Divine Rascal

On the trail of LSD’s Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead Andy Roberts Strange Attractor Press 2019 Pb, 301pp, £16.99, illus, bib, ind, ISBN 9781907222788

Given the red herrings that are to be found on the many roads travelled by Darlingtonborn Michael Shinkfield (later Hollingshead), Andy Roberts has done an incredible job in appraising the unruly life of a resolutely mercurial character who reputedly introduced (among many others) Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles to LSD.

Born in 1931, Hollingshead’s early life culminates in his despatch to a correctional school aged 14 following an incident at school about which little is known. This early trauma, it is suggested, and his exposure to domestic abuse, arguably dictated how he later conducted his marital and business affairs. After astintintheRAFhe worked as a travel agent in London where he met John Beresford, a doctor who would later play a crucial role in the birth of psychedelic culture. Later in 1951 we find him pursuing a successful media career in Denmark, married and a father. However, by 1959 he abandons his family and returns to London where he befriends the playboy Desmond O’Brien and the heroinaddicted writer Alex Trocchi.

For many it is Hollingshead’s hallucinogenic messianism that is of primary interest and Divine Rascal documents his personal discovery of LSD in detail. Having reinvented himself as an Oxford-educated gent (cue name change) and finding himself resident in New York around 1960, Hollingshead contacts his old friend John Beresford, also in New York, and finds employment with the alleged MI6/CIA front, the Institute for British-American Cultural Exchange. Using Beresford’s medical credentials, Hollingshead’s purchase of the “magic gram” from Sandoz Laboratories and its impact upon the burgeoning psychedelic scene is covered in detail by Roberts. Hollingshead’s first “trip” proved life-changing, and prompted by mescaline aficionados such as Aldous Huxley, he sought out the experimental scientist Timothy Leary. Initially uninterested in LSD, Leary viewed Hollingshead with suspicion, and it was only after Hollingshead threatened suicide that he agreed to meet him. The curious relationship between Hollingshead and Leary is forensically documented, and Roberts’s descriptions of Hollingshead’s jockeying for position amongst Leary’s devotees demonstrate a disturbing propensity for selfpreservation.

Much is made of Hollingshead’s delusional personality as he increasingly dictates the agenda of Leary’s Castalia Foundation at Millbrook and Beresford’s research group, the Agora Scientific Trust; understandably his behaviour alienated his fellow journeymen. Heading up the World Psychedelic Centre in Belgravia, London, to promote Leary’s work, Hollingshead’s diminishing popularity suffered further following his imprisonment for possession in 1966. He was banged up for the Summer of Love, with only superspy George Blake to reminisce with. Roberts’s account of the post-prison Hollingshead exposes the psychological frailty of a man desperate for recognition above all else.

By the late Sixties, Hollingshead had partially recuperated his radical chic. Time spent in Norway following his release from prison proved emotionally beneficial but once again he abandoned his domestic responsibilities to be with Leary and pursue his hallucinogenic mission with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in late 1967. The latter part of his life was governed by an incessant restlessness and drug dependency which Roberts relates with an affective distance. His exploits in Kathmandu, for example, exemplify an unhealthy combination of selfaggrandisement and creativity whereas his attempts to establish himself as head of a sacramental LSD cult, the Free High Church, in Scotland in 1970 suggest a man consumed by solipsism. Articles in the “head” magazines High Times and Home Grown kept his name alive and provided a

regular income, but interest in his life proved insufficient to ensure the success of his autobiography. With his star waning, a last-ditch attempt to secure his name amongst the countercultural pantheon proved to be little more than an attempt to scam Marvel Comics! His death in Bolivia in 1984 sadly came as no surprise to his wife, son and daughter Vanessa, now an American actress and comedian, who told Roberts to write her father’s story “warts and all”.

Roberts’s biography is a sympathetic and honest account of a damaged and vain man indelibly marked by traumatic childhood experiences.

Chris Hill

★★★★★