John Higgs - I Have America Surrounded

It has been claimed that by the end of 1962 the house had become increasingly chaotic. The English author Alan Watts, who is credited with popularising Buddhism in the West, was amazed at the mess that he found in Leary’s house. He could not understand how anyone who had experienced such expanded awareness could live in such squalor. Those who lived in the house, however, find this reaction a little unfair. Ralph Metzner lived in the commune throughout its existence and claims that the mess was ‘no more than average, although on some days it might have seemed excessive’. 24 Metzner also doubts claims that psilocybin pills were left lying around where they could be found by children, for there was very little psilocybin available during the time of the Newton Center commune and people were very protective of their supplies. Jack Leary, however, has claimed that he found and ate some when he was aged 12. He later recalled staring at the dog, trying to understand how it could be sitting normally and jumping up in the air at the same time. The dog was equally mystified, as Jack had fed it some of the pills beforehand. 25

Huxley was becomingly increasingly concerned about Leary’s progress. He was not treading the cautious, considered path that they had discussed. Indeed, he seemed to be almost wilfully courting controversy ‘Yes, what about Timothy Leary?’ Huxley wrote to Osmond in December 1962. ‘I spent an evening with him here a few weeks ago—and he talked such nonsense…that I became quite concerned. Not about his sanity—because he is perfectly sane—but about his prospects in the world; for this nonsense-talking is just another device for annoying people in authority, flouting convention, cocking snooks at the academic world; it is the reaction of a mischievous Irish boy to the headmaster of his school. One of these days the headmaster will lose patience…I am very fond of Tim…but why, oh why does he have to be such an ass?’ 26

Huxley’s words, as ever, were prophetic. The CIA had been keeping an eye on Tim’s work. They were aware of all LSD research because they were alerted by Sandoz Laboratories to every purchase of the drug. 27 Initially they were content to monitor activities quietly in the hope that his results would be of interest. But it soon became clear that Leary and Alpert were a touch too evangelical and too public with their work, and that their influence was spreading.

Leary had been crossing the country turning on influential people and talking to whoever would listen. He had taken the drug to Hollywood, where his growing fame made him an honoured guest at many film industry parties. 28 It had also taken him to Washington, where he had been approached by a woman called Mary Pinchot Meyer, whom he trained to guide people on LSD trips. Meyer had recently divorced Cord Meyer, an influential CIA agent noted for his work in covert operations. She explained that she intended to organise LSD sessions for a group of ‘very powerful men’ and their wives and mistresses. Meyer has since gone on to feature in a number of conspiracy theories; a mistress of JFK, she was shot dead by an unknown assailant on a canal towpath in October 1964. 29 It was Meyer, Leary claimed, who convinced John F. Kennedy to try acid, which he took, as well as other drugs, while in the White House. 30

Tim loved all this attention. He loved being in the company of the rich, the famous and the brilliant. He loved his own growing sense of fame and notoriety. The volunteers who came to the project knew that Tim was the oldest, the smartest and the most psychedelically experienced of the group. It was around this time that, in the words of Ralph Metzner, ‘the issue of leadership, with its associated complex of idealization and disappointment, was beginning to rear its ugly head’. 31

It soon became apparent that the participants in the programme were looking to Tim for guidance and expected him to lead them. This seems to have initially bothered Leary, but once he accepted that this was to be his role, he grasped the nettle firmly and never let go. Soon he was the unquestioned alpha male of the psychedelic project, and this position was strengthened with each new person he turned on. Under the influence of the drug, the tripper would often see the guide and drug-giver as an almost divine figure, the benign patriarch who had blessed them with this experience. It was an effect that Tim understood well, for during his first trip he had seen Michael Hollingshead in the same light. It had taken a couple of weeks for this perception to wear off, during which time he had embarrassed Alpert by following Hollingshead around like a lost puppy. For many people to whom he gave the drug, Tim became the personification of LSD itself. Young women in particular would fall hopelessly for him. It was a situation that was easy to take advantage of.

Much to his later embarrassment, Leary had not initially noticed the sexual element of the psychedelic experience. He had always approached a trip as a pure death and rebirth experience that needed to be treated with great respect. He had known that all the senses were heightened and that strong emotional bonds developed between participants, but he had not realised what the natural outcome of this would be until he tripped in a sensually decorated Manhattan apartment with a beautiful Moroccan model. Afterwards he felt almost embarrassed about how long it had taken him to grasp this most obvious effect. How had he been so square and inhibited all this time? He consulted Huxley. ‘Of course it’s true, Timothy’ Huxley told him, ‘but we’ve stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experiences. I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag.’ 32

But if Tim had failed to notice the obvious, his growing circle of ‘converts’ were not so blind. There was a core of around 40 committed trippers at this point, and they were increasingly becoming based not in the classrooms and research labs of Harvard, but in Leary’s large communal household in the middle-class Newton Center. Rumours started to abound of wild, drug-crazed orgies in the Leary house. Locals were all too aware of the influx of junkies, homosexuals, Beatniks, foreigners and perverts to their safe Massachusetts suburb. ‘LSD is so powerful,’ Tim remarked, ‘that one administered dose can start a thousand rumours.’ In situations like this the reality rarely lives up to the events that are imagined by those on the outside. In this case, however, the straight world had no reference points to allow them even to begin to grasp what was happening. Behind the doors of the Leary household a constant stream of sexual and spiritual experimentation occurred that was far wilder than they could ever have imagined.

Although it is easy to assume otherwise, it was not just the hedonism and sexual liberation that made those early experimenters so enamoured with the drug. The main factor was intellectual, the belief that taking LSD gave them an increased awareness and understanding of the world. The drug gave insights that, although often lost after the trip was over, still affected people enough to convince them that they had become better or wiser through the experience. Such a sense of improved awareness is difficult to imagine, but it is helpful to consider the metaphor of a cup that is either half full or half empty. The idea here is that an individual decides which of these descriptions applies to his ‘take’ on life, and this indicates whether that person is optimistic or pessimistic. But to an individual who has been psychedelically informed, that concept can appear absurd because they would look at the cup and see that it is both half full and half empty. The two positions are inseparable and there is no contradiction that requires an ‘either/or’ choice. Indeed, to see the cup as either only half full or only half empty takes a lot of mental effort on the viewer’s part, as it is necessary to blind yourself to what is undeniably in front of you. After undergoing such an ‘obvious’ realisation as this, hearing anyone refer to a cup as being only half full or half empty seems somewhat blind or foolish. It was a series of insights similar to this that made those who took LSD feel that they now understood things ‘better’ than people who had not turned on. Increasingly, users of psychedelics began to feel that they had ‘outgrown’ the rest of the population. As the social critic Diana Trilling remarked, ‘I have observed a curious transformation in all the young people I know who have taken the drug; even after only one or two trips they attain a sort of suprahumanity, as if purged of mortal error.’ 33