Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
And now Inkwell.vue welcomes one of our own, Peter Conners to discuss
his latest book, "White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of
Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg."


Peter Conners' published books include the memoir Growing Up Dead: The
Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead; the poetry collection
Of Whiskey and Winter; and the novella Emily Ate the Wind. His newest
book, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary
& Allen  Ginsberg, was published by City Lights in November 2010. His
forthcoming books are the poetry collection The Crows Were Laughing in
their Trees (White Pine Press, April 2011), and JAMerica: An Oral
History of Jam Bands, Festivals, and Sharing the Groove (Da Capo, Fall
2013). He is also editor of PP/FF: An Anthology which was published by
Starcherone Books in April 2006. He lives with his wife and three kids
in Rochester, New York where he works as Publisher of the
not-for-profit literary press BOA Editions.


Leading us through the psychedelic voyage is Peter Richardson.  

Peter Richardson is a lecturer in the humanities department at San
Francisco State University, editorial director at PoliPointPress, and
chair of the California Studies Association.  His publications include
A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine
Changed America (2009) and American Prophet: The Life and Work of
Carey McWilliams (2005). He has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley and
lives in Richmond, California. 


Take it away, Peter(s)!
  

    

Welcome, Peter. I've been looking forward to this conversation. I
ingested *White Hand Society* very quickly after it arrived, and I
recommend it highly.

Before we get to the book, I'd like to hear more about your decision
to write it in the first place. What drew you to this topic?  I gather
from your City Lights interview that you came across Allen Ginsberg's
archives at Stanford almost by accident. Can you tell us about that?  

I'm interested, too, in how you came to understand your book's unique
contribution. Before reading it, I would have said it was a challenge
to write originally about Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, or the social
history of LSD. Did you see a gap in that literature, or did you think
of your contribution more as a unique way into or through that
material?
  

    
Thanks, Peter, and hello to everyone tuning in!

Let's get right to it: 

The seed for WHS was planted in the mid-90s. I had graduated from SUNY
Potsdam college and was driving around the country in a blue Ford
Ranger with a futon mattress in the back. I'd stay with people, pick up
random jobs, write, read, then travel some more. One of my friends
(for anyone who has read it, I'm talking about "Shasta" from Growing Up
Dead) was in law school at Stanford. I knew that Stanford had
purchased Ginsberg's archives, so I asked him to get me in to see them.
As I remember it, he signed in with his I.D. and then we just pulled a
switcheroo and I walked into special collections and requested the
boxes (sorry, Stanford... you guys are the best...and it all turned out
okay in the end). I didn't have a particular focus and I definitely
wasn't thinking about researching for a book. I just saw it as part of
my writer's education.

Ginsberg was an astounding collector and his archives are rich, rich,
rich. There were many things in there that were just plain cool
(cocktail napkins with scribbled notes from Kerouac, etc.), but I was
most intrigued and intellectually stimulated by the correspondence with
Leary. The letters cover a wide range of emotions, experiences,
geographies, mutual friends/causes/organizations... On a micro level,
they tell the tale of a friendship (or "partnership") between two truly
unique men. On a macro level, they tell a fascinating story about
mid-twentieth century America.

The 15-odd (sometimes very odd) years between first reading those
letters and actually starting WHS served to germinate the idea in my
mind and reinforce to me that this was a story worth telling. (I am
getting into the second part of your question now, Peter). While a
great deal has been written about both Leary and Ginsberg, I hadn't
read any books specifically addressing their relationship and its
impact on mid-XXth century American culture. So, yes, I saw that there
was a gap and felt that I could make a contribution by investigating,
probing, and writing about that relationship. 
  

    

The book is about a (psychedelic) partnership between Ginsberg and
Leary. Can you talk about the nature and purpose of that partnership,
what each man brought to it, and how it changed over time?  
  

    
The partnership developed out of a mutual desire to share the
psilocybin experience with an established and influential group of
artists and intellectuals. They both believed that the use of the drug
could benefit people creatively and psychologically. Ginsberg was a
great networker and had access to many of these people. Leary had solid
academic credentials, a Harvard position, and access to psilocybin
through Sandoz Chemical. They both understood that if they combined
their efforts they could get the drug to these artists and
intellectuals. That would aid Leary in his research (he had the
"subjects" provide follow-up information after the trip which was then
gathered and evaluated through the Harvard Psilocybin Project) and it
would allow Ginsberg to share this powerful, transformative
hallucinatory experience with people he thought would benefit from it.
There was also the mutual belief that if they could get enough
influential people behind the drug before the government caught on, it
would be harder to demonize and criminalize it. Leary was more
convinced of that than Ginsberg though. Ginsberg had been through a lot
more drug experiences by the time they met and had a more measured
opinion about how the public and government would handle the promotion
of psilocybin. That difference speaks to how their relationship evolved
over time too. Leary ended up spending the next dozen years preaching
the benefits of psychedelics and becoming "the pope of dope" and the
public face of psychedelics. Ginsberg was always a poet first and
increasingly shifted his visibility and influence to support political
and humanitarian causes. Their paths certainly crossed back-and-forth
for the rest of their lives, but my premise is that the solid core of
that partnership started in Leary's kitchen at Harvard in November 1960
and culiminated with the Human Be-In in San Francisco in January 1967.
  

    

Folks, feel free to jump in on this.  

Peter, if I had to check a box, I found Ginsberg the more sympathetic
character of the two.  But as you say, Leary's path was also
intriguing, not least because he gave up the role of Scientist--at
Harvard, no less.  Playing that role was supposed to be his big
contribution to the partnership. Over time, he seemed to be going for a
kind of mystical or poetic register, but Ginsberg was already covering
that, as per the plan. 

Do you think Leary's move away from his original role affected the
reception of psychedelics in this country?  That is, would it have made
any difference if Leary had been able to provide more academic
legitimacy? I realize that another, somewhat more rambunctious, part of
that reception was playing out in Palo Alto and San Francisco 

   
  

    
For our offsite readers, if you'd like to participate, email your
comments to <inkwell@well.com>
  

    
Ultimately, no. I don't think one person - no matter who - could have
made America embrace psychedelics. A Gallup poll taken in October of
this year revealed that 46% of Americans are in favor of legalizing
marijuana, yet we know where that stands. It's hard to imagine a
well-meaning psychology professor breaking through that sort of static
to secure a safe haven for psychedelics.     
  

    
I read the book and really enjoyed it, but did not make note of the 
questions I'd like to ask (except for one mundane one that I'll ask 
later). So I must go back through it, because I know I had some 
questions in mind.

One thing that struck me is how ridiculous most of those guys look from 
the vantage point of 2010. I was there in those days, and I actually 
dropped out for several years (and turned on and tuned in), and now it all 
looks... just silly. And amazingly snobbish.

The idea that somehow the actualities of human life on the planet would 
fade away and we could all live idyllic lives without things like 
education, science (other than empirical psychedelic research), 
engineering, roads, buildings, medicine, everyday work, everyday workers 
-- that line of thought seems quite insane to me now.

So I guess I would ask -- do you think Leary was sincere when he suggested 
that we should just drop out? Do you think Snyder was sincere when he 
suggested that there should be a big wall around Chicago, and the rest of 
us could live a wild life in the woods?

If sincere, weren't they totally in cloud cuckoo land? And if not sincere, 
what was their objective?

(I'm leaving out Ginsberg because he never dropped out, as far as I can 
tell; he was an industrious, serious working poet all along.)
  

    
Also -- I look at parti (a way to see who is participating) and it looks 
like around 40 people have been here today. I'm wondering if any of them 
read the book, and what they have to say about it.
  

    
I think Snyder was very sincere because he was actually living it. It
wasn't theoretical to him. He had his land, his people, his kids, and
he was making a real effort to build a sustainable life "off the grid."
The sincerity in his efforts and also his sincere effort to
acknowledge that he didn't have the answers, but was actively striving
for a way to simplify and humanize his life, comes through in the
Houseboat Summit at the end of the book. 

That said, the Summit was a group of poets and philsophers sitting
around talking together... and there will always be a high level of
metaphor, wit, and untethered-ideas-from-cloud-cuckoo-land floating
around in a group like that. That's what poets and philosophers, bless
them, are for.

That said, you can also hear Watts, Ginsberg and Snyder pushing Leary
to explain how one survives post drop out. And you can hear him fall
down in giving any concrete suggestions. In other words, they were
bashing their dreamer heads up against the same reality questions you
pose above... and while they had historical anecdotes, metaphor,
poetry, stories, and high aspirations, there was no sense of reaching a
sustainable solution. You can feel the frustration in their
discussion. It's a very powerful, provocative and telling dialogue -
that's why I couldn't bring myself to chop it up, paraphrase, etc. It
was just too revealing and begged to be a stand-alone addition to the
book. 
 
 
  
  

    

I got a lot out of reading the Houseboat Summit. Yes, it showed the
thinness of the political program, and many of the ideas and
aspirations haven't aged well.  We may be in trouble if Allen Ginsberg
is the grounded, sensible one in our partnership.  But I'm less
inclined to dismiss the utopian impulses behind that conversation as
lunacy.  I find myself wishing we had more of that energy today.  (Or
maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.)

Peter, in retrospect, what were some of the more fruitful aspects of
the partnership you document in the book? 
  
  

    
I'm so glad that you included the whole Houseboat Summit. It's 
fascinating. 

Thanks for your answers. 

Whoa -- I just found a recording of the PILL press conference:

<http://www.archive.org/details/PsychedeliaLa6-pill-press-conf-sf-1974>

I listened to this live on a Bay Area radio station, maybe KSAN, and 
found it riveting.

For those who haven't read the book, this is the press conference where 
Ginsberg, Alpert, Jerry Rubin, and Leary's son -- and maybe others, I 
forget, haven't listened yet -- denounced Leary after he got out of prison 
by informing on his former attorney. I remember Alpert and Ginsberg 
discussing the discinction between "rascal" and "scoundrel" and agreeing 
that Leary had been the former but had become the latter.
  

    
First of all, I want to say that I agree wholeheartedly that we need
more of this energy today. That was a big part of why I wanted to do
the book - as a reminder and also a way to furthur instruct myself and
readers about how this energy was generated. Whether you like these
guys or not, they spurred a lot of thoughtful activity around
alternatives to the dominant acquistive culture. We ignore and dismiss
that activity at our own peril. That's my answer to your question about
fruitful aspects of their legacy as well. Ginsberg, Leary, and many
others helped push an alternative agenda and outlook that has become so
seeded in our culture, it's easy to dismiss their role. Whenever I see
soccer moms carrying yoga mats, I think of them. When I hear people
say, "I'm not religious, but I am spiritual." When my kids take
recycling and conservation for granted. When I see a new vegetarian or
macrobiotic restaurant open in Upstate NY. There is a whole host of
activities (not theories or pie in the sky, but real actions) that have
become mainstream as a result of these guys (and many others)
presenting new practices to American culture. Obviously we're not all
the way there yet... lord knows... but they helped move the marker
forward enough to celebrate as a success. 

 
  

    
Very well said.
  

    

Yes, good point. A quick question about politics, which isn't the
focus of the book.  You note that many leftists (not to mention
conservatives) saw Leary's message as "dangerously irresponsible," and
you quote Abbie Hoffmann: "I saw the reverse of Leary's trip: change
the world and you'll change your mind. Total absorption with the
internal voyage made you easy to exploit and convert." 

Does that charge make sense to you?  Or is there a better way to
understand the politics of the "cosmic campaign"? 
  

    
Peter - before I answer (and assuming you have them handy) can you
give me the page numbers on those two quotes? I just want to refresh my
memory before I answer. Thanks. 
  

    
The “pioneer effort in the government’s anti-marijuana campaign”
Reefer Madness was “made in 1936 in close collaboration with the FBI”. 
This video continues to explain the tape on the back of its cover
saying it was intended to educate the public about narcotics.  Need I
call this a conspiracy?  

Don Juan appeared on “What’s my line” and spoke about his book.  The
spirituality of peyote was captured by that book well enough that I
could only read one chapter at a time with a nap between.  The
“spirits” about which the book detailed affected me although I knew
little of peyote.  

My 2003 word recommends ‘poet’ when I misspell ‘peyote’. ;-0

I too need to reread the book.  The above I put together last night
until my battery stopped.  
  

    
;-) By the way, greetings.
  

    
Clare, do you mean Castenada was on What's My Line?  I'd love to see
that.
  

    

Page 207 for the quotes, Peter.  While I'm here, another question. 
You say that Leary formed drinking clubs and that his wife had a
drinking problem, took tranquilizers, and eventually committed suicide.
 (My note in the margin: "Drugs but no ecstasy").  Can you talk a bit
about alcohol?  I had the feeling that it was thematically significant.
  

    
Thanks for the page reference, Peter. Those quotes lead directly into
a paraphrasing of the Houseboat Summit (which didn't satisfy me enough
and led to my including the entire Summit at the end) and they do get
to the heart of the split in the wake of the Be-In. The leaders of the
anti-war movement (just like the makers of war) were counting on the
country's youth to fill their ranks. Then along comes Leary making
headlines by telling them all to "drop out" and - as he makes clear
during the Summit - not get involved in politics, including protest.
So, yes, there was a sense that Leary was acting irresponsibly and
derailing the anti-war movement and the Summit was called to figure out
what was behind this "drop out" philosophy. The "dangerous" part comes
in when we consider the very real stakes of kids getting shipped off
to Vietnam. 

re: alcohol, I wouldn't go so far as to call it thematically
significant to my book. It's more of a background reality. There was
drinking going on throughout this period, but I didn't feel that
alcohol was significant enough to the specific Ginsberg-Leary
relationship to warrant an isolated study. The differences between
alcohol, psychedelics, opiates, etc are well-documented and it's
certainly worth looking at how drugs-of-choice impact different
generations. It's seems we're living in a pill era now. Leary was a
good bit older than most of the other countercultural "leaders" of the
60s, so he had some generational differences and biases (not to mention
a fixation on youth) and I believe his relationship with alcohol falls
under that category. That's not to diminish the significance of his
father being an alcoholic, his 1st wife committing suicide after a
drinking bout, the role alcohol seemed to play in the harrowing
"O'Donell incident" and any number of other places where alcohol
negatively impacted events in his life. I'd venture to say a whole
other book could be written on Leary's relationship to alcohol, but in
many ways it'd be a study of how alcohol was used and viewed by
mid-xxth century America...     
  

    
(You don't normally see this many Peter's all in one place :-)
  

    
Because it's a little slow here, I'll ask my mundane question:

Page 228 says that the escaping Leary was "stashed in a duplex in North 
Oakland, where he bathed and got some much needed sleep."

Any idea just where that duplex was? I have a personal reason for asking; 
I live in a duplex in North Oakland that's around the corner from the 
former Black Panthers HQ, and that was occupied by Angela Davis for many 
years (though not as far back as 1970 -- I think she lived here in the 
'80s). I don't know who lived here before Davis. Anyway, I'm wondering if 
Leary might have been "stashed" in what is now my place.
  

    
Ha, yes, there is definitely an inordinate number of Peters in this
talk. I hardly ever meet anyone else named Peter. Guess I was looking
in the wrong places.

Sorry, I don't know the address in Oakland. 
  

    
http://www.tv.com/whats-my-line/episode-344/episode/95495/summary.html

I hoped that worked... They are calling him Luis.