Separation and The Dawn of Psychedelia 1957-1960
In 1957, Watts was was invited to lecture at the Jung institute in Switzerland. On the way he stopped in London to see his parents, and gave lectures at Cambridge. He was disappointed, and later recalled that he had ‘never in his life met such an unresponsive audience’
“My basic respect for English literary standards leave me truly puzzled and even alarmed at the continuing indifference of this country to my own work – and it is not as if the land were still enthralled by Anglican theology and the morals of the Victorian bourgeoisie…but I am most reluctantly forced to believe that its intellectual life is elegantly shallow.” He found the logical positive philosophers, in vogue at the time, ‘”condescendingly boring”.
“The academic world, at least in the sphere of my own interests, was a tower of decaying ivory”.
He remained bemused and puzzled why his books were hardly read at all in his own country. He felt fondly towards England still ‘ a peculiarly agreeable land if one agrees to play the game of detached courtesy, undemonstrative friendship and quiet contemplative enjoyment’. But at the same time there was a ‘blasé weariness that came from lack of imagination. I felt that many of my friends had remained intellectually and spiritually exactly where I had left them; that students showed little thirst for knowledge; that the publishing business was dreary and tired from the sense that the market had reached its limit, and that one’s efforts were destined to be wittily damned by faint praise in the Times Literary Supplement.
In Zurich, Watts met Jung, and was delighted by Jung’s own assertion that he was ‘not a Jungian’. But he found him “an even greater, more intuitive, more humorous and deeper person than I had expected from his writings.”
In 1958, another book, ‘Nature, Man and Woman’ was published, focusing on Mind /Body dualism and the potential for relationships between the sexes.
A book on emotional relationships was perhaps a tough call for Watts, given the disastrous nature of his own two marriages at that time, but it by all accounts remains Watts’ favourite of his own books, perhaps because in its exhortation of personal sexuality, it is a justification of his own unapologetic libertinism
‘Nature, Man and Woman’ had received very positive reviews, and his professional career continued to flourish. But on the home front, he was barely on speaking terms with Dorothy. The poet Gary Snyder became a neighbor of Watts around this time. Snyder noted that Watts and Dorothy ‘did not behave as a couple’ - Watts was out most evenings at parties on his own and detached from home and family. Watts was still very much part of bourgeois life, though, formally dressed and refusing marijuana when it was passed to him at parties.
“He had not shifted gears into the counter culture” observed Snyder.
Watts now had another child by Dorothy, Lila, and the pressures of his family life were acute.
“ He was one who sowed problems wherever he went” recorded Snyder.
Watts wrote in ‘In My Own Way,
“ I was attempting to sustain the desperate social and family life of suburban Palo Alto and Mill Valley, in somewhat reluctant imitation of the style of life represented by Sunset Magazine – the picture windows of the ranch type house, the outdoor barbecue, the children playing ball on the lawn, the do it yourself projects of tiling the bathroom and putting up shelves, and the station waggoning of loads of sun browned and quarrelsome papooses and brats to picnics on beaches or marshmallow roasts in state parks”
“ Dorothy...was putting more and more pressure to suburbanise myself, to live a more ordinary life, to mow the lawn, play baseball with the children, and abandon my far-out bohemian friends. …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Alan Watts, Shaman - Book Serialisation. to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.