"The nation's moral fibre I have always seen as a kind of potting compost in which the luscious weeds of persecution, repression and sanctimoniousness can be nurtured."

-- Maureen Duffy

As a lesbian, Duffy would have found the 1960s a peculiar decade in which she started off ostracised (and her male contemporaries criminalised, lesbian sex never actually having been illegal) yet ended it symbolic of the liberating nature of the 'Swinging Sixties'. Looked at objectively, there would appear to be an impromptu moral shift, where homosexuality goes from being wrong to being right (or at the least, tolerable). It's no surprise, then, that several of the prominent writers of literature in Britain in the 1960s were also homosexual, and that consequently they would have a more open, informed view of moral grey areas than readers of certain centre-right tabloids.

But to look at why the 1960s as a social and literary movement came about, we have to look back to 1945, with the landslide victory of Attlee's Labour government and the birth of the welfare state. This is arguably the greatest socio-political event in British history, aspiring toward a free, fair and just demi-utopia. Yet in actuality it was, and remains, merely a safety net to prevent people from falling into the depths of poverty that had marred post-industrial England and inspired such writers as Dickens. What it meant, however, that the state was always going to be there to catch you if everything fell apart. This inspired confidence and aspiration. It's ironic, but no surprise, that Labour lost three elections in a row in the 1950s; the Conservative Party always was the party to capitalise on people's desires for wealth. "The Tories identified better with the new working class rather better than we did," said Labour politician Patrick Gordon Walker.

The post-war fiction of the 1950s, such as that by Sillitoe, Storey and Barstow, was often concerned with young male heroes making their way in this new Britain. By the 1960s, the welfare state was omnipresent. This led to a move in British literature from mere acknowledgement and acceptance of change to a more self-analytical look at what this change really meant. For what it meant, for most, was choice. For once there were alternatives in every walk of life. Right and wrong became vague definitions. For the working class in particular, the welfare state meant more freedom, and not just economically. British fiction of the 1960s reflected this: it is about being lost in a world where there is no right, no wrong, just different levels of acceptability.

IRIS MURDOCH AND THE FALL OF RELIGION

According to the church's own figures, the average number of people attending church each week immediately after the war was over 18 million, which was over 50% of Britain's population. In 1959, this had fallen to beneath 15 million, but by the early 1970s it had fallen beneath 10 million for the first time. The 1960s, then, represent a fall-off of attendance steeper than the rate of decline both before and after the decade. During these ten years, religion ceased to be one of the mainstays of British society. Its significance in the apparent socio-political moral shift is great.

The Second World War of 1939-45 has come to symbolise a midlife crisis for the British sense of identity, and not just nationalistically. Not only was it the last time we could claim to be a world power (and an imperial one, at that) but it challenged our conventional conceptions of good and evil. The experience of World War Two informed and haunted much of the literature of the 1950s. Most prominently was William Golding, who said of the war: "It taught us not the follies of war and nationalism, but the given nature of man." His seminal novel, Lord Of The Flies, challenges the view of our innate innocence and claims civilisation and morality is something artificially imposed upon us, either by ourselves, or by an outside presence, be it the state or religion. Yet religious virtues hadn't prevented the horrors of Auschwitz, Dresden or the Burma Railroad, which were all state-sponsored as well. The dwindling number of churchgoers revealed a loss of faith, but it was the writers of the 1960s who began to consider in their work where, if not religion, morality came from in the first place.

"Our general awareness of good, or goodness, is with us unreflectively all the time, as a sense of God's presence, or at least existence, used to be for all sorts of believers," Iris Murdoch wrote in 1992, after several decades of philosophical contemplation on the nature of what is good. She would seem to be suggesting a link between religion and morality, yet she was writing this in a year when church attendance had slipped to beneath two million. What she's actually saying is that throughout history people have mistaken God for the supreme representation of what is good by following the Judaeo-Christian misinterpretation of Plato's Republic. She does not rule out the possibility of a deity completely, but believes goodness is neither created by nor reliant on the divine.

Murdoch was a moral realist. She believed that there were universal moral truths (i.e. definitions of what was good) but that human existence does not depend on recognising them. She dismissed the idea of salvation, claiming that to do good things out of a desire to reach Heaven was not moral at all. She believed that as social creatures, we all have an innate ability to make moral judgements based on awareness of a prior sense of values. That's because good is transcendent - it exists beyond us, and we exist within it's sphere of influence, but she had no time for the utilitarian philosophers and evaluative nihilists who held that values have no real existence; that good doesn't exist as a tangible concept because it is substanceless. Morality, then, is beyond our control, and beyond the state's and religion's too. Immorality is a moot concept. If we know that something is wrong, we wouldn't do it, but if we don't know it's wrong, then that's amorality.

"The good and evil that we dream of may be more incarnate than we realise in the world within which we choose," she later wrote. The idea that morality is an extrareal (i.e. in the same sense that extraterrestrials come from beyond our planet) vision that informs our choices is something examined subtextually in her 1969 novel, Bruno's Dream. In this novel, an old man is bedridden, close to death, yet is the centre of an intricate spider's web of entangled lives. At first glance a soap opera, the melodramatic excesses of the novel (Will wants Adelaide, but Adelaide wants Danby, who wants Lisa, sister of Diana, who wants Miles, but he wants Lisa too, etc.) represent people who are lost and must make their own choices now that their deity (Bruno himself) is waning. Yet Bruno isn't a controller, he is merely a catalyst. He is what holds these people together. Perhaps, then, he does not represent this all-powerful god, after all, but more Murdoch's perception that good morality is something often confused for one.

This is an important work as far as the 1960s are concerned. Murdoch saw the self as a moral being, but that our conventional morality was derived from religion. As religion began to fade, so did the sense of the self. We had gone so long, having replaced Murdoch's innate moral consciousness with religious thinking, that we were lost, no longer in touch with the morality with which we defined ourselves. This may be a bold statement, yet to put it in a context that remains contemporary to this day: homosexuality is still looked upon by many as wrong. This is a religious hangover. Homophobia today isn't restricted to organised religion. There are homophobes who hold no religious beliefs whatsoever, but have yet to stop thinking in religious terms and start thinking for themselves. The 1960s was when certain people did.

ANTHONY BURGESS AND THE NEED FOR AMORALITY

So whilst Murdoch was writing that we need to look outwards for a sense of morality, Anthony Burgess was writing about the opposite: looking inwards to decide for ourselves what is the right and wrong thing to do. Viewed askance, A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian novel in favour of a different type of dystopian world. Burgess appears to argue almost didactically that it's better to live in a world full of evil where we are free to decide to be evil than a world free of violence and crime, though only because people have been conditioned not to contemplate it. This may well confuse the issue, yet perhaps this was Burgess' intention - morality isn't a simplistic issue. Here was a man whose wife was beaten, robbed and suffered a miscarriage after an attack during a Second World War blackout. Her attackers had been American GIs, the symbolic faces of good, in Britain to fight the Nazis, the symbolic faces of evil.

"By definition, a human being is endowed with free will," wrote Burgess in A Clockwork Orange Resucked, the introduction for the first full (21 chapter) version of the novel released in America, 1987. "He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange." Burgess agrees with Murdoch. Without a sense of morality we are lost, out of touch with the self, something that appears to be alive, yet is really just a mechanical construct reacting to circumstances - clockwork oranges ourselves. Yet Burgess did not believe in the same moral truths that Murdoch did. He believed that any outside factors (be they state, religion, any authority figure) that bear upon our moral decisions will work contrary to our own free will.

"What's it going to be then, eh?" is a line that recurs throughout A Clockwork Orange, indicative of the choice presented to us with free will. Moral responsibility is ours alone, but Burgess visited the Soviet Union and was disturbed by the totalitarian state assuming that position. He was also perturbed by the rise of the welfare state back in Britain, which reached its peak in the early 1960s. He found something worrying in the idea of people living in state housing, getting state medical care and using state childcare. He believed it wrong to force people into considering the greater good of society over that of the individual. But what he was purporting wasn't selfishness, but individualism, from which liberalism is inseparable. To give powers to the state wasn't liberal as far as Burgess was concerned. It assumed people belonged to society, rather than society merely being the sum of all its members. To Burgess, moral choices weren't made on the basis of what other people think, but the concept of society relies on the unity that conformity and obedience to consensual rules brings.

Burgess may well have claimed to be a true form of anarchist, yet he did not clamour for lawlessness. He believed that those who committed crimes against others should be punished for them. The governor inside the prison in which Alex is incarcerated in the novel doesn't agree with Dr Brodsky's plan to condition Alex against violent tendencies. Stripping him of the choice to do evil removes his humanity. "If lewdies are good that's because they like it," he says in the fourth chapter of the first section. This suggests people are only moral out of desire, such as the desire for salvation that Murdoch disdained. Yet at the end of the novel, Alex turns his back on his old life of murder, rape and robbery for precisely this reason: the desire to make something of his life, to find a wife, to have children. He has broken free of the conditioning he went through in prison, he's no longer controlled by his teachers or his parents, and now he's trying to find his true self. He also makes this decision on his own. That is the definition of humanity, yet it is not possible under the constraints of a society that pervades our thoughts with its definitions of right and wrong. A state of quiet amorality, where there is no right or wrong, merely choices with consequences, is both ideal and necessary for the individual self to bloom.

A Clockwork Orange may have ended on a positive note, yet reality does not reflect fiction. We may have escaped our past obsession with religious morality, yet to fill the void the state has moved in, and a state of our own creation. Voltaire once said that "If God did not exist, it would be necessary for us to create him." Man may have put God to pasture by the 1960s, yet it recreated a nanny state in his image, defining good and bad for us so that we can avoid being lost and having to find ourselves just that little bit longer. It's no wonder that one of the archetypal characters in the fiction of the 1960s was the outsider - a vaguely nihilistic character who realises to be himself he has to exist outside the contemporary socio-political bubble with all its cosy moral conventions.

ANGUS WILSON AND THE BIRTH OF NIHILISM

"Special! There's nothing special about 'er!" says Mrs Tuffield of her young daughter Sylvia at the beginning of Angus Wilson's Late Call. "God put 'er here to work for others... [She] wanted to be different! Well, [she's] nothin'. And [she] always will be." Yet when we next meet Sylvia, it is on her retirement, and her mother's prophesy turns out to be inaccurate - thanks to the welfare state and Sylvia's generous son, Harold. She now has a new home, living with Harold, her every need catered for, and she can do as she pleases for the first time in her life.

Sylvia is an unlikely symbol for the outsider existing on (or even beyond) the fringes of 1960s society. When we think of nihilists we think of characters like Joseph in Angela Carter's Several Perceptions, an unemployed dropout with an apathetic grudge against society. However, Sylvia, as a new pensioner in this new Britain, is from another age, and has this form of nihilism thrust upon her. For the first time, there is more to life than merely survival. Retirement is the point where she can stop existing and start living. Yet unsurprisingly she finds it hard. Throughout her life she has had others make choices for her: the hotel owners she worked for replaced her domineering parents. Her son Harold almost appears to fill the void, but we are left to wonder for ourselves whether it is because he is equally as controlling or whether it is because she lets him for want of that stabilising influence in her life.

Angus Wilson is one of the quintessential writers of fiction in 1960s Britain. A homosexual, he could see through the social hypocrisies and entrenchment of both political poles. He was in touch with the important themes of the decade. Anxiety about the self and English national identity feature into his work, and he is preoccupied with images of a delineated society where traditional values are on their last legs. There are some unaffectionate moments of satire in Late Call where he shows that perhaps the 1960s don't represent the great moral shift that many people then (and most of us now) assume took place.

Harold is the great middle class liberal of the novel, campaigning to save a meadow, promoting the new towns and always ready to rant against the traditional establishment. In many ways, the book seems like it was written after the 1960s, after a period of reflection, as Wilson depicts Harold as an ironic hypocrite, even though he is as concretely representative of his class in the 1960s as Sylvia is abstractly representative of hers. Harold, like Mrs Longmore in the prologue, has plenty to say for liberal values, yet when it comes to acting upon them, is more reluctant. His reaction to his son Ray's revealed homosexuality isn't exactly supportive. This is symbolic of the superficiality of the moral shift we see when we examine the 1960s as a historical period today. It might have been a period of liberal reform, but political reform does not mean a change in attitudes.

As always, it was the middle classes making, changing or dropping the laws, looking at the working class majority from the top of their ivory towers and deciding for themselves what best to do with them. Yet for the working classes themselves, living through the 1960s was another experience altogether. There's not so much a nihilistic bent as an apocalyptic one to Nell Dunn's Up The Junction, a disjointed account of lives being lived without purpose or direction or, even, hope. Compiled in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this book is about those who have realised that their government would wilfully throw away their lives in nuclear war. It's another instance of loss of faith in those self-claimed guardians of the moral high ground that sit at Westminster. The nihilistic characters in this book know their lives are contradictorily both out of their hands and for perhaps the first time fully theirs to control, and are determined to make the most of it. The hedonism in Up The Junction wasn't a product of the 1960s - it was a reaction to it.

JOE ORTON AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

"Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three" goes the opening line of Philip Larkin's 1974 poem, Annus Mirabilis. The specific date isn't significant, apart from the fact that it's in the 1960s. 1961 saw the introduction of the contraceptive pill, whilst gay sex and abortion was legalised in 1967. Our moral chastity belt had been unlocked. "Literature is mostly about sex and not much about children; life is the other way round," writes the character of Adam Appleby in David Lodge's 1965 novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down. Adam is wrong. The 1960s saw sex finally divorced from procreation. How most people saw sex changed irrevocably.

From a politico-moral viewpoint, the legalisation of gay sex was inevitable. The categorising of homosexuality as a deviancy rose from the prudish religious thinking that demonised sexual pleasure as ungodly, bad for the bodily constitution, etc, etc. Sex had its purpose, and that was to produce offspring, and any physical pleasure gained from doing so was an unfortunate by-product. For homosexuals, it was solely about the physical pleasure. However, with the appearance of contraception, this also became the case for heterosexuals too, and with the replacement of religion with the state as the moral guardians, it would be hypocritical for homosexuality to remain illegal when really they were just doing the same as heterosexuals of the time.

The morality in the work of one of the 1960s most prominent homosexual writers, Joe Orton, is not so much liberal as completely skewed. Religion, sex, death, murder and violence all feature in his plays without comment. Yet that is the point. Orton had known for a long time that amorality was the ideal. He had grown up with an attraction for members of his own sex, and for anyone to call that immoral, wrong or evil would be to deny him his own identity. Amongst the farce and high comedy of Entertaining Mr Sloane, Orton's most well known play, is a fine line of realism. Orton knows that the objectionable facets of religion, sex, death, murder and violence exist within the real world. He also knows that denying their existence (both within literature and without) under the banner of morality will not prevent them from happening. He's confident and comfortable in his knowledge of what is acceptable and what is not and cares little for those who don't know themselves as well as he does himself. His pseudonymous letters by Edna Welthorpe to newspapers in response to disgust at his plays reveal just how bemused he was by the entrenched moral pretensions of conservative British society.

Yet Orton's diaries reveal another side to this liberalisation of sex that would have also been applicable to heterosexuals now they were freed of the biological concerns. "He sucked my cock," wrote Orton on the 30th December 1967. "Afterwards I fucked him. It was difficult to get in. He had a very tight arse... He wanted to fuck me when I'd finished... So I let him." Orton never knew his name. In this era before AIDS, unprotected homosexual sex was safe sex. Contraception (or failing that, legalised abortion) gave women in particular new sexual freedoms, and allowed men to stop worrying about theirs. But Orton's writing conveys a certain dispassion. Though he comments that it was very good sex, it seems prosaic. It was not for the literature of the 1960s to analyse how rampant promiscuity, anonymous sexual encounters and forgettable, loveless shagging divorced sex from romantic passion even more than the Pill ever did, yet with retrospection we can see such ideas already fermenting. "The old in-out, in-out," Anthony Burgess calls it in A Clockwork Orange.

Whilst 35 years of increasing tolerance mean few of us will take issue with Orton's choice of lifestyle, one thing that continues to be a moral hot topic is his paedophilia. A holiday in Tangier is just an endless series of encounters with rent boys, some of them barely in their teens. To Orton, this wouldn't have seemed immoral. The boys were paid, most of them seemed keen and it was better to accept those offering sex than taking advantage of those who aren't. Just as he did not wake up one morning and decide to feel attracted to members of his own sex, he did not wake up one morning and decide to feel attracted to young boys. It was a normal state for him. It was consensual sex, not rape. This does call into question what morality is for, if not to control people, and that is to protect them. Laws in Britain would prevent Orton having sex with young boys to this day because it would not recognise that those boys were old enough to make their own judgements. If Orton had read Burgess he might well be thinking now that the state has decided for itself in blanket terms when children become human beings.

But to take the literature of the 1960s alone as representative of a moral shift is to discount what happened before. Abortions still happened before legalisation, and it follows that unprotected sex did as well. The most memorable chapter of Dunn's Up The Junction is when Rube falls pregnant and keeps returning to an amateur abortionist called Winny who keeps botching up her terminations. "There's only one reason good-looking girls come to see [me]," Winny tells them. Evidently this is not that rare an occurrence. Whilst written and published in the 1960s, the novel is set in the 1950s. We always think of the 1960s as being the decade of the sexual revolution, yet really the only change to occur was that sex now became less of a taboo, or at least to talk about it did.

MAUREEN DUFFY AND THE END OF A CYCLE

There isn't much hedonistic activity in Maureen Duffy's That's How It Was. It's a story of extreme hardship, making sacrifices and losing who and what you love. Life is about survival, not fun. It couldn't be more different to Up The Junction, and this would seem to be out of synchronicity with the themes of the 1960s. Yet that is only to be expected. It might have been written in 1962, but it is set two decades earlier, during the Second World War. Read in conjunction with other 1960s texts, we can see for ourselves that society has collectively loosened its collar. But taken out of this context, That's How It Was is still a novel about a young girl feeling unidentifiably lesbian feelings for the first time. That would still have been the case had it been written in 1942, 1962 or even 1982. The morality, then, is not a consideration of the text, but something outside it, in the minds of the readers. That wouldn't have changed.

When Duffy revealed what she thought of the nation's moral fibre to the National Secular Society, it was 1978, yet the themes of moral pretension still mattered to Duffy then, just as they continue to do so now, that she would write England: The Making Of A Myth. The most important issue to consider when looking at morality in the fiction of the 1960s is whether she is right: whether these tales of moral revolution really represent what was going on or not. Her novel isn't the only one to present juxtapositions of different eras and generations. Miles in Bruno's Dream is shown to make just the same mistakes his father did regarding women. Harold's children in Late Call rebel against his authority in just the same way he did against Sylvia and his father. As Alex sums it up in the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange: "I would not be able to really stop [my son]. And nor would he be able to stop his own son. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world." There's an apparent cycle to these moral developments, and whilst each successive generation believes it will better the last, it takes a cynical nihilist like Alex to show us that this isn't the case. The fiction written in Britain during the 1960s does not show us any proof of great moral change. In this way, the 1960s as a revolutionary decade is a cliché. The myth has been repeated so many times that it's lost its meaning. It didn't happen like that - but literature shows us that it could.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradbury, M. The Modern British Novel, 1993, Secker & Warburg

Burgess, A. A Clockwork Orange Resucked, 1987, foreword to new 21 chapter US version of the novel

Duffy, M. England: The Making Of The Myth - From Stonehenge To Albert Square, 2000, Fourth Estate

Gasiorek, A. Post-war British Fiction: Realism And After, 1995, Hodder

Henri, A. A Return To The Junction, 1987, introduction to reprint of Up The Junction

Lahr, J. Prick Up Your Ears, 1978, 2000 edition, Bloomsbury

Laing, S. Representations Of Working Class Life: 1957-64, 1986, MacMillan

Malikail, J. Iris Murdoch On The Good, God And Religion, Internet-hosted article, http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol4/murdoch.html

Orton, J. Complete Plays, 1976, 1998 edition, Methuen

Shepherd, S. Because We're Queers: The Life And Crimes Of Kenneth Halliwell And Joe Orton, 1989, GMP

NOTES:
This is the longest, most in-depthly researched and probably best essay I've written, for a unit at UEA run by Paul Magrs on British fiction of the 1960s. I didn't know anything about the 1960s, its literature, its authors. I hadn't read any of the books. I hadn't heard of most of them. I only owned one. I chose this course because Magrs was running it and switched into his seminar group despite its glorious timeslot on a Friday afternoon. No regrets. I got 75%. I'm particularly proud of the title, over which we were given free reign. Actually, reading it now, I can see why it didn't get an even higher mark. It gets a tad too contextual in places.