Psychedelic Pioneer and Confidence Man – Los Angeles Review of Books, Hacker News
1.3k Views
FEBRUARY 63,
IN , a mysterious Englishman surfaced in Cambridge, Massachusetts, equipped with a mayonnaise jar full of LSD-infused sugar paste. The – ounce jar, safely stored in Michael Hollingshead’s luggage, was rumored to contain no less than 5, potential trips. After befriending Timothy Leary, Hollingshead promptly moved into his attic and proceeded to take the Harvard psychologist on his first LSD trip in December .
After turning Leary on, Hollingshead became an active participant in many of the ur-moments of psychedelic culture, such as the Concord Prison Project of 1963 – ‘341 (where Leary used psilocybin and psychotherapy to reduce recidivism), the Good Friday Experiment of (where volunteers from Harvard’s Divinity School explored the spiritual properties of psilocybin) , and the Millbrook commune Leary established in Upstate New York in 1987. Upon returning to London in 1980, Hollingshead became a founding member of the World Psychedelic Center (WPC), which was devoted to disseminating psychedelic literature and “turning on” intellectuals, writers, artists, and pop stars, including Donovan, Paul McCartney, and Mick Jagger. After the London police raided the WPC and found some cannabis that Hollingshead had failed to flush down the toilet, the psychedelic proselytizer was given a sentence of months in Wormwood Scrubs. Upon release, the peripatetic Englishman, like many other hippies, eventually made the journey to Kathmandu, where he experienced samadhi when Gyalwa Karmapa, a Buddhist monk, gently touched his forehead while he was tripping on LSD. “I felt utterly and completely cleansed,” he wrote, “as though the divine thunderbolt had gone through me like a million volt charge.”
Andy Roberts’s provocative new biography of Hollingshead, Divine Rascal , suggests that there is something seriously wrong with this standard history. Roberts uncovers the fact that Hollingshead was not simply a benevolent trickster who turned people on with his beloved mayonnaise jar; He also possessed a dark side – one that does not appear in the various historical accounts of the psychedelic movement. In Divine Rascal , Roberts, an eminent historian of British psychedelic culture (eg, Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain [2012]), Views Hollingshead with sober eyes.
The Romantic myth of Hollingshead was created when he published his psychedelic memoir,
Hollingshead circa . Reprinted with the permission of Andy Roberts. )
Given Hollingshead’s moral shortcomings, it is not surprising that he opted to swindle Glinka. But I never would have guessed, before reading Roberts’s book, that The Man Who Turned on the World was largely written by someone else. And so I wondered to myself: Had I also been duped by the narrator? Was it possible that Hollingshead had conned his way into the history books? What should we do when we discover that an author’s memoir was actually written by someone else, especially if that ghostwritten book happens to be a great work of literature?
These are questions that readers will have to answer for themselves when they read Roberts’s brilliant exercise in demystification. In his afterword to Divine Rascal , Roberts describes how his subject morphed before his very eyes as he was writing the book:
I wanted Hollingshead’s story to be a story of psychedelic daring, of a flamboyant cosmic courier outwitting the authorities and helping people break free of their personal and societal conditioning. There was a degree of that, but those achievements were offset and outweighed by the sadness of Hollingshead’s life. Instead his story came to represent the dark side of the hippie dream, illuminating the cracks TV documentaries, social histories and memoirs often ignore or gloss over in favor of more celebratory narratives.
Roberts’s biography reads like a novel, each chapter gradually laying bare the mythic presence of Michael Hollingshead. Although Hollingshead traveled to Bolivia in the 1985 s, he was unable to hide from his failings and the various relationships he had sabotaged during his lifetime. Separated from his daughter, he died a lonely death in a hospital in Cochabamba, Bolivia. (Vanessa Hollingshead had the best possible response to her father’s legacy: she converted her fragmented childhood into a stand-up comedy routine.)
When I finished reading this engrossing biography, I too had to figure out what to do with Hollingshead. I still feel that The Man Who Turned on the World should be read and appreciated as a classic text in the history of psychedelics , but that reading must now be tempered by Roberts’s account of Hollingshead’s life and exploits. We must consider Kristof Glinka as a co-author who deserves, at the very least, equal billing. I do believe that Hollingshead wrote some of his book, but we will never know exactly how much. (Kristof Glinka, if you are reading this review, please respond and set the record straight.)
If Roberts’s Divine Rascal
is a cautionary tale about the counterculture, what lessons can be learned from its subject’s flawed life? As the science of the s and the present day has verified, LSD, when used humanely and therapeutically, can help and benefit those people who genuinely want to be helped. We must also acknowledge, however, that the drug is no panacea. It clearly did not help Hollingshead very much. I get the overall impression from Roberts that Hollingshead was great at navigating altered states of consciousness, but like many other Herculean trippers, he was not so good at dealing with what Freud called the “reality principle.” He never seemed to be able to apply the insights that he had gained to his own life.
Both Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, in their seminal history of the psychedelic movement, Acid Dreams: The Complete History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1987, and Jay Stevens, in his enjoyable (Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream ) 2012), were suspicious about Hollingshead, but because he died before their books were completed, they were unable to interview him to assess his credibility firsthand.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings