Robert Greenfield - Timothy Leary: A Biography [excerpts]

ROBERT GREENFIELD

A JAMES H. SILBERMAN BOOK HARCOURT, INC.

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Excerpts from The Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited by Grover Smith,

1969, 1970 by Laura Huxley and prefatory material 1969, 1970 by Grover Smith is reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Lyrics from The Seeker" by Pete Townsend Towser Tunes (BMI)/Abkco Music Inc./ Fabulous Music All rights for the world on behalf of Towser Times (BMI) administered by BMG Music Publishing International (PRS). All rights for the U.S. on behalf of BMG Music Publishing International (PRS) administered by Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMP. Used by permission. "Legend of a Mind. Words and music by Ray Thomas copyright 1968 (renewed) and 1969 (renewed) Westminster Music Ltd., London, England TROEssex Music International, Inc., New York, controls all publication rights for the U.S.A. and Canada. Used by permission. Excerpts from the letters of Jack Kerouac reprinted by permission of SLL, Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Jack Kerouac.

Text set in Dante MT Designed by April Ward

Printed in the United States of America

First edition

A C E G I K J H F D B

And that most treacherous and tragic game of all, the individuality game. The Timothy Leary game. Ridiculous how we confuse this game, overplay it.

Timothy Leary,

speech to the International Congress of Applied Psychology, August 19, 1961

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,

1958-1963

Harvard stood for the broad a and those contacts so useful in later life and good English prose ... if the hedgehog can't be cultured at Harvard the hedgehog can't at all.

-John Dos Passos, Nineteen Nineteen

It is a multiple million eyed monster
it is hidden in all its elephants and selves
it hummeth in the electric typewriter
it is electricity connected to itself.

-Allen Ginsberg, Lysergic Acid

Timothy Leary stands below the marquee for the opening of his second celebration. Bettmann/CORBIS

Although he had come to Costa del Sol to live out a highly romanticized dream of expatriate life, Tim Leary found instead a very solitary form of exile. For the first time since his silencing at West Point, he was completely on his own. He had brought with him a trunk containing thousands of test scores and numerical indices which demonstrated with precision why psychotherapy did not work. Using this data, Tim intended to compile The Existential Transaction, but right from the start the work did not go well. After sending Susan and Jackie off to school, he would sit each morning for hours sweating in a small room in a Spanish house adding and subtracting long columns of figures. Inevitably, he would throw down his ballpoint pen in frustration and walk to the main street of the village where he sat in a bar to drink and talk detached-zombie-fashion with the expatriates and leave abruptly and run back to the house and continue the paralyzing calculations, sweating in panic. Tim soon began to experience what he called, Boredom, black depression, flashes of frantic, restless anxiety, a list of symptoms any psychologist might recognize as early warning signs of a nervous collapse. As always when he was in distress, Tim went looking for a woman. In December the rains came and the Mediterranean was gray and cold. On Christmas Eve I met a young runaway prostitute from Valencia and took her home. By New Years I had the clap.

In January 1959, Tim, Susan, and Jackie moved to a hotel in Torremolinos. Jackie had been given a puppy, which was not yet house-trained, and Tim's distant gloom upset the owner, so the family moved again to an apartment tunnelled into the rock at the foot of Calle San Miguel. It was a cave with oozing stone walls. The beds were always damp. Here began what Tim would later call his break-through-break-down.

One morning, he woke up with his scalp burning and itching. By the pain was unbearable. "Each hair was a burning rod of sensation. My hair was a cap of fire." By evening, his face had begun to swell. Huge blisters erupted on his cheeks. A young Danish doctor came and gave him an injection and some sleeping pills. Tim went to bed. In the morning, he woke up blind. his eyes swollen shut with dried pus. Feeling his way to the bathroom, he lit a candle, stood before the mirror, and pried open one eye. "In the oblong glass I saw the twisted, tormented face of an insane stranger" A Spanish doctor came to give Tim more shots and more sleeping pills. On the third day, huge watery welts covered his back and stomach. Both doctors shook their heads in dismay and injected him yet again. In the afternoon. Tim hired a taxi to take him to Malaga, where he consulted a specialist. The specialist gave Tim two injections. Too ill even to respond to the advances of a pretty young Swedish girl who sat down beside him at a sidewalk cafe in Malaga, he returned to Torremolinos, where the doctors agreed Tim should move to a steam-heated hotel.

Tim somehow managed to smuggle Jackie's puppy into the room, but Jack and Susan went off to stay with a family on sabbatical from the University of Pennsylvania, leaving Tim alone with his agony. By nightfall. his ankles and feet were so swollen that he could not walk or even move his fingers. "I sat in the darkness for several hours and then came the scent of decay. Overpowering odor of disintegration, he would later write. Trying to rise from his chair, Tim fell to his knees. Crawling across the room, he turned on the electric light. Jackie's puppy had been sick, and a rivulet of yellow shit ran across the floor. If the chambermaid found the evidence, Tim knew he would be thrown out of the hotel. For the next hour, he crawled along the floor cleaning up the mess with toilet paper. He tried to flush it all away but the toilet did not work. Opening the window overlooking the backyard, Tim heaved the toilet paper wad into the darkness. Only then did he see electric wires below the window. From them, discolored strings of toilet paper now swayed like a banner in the breeze. Using an umbrella as a cane, Tim hobbled along the hallway, down the back stairs, and across the rutted muddy backyard. Each step was torture. He fell down several times. Standing on a packing crate, he flailed at the filthy toilet paper banner, feeling like a madman fighting vultures. Two hours later, Tim somehow made it back to his room. Weak and trembling, wrapped in a Burberry mackintosh, he spent the rest of the night slumped in a chair. I died. I let go. Surrendered. I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home. My identity. The guilts. The wants. With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social self were gone."