Kitabı oku: «I Have America Surrounded»

CHAPTER 2 The Children Will Grow up Wondering about Their Mother

Timothy Leary’s arrest and imprisonment was not the first time that his love of forbidden substances had got him into trouble. His training at the prestigious West Point military academy in Massachusetts had also ended in such a fashion. On that occasion the substance in question was whisky.

Leary had been excited and a little overawed when, on 1 July 1940, he was accepted into the American armed forces. He was 19 years old, and war was engulfing the globe. West Point was steeped in the pageantry of American military history, and the sense of theatre created by the parades, flags and uniforms really appealed to him. But as soon as the need to conform began to be drilled into him, his doubts started to surface.

The physical side of the army wasn’t a problem. He completed the toughest part of the training without difficulty. This was ‘Beast Barracks’, or army basic training done in half the time to make it twice as hard. What was problematic, however, was the requirement to unthinkingly obey his superior officers. Tim’s interest lay in battlefield strategies and military history, and when he joined the army he had thought that it would be an essentially intellectual career. He hadn’t seemed to realise that he would initially be trained to disengage his intellect and simply do as he was told. With hindsight, it is difficult to see how Tim ever thought that he would be suitable for the army. In later years he would sum up his philosophy with the words, ‘Think for yourself. Question authority’ In the military an attitude such as this could get a soldier and all his squadron killed.

Another problem was the monastic conditions that the new cadets lived in. Opportunities for meeting girls were almost non-existent. Their best chance of doing so was when attending sporting events, because they were allowed a few hours of free time between the end of the event and the return to barracks. On the day that the sporting season came to an end, the cadets knew that they needed to make their last opportunity count. Following the army–navy football game in Philadelphia,¹ Leary and a friend managed to find a brothel. Feeling magnificent and indestructible when he left, Tim bought four half-pints of whisky He ended up sharing these with the senior cadets in the toilets on the troop train home. This was a terrific honour, for the strict class system at the academy usually forbade the first years, or ‘plebes’, from speaking to the senior first classmen.

Leary’s involvement in this illicit drinking session was immediately obvious the following day, when he missed the morning reveille formation. Too hung over to attempt anything, he failed to make it out of bed. He readily admitted to the drinking, but did not offer the information that he had supplied the alcohol. When this was discovered, the Honour Committee decided that he had lied to them. They requested his resignation.

How should he respond? Tim knew that resigning from West Point would be a huge disappointment for his mother. But, more importantly, he felt that the Honour Committee was wrong. He had not lied; he had simply not told them the whole truth. Others considered that this was splitting hairs, and that his statement had still infringed the ethical code of the Honour system. Tim, however, was a man who was almost incapable of accepting blame, and he clung to this detail as proof that he had behaved ethically. He announced that he would not be resigning.

A court martial was arranged. The military trial in the elegant, wood-panelled room, with the officers in full dress uniform, their sabres laid on the table, was just the sort of event that had initially attracted Tim to West Point. The court examined all the evidence regarding the forbidden drinking session, and declared that there were no grounds for dismissal of Leary from the service. But he was still guilty of defiance. As punishment, he would be ‘silenced’.

Being silenced, or ‘sent to Coventry’ as it is also known, is a military punishment that effectively turns a recruit into a non-person. The victim is ignored, and the rest of the squadron are forbidden to speak to or acknowledge him. Tim’s roommates were moved into new sleeping quarters and he had to sit alone in the mess hall, surrounded by empty seats. It is a harsh punishment, similar to being jailed in solitary confinement while simultaneously having to undergo the rigours of regular training. Few people can take it for long. To make matters worse, the Honour Committee planned to get rid of him by ‘demeriting’ him. His every action was scrupulously studied for signs of failure. He was written up for ‘untrimmed hairs in nostrils’. A shaving cut was cited as ‘careless injury to government property’.²

It may have been the injustice of his punishment that inflamed Leary’s stubbornness. It may have been a test of personal integrity, or it may have been nothing more than sheer bloody-mindedness, but despite now having no hope of a military career, Tim took this punishment and stayed in the academy. He refused to let it beat him. Months passed.

This was not what was supposed to happen. The point of silencing someone is that they will, sooner or later, break down under the treatment. Cadets are not supposed to be able to keep going, especially when, like Leary, they are in their first year and still have over three and a half years to serve. Leary threw himself into reading and sports. The strain turned him into a chain smoker, but he still won the long-distance run and competed at baseball.

In due course he became a sophomore, a third classman in the West Point system. The new influx of cadets saw him and started asking questions about his treatment. The last thing the military wanted was an influx of recruits who start questioning the system. Senior cadets were starting to speak out, too. As time went on, the judgement of the Honour Committee began to look more and more questionable. In August 1941, after nine months of silencing, Leary was approached by a pair of cadet officers who were acting as unofficial go-betweens for the Honour Committee. They asked him what his terms would be to leave West Point.

Leary replied that he would need a written statement of his innocence from the Honour Committee, and he wanted it read out publicly. After a couple of days, this was agreed to. The Cadet Adjutant called for silence during lunchtime in the mess hall, and read out the brief statement of innocence to an unprepared audience. At first there was a stunned silence, and then applause from some of the braver cadets. After lunch Leary packed his bags and left.

When Tim told this story in later years, he framed it as a terrific victory, a triumph of one innocent man’s will against a seemingly unbeatable bureaucracy. Ultimately, of course, he had been rejected by the army and his peers, and had been forced to resign. Yet he found a perspective on events from which he could view his failure as a personal success. He had rejected the consensus viewpoint of the Honour Committee and instead invested his own point of view with a greater level of importance. He had learnt that it was possible to position a defeat in such a way that it appeared to be a success. There is much in this incident that seems to foreshadow the path his life would take, from the forbidden substance to his willingness to fight authority. But it was his ability to choose the way he viewed the events that was perhaps most indicative of what was to come. That and the realisation that the personal cost of a fight like this could be extremely high.

Forbidden alcohol at West Point had previously played a different, more fundamental role in Tim’s life. He had been conceived on the base following a dance at the West Point Officer’s Club.³ It was 17 January 1920, the day after Prohibition had made alcohol illegal, and his parents were loosened by bathtub-distilled gin.

His newly married mother, Abigail Ferris, was not accustomed to behaving loosely. The Ferris family were farm gentry from the village of Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. It was a strongly Catholic household, full of religious art and books, but years of social respectability had given the family’s religion a puritanical, almost Protestant ethic that differed from normal Irish Catholicism. Abigail was extremely devout and is said to have attended Mass daily. There were no wild parties in the farmstead, no drinking or dancing or merriment. The family was ruled by a series of pious spinsters. Men were not to be trusted, and sex was too horrific to contemplate. Abigail’s sister Mae wept for three days when Abigail got married, and begged her not to go on honeymoon. Tim’s father never visited the Ferris homestead.

The Learys were polar opposites. They were city dwellers in Springfield; rich, sophisticated and fun. They were among the first generations of Irish immigrant families to rise up and become professionally respectable. Tim’s grandfather was a professor at Tufts University, and became the medical examiner for Boston. He had significant real estate holdings and was thought to be the richest Irish-American in western Massachusetts. Like the children of many a wealthy patriarch, the younger generation of Learys veered more towards hedonism than enterprise. There were affairs, intrigue and glamour. Gossip and laughter were more common than religion or worry.

Tim’s father, also named Timothy but commonly known as ‘Tote’, gradually slipped into alcoholism after Tim was born. After West Point he practised dentistry, but although he was successful enough to become General Eisenhower’s dentist during World War II, it seems to have been a career that he had little enthusiasm for. He knew that he would be a wealthy man when his father died, and the drink helped the years to pass by while he waited. Tim grew up, caught in the culture gap between the two sides of his family. It was to the Leary side that he was most attracted, and the Ferrises could see this. The Leary blood in him would be a constant worry for them.

Tim was an only child and was often lonely in his earliest years. Like his father and grandfather, he was named Timothy after St Timotheus⁴and was raised as a strict Catholic. He did what was expected of him by attending mass and becoming a choirboy, but he never seemed happy or engaged by his life. He had an imaginary friend⁵ for whom he would make his mother set an extra place at the table. He enjoyed the conversation of his imaginary friend and was an avid reader, but real people didn’t seem to interest him. He much preferred the cartoon character Felix the Cat, who merrily smiled and whistled throughout all his adventures. Prohibition may have made alcohol illegal at the time, but this never concerned Felix. He would usually have a glass of champagne in his hand. It wasn’t until Tim discovered sports and, later, girls that his more sociable, charming side started to emerge.

His grandfather⁶ died when he was 14, and the family discovered that the wealth they had been expecting had all but disappeared in the stock market crash, family loans and poor management. Tote went out to get drunk and never returned. Tim would not see him again for 23 years.

Tote had been a poor father, but he was a strong influence. He was a charming rogue, a storyteller and a drunk who had a passionate dislike of middle-class morality and institutions. When he left he seemed to become an archetypal loner figure for Tim, a nonconformist who walked away from his life when he realised that it wasn’t sustaining him. Long-suppressed feelings of abandonment would surface many years later, during a psilocybin trip with the writer Jack Kerouac, but the overriding impact of his drunken, occasionally abusive father was that he was the first person Tim knew who was brave enough to ‘drop out’. Although there was good reason to, Tim could not bring himself to hate him for it.⁷

The West Point silencing was a terrible disappointment to the maternal side of the family. It was clear by this point that a pattern was emerging in Tim’s life. His career at Classical High School, Springfield, for example, initially showed great promise. He became editor of the school newspaper, The Recorder, and helped it win the interstate award for excellence. He was popular, concerned more with his extra-curricular activities than his academic work, and the girls voted him the ‘cutest boy’. But poor attendance and some controversial editorials in the paper led to a confrontation with the principal that soured his leaving. The principal, Dr William C. Hill, had adopted Kant’s Categorical Imperative as the school motto: No one has the right to do that which if everyone did would destroy society. Tim and Dr Hill clearly saw the world very differently. Leary’s reprimand for absenteeism ended with Dr Hill shouting, ‘I never want to talk to you again. Just stay away from me and this office.’⁸

Strings were then pulled to get Tim into the Holy Cross Jesuit College. This meant a great deal to his mother, since she dreamed that he would become a priest. Again he started promisingly, but the lack of girls became unbearable. He began gambling, skipping classes and indulging in general schoolboy mischief. It was around this time that Tim, previously a diligent choirboy, began to question Catholicism and rejected his faith. He dropped out during his second year. After entering West Point and being silenced he enrolled in the University of Alabama and, more by accident than design, started studying psychology⁹ He was found spending the night in the girls’ dormitory, and expelled.

Aunt Mae worried that Tim was doomed to keep falling into trouble, letting himself down and distressing his family. In a pattern that he would repeat throughout his life, Tim would use his intelligence, drive and potential to raise himself into lofty situations that he then allowed the rebellious part of his nature to hijack and destroy. What could be done about his Leary blood? How could his behaviour be improved? It is ironic that these concerns were being raised about him, for his later professional career would be dedicated to trying to answer those very questions.

Being kicked out of university meant that he lost his draft deferment. Tim returned to the army in 1942 and enlisted into the anti-aircraft artillery. Here he learnt how to load metre-long artillery shells into enormous 90-millimetre cannons, only to have his hearing damaged by proximity to the artillery. He was forced to wear a hearing aid, and the disability prevented him from being sent into combat. He was given a clerical position in an army hospital, and took the opportunity to complete his psychology degree. He left the army with an honourable discharge shortly after the war, by which time he had been promoted to the rank of sergeant. He was awarded the standard certificate signed by President Truman, which extended to Tim the ‘heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation’ for answering the call of duty and bringing about the ‘total defeat of the enemy’. He does not appear to have treated this certificate with a great deal of respect or care, for it is now damaged and looks as if at some point a dog has tried to eat it.¹⁰

Leary wasn’t cut out to be a soldier or a priest, but psychology did appeal to him. It was an intellectually adventurous pursuit, on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. It seemed that great advances were being made in understanding the human mind. On this frontier he could hunt for answers to profound questions, such as why do people act in a destructive manner? How could a person’s behaviour be changed? How can a person be made ‘better’? Of course, he wasn’t searching for answers in order to improve himself. He didn’t think that his behavioural patterns were too bad at all. It was other people who had the problems, and it was them he wanted to help.

The stifling conformity of 1950s’ America was, intellectually at least, supported by contemporary psychological thought. There exists, the psychologists argued, such a thing as ‘normality’. This is how people’s minds, personalities and behaviour should be. But many people differed, by varying degrees, from this norm. They may have been unmotivated, homosexual, radical or mysteriously unhappy. These people were considered abnormal. It was the job of the psychologists to cure them and make them ‘normal’.

The psychologists were confident that they were up to the task. Wonderful new anti-anxiety drugs, such as Librium and Thorazine, had recently been invented, and they were being prescribed at a terrific rate. Therapy became fashionable. And if these methods were not sufficient to deal with severe deviancy, then whole sections of problematic brain tissue could be removed or neutralised through surgery or electric shock treatment.

Psychologists and psychiatrists took over the role in society once occupied by priests or shamans. It was their job to make sure that everything was all right. America couldn’t train psychologists quickly enough in those days, for it was believed that if only they had enough head doctors, then society could be made perfect. For a bright, ambitious young man like Timothy Leary the field of psychology allowed him to establish himself rapidly, achieve financial comfort and respectability, and settle down to just the sort of idealised life that psychologists and the American Dream were offering. After the war he returned to academia and embarked on the longest period of conformity in his life. He moved to California and, in September 1946, he became a doctoral student in psychology at Berkeley. He would consider himself a Californian, jail and legal status permitting, for the rest of his life.

Tim’s professional rise was quick and seemingly effortless. After finishing his studies he worked as a consultant, an instructor at the University of California’s Medical Center, and in private practice. In 1954 he became director of psychology research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, and published nearly 50 papers in psychology journals. His work culminated in the publication of a book called Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personal Evaluation. A huge work, 518 pages long and stuffed with diagrams and charts, it created a big impression in the world of psychology. The Annual Review of Psychology named it their ‘Best Book on Psychotherapy of the Year’ in 1957 and called it a ‘must read’ for American psychologists. It was followed by a manual of diagnostic tests called Multi Level Measurement of Interpersonal Behaviour, which sold well to institutions such as the prison system. It was these tests that, 14 years later, labelled Tim as a model member of the Californian prison population.

Interpersonal Diagnosis was essentially a method of categorising patients based on their personality types. The system would be used for decades to come and was an important step towards the personality tests commonly used today, such as the Myers-Briggs assessment. It included many ideas that were radical at the time. It argued that the definition of normality in psychological therapies was nothing more than a reflection of the white, middle-class values of the vast majority of psychologists.¹¹ It claimed that the profession was too hung up on symptoms when it should have been analysing the patient’s environment and circumstances. Too often, what was considered abnormal, neurotic or psychotic behaviour was a ‘healthy, pro-survival adaptation’ of an individual to an unhealthy situation. And he argued that ultimately a patient is not a victim, and should not be encouraged to seek a source of blame for their problems, such as bad parents, the system or their background. Instead, they must accept responsibility for their lives and their own reactions to the situations in which they find themselves. This is an idea that is now a familiar concept in the twenty-first century personal development movement. Although many of Tim’s staff contributed to the work that went into the book, the ideas behind it and the overall philosophy were clearly his. It earned him a nickname: Theory Leary.

Interpersonal Diagnosis was the high point of Leary’s psychology career. But despite his success, his dissatisfaction with his profession was slowly becoming visible. For years his research team had been keeping score of the success rate of psychology. The results were sobering. No matter what types of psychotherapy were being used, a third of patients would get better, a third would stay the same, and a third would get worse. Control groups, where the patients did not receive treatment, showed exactly the same scores. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the profession he studied simply didn’t work.

Tim’s personal life flowered during this period. He met Marianne Busch during the diagnosis of his hearing problem in the army and fell in love at first sight. She was intelligent, musical, sophisticated and very sexy, and they were married on 12 April 1944. Once in California, they bought a $40000 house in the Berkeley Hills, at 1230 Queen’s Drive, with a terrific view of San Francisco across the Bay. Their first child, Susan, was born three years later, and their son Jack followed two years afterwards.

Their social life revolved around parties with other professional and academic couples. These were flirtatious, alcohol-fuelled affairs, but they always remained on the right side of respectable. No one really misbehaved, or at least not publicly. Like everyone else, the Learys drank heavily and, despite Tim’s father’s alcoholism, they thought nothing of it. Jugs of martinis were thought to be sophisticated, and those who didn’t drink were considered prudes. Cracks had started to appear in the marriage after the children were born, but alcohol helped to mask them, so they stayed, in true 1950s’ style, hidden and ignored.

In 1953, after months of friendship and flirting, Tim realised that he was in love with his project manager, Mary della-Cioppa, more commonly known as Delsey They started an affair that lasted two years, meeting three or four times a week in a small apartment that Tim rented in Telegraph Avenue. The affair became common knowledge, but although Marianne knew, it was never mentioned. Her drinking increased. She started seeing a psychiatrist.

No one realised how badly Marianne was suffering. She kept up the proper, respectable 1950s’ façade when she could have complained and argued and screamed. She could have escaped through separation or divorce. She could have taken the children and moved back in with her parents. Instead, she got out of bed on the night of 21 October 1955, taking care not wake Tim, and went downstairs to the garage. She closed the heavy redwood garage door, which was always left open because it had swollen in the damp weather. She got in the car and she started the engine.

When Tim woke the next morning, it was his thirty-fifth birthday. He was hung over. He searched the house, looking for his wife. His cries of ‘Marianne!’ woke the children, and they were following him when he went outdoors. The sound of the engine idling could be heard from within the garage. He wrenched the redwood door open and inhaled the sudden rush of exhaust fumes. Marianne’s body was in the front seat.

The note she left was brief. ‘My Darling,’ it said, ‘I cannot live without your love. I have loved life but have lived through you. The children will grow up wondering about their mother. I love them so much and please tell them that. Please be good to them. They are so dear.’¹²

It’s impossible to say how anyone, whether spouse or child, can recover from an event like this. The Learys found their own ways to cope. Tim dealt with the situation by turning to Delsey for support, and after the funeral they were married. They honeymooned in Mexico with the children, a vacation that Jack Leary would later describe as ‘short and unpleasant’. After returning to California, Tim felt the need to get right away. He took a leave of absence from his job, rented out the house and dragged the family off to Spain. The voyage was miserable and Tim and Delsey separated shortly after they arrived.

This self-imposed European exile would be a period of transition for Tim, and the end of his previous life would prove to be painful. The children were having a horrible time being dragged between various European schools. He had lost his faith in his profession. Marianne’s death hung over him, and he now had two failed marriages to add to his failures at Classical High, Holy Cross, West Point and the University of Alabama. He caught the clap from a Spanish prostitute during the Christmas of 1957. His money supply started to dwindle.

Tim rented an Olivetti typewriter and began work on a manuscript that outlined the changes he felt his profession needed to make in order to achieve results. It was called The Existential Transaction. In it he argued that psychologists shouldn’t stay inside clinics, but needed to venture out into the real world and see patients in real-life situations, as the act of going inside a hospital and seeing a doctor changes the patient’s psyche. He also argued that the psychologist himself should not try to be a neutral observer. He had to become involved with the patient, and be prepared to be changed by the process as much as, or even more than, the patient. This was a radical stance to take in the field of psychology. It recalls the paradigm shift in physics caused by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which stated that the act of observing an event changes the event. This was the ‘transaction’ of the book’s title: the idea that something had to pass between doctor and patient if there were to be any change in the patient’s condition.

In January 1959 Tim became ill. He was staying in an apartment that had been tunnelled out of the rock in Calle San Miguel, in the south of Spain, where water ran down the bare rock walls and the beds were always damp. His scalp began to burn and his face began to swell. Water blisters formed on his cheeks. ‘Tim’s head was almost double in size,’ his son recalled later, ‘completely swollen up, incredible! He couldn’t see; his eyes were completely shut!’¹³ The Spanish doctors were unable to diagnose exactly what was wrong with him, for they had never seen anything like it before. The swelling and blisters began to spread to his body. Jack and Susan were sent to stay with a nearby American family, and Tim checked into a warm hotel. The mysterious disease spread to his hands and feet. He could barely walk and began to smell of decay.

The hotel did not permit guests to have pets, so he had had to smuggle Jack’s puppy into his room. The dog was also sick, and soon left a river of slimy yellow diarrhoea across the floor. Tim knew that he would be evicted from the hotel if the maid saw it, so he crawled to the bathroom, collected the toilet paper and set about mopping up the mess. It took him the best part of an hour. Then he discovered that the toilet had broken, and he couldn’t flush the evidence away.

The window overlooked the yard at the back of the hotel, so he crawled over to it and threw the paper out. It landed on electrical cables below, fluttering like flags for all to see. The only way to reach it was to head out across the hallway, down the stairs and out into the back yard. Every step was agony. He used his umbrella as a cane but fell more than once. Somehow he climbed on top of a packing crate, where he frantically waved the umbrella, desperately trying to reach the paper that dripped above his head.