Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, Seven Stories Press, 2002. Orginally published by Praeger, 1975

There’s a saying about the 1960s: If you remember them, you weren’t really there. Mark Vonnegut was definitely there—and he remembers.

The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity is about Vonnegut’s descent into madness while living in a commune in British Columbia. First published in 1975 and reissued in November, it chronicles his post-Swarthmore odyssey and illness—then diagnosed as schizophrenia but likely understood today as bipolar disorder.

It’s also a cogent contemporary account of the mind-set of the 1960s—one of the best books I’ve read about the restless idealism and hard work of “being a good hippie.” The Eden Express doesn’t analyze or romanticize the hippie experience—it just pours it onto the page with all the passion, anguish, and dichotomies that characterized the time.

“I think most of us were fed to the teeth with the brand of rationalism that had made up so much of our education,” Vonnegut wrote. “Western rationality had made a dreadful mess of this lovely planet, but it was more that this form of rationality had taken up the lion’s share of our minds without giving us much in return.... We wanted to free some of our rational brain space to make room for other ways of being.”

The Eden Express depicts hippie life and its mental aberrations without a shred of defensiveness. A new afterword to the 2002 edition (the foreword is by the author’s famous father Kurt) offers this retrospective explication:

“We were not the spaced-out, flaky, self-absorbed, wimpy, whiney flower children depicted in movies and TV shows.... It’s true that we were too young, too inexperienced, and, in the end, too vulnerable to bad advice from middle-aged sociopathic gurus. Things eventually went bad, but before they went bad, hippies did a lot of good. Brave, honest, and true, they paid a price.”

One such guru was Harvard professor and acid-head Timothy Leary. For followers of his mantra, “turn on, tune in, drop out,” LSD and other psychedelics were the gateways to a new consciousness—a way of short-circuiting the Western rationality that was so troubling to our generation. The trouble was, Vonnegut said in an October interview, “we didn’t know that drugs were bad for us. I really do think that was a key piece of information we were missing.”

Another guru, psychologist R.D. Laing, may have done more damage. When Vonnegut fell ill at the commune, his fellow Eden seekers viewed his psychosis through Laing’s then-popular idea that insanity is a sane response to an insane society. Though Mark was going crazy, his friends (including several classmates and friends from Swarthmore who also lived at the commune) at first saw his behavior—and even his misery—as normal behavior in the crazy world of 1971. Mark had been the commune’s visionary, and it seemed that his mind was merely intensifying its natural self. Only after he became incoherent, stopped eating, and threatened suicide did his comrades seek medical treatment for him in Vancouver. He eventually suffered three severe psychotic “crack-ups,” as he calls them, and was hospitalized twice.

The book’s description of Vonnegut’s psychosis—the voices in his head, delusions, and despair he feels when he thinks he will not recover—is vivid and immediate. At one point, he decides that his thoughts are responsible for an earthquake in California that has killed his girlfriend. He also imagines that his father has killed himself.

The third break, which came unexpectedly as he seemed to be recovering, was the worst.

Vonnegut writes: “I was running out of excuses. My father hadn’t committed suicide. Virginia was OK. My mother was OK. Spring was on schedule.... I had followed all doctor’s orders faithfully, and here I was back in that fucking little [isolation] room again.”

He adds: “My suicide attempts became more frequent, more pathetic, more sincere. Before, I had danced with death, loved death, hated death, teased death, been teased by death.”

Against the odds, he recovered. Slowly, with the help of a doctor who prescribed antipsychotic medication and vitamin therapy, he regained his mind. He went back East, wrote this book, went to Harvard Medical School, and became a pediatrician. He also learned from his disease.

The Eden Express closes with a letter to a friend who is suffering from schizophrenia. “Simply realizing that the problem is biochemical can be enormously helpful,” he wrote to her. “No one’s to blame. Psychological heroics are not required to improve things.... As poetic as schizophrenia is, I know of very few cases in which poetry was of much help.”

Mark Vonnegut was one of the lucky ones; he got better. Yet he still believes that his crack-ups remain a presence in his life.

“I know that I was very sick and got well—well enough to participate in life,” he said. “I’ve had other things that have been extremely challenging. I had one more psychotic episode. I’ve had horrible trouble with insomnia. So sometimes, when things get rough, I still feel, ‘Oh shit. This can take me out somehow.’ A lot of mental illness is how many times you get your wheels in the rut and spin. After a certain number of times, it gets very hard to get the wheels out of the rut.”

Mental illness drove Mark Vonnegut off the road on the way to his Eden. Nearly three decades after the book was written, it traces not only Mark’s path from 1969 to 1972, but also the early turns of a generation still in spin—still wondering whether the roads we chose have brought us to where we truly wanted to go.

—Jeffrey Lott

OTHER BOOKS

Christopher Castellani ’94, A Kiss From Maddalena, Algonquin Books, 2003. In this first novel, the author imagines a story about young love and war in 1943. Castellani, whose parents are Italian immigrants, won the SUNY Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize and the Ella T. Grasso Literary Award.

Judith Fetterley ’60 and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place, University of Illinois Press, 2003. The authors focus on regional writers, offering a countertraditional viewpoint of human development and considering feminist theory and American literature.

Jonathan Franzen ’81, How to Be Alone, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. This collection of 14 essays includes the author’s controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel as well as other personal narratives and reportage.

Marjorie Garber ’66, Quotation Marks, Routledge, 2003. These essays explore the power of language and miscommunications. Garber is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, where she chairs the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and directs the Carpenter Center of Visual Arts.

Stephen Henighan ’84, Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family, Prospect Books, 2002. The author of four books, Henighan explores the struggle of an outsider in our “global village.” His controversial When Words Deny the World (The Porcupine's Quill, 2002) was nominated for the Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards.

Anne Sheldon ’67, Hero-Surfing, Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2002. The winner of the 2001 Washington Writers’ Publishing House poetry competition, Sheldon creates a sequence of Lancastrian poems and delivers sonnets based on Icelandic sagas.

Jack Spafford ’44, An Interesting Life: An Autobiography, self-published, 2003. The author describes his life experiences, including schooling, World War II, jobs, and travels.

Carol and David White ’65, Catskill Day Hikes for All Seasons, Adirondack Mountain Club, 2002. Describing 60 mountain hikes, the authors include practical advice, round-trip distances, difficulty ratings, summit elevations, and page maps.

Richard Wolfson ’69, Simply Einstein, W.W. Norton, 2002. The author presents key ideas framing comtemporary physics—from the possibility of time travel to the fate of the universe. Wolfson explains the concepts of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell’s elec-tromagnetism, highlighting contradictions leading to the 19th-century physics crisis.

EXHIBIT

Alexandra Grant ’94 organized unDRAWN at the Brewery Project in Los Angeles during November and December. The exhibit included the works of 11 young, emerging artists who use drawing as a concept on which they base their work in other media. Grant’s own work is part of a series called “drawings without paper,” wire sculptures that dance across the gallery walls in the form of shadows.