American teenagers shaped their identity and differentiated themselves from the rest of the family.Footnote 143 For Hoyland, however, his bedroom represented a way of creating an identity within, not apart from, the family. In contrast to contemporary cohorts such as the Angry Young Men and future second-wave feminists, he embraced rather than rejected the romantic constructions of 1950s domesticity that were alive in the advertising, magazines, and newspapers of the era.Footnote 144 On 15 April he recorded a quiet evening “listening to Bartok on our beautiful new gramophone & washing up at our beautiful new sink unit.”Footnote 145 The pleasures of the evening saw him reflecting on “what marvellous possibilities of cleanliness & efficiency & beauty the new advances in technology open up for us.”Footnote 146 This sentiment was far removed from the disapproval with which many fifties socialists greeted the enclosed home-centered world, decrying its “crude materialistic appeal.”Footnote 147 Yet in contrast to his unease with the “garish Americanisms” defining modern youth culture, the comfort of the modern home did not feel a threat to Hoyland or to his socialism. The beauty, constancy, and certainty of its aesthetics and inhabitants sustained his activism and informed his romantic outlook on the world.Footnote 148 Above all, the home represented a secure space in which Hoyland experienced the responsible ordinary masculinity that fitted with his model understanding of the “good” postwar man.
Central to the security Hoyland found in the home were the mutual loving relationships he saw and experienced inside it. His mother and stepfather represented a companionate domestic ideal with which he admired and felt at ease. He expressed deep affection for his stepfather, Jack, and the way in which he “communicates his kindness & his pleasure in ordinary things.” On 5 February, with his mother “in bed with flu,” Hoyland noted how, thanks to his stepfather's efforts in the kitchen, the rituals of the Sunday roast dinner proceeded without disruption; Hoyland, Sutherland, and the baby sat down to a meal of “roast lamb, roast spuds, & brussell sprouts.”Footnote 149 For Hoyland, this only seemed to elevate his respect for Sutherland's socialism; “it was quiet & authoritative & moving.”Footnote 150 His diary depicts Sutherland as the kind of family-oriented man that by midcentury could be seen celebrated in popular newspapers and magazines as a new “normative standard” of masculinity. He was actively involved in the running of the home, and he enjoyed spending time with all three of the children. Hoyland recorded Sutherland as the “involved father” sociologists and child experts praised, giving guidance to Hoyland and his adolescent brother, driving them to leisure venues, and even occasionally socializing with them and their friends following their return home. To what extent Hoyland's view of his mother and step-father's marriage may have been tinged with adolescent romanticism is unknown.Footnote 151 His diary illustrates a marital partnership based around a shared family life, visits to friends and family in the neighborhood, political discussion, homemaking, and laughter.
Domestic activities informed the self-narrative Hoyland took pains to compose of himself as the good postwar man. In taking his sister out for walks, shopping for nutritious meals, and displaying pride in a well-kept family home, he was representing an imagined self in which he wanted to appear to himself and the world. This social imagining felt empowering because it was endorsed by dominant cultural references around him.Footnote 152 It worked to offset the guilt and shame that arose from his sexual desire and the self-indulgence he perceived in his carefree lifestyle. He frequently described “virtuous” sensations, feelings of being “rich & mature & sound” arising from his domestic activities that echoed the emotions he described when organizing for the CND. As with the CND, Hoyland experienced the home as a site for self-growth. On the Sunday following dinner with his stepfather, for example, he recorded making a bookcase for his bedroom: “I got some bits of wood, and hammered and sawed and screwed things in. I even scrubbed the wood down in the back yard, and put newspaper down where I was working in the cellar, so that things should keep clean. All of which gave me a virtuous feeling.”Footnote 153 That same evening he described how studying his reflection in the mirror he noticed a difference: “My shirt sleeves are rolled up, my shirt's open at the neck. I'm wearing jeans, and I've got marks of paint on my hands. It occurred to me … the reflection was of a young man. No longer a boy.”Footnote 154 His account shows the subjectivity of the young man in the process of construction. This was the identity he shared with his nonpolitical peers and distanced him from socialists who disregarded the everyday of the working masses.Footnote 155 As for many postwar citizens, it was the family home that grounded Hoyland, where he looked forward to returning tired from his travels and his activism. It was also where he found the peace and quiet to take stock, reassess himself, and make sense of his identities. By the end of the summer he described himself moving towards a sense of self-composure; he felt a “glow of understanding” about who and what he was—“fluid and changing,”Footnote 156 still “hovering” somewhere “between childhood and adulthood,” but “absorbent, learning from other people,”Footnote 157 and arriving at a “whole range of conclusions.”Footnote 158
CONCLUSION
Hoyland ended his 1961 diary suddenly on 9 September when the notebook ran out. As though attentive to the literary conventions that called for a story to be properly concluded, he noted:
The end of this diary. I've not written much of very great event. My old diaries were better, I suspect. Peggy is wrong. She said the political side was the best part … the ideological side. With me the personal side is best. But either way it must be immediate. My Berlin visit was written retrospectively, therefore lacks vitality. That, dear book, is all.Footnote 159
His final reflection acknowledged the change of tone marking his final accounts. On 31 August, Hoyland was unexpectedly chosen to accompany a small peace delegation (including the Greenwich mayor and his fellow CND member, Peggy) surveying the escalating political crisis in Berlin: the East German army had closed the border on 13 August and begun erecting the wall. His narrative switched from the personal to the political landscape of the German Democratic Republic. What he saw and experienced there—“red banners & huge slogans on dirty, bleak buildings,” “a searchlight … cutting across the sky,” “secrets,” “spy business”—took him, momentarily, beyond his everyday metropolitan world to complicated questions of Cold War ideology and international security.Footnote 160 Other experiences felt more familiar—“the girls, beautiful and well-dressed,” “night-clubs … as bored & bourgeois & sick as you please,” “dark lights, & vodka, & Peggy's neurotic suspicions.”Footnote 161 They brought Hoyland back to the tensions of personal and political identity he had narrated since beginning his diary and that continued to trouble him at the diary's end: what it meant to be a young socialist in the postwar world, whether hedonism was compatible with true socialism, and how to manage himself as a heterosexual subject. As with his own metropolitan landscape, Berlin left Hoyland feeling “confused,” troubled,” and needing the “rest” home offered; he was relieved when, on the boat returning home, he saw “grey old England.”Footnote 162 His closing entry allows for some timely conclusions about the particular self-fragmentation the diary discloses and about how his experiences might speak to social historians concerned with the wider social, cultural, and subjective patterns of his postwar generation.
Hoyland's diary offers the self-narrative of one young New Left man in a decade of political, cultural, and social transition. In many ways Hoyland's 1961 diary represents the experiences of a specific generation of New Left men who grew up and came to political consciousness a decade before the advent of feminist sexual politics. It suggests that many of the divisions he experienced within himself were the result of his upbringing within a family and community of prewar and wartime Communists and socialists; they imparted political and social codes that had been colored by the idioms, values, and certainties of the British Left prior to 1956. Despite Hoyland's strong emotional and cultural ties to his own generation, he respected and was influenced by the voices and conduct of this older left generation; they embodied a romantic model of service to the common good that carried “aura elements” amid the insecurity of postwar affluence and the Cold War.Footnote 163 Hoyland crafted an idea of himself in relation to their example, and in dialogue with his diary and in the context of the CND, he strove to perform the identity of dedicated activist. But in 1961 this identity was not easily compatible with the more liberal social and sexual codes he and his younger political generation were embracing amid the nonconformist Bomb and beatnik cultures centered round the CND and the Committee of 100. Hoyland's taste for the commercial hedonistic pursuits and self-seeking lifestyle of the young man about town conflicted with his heroic models of male identity to create considerable inner turmoil. He struggled to incorporate narratives of masculinity past and present into his own inner and outer life to achieve a coherent sense of selfhood.
Hoyland's thoughts and feelings were only ever his own; his personal and political narratives were shaped within the specific context of his family history, home environment, north London community, and the cultures and relationships surrounding these. Yet his diary has much to say to the social historian seeking to understand how young men engaged with social and cultural discourses in postwar Britain to shape a self. There was a reason Hoyland thought the personal his “best” side. His introspections reflected the age in which they were written. Against the background of the affluent society and the Cold War, socialist intellectuals worried about how the Left was to meet these grand political and moral challenges. While conscious of these narratives, for Hoyland they only ever refracted into the smaller interior stories that composed his every day: sex, love, friendship, campaigning, writing, clothes, girls, and parties. With the exception of campaigning, these were the concerns of many young postwar men.
Hoyland was not altogether unusual as a young man keeping a private diary; my project examining the subjectivities and self-making of young higher- and further-educated men has uncovered other men who recorded their daily lives. As they detailed home life, school, friendships, hobbies, and girlfriends, many of them shared Hoyland's anxieties about girls, courtship, and sexual codes, as well as the negotiation of a sexual desire that seemed at odds with midcentury moral codes designed to contain it, the distinction between sexual desire and true love, the interpretation of young women's feelings and behaviors, and appropriate male conduct in relation. At a time of expanding possibilities for selfhood, these young men wrote to make sense of themselves as social, emotional, and sexual male subjects; their narratives represent efforts to negotiate cultural discourses about normative masculinities as well as the expectations of family, peers, and schools. Their stories also tell of conflict between identities inhabited at home, in the company of the older generation, male friends, and alone with girlfriends. Where many of these narratives depart from Hoyland's, perhaps, is in the degree of self-reflection; Hoyland was especially self-aware, a practice that may have owed something to Leighton Park's Quaker tradition that promoted self-reliance and individual contemplation.Footnote 164 However, as with the example of Hoyland, the practice of keeping larger journals rather than small pocket diaries seems to have occurred during late adolescence; in these we see more considered self-narratives. Amid the transition from school to university, from the security and cultural confinement of home to the social freedoms of urban environments and to serious opportunities for sexual and romantic relationships, the diary was a private space for young men to make sense of who they were and how they felt they should be. In this context, Hoyland's own uneasy quest for goodness showcases the hidden emotional lives and confused masculinities that shaped the new patterns of heterosexual relationships in the second half of the twentieth century. It illustrates how private male narratives might open up new understandings of gendered subjectivities in postwar Britain and what these subjectivities meant for relations between the sexes.
Hoyland's adolescent diary is particularly insightful in this instance, because from 1972 he was an active participant in the emerging profeminist men's movement, attending consciousness-raising meetings, national conferences, contributing to the movement's newsletters and (from 1979) to the magazine Achilles Heel. He also wrote a novel based upon his own responses to feminism and sexual politics. It is notable that these writings and his 1970s diaries echo many of the anxieties towards women that he expressed as a nineteen-year-old, seeing them as intellectual and social equals on the one hand, and sexually desirous objects on the other. Reading Hoyland's 1961 diary through this feminist frame reveals a prevalence of guilt and shame, which stand out as significant emotional registers to be confessed secretively in the safe space of his diary.Footnote 165 These registers suggest that the emotional and subjective fallout of the Women's Liberation Movement may be understood as part of a longer, more complex emotional history of social and sexual relationships young, higher- and further-educated men and women were negotiating in postwar society.
