Best sellers

The Teachings of Don Juan:  A Yaqui Way of Knowledge is a surprising artifact of 1968.

Surprising, since the extraordinary impact of this book really doesn’t come until its paperback version published (and reprinted endlessly) in the 1970s.  But here it is, in an extremely rare first edition, issued by the University of California Press in probably fewer than 1250 copies.  The original price was $5.95.  This particular example was recently offered by an Internet seller for nearly $3000.

Once upon a time– say, about 1971-72–”everybody” was reading Castaneda.  The Teachings of Don Juan, by then in a paperback edition with a semi-psychedelic cover, was on hundreds of thousands of college-room bookshelves.  (Full disclosure: I was not one of the “everybody.”  I’ve just read this seminal 1960s book for the first time.)  There were several sequels in the early 1970s, including  A Separate Reality (1971) and A Journey to Ixtlan (1972), and even an appearance by Castaneda on the cover of TIME in March 1973.  But the original book’s notoriety is all the more surprising since it began as a work of (allegedly) serious, unassailable–if hardly conventional– anthropological scholarship, presented here in a plain, decidedly un-groovy university press edition.

Peruvian-born Carlos Castaneda was a graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles, and Don Juan was based on his dissertation research from the early 1960s on medicinal plants used by Indians of the Southwest United States and northern Mexico.  It is emphatically not dissertation-like in style or substance.  Within its first few lines, Castaneda is introduced to a Yaqui Indian, Don Juan Matus, who is alleged to be a powerful brujo, or shaman. Castaneda becomes apprenticed to him (not an easy passage) and is introduced to mind-altering organic hallucinogens such as peyote, jimson weed, and psilocybin mushrooms.  When Castaneda died in Los Angeles in 1998 (a death clouded in mystery and suspicion), the L.A. Times obituary writer called the book a “strange alchemy of anthropology, allegory, parapsychology, ethnography, Buddhism and perhaps great fiction,” a book that “made Don Juan a household name and Castaneda a cultural icon.”

One of the extraordindary things about this book was its instant and widespread critical reception.  How did a re-write of a Ph.D. dissertation (or maybe a master’s thesis; sources differ), published by a university press in a tiny edition, attract immediate, glowing reviews in the New York Times?  ”An extraordinary spiritual and psychological document,” wrote Charles Simmons in the Times on August 14, 1968:  ”Its style is so severe and yet easy, its narrative effects so expert, that if it had been published as a novel it would be, I think, destined for fame.”

The Teachings of Don Juan landed on fertile cultural territory in 1968, bringing together so many elements that now so clearly define the time:  a seeking for alternate pathways to spirituality; an openness to the teachings of “primitive” non-Western teachers or “gurus” (Don Juan is called a guru by more than one commentator); an eager, even grasping experimentation with mind-altering drugs; and a reverence for indigenous cultures, especially American Indians (and especially those of the Southwest).

Anthropology?  Fiction?  It  hardly seems to matter anymore, as it continues to maintain a firm grasp on its status as cultural icon.

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Science rocks the Sixties

In retrospectives of the 1960s, particularly of 1968–so dominated by violence, war, racial conflict, sex, drugs and rock-and-roll–it can sometimes be forgotten that the decade was also intensely focused on scientific and technological breakthroughs.

A surprising bestseller

On the non-fiction bestseller lists in 1968, jostling for rank with diet books and cookbooks, was this extraordinary little volume.   The Double Helix was a publishing sensation; it spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in the spring and summer of 1968, eventually rising to Number 3.  (Meanwhile, over on the Fiction side, there was Airport, Myra Breckinridge, Updike’s Couples, and the eventual winner of the Pulitzer, The Confessions of Nat Turner– more on all of those in future posts.)

“DNA?”  What’s that?

The Double Helix has a kind of archaic subtitle, printed on the cover:  ”Being a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, a major scientific advance which led to the award of a Nobel Prize.”  That discovery had occurred more than 15 years earlier, in the hothouse scientific environment of postwar England, at Cambridge University.  Indeed, the 1953 discovery had already had its day in the sun, and Watson and his partners, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, had already (1962) collected their Nobel Prize.  In the Foreword, Sir Lawrence Bragg (himself a Nobel laureate) calls the Watson/Crick discovery “one of the major scientific events of the century,” which has “caused an explosion in biochemistry which has transformed the science.”  Watson writes in the Preface that he hoped the book will show that “science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders,” that its “steps forward (and sometime backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.”

Robert K. Merton, in his review in the New York Times, called it a “wonderfully candid self-portrait of the scientist as a young man in a hurry . . . a fascinating case history in the psychology and sociology of science as it describes the events that led up to one of the great biological discoveries of our time. . . . I know of nothing quite like it all the literature about scientists at work.”  Merton calls attention to one of the book’s most memorable–and most deplored–features: Watson’s frank admission that his lab’s work on DNA was something of a cutthroat race against rival scientists (particularly Linus Pauling), complete with gleeful gloating when the Watson/Crick team wins.

Who was reading The Double Helix?

I wonder who propelled this book to (nearly) the top of the charts?  Books about science — and “science”– were not unknown on the bestseller lists, especially since the end of the war when the development of an atomic bomb made scientists, for a moment at least, into military heroes; or since 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik and set off a desperate boom in American science education.  Another scientific book, Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape, was a huge popular success this same year, 1968.  But that was different: Morris’ book (we’ll get to it in a future post) was pure “pop anthropology,” and it was also kind of sexy.  Watson’s book–essentially a memoir of two years spent in scientific discovery–is written in an extraordinarily candid, even intimate way that, as Merton wrote, “conscientiously violated the mores that govern the public demeanor of scientists.”

My guess is that The Double Helix sold exceptionally well on America’s college campuses, suddenly booming with, well, Baby Boomers in 1968.  (I think I recall reading a paperback copy of it, in 1969, in Richard Lewontin’s Biology I class at the University of Chicago, which was also Watson’s alma mater.)   The book’s “hero” (every book has a hero), James Watson himself, was just 25 at the time of the discovery, and the pictures in the book make him look even younger.

James Watson in Paris, Spring 1952, back cover of The Double Helix

In the book’s very first lines, he writes that he wanted to “convey the spirit of an adventure characterized by youthful arrogance.” He later opines that a “a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.”  For his younger readers in 1968, this is raw meat:  a brash, rules-busting young man, who lives by the rule to “question authority.”

But Helix is not a just a “college-boy’s” book.  My guess is that those boys’ Dads (and Moms) were also reading it–or at least buying it.  These members of the “greatest generation,” by 1968 in their 40s and 50s, many of whom had experienced the horrors and devastation of global war, were still looking for answers to the harrowing questions raised by a war that had killed nearly 50 million people.  In some ways, although Helix is more purely “scientific” than almost any other popular literary product of 1968, it also, for many people, contained a germ of the spiritual, some pathway to an understanding about the “meaning of life” that had recently been so brutally shaken.

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Blogging my way through 1968 is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.  Last week, I went to the library, checked out Listen to the Warm by Rod McKuen, and –this is the tough part– read it, cover to cover.  Forty years ago, I could have eliminated the first two steps, because I owned it, of course; “everybody” did.  Don’t ask me what happened to my copy of this slim volume of poetry.  Clearly it was jettisoned at some point along my way out of the purple haze of 1960s countercultural “culture.”

But was McKuen part of the “counterculture”?  Could someone as wildly successful as this “best-selling poet of all time” be thought of as “counter” to prevailing culture?  Probably not.  By the early 1970s, McKuen had written well over 1,000 songs, which were recorded by various artists and pressed into more than 100,000,000 records.   He became exceedingly rich on music rights alone.  But in 1966, Random House brought out a new edition of a recent book of his poetry, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, and it became the 4th-best-selling non-fiction book of 1967, in the year-end tallies of Publishers’ Weekly.   Almost immediately, his next book–Listen to the Warm–was released, and it became the 3rd-best-selling non-fiction book of 1968, just behind the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook and the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, College Edition.  What’s even more amazing was that numbers 5 and 8 on PW’s list of of the top ten non-fiction books of 1968 were two OTHER books of Rod McKuen poetry.  (Three others in the top ten were diet books, the beginnings of a new and mostly unabated trend in publishing.)

McKuen may have been the first poet to have a “brand;”  all of his books, starting with Stanyan Street, were exactly the same size and format, and were designed with a consistent graphic palette.  It’s quite a revelation to visit a library and see them all lined up there on the shelf.  (And, trust me, they’re all there; you have to wonder how often they get checked out.)

Rod McKuen was born in Oakland in 1933; biographical sketches dutifully recite his colorful resumé:  logger, ranch hand, railroad worker, rodeo cowboy, disk jockey, film and TV bit player, and, in the Army during the Korean War, a psychological-warfare scriptwriter. By the mid-1950s, he was performing and writing songs, and then turned to poetry.  By 1968, he had clearly become something of a “craze,” as people in 1968 might have called it–publicity and fame begetting more publicity, more fame, more sales.   McKuen books were extremely popular as gifts (the slim hardbound books retailed for about $4.50).  Even the library copy of Listen to the Warm that I checked out of the downtown Minneapolis library a few days ago seems, oddly, to have been “pre-owned”– it’s inscribed “To Jim, from Grandma Dorothy.”

How to explain the appeal?  What did it mean to be “quintessentially, the poet of ‘right now,’” as a NYTimes profile called him in 1971?  [William Murray, "It Doesn't Matter Who You Love. . ." NYT April 4, 1971].  McKuen was often discussed in the same breath as other contemporary poet-songwriters, such as Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, or he was included in the so-called chansonnier tradition best exemplified by Jacques Brel (whose work McKuen occasionally translated).  The same Times profile noted that McKuen was hugely popular on the concert circuit, drawing as many as 250,000 people in a summer 1970 tour, and that everyone in the audiences, regardless of age, “have the earnest, thoughtful concerned look of commitment characteristic of the middle-class college students and young marrieds who are, as the cliche goes, ‘prepared to work for change within the System.’”   For his fans, his poems must have been accessible but at the same time profound, “edgy,” even a little transgressive and daring (lots of talk about thighs and breasts).  He may have been saying, in his simple, sometimes painfully awkward lines, things that people in those unsettled, changing times wanted to be able to say to each other, but couldn’t:  ”I love the sea/but it doesn’t make less afraid of it/I love you/but I’m not always sure of what you are/and how you feel.”  (From Listen, number 14).  Or (from Listen, number 16):  ”This is daylight.  Turn and face me face-to-face./We’ll go naked in the afternoon/ and then you’ll see I’m only me./Were you expecting something more?//I taste like you–remember/because I’ve been with you so long/because we are each other as we are ourselves./All I have to fight/is what I’ve been for you before.”

More of this now available in your local library…..

And thoughts or memories about Rod McKuen, love, and poetry in the 60s?  Post a comment.

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THE COVER:  THE FRENCH CHEF COOKBOOK, by Julia Child.  Published 1968

The publicity bandwagon for the new movie Julie & Julia has been rolling out for a few weeks, so I’ve decided to jump on it.  Julia Child may seem an odd choice as a 1968 cultural figure, but that year she was approaching the apex of her brilliant career.  Note:  ”approaching” the apex, not yet at the pinnacle. Though she had already been on the cover of TIME (1966), she was not yet a parodied figure on Saturday Night Live or Sesame Street. In 1968, if you were a viewer of public television (still called “educational TV” back then), you would have known right away that something called The French Chef Cookbook would be related to the TV show of the same name: “The French Chef,” which debuted on WGBH in Boston in 1963 when she was 50 years old.  This was her second book; her first, great book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, had been published in 1961.   The 1968 book was what would be instantly recognized today as a “TV tie-in” book:  it took all of the recipes from the 119 black-and-white episodes of the show and laid them out “as they were shown on the air, in order and without further comment,” as she later wrote.  (The next series of 72 shows were in color, and gave rise to what is, in my view, her best book,  From Julia Child’s Kitchen).  The cover of this 1968 book is thus appropriate:  a black-and-white photograph, framed as it it were a rounded television screen, depicting the gleeful and substantial (6′2″) Mrs. Child wielding a mallet, about to smash into what appears to be a turkey carcass.

That this book should emerge in 1968 is a useful reminder of more than the fact that most Americans still watched black-and-white TVs that year.     It reminds us of the diversity of the cultural landscape in that phenomenal year.  A cookbook (Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook) topped the non-fiction bestseller lists that year.  Julia Child’s popularity could be seen as echoing or presaging other cultural markers:  the rise of a new “middle-brow” culture, symbolized by the rise of the Public Broadcasting Service (Masterpiece Theatre’s debut was barely 2 years away); the rise of a consumer-driven food revolution, which led to the eruption of fancy cheese stores and bakeries, trendy wine shops, and high-priced imported food equipment (the Cuisinart debuted in 1971); and the boom in jet-travel tourism that reached into the middle classes (especially Boomer college students) beginning in the 1960s, as millions of Americans jetted off to discover “real” French cuisine, “authentic” Tuscan farmhouses, and the like.

Are “the Sixties” unthinkable without Julia Child?  Well, the history of PART of the Sixties–the part that embraces Janis, Jimi, Fillmore West, dope-smoking, race riots and rebellion–can certainly be told without her.  But for a picture of ALL of the Sixties, she’s an essential piece of the jigsaw.

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