Sunday, January 21, 2007
Interview with John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (part twoHow would you describe that unwavering "core spark)
John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, was gracious enough to grant a two part interview to increasingintelligence.com. We published part one several weeks ago and are pleased to present part two below:
increasingintelligence.com: How would you describe that unwavering "core spark" of Leary that transcended the transient personalities?
John Higgs: I don't think I can, Sean, not in a few sentences. I spent the 113,000 words that make up the book trying to sketch exactly that, but trying to condense it to a paragraph is just beyond me. Annoying really, as you can catch the 'core spark' of a person in a flash, but never really properly describe it.
For a while I used the phrase "an optimism addict" to describe Leary as succintly as I could, but I stopped using that when it got misheard as "an optimistic addict", heh!
i2: Most of the other books and articles on Timothy Leary (including Leary's autobiography Flashbacks) fail to mention much about the role of Brian Barritt in Leary's life as fugitive. Why do you think that is so?
JH: There's a few reasons, the main one being that Leary and Barritt had a big falling out around 1980, which led to Brian being written dismissed in 'Flashbacks'. This was basically because Brian dedicated himself to taking heroin for a decade, rather than writing and being productive. 'Flashbacks' has since stayed in print, whereas Leary's previous books which did include Barritt, in particular 'Confessions of a Hope Fiend', have not. (Others that mention Brian are less approachable than 'Flashbacks', such as 'The Intelligence Agents'.) Happily though they reconciled before Tim died.
There's also the fact that most commentary about Tim and his life comes from people who knew him in the last 20 years of his life, and this tends to be filtered through Californian preoccupations and counter-culture politics. Which is all absolutely understandable and I certainly don't mean it as a criticism, but it is very noticeable to an outsider such as myself. Brian lives in London and is off the radar to a lot of people, so to speak. As he in particular, and the whole exile period in general, was frequently skipped over it made sense for me to go into detail about it all in the book, as I had a lot of new information that wasn't on the public record. And it's a great period, lets face it, the archytype of a disgraced philospher exiled from his homeland and forced to wander in the wilderness is a pretty compelling one.
There's a piece of paper in Leary's archive where he made a list of each year since he first used psychedelics, divided them into the four seasons, and listed for each quarter his closest male influence, his most significant lover and the work he produced at the time. It starts at Harvard with Richard Alpert being listed as his biggest influence, then Alpert and Ralph Metzner
increasingintelligence.com: How would you describe that unwavering "core spark" of Leary that transcended the transient personalities?
John Higgs: I don't think I can, Sean, not in a few sentences. I spent the 113,000 words that make up the book trying to sketch exactly that, but trying to condense it to a paragraph is just beyond me. Annoying really, as you can catch the 'core spark' of a person in a flash, but never really properly describe it.
For a while I used the phrase "an optimism addict" to describe Leary as succintly as I could, but I stopped using that when it got misheard as "an optimistic addict", heh!
i2: Most of the other books and articles on Timothy Leary (including Leary's autobiography Flashbacks) fail to mention much about the role of Brian Barritt in Leary's life as fugitive. Why do you think that is so?
JH: There's a few reasons, the main one being that Leary and Barritt had a big falling out around 1980, which led to Brian being written dismissed in 'Flashbacks'. This was basically because Brian dedicated himself to taking heroin for a decade, rather than writing and being productive. 'Flashbacks' has since stayed in print, whereas Leary's previous books which did include Barritt, in particular 'Confessions of a Hope Fiend', have not. (Others that mention Brian are less approachable than 'Flashbacks', such as 'The Intelligence Agents'.) Happily though they reconciled before Tim died.
There's also the fact that most commentary about Tim and his life comes from people who knew him in the last 20 years of his life, and this tends to be filtered through Californian preoccupations and counter-culture politics. Which is all absolutely understandable and I certainly don't mean it as a criticism, but it is very noticeable to an outsider such as myself. Brian lives in London and is off the radar to a lot of people, so to speak. As he in particular, and the whole exile period in general, was frequently skipped over it made sense for me to go into detail about it all in the book, as I had a lot of new information that wasn't on the public record. And it's a great period, lets face it, the archytype of a disgraced philospher exiled from his homeland and forced to wander in the wilderness is a pretty compelling one.
There's a piece of paper in Leary's archive where he made a list of each year since he first used psychedelics, divided them into the four seasons, and listed for each quarter his closest male influence, his most significant lover and the work he produced at the time. It starts at Harvard with Richard Alpert being listed as his biggest influence, then Alpert and Ralph Metzner