MUTANTS
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not
sorry.
I
smoke marijuana every chance
I
get.
I
sit in
m~
house for days on end and stare at the roses in the
closet.
When
I
go to Chinatown
I ...
never get laid .
..
523
Similarly, Michael McClure reveals in
his
essay,
«Phi
Upsilon
Kappa,"
that before penetrating the "cavern of Anglo-Saxon,"
whence he emerged with the slogan of the ultimate Berkeley demon–
strators, he had been on mescalin. "I have emerged from a dark
night of the soul; 1 entered it by Peyote." And by now, drug-taking
has become as standard a feature of the literature of the young as
oral-genital love-making. 1 flip open the first issue of yet another
ephemeral San Francisco little magazine quite at random and read:
"I tie up and the main pipe [the ante-cobital vein, for the clinically
inclined] swells like a prideful beggar beneath the skin. Just before
1 get on it is always the worst." Worse than the experience, however,
is its literary rendering; and the badness of such confessional fiction,
flawed by the sentimentality of those who desire to live "like a cun–
ning vegetable," is a badness we older readers find it only too easy to
perceive, as our sons and daughters find it only too easy to overlook.
Yet precisely here the age and the mode define themselves; for not
in the master but in the hacks new forms are established, new lines
drawn.
Here, at any rate, is where the young lose us in literature as well
as life, since here they pass over into real revolt, i.e., what we really
cannot abide, hard as we try. The mother who has sent her son to
private schools and on to Harvard to keep him out of classrooms
overcrowded with poor Negroes, rejoices when he sets out for Missis–
sippi with his comrades in SNCC, but shudders when he turns on
with LSD; just as the ex-Marxist father, who has earlier proved
radicalism impossible, rejoices to see his son stand up, piously and
pompously, for CORE or SDS, but trembles to hear him quote
Alpert and Leary or praise Burroughs. Just as certainly as liberalism
is the LSD of the aging, LSD is the radicalism of the young.
If
whiskey long served as an appropriate symbolic excess for
those who chafed against Puritan restraint without finally challenging
it-temporarily releasing them to socially harmful aggression and
(hopefully) sexual self-indulgence, the new popular drugs provide
