-Caveat Lector-
"WISDOM'S MAW" - The Story Behind the Story
by Todd Brendan Fahey
Author of "Wisdom's Maw," pub'd by Far Gone Books
"If someone were to take you out -- today -- would anyone
see the book?"
It was an absurd question. But we live in absurd times, and
so I paused in reflection and took a quick mental inventory of
just how many copies of the manuscript were floating around the
U.S. and England. In the final analysis --including published
excerpts from the book-- there are far too many copies of
"Wisdom's Maw" circulating "out there" to do anything about. For
better or worse, the CIA will have to lie with its mistakes.
There was a time, though, several years ago, Spring of 1990,
when I found myself worrying about the little things: the car
that had been in my rearview mirror for several miles and many
odd street changes, or the sonar blip somewhere in the bowels of
my phone line to which I could set my watch, or whether this turn
of the ignition key would be the last move I would ever make.
Democratic Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, in a closed
door session of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1978, deemed
Project MK-ULTRA "the most diabolical experiment imaginable in a
democratic society."
And from what I know now, from the four-plus years it took
to research and complete "Wisdom's Maw," I would have to agree.
For over twenty years, several branches of the federal
government of the United States of America --most notably the
Army Chemical Corps, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation-- sought as their ultimate
objective nothing less than total control over human behavior.
A little-known chemical compound procured from a Swiss
pharmaceutical firm was to be THE KEY. Today, of course, we know
the drug as LSD-25.
It was through my reading of the history of lysergic acid
diethylamide in two works of nonfiction, "Acid Dreams" and
"Storming Heaven," that I decided this epoch in American history
to be worthy of a novel -- a work of fiction with space and time
altered, as if in the powerful throes of an acid trip, and with
the dimensions redrawn to benefit certain human agents who may
have been neglected proportionally by state-approved historians.
Such an art form was the only way to make sense of LSD
Precisely, it was the coming across the figure of one Alfred
M. Hubbard in "Acid Dreams," in the chapter titled "The Original
Captain Trips," that would throw me headlong into an obsession
that would culminate in the completion of a 77,000-word novel
surrounding Project MK-ULTRA.
After the buzz settled from my reading of "Acid Dreams," I
immediately set for myself the goal of knowing more about the
man whom Timothy Leary called, "the great, enigmatic triple
agent," than anyone alive. It was during this period of research,
between March of 1990 and the summer of 1991, that the word
"paranoia" became a meaningless abstraction.
I was, am, and will forever be convinced that Captain Al
Hubbard was a conscious, dedicated agent of the Central
Intelligence Agency, and that his astonishing career as "the
Johnny Appleseed of LSD" was but a pebble on the surface of
MK-ULTRA.
After dozens of hours of taped conversations with the likes
of Myron Stolaroff, Drs. Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer,
Timothy Leary, and Laura Huxley, wife of the great psychedelic
visionary Aldous Huxley, I was able to deliver to Steve Hager and
John Holmstrom at High Times a long, investigative piece on Al
Hubbard for its November 1991 issue. I was also so convinced of
my being under surveillance, and that the phones at my home and
place of employment (then a Big-Eight law firm) were tapped, that
my wife and I moved abruptly one afternoon from Los Angeles to
Salt Lake City, Utah. ("They" would need to really want to go
after me, I reasoned, to follow me to Utah.)
It was in the idyll of a huge, old flat with hardwood
floors, just off Temple Square, in the heart of Salt Lake City,
that "Wisdom's Maw" was completed. While in the throes of too
many acid trips, drawing from Freedom of Information Act
sensitive documents, and supported by long breaks between
quarters at Weber State University, where I had been hired to
teach freshman English, I was able to finish off three-quarters
of the novel in about eight weeks (the other one-quarter had
taken four years ... "it must GERMINATE," I kept telling myself
... ). The excerpting of the book in 1993 by "Utah Holiday," a
now-defunct glossy regional, allowed me to forget about the sound
of footsteps (the phone-blips stopped after leaving L.A.), and
since then, the only concern I have had is the nature of the
baffling silence of virtually every major publisher in New York.
Author Ernest J. Gaines ("The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman"), who spent time at Stanford in '59-60 with some of the
principals in "Wisdom's Maw," uttered this bottom-line conclusion
after reading the manuscript, perhaps the raison d'etre of its
unpublished status: "You have written a very controversial book
here, and if it is published and read, you might have to answer
some questions to some pretty big boys. I hope you have the
backbone for it."
Indeed, appearing front and center in "Wisdom's Maw" --
toward the novel`s premise that the CIA, using LSD, created "The
Sixties" for the purpose of containing, then destroying, a
burgeoning youth rebellion-- are no less than Hunter S. Thompson,
the Hell's Angels, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Al Hubbard and
other known and suspected MK-ULTRA spooks, as well as one former
Oregon wrestler who shall here go nameless.
For now, readers, you have access to as much of "Wisdom's
Maw" as exists in a state of publication. The New York literary
mafia, as Timothy Leary likes to call it, has sat on this
Pandora's box long enough.
Are you ready to open the lid?
http://www.fargonebooks.com
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