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History of the Psychedelic Rediscovery

  The Door in the Wall

    Jay Stevens

        Psychedelics in the 1950s. An excerpt from
        Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens.
        Harper & Row Publishers, ©1987 by Jay Stevens. ISBN 0-06-097172-X

We noticed, predominantly, changes similar to those seen in schizophrenic patients. The subjects exhibited preeminently difficulties in thinking, which became retarded, blocked, autistic, and disconnected.... Feelings of indifference and unreality with suspiciousness, hostility, and resentment also approximated schizophrenic phenomena. Hallucinations and delusional disturbances were much less prominent...

    The first schizophrenic Humphrey Osmond ever treated was a girl who told him that whenever she looked in the mirror, what she saw was an elephant. As soon as she left, Osmond trotted off to find his superior and tell him of this very odd delusion. "Well you know she has schizophrenia," his boss had said. "What's that?" Osmond had asked. He'd heard of it, of course. What he wanted were the answers to the usual first questions—symptoms, treatment, etiology. But what he discovered was that nobody could tell him anything substantive. There were lots of theories, but no hard data that did for schizophrenia what Freud and his followers had done for the mechanism of repression, for the dynamics of neuroses. Tired of his questions, Osmond's boss finally suggested that he look up a Jungian analyst named Anthony Hampton, who in turn suggested that he read a book by Thomas Hennell called The Witnesses.
    Alongside Clifford Beers's The Mind That Found Itself, Hennell's book was one of the more evocative descriptions of what it was like to suffer and recover from extreme psychosis. Hennell captured perfectly the gradual inflation of his own disease. The nocturnal noises. The odd subjectivity of objects. The contradictory feeling of great personal destiny coupled with a growing certainty that one's ego was shredding away. The symptoms were a bit like an orchestra tuning up, first the strings, then the woodwinds, last the brass. As anyone who has attended a concert knows, the tuning up is nothing compared to the full orchestral blast. For Hennell the crescendo came on a day when he decided to walk into Oxford. He noticed that the other pedestrians were giving him meaningful looks, as though they knew something he didn't. As dusk arrived, Hennell saw that the fields beyond the hedgerow were beginning to boil, a bit like a Van Gogh painting, while up in the sky the stars were wheeling about, again a bit like a Van Gogh painting. Hennell only had a second to savor these weird perceptions before a squad car of secret police roared up, clapped him into a van filled with meat, and drove him off to a secret prison.
    Although Osmond reread The Witnesses many times, its net effect was to leave him more perplexed than ever about the nature of schizophrenia.
    After his apprenticeship ended, Osmond took a job at St. George's, one of London's famous teaching hospitals. There he met a rather exotic—exotic in terms of Osmond's Scotch upbringing in the Surrey downs—junior resident named John Smythies. Smythies had grown up in India during the twilight of the Raj, where his father had been chief forestor. It was Osmond's impression that young Smythies had had numerous exotic adventures before being dispatched to Rugby and Cambridge, for the intellectual tempering all proper English gentlemen underwent. Smythies's passion was the nature of mind, and he was not at all reticent about the fact that he considered psychiatry merely a handy way to investigate what was really a philosophical problem. This, plus his habit of speaking in brisk declaratives prefaced by the phrase "it's obvious," did not endear Smythies to his superiors, most of whom were old-time clinicians with a deep distrust of theory. But Osmond thought Smythies "not much less bright than he thought he was," and they got on famously.
    Smythies had a number of eccentric enthusiasms—parapsychology was one—and one day he showed up at St. George's with a book by Alexandre Rouhier, a contemporary of Beringer's, who had written a book on peyote called Le Peyotl. On one of its pages was a molecular formula for mescaline.
    The formula reminded Smythies of something, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. Osmond also had a feeling of vague recognition. Then they showed the picture to a former biochemist who said it looked sort of like thyroid and sort of like adrenaline, with the nod probably going to the latter. This similarity between adrenaline and mescaline suggested an intriguing hypothesis: what if, in stressful situations, adrenaline got transformed into something chemically akin to mescaline. Wouldn't that account for Hennell's boiling fields and whirling skies, for the elephant in the mirror? It was known that certain plants were capable of such a metabolic transformation, known as transmethylation, but there was no evidence that animals were capable of transmethylation.
    Obtaining some mescaline from Lights Chemical, Osmond and Smythies began testing their hypothesis. Osmond took 400 milligrams of mescaline one afternoon in Smythies's rooms, which were down a back alley off Wimpole Street. A tape recorder had been borrowed to record his thoughts. Osmond found it menacing. First it glowed a deep purple, then a cherry red. Putting his hand close to it, it felt as though someone had thrown open the door to a blast furnace. For the first time Hennell made sense. Schizophrenics weren't talking in similes and metaphors—there was no as if involved in the mad state—they were talking about reality, and it was scientific arrogance to dismiss it as delusion.
    Once his astonishment had cooled, Osmond turned to the philosophical ramifications. If what we took to be objective reality was so fragile that it could be swept away by 400 milligrams of mescaline, then perhaps the vitalists who had argued that the brain was merely a mechanism to stabilize an anarchic world were correct. Perhaps the notion of objective reality was a paradox.
    Smythies and Osmond published a small essay on these matters in 1952 called "A New Approach to Schizophrenia." In it they theorized that the body, confronted with an anxious state, might react by producing an endogamous hallucinogen, in this case one derived from adrenaline. The hallucinogen would cause the perceptual world to change, leading to more stress, more adrenaline, more of the natural hallucinogen, and ever deeper levels of psychosis. The only way to break this cycle would be for the sufferer to literally turn off reality: to retreat into another world. This, paradoxically, was the body's only way, short of death, of preserving its own sanity.
    What was particularly elegant about this theory, which they called the M factor theory, was the way it combined both a neurological and a psychological dynamic, thus marrying what were usually two mutually exclusive bodies of research.
    Having imagined this hypothetical chemical, the M factor, the next step was either to isolate it in its natural state or to make some up in the lab. It was a dilemma not unlike that faced by the American astronomer W. H. Pickering, when he had deduced in 1919 that the solar system had to contain another planet, as yet undiscovered, which Pickering confidently named Pluto. Eleven years later Pluto was found exactly where Pickering had predicted it would be. But the tools of astronomy, as Osmond and Smythies quickly learned, were far more sophisticated than the tools of neuropharmacology. The mysteries of outer space were child's play compared to the complexities of inner space. They approached some chemists at Imperial Chemical—"the chaps who had done the original work on synthesizing penicillin"—and asked them to work on a series of compounds intermediate between adrenaline and mescaline. The chemists tried, but soon gave up: however slight the differences were on paper, they were insurmountable in the lab.
    So they decided to concentrate on the amenochromes, which were formed when adrenaline decomposes naturally. One of these amenochromes, adrenochrome, seemed a likely candidate, as it had a molecular structure surprisingly similar to mescaline.
    Osmond swallowed his first adrenochrome in 1952. After ten minutes the ceiling changed color, and whenever he closed his eyes he was overwhelmed by a swarm of dots, which merged and fled with the kind of shifting pointillism one finds in schools of fish. Someone pulled out a pack of Rorschach cards, and Osmond astounded himself with the inventive shapes he was able to discover. Walking back down the corridors of the hospital, Osmond was amazed at how sinister they seemed: what did all the cracks on the floor mean? And why were there so many of them? His colleagues were delighted with his behavior—this certainly was a model psychosis—and Osmond watched them celebrating as though from behind a thick glass wall.
    Osmond was no longer in England when he had his adventure with adrenochrome. In mid-1952 he had accepted a job in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, as Clinical Director of Saskatchewan Hospital. The place was touted as the finest mental hospital on the prairies, although this was something of a joke since it was the only mental hospital on the prairies. Actually the place was so rank, so depressingly nineteenth-century-madhouse, that when Osmond and his colleagues received the APA's Silver Plaque award for most improved mental hospital, American customs declared the "before" pictures to be obscene and special dispensation had to be obtained before they were allowed into the country.
    It was Osmond's job to clean up this mess without unduly rattling the Old Director, who was supposed to remain on as a patriarchal figurehead until retirement. But the Old Director resented this new crop of bright boys, with their talk of insulin treatments and electroshock and the search for the mysterious M factor. Whenever possible he countermanded Osmond's innovations.
    Work on the M factor was proceeding slowly. In the absence of Smythies, who was scheduled to arrive in Saskatchewan in a few months, Osmond had begun working with a psychiatrist affiliated with Saskatchewan University named Abram Hoffer. Hoffer had a passing acquaintance with Heinrich Kluver, who had suggested that sometime he might want to look into mescaline as "quite the most interesting thing around." When Smythies finally arrived he brought along some notes for an essay, which, after some input from Osmond, was published under both their names in the Hibbert Journal. Smythies had been reading up on eighteenth-century medicine, a period of fanciful theories and bitter polemics, with little regard for the facts. It was, Smythies thought, a period with remarkable similarity to twentieth-century psychology. What was needed was a new model of scientific progress, one along the lines that Karl Popper had suggested, which saw science proceeding from Orthodoxy (the accepted theory of the known facts) to Heresy (a new ordering of the facts, often of greater inclusiveness) and thence to a New Orthodoxy, and so on through further heresies and better orthodoxies.
    Mescaline was mentioned exactly twice. The first instance came in the context of an analysis of the psychobiological explanation of schizophrenia. "No one is really competent to treat schizophrenia unless he has experienced the schizophrenic world himself," they wrote. "This is possible to do quite simply by taking mescaline." The second mention was in the context of a new theory of mind, which henceforth would have to account for three new sets of facts:

A) The recent development in the study of the design and behaviour of electronic computing machines, and the study of analogous brain mechanisms.

B) The recent advances in parapsychology. We refer to the establishment of Extra-sensory perception as scientific fact.

C) The nature of the phenomena witnessed under the influence of mescaline. One would have thought that anyone, concerned in devising systems of psychology based on the concept of the unconscious mind, would have utilized such a prolific source of material as mescaline offers, but no one has yet done so, although Rouhier made this suggestion as long ago as 1922.

    Aldous Huxley was fifty-eight when he dashed off that characteristically enthusiastic note to Osmond and Smythies. He had been a featured player on the literary stage for thirty-two years, his reputation secured by a quartet of satirical novels begun when both he and the century were in their twenties—exercises of such brilliance that André Maurois, the French belle lettrist, lauded Huxley as "the most intelligent writer of our generation," by which he meant Huxley's mind held more information in perfect equilibrium than anyone else around.
    He was supposed to have read, while still in short pants, the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, which was certainly conceivable from the volumes of essays that flowed from his pen, and paid his rent for most of his life. He seemed to know something about everything, which might lead one to think he was either a bore or a dilettante, but he was neither. His opinions, whether the subject was molecular biology or the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, were so precociously sharp that art critic Kenneth Clark once groused that after a lifetime studying Piero, in the end he seemed to know "far less than Aldous had learnt in a few weeks, by some miraculous combination of intellect and intuition."
    Once, vacationing in Italy, Huxley happened to stumble across the filming of Helen of Troy, one of those excessive Hollywood costume dramas of the 1950s. Now this production, on this particular day, had a particularly pressing problem: the script called for a bacchanale. But neither the director, a midwesterner, nor the assistant director, a New Yorker, were exactly sure what a bacchanale was. Enter Aldous Huxley. Who, as the assistant director later told the story, "went on for hours relating what he knew about bacchanales. As a result our bacchanale was so successful that the crowd people could not stop when the director cried 'cut.'"
    That was the quintessential Huxley: amusing, full of exotic lore made even more exotic by his own exotic physique: six four and so thin it was as though a flagpole had animated itself. When Aldous was young most of his friends thought he looked like a grasshopper, but as he matured he was usually compared to a waterbird, a heron or egret. He had a long, wide face that was always a decade younger than his calendar age, topped first by brown, then silver hair. But his most compelling features were his blue eyes, one sightless, the other nearly so, and his conversation, which flowed with such grace it was easily the most athletic aspect of a decidedly unathletic man. Huxley would lean back in his chair, fix his myopic blue eyes above and beyond one's head and then let his thoughts unwind "without interruption until he had turned over every stone to discover the strange facts hidden beneath them, or had followed the labyrinth... and had unraveled the truth at the end of it." Unlike a lot of champion talkers, he was also an avid listener, with an insatiable appetite for information, for gossip, stories, books, politics, science, scandal, and facts, the more exotic the better, murmuring "most extraordinary" whenever a choice tidbit presented itself.
    Had Aldous Huxley died at thirty-five, shortly after the publication of his fifth novel, Brave New World, his place in English literature would have been secure. Somerset Maugham might have placed him alongside himself, in the first seats of the second row; Scott Fitzgerald could have lamented the premature closing, after a rousing first act, of another promising career. But Huxley didn't die—he changed, which is sometimes worse. From the mid-Thirties on he immersed himself in mysticism and oriental philosophy. His novels, when he stirred himself to produce one (which he did at regular intervals for the simple reason that novels earned more than essays), were really philosophical essays dolled up in fictional garb, like something Voltaire or one of the other philosophes might have written. "Nobody since Chesterton has so squandered his gifts," wrote the critic Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise, which was ironically, an inquiry into why he, Connolly, had squandered his own gifts.
    But the feeling that something alarming had happened to Aldous was widespread. To André Maurois, the new incarnation was "an astonishing reversal of his thought, and disturbing to anyone as close to the earlier Aldous Huxley as I had been." Few of his early admirers dared or cared to follow him down the paths that led first to The Perennial Philosophy, his compilation of the mystical components underlying all religion, and thence to his suggestion to Osmond and Smythies that he was not adverse, indeed he was most eager, to try mescaline, a drug that presumably made one crazy.
    The consternation over this transformation dogged Huxley until the day he died, which was the same day John Kennedy died, November 22,1963. When the obituary writers came to summarize his life in the twenty or thirty column inches reserved for the passing of Great Men, their inability to rationalize the whole was obvious. What they didn't realize was that Huxley's life was less a career than a quest for... what? The perfect synthesis of science, religion, and art? The uniting of the inner man and the outer man? "My primary occupation," Huxley once wrote in one of his approximately ten thousand letters, "is the achievement of some kind of over-all understanding of the world... that accounts for the facts."

    He was born Aldous Leonard Huxley on July 26, 1894, in the county of Surrey, England, the third son of Dr. Leonard Huxley, educator, editor, and minor literary figure, and the grandson of T. H. Huxley, eminent biologist and one of the most famous men in Victorian England. Known as "Darwin's Bulldog," T. H. was the man who had demolished Bishop Wilberforce in the famous Oxford debates over Darwin's theory of evolution. He personified the scientific rationalist, and he eloquently argued its case in newspapers and magazines, and from lecterns throughout the English-speaking world. His collected essays, filling nine volumes, began appearing in the year of his third grandson's birth, and just a few months before his own death at age seventy.
    "Clear, cold logic engines," were what T. H. demanded from his son and grandsons. As Aldous's older brother, Julian, once defined it, the Huxley tradition was one of "hard but high thinking, plain but fiery living, wide intellectual interest and constant intellectual achievement."
    Huxley's mother, Julia, came from equally impressive stock. She was the niece of poet Matthew Arnold and granddaughter of the moralist and educator Dr. Thomas Arnold, one of the eminent Victorians later eviscerated by Lytton Strachey in the book of that name. Julia Huxley was an educator who founded Prior's Field, a girls' school just a few meadows away from Hillside School, where young Aldous received his first education.
    He was, by all accounts, a brilliant, unathletic, aloof student, whose capacity for detachment unnerved his peers. "Aldous possessed the key to an inviolable inner fortress," said his cousin Gervas, who also attended Hillside. "Never can I remember him losing his control or giving way to violent emotion as most of us did." He "possessed some innate superiority and moved on a different level from us other children," according to his older brother, Julian. He was always thinking, measuring, comparing, assessing. Once his godmother, after observing him staring fixedly out a window, asked what on earth he was thinking about and received the single word skin in reply.
    So he was an odd child, even a little scary. Some years later the English science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon published a book called Odd John, which was an attempt to imagine what an intellectual superman, a true Übermensch to use Nietzsche's much debated term, would really be like. The resulting portrait bears a striking resemblance to the adolescent Aldous Huxley, with the profound qualification that Odd John was never tested by personal tragedy the way Huxley was. Beginning with his entrance to Eton, Huxley's detachment was shattered by three tragedies. When he was fourteen his mother died. When he was sixteen he contracted a streptococcus infection that destroyed the cornea in his right eye and left the other clouded to the point of blindness The condition was so serious that Huxley was forced to learn Braille which he shrugged off with the wry joke that now he could read with impunity after lights out. He was also forced to give up his dream of studying biology, in preparation for a medical career. Adapting a typewriter with Braille keys, he began tapping out poems and stories.
    Finally, two years after his blindness lifted and a year after matriculating at Balliol College, Oxford, in the same August that saw the beginning of World War One, Huxley's middle brother, Trev, committed suicide.
    "There is, apart from the sheer grief of the loss, an added pain in the cynicism of the situation," Aldous wrote to cousin Gervas. "It is just the highest and best in Trev, his ideals, which have driven him to his death, while there are thousands who shelter their weakness from the same fate by a cynical, unidealistic outlook on life. Trev was not strong but he had the courage to face life with ideals—and his ideals were too much for him."
    This was not a mistake Aldous intended to make. At Oxford he buried his idealism under a cloak of aesthetic dandyism, affecting yellow ties and white socks, and instead of the usual classical reproduction above the fireplace, installing a poster of bare-breasted bathing beauties—French of course. He moved a piano into his room and began banging out American jazz. And he started spending weekends at Garsington, a manor house some six miles from Oxford that Phillip and Ottoline Morrell maintained as a country retreat for the Bloomsbury crowd. A typical Garsington houseparty mingled the likes of Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, the Woolfs—Leonard and Virginia—with assorted other aristocrats of the artistic and intellectual beau monde. Young Huxley held his own amid this galaxy of wits, and was considered by them an intellectual comer and promising poet. When he published a chapbook of poems entitled The Defeat of Youth in 1918, tout Garsington joined in his praise.
    Garsington was also where Huxley met his future wife, Maria Nys, a waifish Belgian war refugee who was one of Lady Ottoline's charges. Besides being more than a foot shorter than her future husband, Maria's temperament—intuitive, magical, sensuous—was the exact opposite of Aldous's clear cold logic engine. Igor Stravinsky once said of Maria: "knowing nothing, she understands everything." And one of the things she understood was people. Maria had great psychological acuity, something her husband was almost totally without. Aldous called her his "personal relationship interpreter," and he used to quiz her thoroughly about the people they met at Garsington.
    Their partnership—they began living together in 1919 and were married a few months later—produced one child, a boy, Matthew, and at least eight novels. The first of these, Chrome Yellow, was published in 1921, and was followed at two-year intervals by Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and Point, Counterpoint. Opening the boards of that first book, none of Huxley's friends could have been prepared for what they found inside. The gentle, abstracted poet of lines like

The style is formed, the specific frame of reference and interpretation of life is clear, and a public has gathered to buy the wares this craftsman knows how to produce in steady supply. And then suddenly the formula seems false, the angle hopelessly inaccurate, the analyses contemptibly shallow. Huxley's family mores and his ancestral genii were challenging his own personal genius. Satire could entertain; it could not assure. The sardonic, to keep its edge, must sharpen on the whetstone of the full truth of man—man, the one unfinished animal; man the incomparably teachable; untaught, less than a beast; ill-taught, worse than a beast; well-taught, the one creature of infinite promise, of superhuman potential.

For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close in that great city; the next, I knew the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to belie re, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, attune us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant... then, it seems to me, all our problems would be wholly solved and earth would become a paradise.

    "But Aldous, what if we don't like him? What if he wears a beard?" was Maria's comment when Huxley announced that he had invited an unknown chap named Osmond, a psychiatrist no less, for a visit. The offer of room and board chez Huxley was a rare ticket; even Julian, when he was in town, stayed at a local hotel.
    The possibility that Osmond might be a tedious bore hadn't occurred to Huxley, and after a few moments' thought he arrived at a simple solution. "We can always be out," he said.
    Osmond, some three thousand miles away, was having similar fears. What if he couldn't play in Huxley's intellectual league? What if he came off as a tedious bore? "You can always arrange to stay late at the APA," his wife said.
    He need not have worried. The one thing Huxley prized most in a fellow conversationalist was intellectual breadth, and Osmond had plenty of that. Like Heard, he could turn on a conversational dime and launch into a disquisition on, say, scurvy, that was so vivid one would almost swear he had shipped with Da Gama when half of that gentleman's crew perished. Maria, watching Aldous warm to the younger man, confided to Osmond: "I knew you'd get along. You're both Englishmen."
    Huxley accompanied Osmond to several APA sessions, which he found deadly dull, and amused himself by genuflecting whenever Freud's name was mentioned. The subject of mescaline didn't arise until two days before Osmond was to leave, and then it was Maria who broached the subject, having decided that the famous British reticence was going to prevent the two men from discussing what was certainly uppermost in Aldous's mind. Osmond admitted that he had brought some mescaline with him; while Huxley conceded that he had borrowed a tape recorder to preserve a record of the experiment.
    The next day, May 4, 1953, Osmond dissolved some mescaline crystals in a glass of water and nervously handed it to Huxley. Outside it was one of those perfect LA mornings, blue and warm, with just a trace of smog hanging over the San Bernardino valley. What if the drug worked too well, Osmond thought to himself. Although Smythies and he had begun to appreciate that there was more to the mescaline experience than simple psychosis, that didn't diminish the possibility that the next six hours might be absolutely hellish. And Osmond didn't relish the possibility that he might become infamous as the man who drove Aldous Huxley crazy.
    On the other hand, what if nothing happened? It was beginning to dawn on Humphrey that Huxley had some rather idiosyncratic notions about what he hoped to achieve in the mescaline state. Nowhere was this more explicit than in the letter Osmond had received confirming his invitation to stay with the Huxleys while at the APA. After the usual pleasantries, Aldous had launched into a critique of what he called the Sears & Roebuck culture:

Under the current dispensation the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue; is it too much to hope that a system of education may someday be devised which shall give results, in terms of human development, commensurate with the time, money, energy and action expended? In such a system of education it may be that mescaline or some other chemical substance may play a part by making it possible for young people to "taste and see" what they have learned at second hand, or directly but at a lower level of intensity, in the writings of the religious, or the works of poets, painters and musicians.

Part II