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I moved back and forth between Berlin and London several times during the two years of my fellowship, and this enabled me to keep a close eye on the growing pains of IT. Looking back on the early years of England's first underground paper, I am most struck by the relative mildness and gentleness of everything connected with that time. It certainly did not seem mild or gentle while it was happening, for we had more than our share of argument, crises, arrests, trials, imprisonments, and other setbacks, but compared to the mood in either Germany or America, things were positively idyllic.

The immediate reaction to the mere existence of such a publication in England, with its blatant espousal of sex, drugs, pop culture and anarchism, was one of stunned disbelief that such a paper could appear at all. In this most establishment-oriented of all established societies, it was unthinkable that something so totally opposed to the status quo could ever come about, and thus it took some time for the upper echelons of London society to figure out sufficiently well what it was we were in order to react. It was considered jolly good fun for little boys just down from Oxford to cock the snook at establishment culture, provided this was done in the prescribed manner and clearly labeled as satire. Indeed, this had been done with impunity by generations of university men as a safe and sure way of gaining reputations and making a few pounds for themselves. But that a group of celts, colonials, and lower-class elements should imagine themselves capable of putting out a publication dealing with aspects of current culture was quite beyond belief.

Because the reaction was slow in coming, many of those connected with the paper lulled themselves into a false sense of security that there would be none. We were receiving moral support from certain sectors of the orthodox cultural world, and several publishing houses and theatre groups were holding their breath in the hope that we might be able to survive. It should be remembered that a strict system of censorship regulated publishing and the stage at that time: one publisher was locked in a prolonged suit over alleged obscenity in the English edition of Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, another was forced to bring out an expurgated version of Terry Southern's Candy. While in the theatre, the Lord Chamberlain ruled as supreme and almost unchallenged censor: whatever proclivities Britons may have had towards homosexuality, they could still only go to see such "daring" stage works as Tea And Sympathy in closed club productions.

This initial lull was mistaken for public acceptance by some of the editors, and I remember Miles poohpoohing my suggestion that there might be form of police restraint imposed upon us. He insisted that this sort of thing, while it might be likely in benighted America, could never happen in sophisticated, tolerant common-sensical Britain. I wasn't so sure, for although I was no worshipper of the writings of Herbert Marcuse, I had found that his definition of "repressive tolerance"—which I believed to be largely specious for either American or German society, as neither was really that tolerant of cultural innovations but would react like a serpent and strike them dead—suited Britain to a tee. Here the authorities would indeed tolerate any sort of weirdness to the point of destroying its raison d'être, provided it fit within the spectrum of what they understood as permissible weirdness. The problem with our paper was that it was outside that spectrum.

The first issues of IT were scarcely radical pace-setters by any standards, indeed they were far behind the impassioned prose of their American cousins—quite measured and British in their criticisms. Yet their very choice of name—International Times—so seemingly staid to American ears was calculated to raise eyebrows and eventually provided the substance of a legal challenge and a forced change of name. Although most people called the paper "IT" and eventually "Eyetee," the founders had brazenly set out to cause confusion and provoke the ire of the editor of Britain's chief establishment organ by appropriating most of their name. Our logo made use of an overpushed photo of silent movie "It Girl" Theda Bara to create an even more complex multiple entendre around our name. Yet the editorial in the first issue could not have been more low-keyed and reasonable in tone:

"Every day people pour into London to find out what is happening there. They have been told attractive stories—young, swinging, on the move, etc.,—and they're keen for a taste. Frequently they are disappointed.

"True, London is a comparatively free and happy city. But it isn't quite as switched on as our ad-men make out. Things are happening all over the city, but there is a lack of togetherness... And whatever scene you're on, with the possible exception of the pop music explosion, you're likely to discover that things aren't happening quite as they should.

"Most of the 'creative' people in the city including everyone from paunchy, old artists to vague, smiling acid heads seem agreed on the need for a change in the quality of living. But no-one seems to be doing much about it."

The next few issues were to expand this thesis into a demand for a "Twenty-Four Hour City," scarcely a radical proposal except in a country run essentially as a boy scout camp, where the worker scouts were all supposed to be in bed by midnight, and the pubs, public transit, and TV all shut down by then or even earlier to encourage the scouts to go home and sleep. But one other early piece perhaps best embodied the ideals of the British editors on our staff. It shows how incredibly English this underground paper really was and what these editors regarded as the first step in the cultural revolution for Britain. I print it here almost in its entirety:

"YOU, WHO ARE LOOKING OVER MY SHOULDER,

"PLEASE SPEAK TO ME!.

"In an effort to break down the ever-mounting walls of non-communication between human animals, we print the above headline as a public service.

"It is suggested that whenever you see someone with whom you wish to communicate—particularly in tube, bus, queue, cinema, or other crowded public place, you bring out this page and hold it up so that it inevitably catches their eye, on the inalienable principle that the news in the other person's paper is always much more interesting than the news in one's own.

"In the further pursuit of this aim, we are prepared to manufacture and retail at little or no profit, badges bearing the words, "I AM TOO BRITISH TO START A CONVERSATION—WILL YOU?" to be worn under the lapel and flashed at appropriate moments."

I have spoken of the problems the English had in getting through to each other, problems which I too in my efforts to become a surrogate Englishman had come to experience, and I think this piece expressed the situation quite perfectly. Indeed, for 1966, this was probably the most revolutionary idea going in England.

But what shocked many Londoners far more than our content, leaving them almost speechless in amazement, was the format of the paper, for no one had ever published anything quite like it in England before. This was because no one had ever imagined it possible to bring out a publication dealing with serious matters, such as art and politics, in such a frivolous combination of words and layout. A tabloid newspaper—any tabloid newspaper—was not seen as a fit medium for serious discussion. It would have to be a magazine or a Sunday newspaper format if it was to be taken seriously. To this extent at least, the much debated, dictum of McLuhan was certainly true—our medium was our message, and the message we were projecting to our eagerly waiting opponents was "tabloid paper" and therefore "trash."

Rumblings began to be heard from certain highly placed Londoners, who took exception to our treatment of sex and nudity—even before we began to publish explicitly sexual articles—as well as to our overall "trashiness" of appearance. These rumblings were sufficiently loud for me to hear them even in Berlin, where I met some establishment English types passing through. But at first it was believed that we had enough supporters to protect us from our detractors. At all events I was encouraged to send in material with a sexual angle, which I was happy enough to do.

I not only submitted an article about the German sex supermarkets run by Beate Uhse, representing a slick and sensible solution to the problem of distributing contraceptives and other sexual specialties. This forthright method has still not fully caught on in the furtive, sleaze-ridden plain-brown-wrapper atmosphere of either England or America, despite supposed, strides towards sexual liberation in both countries. My article was widely reprinted in the American underground press, as was my next piece, the first to my knowledge to use the phrase "sexual olympic, games" and to propose the establishment of such an event. This article was bought by American sex-entrepreneur Ralph Ginsberg for his Avant-Garde, though the financial confusion at IT was so great that I never saw a cent of the money. [click here to read that article]

One casualty of the 'Sixties was a book I had been writing about the ancient Greek theatre. While reading one day, I stumbled onto the existence of a little-known satyr play, a large portion of a work by Sophocles entitled the Ichneutai, or The Bloodhounds. This surprised me, as I had studied Greek in college and had immersed myself in the ancient theatre without hearing of it. Immediately I got hold of the Greek original as well as translations of the work into several European languages. Comparing versions, I was amazed to discover that a German translation included a lively scene in which the characters pelted one another with cattle dung. Bullshit in Sophocles? None of the English versions showed a trace of this scene, and I was forced to look at photos of the original and finally at the papyrus itself on which the play had been preserved. There was no doubt that the German had been quite correct, and the English scholars had shoved the entire matter under the rug out of prudishness.

This discovery led me to a prolonged quest into the Greek theatre and the various ways in which the attitudes of Victorian scholars had affected our image of the Greeks. Although I only had two years of college Greek plus some conversational modern behind me, I began to make considerable headway into this subject when the pressures and politics of the 'Sixties suddenly caught up with me. I found it hard to reconcile my interest in an ancient culture with the very real problems of the present and to integrate the close work, and thoughtful style needed for a serious book on the Greeks with the breezy tone I had begun to cultivate for the underground press, and finally I gave up on the project altogether. I received considerable encouragement from the critic and theatre scholar Eric Bentley, who eventually helped me to get a small portion of this work published in Ted Solotaroff's New American Review (available on this website as Goat-Singers and Scholars: A Slight Case of Suppression).

When I returned to London for a month's visit in March, the problems of publishing an underground paper had begun to be apparent to everyone, though our British editors still refused to believe what was happening. The English stationery monopoly of W.H. Smith, which until then had been selling the paper without a word of protest, suddenly decided they could not handle "smut" and refused to accept all further issues. There was absolutely no appeal possible from this decision, and we were informed that it was entirely the doing of the extremely conservative company director, who had by chance looked at a copy of the paper he had been distributing for several months. Smith's enjoyed a virtual monopoly over distribution of printed matter in England, so that this cut grievously into potential circulation, which until then had been growing prodigiously. A desperate search for new outlets began, and soon one would see male and female youths hawking IT in the streets, which added to the populist allure of the paper.

But IT's problems were only beginning. I was in the office a few days before I was due to return to Berlin, busily going through copies of American underground papers. There was a huge pile, as IT exchanged copies with every underground paper then existing. I marvelled at how many cities were already represented, and at the variety of subject matter, layout, and graphics in these papers. I asked permission to take them back with me to Berlin to show to my German student friends there, who had certainly never seen anything like them before. This was readily given, and I left, quite laden down but proud of my burden, as I knew these papers could have a real impact in Berlin.

I didn't realize that I had made my haul with only twenty minutes to spare. The very next day I received a call to tell me that the police had raided the office just after I left and carted away not only all the work for the next issue but every single copy of the paper, including all of IT's back numbers in stock. In fact they had taken every piece of paper on the premises. I was asked for my advice on who might help us in what could clearly be a very long and painful fight against the government to save the paper. Plans had already been made for a demonstration in Portobello Road that Saturday when the regular antique market took place, so the road would be jammed with tourists and sight-seers as well as press and police.

As luck would have it I was expecting my friend Michael Kustow of the Royal Shakespeare for dinner. It was Michael who had first published my piece on Dürrenmatt in Encore, and we had become quite close. Michael was one of the most liberated people then working in London, though I found him slightly foppish and priggish in the way of so many crypto-Jews trying to be Englishmen. He had single-handedly organized "Theatre-Go-Round," a rather condescending program of excerpts from "great theatre" which the Shakespeare had been sending around to schools and factories in lower-class neighborhoods in a self-conscious attempt to counter class prejudice. Michael imagined himself to be incredibly hip and "with-it," though I sometimes found him to be remarkably pretentious and "without-it."

As soon as he arrived, I told him what had happened at the paper. I expected him to launch off into a long stream of ineffectual criticalese, which he did, but then to my great joy he actually lost his temper, asked for the telephone, and called Peter Brook, Peter Hall, the critic Edward Lucie Smith, and several other people one after the other, giving each of them the news of the police action at the paper, which of course had not been reported in the established press. Dinner was left to wait, as Michael, much to my amazement, marshalled from my flat a large part of the effort that went into saving IT. I was a bit more hesitant thereafter in criticizing his more phlegmatic side.

The next disaster awaiting the paper was the imprisonment of its chief English inspirer, John Hopkins, better known to all of us as "Hoppy." A product of the educated classes, he was a true maverick in the English tradition. He had read physics for his degree and shortly after obtaining it was seated securely in his job as a nuclear scientist, when one day he simply walked away and with a dozen friends drove a yellow hearse to Moscow.

This was the beginning of his voluminous flirtation with the unconventional, a career which brought him into contact with the black population of Notting Hill, the drug scene, and the beginnings of political protest. He had started a social agency cum dance hall and classrooms called the London Free School in Notting Hill shortly before IT was founded, and it was here that some of London's very best rock groups, including the Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine, made their very first appearances in public. Later he started a social agency and information center in Notting Hill called "BIT." A related social agency, called "RELEASE" and still going strong, was founded by another hustler saint, Caroline Coon, who worked closely with Hoppy

The police had arrested Hoppy for having hashish in his apartment, but no one expected the charge to stick, as several people were living there at the time, and it was impossible to prove that he was the culprit. However, all the others charged were let go, but Hoppy was jailed by the same technicality that was later used to convict a Beatle, that he was the owner of the flat, in which the drug was found. We had all underestimated the vindictiveness of the English system—Hoppy had been singled out for punishment, most probably because he was regarded as a traitor to his class, and sentenced to nine months in prison, of which he eventually served six. The rest of us were ignored by the police, possibly because we were celts, Jews, or foreigners and could not be expected to know any better. But Hoppy's imprisonment was a clear signal to all of us that the English establishment had finally decided we were some kind of threat. What that foreboded for the future no one could be entirely sure.

Hoppy didn't go to jail immediately, but his arrest plus the confiscation of the entire newspaper caused deep depression and a certain amount of temporary bitterness among the editors. Two nights after the police carted the paper away, we attended a session of "UFO," the rock-and-dance, film-and-happening environment (founded by Hoppy and Joe Boyd) that was then the talk of London.  All the proceeds that night naturally enough went to the IT defence fund. Miles, who was not only still running the Indica bookstore but also sitting on the IT editorial board and writing rock articles for the paper as well came up to me at the organic juice bar and spoke to me above the din.

"Well, I hope you feel proud of yourself for our arrest" he began. "You can thank those articles you wrote about dildos and sexual olympics for all our trouble." I was flabbergasted and asked him what grounds he had to suppose either of my two sex articles had led to the police action, as it seemed fairly obvious to me that our stand on drugs had been the real cause. In any case, there was no shortage of material in the paper for the police to object to, once they had made up their minds to do so.

Miles was just as upset by my notion that the drug articles had caused the raid. At that time I was still a bit naive about drugs and had not yet understood the role they were playing among the young. I definitely had a hangup about heroin and any drug that could be injected. This was partly because I had no choice but to take injections for a medical condition of my own every other day. I hated taking these injections, and it was several years before I gained the courage to give them to myself, with Ilene acting as my nurse until then. I found it hard to understand how anyone could possibly take injections who didn't have to, and this colored my view of all drugs to some extent.

It was another year before I was to confront this problem and gain any direct experience of the creative side of drugs other than pot, which I smoked mainly socially in any case. At that time I chose to locate my own frontier of freedom in eastern mysticism and sexual fantasies. Clearly, my concept of freedom was just as upsetting to Miles as his was to me. Between us, we were a fine pair of hipsters. Later all this was to merge for both of us. I believe this story shows how the counter-culture made everyone grow, even its leaders

But besides the bust, Miles had his own personal reasons to be bitter that night. He had been active for several years in arranging poetry readings in London and was responsible for some of the city's most successful poetry events, including a festival at Albert Hall drawing 7,000,people. This had been the first time anyone became aware that there was a sizable audience for offbeat cultural events in London and in many ways had led to the founding of IT and the rest of the scene. As a result of all his work, someone had proposed Miles' name to serve on one of the committees of the Arts Council of Great Britain responsible for poetry, and it was supposed by many that he was a shoe-in for the appointment.

And he probably would have been appointed if there had been any competence or justice to the way these things were managed in England. But Miles was blackballed by Lord Goodman, the director of the Arts Council at that time. First of all, he was connected with a newspaper that published information about drugs, which Lord Goodman found simply unacceptable. Besides which, Miles' taste in poetry was considered somewhat heretical and foreign, and it may also have been that his class credentials were not fully in order, for only in Red China, though in an inverted way, was more attention paid to class origins at that time than in England.

In short, Miles was denied the post in a public and humiliating manner. As he had long been one of the most fervent spokesmen for English fairness and commonsensicality as opposed to American emotionalism and hysteria during the various policy debates at IT, this rebuff must have been especially crushing to him in its irony. As for our encounter at UFO, we both immediately backed off, horrified in true English fashion that we had been so rash as to indulge in a frank exchange of views, apologized to each other for our excesses, and began to talk about the weather. Underground or no underground, we were still very much in England.

But for all its setbacks, the London "scene" had made enormous strides in a remarkably short time. Our paper had become the talk of London, the rock concerts and events at UFO were turning into a Mecca for an ever larger number of Londoners, and it was virtually impossible to pick up a newspaper or turn on the telly without reading or seeing some news of the counter-culture. And on the positively optimistic side, Jim and Jack had made a go of the strange animal they called an "arts lab—it had become a functioning institution in Covent Garden.

We attended the demonstration for IT at Portobello Road the next day, getting up early after our night out at UFO. We found waiting for us in Notting Hill most of the same faces we had seen the previous night, many of them bleary-eyed from having stayed up the whole night, as they escorted a coffin, in which the corpse of IT allegedly lay, through the streets of London and into the early morning crowds of tube-travellers. For several hours they sat mourning over it as they travelled round and round on the Circle Line. There were police galore waiting for us as soon as we reached the Notting Hill tube station, and more police lined the sidewalks along Portobello Road, where we were to march.

Yet our demonstration could not have been more peaceful, but for one small incident. We all soon realized we were not really committed political marchers but rather a group of poets, artists, late-night revellers, and other anarchistic types who had simply gathered together over the denial of our only means of communication, the newspaper. These were not Berlin students, and so there was no rhythmic shouting of slogans during our march down Portobello Road to the Grove and back, just a prolonged moaning Hoo sound, punctuated by various wisecracks at the expense of the bystanders and ourselves.

At one point Ilene half-heartedly started a chant of "One Creature, One Vote!" and some of the others took it up. Near the Grove the police had erected a barricade and told us we could go no further. At this point, many of the demonstrators handed the flowers we were all carrying (for this was still 1967, the year of "Flower Power") to the police. I thought this was quite effective and would certainly produce a positive effect on the police when suddenly the corpse of IT, the poet Harry Fainlight, leapt out of his coffin and got into a slugging match with one of the policemen. They carted Harry off in the Black Maria, and we all gradually dispersed.

Ilene and I found this demonstration somewhat disconcerting. It was the first one we had taken part in, for so far we had really been journalists and onlookers in Berlin. While it seemed to us that the concept of "a demonstration" ought to work, the problem seemed to be that any demonstration was entirely at the mercy of a single irrational participant, who might by his anger and actions totally defeat the goal and tactics of a hundred others. What we did not realize was that we were only a few months away from a time when we ourselves would have no choice but to demonstrate for what we believed in and simply take our chances on the good sense of our companions as well as our own. A day or two later, we were off to Berlin again.

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