![[cover of paperback edition]](turn.jpg)
Perhaps of all the mass-market paperbacks devoted to the hippies,
the Sixties and LSD, Michael Hollingshead's The Man Who Turned On the World
occupies a unique niche. American publishing in the genre tended to be
defined by exploitation and dismissiveness, though the lurid packaging
occasionally clothed a serious author. This book, by a British writer and
published by a U.K. firm, is noteworthy for its sincerity and
seriousness - unusual by the time of its publication, 1973. It purports to be
a fictionalized autobiography, a claim that is not as far-fetched as it
first appears. In fact, the term is a good description of the highly
specific nature of the narrator's actions and the relative absence of an
identifiable protagonist behind it all - as if he were writing about someone
else. And the book has so much glorious specificity: doing drugs with
Huxley and Leary and stays in jail and Nepal and methamphetamine addiction
and poetry readings and friendships with kings and convicts.
Coverage begins in New York, about 1960. Little background is
provided - and the narrator is generally absent, except with regard
to inner consciousness. Few if any emotions appear, just thoughts and
experiences. Events such as marriage and losing a job are flatly described,
vaguely reminiscent of Burroughs's narrator in Junkie. Also reminiscent of
Junkie, it occasionally adopts a semi-confessional style, especially
when dealing with the narrator's addiction to methamphetamine. But in general,
Hollingshead attempts to make his journey through the Sixties as archetypal as possible.
He succeeds in no small measure because of his timing: the book
covers the demise of the Beat era and the emergence and meteoric rise of
the hippies, and he does an especially good job showing how open the early
psychedelic culture was - he could write to Huxley, correspond with Leary,
even stay at Harvard during Leary's tenure there. He also describes how the
climate changed, chronicling Leary's moves from Harvard to Millbrook to
jail, and claims responsibility for providing Tim with his first LSD. As a
result of this vantage point, he can describe acid's transition from a
salon experience to a street culture, and he offers an interesting insight
on the nature of the new illicit LSD, which, as he put it, "lacked, in my
opinion, that invisible non-pharmacological factor - the magical, spiritual
component that was really what acid was about."
Halfway through the book, it becomes clear that things are going
awry. After his arrest for methadrine, the story slows down; his
reflections on prison here form an extension of his meditations on LSD:
"Prison is a feeling, a subjective as well as a purely physical thing. ...
It lowers by its sense of decay, its corridors of refuse, its wasteland
approach to fallen humanity." From prison he travels to Norway (how does he
afford this?), and from there to Nepal, following the hippie trail. Norway
provides him with one of his few didactic political interludes, a chance to
describe a great drunken poetry reading and the chill provided by a poet
who spoke for a greater sense of First World responsibility for the
U.S.-led war in Indochina.
Nepal is the setting for a grand synthesis of his adventures and an
explication of what he learned during his acid transformation. Amidst
stoned hippie expatriates he edits a poetry newspaper and finally just
contemplates the meaning of it all: "And there one sits, day in and day
out, in urn-like silence, staring wearily into the nothing - you can almost
see the nothing." This, perhaps, is what informs the real strength of the
book: the statement of the psychedelic seeker, a European version of the
little-known psychedelic classic Tripper, told from an older perspective:
"I had taken to acid and later to myths and ancient stories to seek a
formula that would turn the surrounding world to dust and reveal the sought
for paradise." And he offers a terse, classic summation of the challenge
that psychedelics carry: "It's not a question of the validity of facts or
even of a personal manifestation of the spirit, but of becoming aware in
oneself of how to fashion a new and better reality."
Some readers may find his style or elements of it irritating: in
general, it is extremely discursive, marked by tight writing that has to
make use of too much repetition to hang together. And he can be
unconvincing when he saunters through Transcendentalism, Romanticism and a
slew of authors from Shakespeare to Whitman to Blake to make his points,
not to mention a pantheon of Norwegian poets. But, as a first-person account
of a turbulent period, it is well worth the effort necessary to locate a
copy. And as an entry in a field of human inquiry so culturally and
politically battered that it has largely dropped from sight as worthy of
serious study, it makes a convincing case for the transformative abilities
of, and the universality of the lessons contained in, what has been called
by some scientists the most powerful chemical yet discovered by humanity.