"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe

 

Journalism, rather than fiction, but New Journalism in which the reporter is submerged within the events he is reporting, and the book is structured using novelistic techniques; but in this case rather more Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, than Truman Capote's utterly detached In Cold Blood. 

It is written in the breakneck, breathless, runaway prose of Kerouac's On the Road of which it is a direct descendant (indeed Kerouac has a walk-on part and Neal Cassady, the model for Kerouac's hero Dean Moriarty, is an important member of the Pranksters). The prose is laced with hippy words and comes into its own when describing the LSD trips that the Pranksters experience. But there were times when I wondered whether it was a little self-indulgent and needed a severe pruning or at least a little self-restraint; it was a sort of Californian hippy rococo. 

The style is also much more Thompson's with a huge nod to Kerouac, especially ; indeed, one for the characters in this book is Neal Cassady who was the model for Kerouac's Dean Moriarty. Other name checks include the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Test, Owsley, the first creator of quality mass-produced LSD (and later a sponsor of the GD), Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg.

The book follows the adventures of Ken Kesey (real life author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) as he travels with a bus-load of stoned hippies (the 'Merry Pranksters') across America from San Francisco to New York and then starts a series of "experiences":  discos/parties in which the attendees take LSD (not yet illegal in California at the time): these are the 'Acid Tests'; in one of them LSD is used to surreptitiously spike the Kool-Aid which somewhat disastrous experience provides the title of the book. It continues to describe Kesey's flight from the law following his arrests for drugs offence and his exile in Mexico, while the Pranksters started to disintegrate, and his return and the fizzling out of the movement.

The influence on the Merry Pranksters of Robert Heinlein's sci fi novel A Stranger in a Strange Land is acknowledged; the book claims that the La Honda location of the HQ of the Pranksters is the same place where the mystic brotherhood in the Heinlein novel gather. The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse is also cited.

The book also claims that the Pranksters, the Grateful Dead and the Experiences were the creators of acid rock and a direct influence on the Beatles Revolver, Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper. These were very early hippies, around 1964; they attend a Help-era Beatles concert on San Francisco when nothing can be heard apart form the screaming of young girls. They are more or less direct descendants of the beatniks; they find a fellowship of outlawry with the Hells Angels.

It is a fascinating chronicle of the early days of LSD use on the West coast of America but it is sometimes hard to cut a path through the overgrown jungle of the prose.

A much more conventional novel focusing on the experiments with psilocybin and LSD of Timothy Leary, in which the Pranksters feature, is Outside Looking In by T C Boyle.

Selected quotes:

• "Everyone is picking up on the most minute incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself." (Ch 2)
• "In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world.  ... but it screens out the most wonderful part of a man's potential experience without his even knowing it.  ... the drugs opened these ancient doors." (Ch 4)
• "the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive" (Ch 4)
• "The Now Trip exercise, in which you try to catalogue the information your sense are bringing you in the present moment. You make a rapid series of statements beginning with the word 'Now': 'Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration on my forehead ... Now I hear a bus coming up the drive in low gear' ..." (Ch 10)
• "The Hermit memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue." (Ch 11)
• "He talked in clots of words." (Ch 11)
• "Amputated apartments, as I called them The seats, the tables, the beds - none of them ever had legs." (Ch 11)
• "Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you." (Ch 11)
• "No Left Turn Unstoned." (Ch 12)
• "Outlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off dead centre and were out in some kind of Edge City." (Ch 13)
• "Bummer was the Angels' term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world's term for a bad trip on LSD." (Ch 13)
• "They start grumbling, like a bunch of prisoners who haven't been fed but don't know whether this is the time for the slave revolt or not." (Ch 15)
• "The Pranksters were not the world's greatest at the mechanics of things." (Ch 18)
• "Cassady had a microphone and started rapping." (Ch 20)
• "A pair of jockey shorts show faintly under the leotards ... just the right touch." (Ch 27)
• "Oh, did we give in to Fear and Doubts, which a good head cannot afford, and thereby stop a brave cat doing his thing." (Ch 27)

July 2022; 366 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Cain's book" by Alexander Trocchi

Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish writer who published Henry Miller (who wrote Sexus, Nexus and Plexus) and Samuel Beckett (author of Waiting for Godot and the tetralogy of short novels:
The Expelled; The Calmative; The End and First Love) in Paris; he knew Norman Mailer (The Deer Park) in New York and Leonard Cohen in Canada. His other novels include Young Adam.

With such connections one can understand his work. Cain's Book was finished in New York in late 1959; the influence of Miller and Godot is clear as is the fact that Trocchi would influence the beat writers. The rush of the style reminded me of Jack Kerouac and the fragmentation of the cut-up technique of William Burroughs (himself another junkie responsible for Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, The Soft Machine etc.) The language is rich and intricate. It is difficult to read something so intense, especially when the structure is disrupted; there is always the danger (and especially with a memoir such as this) that the prose will become purple and the content will appear self-indulgent. But when it is done well it is exhilarating and Cain's book is heading towards the classic standard of Kerouac. They don't seem to write them like this anymore (though I was reminded of Eros Island by Tony Hanania.

Cain's book is the barely fictionalised story of a young junkie in New York. He remembers his Glaswegian childhood; he works on a 'scow' (a cargo-carrying barge); he has sex and takes drugs. It is somewhat chaotic, reflecting Trocchi's life, but it is an honest and informative account of heroin addiction.

In many ways, the narrator and protagonist Jack Necchi (a very thinly disguised portrait of Alex Trocchi) is the classic outsider (in terms of Colin Wilson's The Outsider). He lives on a barge on the edge of the city, in a liminal world where the land meets the water. He is a drug addict. In a burst of anger almost exactly at the three-quarters mark he describes his outsiderness in terms of detachment and alienation: "I was heavy with the sense of my own detachment ... gaining in intensity at each new impertinence of the external world with which I had signed no contract when I was ejected bloodily from my mother's warm womb. I developed early a horror of all groups, particularly those which without further ado claimed the right to subsume all my acts under certain normative designations in terms of which they could reward or punish me. I could feel no loyalty to anything so abstract as a state or so symbolic as a sovereign. And I could feel nothing but outrage at a system in which, by virtue of my father's good name and fortune, I found myself from the beginning so shockingly underprivileged."  (p 119)

There are some wonderful pieces of prose:

• "The mind under heroin evades perception as it does ordinarily ...perceiving turns inwards, the eyelids droop, the blood is aware of itself, a slow phosphorescence in all the fabric of flesh and nerve and bone ... the organism has a sense of being intact and unbrittle, and, above all, inviolable." (p 2)
• "It is not possible to come quite naked to apprehension"
• "Anger and innocence ... those virgin sisters again." (p 17)
• "When a man fixes he is turned on almost instantly ... you can speak of a flash, a tinily murmured orgasm in the bloodstream" (p 17) I adore 'murmured orgasm in the bloodstream'!!!
• "Talking to Fay you have the impression you are speaking to the secretary of her personal secretary. ... It's not that she doesn't reply. It's simply you have the impression you are in touch with an answering service." (p 19)
• "The hysterical gymnastics of governments confronting the problem of the atomic bomb is duplicated exactly in their confrontation of heroin." (p 22)
• "The sky was darkening indigo and shifty with thin cloud.  I thought: on such a night as this werewolves are abroad and the ambulances of death run riot in the streets." (p 26)
• "Perhaps I was the stranger you watched apprehensively from your kitchen window." (p 29)
• "Her beauty, I felt, would serve to put a frame round my own which, sad to say, had up till that time attracted the attention of few connoisseurs." (p 36)
• "Hard work never hurt anyone, I was told, but it killed my mother." (p 161)

Moments of genius. February 2020; 164 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Daybreak" by Pat McGrath

Beatnik culture in 1970's London: squatting and hitch hiking and taking drugs and pretending to write poetry. A sort of cross between On the Road and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Hippy culture meets gritty realism.

It opens with Rick returning home with his end of school exam results clutched in his hand to find that his mother has been on an alcoholic spree. He looks after his little sister, getting her first to a neighbour's and then to his gran's in Southend; then he abandons any further responsibility to leave home and shack up in a squat with Marie. From then on we follow his occasional forays taking drugs or hitchhiking into Wales to see his writing teacher and to Southend for Christmas with his family; he is occasionally reminded he has familial responsibilities but there is little serious conflict here. The book meanders, rather like Rick's life, with the only real question being whether Marie will stay with him.

Great lines:

• "A teenage mind tangled up in barbed wire knots."
• "I breathed in the sweet clouds of cancer."
• "I ... was oblivious of all the reality around me, unaware of the weight of life on grown-ups' minds."
• "I was alive like a ripple on a river - something deep was happening."
• "How long would we have to die in this queue?"
• "We lay body to body, warm skin to skin, warm soft lips to lips, soft tongue to tongue, teeth biting, legs tangled, arms locked around flesh, moving, crying out as we lost control together."
• "In London you were really content to know that the theatres were there, but really it was very rare that you'd actually go to one."
• "We were now self-contained in a magic box with a pink light, beds, carpet, compartments, curtains."
• "I was a young man thinking I've got a whole life ahead of me, what a drag."
• "It must be a hell of a life being a tree in this weather."

February 2019

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Last Exit to Brooklyn" by Hubert Selby Jr

Banned as obscene in British courts in 1967, Last Exit to Brooklyn is a collection of interlinked stories about poor people in Brooklyn. Each story is introduced with a Biblical quotation. Then the action gets going. In long paragraphs in which people think or talk or argue and using many phonetically spelt words such as krist and fukim, Selby captures the rhythms, the styles and the interior monologues of his characters.

And what characters they are. We start with a scene at the Greeks which ends when the boys go out and beat up a sailor from the naval base. Then we discover Georgette. 'She' is a fairy addicted to benzedrine. After getting cut in the cross fire of a Harry and Vinnie knife throwing competition she is sent to the place she dreads most, her home, where her brother tells her off for being a fairy, and then she sneaks out and goes to a gin and benzedrine fuelled party with other fairies and ends up sucking Vinnie's cock, Vinnie being her ex-prison rough trade boyfriend.

Tralala is a young girl who discovers that she can get money by being laid by drunken sailors and then stealing their money when they pass out. She enjoys this and enjoys the sex but she becomes addicted to this way of life and ends up a pathetic tart being gang-banged by by the boys from the Greeks.

Harry is shop steward at an engineering works and causes a great deal of trouble. The management engineer a strike hoping to get rid of him. He finds purpose in the strike although at the same time he discovers a strange attraction for cross-dressing gay men. His role in the strike enables him to spend big, charging it to expenses at the corrupt union. But when the strike ends his life outside drag bars has lost its meaning and his boyfriend throws him over because he can't lavish money on her so he ends up pathetic and beaten up.

Finally there is a 'coda' which explores a number of interlinked lives at the Housing Project. The men are useless, mostly out of work but unwilling to help their wives at home and with the kids, the women are long-suffering, taking a great deal of abuse for the sake of their husband's hard cock at the end of the day. The children just suffer. No life is happy, even the slightly more couth ones.

This is a depressing nightmare vision of life in America's underclass. But it is brilliantly written.

Difficult to read but fantastic. September 2014; 240 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God