Outside of a Dog (14 page)

The lady glared, Barbara smiled, and we carried on.

8

I’d worked hard, and now it was time to have fun. I finished my BPhil exams in the early summer of 1968, and headed back to the States for a holiday, my head humming with
passages from Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other Victorian luminaries. It was then easy for me, over a short term, to memorize large chunks of text, and to use them where
appropriate in exams. After the results were announced one of the examiners asked me, with a mixture of incredulity and respect, whether I had a photographic memory. I did, sort of – I could
actually see chunks of text and inwardly read them – but the photographs faded quickly, so that by the time summer had blossomed, and the muggy Long Island heat set in, I could hardly recall
more than occasional phrases. I was glad of it, because Matthew Arnold didn’t go down very well in that second summer of love.

It is a major premise of
Culture and Anarchy
that a belief in ‘the prime right and blessedness of doing as one likes’ was the besetting error of Victorian liberalism, and that
this disposition towards the merely personal had to be combated by the full force of culture. One must follow what ‘right reason’ and disinterestedness ordain, or else anarchy would
surely prevail. And in that drug-hazed musical summer it did. It was great, ‘doing your own thing’, unswayed by the force of Arnold’s hundred-year-old disapproval.

I lounged about smoking dope, reading book after book, listening to Dylan’s ‘Blonde on Blonde’, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish, who did a
gig on Long Island that summer. We drove to it down the Expressway passing a joint back and forth through the window, at sixty miles an hour, with the amiable folks in a car in the adjoining
lane.

Best of all was the Doors, whose song ‘The End’, while palpably about death, was also a metaphor for entry into a new way of being. In 1967 the group had appeared live on the show of
the ghoulish and shockingly talentless Ed Sullivan, an accolade also offered to the Rolling Stones, having been firmly instructed to alter the line ‘Girl we couldn’t get much
higher’, from ‘Light My Fire’, lest it suggest – gosh! – indulging in drugs. Jim Morrison sang it anyway – unlike Mick Jagger, who had agreed to change
‘let’s spend the night together’ to ‘let’s spend some time together’. Sullivan was furious, and vowed that the Doors would never return. They didn’t want
to anyway. Presumably the Stones did.

The new literature was as good as the music, and explained it to those of us too remote to understand, quite, what was going on. There was a crazy new spirit in the air, and we learned about it
through a remarkable series of books written in the style called ‘new journalism’, in which the writer becomes a participant in the pageant, observing both it and himself as the story.
I adored Hunter S. Thompson’s creepily fascinated book on the ‘strange and terrible saga’ of
The Hell’s Angels
, and the equally chilling
In Cold Blood
, Truman
Capote’s novelized version of the murder of a family of mid-Westerners, both of which came out in 1966. Then there was Norman Mailer, whose evocation of the march on the Pentagon in
The
Armies of the Night
caught the wild energy of the time.

Joan Didion’s
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
, a dry-eyed account of hippy California, served as a useful antidote to Mailer’s enthusiasm for the encroaching new forms of life.
Less forensically, and with more verve, Tom Wolfe’s take on the same place and period focused on Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. Entitled
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, I
first heard of it in the
New York Times
Magazine in August of 1968, in which Wolfe described his experience writing the piece on which the book was based: ‘I had a terrible time
writing the article... the weird fourth dimension I kept sensing in the Prankster adventure. I wrote most of it at such a burst that to this day I have no perspective on the book.’

I’d read Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
– who hadn’t? – but these Pranksters were new to me. Contemporary incarnations of the archetypes of
the Trickster and the Fool, they had traversed America in 1964 in a psychedelically enhanced, Day-Glo school bus, blaring music, totally spaced out on hallucinogens, doing their thing, blowing
people’s minds. It was sheer mania, there were
no
rules. It made
On the Road
seem as exciting as a picnic at the local Elks Club, though synchronistically, at the controls
– no, call it at the wheel – of the bus was Kerouac’s old muse and travelling companion Neal Cassady. And who should show up at Kesey’s house in the woods but Neal’s
old friend Allen Ginsberg, and his new pals, the Hell’s Angels. Everything seemed to be coming together, though the principles of connection were obscure. Jung was cited:
synchronicity, an
acausal connecting principle
. That was it!

I rolled my joints, and read and read, putting the book down only to change LPs, have a beer and a sandwich, substitute a pipe full of Balkan Sobranie for the dope. Wolfe was a revelation. The
book was captivatingly fresh, like hearing Bob Dylan for the first time: totally authentic, creating a new sound, making you wish you could think and talk – sing! – like that. Form,
sound and content in perfect harmony. Finding the right language to convey this curious new form of life was a problem that exercised Kesey too. The acknowledged guru of the group, he denied that
he was in any way the ‘Chief’, and in so doing confirmed that he was. He was uncertain about how to convey the being-experiment of the Pranksters, with their crazed bus-ride across
America, their clanging devotion to the machinery of sound, their incessant desire to – as the Doors put it – ‘break on through to the other side’. How could you make the
Acid experience more widely available, convey its visionary and spiritual nature?

Kesey had stopped writing. Though acknowledged as one of America’s great young novelists, what he was now experiencing was so powerful that it seemed to leave language behind. He had no
further desire, he said, to be ‘trapped by artificial rules . . . trapped in syntax . . . ruled by an imaginary teacher with a red ball-point pen who will brand us with an A-minus for the
slightest infraction of the rules’.

But if Kesey couldn’t or wouldn’t find a new way of writing, and keeping his finger on the pulse, Tom Wolfe could. To do so he had to reanimate the available language: he practically
reinvents the exclamation mark, uses extended runs of full stops . . . not to indicate some omission from the text... not
that
. . . but to enact the rhythms of the mind, thinking and
experiencing, pausing as it reflects . . . moving forwards in staccato movements of perception . . . repeating itself. And how frequently such perception seems to demand
italics
, or
CAPITALS
! He invents a line through which the apprehensions buzz across neural synapses –
electric prose
, you can hear the hum! – and the staccato rhythms
seem to re-enact the activities of the stoned mind as it goes about its business of apprehending, and
making
, the world.

Just as Kesey was bent on extending the range of how we can think and feel, so too Wolfe had to find a language that not merely conveyed this, but caused an analogous excitement and dislocation,
leaving the reader feeling exhilarated, even transported.

This was way further out than Dylan’s recommendation that ‘everybody must get stoned’. That was easy, we were all doing that. But dropping acid? Or, as happened in the first
Acid Test – a large public party with strobe lights, thumping music, Pranksters galore, everyone zonked – having it dropped on you, unawares. The freely available, apparently harmless,
Kool-Aid was spiked with LSD – that was why they called it
electric
– and a lot of unsuspecting people had their first trip, some of them damagingly. It created a terrifying
precedent: these Pranksters were capable of anything! No one was safe! The anxiously privileged citizens of Piedmont, California, just next to Berkeley, were so alarmed that they built a cover for
the town reservoir, at enormous cost, lest some crazed freak put LSD in their drinking water.

Tripping was scary, even if one chose to do it with that nice intellectual Professor Timothy Leary, and a lot more so if you gave yourself to the Keseyan way, abandoned what you knew and had
been: gave up the sanctuary of your inner Piedmont, opened the doors of perception. How do you know, asked William Blake – in a line much quoted at the time – ‘but every bird that
cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five’? How
do
you know?

I thought I knew quite a lot about that. I’d read about it, thought and written about it, followed my Blake through Whitman, Yeats and Ginsberg, but I found it difficult to understand what
Kesey was up to. Lots of people did. A film editor called Norman Hartweg drove up from LA to see if he might help the Pranksters edit the monumentally confused film that they had made of their
journey on the bus, some forty-five hours of psychedelically mashed material. In Wolfe’s account:

We were a long way from Merton College, Oxford, from college scarves and tutorials with sherry, from Matthew Arnold. In only a few months I’d smoked a tub of dope, changed into jeans and
work shirts, begun growing the Ginsberg-like beard that was to flourish in the next few months. I soon looked the part, almost. But I was just following a half-apprehended fashion, like so many
straight middle-class kids who dressed a little like hippies, but palpably were not. They – we – I – were unprepared to take the risks, to turn on and drop out. To take the
ACID TEST
. To find a new form of life, a new language.

It was so beguiling, this new psychedelic utopia, partly because spending that summer at my mother’s was so stressful, and I was so grateful to find a way to avoid the daily conflict. My
parents had separated, and dad was now to be found in a modest apartment block a mile from the family home, where he professed himself ‘content’, and had donned a beret, love beads, and
a new, strikingly contemporary, set of attitudes. My mother seethed in our old house, ill with cancer, frightened, brittle, and increasingly irrational. She maintained she’d had ‘a
royal screwing’, by my father, a phrase that she insisted that Ruthie and I not merely acknowledge, but parrot:
a royal screwing
! When we refused, she attacked us venomously, claiming
that our professed neutrality sanctioned our father’s abandonment of her, and insisting desperately that we make him come back.

It was hard for me, but it was murder for Ruthie. I was only an occasional visitor to America, and honoured accordingly, whereas my sister bore the full force of my mother’s cancer and
post-separation distress. She insisted that her daughter ought to
relieve
her unhappiness, ameliorating her sufferings through the balm of constant unconditional love and support, which was
cruel and unrealistic to ask of a young woman of nineteen, and impossible to deliver. Ruthie had transformed from the gawky girl called Tarzan by her sixth grade classmates into a considerable
beauty, often compared to the actress Natalie Wood, but not a confident one. Her mother’s incessant hysterical demands undermined her self-confidence, and she had retreated into a quietude
which was regarded by strangers, particularly male ones, as pleasingly enigmatic.

Ruthie and I trooped to our father’s apartment, and put our mother’s case, however half-heartedly. He looked pained, took care not to criticize us for the weaklings that we were, and
said that he was sorry we had to go through this. Of course he was not going back. We knew that, we believed he was right not to, we’d done our duty, and could again enjoy our visits with
him.

We’d put on some music – he loved ‘Sergeant Pepper’ – and one night he, Ruthie and her boyfriend Bobby dropped acid together while I smoked some dope. I
didn’t want my mind blown, just fuzzed about a little. My dad showed me the notes he’d taken during his last trip – he was always very well organized – and they were total
gibberish.

‘You have to be tripping to understand,’ he said.