ball of confusion—drugs & free love

As an undergrad in the late 80s I once had a class with Marcus Borg, of the Jesus Seminar fame. One week we read a chapter from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I only vaguely remember. Although I do remember the scent of the yellowed pages and the green cover of my used hardback. And I also remember precisely the day he told us, giggling, “Back in the 70s when I taught this book, I used to ask my students to come to class high. Can’t do that anymore.” He had twinkly eyes.

He’d brought an orange to class that day, a bright lovely ball of color in the drab library classroom. He rolled it in his hands, and I think he passed it around the table. He peeled it, urging us to experience the scent… and such like. I can’t fully remember past that bit, as I was in a fugue state of mortification.

That orange-in-the-library scene came back to me last week after I read Tessa Hadley’s brilliant novel, Free Love, which takes place in 1967—that fractured time ushering in the 70s, when you could ask your students to smoke some weed before class. Vietnam. Race riots. Protests. The Beatles.

I was alive during the summer of love, but only barely. I don’t remember the 1960s. Except maybe one scene when I was a toddler. I have an older half-brother, born in 1952, who lived with us for a while when I was very small. I woke one night and saw my brother at the kitchen table with our father, who was weeping and talking about Canada. Oh—and I remember the television propped up on the avocado green counter in the kitchen, our father springing into action to shut it off. I didn’t understand the words “wholesale slaughter,” not yet, but I had a visceral terror of my father’s distress. I don’t remember Vietnam, and it wasn’t history yet when we were in school, but it cast a shadow.

My younger brother has much more specific memories of our 1970s childhood. Occasionally we exchange texts, usually trying to suss out what the hell happened. “Do you remember…?” I can’t recall what triggered the last spate, perhaps I asked a question because of the Hadley novel, but out tumbled a distressing series of texts.

It started with Muffy. I don’t remember Muffy, but my brother sure does. One day, evidently, she drove up in her blue Saab and our father hopped in and said, “Hi, Muffy!” and off they went.

(Our mother’s name is not Muffy.)

And then the phone pinged and pinged, one text after another.

I told Bonnie B that her mom’s friend and my dad were a couple of hoes… lol. 

Bonnie’s mom’s friend Mrs. Windrow had an affair with Buddy who was Mrs. Mouche’s boyfriend. I would come home from work and tell mom I saw Bonnie and she would mention Mrs. Mouche, Mrs. Windrow and Buddy.

Bonnie said I didn’t like Mrs. Windrow and she thought I saw something.

I finally remembered needing to use the bathroom at the beach and Buddy and Mrs. Windrow were in the doorway. 

It’s sick because she was as blatant as Pa was with Colleen Wood.

Mrs. Windrow’s kids were probably out on the beach.

Ball of confusion. Good God. I had to read this series several times before I finally (kinda) figured out what he was saying. Then, pondering what might possibly say in response, he followed up with this:

I saw and heard too much when we were kids.

I saw different things, but also too much.

We grew up in affluence, not technically on the Gold Coast, but close enough. My own children’s amused sense of their grandparents is that they were swingers, young and beautiful, drinking, fucking, getting high…. Accurate.

Meanwhile, the children were unsupervised. While there are good reasons to mourn the loss of unstructured time for children—I’d link a recent article but can’t find it—generally having an adult around to make dinner or do the laundry is pretty swell for the small people.

So. I picked up Free Love because I’d heard the author on my favorite podcast. After the first chapter or so, I paused for several days. I knew that our protagonist, Phyllis, a suburban homemaker, was about to make terrible choices throw off convention. And I knew that the children were going to pay for their mother’s need to explore her sexual identity. (And they do.)

I finally girded my loins and finished. Hadley’s characters are frankly more nuanced and less selfish than many of the adults in my tiny hometown were. I didn’t like Phyllis or, honestly, many others, but I could sympathize. A bit. Because this question of how we might live an authentic life when expectations are stultifying and the world is on fire—relatable.

At the same time I remain convinced that there is something to be said for convention. Or, at least, for paying attention to each other’s needs, especially the children’s.

There is one scene in the book that soothed, let in some light. It’s almost an aside, and probably only a paragraph or two. (I listened to the book, so I’m guessing.) This bit is a description of one of Phyl’s sisters, and it is vivid and recognizable and compassionate. Her sister’s husband helps with the housework so his wife can paint, and they have a non-verbal child with a mental disability, around whom the rest of the immediate family rallies. The love for that child binds them. An older family member comments that it would have been better for everyone if they’d gotten rid of the child. So this sister has found a way to make unconventional choices and live an authentic life within a marriage.

This brief sketch is the freest love in the story. I’d like a novel about that family, please.

Some books mess with us in a bad way. In college, Free Love would have wrecked me. I couldn’t even handle the orange Marcus Borg brought to class, or the idea that getting high could be in any way liberating. I appreciate that Hadley avoids waxing nostalgic, but doesn’t go entirely dark. She gives us a glimpses of care.

The cliché is that a fine book will transport us, take us out of our experiences. But a fine book can also help us integrate our experiences, which is what Free Love has done for me. A bit. I still feel that the 60s and 70s were a terrible time to be a child—although at least then we waited until (the boys) were teens to send them off to participate in wholesale slaughter. Now we let that happen in schools. On my bad days, I despair that we’ve made so little progress in my lifetime.

On the whole, I’m not sorry I read Free Love, but I’m heading back to my favorite reading era, between the wars and just after—I’m just finishing the novels of Josephine Tey. And it’s almost time for my annual reading of Gaudy Night, which is (in my humble estimation) an exploration of women and power and marriage disguised as a murder mystery.

And if it ever warms up around here, I’ll call this my summer reading.

What’s on your list?