High low
KENNETH ALLSOP
Drop Out! Robin Farquharson (Blond 25s)
In 1955 Warden Sparrow was called from high table to the telephone. On the line was Robin Farquharson, a young candidate for a Fellow- ship of All Souls, with the urgent information that he had a message for the Warden from God.
Whether Warden Sparrow eventually beard direct from God is not recorded; certainly Farquharson heard no more of his Fellowship. From then on, mental illness dogged his poten- tially brilliant academic career until, in 1967, he stepped sideways off the podium and into the gutter. The self-description on his passport to London's netherworld is `shiftless, crazy, crooked, queer.' Drop Out! is his fragmented message, short bursts of manic Morse code, from an Lso-boosted trip into the outer space of society.
These passages, scribbled in all-night laun- derettes and against lamp-posts, are neither chronological nor always coherent. But evi- dently before this decisive step into 'liberation from the fetters of convention' intermittent psychosis had landed him in straitjackets and 'bins,' had impelled him to blue £1,600 of a Churchill College grant in three months (`the greatest gas of my life, attractive chauffeurs at £50 a day and handing out fivers in pubs'), to disrobe on the Bakerloo Line and had got him evicted from the Arts Laboratory and Ronnie Laing's shelter, which suggests da77Iing performance even in this field of derangement.
After each break-out he has slewed back on to the rails. This is an account of a particu- larly protracted `up'—for, be says: 'I am a manic-depressive. When I'm up, I have no judgment but fantastic drive; when I'm down I have judgment but no drive. In between I pass for normal.' In the preface, written in the third phase, he detaches himself from the
views expressed but lets them stand unrepudi- ated as the truth as he then saw it.
So, unshaven and uncircumscribed, Ite drifted on his up down among the hippies and the beats, too middle-aged at thirty-seven to qualify as a flower child and settling for the category of 'dirty old tramp.' He kipped at friends' pads or in derries, or got through the night at Middle Earth or in the Joyboy in Westbourne Grove where you can make a cup of coffee last until daylight. Obviously Dr Farquharson felt he had much to escape from —yet to what did he escape? He tears a £126 cheque into shreds and plucks every coin from his pockets, 8s 7d, and throws them on the pavement. 'Free! Free! Free!' he exults. Free for the dismal trek from dosshouse to the post office where you can linger in the warmth for the price of a letter-card, from scrounged sandwich to a conned fourpence for a tube ticket. Every move needed all the logistical planning and plotting of the rat-race he quit -after heeding the drop-out biddance of that guru of the acid-heads, Dr Timothy Leary.
Of his exploration of the rock-bottom on a cube of sugar, he concludes: 'There is another world, there is a transcendental reality, there is a spiritual plane.' And he claims that the `LSD insight enabled me to make sense of what before had seemed simply a purposeless afflic- tion.' Insight or illusion? An agonising euphoria comes through. But of -beatific release or en- hancement there is no trace. The visions of psychedelic drugs or psychotic conditions may subjectively seem cosmically significant. Come to cold, they appear as flimsy as those tangerine trees and marmalade skies of the Beatles.
Previous page
