Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
That bio doesn't sound like Carlos.  Is that episode online somewhere?
I met Carlos, and would recognize him, if it is indeed him.
  

    
Peter, I enjoyed the passages on Burroughs.  Leary's letter to him
sums up the project and its ironies, I think.  Can you tell us more
about that and other attempts to recruit artists like Thelonius Monk to
the cause?  

I was vaguely aware of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, mostly from
reviews of Nicholas Schou's book, Orange Sunshine.  How did they get
involved with Leary?      
  

    
Once Ginsberg decided to help the process, the recruiting went very
well. Among the recognizable artists and intellectuals who took
psilocybin as part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project were Robert
Lowell, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Kerouac, William
Burroughs, Charles Olson, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barney
Rosset, Muriel Rukyser, LeRoi Jones… For the most part, Ginsberg had
the "in" and Leary swept in with the credentials, the follow-up
questions, and the pills. It was a powerful one-two punch and they were
very successful at garnering volunteers. 

Nicholas' book is definitely the place to go for info on the
Leary-Brotherhood connection. The inner circle of the Brotherhood
revered Leary and The Psychedelic Experience and when Leary moved back
West he connected with them. They were the ones who put up the money
for the Weather Underground to break Leary out of prison. Between
Leary's notoriety and the Brotherhood's, their relationship speeded the
demise of all involved; there was just way too much high level drug
activity and publicity for the Feds to go unpunished.  
  

    
The government's role in LSD research still isn't widely known,
despite some excellent books on the topic. Soon after that research
indicated LSD couldn't be weaponized, its private use was prohibited. 
In between, of course, came Ken Kesey, the Pranksters, Acid Tests, etc.


Peter, can you talk about the disjunction between the Ginsberg-Leary
partnership, at least as it was originally drawn up, and what was
happening in and around La Honda? Many have heard about the Millbrook
encounter, but I didn't realize until I read your book that the spirit
behind the Pranksters' visit was a kind of challenge to that
partnership.  
  

    
Does Bill Wilson work into this narrative or had he ended his
association with Leary prior to the Ginsberg connection?
  

    
I'll take the short question first... No, Bill W. doesn't come into
WHS b/c he wasn't part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project proper. I did
have him in an earlier draft, but he didn't make the final cut for the
book. That's a tough door to open without making it an entire chapter
and it just took me too far astray my intention. That said, the
connection between Bill Wilson, AA, and psychedelics is an interesting
one and there was some good research done (pre testing ban)on giving
psychs to alcoholics - along the same lines as the MDMA and psilocybin
testing currently going on with terminally ill patients and soliders
suffering from PTSD.
  

    
The Pranksters' visit to Millbrook is definitely a fascinating story.
Obviously Tom Wolfe famously wrote it up in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(which I'm told is currently being filmed) and that served as the
definitive account for a long time. However, Wolfe was traveling with
the Pranksters, so his take on it was securely from their perspective.
In WHS, I looked at it from a greater distance and took the Leary
camp's version into account. From their take, they were coming off a
long trip and were just starting to shut-down when The Bus came rolling
up the driveway, smoke bombs, blaring music, etc. Rather than deal
with this strange new wrinkle, most of the house just retreated to
their rooms. Leary says he was just returning from business travels and
was very sick in bed with the flu. So that left Richard Alpert to
welcome the group and give the tour.

In short, Millbrook was taken off guard by the visit and it isn't hard
to imagine how overwhelming the entrance could have been. The
Pranksters certainly had a vision of how it would all go down and the
reality didn't meet their expectations. It's also important to remember
that the Millbrook group had been experiencing increasing brushes with
the law and they were trying to assimilate that into their open
lifestyle. So they were surely wary of the attention The Bus drew to
their compound as well.

That aside, there was a philosophical difference between Leary's
approach and the Prankster approach. Leary was more about guiding the
trip, providing the right "set and setting" and using psychedelics to
open the mind to new ideas, spirituality, psychological insights, etc.
The Prankster's certainly overlapped with those goals, however (and the
name says it all) the approach was more about confronting (pranking,
freaking out, perpetrating hilarity & stimulating the unexpected) so
that the trippers would come face-to-face with their own established
thought and behavior patterns. I've often thought of these approaches
as Left and Right brain illustrated geographically, at that time, as
East and West coast.  

 

  
  

    
Yes, I see what you mean, and nicely put.  

One other threat to the program, I guess, was Andrew Weil's article in
the Harvard Crimson.  (It ran, I think, the same month that *Cuckoo's
Nest* appeared.)  Weil's description of the Harvard program required an
immediate response, though in same ways it articulated Ginsberg's and
Leary's highest hopes. How would you characterize that exchange?       
  

    
Sorry I'm late here, I had a major deadline.

Peter, thanks for writing this book!  I enjoyed it and learned a lot, 
despite the fact that I've been studying Ginsberg in-depth for more than 
35 years, and (as most of you know) was one of his teaching assistants at 
Naropa.  I was also interested in Leary as a kid, though that interest 
waned over time as I realized how much of what he was saying was just hype 
and blarney.

Peter Richardson, you said:

> We may be in trouble if Allen Ginsberg
 is the grounded, sensible one in our partnership.

I guess?  I know such snark is nearly de rigeur these days when discussing
the Beats, but Ginsberg *was* notably grounded and sensible, by any
standard, not just Beat or Hippie standards.  In fact, his political views
(see the song/poem "Capitol Air," for example) have stood the test of time
surpassingly well, compared to the public statements of many other people
of his era, some of them leaders of nations.

Peter Conners, how did your opinions of Ginsberg and Leary change as you 
wrote the book?
  

    
Andrew Weil was reporting and directing the reportage on the
Psilocybin Project for the Harvard Crimson. Leary felt that the first
article portrayed the Project as overly optimistic about the prospects
of psilocybin in Psychology, so he wrote a response insisting that they
were, in fact, proceeding in a measured and cautious way. Once the
Crimson/Weil latched onto the Project it helped open the group up to
more scrutiny on campus and also outside of Harvard. In a sense, Weil
and the Crimson blew Leary's cover. The articles became more
sensational and even when there wasn't much to report, the Crimson made
the Project front page news. It turned out that not only was Weil
directing the Crimson on this reporting, but he was also acting as a
spy for the administration and reporting directly to them about Leary's
activities. In short, during his Harvard days Weil was no friend to
Leary or the Project and his efforts helped speed their demise.   

Don Lattin's book The Harvard Psychedelic Club delves into the whole
Weil-Leary dynamic in detail and explores what the motivations were for
Weil's behavior, so I'd highly recommend that book for people more
curious about the Weil connection.
  

    
Hi, Steve, good to have you here... 

I was much more in-tune with Ginsberg when I started writing the book,
so my perception of him changed very little. I'm a poet and have been
reading and studying the Beats for a good 20 years including the
letters, biographies, etc. So my grounding in Ginsberg's story,
motivations, and connections was solid from the get-go.

I was aware of the big picture Leary, but hadn't spent nearly as much
time thinking and reading about him prior to writing WHS. The
opportunity to contemplate his life and role was a big motivator for me
in taking on this project. In general, I like to write about things
that I know something about, but that I'd like to learn more about.
That learning part is what keeps me going.

Leary is a tricky subject, no doubt about it. One of his famous quotes
is "You get the Timothy Leary you deserve." That is the most telling
and accurate phrase to sum up the challenges of writing about him.
There are many different Learys - some of them quite admirable, some of
them abhorrent. My favorite Leary is the Harvard era Leary and that
was really the focus of my research. There was a sincerity and purity
to his efforts at that time that reflected a respect for psychology,
his colleagues, and the potential of the drugs. Even after all the time
I spent reflecting on the two men, I still get an electric charge when
I think about Leary and Ginsberg sitting together at Leary's kitchen
table after Ginsberg's first trip at Harvard and planning how they
would proceed. It's truly a flashpoint moment and I believe in the
purity of the motivations that sparked it. 

Unfortunately, the more heat Leary drew to his activities, the more he
had to become TIMOTHY LEARY to pay the bills to fight the legal
battles to keep the trip going. It's a pretty common scenario: a famous
countercultural figure gets trapped in a charicature of themselves and
can't escape. Ironically, in trying to shut Leary up, the law was
forcing him out onto college campuses, media, etc. to spread his
message, because that's how Leary was making his money. The situation
quickly grew out of control and, without a doubt, Leary got off on
being at the center of the storm.

       
  

    
Steve, welcome to the conversation.  De rigeur snark?  What Peter's
book shows (among other things) is that Ginsberg was the sensible one
in the partnership.  Also that his public image was linked to the
systematic derangement of the senses. That's not usually associated
with grounded and sensible in the public mind, and Ginsberg knew that
very well.  That's why he wanted to partner with Leary.  






   
  

    
I suppose. I suspect that Ginsberg's experiences with his mother Naomi's
schizophrenia, as chronicled in his great poem "Kaddish," gave him mixed 
feelings about "the systematic derangement of the senses" from the very 
beginning. It's certainly not what he was promoting from the late '60s on;  
even his advocacy of LSD was more along the lines of "widen the area of 
consciousness" than "undermine consciousness." And certainly after he met 
his Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trunga in 1970, he was all about grounding 
the mind in meditation rather than getting high -- via drugs, chanting, 
meditation, or anything else.

Just saying, many people have a kind of naive view of the Beats, and 
Ginsberg in particular, that he promoted madness as a way to live.  
He was more a spokesman for a wider view of sanity.
  

    
I didn't actually see that as snark, de rigueur or not -- just an amusing 
comment. And as down-to-earth and sane as Ginsberg was, he was also pretty 
trippy. I don't have anything like the background Steve has, of course, 
but I do have a little first-hand knowledge: I met Ginsberg and chanted 
with him in the park during the 1968 thing in Chicago and took a memorable 
long walk with him (just me and him) up Michigan Avenue the night of the 
violence there. He was a relatively sensible but also kind of zany 
counterculture figure, ya gotta admit.
  

    
fom, will wonders never cease!  That's wonderful.  I wish you had a 
recording of that conversation.
  

    
Oh so do I.

When we got to his hotel, he said "I'd invite you in, but Burroughs is 
up in the room and he doesn't like women!" and gave me a nice little kiss 
goodnight. I was so starstruck. (Of course I knew he was gay, I didn't 
have a crush, was just starstruck.)

Also remember that he talked about how all is one; and as we were crossing 
the bridge, he gestured up at the tall buildings and said "This reminds me 
of Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!"
  

    
Loving this conversation.  And <fom>, who says you can't have a crush
on a man you know is gay?
  

    
This is why I love the Well (and why I give it a shout-out in the WHS
acknowledgments page). What a wonderful story. Thanks for sharing it. I
know there are a whole bunch of other Ginsberg stories out on the
perimeter of the Well right now too. Anyone care to share? I'd be very
curious if anyone has a good Leary story/anecdote to share too.  
  

    
I don't have any great Ginsberg stories, though I appreciated his
performance at Harper & Row when I worked there in 1988.  Harper's
corporate offices were staid, and I was secretly delighted when
Ginsberg pulled out his squeezebox and chanted a poem about a new
boyfriend. It was a good example of Helen Vendler's comment that
Ginsberg was "responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry."
  

Two miscellaneous comments: 

1.  My late uncle was what Leary was supposed to be in this
partnership--a respectable psychologist.  He ran clinics, tested
Sirhan, testified in the RFK murder trial, etc.  He also took acid
under clinical conditions in Long Beach as part of his training, I
think.  He was a combative fellow, a heavyweight boxer in college, but
when he came home that night, he was as gentle as a lamb.  My aunt was
distressed because the dinner (specifically, the gravy) hadn't come out
right.  "Everything's going to be all right," he said soothingly. 
That's when she knew something was up.  

2.  The Bill Wilson topic came up earlier.  This morning I read Clancy
Martin's article ("The Drunk's Club: A.A., the Cult that Cures") in
the current issue of Harper's.  He includes several references to
Wilson and his penchant for psychedelics.   
  

    <scribbled by digaman Sun 19 Dec 10 09:44>
  

    
 I have too many Ginsberg stories to tell.  But here's one:
 
 In 1987 or so, he was giving at reading at San Jose State University.  I
 was traveling with him and checked in with him at the San Jose Hilton.  
 When the bellboy informed him that he had been given the presidential
 suite, he excitedly ran into the bathroom and said, "Does that mean 
 Reagan took a crap in this toilet bowl?"  Later, we were walking down the 
 bright pink hallway of the hotel, swathed in cheerful carpets and 
 wallpaper, and passed a dank and dreary janitorial closet with the door
 left open, revealing a rusty pail and mop. "That's what I always think is 
 going to happen," Ginsberg said. "Some door is going to open in the 
 middle of the nice, beautiful world and reveal how HORRIBLE everything 
 really is!"
  

    
That reflects many aspects of all kind of angles in life.
  

    
That's a great moment.  

I know you have too many stories... but, sheesh, Steve, you gotta
share these trippy poet realtiy perception stories.  That door opens in
the middle of the nice AND horrible world, and reveals something ...
powerful in its own right.
  

    
Totally.  That door is the First Noble Truth.
  

    
Excellent story, Steve, thanks for sharing that one.