I Have America Surrounded. John Higgs

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      When he finally made it back to his room, hours later, he collapsed into his chair. The pain was great and he had no intention of ever moving again. As the hours passed and the day turned to night, Tim basically just gave up. As he would later write, ‘I died. I let go. I 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 life were gone.’ ¹⁴ And then there came an incredible feeling of liberation.

      At some point in the depths of that night Tim felt something new growing in him. When the dawn came he found the swelling had gone from his hands. The disease was leaving him. But it was not just physical healing that occurred, because for the first time in his life Tim believed that he had experienced something spiritual. He felt that he had been reborn, and he suddenly had hope and confidence. He felt that he could move away from the life that he had led, and embrace whatever new life was about to arrive.

      This new life was not long in coming. Tim heard that Professor David McClelland, the director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, was taking a sabbatical in Florence. Professor McClelland had read Interpersonal Diagnosis and the pair met for lunch. Leary explained his thoughts in The Existential Transaction. They echoed emerging theories from a number of American psychologists, and McClelland recognised that these radical theories seemed to offer a way forward for the field of psychology. Impressed, he offered Leary a job. Tim would be returning to Massachusetts. He was off to Harvard.

       CHAPTER 3 But Don’t You Think He’s Just a Little Bit Square?

      Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard at the tail end of 1959. It was a good time to draw a line under the past and focus on the future. The 1960s were about to begin.

      His new position called for a new outfit, so he visited a Harvard Square tailor and emerged wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a button-down shirt. With his greying hair, horn-rimmed glasses and hearing aid, he looked every inch a stereotypical East Coast academic. The only clue to his rebellious instincts were the white tennis shoes that he wore everywhere. He moved into a nearby hotel and enrolled the children in yet another school.

      He soon settled into life at the Harvard Center for Personality Research, and his classes made an immediate impact on the students. There was some suspicion among the more conservative members of the faculty about his ideas, but he was undeniably interesting and it was possible that he was on to something important. He made friends quickly and was soon part of a drinking group called the White Hand Drinking Society. Evenings were spent hanging out in Harvard Square bars, discussing work and generally putting the world to rights. The return to Massachusetts also brought him near to his childhood home, so he was able to spend more time rebuilding his relationship with his mother. She was horrified when she discovered that her grandchildren had never once attended mass, but at least Tim’s current position gave her cause for pride.

      Tim got into the habit of returning to his small office on Divinity Avenue to read and drink wine late at night, after his children were asleep. In this relaxed atmosphere he began to attract visits from eager and curious graduate students. Tim was always welcoming and willing to give time to their questions and concerns. It was during this time that he met Assistant Professor Richard Alpert, a man also prone to late-night hours. Alpert was 10 years younger than Leary, and was shorter with a fuller build and a round, friendly face. Like Leary, he was ambitious, a trait inherited from his extremely wealthy family. His father was a noted Massachusetts lawyer who had previously been president of the New Haven Railroad, and Richard had grown up in an atmosphere of money and success. He was a warm, fast-talking, eminently likeable psychologist who was a big hit with Tim’s children. When Tim decided to spend the summer vacation in Mexico, Richard agreed to join him. Their respective methods of journeying south said much about their different personalities. Tim was planning to make the journey in an old Ford that СКАЧАТЬ