From work-in-progress:
Rock and roll (as well as dandyism) also overlapped with the “back to the roots” Fabian schooling movement (“a mixture of Freud and Red Indians,” remember). An important member of the Braziers Park community, for example, was Glynn Faithfull, who met Glaister through the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. Faithfull had been an academic at the University of Liverpool, studied the Italian renaissance, and worked for MI6 during World War II. He was married to Baroness Eva Erisso, a former ballerina, and their daughter was the singer and actress Marianne Faithfull. According to Marianne’s second memoir (
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, curiously the same title as Jung’s autobiography), Glynn Faithfull was the person called in to interrogate Heinrich Himmler after Himmler surrendered himself to the US government on realizing that the Nazis would be defeated. It was Faithfull who
allegedly failed to search Himmler well enough to find a cyanide capsule on his person, thereby allowing Himmler to
allegedly take his own life (and be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere). A curious enough little tale, even before noting that this happened during the same period in which, via Operation Paperclip, leading Nazis were being incorporated into the OSS, soon to become the CIA.
Marianne was born the following year, and by her own account she moved to Braziers Park when it first began, in 1950 (she was four), and lived there until she was seven. In her first memoir (
Marianne: An Autobiography), she describes recurring nightmares of “frightening entities” who were “just like my father,” strange men with moustaches who would tickle her and pour hot tea over her. “Every year” she writes, “we took deprived children on an annual camping holiday to the New Forest”—there to participate in “quasi-mystical” rituals. (
Faithfull: An Autobiography, by Marianne Faithfull, Cooper Square Press, 2000, p. 6-7, see
here.)
Faithfull reminisces in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
“Things were madder, wilder, more eccentric, more randy, in the early years—some of the things that went on there were quite peculiar. . . . They appeared to be studying Dante and the Destiny of Man, but what they were also doing was fucking like rabbits—with what were technically the wrong people. . . . There was sex going on everywhere at Braziers. Not exactly an entirely happy and positive experience for a kid, I guess. . . . The mixture of high utopian thought and randy sex might seem incongruous but it was very much of its time—the 1950s—and an uncanny harbinger of the heady free-love, let’s change the world vibe of the sixties. It was the fifties, the intellectual, Bertrand Russell-ish fifties, when Braziers began and there were all these ideas—grand, world-mending ideas, small groups of people isolating themselves from the big bad world to study Big Ideas, ideas about the Nature of Man, the foundations of civilization, the complexities of communicating ideas. Along with the metaphysical deliberations came experiments in group consciousness. This combo—shagging and Schopenhauer—was as rampant at Braziers as it is in the novels of Iris Murdoch. [My father] was a philosopher of the group mind, almost a technician of group dynamics—how to deal with ego within the group.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Marianne Faithfull, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 135-6, 141-2.)
Further along, in a chapter titled “The Girl Factory,” Faithfull describes meeting the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, whom she describes as “an archeologist of myths.” When Faithfull told Calasso about her childhood at Braziers, she recounts, Calasso compared it to a story by the playwright
Frank Wedekind, called
Mine-Haha. Mine-Haha is about a vast girls’ school located inside a castle, where unwanted females are raised from infancy to the age of sixteen, “a sort of geisha finishing school where they are brought up to please others.” At the age of sixteen, these girls
are either placed into show business or prostitution. Faithfull responds to Calasso by insisting, “nobody forced me to go to London and become a pop singer.
Tempted me, definitely,
seduced me into it, but I wasn’t actually
compelled to become a pop singer, whereas the girls in the castle are made to become performers with whips and torture.” Calasso’s response is that he finds it strange how Faithfull “grew up in a similarly cloistered place . . . and at the age of seventeen . . . burst out into the world, trained, in a strange way, for all sorts of things—group politics, sex, books, dance, acting, singing—that were useful to you in your career.” Faithfull agrees that the “group mind concept my father taught at Braziers must have helped me a lot in fitting in. Probably why I fitted in so easily with the Stones.”
“Before the girls are sent out into the world,” Faithfull writes, “they’re examined head to toe, internally, externally, the whole thing. It’s really perverse. Anyway, none of that happened to me, obviously.” Why obviously, I wonder? Faithfull winds up the chapter by mentioning an Italian dance troupe (Gruppo Polline) who created a performance piece based on
Mine-Haha, the themes of which were, “The persistence of memory, isolation, the hesitation about the future, alternating static and frenetic, and
the negation of the body as a result of an education based on theories and exploitation of the young” (emphasis added). She then adds that she wrote the song “In the Factory” with Polly Harvey, inspired by one of Calasso’s essays. She had wanted to call it “The Girl Factory,” she says, but Harvey talked her out of it. Faithfull regretted the change, but added that Polly was “quite intimidating.” (
Memories, Dreams, Reflections; this series of quotes from “The Girl Factory,” p. 218-222.)
Marianne Faithfull met Mick Jagger sometime at the start of her music career in 1964-5, and he wrote her first hit, “As Tears Goes By,” for her (though they didn’t become a couple until 1966). Jagger was just fresh out of the London School of Economics, having got a grant to study there in late 1961 and staying on through to 1963. This two-year period was the same period in which the Stones were first formed and grew into a known act, soon to become “the vanguard of British rock and roll.” Before this Jagger had been working in a psychiatric institution called Bexley Hospital in the summer of 1961, where, by his own account, he learned invaluable lessons about human psychology, as well as losing his virginity to a nurse. (
Mick Jagger by Phillip Norman, ebook
here.)
According to the official story, Jagger ran into old schoolmate Keith Richards “coincidentally” on a train platform in 1961, on his way to LSE, and the rest is history. There’s a well-known anecdote about how Jagger kept on studying to be an accountant even while the Stones were taking off, just in case it should turn out to be a flash in the pan. What’s considerably less well-known (in fact it’s hard to corroborate, my only source so far is the singer
Sally Stevens) is that, besides giving Jagger a grant, LSE also bankrolled the Stones in 1963. Stevens reports a conversation from that year with Derek Bell, Gertrude Stein’s nephew:
“From what I recall of the ensuing conversation, during their first year, students at LSE were allowed to write a grant proposal for project funding from LSE. According to Derek, Mick had written a good grant proposal, using the Rolling Stones as his business model, and asking for financial aid to buy equipment so they could improve their stage sound. Of course, not one member of the Board, including Derek, had much of an idea about the financial soundness of rock music, though obviously it was becoming an economic powerhouse, and they’d sort of heard of the Beatles, but when it came to the niceities[sic] of the business, LSE needed an expert opinion, in this case, me. The Board wanted to know if the Stones had any future, and I was able to say I thought so, based on what I was seeing. Would they be a good risk? ‘Er - yes,’ quoth the expert. So, Mick got some grant money from LSE which he bought gear with, after which he gave LSE the salute, and took off for the sky.”
http://rockphiles.typepad.com/a_life_in ... omics.html
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.