Mescaline

A Global History of the First Psychedelic

Mike Jay

Yale University Press 2019 Hb, 304pp, illus, notes, bib, ind, £18.99, ISBN 9780300231076

One day in 1952, Aldous Huxley saw his trousers properly: “Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!” Spellbound, his vision transfigured by a Mexican cactus, he added “This is how one ought to see” (and, you might be tempted to add, “This is how trousers ought to be!”). It is a famous moment, but what is not so famous is that he wasn’t actually wearing flannels – he was wearing jeans, but his wife made him alter them for his book The Doors of Perception, to raise the tone. And as Mike Jay says, “the image of Huxley on a psychedelic voyage in his grey flannels captured precisely the book’s winning sense of intellectual gravitas surprised by joy.”

The rounded-out, behindthe-scenes information and the larger cultural nous of Jay’s commentary are characteristic of this excellent book, which has its own joy and gravitas and adds up to a comprehensive history of this enigmatic substance. Sartre tried it in 1935, to less illuminating effect: for a long time afterwards he thought he was being followed by lobsters and crabs, and although he knew they were hallucinations he had to talk to them, asking them to be quiet during his lectures.

You might be wondering, almost with a sense of “absent friends”, what William James was doing while all this was going on. You might expect to find him more involved. The answer is that he did try it, but it made him so sick he never tried it again. Mescaline can be unpleasant, and unpredictable even by psychedelic standards. The exception to all this chaos is the mescaline use of native American peoples, who use the cactus religiously, and this is where Jay’s deeper sympathies lie. His great achievement is integrating the two halves of the mescaline story, ‘Western’ and indigenous, rooting it in its native worlds and rescuing it from the kitsch that has gathered around psychedelics since the Sixties. Herbert Penton

★★★★★