The battle for the historical interpretation of the 1960s is on. To some, it was merely a time of self-indulgent narcissism and political disarray. For others, the era has left an enduring legacy, including changed social attitudes, great music, and, via Thoreau and others, a renewed belief in the power of individuals and committed communities.
With such cultural conflicts in mind, I was happy to find another voice representing the hopeful, idealistic side of the sixties. This was the writer James Marinovich. When he recently re-published “The Psychedelic Symphony,” his long-out-of-print novel, I immediately ordered a copy and read it.
“The Psychedelic Symphony,” written a little over ten years ago, is a brief, poetic, lyrical tale which owes its content to a reminiscence of the 1960s and its form to the innovative model provided by Russian writer Andrei Biely in his short novel “The Dramatic Symphony” of 1901.
As Marinovich explained to me he, like Biely, wanted to use music as an organizing principle to write about a particular moment in history – for Biely, the fraught time that would lead up to Russia’s first revolution; for Marinovich, the charmed, fleeting mood of the summer of 1968.
Throughout many short chapters, in writing whose loose intensity resembles the prose of Rilke or the sixties literary hero Richard Brautigan, this is what Marinovich does. Over the course of the book’s gently moving, playful pages we trace in alternating, interwoven episodes the life and times of some ten major and ten minor characters as they navigate either the new world of the late 1960s, or the old one of American materialism and hardened cultural views in which they were, in Marinovich’s eyes, still unfortunately mired. Over all of this hovers the haunting symphonic chord of the book’s title, which unites them all. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
In one of the central scenes of “The Psychedelic Symphony,” a group of young Midwestern friends gathers in a small outdoor encampment to sample a fresh crop of local mushrooms.
“Nobody gets higher than Terrance,” one of the friends warns another, indicating the de facto leader of the group. Given the effects of the mushrooms, though, this may have proven a short-lived truth. From their gathering, circling a giant oak tree, they dance and sing and make contact with other worlds, learning through their own invented, communitarian experience to make sense of their lives.
“Wow,” says Theresa. “Y’know, I’ve always felt this place was different, and on mushrooms it’s really going to be far out.”
She cast her smiling gaze upward and shook her head. Her eyes and teeth glowed in the lamplight.
Escape had been one of her constant dreams.
In “The Psychedelic Symphony,” some escape and some do not. One of Marinovich’s gifts is his ability to juxtapose multiple levels of society and individual lives simultaneously. As the group dances around the tree, we are reminded at different points that in the nearby town “people had worked, played, shopped, gone about the same things they always did;” that behind the bowling alley two alley cats fought so hard that “a rat skittered by, unnoticed;” that, as they celebrated, “troops prepared for invasions of Chicago and Czechoslovakia;” and that in Boston “a young seer knocked ash from his hash pipe” as Mick Jagger sang “Backstreet Girl,” then “drove through the dark night to a farm in Vermont.”
Despite the accurate, even inspired account Marinovich gives of those times, he considers himself an outsider who never really knew them. Born in the mid-1950s in Kansas City he was, he says, too young to have experienced them and too far from the often bi-coastal action to have had more than a glancing view.
Actually, Marinovich and his peers were exactly what the larger movements at that time were all about. Dependent on movies, the radio, records, magazines and television for social and political news, they absorbed all that was broadcast from larger cultural centers and did their best to understand, assimilate and live by it. In one of the book’s brief, observant episodes, its central character, Jacob, feels the strength of transmitted culture as he catches the eye of Jerry Garcia at a live performance of the Grateful Dead on tour. This is the world of 1968.
Marinovich’s novel, with its warm, youthful, community-centered, you-are-there tone constitutes to my mind a new classic of the era. Never mind that it was written years later — to read “The Psychedelic Symphony” is to be transported directly back to that time which, like Biely’s turn-of-the-century Russia, was rife with the scent of revolution. With the constant challenges the era faces in the battle for re-interpretation, it’s a message much needed today.
