Music Inside

Self-Promotion Pays! Or ‘How the Self Promoters Write History’. That might be the title of a book I’ll never have time to write.

The four central personages of “The Harvard Psychedelic Club” were and still are among the most ardent self-promoters of modern times, as author Don Lattin sporadically discloses. Huston Smith, whom Lattin calls “the teacher”; Richard Alpert, “the seeker’; Timothy Leary, “the trickster”; and Andrew Weil, “the healer” are all portrayed by Lattin as deeply flawed individuals — and that’s accurate enough — as highly influential personages — and that’s certainly true, as far as it goes — and as Shiva-like meldings of destruction and creation. The extent of their megalomania is obvious, but when the original Narcissus stared at his reflection in the still pool, perhaps the face he beheld was truly as handsome as he thought. Lattin himself is of an age, of the `baby boomer’ generation, to have been impacted by the activities of all four. In researching this book, he interviewed three of them (Leary is dead), as well as many of their families and associates. He plainly reveres three of them, and keeps a window open for reverence along with disapprobation for the fourth. He doesn’t beatify them, however. Given the record of their personal lives, beatification would be utter fantasy.

But there was no “Harvard Psychedelic Club” in an explicit organizational sense. Lattin’s use of this disingenuous title for his book is purely an opportunistic publisher’s ploy to sensationalize the subject and to cash in on the iconic status of Harvard University in American culture. Really, this is a `group biography’ of the four persons mentioned. All of them were active at Harvard in the early 1960s — I was there also and knew three of them fairly well, especially my classmate Andy Weil — but les than a third of the book examines their `conjunction’ at Harvard. The bulk of the text pursues their much longer later careers, through the decades of the `70s and `80s right up to the present.

In the `Afterword’ of the book, Lattin declares: “This book was not about me…” That may be the most inaccurate statement in the whole text. In fact, the whole book is implicitly about Lattin, about his perception of the affect these four men and the `movement’ associated with their names had on his life. Lattin is narcissist enough to consider his own life as emblematic of his generation, of the flower children baby boomers now approaching the stage of lif when `memoirs’ seem suitable. Like most baby boomers, Lattin sees himself as a `majority’ phenomenon, a perspective that limits the authenticity of his research and the perspicacity of his book. He’s a journalist; you won’t be able to ignore that fact as you read his jaunty pop prose. At his worst, he’s glib. His special niche as a journalist is important; he’s the `religion’ writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Spirituality is his bag,” as one of his boomer peers might express it. He freely admits as much. He also admits, in his Afterword, his own extensive use of psychedelics and his neverending `search’ for spiritual enlightenment, for some kind of vision of a Power controlling human life and afterlife.

It’s the “spiritual quests” of his four subjects than intertwines their lives, in Lattin’s account of them. A Freudian biographer might have found their diverse sexual quests central, but Lattin treats their misbehaviors as peripheral to the Big Quest. With these four guys, he may be right. Where he goes amiss or amok, in my opinion, is when he defines his entire generation in the same terms, as spiritually restless and needy. Undoubtably, a portion of the generation – a cadre of hippydom – were `seekers’ ready to tread in the footprints of Alpert or Smith, but they were not even a plurality. Remember the film “Forrest Gump”? The `retarded’ Gump represented his generation’s obsessions in his serial adventures. Civil rights, anti-war, sexual freedom, non-conformity, `healthy’ living, and environmentalism were all formidable obsessions of the generation, but they are scarcely mentioned amid Lattin’s account of the religious hunger that he considers the initiation rite into his Psychedelic Club.

I’m not a baby boomer. I’m a few years too old, born before Pearl Harbor. Really, Mr. Lattin, all of us who entered Harvard in 1960 were too old to be boomers or hippies. If we arrived at Harvard Yard with any counter-culture predilections, they were based on the Beats and the Beach Boys, on Jack Kerouac in particular, and on the hedonistic rebelliousness of California. Kerouac isn’t mentioned in “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.” Neither are the Beach Boys or, for that matter, any of `rock `n roll’. By Lattin’s account, everything began with The Jefferson Airplane. The California cohort at Harvard in the years 1960-1964 came with more experience of mescaline and peyote than Tim Leary at the time. Many of “us’ had already discarded drug-fueld mysticism for the more earnest struggle to `fix’ our society. Harvard in the early `60s was afire with social protest, with demonstrations against HUAC and lingering McCarthyism, with freedom-riding and lunch-counter sit-ins, with resistance to thecolonialist boycott of Cuba and the limitation of passport freeodms, above all with opposition to the shameful Cold War `business’ in Vietnam and the Draft. I was part of all those movements during my Harvard years, and I still consider them the defining experiences of my class (‘64). Leary and Alpert? We all knew about them, and considered them a minor diversion. Andy Weil? One of those self-important Crimson editors. Weil’s reportage in the Crimson did indeed contribute to the expulsion of Leary and Alpert from their faculty positions in 1963, but believe me, that was `on the docket’ anyway. Weil’s lifelong `guilt’ about his role in the downfall of the (non-existant) Harvard Psychedelic Club is a bit ludicrous; as usual, Weil exaggerates his own importance.

There were most certainly drugs available at Harvard in the 1960s – marijuana, hashish, peyote, laboratory mescaline – though they were used by only a small percentage of the undergraduates. Alcohol was the mind-blower of choice for most. Those drugs were all available at the high school in California from which I happened to graduate (I attended that school very briefly, one of seven high schools I passed through, in four different states). It was the California cohort of my class that brought the Beat Generation to Harvard, and the mind-altering drugs along with it. Allen Ginsburg was there, hanging out with Tim Leary at times, but I’m the guy who brought Kerouac to Harvard. Literally. In the flesh. I staged his two public readings at Memorial Hall. I sat with him at Lowell House High Table, the snooty bastion of Boston Brahminism, and interpreted his chaotic comments to Headmaster Elliot Perkins.

I mention all this in reference to the principal shortcoming of Dan Lattin’s literary effort: its partiality to a `post hoc ergo propter hoc’ assessment of the milieu, and its dishonesty by omissions. Notice please the subtitle of Lattin’s book: “How Timoth Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.” Sorry, Dan. That’s not the whole story after all.
Rating: 3 / 5

I know it’s selling well, but this is a lightweight book. A Wikipedia entry.

Although author has much factual material at his disposal, and frequently repeats it (one wonders at the whereabouts of his editor and pre-publication readers), there is little in-depth analysis or cultural/historical contextualization of the activities in question.

Virtually meaningless and trite observations are given too much space and there is tuch reliance on hearsay, gossip, newspaper accounts and the subjects’ self-serving description when it comes tothe motivations involved. These activities, these people did not develop in a vacuum and for this material to have meaning beyond the patently obvious, it needed to be related — in depth — to the larger culture and period.

That said, most readers will learn something of the wacky, childish, sneaky, abusive and often unsavory activities of all four of Lattin’s iconic “boys” (“The Trickster,” “The Seeker,” “The Healer,” etc.) and the grotesqueries of the era in which they made their mark. After reading this, I disliked both decades even more than when I lived through them.

Andrew Weil, the porky, smug and snakey little “health guru” and grinnin’ egoist Tim Leary, whom Weil helped to grind into the dirt (although Leary did plenty of that himself) come off the worse here, and it seems deservedly so. Their positive qualities are listed by their buds but their nasty behavior screams at the top of its lungs.

The author lets others speak but doesn’t weigh in himself, which might be okay in a feature news story but not in a book that pretends to treat decades of American life. It suggests that he just can’t get his mind around the whole topic, much less its myriad jabbertng parts. So he lets the sensationalist descriptions of the subjects’ self-important, hair-brained behavior in a rather sensational time substitute for depth.

I was left hungry for understanding, for a sense of the psychology of the main characters, not just their nuttiness, greed and shallow regrets, but how their rather profound losses affected them (the suicide of Leary’s wife and the death of his daughter are quite lightly treated) and how they came to understand their roles and the often faulty assumptions that so defined their lives and times.

Lattin is a newspaper religion writer, after all, not an anthropologist or a sociologist and I’m afraid a scholar with years of research under his belt is what was called for here.

Perhaps my reading suffered from having just finished Blake Bailey’s masterful biography of John Cheever. The comparison is of a handful of corn chips eaten on the fly to an eight course meal prepared by a master chef. Of course, Lattin’s book is not cheap, it just tastes cheap.

I would like to think the subjects of this book deserved better. Perhaps some of them did. Others I could easily do without. In any case, it will be a cold day in hell before I read ANYTHING about this crew again.
Rating: 3 / 5