The Village Moving Through Here

235 pages; $5.95.

MEMORIES, especially memories within a political or cultural movement, have always been exploitable commodities. When swathed in the rhetoric of one side or the other, they gain momentum and become issues: impounded in books and supported by experts, they gain time and become history. But rarely are they presented to us without the benefit of afterglow or hindsight-and yet it is only when they stand alone that they permit us to remember the past in its own peculiar light and to see the present as growing from that past.

Moving Through Here is a collection of memories such as the latter. The book consists of a series of articles written by a young staff writer for The Village Voice between the summers of 1967 and 1968. The articles center around the people and events that were characteristic of the new culture emerging in New York's East Village and the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Don McNeill was a participant-observer of this culture, and he recorded its moments as they were happening, and as they accepted him, without any postmortem analysis or morning-after perspectives, McNeill presents the growing pains of the counter-culture intact and unviolated-the reader is free to judge them for himself against the chaotic results of the present-day aftermath.

The book's contents are divided into two sections. The articles in the first give brief sketches of the new life-style emerging in the East Village. They report on the actual manifestations of that life-style-the drugs, the communal living, the Be-Ins, the street life-as well as the community that was growing up around it and the key figures who were helping to bring it all together. Personalities now quite familiar stray casually across the pages-Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Country Joe and the Fish, Timothy Leary. Everything is new and exciting in McNeill's eyes, and he talks about the community's development as if it were a shining, delicate toy, to be handled carefully and with restraint.

The second part of the book is devoted to the San Francisco scene-the origins of the Height, the "summer of love" and the following autumn, when the hippie movement was declared dead, murdered by the media. From there, the book shifts back to the East, keeping pace with the changing vibrations, as the love-peace-flower power ethic finally dissolves, and the Movement begins to splinter.

THE ARTICLES were originally written for a newspaper, with a deadline never too far ahead, and McNeill's style reflects this momentary character. A certain amount of professionalism tempers his rather casual attitude, and he manages a degree of objectivity despite his obvious sympathies with his subjects. The fact that McNeill wrote each article without any thought to or connection with any of the others, is valuable to the reader, for it permits him to make his own observations and conclusions without having to sift through any that were already there. The author doesn't try to analyze or measure the changes that are taking place in the Movement as he writes about it, but the evidence is laid out before you, as the tone of his writings changes with the tone of the community. The respected policemen of the first part of the book become the pigs of the second. United community leaders from one article suddenly reappear as leaders of opposing factions in another. The flower power ethic, gently regarded in the beginning of the book, is nothing but a myth by its end.

It is difficult, however, to overcome entirely the distance that time creates between the reader and Moving Through Here. McNeill's wonder and excitement over the things of which he writes evokes a certain amount of nostalgia, but it is often not easy to share his feelings. The Movement lost its innocence in Chicago, and much of its joy has turned to a cynicism necessary for its survival, McNeill died in August 1968, shortly before the Democratic Convention. He did not live to see the chaos and disillusionment that were to come in its wake. But the book preserves his dreams, and the dreams of those he writes about as they were when they were still intact. And even though their reality has faded, it is good to have this reminder of their promise.