It took me ages to track this one down - it's long out-of-print and now it's author had passed into the bardos, a reprint seems unlikely. I managed to grab a copy on eBay for 10 (I've seen used book sites listing it for over 150!!).
Barritt provides part autobiography, part travelogue and part psychedelic novel within it's 300 pages. He recounts an incident from his childhood, which fires his interest in altered states of conciousness - then gives a portrait of his life in early 1960s London, inc
It took me ages to track this one down - it's long out-of-print and now it's author had passed into the bardos, a reprint seems unlikely. I managed to grab a copy on eBay for £10 (I've seen used book sites listing it for over £150!!).
Barritt provides part autobiography, part travelogue and part psychedelic novel within it's 300 pages. He recounts an incident from his childhood, which fires his interest in altered states of conciousness - then gives a portrait of his life in early 1960s London, including a chapter on his stay in Her Majesty's Pleasure Wormwood Scrubs (after a friend turned him in for drug smuggling). He serves his sentence, then leaves England for travels in the East, sampling Afghan hashish and tripping on the small quantity of LSD that he left England with.
Eventually, Barritt ends up in Algeria and meets up with Timothy Leary, then on the run from the U.S. government after escaping from a minimum-security prison in the States. Leary was invited there by another exile, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver wants to use Leary as a political tool for his revolution. When it becomes clear that Leary won't play ball, Cleaver puts him under house arrest.
There's still plenty of time for psychedelics, though, and Barritt recalls a strange LSD experience with Leary. The two managed to locate the spot in the desert where Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuberg performed a magick ritual 60 years beforehand. Barritt's account seems both fascinating and quite creepy at the same time.
Both Leary and Barritt and their partners (Leary's wife Rosemary and Barritt's lover Liz) flee to Switzerland, broker a book deal for much-needed cash. They also head to Germany to create an acid-soaked record with Krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel. When Leary is finally apprehended in 1973 by the FBI, Barritt and Liz return to London and settle in the Notting Hill section of London (when it was still a bohemian enclave).
I really enjoyed this book - Barritt comes across as thoughtful and balanced and his descriptions of his psychedelic experiences seem tangible and far less 'purple-prose'-y than some I've read. While he did miss out on a lot of the 'Swinging London' happenings - he was one of the few pioneers blowing his mind out in Asia, before it became de rigeur of hippies everywhere. Here's to a little-known counterculture figurehead.
...more