PEN AND INK AND HALLUCINOGENS

Anthony Daniels reviews The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
by Marcus Boon

Once when I worked on a tropical island where everything appeared as free
as possible from the pressures of modern life, I discovered that some
youths inhaled petrol fumes. Their description of the effect made it sound
distinctly unpleasant, and yet they continued to do it. When asked why,
they replied that the fumes made them feel different and the change, even
for the worse, was reward in itself.

It seems, then, that the strain of being human is too much for many men to
bear, at least for very long, and if a substance comes along that will
relieve them of it, many will take it.

The literary exploration of this propensity to take mind-altering
substances, and their use to create new realms of experience for literary
purposes, is comparatively recent. The author of this book, a professor of
English at Toronto University, has written a history of the effect of
drug-taking on literary production, touching only tangentially on the
effect of literary production on drug-taking.

After all, in a democratic - not to say demotic - age, the activities of a
cultural elite will soon be aped by the populace, with social consequences
not altogether desirable. This thought, though, never inhibits a cultural
elite from doing anything it wishes.

One of the merits of the book is to remind us that literary interest in
drug-altered states of consciousness did not begin with the Beats or in the
hippy years. The roll of writers who experimented not only with opium but
with laughing gas and hashish in the 19th century is long, and includes
great names as well as many lesser ones: Coleridge, Baudelaire and Gautier
among them.

As the sciences of chemistry and pharmacology advanced, a greater variety
of substances became available for experimentation, and the claims made for
the advantages of taking them ever wilder. Aleister Crowley, for example,
who regarded evil as an advertising slogan for himself, took hashish and
cocaine, thinking they were a short-cut to mystical illumination.

The idea that drug-altered states of consciousness were superior to normal
consciousness eventually became a commonplace, as famous authors
experimented with amphetamines, mescaline and LSD, among other drugs. It
was the novelty of the experience that gave it its patina of transcendental
profundity: no one would have taken the lucubrations of a drunkard for
philosophy, because drunkenness was thoroughly familiar to all.

Several writers who wrote under the influence of drugs - William Burroughs
and Jack Kerouac among them - believed that the drugs released creativity
and valuable associations of ideas that would otherwise have remained
concealed or locked away. Needless to say, this was a recipe for a lack of
literary discipline, valuing as it did spontaneity more than craft, and
self-expression more than intellect. These ideas are, in my opinion,
ultimately destructive of worthwhile art.

But these writers made it seem that to abstain from drugs was not only to
miss out on a philosophically important and illuminating experience, but to
be naive, conformist and unsophisticated. As a result, many people probably
started to take drugs more from a fear of appearing cowardly and ridiculous
in the eyes of their friends than from any desire to experience the
ineffable. But the easy gratifications of drug-taking are not easily
abjured once experienced.

It was all too easy for people to suppose that, if members of the cultural
elite (which quickly came to include members of the counter-cultural elite)
took drugs, then those who took drugs were part of that elite. Aldous
Huxley, whom the author quotes, states in his famous book about his
experience of mescaline, The Doors of Perception, that "art…is only
for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up
their minds to be content…with symbols rather than with what they
signify…"

In other words, raw experience is more important than what you do with it,
and to be is better than to do: by taking a mind-altering substance, anyone
could be a Leonardo or a Shakespeare. As the author rightly remarks, this
represented a profound cultural shift.

But whether it was a shift for the better or the worse is not a question he
cares to discuss. Although (or perhaps I should say because) he is a
professor of English, he makes no distinction between the works he
considers on grounds of artistic merit. He is nevertheless inclined to take
popular culture seriously, not merely as a sociological phenomenon, but
artistically. It would not nowadays be safe, or at least prudent, for a
university teacher of humanities to do otherwise.

There are errors in the book. Contrary to the author's assertion, cannabis
is addictive, at least in the sense that tolerance to it develops and
withdrawal occurs. It is alarming to see the possessive pronoun "its"
printed as "it's" not once but thrice under the imprint of one of the
world's greatest institutions of learning (but I suppose it is inevitable
that if you don't believe in a difference between high and low culture, you
soon won't believe in a difference between high and low grammar or
orthography either). And by using the word "disinterested" to mean
"uninterested", the author has done his little bit for the impoverishment
of our language.

He has, however, produced an exceedingly well-documented history of his
subject, which is generally lively and well-written. As a guide to the
literary history of drug-taking, his book is unlikely to be bettered for a
long time.