Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 1998
I first heard of Millbrook, the book, 25 years ago after joining the Neo-American Church. I was attending the University of Vermont and bought a copy of the Boo Hoo Bible by Art Kleps (also available from Amazon). During an acid trip several days later I decided that any religion which recognizes synchronicity and yet is irreverant and humorous, and considers psychedelics to be sacraments, was worth becoming a part of. I sent my signed membership card off to someplace in New Mexico. A few weeks later I got a call from a church member who said that the chief boo hoo, Art Kleps, was living in Burlington and wanted to set up an interview with the school newspaper for an upcoming lecture. Synch! I contacted the newspaper to find a reporter and was told that none were available and that unless I did the interview myself it wouldn't be done. Heavy synch! So on a beautifully crisp autumn evening which Vermont in so justly famous for, I walked from my dorm room down to Church Street to meet the one and only chief boo hoo of the Neo-American Church.
My visit with His Highness, chief boo hoo, and his wife, Her Highness, chief bee hee, was an Enlightening experience. It was the first time that I had heard in a coherent fashion the idea that life is a dream and the externality of relations an illusion. That everything is synchronicity. Suddenly all of the pieces fit. I also heard about the chief's new book, Millbrook, which he promised was not only philosophical but also had lurid tales about Timothy Leary and the millionaires of the sixties LSD culture. It was contracted to be published by Regency.
The Regency printing never happened and I didn't have much personal contact with the Church for the next year. But when the magic autumn of Vermont returned I was invited for visits to Court in Vergennes, where Their Highnesses lived in a house in the country. It was here that I would sit in an overstuffed chair and read Millbrook for the first time. It was in manuscript form so there were big ringed notebooks of typed paper. I loved Millbrook then and I love Millbrook now.
A rough outline of major events in the book: In 1960, the author, then a school psychologist, takes a half a gram of pure mescaline sulfate, which he legally orders through the mail, and has a massive visionary trip. Three years later, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzer, Ph.D.s recently ejected from Harvard, move into the Hitchcock property, a 2500-acre estate in Millbrook, wealthy Dutchess County, New York. They were offered a 50 room mansion, the "Big House," by Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs of the Mellon fortune, as a "psychedelic research center." Art Kleps sends Leary a copy of his Neo-Psychopathic Character Test and is invited to visit Millbrook. He feels an immediate affinity with the LSD-gobbling residents, who are described in glorious detail. During this and subsequent visits amazing stories unfold. After the author is fired as a school psychologist in 1964 for writing a paper on marijuana, he buys lakefront property in the Adirondacks for a psychedelic retreat and names it "Morning Glory Lodge." He creates the Neo-American Church, with the clergy being "boo hoos," himself as "chief boo hoo," and psychedelic drugs being sacraments. New members receive five peyote buttons and a membership card. The chief loses the property and in 1967 moves into the psychedelian community of Millbrook, remaining there until police raids and legal pressure force its dissolution in the spring of 1968.
A brief glimpse of a few of many memorable scenes from the book: Allan Watts well-lubricated on whiskey reeling off an amazing eulogy to a recently dead Aldous Huxley. Jack Kerouac smashed on wine and a little LSD visiting a Neo-American meeting in Miami. Timothy Leary being rebuffed after exclaiming, "We are all charlatans, aren't we?" The evil Michael Hollingshead unsuccessfully trying to find a mysterious stash under a rock with a flashlight during a dark and thundery night. The 1967 Fourth of July party at Millbrook with pitchers of acid punch, millionaires dressed in fanciful costumes, an incredible fireworks show and music by the Grateful Dead. Bill Haines, guru of the psychedelic Sri Ram Ashram, reading the chief boo hoo's classic, "The Bombardment and Annihilation of the Planet Saturn," to the Ashram kids. A big acid trip that the author and Haines take with the Hitchcocks which is the best description of a really big one in print. A naked and scrawny Owsley, underground chemist, wandering around Millbrook with his two dim and dusty-looking girlfriends. Owsley bringing his new wonder drug, STP, to Millbrook, with the usual consequences. Dick Alpert, aka "Baba Ram Dass," with a broken arm caused by jumping out of a window on LSD to see if he could fly.
Sitting on an Adirondack wicker chair in front of me are three different versions of Millbrook. To the left is a tattered and yellowed copy of the tabloid version of Millbrook, published by the Church in 1975 in the mountains of Northern Vermont. To the right is the 1977 Bench Press edition, with its horrible dark-toned cover showing a photograph of the Big House and the sun rising or setting in the north. In the center is the present Recension of 1998, with its bright yellow cover and author-drawn map and photographs and newspaper articles.
Millbrook, A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism, by Art Kleps, is a fascinating story of the psychedelic sixties and a beautiful explanation of solipsistic nihilism. It has changed over the years. And it just keeps getting better and better.
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