The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 February 2008
by Robert Houriet
The 1960s are now five decades in the past, but the so-called culture wars that started at that time are still being fought. It is unfortunate, because too few fighters in these wars are seeking to appreciate what good came of those times and what we've all learned from the interesting cultural experiments that went on back then. The present day can often seem quite dull by comparison. Part of the problem is that books like this one are out of print. In 1969, its author set out on a journey across the country to visit many of the communes and communal living situations that were cropping up all over the place.
The first chapter of the book is a version of a story he wrote for the New York Times magazine, which told of the rise and fall of the chaotic Oz commune in rural Pennsylvania. Houriet then visits several places in the West, staying longest at High Ridge Farm in Oregon, New Buffalo in New Mexico, and with the group marriage at Harrad West in Berkeley. He gives insightful and sensitive account of life in these groups in what was still the fairly early days of the communal experiment. Few communes lasted more than a year or two, but some of those Houriet visted in these early days are still around today, albeit often in very altered forms. Later, he explores the more spiritually or organizationally minded communal living groups, such as Twin Oaks and the Hare Krishnas, both in Virginia, and the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. There are many shorter stops at places of all kinds.
The book is long but coherent and extremely well written. The author brings his characters to life. Some of these are anonymous hippies on various trips, many of which were merely escapes from oprpressive childhoods. Others include interviews with noted people of the day, such as Baba Ram Dass. Houriet takes a direct, intellectual and journalistic approach to his adventures. Almost universally, though, the groups in question tell Houriet, and the reader, that the only true way to experience these trips, the only way to be fully engaged, is to abandon attachment to intellectual understanding. Almost all of the people who make up the core members of these groups (as opposed to the many wandering hippies dropping by for visits, sometimes to the extent of destroying the communes they descend upon) create a sort of anti-intellectual theory, an ideal based upon raw experience, that sets them apart from traditional understanding. Sometimes this is convincing, and sometimes it looks like a superiority complex. Houriet, to his credit here, is deeply engaged in the experiment. He dreams, too, of finding his ideal community and, in the end, describes a dream that presages some of what would eventually happen to many of the communes, those that adopted some organizing principle and dedication to the hard work of keeping a group or intentional community together.
The book is comprehensive and almost absurdly immediate. It is a first hand account written in that time. The details of its life and times are acutely well drawn. It is a shame the book is out of print. At the end, Houriet says he isn't likely to write another any time soon. It has been nearly forty years. One would hope that such a good writer would one day turn his hand to his literary craft one more time.