Hello readers! I hope the holiday season and end of the year isn’t too stressful and even enjoyable. Mine is all right. Among other things, I am busily planning some year-in-review stuff for the Review! But here are some book reviews to tie you over til then.
CONTENTS
Reviews
Vidal, Burr
Schou, Orange Sunshine
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Work Seat Thief
REVIEWS
Gore Vidal, “Burr” (1973) - My first Gore Vidal novel! Without quite meaning to, it seems that Gore Vidal set himself up pretty well for posthumous approval. I don’t know how many people my age or younger actually read his work, but plenty of them quote approvingly encounters with his long list of enemies: William Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Henry Kissinger. He was also on The Simpsons that time! Enough to endear yourself, much more than similar big white chiefs of midcentury American literature have done with twenty-first century literate types.
I got “Burr” from a library free pile, and hence, am violating my usual practice- I like to read series in chronological order. I didn’t know when I picked it up that “Burr” is part of Vidal’s “Chronicles of Empire” series, where he does his thing by following American history and writing scabrous thing about respected patriotic idols. “Burr” is the volume that takes place earliest in American history, but is not the first published. Rats!
Anyway, as the title implies, Aaron Burr, revolutionary war hero, lawyer, vice-president, guy who shot Alexander Hamilton, alleged would-be conqueror of Mexico and/or the American west, all around scoundrel and bon-vivant, is the central figure in this book. The book takes place in the 1830s, after Burr has returned to the United States after being pseudo-exiled for treason and murder. He’s old, now, and has worked for some time as a lawyer in New York, leveraging his reputation for clever wickedness to his professional advantage. The narrator, Charlie Schuyler, is a young lawyer with literary dreams who is tasked with taking dictation of Burr’s memoirs, but with a hidden agenda. Various political poo-bahs in New York want Charlie to prove that Martin Van Buren, current president Andrew Jackson’s heir apparent, is Aaron Burr’s illegitimate son! Charlie is a somewhat angsty, weak-willed type, so he never quite commits to either Burr or to his handlers, or to the political passions that roil the city, or to anything other than a bad “Captain Save-A-Ho” fantasy in his love life. He’s a good receptacle for Burr’s story.
Burr details the Revolution, his politicking in New York (he helped found Tammanny Hall, among other deeds), forming the Democratic-Republicans with Jefferson, almost becoming President, fighting the duel with Hamilton, and his shenanigans out west in fine high style. Burr prides himself on being an eighteenth century-style gentleman: urbane, disinterested, something of a scoundrel, adventurous, horny. In this, he sees himself as vastly superior to the rogue’s gallery we call the Founding Fathers: through Burr, Vidal depicts Washington as a vain blunderer with a gigantic ass, Jefferson as a sinister egomaniac who believes his own ever-changing lies, and Hamilton as tragic in large part through his failures to be the upper-class gentleman he desperately aped and sucked up to, despite the talents Burr acknowledged he had.
In general, Burr and Vidal depict the era of the American founding as less of an epic of genius and more as a rather grubby tale of ego and greed. He reverses most of the conventional valuations of the period, not just about personalities. Burr didn’t mind the Articles of Confederation and saw the Constitution as a scam. Gentlemen as Burr understood them continually lost, and schemers – a class reading would say “proto-bourgeoisie” or vaguely caesarist/ideologue types ala Robespierre and Jefferson – won out. Out of the first five Presidents of the US, Burr has the most time for John Adams, who was at least a straightforward and intelligent opponent, and James Madison, whose brains Burr acknowledges but pities for letting himself become an appendage of Jefferson.
Jefferson is the heavy for much of the book, and really, he makes a good one. A gentleman is always himself- Jefferson makes himself whatever is convenient for Jefferson. Burr depicts the various twists and turns in Jeffersonian thought — from borderline Rousseauian anarchism when he was in opposition, to interpreting the Constitution to mean he could buy a third of the continent — as having even less to do with principle than most scholars now, emerging from decades of filiopiety towards the founding fathers, would find in it. Jefferson wanted power, wanted to throw red meat to the mob so they’d approve his tyranny, and only his incompetence — Burr carefully notes his shabby dress, his broken down houses with unworkable “inventions,” his generally ungentlemanly demeanor — kept him from being a Robespierre.
Burr, for his part, models himself after that other half of the French revolutionary (shitty) outcome coin- Bonaparte. I’ll need to read more of Gore Vidal to really make this call, but in this one, Vidal comes off as squarely an American Bonapartist. It’s not so much that conquering Europe is good. It’s just that out of bad options, a smart dictator is preferable to feeble febrile weirdos like Jefferson. Burr considers himself a gentleman above the democracy- but his honor and good humor doesn’t allow him to despise the people, like Hamilton does openly or Jefferson does on the sly. To the extent Burr had a politics beyond frank (as opposed to secret, hypocritical) self-advancement, it was giving the people what they wanted- glory, conquests and adventures to either participate in or live vicariously through, and beyond that, being allowed to live their little lives in peace and relative prosperity.
This is where Burr’s western adventures come in. Vidal, contrarian that he is, still can’t quite land on treason as being cool- if nothing else, that would cut across the rep he builds for Burr as being an honest crook. So he doesn’t represent Burr as trying to break off the (then-) western parts of the US as a private empire, or to sell it to Britain or Spain, with which the Jeffersonians accused him. Instead, Burr recounts a somewhat confused but fun tale of trying to gather armies of western pioneer folk to take over Mexico, and make him King or Emperor Aaron. He would have gotten away with it, too, if not for that lousy meddling James Wilkerson! But really, he implies, what gentleman of character wouldn’t want to get out from under Jefferson’s Virginian oligarchy and light out for conquests new? It’s no coincidence that the major political figure of the time that Vidal paints in a relatively positive light is Andrew Jackson, who, it seems likely, at least paid Burr’s schemes some attention before Burr got pinched. Jackson’s a rougher-hewn, less interesting Burr, as far as Vidal is concerned, the best we’re going to get. But Burr was in Europe for most of Jackson’s career, exiled as a traitor (even if he was cleared by a federal court) and murderer (he argues Hamilton basically set himself up as a martyr for… well, a martyr for the elimination of Aaron Burr from polite society). He can’t get the real Napoleon interested in any schemes, alas, so he slinks back to New York to practice law and romance widows out of their money.
This book is a little over seven hundred pages in my edition, and quite action packed. Charlie has his own life, involving literary and political intrigue, trying to “redeem” a working girl, and bloody murder, and beyond the political there’s shocking personal revelations about both Charlie and Burr. These are a little less interesting to me, and the big one about Charlie you kind of see coming. Most of these come down to questions of birth legitimacy and illicit love, and you can see why Vidal would incorporate this into his historical vision. The real America, he implies, is the one from the other side of the sheets, not in some Howard Zinn history from below sense (though there’s a soupcon of that), but in the sense of a subversion, sometimes just a plain inversion, of the received story. Burr is a devil figure in the sympathetic version of “Old Nick,” as a gentleman you can rely on to be naughty, and it appears Vidal has taken bits and pieces of old American lore, the Progressive school of history that would have been coming out of favor around the time Vidal was in college, with its emphasis on the venality of the great figures of the American past, some personal grudges (there’s a sort-of funny Buckley pastiche character), and his own interest in transgressive sexuality and behavior to make a sort of devil’s dictionary of American history. I look forward to reading the other installments. ****’
Nicholas Schou, “Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World” (2010) (read aloud by Stephen Bowlby) - Due to various life decisions, despite not being a user of psychedelics (at this point I’m not even really opposed, it just seems like more bother than it’s worth) I have read a reasonable amount about the social history of their use in the US. Not as much as I could! The psychedelic scene is really, really well-documented, or anyway the early scene around figures like Timothy Leary, before LSD became as profoundly, absurdly illegal as it would become! But a fair amount. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the business end, so I gave a listen to this account of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an Orange County, California-based group variously described as a cult, a “hippie mafia,” a circle of men with similar spiritual ideas, etc. The Brotherhood might be best known for, at one point, dropping thousands of doses of LSD over a rock concert by airplane, and for commissioning the Weather Underground to bust Timothy Leary out of jail and smuggle him to Algeria.
Author Nicholas Schou is an Orange County-area journalist who tracked down a lot of old Brotherhood members to get their stories. Like most long form crime journalism I read, there’s more in the way of anecdote and name-dropping (visits from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and a lot of involvement with Timothy Leary) than I’d prefer and less detail about organizational culture, strategy, etc., though I will say it’s actually better in terms of analytical detail than most similar books. To me, the most interesting stuff wasn’t how high anyone got, or all the ways the group found to smuggle LSD, hashish, and regular old weed into various places. There’s a cultural transition you see in the very beginning that intrigues me.
The core of the Brotherhood was made up of a group of fairly nasty young low-level criminals. These were the flotsam of the (white) Southern California dream, kids who born to families who washed up in working-class suburbs (though it’s worth noting “working class” in white Southern California in the fifties still meant cars, surfboards, plenty of leisure time at the beach) and seemingly had no ambition other than making small-time criminal deals and fighting. There’s a lot about fighting here, future Brotherhood members just beating the hell out of people for the temerity to be from another high school or beach town.
And then, sometime around 1966 or 1967, they discovered acid. And here, depending on how much you buy the Brotherhood’s nonviolent rep – Schou mostly buys it, other journalists less so (and cops much less so, but who cares) – acid transformed these guys from an obsession with random violence to something resembling inner peace. They stopped wanting to beat up everyone not from their clique, and wanting all of them to take acid and feel the oneness of the universe or whatever. Failing that, they wanted to go to a tropical island somewhere and have a Huxley-inspired island utopia.
In order to achieve both ends – and, one suspects, because it’s what, other than brawling, they knew how to do – the Brotherhood became some of the major dealers of acid, marijuana, and eventually refined marijuana product hashish, in Southern California and beyond. Somewhere between getting in a new market and native business savvy, they turned Laguna Beach into a hub of drug trafficking. They worked with legendary counterculture chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley to develop better and stronger varietals of lsd, culminating in the titular “Orange Sunshine” (one anonymous Brother confessed to giving some — a lot — to the Hell’s Angels at before they killed a guy at the Altamont pop festival, in an effort to calm them down!). They pioneered smuggling hashish out of Afghanistan and into the US. One group bought a yacht in the Caribbean, loaded it with high quality Mexican marijuana, almost died crossing the Pacific, and brought it to Maui, where it became a parent to some famous strains.
Alas, the Brothers never got their island utopia- the ones who settled on pre-tourism industry Maui came the closest. One of the leaders did set up a sort of commune camp in the mountains outside Palm Springs, but that ended poorly- they didn’t maintain the camp, people left, internal divisions, the leader eventually died there, though the location seems to be incidental to the cause of the death (overdose of psilocybin, which I have never heard of before, but I know it makes you puke so it makes sense I guess). Timothy Leary was happy to make use of them as evangelists, Front men, and a get out of jail free card, but by the time Leary was pronouncing himself the most evolved human of all time in Algiers (just before the Panthers put a gun to his head and made him declare himself in favor of violent overthrow of the US government), the Brothers lost most of their interest in him. In the seventies, the newly-formed DEA caught up with the Brotherhood, a number of them went down, and the group drifted apart.
This is reasonably decent narrative history/journalism. To tell the truth, the individual Brothers tend to merge together- from tediously aggressive beach bum goons to tediously enlightened trickster smugglers. Some of them cared more about the money than others- and all of them did a certain amount “for the cause,” which was one of the things that both brought them to fed attention with their evangelism, and helped keep the group together. If acid really did lead these guys to go from wannabe killers to dudes who just really, really liked acid and surfing, more power to it. There are intimations of darker things — connections to the Manson Family, and something tells me that many Brothers didn’t spend that much time in Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey without some connections to US intelligence (which helped take some of them down in the end) — but Schou doesn’t really track them down. He doesn’t show them as angelic, even post acid-conversion — there were some creepy cult aspects to their behavior (weird biblical patriarchal gender rules, for instance), they were fine with turning on and then screwing underage girls, etc — but isn’t willing to show them doing anything the group itself would consider really wrong… well, maybe it’s truth, maybe it’s stenography. I don’t know. ***’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Work Seat Thief
I got up briefly while working from home and Mithra stole my seat. Not only did I need to keep working from the beanbag, but she didn’t even look at me when I tried to document the situation!