‘The Last Great Dream' Review: A Wrong, Strange Trip

Wall Street Journal

3 days ago

The message was clear, Dennis McNally states in reference to Haight-Ashbury and its pervasive atmosphere in the 1960s: 'The Bay Area was the promised land.' Promised lands are a fixture of most belief systems, but the milk and honey on offer in the Haight was of a kind untasted by earlier pilgrims. It came in the form of a tiny pill to be placed under the tongue. In Mr. McNally's telling, the effects shook the temple to its foundations. 'What LSD ultimately did was challenge the rational materialist Western approach to life and suggest that there was far more going on than the authorities taught. . . . It was the philosopher's stone for an entire generation and for many in succeeding generations.'
One philosopher after another is called upon in 'The Last Great Dream,' most of them part of the shifting assembly of bohemians, Beats, hippies, Diggers and motley teens on the run from the infidels—or, if you prefer, their parents. Among the believers is Ron Thelin, the co-owner, with his brother, of the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street. (The information that their father had once managed a nearby Woolworth adds a poetic touch.) Thelin outlines the promise: 'There's a whole new symbolic reprogramming, and the programming is mankind. Planetary. Universal. It's one to one, it's joyous. I'm tempted to say it's wise. . . . And it's evolving.' His wife, Marsha, adjusts the phrasing while following the thread: It was, she tells the author, 'the change from the Age of Pisces (faith) to that of Aquarius (knowledge).' It was 'an explosion of consciousness.' Mr. McNally may dismiss Timothy Leary's pithy 'Turn on, tune in, drop out' as a 'Madison Avenue-esque slogan,' but it makes a decent fit for his own thinking in 'The Last Great Dream.'
This is not Mr. McNally's first book on the cultural background to what, for shorthand's sake, we call the '60s. Earlier publications include a biography of Jack Kerouac, an account of the melting-pot foundations of American popular music and an 'inside history' of the Grateful Dead. Publicity for 'The Last Great Dream' asserts that it covers 'everything that led to the 1960s counterculture.' Everything in Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village, that is, with a concession made for the emergence of the Beatles in the Abbey Road studios and Mary Quant's Chelsea fashions.
The book opens with the reasonable proposition, attributed to the Grateful Dead collaborator John Barlow, that the invention of the atomic bomb and its deployment at Hiroshima left 'a 'soupçon of pure nihilism' in the minds of the generation born during and after the war.' Artistically inclined people on the Haight and North Beach scenes sought a form of resistance. Mr. McNally places the poets Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan at the heart of what would later become known as the San Francisco Renaissance: two highly original writers, whose influence grew as the years passed. Rexroth is renowned for his translations from the Chinese and Japanese, and for acting as master of ceremonies at the Six Gallery reading on Fillmore Street in 1955, where Allen Ginsberg first read 'Howl.' Gary Snyder and Michael McClure announced the beginnings of eco-poetics at the same event. Duncan, who had ties to Black Mountain College, was developing an 'open-form' poetry related to the color-field painting of Clyfford Still, one of a few notable Abstract Expressionists to work on the West Coast. (It is interesting to learn that Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell had their first solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art.)