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Millbrook, A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism Recension of 1997

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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 it's 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 1997, with it's 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.

I find it interesting that such an intriguing part of sixties history has been written about so little. Before reading Millbrook, my only knowledge of this occurence came from "Acid Dreams", Leary's "Flashbacks" as well as brief mentionings in other biographys about the hippie era such as Wolfe's "Electric Kool Aid...", magazine articles and information on websites. Very little is written of Kleps and for whatever reason, not many other biographers or players at the Millbrook scene found him worthy to write about or include in their memoirs. For this reason, some seem to suspect his legitimacy and accuracy, but then again I have not found one mention of Bill Haines nor the Hitchcock brothers on the web and they were very much a part of the action. It is ironic that this man wrote the most extensive history of this radiant time and psychedelic soap opera which took place in Millbrook, New York. His work is both fascinating and disturbing as he brings the details to light. One such disturbance is the accidental dosing of one of the young Hitchcock kids with an enormous dose of LSD and his parents obvious unconcern as they head to town for dinner. I think some have questioned Kleps truthfullness and his sorting out of the events as their is obvious discrepancies between his writing and others which he candidly points out on his website. Whether this is a moment to moment accurate account of Millbrook I can't say, but I think the man was generally honest and didn't have much to lose by being open and honest about his life. He talks of his alcoholism, drug use, break downs of his family unit without regard as to what others might think and conveys a true genuineness with his expression. I have read in the past that high dosage levels of LSD and alcohol mixed together are a big no-no and wonder how Kleps managed the effects of both, being the supposed recipe for disaster they are.

To me, and I'm no scholar, the style of writing was difficult to follow at times as he jumped around chronilogically and I was required to reference other sources for names and incidents I was unfamiliar with. Kleps was an obvious genious which is evident in his expression of thoughts, vocabulary usage and as a bonus, I found him quite witty with his charactor assessments and his take on individuals and situations. To spend an afternoon with Mr. Kleps would have been worth a small fortune were he still alive and I had a large fortune.

The book did suck me into this era like no other I have read and has propelled me on a steady search for more material and the cross examining of one book against another to get a true sense of what Millbrook and the sixties in general were about. If you are considering this purchase, but are not familiar or only been slightly exposed to these people and events, reading this book first is a mistake. A fair amount of reading and understanding needs to preface this or you will be totally lost. Do your homework first and Millbrook will be a fine reward. One final conclusion is that having read Millbrook, I can claim now more than ever, that as one born in '66 rather then being an older witness to it, I am no closer to understanding the utter lunacy and madness of the Millbrook or California's Acid Test scene then I did when I first heard any of these words uttered. You can gain facts and knowledge that make for interesting conversation, but the true mindset of the scene and the thoughts, raw emotion and sensory overload one must have been enveloped in while hanging out at the Millbrook property are unaccessible. It is simply a moment in time tucked into a capsule which cannot be opened. You were either there or you weren't. Go get the book and write to let me know what you think.

Not having any personal familiarity with (most of) the events described in this book, I can't testify to the accuracy or inaccuracy of the historical parts. I don't see how it matters, however, because it is one of the most entertaining reads I've ever had. If you're a 20-something and interested in philosophy, read this book and (if you can get past the rather annoying hagiography in the beginning) you'll enjoy it.

The author has at least one other book out, _The Boohoo Bible_, that is similarly excellent, although it's not a particularly coherent read. More of a source book for random reading...

This book has changed considerably since it was first written. I read each version (and recension) as it became available to me. The author has done a remarkably good job of changing the tenor and mood of the book, and its portrayal of the personalities of some major characters in his life, throughout the series of recensions. He has definitely experimented with his writing style throughout the years that Millbrook has been available; and he has adjusted the book to accomodate the prejudices of the years when it was published.

"Millbrook" is not, however, a history book. (It is more properly, now, called a narrative; this is new.) The book is, chronologically, very jumpy and it is probably not possible, presently, to assign even approximate dates to many of the events in the book. The authors' changes to the text indicate, too, that the presentation of characters depends greatly on his current opinion of them. A considerable amount of bias is very evident in his relations of the characters; and consequently (after many careful readings of each recension) I have decided that I do not trust the characterizations to be well-rounded ones. In particular, the qualities in others that might reveal "negative" or unsavory aspects in the author are absent or apparently misrepresented. (For example, his wife's decision to abandon him is blamed on her inability to get-with-the-program of excitement and fun, rather than on his severe alcoholism, sadistic and bullying tendencies, and under-age womanizing.) Very simply, his avoidance of certain explanations as primary ones makes his overall scheme of interpretations suspect. Nonetheless, the author does poke fun at himself, as well as at others, and does this to a greater degree than is found in most narratives from that (or other) times. And he certainly does it with considerable, interesting detail.

A major flaw of the book, however, is that it is "a hack." Specifically, it was originally written as a very long book! that was, apparently, reduced greatly to about 150 pages. This decision, probably an economic one, gave a "lean, mean" book that was united throughout by a quick pace and by brisk descriptions that were, themselves, fairly representative of Northeastern USA narratives of this sort. (The narratives of Ethan Allen come to my mind, as does Thoreau's "Walden" although Kleps' writing is not nearly as sublime as Thoreau's. Nonetheless, his writing was of that genre and general style.) Since the publication of Millbrook by Bench Press, however, he has "hacked" Millbrook so many times that it has lost the coherent style; and it is now more like a scrapbook of styles and reminiscences than a narrative. I mean: it narrates incoherently.

A third fault of the book is that the philosophical and sociological material in it has not been carefully expanded to represent the subtleties of the author's thought. Although a "laundry-list" of philosophical systems is presented in the book, and the author's philosophy is presented in it's simplest form, a great deal of his own development is neglected. (For example, the author placed great emphasis in his early years on this phrase: "I deny the externality of relations." He insisted it was important to explain this phrase to people; yet his books have invariably sidestepped that explanation. Although a variation of the phrase appears on the application forms for membership in his church, I have never heard a clear explanation of the phrase from anyone in his group. Likewise for his philosophical jargon called "Snazzm, Fazzm, and McPozzum." He wrote a very interesting paper about these epistomological categories of thought; and he asserted that they are incommensurable yet that one (Snazzm) is more true than the others. (Students of Logic 101 will see the contradiction there; and so did he, I think, since he quickly qualified that assertion into meaninglessness - or at least extreme vagueness.) In short, t! here are serious, genuine philosophical objections to the author's philosophy and he seems to sidestep them in Millbrook by avoiding any mention of them. (This same tendency is revealed by: his disinclination to include USA academic philosophers in his lists of reading; by his panning of American Pragmatist philosophers, in general, despite the fact that "externality of relations" is probaby Pragmatist terminology from the late 19th centure - see Josiah Royce et. al. for examples; and the exclusion from his history of any mention of a USA sociology book about "Neoamericans" [no hyphen] which focussed on the race-IQ question in the USA. [His church was named the "Neo-American Church" and his early social writing focussed on the race IQ question; the book was published about five years before his church was formed, and he administered IQ tests professionally during those intermediate years...] Similarly, the author maintains that he was a "heavy player" at Millbrook but I have never seen his name mentioned in any book by acknowledged Millbook "heavies." [Peter Stafford published interviews with the author at Millbrook in "The Psychedelic Baby" and its sequal. I've found no others mentions.] I did not find his name in an earlier, published book about Millbrook either. [That book was a voluminous collection of newspaper clippings about the place and its residents.])

So there are very heavy elements of "cover-up" within the author's narrative. A great deal of repression occurs between those covers. The author's apparent decision to hide some facts while revealing others that are, perhaps, more defamatory, is very interesting. A careful study of the repressed material would probably reveal a great deal about both the author and, indirectly, about Millbrook (by, in the latter case, filling in the blanks in the characterizations).

I was fascinated by the book when I read it the first time, in tabloid format. The hodgepodge printing ! style - large blocks of text printed in fonts of various size and boldness, fitted the gothic mood of that recension perfectly. The "Bench Press" version was an airy, attractive paperback that included more detail and enough fine changes to, again, fit its appearance perfectly. It was quite difficult to buy that copy, incidentally: the publishers pretended it was out of print until my bookdealer sent a threatening card; it arrived swiftly then. Even more interesting was the bookdealer's increasingly frantic pleas that I rush to the store and collect the book, after it arrived. Here is the crux of the matter: despite all of its flaws, Millbrook remains an extremely stoned book. It is so stoned, in fact, that a copy of it stored below their register for a week, where it was (incidentally) easy to read during free minutes, "freaked out" the bookdealer and her staff. (She recommended, with a bit of anger, that I "order it from a bible store next time!)

The author is, incidentally, one of the few whose writing I have reread several times with pleasure. (Two others are: Philip K. Dick, and Dr. Alexander and Anne Shulgin. "The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian," published inexpensively by Dover Press, also remains a favorite of mine.)

So there you have it: a profound book and a piece of sublime writing that has, nonetheless, many flaws. It is our misfortune that, since the first paperback publication, the author has not adjusted to the new publishing standard of 350-to-500 pages per book; otherwise the entire mass of text from the original book might be available for reading. I suspect that a lot of imbalances in Millbrook might vanish in that wealth of detail. Also, unfortunately, the author gradually steered away from philosophical writing, so a great deal of early perceptiveness (of the sort revealed deeply by his first book, "The Boo Hoo Bible") also remains absent from Millbrook.

Millbrook and the author's other writing steered me smoothly thr! ough the shoals when I became enlightened about 20 years ago. Every remark he made about enlightenment, including the essential philosophy thereof and the interpretation of synchronicity was right on the button: it was faultless. A roommate of mine (a Canadian mechanical engineer) stopped "dead in his tracks" when he glimpsed the final page (excluding the concluding poem by Rimbaud) of Millbrook on evening. He was literally struck speachless...

The author wrote Millbrook to appeal to the masses, so to speak, and he consequently blunted its edge. It is, nonetheless, well-written enough to appear on the New York Times Best Sellers List.

Is it worth reading? Yes. Does it represent the author, or his church, well enough to justify a decision to join them in a common cause? No. But you will not find a better description of enlightenment, or better advice regarding it, in any book written in English. In that regard, it is the cream-of-the-crop.

... Man, I fall in love with this book every time I read it. ... There are books, and then there are STORIES made into BOOKS. This book is one of the greatest STORIES ever told. ... WHY? ... Because there is NOTHING more important in this world than spiritual enlightenment that can lead to ultimate spiritual liberation - and that is the truth. MILLBROOK is a book that, if read with an open mind and with an open heart, will bring you ever so closer to understanding what enlightenment is all about. Gaining that understanding - which can lead to enlightenment and the transcendence of illusion - is of great value in any day and age. Reading MILLBROOK will most definitely increase your understanding of enlightenment; no small feat. ... It will not guarantee that you will become enlightened, which is the negation of illusion ( and NOT the aquisition of ANYTHING! ), but it WILL bring you closer. Along the way, you will be entertained by one of the most glorious, interesting, and humorous bunch of characters you will ever come across in the world of literature. ... Trust me! If you read this book, you will love it so much that you will not only want to read all four versions of it, but you will also want to read THE BOO HOO BIBLE and every remaining issue of DIVINE TOAD SWEAT available in existence before you will be satisfied that you have a full and clear understanding of the writings of Art Kleps; a true, modern, American philosopher if we ever had one. ... I am sorry he dropped his body before I had the chance to have a true conversation with him face to face. ... But it ultimately doesn't matter, anyway. He has left us these pearls of wisdom to shine on our path forever! For that alone, we thank him with all our hearts. ... YOWZA! - The Aeolian Kid

In 1964 Arthur Kleps was a school psychologist in his late 30's with a wife, two kids, and a taste for cheap wine and teenage schoolgirls. By 1968 he was a homeless psychedelic swami with string of arrest warrants and a trail of discarded wives, friends and fans stretching across the east coast. How he got from point A to point Z is the sadly funny part of this rather Rabelaisian, sometimes savage, and frequently frustrating memoir.

Kleps has a disarmingly engaging writing style but the story has several shortcomings. The author is too impatient (and too opinionated!) to hold back conclusions he would like the reader to believe he arrived at after 4 years of painful experience and shrewd observation. He doesn't trust the reader to draw conclusions for himself in what should unfold as a developing revelation of enlightenment and self-confidant conviction. Kleps never saw a digression he didn't like and dogmatically propounds his 'religious' beliefs at every opportunity. However Kleps and his mordant wit, expended on every available target, enlivens the narrative immensely. Bitterness, alas, too often gets the better of him and he rants in '70's-radical style against 'the establishment'. These moments, however, provide the reader a certain degree of unintentional humour when contrasted to Kleps belief system, a Shirley Maclaine-style 'you create your own reality' philosophy which is applied more to metaphoric interpretations of random events than to his own real-life setbacks!

Kleps is at his best when describing the follies of the time with self-deprecating humour. He entertainingly describes founding the 'Neo-American Church', essentially a legal dodge to permit drug experimentation and raise funds to support him in a style to which Timothy Leary had become accustomed. Alas it never quite comes off for reasons that baffle Kleps but which the attentive reader may ascribe to the author's adolescent delight in provocative remarks, self-righteous mooching, and condescending arrogance. Some of this is eye-poppingly funny, however, as when he relates in some detail his beliefs about the genetic inferiority of African-Americans, propounded to a barful of blacks while on an acid high!

Kleps belief is essentially that the universe is meaningful and everything we observe can be deciphered to our benefit since we can determine our own destiny. Central to his spirituality is the 'sacrament', marijuana or mescaline.

Kleps story, while episodically funny, is basically Paradise Lost. Different interpretations of the mescaline message and the appropriate vehicle for expressing it divide Millbrook. Moochers less elegant than the author overrun the idyll. Bickering and feuding increase until 'the establishment' intervenes to deliver the coup-de-grace. The book's description of the psychedelic community is a bleak one and even if the skeptical reader discounts Kleps' opinions of his colleagues he himself is a sad example of psychedelic 'enlightenment'

After first reading the online version of this book, posted at the okneoac website, I decided I needed a copy of my own. This represents, to me, a Sufic exposition of human nature. Though it is told under the aegis of an autobiographical account of a psychedelic community, it is in fact a philosophical exposition on the nature of perception being a dream, which is a delight to read.