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When Ilene and I next returned to England in the autumn of 1967, the climate surrounding I.T. had altered considerably, though its situation was just as perilous in a different way, During the two months we remained in London, I was to become more deeply involved with the paper than ever before. My own influence among the editors had grown substantially as a result of the reports I had been writing on the Berlin student scene. Our first editor, Tom McGrath, had quit for a variety of reasons, some personal, some endemic to the English ambience.

First of all, though writing of a new age and a new consciousness where all men would be provided with the necessities of life without strife, Tom had never been able to find himself an affordable flat in central London. He had been living with friends in distant Bermondsey through most of his editorship, which meant, with the tube closing down at midnight, that he often had to meet deadlines by sleeping over in our frigid office.

There was also another problem: during a previous visit to London he had contracted a drug habit. Although this was perfectly legal in Britain at the time, he had done every thing he could to kick this habit, and had finally succeeded during a period he spent back in Glasgow. But now that he was once again in London, he was concerned that he might be yielding to the old temptation once more. This was particularly tragic and ironic in view of the fine, balanced articles he was writing about the uses and the misuses of drugs, in one of which he took Tim Leary to task for suggesting that everyone ought to turn on to acid.

A third factor in his departure may have been the growing confrontation between the Americans and the Britons on the paper. Not everyone among either the Americans or the British took predictable sides in this conflict, and I myself frequently opposed the American faction and sided with the English. But feelings would occasionally run high. At one point, while I was in Berlin, Tom ran an editorial talking about how much more commonsensical the English were than other people. I for one had never found "common sense" to be very common anywhere, and I rose to the occasion by writing a "letter to the editor" offering ironical examples from English history and showing how this common sense had worked out in practice. The letter was never printed, but I later learned that it was a hot item during one of the more inflamed periods of this controversy.

The legal problems of I.T. had been solved through the intervention of some of London's more notable liberals, a process which had been begun by Michael Kustow the previous spring in my flat. The police had finally come in a truck and returned all the confiscated papers, and it looked as though peace had been declared. But it was an extremely uneasy peace, and Michael warned me that the Home Secretary might take further steps against the paper at any time if the editors were not a bit careful in handling certain issues. Through me he offered his own counsel in helping to orient the new American editor, Bill Levy, in the Byzantine intricacies of the British system of placating one's opponent while simultaneously attacking him. I told him I would do my best to set up a meeting between him and Bill, where we could all talk the situation over informally.

Actually, Bill was the second new editor. During the emergency precipitated by Tom McGrath's flight back to Glasgow, Jack Henry Moore had stepped in for two or three issues. He wrote me a letter in which he gloated slightly over having been made editor, as he imagined I was coveting the position from Berlin, since I had been fairly emphatic to several people about certain mistakes I thought the previous editors had been making. What he did not know was that I could not have accepted the editorship even if it had been offered me, and I was later to turn down just such an offer. Although Ilene and I had sometimes speculated together on what sort of paper we could put out together if the opportunity arose—with myself handling the words and Ilene the graphics and layout—we both realized we were not up to the grueling effort and incessant politicking such a project would require. A little bit of politics or free-lance work was fun and games, but we knew that doing it full time would soon take the fun out of it.

Jack lasted only a brief time as editor, as was foreseeable enough for he was simply too erratic for the mundane task of ordering sentences one after the other in a coherent manner, and the job of inspiring others to write for him was beyond his limited abilities at diplomacy. Bill Levy, who had been working as an assistant editor for some time, was called in to fill the gap. Bill and I had a good deal in common—like myself, he was a relatively scholarly type with a great love of poetry. My main objection to him was that he was still on an Ezra Pound kick, something I had outgrown in the 'fifties. Once started on his hobby horse, he sounded like any number of academics in the poetry field as he explicated the hidden meanings in Pound's Cantos. He was sure that these meanings must be directly relevant to everything that was happening in England or anywhere in the world at that very moment.

Bill was extremely soft-spoken and reserved, which ought to have helped him get on with the English, but somehow his softness and theirs were never to mesh. His real fault was that he had no deep desire to deal with other people. He preferred to bring out the paper from his own apartment, making only such phone calls as were absolutely urgent, and leaving the house only in case of an absolute emergency. Needless to say, there were certain built-in problems for the paper in this modus operandi. During that time the paper was without any proper offices, having outgrown its premises at Indica, though the editorial board was busy looking for the right space.  It was around this time that Bill commissioned Ilene to do a cover for the Christmas issue of 1967 as well as several smaller illustrations, just before we went back to Berlin.

 
Although I.T. was beginning to show a profit of sorts. our political enemies had seen to it that we could not find a printer in London. Our material was considered so hot that no local printer would touch us, as under English law it is the printer—rather than the editor—who is open to arrest for obscenity or libel. The only web offset presses in London turned out to be owned by Michael Foot, a Labour member of Parliament with radical pretensions who nonetheless objected to the content of our paper and would not print it. We had to go almost to the Scottish border to find a printer in Carlisle, and Bill had no choice but to spend three days out of every two weeks there to see the paper through the presses.

I told Bill of Michael's offer to clue him into the inner workings of London's cultural politics. At that time I was working quite closely with Bill on a few issues as associate editor, and he agreed to my making an appointment with Michael for the two of them to meet. I did this, inviting both Bill and Michael to my place for dinner. Michael was extremely pleased to hear that he would be meeting Bill, for he had heard rumors of yet direr moves planned against the paper. When the appointed evening arrived, Michael came, which was not easy for him, as he was very busy in between his rehearsals of Theatre-Go-Round and various other projects, but Bill failed to show. When after some time I called Bill to find out what had happened to him, he replied in an off-hand way that he was too busy tonight, and I must set up another appointment for another time.

If Michael was angry, he did not show it. He was in fact very full of himself for another reason—he had just been appointed the new director of something called the Institute of Contemporary Arts, familiarly known as the ICA, which had a reputation for sponsoring adventurous and avant-garde events in theatre and the arts. Although the premises of the ICA were moving onto establishment turf, just down the Mall from Buckingham Palace, Michael felt confident that he would be able to use his new position to encourage all kinds of hip new events, thus forging a link between the underground and orthodox cultures. This was indeed important news and may have explained Michael's ebullient lack of concern for Bill's failure to show up. He swore us to secrecy about his appointment, pending a formal announcement, and solicited our ideas on what sort of events the ICA should sponsor. We gave him such thoughts as we had, though we were really not sure if Michael was the right person to "hippify" London.

As I had agreed to keep his secret, I was not able to tell Bill Levy of this potentially favorable new development for us, and although I hinted of it to him, Bill still put off meeting with Michael. Only several weeks later, when the appointment was announced in the press did Bill get my point, but by then Michael had taken slow but sure offence at Bill's hesitancy, and it was too late.

Our paper was only moderately insecure at that time. Our circulation was slowly growing, but we were very poorly coordinated, and the relations between those striving to work together were close to chaotic. As I have said, the paper was brought out entirely from Bill's flat, or rather from the fashionable Chelsea mews apartment which Bill had somehow scrounged from our main protector of the moment, a young member of the English-Jewish aristocracy, Nigel Samuels. Nigel, who was Lord Samuels' son, was another of those young men just down from Oxford who thought that the entire world depended on them. And in England it still did to a great extent.

Nigel was still in his heretical cock-snooking period which allowed him to enjoy the idea of supporting an anti-establishment newspaper despite—or perhaps partly because of—the opposition from his parents and social peers. It was fairly evident to me and everyone else with any perspicacity that Nigel, for all his patrician charm, was simply going through a phase, and when it was over the newspaper might be over as well. Actually to do Nigel justice, he could be rather sweet and remained faithful to the paper for almost a year in the face of considerable pressure from his family. He undoubtedly performed a vital service at that time, despite his disconcerting habit of asking visitors to the paper's home-cum-office such questions as "I say, what's your trade?"

Shortly before we were ready to leave London again, the paper managed to rectify its position sufficiently to move into new offices in Betterton Street, at which Bill became an infrequent and unwilling visitor, preferring to transact most of his business by phone from his flat. After working with him on a few issues, I found dealing with him too difficult and bowed out from any further editorial duties. Now Ilene and I started building up a relationship with others on the staff, who were beginning to do most of the work. These included Peter Stansill and Graham Keen, both of them cheery and light-hearted Englishmen, who quickly became the heart of the paper in its new location.

When we returned in the spring, Peter and Graham had solidified their position and Bill had finally been asked to leave. He had grown increasingly reclusive and had finally just holed up with all the work for one issue in Nigel's flat, refusing to talk to anyone until he had personally passed on every detail of the writing and layout. This was too much for everyone, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when he left. I still found him an engaging person, however, and a year later, after my return from New York, I was to agree to write an article for Europe's first sex newspaper called SUCK, to be published from Amsterdam, as it was too hot for an English printer to handle. Bill got himself permanently tossed out of England for this paper, as he had personally brought several hundred copies over on the Channel Ferry. [you can read this article by clicking here]

Unfortunately, Her Majesty's Customs Inspector discovered the copies, and even though the paper was fairly mild and tasteful compared even to the Screw of that era, he told Bill he would have to show it to his superiors, as he rather doubted if it could be brought into England. At this point Bill might yet have talked his way out of trouble and even finally have gained entry for the paper, but he saw fit instead to enter into a long philosophical defence of pornography to the customs officer and apparently became somewhat abusive as well. The upshot of it all was that Bill was declared Persona Non Grata in England. (Parenthetically, I should add that the genesis of all the hard-sex tabloids that would later proliferate in both the UK and America lay in quite genuine protest work by artists and writers during the 'Sixties.)

We had mainly come to London that spring to promote our light art techniques, but we also found some time to do some more writing and graphics for I.T. It was then that we first got to know Hoppy a bit better, for during our previous visits he had either been busy with his trial or in jail. He remains, in my mind, the most genuine and original of the English hustler saints, and the only one with any real vision of the changes he wanted for England. He was part of a new breed that seemed to have escaped most of the English class nonsense. He didn't really seem to care how he lived, and he had an odd, quirky sense of humor that was capable of joking about almost anything. Nonetheless, his months in jail had taken their toll, and though he now added prison reform to the causes he was pushing for, his ardor had been cooled by the time he spent inside, and he admitted to me that he was taking great care not to do anything that might send him up the hill again.

Basically, Hoppy had an enormous faith in pleasure, and the potential it had for transforming the English personality, so long inured to silent suffering and stoicism. He seemed to feel it was his personal duty to spread a capacity for pleasure—whether it came from sex, drugs, brain-wave machines, or mystical contemplation seemed irrelevant to him—to every Englishman in every corner of the kingdom.

In this he was very like the Australian hustler saint, Richard Neville, the editor of London's other major underground organ, OZ, which was to have its own legal problems three years later. OZ was a slick monthly which reprinted a great deal of material from the American underground press but also originated some very controversial special numbers on sex, the English school system, and other local issues. Richard and I kept missing each other for two years—whenever I was in London, he would be in Australia, and when he would be in London, I was in Berlin. Although Miles told me on several occasions that he was eager to meet me (and the feeling was reciprocated), this was not to happen until our last visit to London from Berlin, just before we returned to America. As I recall, we spent an idyllic few hours in his Notting Hill flat, lying back and batting a red balloon back and forth as we talked about the potential of play and ecstasy for totally transforming human society.

Richard was more convinced of this than anyone I have ever met and seemed to think it was an imminent prospect for all of humanity rather than an eventual one. I think that by that time some of us had seen our writing attract so much attention and admiration—as well as anger and opposition —that we had become a bit too sure that we were ourselves the advance wave of humanity instead of just propagandists for it. It is this sort of overenthusiasm and over-belief in one's own propaganda that I myself have always tried to avoid in my writing, however urgent the cause may have seemed at the moment.

In any case, Richard held the floor at some length about his theory that work would soon be unnecessary, that the whole work ethic was therefore already antiquated, that it was just people's stupidity that stopped them from seeing this. He boasted that he had told off David Frost on television for trying to claim the contrary, telling Frost that he wasn't really working on television, he was simply playing, and he ought to have the honesty to admit it. Richard seemed absolutely convinced that the world was his oyster in the way that only a witty young colonial who has made a mark for himself in London can believe. He was off for the Duke of Bedford's that afternoon, and he seemed surprised that I showed no great ambition for hobnobbing with the elite myself or trying to promote my own skills on television. He was at that time an odd combination of committed revolutionary and opportunist gadabout, though the former trait most usually prevailed.

I don't know how he feels about these subjects today after the long legal ordeal which English society finally subjected him to. I do know that I still feel fairly sure that his ideas may prove right...one day. But right after Ilene and I left him that afternoon, we began to express certain reservations about his thoughts on the work ethic. We had only recently started taking planes and were soon to make our first transatlantic flight to America. We speculated what kind of society it might be, if all the people who were required for us to take our flight were to accept Richard's ideas literally and walk off the job, or if all the nurses and doctors in our hospitals were to do the same thing.

As practicing artists, we also probably had a better idea of what working with one's hands entailed than Richard did, and we had spent some hours speculating on which jobs in our society could really be subjected to the allegedly all-purpose solution of automation, and which could not. We were appalled to conclude that a vast number of these tasks could probably never be automated, even with the most modern technology available. Although some of these tasks might eventually surrender to new techniques, many exceptions would still be left. What was even more appalling, those jobs most demeaning and humiliating to perform—the ones typically performed by untouchables in India—seemed to be among those least amenable to technological solutions. So we were obliged to conclude with some sadness that Richard's vision was still some distance in the future, assuming people could really habituate themselves to the problems of living in a true leisure society in the first place.

Speaking of jobs, two interesting offers were to come my way in these last weeks before we returned to America. We had been asked to create a happening for a project called Pavilions in the Park, a program partly inspired by events of the previous years in New York's Central Park. The Lord Chamberlain's office was just about to be abolished in its role as play censor, and we decided to do a mock funeral for the Lord Chamberlain, combine this with some performance of some dramatic sketches I had written, and invite our theatre friends to it.

Jeremy Brooks of the Royal Shakespeare came down to help us and constructed most of our coffin for us. While doing so he told us he was quitting as Literary Manager of the Shakespeare to pursue a film career and asked me if I would like to be considered as his successor. I turned him down, saying that we would soon be returning to America to promote our light devices and after that we would probably be staying in Berlin a while longer. Actually, my reason as usual was my health, combined with my disinclination to endure long rehearsal periods with scripts I didn't like. But my health was the main reason, for I would have had to make constant trips between London and Stratford, something quite beyond my stamina (and I had also become aware of the strain this was placing even on Jeremy's strong constitution). I was nonetheless extremely pleased with his offer as it tickled my pride even to be considered for the job, and it also meant that the period of misunderstanding between us was now over.

A few days later, Miles invited us to his home and asked me if I would consider taking over the editorship of I.T. This too pleased me and also meant the end of any hard feelings there may have been between Miles and myself over our tiff after the police raid, but here too I was obliged to say no. For a while I toyed in my imagination with the mischief I might be able to wreak if I were to accept both jobs, somehow manage to hold on to both of them, and play them off against each other. One of them was the most powerful job in the counter-culture, the other was one of the most important positions in England's orthodox culture. Such an opportunity to provoke outrage and scandal was very appealing, but I had  no choice but to turn down both offers.

Our funeral for the Lord Chamberlain got written up in Time and the English papers, despite a mishap that occurred at the last minute. The drama school whose students I was using for my dramatic sketches discovered their charges would be following the coffin as mourners and chanting obscure Latinistic obscenities while we carried it to its burial place. Their principal forbade them to take part, but we made our point anyway. A week later there was a big party for all those artists who had taken part in the Pavilions in the Park program that summer. It was a happy occasion, with rock music, a giant inflatable covered with bouncing and cavorting English artists, and a large open fire on which delicious hamburgers were being roasted. We enjoyed the outright revelry and reflected on how much England had changed in the five years we had been there.

The next day we boarded a giant American airplane, grim, grey, and metallic. Only a few hours later we were eating hamburger again, this time in a grim, grey steak joint on Sixth Avenue, just north of Eighth Street in the Village. We were tired, somewhat depressed, and extremely confused. But we were back home.

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