15

BURROUGHS MEETS LEARY

1960-1961

IN APRIL 1960, FOLLOWING his drug bust in Paris, Burroughs left for London, settling into a room in the Empress Hotel, at 25 Lillie Road. He occasionally saw Ian Sommerville, who was in his last year at Cambridge, and he lectured to the Heretics Club on the cut-ups. He lived quietly, writing his next novel, The Soft Machine, a cut-up work based on material left over from Naked Lunch. This material was his “Word Hoard,” a mass of notes and routines that he would continue to recycle into two additional novels, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express. Mired in work, Burroughs did little socializing. For relaxation, he would spend a quiet afternoon in the cemetery near the hotel. You couldn’t find a more pleasant place to sit in all of London.

With the publication of Naked Lunch in Paris and his growing fame as the mystery man of the literary underground, Burroughs had changed, as if he had become a character in his own book. Like his narrator, William Lee, he now thought of himself as an agent surrounded by hostile forces and menacing viruses. Writing was the all-important activity that would protect him—he had to get down on paper the instructions for survival on the planet.

He sent a typescript of cut-ups by himself and Brion Gysin to Dave L. Haselwood, who ran a small press in San Francisco, explaining that his writing was “only a transcription of voices along the streets and quarters where I pass. Abstract literature. Not Personal Opinions. Do these plots really exist? How in the fuck should I know? Just a writer is all. Just an artisan. Not running for office. Just writing what I see and hear in my imagination. Pure abstract literature.”

Burroughs now dated his letters “present time,” and told Haselwood that he wanted Exterminator! (as the collection was called) published “in response to present need.” When Haselwood asked for biographical data, he responded: “I have no past life. Talk to my medium.”

His medium was Brion Gysin, who was not so detached from worldly concerns, for he wrote Haselwood to complain that his name was not mentioned in the ad for the book, whereas he was the inventor of the cut-up technique. “There is no literary bucking for place here,” Gysin said. “Times are just hard enough as it is without any misunderstanding.”

Like Minutes to Go, Exterminator! was a book of cut-ups, with Gysin still trying to RUB OUT THE WORDS/OUT THE WORDS RUB, and playing with other permutations such as CAN MOTHER BE WRONG, and JUNK IS NO GOOD BABY. Whereas Burroughs prepared his mixture as before, of newspapers and literary texts, coming up with pithy phrases such as, “Is this shit necessary language of life?”

As the flap copy explained, “Burroughs in this his latest work has thrown away all traces of a polite regard for the sacred cows of narrative fiction. . . . Magazine and newspaper articles, headlines and catch-phrases of the day are cut up, scrambled and thrown at the reader, or rather, sprayed at him in the same way a machine gun sprays its target.”

Concerned about “claim-jumping” on the cut-up method, Burroughs urged speedy publication. Not only were there no claim-jumpers, there were practically no readers, so that when he asked for royalties, as he was “short of the ready,” there were no royalties, because the book, in an edition of about 1,000 copies, had not sold. Having just made a futile trip to Paris to collect some money from Girodias, Burroughs was understandably vexed, and took it out on David Haselwood, to whom he wrote: “You seem to be running a mighty loose ship. This is the 5th letter I have sent you and now I hear that you do not intend to publish Exterminator II. I consider your behavior sloppy, dishonest, and downright stupid. Is that clear enough or should I make it even clearer?” Recovering his equanimity, Burroughs accepted the failure of Exterminator! since there was always a time lag in the acceptance of new concepts.

When Paul Bowles received a copy of Exterminator! from Jack Kerouac’s friend John Montgomery, he wrote: “I’m not really convinced of the importance of Burroughs’ new kick . . . because I don’t believe that abstract literature can help writing much. . . . What does it mean, really, save the expression of unsatisfied desire on the part of the mind to be autonomous?”

That March of 1960, traveling in Marrakesh, Paul found Naked Lunch on sale at the bookstore in the Hotel Mamounia. Two tourists were looking at it, and one said, “It’s rather expensive. I don’t know as I want to pay a pound for it.” “Oh, is it a pound, I didn’t realize,” said the other. “Anyway, I’ve got the Tropic of Capricorn book. That’s quite enough.”

Still in Paris at the Beat Hotel, Brion Gysin wrote Burroughs that May: “We had the police in again the other day and they gave me a bad moment because they would not believe that it was my passport because I looked too young.” In August Ian Sommerville arrived in Paris on his summer holiday and he and Brion did some mirror gazing and saw “lots of powerfully hatted ladies of about 1910.”

In London that October, the tranquillity of Burroughs’ life was shattered when one day there was a knock on the door of his hotel room and he opened it to find a young man of unusual beauty. Seventeen-year-old Mikey Portman, who had the pouty lips and mischievous eyes of the Caravaggio Bacchus, the kind of face in which youthful self-indulgence is already tinged with decay, was the first of a new breed—the Burroughs worshiper. He had read Naked Lunch, had been knocked out by it, and was determined to sit at the author’s feet.

But as Burroughs would learn, having Mikey at your feet was not unlike having Missouri chiggers nipping at your ankles. Mikey was selfish, greedy, weak, and undisciplined. Already at seventeen, he had every major vice—homosexuality, drug addiction, and alcoholism. He also had, which made things worse, the funds to gratify his vices, for his family owned large chunks of London real estate. Whenever he ran out of money all he had to do was sign a check. His father had died when he was fifteen, and his bubble-headed mother was wrapped up in her Greek lover. The only stabilizing factor in his life was his godfather, Lord Goodman, who was head of the Arts Council and private lawyer to Harold Wilson. Portly and avuncular, he looked like Alfred Hitchcock. He was a liberal, who refused to serve South African sherry in his home. As the Portman family solicitor, he put Mikey on an allowance and did his best to curb his excesses. Privately, Lord Goodman referred to Mikey as “a poor, shattered thing.”

Mikey was one of those young men on whom you could smell trouble. You could almost see a sign around his neck that said HANDLE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Although still in his teens, he already had a reputation for general irresponsibility, such as smoking in bed, or borrowing clothes and not returning them. Michael Wishart, an English painter and man-about-town who invited Mikey to his house in the south of France, wrote in his memoir, High Diver, that when Mikey was around, the gramophone records became ashtrays and the sheets became tourniquets. His house became a rallying ground for the tout Marseille, quartier Arabe. Mikey took Wishart’s Citroën and crashed it into a ravine, escaping unhurt. “He has nine lives, that boy,” his doctor often said. But he was not equipped for terra firma. Wishart concluded, “He is far more beautiful, capricious and unpredictable than any of the monkeys and marmosets I have entertained and been obliged to dispose of in despair.”

Burroughs at first was not amused by Mikey’s craven attempt at ingratiation. Mikey wanted to take a room in the Empress Hotel at once so he could be near his idol, but Burroughs blocked his move, and he flounced out in a huff. Burroughs had been reading newspaper articles about the Soviet Party Congress, some of whose members had described KGB chief Beria as “crude and rampant,” and “an enemy of the Soviet people.” He wrote Brion Gysin that Mikey was “crude and rampant.” In somewhat the same way as Beria, he could be viewed as an enemy of those he wished to befriend. But Mikey kept coming back, wearing Burroughs down so that finally he felt flattered to have this young hanger-on, whose beauty, he found, produced an aphrodisiac effect.

Of course, it was always touch and go, because Mikey could be infuriating, and although his family was rich, he was always broke and borrowing money and not paying his share. Burroughs tried to get him to stop using heroin, but that was hopeless. And when he was on junk he was a blank. Mikey was a definite liability, but whenever Burroughs said he’d had enough, he would come bouncing back, as in this letter in which he explains that he has split up completely with a friend who had a bad influence on him: “I gather by your letter that this may be exactly the way you feel about me. I am sorry if I have hindered you by my incompetence and sloth but please believe me when I say that, as far as I consciously am, am wholeheartedly for you and what you stand for, and if you think my presence is a hindrance, I will understand with no bad feelings.” In the face of Mikey’s mea culpas, Burroughs always relented.

On January 5, 1961, Burroughs received a letter from a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary, director of the Center for Research in Personality, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University. Under the auspices of Harvard, Dr. Leary was studying the effects of consciousness-expanding drugs. He wanted to know whether Burroughs, as a leading expert on the subject, would like to try some of his magic mushrooms. “There exists a group of people,” Leary wrote, “who are interested in the potentialities of such new substances as mescaline and psilocybin. The latter is the synthesis of the Mexican mushroom. Under the right circumstances with the right people these drugs give not only a memorable high but leave the vision and mind uncluttered—in an enduring way. We—and I refer here to mainly Allen [Ginsberg] and me, with counsel from Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, etc.—are concerned about the politics of the stuff. . . . I know you see the issue. Medicine has already preempted LSD, marijuana is the football for two other powerful groups—Bohemia and the narcotics agents. Mescaline and psilocybin are still up for grabs and it is our hope to keep them ungrabbed, uncontrolled, available. We are working along these two lines: We are turning on as many well-known opinion-making people as we can. When the issue comes up for legislation we hope to have a strong team to fight the noncontrol game. . . . I’ve got approval for a seminar next semester in which graduate students regularly take mescaline and psilocybin. . . . So specifically, would you be interested in trying the mushrooms? Perhaps you have already had a go at them. . . . In either case we’d be pleased to have your reaction both to the drug and our vedic aspirations” (Veda being the sacred literature of Hinduism).

This letter from Leary to Burroughs could be said to mark the beginning of the sixties “movement.” It shows Leary, at the birth of his “psychedelic revolution,” seeking an alliance with those fifties renegades, the Beats. At the same time it shows how, with Leary as their mediator, Burroughs and Ginsberg made the transition from the fifties to the sixties, keeping up with the changing style of the counterculture, while Kerouac remained frozen in time, an icon of the fifties. Neal Cassady made the transition, too, from the Beats to the hippies, via Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, for whom he became the driver. It was like the circle closing on the first forays into the world of drugs, with Huncke in the forties, and growing pot in Texas, and bringing it to New York to sell in mason jars, with Neal at the wheel. In the sixties, Neal was again at the wheel, driving the Merry Pranksters bus around as they celebrated acid.

On the run from the anthill, the Beats had been the coureurs de bois of the counterculture, blazing trails through the underbrush. They represented the affirmation of existence at a time when America seemed to be suffering from a collective nervous breakdown, the fruit of World War II, which had shaken up the society like nothing else since the Civil War. Mailer in 1957 wrote about the White Negro, the new man, who feels the danger that a black man feels from a hostile society, and who says, why not encourage the psychopath in oneself, as society is doing?

Briefly a Beat movement flourished, whipped up by the media after the success of On the Road, but its energy soon flagged. Self-parody was a sure sign of decline, as when Ted Joans advertised himself in the Village Voice as a Beatnik for hire at parties. And yet there would have been no Village Voice without the energy of the Beats.

So, with the closing of the Eisenhower years, a new set of boat-rockers arrived on the scene. The mutation from Beat to hippie meant a switch from grass to acid, from literature to music, from a small group of writers and artists and jazz musicians to a mass youth movement, from an anti-political stance to a coalition of antiwar, civil rights, and environmental movements, a great nest into which flew birds of every feather, from yippies to radical nuns and priests.

The Beat mission of expanding consciousness mutated into ecological and antiwar consciousness. The questioning of authority, the drugs, the experimental lifestyle, the leaning toward Eastern philosophy, all were a carryover from the Beats. But in the sixties, concerts began to drown out poetry readings. The sixties people were on an audio trip and didn’t need much more poetry than John Lennon’s lyrics and Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Dylan who had started out writing long Surrealist poems that he sent to City Lights, and whose early songs reflected his reading of Howl and On the Road.

At the heart of this transition, of this generational upheaval, was Dr. Leary, proclaiming that he had the answer in LSD, which would enlighten and free its users. There was a time in the sixties when people wore a blue-and-orange button that said “Leary is God.” Of course he had to compete for the title with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and several other contenders.

In 1960, however, Dr. Leary was not yet God, he was a Harvard professor who had not yet stumbled on LSD but who had, through some moment of aberration on the part of the university authorities, been empowered to administer hallucinogenic drugs to graduate students and prominent people in various fields. Although it’s not generally known, Harvard had pioneered LSD experiments before Leary, in the mid-fifties, when ads appeared in the Harvard Crimson asking for volunteers at twenty-five dollars a day. The undergraduates who responded were taken to Boston’s Psychopathic Hospital and given doses of LSD. It was part of a research program into death and dying. But when several of the volunteers freaked out, the LSD testing was discontinued. Later, Harvard gave Leary the go-ahead, in which were planted the seeds of the sixties counterculture. As the Beats got started by being expelled from Columbia, it was when Leary was fired from Harvard in 1963 and went out on his own that he became a leader of the young, “upleveling,” as he would put it, failure into success.

At the time that he wrote Burroughs, Leary was a boyish, aggressively clean-cut and tweedy forty-year-old, having been born in 1920 in Springfield, Massachusetts, of a Catholic mother and an army dentist father, who fixed Eisenhower’s teeth, among others. An army brat raised mostly by his mother, Leary went to Holy Cross in 1938 but rebelled against the Jesuits, and then got into West Point, where he made it through Beast Barracks before falling from grace. Drunk on the troop train returning to West Point after the Army-Navy game, he missed reveille the following morning. When questioned by the company commander, he would not admit that he was the one who had brought the booze on the train, and he was ordered to report before an Honor Committee made up of other cadets.

When the Honor Committee asked him to resign from the Corps of Cadets, he refused as a matter of pride. His punishment was the Silent Treatment. No cadet was allowed to sit next to him in the mess hall, and he had to request food by writing on a pad. He was a nonperson, completely ignored. In August 1941 he went before a court-martial, which acquitted him, so the Honor Committee decided to demerit him out. Demerits poured down for the flimsiest of reasons, for untrimmed hairs in his nostrils, for a shaving cut cited as “careless injury to government property.” Leary agreed to resign from the Point in exchange for vindication by the Honor Committee. He had fought the system to a draw, and would continue to fight it, for the West Point experience had turned him into a subversive, who had decided that “nothing good for America can come from those gray Gothic piles.”

There was indeed a pattern of expulsion from military and academic institutions, from West Point, from the University of Alabama in 1942, where he had sneaked into a girls’ dormitory, and later from Harvard. But he also obtained his academic credentials at Berkeley, with a doctorate in philosophy, which eventually led to his Harvard appointment.

Leary’s adoption of psychedelic drugs came almost by accident. Vacationing in Mexico in the summer of 1960, he took some magic mushrooms in Cuernavaca, obtained from the witch doctor of a nearby village. He went into trances, had visions, and experienced what amounted to a religious conversion. He had seen the face of God, and would never be the same.

Back at Harvard that fall, Leary decided to devote himself to the study of mind expansion through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. He moved to a big house in Newton, five miles from Cambridge. He discovered that the Swiss chemical company Sandoz had isolated psilocybin, the active ingredient of the mushroom. On Harvard stationery, he dictated a letter asking for a supply for research purposes. The pink pills arrived labeled: NOT TO BE SOLD: FOR RESEARCH INVESTIGATION.

Then Leary learned that the Grand Old Man of psychedelic experimentation, Aldous Huxley, who had written two books on mescaline, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, was right there in Cambridge, as a visiting professor at M.I.T. It seemed providential. Tall, gray, stooped, and nearly blind, the sixty-six-year-old Huxley reminded Leary’s wife Susan of Gandalf the Grey Wizard in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring.

That October and November Leary and Huxley met to design a research program. They took psilocybin together. Huxley saw it in religious terms, calling it a gratuitous grace. Leary wanted to spread the word of mind expansion, which he saw as a tool for “cracking the psychotic crust” that covered America. The Tree of Knowledge, he thought, had been the first controlled substance, which Adam and Eve had been expelled from paradise for using. The Bible had enforced food and drug prohibitions. The idea was to distribute psilocybin, selectively, and to prevent the government and other meddlers from regulating it.

Leary’s ambition was to turn on the entire country, the clergy, the bureaucrats, the politicians, the lawyers, the military, to pop his pills down the nation’s throat. But he had to start slowly, and this is where Allen Ginsberg came in—Allen had his ear so close to the ground it was full of grasshoppers, and he heard about Leary’s work and asked to visit. Allen came up that December and took some pills, and began recommending people that Leary could contact, for Allen had all sorts of connections—his address book was the Who’s Who of the counterculture.

Allen of course recommended his friends. Jack Kerouac took the mushrooms, but he was a juicer, who had never liked drugs. His reaction to the claims of instant enlightenment was, “Walking on water wasn’t done in a day.” Neal Cassady was more receptive, calling psilocybin “the Rolls-Royce of dope.” Leary wanted well-known people from the artistic community, whom Allen rounded up—Dizzy Gillespie, Willem de Koo-ning, Robert Lowell.

“You’ve got to write a big, enthusiastic letter to Burroughs,” Allen said, “and get him interested in taking psilocybin. He knows more about drugs than anyone alive.” Responding to Leary’s January 5 letter, Burroughs replied on January 20: “I can only say that I think what you are doing is vitally important. Yes, I would be very much interested in trying the mushrooms and writing up the trip as I have done with mescaline. . . . I think the wider use of these drugs would lead to better conditions at all levels. Perhaps whole areas of neurosis could be mapped and eradicated in mass therapy.”

Leary sent him the mushrooms in February, reporting that Arthur Koestler had come to stay for three days. His reaction to the mushrooms had been amazingly mixed. The author of Darkness at Noon called drugs an obscene short-cut, insisting that he preferred whiskey and good wine, and yet after taking the mushrooms he admitted that they put you in touch with God. He asked Leary for a supply to take back to London so he could turn on his friends. Charles Olson, the two-meter-tall Black Mountain poet, had turned on with Koestler, but Leary found that great writers sparring interfered with the trip. And yet Olson, who had always been down on drugs, was now saying, “Give them all mushrooms.”

Leary was already moving into his second phase, which was a group therapy project in a state prison in Concord, Massachusetts, where a hip black prison psychiatrist named Madison Presnell was receptive to his ideas. They would give mushrooms to the convicts every two weeks and hold discussions afterwards. Leary was pretty sure they could turn on some of the guards as well. He also planned a reaching-out program for ex-cons in the area, in which a few would be hired as community liaison to help other ex-cons in trouble, giving them whatever they needed—lawyers, schooling, cash, or mushrooms.

Leary was in a unique position. By using the name and authority of Harvard, he had obtained an unlimited supply of psilocybin, of which he was the sole dispenser, without any faculty supervision. He was happily infiltrating the society with a substance he knew little about, except that it gave you trances and opened the doors of perception. He attributed to it miraculous, behavior-modifying properties, seeing it as a way to change such a normally unregenerate segment of society as the prison population.

Riding the crest of his Utopian wave, he had arranged a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, which was being held that September of 1961 in New York, on “Drugs and the Empirical Expansion of Consciousness,” and he wanted Burroughs to be a member of the panel. “We need your moral support,” he wrote on February 14. “I know you will understand the tightrope we walk. . . . [the meeting] could be the equivalent of the Armory Show for modern art. Once the snowball starts rolling it’s amazing and really shocking to see how everyone, including the most implausible everyone, starts jumping on. I see it this way, that I’m just an academic second-baseman playing in a ball game that you started, and I’d feel a lot better to have you around when we start playing the crucial series.”

Burroughs agreed to attend, even though he tried the psilocybin in Paris that March of 1961 and found it awful. It made him nauseated and irritable, and the visions he had were not pleasant—he saw green boys with purple fungoid gills.

In April 1961, he went to Tangier to spend the rest of the spring and summer, staying at the Hotel Muniria. He was sorry to see that the Spanish were all gone, which meant no more boys. It was a changed and sadder place, and all the trees in the Gran Socco had been cut down. Coming through the sidewalk in their place were bearded, sandaled, long-haired creatures of the late Beatnik or early hippie species, the female members with blackened eyes and whitened lips, who had included Tangier on their Occident-to-Orient itinerary. There were so many of them that the town looked like Greenwich Village. Burroughs deplored the presence of these untidy young people, who were in a sense his constituents, who read his books, and whose lifestyle he had helped to spawn.

He tried a hallucinogenic powder called Prestonin (actually dimethyltryptamine, known as “the businessman’s buzz,” because the high lasted only half an hour), made with ether, which gave him nightmarish visions: “Trips to the ovens like white hot bees through your flesh. But I was only in the ovens for thirty seconds and pretty good for a goy they said, and showed me around a very small planet.” Burroughs decided to offer some to Paul Bowles, who was still around, and who was friendly, “but shifty like you know the color he was born,” as he wrote to Allen Ginsberg. He went to Paul’s apartment and said, “How do you want to take it, inject it or sniff it?” No injections, thank you, thought Paul. He didn’t want to get hepatitis from a dirty needle. “All right, I’ll sniff it.” From a dirty gray bottle, Burroughs took out a substance that looked to Paul like the powder that was ground up out of fried worms to make mescal in Mexico. He made a little paper cone and took a sniff, and then Paul took a sniff, and there was a terrific explosion inside his head. He felt as though his head was a garage, and one of the walls of the garage had blown out, and he had a vision of the side of his head burst open, as in a comic strip. Then he thought he was thousands of miles from anywhere, far far away by himself, like a baby bird melting on a bough. In the meantime, Burroughs had gone into the kitchen to shoot up some more, and came back and asked, “Well, how is it?” A terrified Paul replied, “I don’t know,” and Burroughs said, “You’re probably gettin’ bum kicks.” Well, thought Paul, nobody could call it fun. Burroughs didn’t like it much either, and was increasingly sure that hallucinogenic drugs were not for him. Going to the ovens reminded him of the ergot outbreaks in medieval France from rotten bread, known as St. Anthony’s fire. It was about as unpleasant an effect as you could have with a drug.

The day after he tried Prestonin a cool mist came in from the sea and covered the waterfront. In his hotel room, Burroughs started experimenting with photo montages, which would eventually fill many scrapbooks. He spread some snapshots out on the bed with a gray silk dressing gown he had bought in Gilbraltar and several other objects, and rephotographed the ensemble. It was a sort of photographic cut-up of random objects.

As it turned out, that summer of 1961 in Tangier was a gathering of the tribe. Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, and Gregory Corso turned up, and Burroughs was joined by Ian Sommerville and Mikey Portman. The only counterculture statesman absent from the conclave was Jack Kerouac, who was stuck in the states with a paternity suit.

His wife, Joan Haverty, had given birth to a daughter, Jan, in 1952, and Jack was sure he was not the father, having been told by doctors that he was not fertile as the result of his mumps. As he wrote Neal Cassady that April of 1961: “One night when I went to visit her to try to tell her On the Road had been rejected by Giroux ‘because the sales manager Ed Hodge wouldn’t like it,’ she was in bed with a Puerto Rican dishwasher called Rosario. . . . I never knew his second name. . . . I’m certain the girl is not my seed, and I’m going to have the court order the blood test when the time comes. This bitch is trying to take my own mother’s life away. You remember as well as I do my mother worked in the shoe factory for years while I wrote most of my books. Now she’s retired, on $84 a month Social Security and I take care of the rest. . . . But now this bitch with a shitass tight-faced Jew lawyer is closing in on me for what’s left after taxes. . . . There you have the salacious picture of a typical American marriage whore.” Jack’s conviction that the child was not his should be balanced against Jan Kerouac’s striking resemblance to her father. But whoever the father was, how sad and ironic that the man who had eulogized the road was still tied to his mother’s apron strings!

That summer of 1961 in Tangier became known as “the psychedelic summer” because they all sampled Leary’s pills. Leary-induced chemical euphoria was in the air, but there were many undercurrents as well, having to do with the changing identities of the principal players and with the muddying of waters caused by the presence of new players.

Allen had not seen Burroughs since his departure from the Beat Hotel in 1958, and was still a little worried that Bill’s obsession for him remained. In their correspondence, when Allen mentioned that he and Peter Orlovsky had gotten hot and horny with a couple of girls, Bill spitefully replied that Allen would always regret making it with women, that they had teeth in their vaginas, and so on. And then, when Allen, trying to show Bill that no relationship was idyllic, told him that sometimes he had to nag Peter for sex, Bill responded rather superciliously that he had never had that problem with his Spanish boys.

They had both changed. Allen now saw himself as one of the venerables elected by youth to lead them. He had a position, his manuscripts were in demand, even the proofs were sold to a collector, which he found rather ghastly, like selling fingernail clippings. Allen noticed that after the publication of Naked Lunch Bill seemed to go through an amazing transformation, seemed to gather strength, seemed to go beyond Allen in ordering his mind and emotions, expanding into a more solid artist role, so that pretty soon, instead of being a suitor, he became a teacher, more and more identified with his writing. His human fallibility and vulnerability dropped off, and he seemed to take on a kind of armor, so that Allen began to feel that he had lost something in the bargain. Bill was no longer dependent on him—or rather, the sexual role had been transposed into the role of editor and agent, a role that Allen gladly took on to compensate for not being able to satisfy him physically. It was another way of showing devotion. Underlying all these feelings was the conviction that they would join up again, which was realized in 1961 when Allen raised some money to go abroad with Peter Orlovsky.

He went first to Paris, where in the Beat Hotel he met Brion Gysin for the first time, writing Burroughs that he considered Brion “unhealthily superstitious.” Brion had a big, red, garishly florid face, which frightened Allen. He was coming on with this galloping paranoia, as if everything was a plot and everyone was an agent, seeing conspiracies and correspondences everywhere. Allen was repelled by his hashish-induced performance. He wasn’t really able to relax with Brion until years later, when he was giving a reading in Vancouver and looked up Brion’s mother, Stella. When he told Brion, the paranoia dissolved. Allen realized that the origin of Brion’s anxiety was a feeling of shame about his background. His mother was a farm girl who did not fit in with “the princess circuit.” Allen had been through so many twists and turns with his own mother that anyone else’s mother was all right with him. He understood that Brion wanted people to think he was self-generated, whereas he had a mom like everyone else.

His other reason for disliking Brion at first was that Brion had so much influence over Bill, and he was a little jealous. Somehow Brion had conned Bill, who had always been a practical and common-sense person, into playing arcane magical games. And it seemed to Allen that he had lost the authority that Brion had gained, and that Brion was making fun of him and undermining whatever authority he had left, so of course he was wary of Brion, although he was careful not to bad-mouth him. He did, however, feel that with the cut-ups Brion had led Bill right down the garden path. Allen liked linear narrative, and thought Bill’s prose was enough of a cut-up as it was. The mind already cut material up. Then when Bill started saying that he was doing cut-ups to get messages from other worlds, well, to put it politely, Allen thought that was balls.

When Allen arrived in Tangier that May with Peter Orlovsky, he found a different Bill, aloof and guarded, who seemed no longer to value the old ties of friendship. Allen wondered what it was: Was it the influence of Brion Gysin, who with the cut-up method was pushing him into dehumanization, cutting up people the way he cut up texts? Perhaps the cut-ups were a useful passage, to see where he was going, but working in that mode seemed to be making him humanly unreachable. Or was it, Allen wondered, that Bill was still trying to work out the frustration of their old relationship, that he was now questioning habitual patterns, and asking himself why he had been so long obsessed with someone who was not receptive?

In any case, Allen was startled when at their first meeting Burroughs asked, “Who are you an agent for?” Allen knew he didn’t mean a government agent; he meant that one’s personality was a composite of all the influences and viruses that had already been contracted, of the imprints that had already been laid on. Burroughs told Allen that he had been imprinted by Lionel Trilling at Columbia. He said he saw Trilling in his face. Allen protested that it wasn’t so, but in hindsight, he recognized that the statement had some validity. There was a certain part of his consciousness that had tried to please authority figures, which was a once-removed way of pleasing his father. But Bill was using his insights in a menacing manner, which made Allen go through a period of doubting his own identity and the value of his work.

And then Bill was always flanked by his two attendants or puerile bodyguards, Ian Sommerville and Mikey Portman, whom Allen found difficult, possessive, and malevolent. They were living together in an arrangement that Allen never understood, although it was clear that Bill had a crush on Mikey, who was encouraging his worst tendencies. Mikey had the new-wave indifference to anything classical, as well as an adolescent cattiness. He had a way of patronizing Peter when they went out to supper, which made Peter frightened and angry. Peter was made to feel unwanted, and Allen was caught in the middle. Bill, who thought Peter was dumb, encouraged the baiting. On one occasion, Allen was invited to dinner without Peter, who got upset at being so pointedly excluded, and decided to take off on his own. Allen wanted to stay in Tangier, and felt that Peter should have stuck it out. They argued to the point that Allen said Peter was a firing squad, with the usual orders: ready, aim, fire. . . . followed by the coup de grace. But Peter felt rejected, and they parted temporarily that August, amid a good deal of grief, with Peter predicting they would not see each other again “for years.”

Ian confided to Allen that he didn’t like Mikey either, who was slavishly copying Bill. When Bill drank mint tea, Mikey drank mint tea. When Bill wore a trench coat, Mikey wore a trench coat. He even imitated the way Bill walked, with brisk, short steps. Mikey had a taste for black cock, Ian told Allen, and would probably end up with a knife between the ribs. Well, at least he had an adventurous soul, thought Allen. In spite of these problems with the crew, Allen and the others made the most of their stay. On June 4, Allen, Peter, and Gregory Corso sat on woven mats under a fig tree and drank green mint tea. Later, they smoked pot in alabaster pipes and gazed at the ocean, which seemed to Allen a vast animal back, a blue wall of living jewels and fire. They seemed to be conversing on the hide of the sea.

On July 9, on the roof of the Armor Hotel overlooking the beach, Allen’s typewriter clicked as the windowpanes rattled with the roar of a levanter. He thought of his mother, Naomi, in the madhouse, the mother to whom in sex with a woman he was afraid to return. Peter was sick in bed, and Gregory was curled up in his room with a cut finger. Allen knocked off at two that afternoon and stopped by Bill’s room. He was lying in bed with his clothes on, and Mikey Portman was at his desk, faithful as a hound dog. Bill said he had been high on majoun, entering a very exquisite place. He had seen the ghost of Truman Capote, with the skin rotting and hanging from his body like Spanish moss. Allen thought of Peter, who was leaving for Istanbul in August, and wept at all the years they had spent together. With his departure, Allen’s sense of assurance and unity would be gone.

In mid-July, Alan Ansen arrived from Athens, which he reported “was no cock-sucker’s dream,” but when you could get it it was cheap, “from seventy cents to a dollar a crack.” He had not seen Burroughs since 1957, but had much admired Naked Lunch, although he felt that some of the obscenity was unnecessary. There were “too many fucks in a little room. And of course if you’re trying to show sex as something nice, obscenity is a very two-edged tool. . . . What description wants to do is suggest. . . . boy is a sexier word than cock.” As for the cut-ups, Ansen said that “when you smash a mirror because you don’t like what it reflects, the fragments continue to wink the old message. Only an obsessed writer can make cut-ups fascinating, but the fascination is not that of total victory.”

It seemed to Ansen that Gregory Corso was the life of the Tangier party, part Groucho and part Harpo, saying things that no one would think to say. When they went to see Paul Bowles, Gregory asked, “Why are you so polite?” “Well, maybe I am too polite,” Paul admitted. But there came a day when Gregory rose up in wrath. He didn’t like Mikey Portman either, whom he called “replica Bill Burroughs.” So Mikey drank this thick sugary mint tea—to show what? He was a bore, really. One morning Mikey came by to give Gregory some majoun he had made. Now Mikey could seldom do anything right, and he had used kif mixed with tobacco to make the majoun, which makes it inedible. When Gregory ate it, he immediately got sick and started retching, and became convinced that he was the victim of a cabal masterminded by Burroughs, who had complete control over those two wretched kids, Ian and Mikey, the light and the dark. Doubled over in pain in his hotel room, Gregory kept repeating, “Omygod, I been poisoned, he coulda killed me.” Then he decided: “I’m goin’ after the motherfuckers!”

He ran over to Burroughs’ hotel, finding him with Alan Ansen, and called him “Willie the Weasel.” Burroughs had no idea what he was incensed about. “You’re not any big guru,” Gregory said. “All you care about is getting your cock up those boys’ asses.” Burroughs had heard enough and said, “Get out of here, you little wop.”

“And ya didn’t kill me with your air rifle, did ya,” Gregory said, “the way ya said ya would.”

Interceding, Ansen said, “The trouble with you, Gregory, is that you can never be a leader of men the way William can.”

But Gregory, for the moment anyway, no longer trusted Burroughs. Even though he did not think he would ever encounter a “more genius or dignified type,” he had lost faith in him. He had bad taste in his Gysin trick and in accepting Mikey the replica, who was a dolt to begin with—every word he uttered was “Bill says this” and “Bill says that”—the poor mother! What a sorry mess. And to think that once he had offered to aid Bill in everything, and they had been close, and now there was no more closeness. So what? Without Burroughs, the world was a less sinister hang-up.

Paul Bowles often had the whole crew over at his apartment, while viewing them through his “what-fools-these-mortals-be” lenses. Allen Ginsberg had a good mind, in spite of always trying to épater one, while Peter Orlovsky didn’t seem to have any mind at all. Allen talked a great deal about getting all the Beats together, and somehow connecting the Beat movement to the Communist Party, an idea to which Gregory Corso responded with enthusiasm, while Burroughs didn’t react at all. Ian Sommerville, Paul thought, was so high-strung he could explode at any moment. But he knew all about electronics, and was brilliant at repairing tape recorders. He would talk mathematics when he got high, and no one knew what he was talking about. As for Mikey Portman, he didn’t know north from south. His father had left him a heavy platinum cigarette case, which he forgot at the Café de Paris, to the delight of some waiter or street Arab, no doubt. And one evening there was a party on the ground floor of Paul’s building, and Mikey arrived at seven thirty, and it must have been one thirty in the morning when Mikey came pounding on his door, asking to borrow 25,000 francs—he had forgotten he had a taxi waiting the whole time. Paul thought that he should have had in his passport “Profession: Lost Soul.”

Now that Burroughs had been published, he was not so deferential toward Paul, and did not hesitate to disagree with him. When Burroughs went into his “we-must-leave-the-planet” routine, Paul said, “We must never allow anyone to leave this planet, and I am perfectly content to stay here with shit inside me.” “Well, Paul,” Burroughs said, “that’s your point of view, don’t expect me to share it.” They were philosophical opposites. Burroughs was a visionary and Paul was an eighteenth-century encyclopédiste. It annoyed Burroughs that Paul would not admit that he was interested in magic. As a matter of New England principle, he had to ignore such things, saying, “I have never had a psychic experience.” “Nonsense, Paul,” Burroughs said, “everyone has psychic experiences, it’s part of life.”

It seemed to Burroughs that during the entire summer there were too many psychic forces jumping around, too many tensions and undercurrents, from which he protected himself by donning his Reichian character armor. Mikey Portman’s West Indian friend summed it all up when he said, “Mikey, it is terrible what is going on here, spirits fighting . . . all the time spirits fighting.”

In early August, Leary arrived, hoping to fold the Beat legacy into the psychedelic movement. Allen was the bridge, the Marco Polo of the counterculture, the cultural carrier and transmitter, the electrician who connected the wires. Leary was convinced that his cultural role was more important than his poetry, and that in the final analysis they were all pawns on Allen’s big chessboard.

Leary took a cab from the airport to the Hotel Armor, where Allen had reserved a room at two dollars a night. It was his first time in Morocco, a culture built on drugs, with the whole country basking in the soft mellow haze of hashish and pot. The Royal Fair was in town and the king’s picture was draped around every lamppost. You could hear the distant music of pipes and drums and see the gleam of fair-ground lanterns. There were tightrope walkers and jugglers on the Avenida de España.

After dinner, he and Allen went to Burroughs’ hotel. In his dark cave of a room, with hundreds of photographs pasted together, and three deliberately untuned radios blaring noise and static, Leary was introduced to a tall, stooped, courtly man, flanked by two handsome English boys. “Well,” said Allen, “everyone’s been waiting for you to arrive with the legendary mushrooms of intercontinental fame. Montezuma’s medicine. O fabled poets.”

The session began in the dim-lit, crowded, smoky room in the Villa Muniria (dubbed by Gregory Villa Delirium), with the unmade bed and the paper-littered desk. Burroughs lay back on his bed, and the rest of them went out into the garden overlooking the harbor, where they could see lights twinkling in the rigging of ships. Alan Ansen was laughing and shaking his head. “This can’t be true,” he said, as the psilocybin spread through his cells. “So beautiful! Heaven! But where is the devil’s price? Anything this great must have a terrible flaw in it. It can’t be this good. Will we ever come down?”

Allen was affected differently, being depressed over Peter’s departure and the situation with Bill and the boys, which was still a bit like a cold war. He told Leary that Burroughs was antilove. Allen was clinging to his identity as a poet and as Peter’s lover, but Peter was gone, and Bill had told him that poetry was finished, because the world was moving on to a new consciousness that might eliminate words and ideas. Allen’s pride was hurt, since part of his security depended on his identity as a poet. And now that the mushrooms took effect, he was filled with anxiety upon realizing that he had no separate self, but was the same as everyone else.

They went back in to find Burroughs and waited outside his door, and after a while it slowly creaked open, and there he stood, almost collapsed against the wall. He rubbed his haggard, damp face with his left hand and stared blankly ahead, like someone who has seen a ghost. “Bill, how are you doing?” Leary asked.

“I would like to sound a word of warning,” Leary recalled Burroughs as saying. “I’m not feeling too well. I was struck by juxtaposition of purple fire mushroomed from the pain banks. Urgent warning. I think I’ll stay here in shriveling envelopes of larval flesh. I’m going to take some apomorphine. One of the nastiest cases ever processed by this department. You fellows go down to the fair and see film and brain waves tuning in on soulless insect people.”

Clearly, the mushrooms were not for him. He had not liked them the first time, and the second time even less. Alan Ansen pointed out that he had taken a very large dose, fifteen pills to Ansen’s five. But Burroughs said that didn’t make any difference. He had taken smaller doses, it just wasn’t quite as disagreeable.

The others, however, were impressed. As Ian Sommerville wrote Brion Gysin: “Leary arrived and laid us all low with mushrooms to the extent that even Gregory had nothing but good to say and was as friendly as hell and universal love reared its ugly head then things got back to normal.”

Allen, his pride wounded by Bill’s statement that poetry was finished, went to his room the next day and told him he wanted to see him alone. But the ever-present Mikey was there, hovering around the door as they were talking inside. When Bill told Mikey that he and Allen were going out to lunch, Mikey said, “Guess I’ll come along.” There was no getting rid of him. When Mikey went to the men’s room during lunch, Bill, sensing Allen’s annoyance, said, “He is too dependent on me, that’s the problem.” So that Allen began to see things less as a conspiracy of Bill and Mikey against him. Bill did want everyone included, though the basis of inclusion was that they had to alter their minds, in the sense that Allen’s mind told him that he was a poet and Peter’s lover, both of which Burroughs thought were pointless. Just as he seemed to think sex was pointless. When Allen told him that sex was a part of the reaffirmation and support of identity, he admitted that sex might be a way to merge souls on an egoless basis, and that he put it down only when it was corrupted, as when it was part of the power-ego grab in America and other so-called civilized nations.

Then things came to a head when Mikey’s friend Mark Groetchen arrived. A fat and loutish boy who worshiped Mikey in the same way that Mikey worshiped Burroughs, Mark was an obvious scapegoat, drawing to his pathetic person all the tensions and cruelties in the psychic atmosphere.

As Burroughs recalled the incident in a conversation with Alan Ansen many years later: “There was an occasion at Paul’s when Mark Groetchen took majoun and flipped out with the horrors. ‘I have a feeling of heat,’ he said, and Paul said ‘Oh, my God, it’s hot in here, isn’t it?’ and Allen looked askance and said, ‘What in hell is Paul doing?’ He was making it worse. And Leary was trying to talk to Mark and get him out of the horrors he was experiencing.”

“Yes,” said Ansen, “there’s a very unpleasant side to Paul, and that was a very good example of it.”

“Well, you know,” Burroughs said, “he gave Cyril Connolly majoun, and Bob Rauschenberg, who hates him to this day, saying that he gave him this stuff and he didn’t know what was happening or what was in it, and he was in a state of fear, and far from reassuring him, Paul was making things worse . . . saying, ‘Yes, it sometimes has these terrible effects on people . . . there have been a number of suicides.’ Just building it up. Paul enjoys seeing the discomfort of others.”

“That isn’t a very attractive trait, is it?” Ansen asked. “Of course, his father was a dentist, a profession oblige, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t imagine he was a particularly painless dentist,” Burroughs said. “He was one of those ‘a-little-pain-won’t-hurt-you’ kinds of dentists.”

“Ahmed Yacoubi [Paul’s Moroccan painter friend] was the one who had the majoun,” Ansen said. “It had some opium in it.”

“I talked to Yacoubi,” Burroughs said, “and he admitted to me that he and Paul did this quite deliberately, giving majoun to people who often had not even smoked pot before, and enjoying their discomfort. See, the danger of majoun is that it takes an hour or an hour and a half to hit, and people think it’s had no effect and take some more. And the first thing they know, they feel terrible.”

Allen Ginsberg, however, describing the incident in a letter to Peter Orlovsky a few days after it happened, saw it rather differently: “Bill and Mikey were too high to notice—I took care of Mark, who was suffering isolation, and realized they were too fucked up to notice and care for him. I brought Mark out of it, and Bill said he was in error. I think it was nastiness on Mikey’s part.”

When Leary left, Allen was convinced that he would start a beautiful consciousness alteration of the whole world. He was sold on the mushrooms, and on Leary’s claim that they cut off the ego part of the brain in the cortex, leaving an “open brain” without any loss of the idea of self. Leary never imagined there could be any academic opposition to his drug experiments. He had grandiose plans to turn on people high up in government. In this the first year of the Kennedy presidency, a new age seemed to be dawning. Kennedy’s first term had begun inauspiciously, with the Bay of Pigs disaster, but no matter, Kennedy was a symbol of youth and change and a thaw in the ice age of the fifties. He had created the Peace Corps, and Freedom Riders were demonstrating in Alabama. A twenty-year-old Minnesotan who had changed his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan was singing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Just as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs had provided the counterculture with its primers, just as Leary was offering his “psychedelic revolution” package, Dylan would give the counterculture its anthems, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Leary saw a good omen in the appointment of some of his Harvard colleagues, such as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as presidential advisers. Overflowing with optimism, he told Allen, “We’ll turn on Schlesinger, and then we’ll turn on Kennedy.” Paul Bowles took Leary with a grain of salt, and had a vision of him as a bishop blessing 5,000 people in a cathedral. He always loved everything, and never had a disparaging word to say, and never showed any angst at all, which made Paul a bit suspicious. Maybe his mind was blown, as though he’d had a lobotomy. Burroughs, however, found Leary aware, confident, and well-intentioned, and accepted his invitation to come to Cambridge and take part in experiments in white noise and sensory deprivation. Although Burroughs had confirmed his aversion to psilocybin, Leary said there were other drugs he could try, such as peyote.

With Leary’s departure, the psychedelic summer ended and the little band split up. Gregory left for London, where he was knocked out by pub names such as Queen’s Head and Artichoke. Alan Ansen and Allen Ginsberg went to Greece, the latter feeling guilty at not having stuck by Peter. In Athens he ran into the critic Leslie Fiedler, who expounded another depressing theory, that criticism was now more important than poetry. Allen was still worrying about the problem that Burroughs had posed, that of cutting off one’s identity. He did not find an answer until he met the Buddhists in Tibet, who told him that if you see something horrible, don’t cling to it, and if you see something beautiful, don’t cling to it.

Burroughs and his two disciples returned to the Empress Hotel in London. Burroughs was fed up with Mikey Portman, who, as he put it, “Was always overdrawing his account.” Mikey took the Dent cure, establishing a pattern for years to come, of drinking himself into a stupor, going on junk, and taking the cure. What could you do with a beautiful boy who had so little sense that he drank a quart of vodka a day on top of heroin? When Mikey said he was going to Paris while Bill was in Cambridge with Leary, Burroughs warned Brion Gysin: “For God’s sake no open bank with Mikey. I pass along urgent warning: Watch that little fucker. Give him the conducted tour routine and see he misses anything important.”

Gregory came to say good-bye to Bill before he flew off to Cambridge and found that the scene was Tangier all over again. There he was in his smoky hotel room with Ian and Mikey playing the courtiers. How could Burroughs be a good man, Gregory wondered, when he left in his wake basket cases like Sinclair Beiles and Mikey Portman? What was he but a dead zombie junky out to fuck all human beings, in spite of his surefire style of writing?

Burroughs flew to Boston on August 23, all expenses paid by Leary’s Harvard outfit. Leary’s big, rambling house in Newton was a sort of Ivy League commune. He lived there with his son, daughter, and girlfriend, and all sorts of people came and went, Harvard people, people taking mushrooms, and distinguished hangers-on such as Gerald Heard and Alan Watts, two Englishmen who had gravitated westward to America, while their minds were turned eastward toward Vedanta and Buddhism. Heard, who was said to be a living example of the Wellsian supermind, had come to California in 1937 and espoused Eastern philosophy, yoga, and vegetarianism. He was a close friend and adviser of Aldous Huxley, to whom he fed ideas for his book Eyeless in Gaza. Alan Watts had arrived in 1938 and was considered responsible, along with Allen Ginsberg and the poet Gary Snyder, for the Buddhist influence on Beat writing, through his various books and articles selling mysticism without tears. A prodigious drinker and self-proclaimed adulterer, Watts was a happy mixture of hedonist and Buddhist, the very prototype of the rascal-guru. Both Heard and Watts were scheduled to join Leary and Burroughs on the panel at the American Psychological Association.

Burroughs went to work on his paper, on the difference between narcotic and psychedelic drugs, but his first impressions of the Leary operation were decidedly negative. He was upset by the waste and conspicuous consumption at the Leary household. Enough food to feed a regiment was left out to spoil all over a vast kitchen by Leary’s overfed and undisciplined children. In the other rooms typewriters, cameras, TV sets, record players, and toys of every description were stacked to the ceiling. It was a real nightmare of surfeit, indicative to Burroughs of the unhealthy state of American society.

He had been hoping that Leary would have other drugs besides mushrooms, but such was not the case. He refused to take any more psilocybin, writing Paul Bowles: “Nothing will ever get another psilocybin pill down this throat. I am of course not expressing my feelings on the subject to Leary lest he cut off the $.”

In early September they went to New York for the panel at the Statler Hotel. Leary felt that he was making history. Here, before the cream of the psychological establishment, he was leading the first scientific panel on mind-expanding drugs. They had him in a room seating 200, and he went to the manager of the Statler and said, “Listen, we need a bigger room, we’ve got some big names here.” But it was too late, and he played to an SRO audience—there were people standing in the hallway. Fortified by two joints, Burroughs gave an effective presentation, going through the different classes of drugs, and warning against lumping them together—stimulants like cocaine and Benzedrine, narcotics like heroin, sleeping drugs like barbiturates, and psychedelics, which were supposed to give you heightened awareness.

Back in Newton, Burroughs was hoping to take part in serious scientific experiments—he wanted to talk about computers and brain localization and biofeedback—but all Leary was interested in was turning people on. “The scene here is really frantic,” he wrote Brion Gysin. “Leary has gone berserk. He is giving mushrooms to hat-check girls, cabdrivers, waiters, in fact anybody who will stand still for it.”

Leary could see that Burroughs was cross, that the program was a joke to him. It was clear that Burroughs saw him as a buffoon, the head coach of the mind expansion set, giving his players locker-room pep talks about inner freedom. Burroughs had not come to Harvard to join psychedelic encounter sessions or to listen to blatherings about love and cosmic unity. He wanted to talk about neurological implants and brain wave generators. The rub was, as he made it all too clear, that he didn’t like psychedelic drugs. All he could talk about was the wonder of apomorphine. He was not using heroin then—God knows where he could have gotten it—but he was using a lot of gin and tonic. In any case, he seemed to Leary to be growing increasingly disgruntled and paranoid.

Leary tried to get him involved in the program in Concord. They visited the prison, and Burroughs talked to the inmates, but it seemed to him that the program was built on illusion. The convicts would say whatever Leary wanted them to say; all they were after was a chance of getting out. Leary gave them mushrooms, and told them the game they were playing was the wrong game, that there were better games than the cops-and-robbers game. With the help of mushrooms, they were supposed to see their motivations and become rehabilitated. As part of the experiment, some of the inmates were released into Leary’s custody, and then one of them held up a store, which sent everyone back to the drawing board.

Burroughs lasted about a month in Newton, and then quietly jumped ship, leaving behind what he called “Leary and his pestiferous project.” He wrote Allen Ginsberg that the project was “completely ill-intentioned,” and that the money came from Henry Luce and other dubious quarters. (Henry Luce was reported to have said after taking LSD that he had talked to God on the golf course.) “They had utterly no interest in any scientific work,” Burroughs said, “no equipment other than a faulty tape recorder. I was supposed to sell the Beatniks on mushrooms. When I flatly refused to push the mushrooms but volunteered instead to work on flicker [biofeedback] and other nonchemical methods, the money and return ticket they had promised were immediately withdrawn. I received not one cent from Leary beyond the fare to Boston. And I hope never to set eyes on that horse’s ass again. A real wrong number.” This was a paranoid reaction, and the low point of a friendship which has survived to this day.

Leary also wrote Allen, giving his side of the story: “From the moment Bill hit the USA he started putting mushrooms down. A crazy situation developed. We were facing a rising storm of opposition here and Bill was saying dreadful things about the mushrooms within our group. This left his research work in an ambiguous state. . . . I admire Burroughs’ game. Tremendously. But only one can play. He declined to join our game—which is developing into a religious, do-good cult, etc. About ten Harvard people are ready to junk everything to work on the project. Start a new social institution. Bill left for New York and reports filtered back that he was attacking us. Too bad. I learned a lot from Bill. I only wish he had learned something from us. Too bad. Big decision coming up. Harvard pressure. They offer protection, prestige, money—if we play the research game.”

Thus, the initial attempt at fusion between the Beats and psychedelics (soon to be hippies) was a fiasco. This was but an episode, however, for over the years the two movements merged on many levels, and Burroughs got over his pique and came to admire Leary for his feisty, “let’s-make-it-happen” quality, his ebullience, his optimism. Leary felt he had a mission to turn people on, and that he would become the High Priest of a Great Awakening, and in a sense he did.

For that November of 1961, only two months after Burroughs’ departure, he found something better than mushrooms. What he found had been discovered by accident in 1938 by Albert Hofmann, who was director of research for the Swiss chemical company Sandoz. At that time, Hofmann was studying the properties of the rye fungus ergot, in the course of looking for a substance that would stimulate blood circulation (or so he said: the rumor was that he was looking for an abortifacient). He was the first to synthesize the active ingredient in ergot, which had driven an entire village mad in the Middle Ages—lysergic acid diethylamide. He called it LSD-25, for it was the twenty-fifth of the ergot derivatives he had concocted. He tried it on mice, but nothing much happened, and the project was shelved. Five years later, in 1943, he made a new batch, and accidentally absorbed a small dose through his fingertips. He went into such a giddy condition that he had to stop work, and started home on his bicycle—this was the first acid trip—this scholarly, bespectacled Swiss chemist, cycling home from his laboratory in Basel to his home in the country, with clips on his trousers, trying not to weave in the road, under the influence of the most powerful mind-changing substance known to man. He was, he later said, in a “not unpleasant intoxicated condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.” LSD would have such large social implications that Hofmann later told Leary that he wished he had never heard of it. He called it his “problem child.”

The turning point for Leary came when an enigmatic Englishman named Michael Hollingshead landed on his doorstep with 10,000 doses of LSD he had obtained from Sandoz to study its effects on the web-spinning of spiders. Instead, human webs would be spun, some splendidly intricate, some darkly chaotic. Leary tried it, and gave it to his friends Maynard and Flo Ferguson—the genie was out of the bottle.

Leary saw himself as a psychic pioneer who would lead society down unexplored paths for its betterment. He had a “single answer” kind of mind, and saw LSD as the way to spiritual awakening, and to artistic and political freedom. Intuitively, he placed himself at the center of that strange phenomenon known as “the spirit of the sixties.”

In 1962 and 1963 he conducted LSD experiments in Mexico, with strains of acid he called “Morning Glory” and “Heavenly Blue.” It was while in Mexico in May 1963 that he learned he had been fired from Harvard. It was, thought Leary, the Semmelweis effect—the Austrian doctor Semmelweis had been banished from the Viennese medical establishment for insisting that doctors wash their hands to prevent the spread of infection. Leary was in a lot of trouble. Newspaper headlines said DRUG SCANDAL AT HARVARD, and he was investigated by the Massachusetts Narcotics Bureau. Ah, well, he thought, he was in an honored tradition—Emerson had been banned from Harvard in 1838 for giving a lecture urging his audience to drop out of organized Christianity and find God within.

Burroughs’ rather ungenerous reaction to Leary’s troubles was recorded in a letter to Allen Ginsberg: “I see Leary has been thrown out of Harvard for distributing his noxious wares too freely, and some undergraduate decides he is God and takes off through traffic in Harvard Square.” But by this time, the ripple effect was at work. A network of people had sprouted up, forming a loose-knit, many-stranded psychedelic movement. In San Francisco, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters celebrated the benefits of acid. In Los Angeles, the psychiatrist Oscar Janiger turned on the stars—Cary Grant, James Coburn, Jack Nicholson. Leary moved to the Hitchcock estate in Millbrook, New York, where he set up the Castalia Foundation, after the fellowship of mystic scientists in The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, a writer whose “psychic quest” books like Siddhartha had an audience in the millions.

As the movement gained momentum, Leary was pushed step by step into political opposition. In 1965, he was arrested in Laredo for possession of marijuana. Singled out for special attention at the border crossing, a pinch of weed was found in his daughter’s bra. The full weight of government might came bearing down on him, and he was given a twenty-year maximum sentence, later overturned by the Supreme Court. The sentencing judge called him “an insidious menace” and a “pleasure-seeking, irresponsible Madison Avenue advocate of the free use of drugs.”

Leary was placed in the same outlaw position that the Beats had earlier found themselves in. They, too, had been expelled by the system. They, too, had been hounded and arrested. They were like himself in an old tradition of civil disobedience among writers and thinkers that went back to Thoreau. Emerson, Leary recalled, came to see Thoreau, who was in jail for not paying taxes. “David, what are you doing in jail?” he asked. “What are you doing not in jail?” Thoreau replied. Burroughs and the others were in that line, Leary thought. Burroughs had been arrested a number of times, and had never given an inch. All he wanted was the freedom to live his life as he saw fit, without government interference. Leary could relate to that. Obviously, the state hated drugs because drugs gave people power over themselves, and were a tremendous tool for individual search and Socratic inquiry.

After his bust, Leary bent his purpose to creating an alternative American society. He became the cheerleader for change: Turn on, tune in, drop out. “Turning on” meant an absolute faith in the beneficial properties of acid. Allen Ginsberg proposed in the East Village Other in January 1967 “that everybody who hears my voice try the chemical LSD at least once, every man, woman, and child in good health over the age of fourteen.” Urging teenagers to drop acid seems in retrospect irresponsible, but such was the euphoria of the times that these and many other things were said ingenuously.

“Dropping out” meant that Leary wanted nothing to do with leftist activists who were clamoring for “student power,” whom he called “young men with menopausal minds.” He did not want the psychedelic movement to become contaminated by the mirror image of a political system. Passive resistance was his response to Vietnam. “The only way to stop the war,” he said, “is for 100 high school kids to quit school tomorrow. Don’t picket, don’t get involved in it at all.”

Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery gathered leading counterculture figures like Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts, who thought up strategies for dropping out. They had a program of sorts, which amounted to a critique of conventional society while remaining in the good old American “how-to” tradition, for it was basically aimed at how to be a successful dropout, how to breathe, how to meditate, how to drop acid and not have a bad trip.

Basic to the program was a heavy reliance on drugs, an automatic form of rebellion, since drugs were illegal. King Leary with his acid rap, in white pajamas at a league meeting, was something to see, as he went on about “the latticework of cellular wisdom,” “the chemical bibles of the nervous system,” “tumbling down the capillary networks,” and “the protein memory banks, waiting with a million card files.” The league was a sort of religion, trying to legalize acid, which Leary called a sacrament that should be taken in a state of grace. Paraphrasing the Gospels, he said, “I am here to lead the broken-hearted.” He prescribed LSD for seven-year-olds, “because children are less entrapped in their minds,” while warning that “for every ecstasy there is terror and paranoia.”

Leary and his cohorts established a sort of counterculture code of conduct. There was the idea that everyone can be good at everything, that everyone can be an artist, that desire is more important than apprenticeship. There was the willingness to take any kind of job in order to have more leisure to do the thing that mattered. There was the tendency toward communal living, so that people could pool their incomes, buy land, and live the way they wanted to. There was a contempt for urban life, Gary Snyder preaching the nauseous city—New York should be leveled and made into a buffalo pasture. There was the politics of farce, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters mixing LSD in Kool-Aid, black students on a college campus campaigning for the right to black vanilla ice cream.

The head trip was passing through the national mind, rippling over the continent, affecting those who said they hated it, firing up everyone’s imagination. In fact, the movement ran away from Leary, who was unable to keep it out of politics. The hippies dropped out, lit up their pipes, swallowed their acid tabs, and pelted the cops with daffodils at love-ins. And then what? They moved from rejection group to militant vanguard, from passive to active resistance. They marched and got arrested and burned their draft cards. A broad alliance formed, among the hippies, the New Left, the civil rights militants, the Vietnam draft resisters, and multiple fringe groups from the Diggers to the Yippies. There was a moving, shifting, meandering spectrum of dissent, which could be labeled the “hippie – pacifist – activist – visionary – orgiastic – anarchist - Buddhist - psychedelic-acid-rock underground.”

The middle class blamed Leary for subverting its children, although Leary by this time was a general who had to catch up with his troops. He was, however, seen as the creator of the movement, a position he was not averse to accepting. All these young people in open rebellion against society were his flock. “After all,” he said, “I am a religious leader and I must behave like one.”

In 1967, the Time Man of the Year was “anyone under twenty-five.” It was the time of the ashram, of Allen Ginsberg testifying before a Senate committee on LSD, of 10,000 hippies in Haight-Ashbury. Life was like a tape on Fast Forward, spinning on an acid spool, with events crystallized in catchwords: “flower power,” “black is beautiful,” “sit-ins,” “generation gap,” “do your own thing.” Sitting out the sixties in Europe, and saved from the silly season by his own peculiar fastidiousness, Burroughs reflected that “95 percent of these people have no idea at all of what their ‘own thing’ is.”

And yet he was one of their gurus, enshrined on the cover of the Sergeant Pepper album as one of the sixty-two faces gathered around the Beatles, along with Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Marx, Jung, W. C. Fields, and Lawrence of Arabia.

The death of the hippie was announced in a funeral notice in the Village Voice in November 1967. According to the devil theory of hippiedom, it was all the media’s fault, but what about that segment of the movement that courted the media? On the David Susskind show, Abbie Hoffman opened a box and let out a duck labeled “hippie.” The duck ran all over the aisle honking and flapping its wings and finally threw up. Susskind didn’t want to run the footage. “But you said it was okay,” Abbie said. “Yes, Abbie,” Susskind said, “but the duck freaked out. You let him get out of control.”

That’s what was happening to the movement: it was out of control. It was now making headlines through drug-related acts of deviltry—the Manson murders, which showed just how bad things could get when the love beads were broken, when a mix of ex-cons and misfits infiltrated the innocent but doomed hippie movement and contaminated it; the Altamont riot, resulting in the death of a bystander, was a classic example of deluded optimism, when the Rolling Stones gave the Hells Angels the security detail. The breakup of the Beatles was emblematic of a more widespread disintegration. Among the great public events of the counterculture, you could take your pick in terms of the horrible and the wonderful. You could toss a coin and come up Kent State or Woodstock. Woodstock was Leary’s communion breakfast, with its estimated 100,000 acid trips among half a million participants, and its absence of violence.

It was also in a sense a grand finale, both for the movement, which was wrecked by the discrepancy between its noble aims and its bad behavior, and for Leary, who was still in the grip of the Justice Department. For when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor on the Laredo bust, the feds refiled on a technicality, charging him with the transportation of marijuana, and in 1970 he was sentenced to two consecutive ten-year terms for possession of less than an ounce of grass. Sprung from his California jail by the Weathermen, he ended up in Algiers, as the misfit ally of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. Then, after many picaresque adventures, he went to Switzerland, and was eventually captured in Afghanistan in 1973. He once computed that during his years on the lam, he served time in forty different jails on four continents. Such was the price of leading the hippie troops—you became the most visible target. Leary was released in 1976, somewhat discredited on the basis of rumors that he had given information to the FBI.

But he had had his moment of triumph, continuing what Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac had begun. There was, Leary would be the first to admit, some validity in saying that the hippies were second-generation Beats.