and both are worth reading, if you like that kind of shit.
Luc Sante in Sunday's Times Book Review: IT has been a mere 10 years since Timothy Leary's death, but already his career seems improbable. A onetime psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs for personal growth, Leary loomed large in the 1960's as something of a cross between a pop star and a religious leader. Both those roles involve performance, but Leary, although blessed with considerable charm, was not a terribly effective performer. He didn't sing or dance; he was a vague speaker and a hopeless writer; his personality, up close, did not inspire confidence. And although he was among the major protuberances in the cultural bouillabaisse we call The Sixties, he was not much of a 60's type himself, as Robert Greenfield demonstrates in his thorough and judicious biography. While he may have been the leading spokesmodel for LSD, Leary remained to the end an old-fashioned booze hound, as well as a snake-oil peddler of the most traditional American sort. Had he been born a decade or two earlier, he would probably have been offering to cure arthritis through the application of the electric belt.
Nearly every page is riveting in "Timothy Leary," which unfolds like the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written had he lived to the age of 120. Greenfield is not one of those biographers who set out to besmirch their subjects and deplore their lives, and for whom every detail is an indictment. Neither, unlike many, does he seek foreshadowing in every trespass of his subject's youth. Nevertheless, he cannot exactly airbrush a life that comes so lavishly shadowed: abandonment of the family by professional-drinker father in 1933, when Tim was 13; dismissal from West Point for blatant transport of hooch; suicide of first wife as a consequence of his dogging around — under the banner of non-bourgeois unpossessiveness, of course.
Still, Leary went places. He was ambitious as well as charming and worked his way up the postgraduate ladder to Berkeley and, in 1959, to Harvard. He was initially known as an expert on personality assessment, but, while on a sojourn in Mexico the following year, he was introduced to psilocybin mushrooms, and the experience was so transformative that psychedelics promptly became the central force in his life, his research and his teaching. Along with his colleague Richard Alpert, son of the president of the New Haven Railroad (and today a guru known as Ram Dass), Leary tried to turn on all of Harvard. He was a proselytizer by nature — soon after his arrival at Harvard, his department head had warned him against "using slogans and waving banners" — and psychedelic drugs gave him a full-fledged cause.
It wasn't long before any pretense to scientific detachment fell away and controlled experiments were chucked in favor of missionary zeal and contempt for all mundane exigencies. Chaotic tripping parties ensued, involving students, under "spiritual" or "philosophical" pretexts. In 1963, Harvard — famous for protecting its own — finally choked on the negative publicity and summarily dismissed Leary and Alpert. In the meantime, Leary had set about converting the rest of the world, beginning with the literary and artistic avant-garde. Most were enthusiastic, especially Allen Ginsberg, who brought in all his friends. ("Coach Leary, walking on water wasn't built in a day" was Jack Kerouac's response to the incessant cheerleading.) Leary had also by then reached out to the intellectual pioneers of psychedelia, Aldous Huxley and the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. Although years later Osmond would assess Leary as someone who "lives in an almost totally hypothetical future" and compare his "millennialism" to Hitler's, he and Huxley, in Greenfield's words, "handed the future of psychedelic research to the wrong man."
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Louis Menand in the New Yorker: (Note to posterity: The link in the above line will not persist. Ultimately, neither will any other link. So much for posterity.)
The good Lord—or maybe it was natural selection, but, when you look at the outcome, how plausible is that, really?—gave us, in addition to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, the fantastic variety of fungi with which we share this awesome planet: yeasts, rusts, mildews, mushrooms, and molds. Among them is ergot, a fungus that destroys cereal grasses, particularly rye, and that, when eaten, can cause hallucinations. Ergot is the natural source of lysergic acid, from which lysergic acid diethylamide is readily synthesized—LSD. What purpose, divine or adaptive, this substance might serve was once the subject of a learned debate that engaged scientists, government officials, psychiatrists, intellectuals, and a few gold-plated egomaniacs. Timothy Leary was one of the egomaniacs.
Leary belonged to what we reverently refer to as the Greatest Generation, that cohort of Americans who eluded most of the deprivations of the Depression, grew fat in the affluence of the postwar years, and then preached hedonism and truancy to the baby-boom generation, which has taken the blame ever since. Great Ones, we salute you! Leary was born in 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is also the home town of Dr. Seuss, of whose most famous creation Leary was in many respects the human analogue—a grinning, charismatic, completely irresponsible Lord of Misrule. Leary’s father was a dentist whose career was ruined by alcoholism; he abandoned the family in 1934, ending up as a steward in the merchant marine. Leary’s mother was a fierce guardian of her son’s interests, which required a considerable amount of guarding. Leary was intelligent, and he did not lack ambition, but—as Robert Greenfield meticulously documents in his exhaustive biography, “Timothy Leary” (Harcourt; $28)—his education was a game of chutes and ladders: Holy Cross (where he came near to flunking out after two years), West Point (from which he was obliged to withdraw after being charged with a violation of the honor code), the University of Alabama (from which he was expelled for spending a night in the women’s dorm), the University of Illinois (from which he was drafted into the Army, where he served in a clinic for the rehabilitation of the deaf, in Pennsylvania), Alabama again (which he talked his way back into and from which he finally graduated, by taking correspondence courses), Washington State University (where he got a master’s degree), and, with the help of the G.I. Bill (a welfare fund for Great Ones), Berkeley, from which, now married and with two children, he received a Ph.D. in psychology, in 1950.
There was no more opportune moment to become a psychologist. Psychology in the nineteen-fifties played the role for many people that genetics does today. “It’s all in your head” has the same appeal as “It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere. So the postwar years were a slack time for political activism and a boom time for psychiatry. The National Institute of Mental Health, founded in 1946, became the fastest-growing of the seven divisions of the National Institutes of Health, awarding psychologists grants to study problems like alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and television violence. Ego psychology, a therapy aimed at helping people adapt and adjust, was the dominant school in American psychoanalysis. By 1955, half of the hospital beds in the United States were occupied by patients diagnosed as mentally ill.
The belief that deviance and dissent could be “cured” by a little psychiatric social work (“This boy don’t need a judge—he needs an analyst’s care!”) is consistent with our retrospective sense of the nineteen-fifties as an age of conformity. The darker version—argued, for example, by Eli Zaretsky in his valuable cultural history of psychoanalysis, “Secrets of the Soul”—is that psychiatry became one of the instruments of soft coercion which liberal societies use to keep their citizens in line. But, as Zaretsky also points out, leading critics of conformity and normalcy—Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, Wilhelm Reich—thought that it was all in the head, too. For them, normalcy was the neurosis, for which they prescribed various means of personal liberation, from better drugs to better orgasms. In the early years of the Cold War, personal radicalism, revolution in the head and in the bed, was the safer radicalism. The political kind could get you blacklisted.
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