http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/review/Murphy-t.html
By MARY JO MURPHY
Published: March 19, 2010
THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB
How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the
Fifties and Ushered In a New Age for America
By Don Lattin
Illustrated. 256 pp. HarperOne/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99
Bits of the Trickster were shot into orbit for the ultimate trip
after his death at 75. The Seeker, 78, lives on Maui, where he has
gone to die. The Teacher, now 90, finally published a memoir last
year. And the Healer, 67, presides over an alternative-health empire,
selling items like Weil by Nature's Path Organic Banana Manna Pure
Fruit and Nut Bars.
These four men are at the center of "The Harvard Psychedelic Club,"
Don Lattin's unexpectedly grounded story of "How Timothy Leary, Ram
Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered In
a New Age for America," as the book's more breathless subtitle has
it. In mini-biographies, Lattin charts their separate paths to shared
and legal academic experiments with psilocybin mushrooms and LSD
at Harvard in the early 1960s. He documents their split, when Leary
and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) were booted from their teaching
posts after Harvard figured out just how far outside the lab the
pair's research had taken them. And Lattin follows the four on their
trips beyond Cambridge.
Anyone expecting "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" has come to the
wrong book but might want to stick around anyway. Lattin lacks the
Wolfean verbal razzle-dazzle, but Tom Wolfe was "off the bus," in
that he apparently didn't partake, and he needed all his writer's
tricks to conjure an extra-reality he hadn't experienced. Lattin
mostly skips the Day-Glo word pictures, but then, as he says in the
afterword, he has been there, most definitely done that. If he can't
paint a scene and what a scene the way Wolfe can, he does manage
to make sense of a complicated movement so often reduced to its
parody-ready costumes, haircuts and groovy lingo. And he does it with
authority and an evenhanded understanding of the good, the bad and
the crazy of it.
Lattin's book can be viewed partly as a prequel to Wolfe's. By the
time the Merry Pranksters took their show on the road, the West
Coast's anarchic aggression had pretty much rolled over what the
relatively disciplined East Coasters had tried to bottle, label and
dispense with care. After Harvard, Leary and Alpert had decamped to
an estate in Millbrook, N.Y., continuing their efforts to tap into
higher consciousness in a controlled setting. When Ken Kesey's
Pranksters showed up, as Wolfe tells it, they encountered "one big
piece of uptight constipation."
The funny thing was, the Learyites hadn't been restrained enough.
Back at Harvard, a social psychologist had accused the group of
fostering "an anti-intellectual atmosphere," and Leary didn't
dispute that he was "sick of these old lab rats, these dour
experimentalists." How could their "lame questionnaires" compete with
magic mushrooms? It was Weil who dealt the fatal blow. A student of
botany, he had eagerly volunteered for the psilocybin research but
was rejected because Harvard had instructed Leary and Alpert to stay
away from undergraduates. The scorned Weil struck back in The
Crimson: "The shoddiness of their work as scientists is the result
less of incompetence than of a conscious rejection of scientific ways
of looking at things. . . . They are contemptuous of all organized
systems of action of what they call the 'roles' and 'games' of
society. . . . Yet . . . they will play these games to further their
own ends."
Weil comes off at times as something of the villain of the piece,
painted first as a hypocritical snitch, later as an evangelist for
pharmaceutical possibility who helped the '90s mainstream culture
catch up with the '60s counterculture and made a mint doing it.
Smith, the group's religious scholar, decided that psychedelics held
a false promise; the mystical experience didn't carry over into the
nondrugged state. Similarly, Alpert concluded that drugs like LSD
allowed you only to "visit" the state of consciousness of a saint.
Not for the irrepressible Leary a rejection of the tools for enabling
"each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on
this planet to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on
the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral,
goodbye," as he once told Playboy. But near the end of his life, he
acknowledged that not everyone felt as he did about his work. "Seven
million people I turned on," he said, "and only 100,000 have come by
to thank me."
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