150
JOSEPH PEQUIGNEY
The twanging twingtwonged louder, fiercer, swelling the room at
the seams, shredding soundwaves into fine electric shrapnel
to
prick the pores of the skin and penetrate anus and ureter in
twitching itching slither, penetrate the lips the nostrils the corners
of the eyes, flood the inner ear and shoot screwdrivers to the
brainstem.
The similes also carry a charge. Alex's pillow "soaked up a cacophony
of noises, like a hunk of electrosponge amplifier," and "Having squeezed
at last through the rear door I burst from the bus like a popping black.
head," when "Darkness clattered down like a pot lid." He offers such
neologisms as "Youthquake," "Lamastery," "Buddhahood," and "amoeba·
hood," and the cute circumlocution "my boyish tassle" (the penis).
Someone once undertook, hilariously, a "pilgrimage to the Episcopal
seminary in Pudendo Beach, California." Of course the narrator is very
hip. He reads a grin "as if to say, dig those crazy people!" and notices
that "the rest of them were having a ball," and explains that "we all
could laugh laugh while we dug dug, because we were hip, dig, it was
understood." The style, so jazzy and so forced, is an index to the
quality of intelligence and imagination operative in the novel.
Its nucleus is the lengthy treatment of an experience with LSD,
here called the Answer Drug. The episode occurs when Alex Randall,
seeking a remedy for the alarming symptoms produced by the Drug on
Benjy, his roommate, goes to Heavenly House, the headquarters of Dr.
Magus
Tyrtan and the cult beginning to flourish around him. The year
is, insistently, 1964 - "remember this was back in '64, before the flood
of potentates and publicity." Dr. Tyrtan has been dismissed from the
medical faculty of a university in New England, the one the narrator
attends (prudently unnamed, for many details belie the broad hints that
it is Harvard). Assured that his fear for Benjy are unfounded, Alex
stays over, and later consents to a "journey." He submits to the influ–
ence of Tyrtan, though leery of him all along, because he transfers to
him much of the ambivalence felt toward his own father, a successful,
self-made businessman. The son treasures a photograph of a youth-
ful Mr. Randall dressed for a career he once briefly entertained,
that of an Episcopalian clergyman. Tyrtan's religious fervor makes him
a paternal surrogate who did follow a priestly rather than an industrial
vocation. This scientist turned guru, broadly caricatured, is attracted
to Alex from watching him play football and from reading his poetry
(the character of which can be inferred from the prose). This enthu–
siasm, unintelligible except to its egocentric recipient, is continuously
purred in soft, embarrassing, though presumably nonerotic compliments:
