His newly married mother, Abigail Ferris, was not accustomed to behaving loosely. The Ferris family were farm gentry from the village of Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. It was a strongly Catholic household, full of religious art and books, but years of social respectability had given the family’s religion a puritanical, almost Protestant ethic that differed from normal Irish Catholicism. Abigail was extremely devout and is said to have attended Mass daily. There were no wild parties in the farmstead, no drinking or dancing or merriment. The family was ruled by a series of pious spinsters. Men were not to be trusted, and sex was too horrific to contemplate. Abigail’s sister Mae wept for three days when Abigail got married, and begged her not to go on honeymoon. Tim’s father never visited the Ferris homestead.
The Learys were polar opposites. They were city dwellers in Springfield; rich, sophisticated and fun. They were among the first generations of Irish immigrant families to rise up and become professionally respectable. Tim’s grandfather was a professor at Tufts University, and became the medical examiner for Boston. He had significant real estate holdings and was thought to be the richest Irish-American in western Massachusetts. Like the children of many a wealthy patriarch, the younger generation of Learys veered more towards hedonism than enterprise. There were affairs, intrigue and glamour. Gossip and laughter were more common than religion or worry.
Tim’s father, also named Timothy but commonly known as ‘Tote’, gradually slipped into alcoholism after Tim was born. After West Point he practised dentistry, but although he was successful enough to become General Eisenhower’s dentist during World War II, it seems to have been a career that he had little enthusiasm for. He knew that he would be a wealthy man when his father died, and the drink helped the years to pass by while he waited. Tim grew up, caught in the culture gap between the two sides of his family. It was to the Leary side that he was most attracted, and the Ferrises could see this. The Leary blood in him would be a constant worry for them.
Tim was an only child and was often lonely in his earliest years. Like his father and grandfather, he was named Timothy after St Timotheus4and was raised as a strict Catholic. He did what was expected of him by attending mass and becoming a choirboy, but he never seemed happy or engaged by his life. He had an imaginary friend5 for whom he would make his mother set an extra place at the table. He enjoyed the conversation of his imaginary friend and was an avid reader, but real people didn’t seem to interest him. He much preferred the cartoon character Felix the Cat, who merrily smiled and whistled throughout all his adventures. Prohibition may have made alcohol illegal at the time, but this never concerned Felix. He would usually have a glass of champagne in his hand. It wasn’t until Tim discovered sports and, later, girls that his more sociable, charming side started to emerge.
His grandfather6 died when he was 14, and the family discovered that the wealth they had been expecting had all but disappeared in the stock market crash, family loans and poor management. Tote went out to get drunk and never returned. Tim would not see him again for 23 years.
Tote had been a poor father, but he was a strong influence. He was a charming rogue, a storyteller and a drunk who had a passionate dislike of middle-class morality and institutions. When he left he seemed to become an archetypal loner figure for Tim, a nonconformist who walked away from his life when he realised that it wasn’t sustaining him. Long-suppressed feelings of abandonment would surface many years later, during a psilocybin trip with the writer Jack Kerouac, but the overriding impact of his drunken, occasionally abusive father was that he was the first person Tim knew who was brave enough to ‘drop out’. Although there was good reason to, Tim could not bring himself to hate him for it.7
The West Point silencing was a terrible disappointment to the maternal side of the family. It was clear by this point that a pattern was emerging in Tim’s life. His career at Classical High School, Springfield, for example, initially showed great promise. He became editor of the school newspaper, The Recorder, and helped it win the interstate award for excellence. He was popular, concerned more with his extra-curricular activities than his academic work, and the girls voted him the ‘cutest boy’. But poor attendance and some controversial editorials in the paper led to a confrontation with the principal that soured his leaving. The principal, Dr William C. Hill, had adopted Kant’s Categorical Imperative as the school motto: No one has the right to do that which if everyone did would destroy society. Tim and Dr Hill clearly saw the world very differently. Leary’s reprimand for absenteeism ended with Dr Hill shouting, ‘I never want to talk to you again. Just stay away from me and this office.’8
Strings were then pulled to get Tim into the Holy Cross Jesuit College. This meant a great deal to his mother, since she dreamed that he would become a priest. Again he started promisingly, but the lack of girls became unbearable. He began gambling, skipping classes and indulging in general schoolboy mischief. It was around this time that Tim, previously a diligent choirboy, began to question Catholicism and rejected his faith. He dropped out during his second year. After entering West Point and being silenced he enrolled in the University of Alabama and, more by accident than design, started studying psychology9 He was found spending the night in the girls’ dormitory, and expelled.
Aunt Mae worried that Tim was doomed to keep falling into trouble, letting himself down and distressing his family. In a pattern that he would repeat throughout his life, Tim would use his intelligence, drive and potential to raise himself into lofty situations that he then allowed the rebellious part of his nature to hijack and destroy. What could be done about his Leary blood? How could his behaviour be improved? It is ironic that these concerns were being raised about him, for his later professional career would be dedicated to trying to answer those very questions.
Being kicked out of university meant that he lost his draft deferment. Tim returned to the army in 1942 and enlisted into the anti-aircraft artillery. Here he learnt how to load metre-long artillery shells into enormous 90-millimetre cannons, only to have his hearing damaged by proximity to the artillery. He was forced to wear a hearing aid, and the disability prevented him from being sent into combat. He was given a clerical position in an army hospital, and took the opportunity to complete his psychology degree. He left the army with an honourable discharge shortly after the war, by which time he had been promoted to the rank of sergeant. He was awarded the standard certificate signed by President Truman, which extended to Tim the ‘heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation’ for answering the call of duty and bringing about the ‘total defeat of the enemy’. He does not appear to have treated this certificate with a great deal of respect or care, for it is now damaged and looks as if at some point a dog has tried to eat it.10
Leary wasn’t cut out to be a soldier or a priest, but psychology did appeal to him. It was an intellectually adventurous pursuit, on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. It seemed that great advances were being made in understanding the human mind. On this frontier he could hunt for answers to profound questions, such as why do people act in a destructive manner? How could a person’s behaviour be changed? How can a person be made ‘better’? Of course, he wasn’t searching for answers in order to improve himself. He didn’t think that his behavioural patterns were too bad at all. It was other people who had the problems, and it was them he wanted to help.
The stifling conformity of 1950s’ America was, intellectually at least, supported by contemporary psychological thought. There exists, the psychologists argued, such a thing as ‘normality’. This is how people’s minds, personalities and behaviour should be. But many people differed, by varying degrees, from this norm. They may have been unmotivated, homosexual, radical or mysteriously unhappy. These people were considered abnormal. It was the job of the psychologists to cure them and make them ‘normal’.
The psychologists were confident that they were up to the task. Wonderful new anti-anxiety