I read Timothy Leary's autobiography a few years ago. It was one of the saddest memoirs I've read because Leary put such a positive spin on a life that was fueled as much by the alcoholism at the core of his being as by his quest for a higher consciousness. And he had a special talent, as so many drunks do, for destroying the lives of his loved ones, too, including his wives and children. Still, I felt a sort of affection for him, sort of like I did for my crazy, alcoholic uncle Kip, who would talk to you quite rationally about last night's ball game one second, then lapse into a rap about the stigmata on his palms the next.

I first fell under Leary's spell as a prepubescent boy who'd listen to him rhapsodizing about LSD on Long John Nebel's late night radio show on WNBC in New York in the mid Sixties. Boy, did I even want to get my hands on some acid. It's a good thing that there were no known dealers in St. Gabriel's Parochial school back in the day. By the time I could buy acid, I'd decided that it wouldn't a good idea for me. Pot made often made me paranoid; I figured the odds were good that I'd totally flip out on acid. I never did take it.

This all come to mind because a new biography of Leary, by Robert Greenfield, is being published this summer. It was reviewed by Luc Sante in today's New York Times Book Review. Sante makes some broad observations in his final paragraph (below) and, in the last sentence, takes Leary's life to a higher level of conscious, if not consciousness.

"The book provides a crash course in several aspects of 60's culture: its often gaseous rhetoric, its reliance on mahatmas and soothsayers, its endless bail-fund benefits and sometimes dubious appeals to conscience, its thriving population of informers, its contribution to the well-being of lawyers, its candyland expectations and obstinate denials of reality, its fatal avoidance of critical thinking, its squalid death by its own hand.," Sante writes. "That still leaves many meritorious elements largely outside Leary's sphere: civil rights, the antiwar movement, music and art, the impulse toward communitarianism,; to name a few. In part because of Leary, however, ideals and delusions were encouraged to interbreed, their living progeny being avid consumerism and toothless dissent."

I never would have thought to hang avid consumerism and toothless dissent on this brilliant sad sack of a man, but Sante may have a point.