Введение
"Хашишеец" (1857) – автобиографическая книга Фитца Хью Людлоу, описывающая измененные состояния сознания автора и философские размышления, вызванные употреблением экстракта каннабиса. В США книга вызвала широкий интерес к гашишу, что привело к появлению гашишированных сладостей и частных клубов любителей гашиша. Позднее книга стала популярной в движении контркультуры 1960-х годов. "Хашишеец" часто сравнивают с "Исповедью англичанина, вкушавшего опиум" (1821) Томаса Де Квинси, в которой он рассказывает о своей зависимости от лаудана (смеси опиума и алкоголя).
The Hasheesh Eater (1857) is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract. In the United States, the book created popular interest in hashish, leading to hashish candy and private hashish clubs. The book was later popular in the counter culture movement of the 1960s. The Hasheesh Eater is often compared to Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey's account of his own addiction to laudanum (opium and alcohol).
История публикаций
Впервые опубликованная в 1857 году, книга "Хашиш-етер" выдержала четыре издания в конце 1850-х и начале 1860-х годов, каждое из которых было издано Harper & Brothers. В 1903 году другое издательство выпустило переиздание оригинального издания — и последнее полное издание вплоть до 1970 года. По состоянию на 2006 год в печати находилось два издания, включая аннотированное издание, впервые опубликованное в 2003 году.
Литературное значение
Людлоу сказал: "Всю правду о Природе невозможно скопировать", поэтому "художник должен выбирать между главными и второстепенными фактами внешнего мира; прежде чем приступить к работе, он должен решить, воплотит ли он существенный эффект, тот, что проникает в душу и овладевает ею без мучительного анализа, или же отдельные детали, которые принадлежат геометру и разрушают эффект". Многие его отрывки, которые могли показаться его современникам фантастическим вымыслом, сегодня звучат правдиво, опираясь на современные знания о психоделическом состоянии. Людлоу описывает одну галлюцинацию так: "И вот, со временем, пространство тоже расширилось. Вся атмосфера казалась податливой и бесконечно вращалась, уходя в огромные пространства, окружавшие меня со всех сторон". Людлоу описывает употребляющего марихуану как стремящегося к "способности души к более широкому существованию, более глубокому пониманию, более возвышенным представлениям о Красоте, Истине и Добре, чем те, что она сейчас получает сквозь щели своей темницы". И наоборот, о потребителях гашиша он говорит: "Стой! Проходи мимо; я испробовал этот путь, и он в конечном итоге ведет в ядовитые пустыни".
Джон Хей, ставший близким другом президента Линкольна и впоследствии госсекретарем США, вспоминал Университет Брауна как место, "где я ел гашиш и видел сны". А однокурсник вспоминает, что после прочтения книги Людлоу Хей "должен был немного поэкспериментировать с гашишем и проверить, действительно ли он является таким чудесным стимулятором воображения, как утверждал Фитцхью Людлоу". "Ночь, когда Джонни Хей попробовал гашиш" стала эпохальным событием для обитателей Колледжа Хоуп.
В течение двадцати пяти лет после публикации "Едока гашиша" во многих городах США появились частные салоны для курения гашиша. И уже возникли споры о законности и моральности опьянения каннабисом. В 1876 году, когда туристы могли купить гашиш на Филадельфийской столетновой выставке, Illustrated Police News написала о "Тайном разгуле нью-йоркских красавиц – гашишном аду на Пятой авеню".
Говард Филлипс Лавкрафт владел экземпляром "Едока гашиша", купленным в 1925 году у писателя и книготорговца Сэмюэля Лавмана. В письме к Бернарду Остину Дуайеру в 1927 году Лавкрафт заявил о влиянии сочинений Людлоу на себя: "Читал ли я "Едока гашиша" Фитцхью Людлоу? Позвольте спросить, сэр, он есть на моих собственных полках, и я ни за что не расстанусь с ним! Я часто перечитывал эти фантасмагории экзотических красок, которые оказались более сильным стимулятором моего воображения, чем любой растительный алкалоид, когда-либо выращенный и дистиллированный. [ ] Пышные панорамы, выходящие за пределы пространства и времени, несут на себе безошибочный отпечаток подлинности, и даже метафизические спекуляции были далеки от сухости".
Восстановление
Писания Ладлоу встречаются в нескольких местах в Америке до запрета марихуаны в XX веке. Оккультист Алистер Кроули считал «Едока хашиша» «испорченным восхищением де Квинси и сентименталистами», но восхищался «удивительной интроспекцией» Ладлоу и печатал значительные отрывки из книги в своем журнале «The Equinox». Под псевдонимом Оливер Хаддо, Кроули также подробно писал о своем опыте употребления каннабиса, сравнивая его с опытом Ладлоу. Он был поражен тем, что [Ладлоу], очевидно, не знакомый с ведантистскими и йогическими доктринами, тем не менее приблизительно выразил их, хотя и в искаженной форме. После запрета марихуаны, труды Ладлоу интерпретировались двумя лагерями. С одной стороны, были сторонники запрета, которые указывали на зависимость Ладлоу от «хашиша» и его ужасающие галлюцинации; с другой – те, кто считал, что каннабис заслуживает второго шанса, и видели в Ладлоу грамотного летописца мистических высот, достижимых с помощью наркотика. В 1938 году, вскоре после того, как федеральное правительство начало преследование за употребление марихуаны, предупреждение сторонников запрета было опубликовано в книге «Марихуана: новая наркотическая проблема Америки». В книге было несколько страниц цитат из «Едока хашиша» и отмечалось, что именно Ладлоу дал наиболее яркое описание эффектов гашиша. Он не только с большой интенсивностью и точностью описал острый эпизод, но и зафиксировал развитие зависимости и последовавшую борьбу, которая привела к избавлению от этой привычки. Как автобиография наркомана, она во многих отношениях превосходит «Исповедь» Де Квинси. В 1953 году Юнион-колледж признал выпускника Фитца Хью Ладлоу «достойным представителем колледжа» и пригласил трех ученых подготовить речи по этому случаю. Моррис Бишоп (который позже включил свои впечатления в книгу «Эксцентрики») критиковал более поздние попытки Ладлоу писать художественную литературу, утверждая, что его рассказы «сегодня – устаревшие и бессмысленные отголоски всех других журнальных рассказов его времени, рожденные в литературе, а не в жизни, и написанные без учета правды и с небольшим вниманием к правдоподобию». В «Едоке хашиша», напротив:
After the prohibition of marijuana, the writings of Ludlow were interpreted by two camps. On the one hand, there were the prohibitionists, who pointed out Ludlow’s addiction to “hasheesh” and his horrifying hallucinations; on the other, those who believed that cannabis deserved a second chance and saw Ludlow as a literate chronicler of the mystical heights that could be reached using the drug. In 1938, shortly after the federal government cracked down on marijuana, the prohibitionist warning was carried in the book Marihuana: America’s New Drug Problem. The book included several pages of excerpts from The Hasheesh Eater and noted that
It was Ludlow who contributed the most remarkable description of the hashish effects. He not only described the acute hashish episode with great intensity and fidelity but recorded the development of an addiction and the subsequent struggle which resulted in his breaking the habit. As an autobiography of a drug addict it is, in several respects, superior to De Quincey's “Confessions”
In 1953, Union College selected the alumnus Fitz Hugh Ludlow as a “Union Worthy” and invited three academics to compose speeches for the occasion. Morris Bishop (who would later include his impressions in his book Eccentrics), criticized Ludlow’s later attempts at fiction, writing that his short stories “are today stale and meaningless echoes of all the other magazine stories of his time, originating in literature, not in life, and conducted with no regard for truth and with little for verisimilitude.” In The Hasheesh Eater on the other hand:
is a sincerity, a reality, which he could not recapture when he tried to construct stories solely from his imagination He finds lyric phrasing to convey the unearthly beauty of his visions, and the unearthly horror of the evil fantasia which succeeded his bliss. He is a drugged Dante in reverse, descending from the Paradiso to the Inferno. His descriptions, drawing from his subconscious a strange mingling of the sublime and the grotesque, often suggest the work of Dali and other surrealists. The writer’s passion gives his work an intensity which the reader recognizes and sympathetically feels. This is a very considerable literary achievement. Robert DeRopp, in the 1957 book Drugs and the Mind, was perhaps the first to express skepticism at Ludlow’s “addiction” story, noting that “[n]o one seriously interested in the effects of drugs on the mind should fail to read Ludlow’s book,” but accusing Ludlow of a “hypertrophy of the imagination and an excessive dependence on the works of De Quincey” (although he also found The Hasheesh Eater to be “more lively and more colorful reading than the grossly overrated confessions of that ‘English opium eater.’”). DeRopp suspected that “in many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.”
At this point in time, there occurred a resurgence of interest in marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English speaking world as a whole. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline researcher Heinrich Klüver, looked to Ludlow’s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized. In 1960, The Hasty Papers: A One Shot Review, a beat literature journal, devoted most of its pages to reprinting the first edition of The Hasheesh Eater in its entirety, and David Ebin’s book The Drug Experience included three chapters from The Hasheesh Eater. In 1966, excerpts were published in The Marijuana Papers edited by David Solomon. In 1970, a reprint of the 1857 edition was put out by Gregg Press, and the Berkeley Barb reprinted several chapters. By this time Ludlow had been rediscovered, both by mainstream researchers into drugs and addiction, and by the growing drug savvy counterculture. Oriana J. Kalant, in 1971 in The International Journal of the Addictions found The Hasheesh Eater to be a remarkable description of the effects of cannabis:
it is evident that Ludlow recognized, with remarkable insight, most of the characteristic subjective effects of cannabis. He also noted, and interpreted essentially correctly, such pharmacological points as the relation of dose to effect, inter and intra individual variations in response, and the influence of set and setting. Most importantly, perhaps, he recorded the development of his dependence on cannabis more comprehensively and astutely than anyone to date. The initial motives — including features of his own personality and temperament — the constant rationalization, compulsive use despite obvious untoward effects, the progression to a state of almost continuous intoxication, the inability to reduce his dose gradually, and the intense craving and depression after abrupt withdrawal, all are clearly described. Ludlow recognized also the lack of physical symptoms during withdrawal, and the difference from opium withdrawal in this respect. With the benefit of hindsight, we can also identify in Ludlow’s account a number of other features consistent with present knowledge, but which even scientists of his day could not possibly have known. For example, the initial change in tolerance, the continuum between euphoria and hallucinations, the differentiation between the hallucinatory process and the affective reactions to it, the relation between spontaneous and drug induced perceptual changes, the similarity between the effects of cannabis and those of other hallucinogens, the attempts at drug substitution therapy (opium, tobacco), and the role of psychotherapy and abreactive writing, are all in keeping with contemporary thought. These points permit the modern reader to feel even greater confidence in the extraordinary accuracy and perceptiveness of Ludlow’s record. The mid 1970s saw two new editions of The Hasheesh Eater in print, one by San Francisco’s City Lights Books, and a well annotated and illustrated version edited by Michael Horowitz and released by Level Press. By the late 1970s, you could even find the face of Fitz Hugh Ludlow on a T shirt, thanks to his alma mater Union College, which had thrown a “Fitzhugh Ludlow Day” celebration in 1979. In the 2000s, Ludlow has been introduced to a new generation of psychedelics users through Terence McKenna, who read chapters from The Hasheesh Eater for a set of tapes (“Victorian Tales of Cannabis”) put out by Sound Photosynthesis, and who regularly praised Ludlow in his books, saying Ludlow “began a tradition of pharmo picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P. T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.”
The Hasheesh Eater remains Ludlow's most remembered work. Only one other of his books, The Heart of the Continent, has seen a new edition since the 19th Century.
есть искренность, реальность, которую он не смог воссоздать, когда пытался создавать истории исключительно из своего воображения. Он находит лирические выражения, чтобы передать неземную красоту своих видений и неземной ужас злой фантазии, последовавшей за его блаженством. Он – наркотизированный Данте, движущийся в обратном направлении, сходящий с Рая в Ад. Его описания, черпая из подсознания странное смешение возвышенного и гротескного, часто напоминают работы Дали и других сюрреалистов. Страсть писателя придает его работе интенсивность, которую читатель узнает и сочувственно ощущает. Это значительное литературное достижение. Роберт Деропп в книге 1957 года «Наркотики и разум» был, возможно, первым, кто выразил скептицизм по поводу истории Ладлоу о «зависимости», отметив, что «никто, серьезно интересующийся воздействием наркотиков на разум, не должен упускать из виду книгу Ладлоу», но обвиняя Ладлоу в «гипертрофии воображения и чрезмерной зависимости от работ Де Квинси» (хотя он также считал «Едока хашиша» «более живым и красочным чтением, чем преувеличенные признания этого «английского едока опиума»»). Деропп подозревал, что «во многих местах научная беспристрастность была принесена в жертву литературному эффекту». В этот период в Соединенных Штатах возобновился интерес к марихуане и появилось множество психоделиков в англоязычном мире. Исследователи, такие как пионер в изучении мескалина Генрих Клювер, обращались к основополагающим трудам Ладлоу о психоделическом опыте, чтобы получить представление о новых наркотиках, которые были открыты и синтезированы. В 1960 году журнал «Hasty Papers: A One Shot Review», посвященный бит-литературе, посвятил большую часть своих страниц перепечатке первого издания «Едока хашиша» в полном объеме, а книга Дэвида Эбина «Опыт наркотиков» включала три главы из «Едока хашиша». В 1966 году отрывки были опубликованы в сборнике «The Marijuana Papers» под редакцией Дэвида Соломона. В 1970 году Gregg Press переиздала издание 1857 года, а Berkeley Barb перепечатала несколько глав. К этому времени Ладлоу был заново открыт как исследователями наркотиков и наркомании, так и растущей контракультурой, разбирающейся в наркотиках. Ориана Дж. Калант в 1971 году в журнале «The International Journal of the Addictions» назвала «Едока хашиша» замечательным описанием эффектов каннабиса:
After the prohibition of marijuana, the writings of Ludlow were interpreted by two camps. On the one hand, there were the prohibitionists, who pointed out Ludlow’s addiction to “hasheesh” and his horrifying hallucinations; on the other, those who believed that cannabis deserved a second chance and saw Ludlow as a literate chronicler of the mystical heights that could be reached using the drug. In 1938, shortly after the federal government cracked down on marijuana, the prohibitionist warning was carried in the book Marihuana: America’s New Drug Problem. The book included several pages of excerpts from The Hasheesh Eater and noted that
It was Ludlow who contributed the most remarkable description of the hashish effects. He not only described the acute hashish episode with great intensity and fidelity but recorded the development of an addiction and the subsequent struggle which resulted in his breaking the habit. As an autobiography of a drug addict it is, in several respects, superior to De Quincey's “Confessions”
In 1953, Union College selected the alumnus Fitz Hugh Ludlow as a “Union Worthy” and invited three academics to compose speeches for the occasion. Morris Bishop (who would later include his impressions in his book Eccentrics), criticized Ludlow’s later attempts at fiction, writing that his short stories “are today stale and meaningless echoes of all the other magazine stories of his time, originating in literature, not in life, and conducted with no regard for truth and with little for verisimilitude.” In The Hasheesh Eater on the other hand:
is a sincerity, a reality, which he could not recapture when he tried to construct stories solely from his imagination He finds lyric phrasing to convey the unearthly beauty of his visions, and the unearthly horror of the evil fantasia which succeeded his bliss. He is a drugged Dante in reverse, descending from the Paradiso to the Inferno. His descriptions, drawing from his subconscious a strange mingling of the sublime and the grotesque, often suggest the work of Dali and other surrealists. The writer’s passion gives his work an intensity which the reader recognizes and sympathetically feels. This is a very considerable literary achievement. Robert DeRopp, in the 1957 book Drugs and the Mind, was perhaps the first to express skepticism at Ludlow’s “addiction” story, noting that “[n]o one seriously interested in the effects of drugs on the mind should fail to read Ludlow’s book,” but accusing Ludlow of a “hypertrophy of the imagination and an excessive dependence on the works of De Quincey” (although he also found The Hasheesh Eater to be “more lively and more colorful reading than the grossly overrated confessions of that ‘English opium eater.’”). DeRopp suspected that “in many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.”
At this point in time, there occurred a resurgence of interest in marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English speaking world as a whole. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline researcher Heinrich Klüver, looked to Ludlow’s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized. In 1960, The Hasty Papers: A One Shot Review, a beat literature journal, devoted most of its pages to reprinting the first edition of The Hasheesh Eater in its entirety, and David Ebin’s book The Drug Experience included three chapters from The Hasheesh Eater. In 1966, excerpts were published in The Marijuana Papers edited by David Solomon. In 1970, a reprint of the 1857 edition was put out by Gregg Press, and the Berkeley Barb reprinted several chapters. By this time Ludlow had been rediscovered, both by mainstream researchers into drugs and addiction, and by the growing drug savvy counterculture. Oriana J. Kalant, in 1971 in The International Journal of the Addictions found The Hasheesh Eater to be a remarkable description of the effects of cannabis:
it is evident that Ludlow recognized, with remarkable insight, most of the characteristic subjective effects of cannabis. He also noted, and interpreted essentially correctly, such pharmacological points as the relation of dose to effect, inter and intra individual variations in response, and the influence of set and setting. Most importantly, perhaps, he recorded the development of his dependence on cannabis more comprehensively and astutely than anyone to date. The initial motives — including features of his own personality and temperament — the constant rationalization, compulsive use despite obvious untoward effects, the progression to a state of almost continuous intoxication, the inability to reduce his dose gradually, and the intense craving and depression after abrupt withdrawal, all are clearly described. Ludlow recognized also the lack of physical symptoms during withdrawal, and the difference from opium withdrawal in this respect. With the benefit of hindsight, we can also identify in Ludlow’s account a number of other features consistent with present knowledge, but which even scientists of his day could not possibly have known. For example, the initial change in tolerance, the continuum between euphoria and hallucinations, the differentiation between the hallucinatory process and the affective reactions to it, the relation between spontaneous and drug induced perceptual changes, the similarity between the effects of cannabis and those of other hallucinogens, the attempts at drug substitution therapy (opium, tobacco), and the role of psychotherapy and abreactive writing, are all in keeping with contemporary thought. These points permit the modern reader to feel even greater confidence in the extraordinary accuracy and perceptiveness of Ludlow’s record. The mid 1970s saw two new editions of The Hasheesh Eater in print, one by San Francisco’s City Lights Books, and a well annotated and illustrated version edited by Michael Horowitz and released by Level Press. By the late 1970s, you could even find the face of Fitz Hugh Ludlow on a T shirt, thanks to his alma mater Union College, which had thrown a “Fitzhugh Ludlow Day” celebration in 1979. In the 2000s, Ludlow has been introduced to a new generation of psychedelics users through Terence McKenna, who read chapters from The Hasheesh Eater for a set of tapes (“Victorian Tales of Cannabis”) put out by Sound Photosynthesis, and who regularly praised Ludlow in his books, saying Ludlow “began a tradition of pharmo picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P. T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.”
The Hasheesh Eater remains Ludlow's most remembered work. Only one other of his books, The Heart of the Continent, has seen a new edition since the 19th Century.
очевидно, что Ладлоу с удивительной проницательностью распознал большинство характерных субъективных эффектов каннабиса. Он также отметил и правильно интерпретировал такие фармакологические моменты, как зависимость эффекта от дозы, индивидуальные и межчеловеческие различия в реакции, а также влияние настроя и обстановки. Возможно, самое главное, он более полно и точно, чем кто-либо до него, зафиксировал развитие своей зависимости от каннабиса. Первоначальные мотивы – включая особенности его личности и темперамента – постоянное рационализирование, компульсивное употребление, несмотря на очевидные негативные последствия, прогрессирование до состояния почти непрерывного опьянения, неспособность постепенно снизить дозу и сильное желание и депрессия после резкого прекращения употребления – все это четко описано. Ладлоу также отметил отсутствие физических симптомов при отмене и разницу с опиумной абстиненцией. Оглядываясь назад, мы также можем увидеть в рассказе Ладлоу ряд других особенностей, соответствующих современным знаниям, но которые даже ученые его времени не могли знать. Например, первоначальное изменение толерантности, континуум между эйфорией и галлюцинациями, различие между галлюцинаторным процессом и аффективными реакциями на него, связь между спонтанными и вызванными наркотиками изменениями восприятия, сходство между эффектами каннабиса и другими галлюциногенами, попытки заместительной терапии (опиум, табак) и роль психотерапии и абрактивной письменной практики – все это соответствует современным представлениям. Эти моменты позволяют современному читателю чувствовать еще большую уверенность в исключительной точности и проницательности записей Ладлоу. В середине 1970-х годов вышло два новых издания «Едока хашиша»: одно издательство San Francisco’s City Lights Books, а другое – хорошо аннотированное и иллюстрированное издание под редакцией Майкла Хоровица, выпущенное Level Press. К концу 1970-х годов лицо Фитца Хью Ладлоу можно было увидеть даже на футболке, благодаря его альма-матер, Юнион-колледжу, который в 1979 году устроил празднование «Дня Фитца Хью Ладлоу». В 2000-х годах Ладлоу был представлен новому поколению пользователей психоделиков через Теренса Маккенну, который читал главы из «Едока хашиша» для серии записей («Викторианские сказки о каннабисе»), выпущенных Sound Photosynthesis, и который регулярно хвалил Ладлоу в своих книгах, говоря, что Ладлоу «заложил традицию фармакопикарескной литературы, которая нашла более поздних последователей в Уильяме Берроузе и Хантере С. Томпсоне. Частью гений, частью безумец, Ладлоу находится посередине между капитаном Ахавом и П.Т. Барнумом, своего рода Марком Твеном под гашишем. В его вольнодумной, псевдонаучной открытости, когда он пробирается сквозь меняющиеся песчаные дюны мира гашиша, есть чудесное очарование».
After the prohibition of marijuana, the writings of Ludlow were interpreted by two camps. On the one hand, there were the prohibitionists, who pointed out Ludlow’s addiction to “hasheesh” and his horrifying hallucinations; on the other, those who believed that cannabis deserved a second chance and saw Ludlow as a literate chronicler of the mystical heights that could be reached using the drug. In 1938, shortly after the federal government cracked down on marijuana, the prohibitionist warning was carried in the book Marihuana: America’s New Drug Problem. The book included several pages of excerpts from The Hasheesh Eater and noted that
It was Ludlow who contributed the most remarkable description of the hashish effects. He not only described the acute hashish episode with great intensity and fidelity but recorded the development of an addiction and the subsequent struggle which resulted in his breaking the habit. As an autobiography of a drug addict it is, in several respects, superior to De Quincey's “Confessions”
In 1953, Union College selected the alumnus Fitz Hugh Ludlow as a “Union Worthy” and invited three academics to compose speeches for the occasion. Morris Bishop (who would later include his impressions in his book Eccentrics), criticized Ludlow’s later attempts at fiction, writing that his short stories “are today stale and meaningless echoes of all the other magazine stories of his time, originating in literature, not in life, and conducted with no regard for truth and with little for verisimilitude.” In The Hasheesh Eater on the other hand:
is a sincerity, a reality, which he could not recapture when he tried to construct stories solely from his imagination He finds lyric phrasing to convey the unearthly beauty of his visions, and the unearthly horror of the evil fantasia which succeeded his bliss. He is a drugged Dante in reverse, descending from the Paradiso to the Inferno. His descriptions, drawing from his subconscious a strange mingling of the sublime and the grotesque, often suggest the work of Dali and other surrealists. The writer’s passion gives his work an intensity which the reader recognizes and sympathetically feels. This is a very considerable literary achievement. Robert DeRopp, in the 1957 book Drugs and the Mind, was perhaps the first to express skepticism at Ludlow’s “addiction” story, noting that “[n]o one seriously interested in the effects of drugs on the mind should fail to read Ludlow’s book,” but accusing Ludlow of a “hypertrophy of the imagination and an excessive dependence on the works of De Quincey” (although he also found The Hasheesh Eater to be “more lively and more colorful reading than the grossly overrated confessions of that ‘English opium eater.’”). DeRopp suspected that “in many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.”
At this point in time, there occurred a resurgence of interest in marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English speaking world as a whole. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline researcher Heinrich Klüver, looked to Ludlow’s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized. In 1960, The Hasty Papers: A One Shot Review, a beat literature journal, devoted most of its pages to reprinting the first edition of The Hasheesh Eater in its entirety, and David Ebin’s book The Drug Experience included three chapters from The Hasheesh Eater. In 1966, excerpts were published in The Marijuana Papers edited by David Solomon. In 1970, a reprint of the 1857 edition was put out by Gregg Press, and the Berkeley Barb reprinted several chapters. By this time Ludlow had been rediscovered, both by mainstream researchers into drugs and addiction, and by the growing drug savvy counterculture. Oriana J. Kalant, in 1971 in The International Journal of the Addictions found The Hasheesh Eater to be a remarkable description of the effects of cannabis:
it is evident that Ludlow recognized, with remarkable insight, most of the characteristic subjective effects of cannabis. He also noted, and interpreted essentially correctly, such pharmacological points as the relation of dose to effect, inter and intra individual variations in response, and the influence of set and setting. Most importantly, perhaps, he recorded the development of his dependence on cannabis more comprehensively and astutely than anyone to date. The initial motives — including features of his own personality and temperament — the constant rationalization, compulsive use despite obvious untoward effects, the progression to a state of almost continuous intoxication, the inability to reduce his dose gradually, and the intense craving and depression after abrupt withdrawal, all are clearly described. Ludlow recognized also the lack of physical symptoms during withdrawal, and the difference from opium withdrawal in this respect. With the benefit of hindsight, we can also identify in Ludlow’s account a number of other features consistent with present knowledge, but which even scientists of his day could not possibly have known. For example, the initial change in tolerance, the continuum between euphoria and hallucinations, the differentiation between the hallucinatory process and the affective reactions to it, the relation between spontaneous and drug induced perceptual changes, the similarity between the effects of cannabis and those of other hallucinogens, the attempts at drug substitution therapy (opium, tobacco), and the role of psychotherapy and abreactive writing, are all in keeping with contemporary thought. These points permit the modern reader to feel even greater confidence in the extraordinary accuracy and perceptiveness of Ludlow’s record. The mid 1970s saw two new editions of The Hasheesh Eater in print, one by San Francisco’s City Lights Books, and a well annotated and illustrated version edited by Michael Horowitz and released by Level Press. By the late 1970s, you could even find the face of Fitz Hugh Ludlow on a T shirt, thanks to his alma mater Union College, which had thrown a “Fitzhugh Ludlow Day” celebration in 1979. In the 2000s, Ludlow has been introduced to a new generation of psychedelics users through Terence McKenna, who read chapters from The Hasheesh Eater for a set of tapes (“Victorian Tales of Cannabis”) put out by Sound Photosynthesis, and who regularly praised Ludlow in his books, saying Ludlow “began a tradition of pharmo picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P. T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.”
The Hasheesh Eater remains Ludlow's most remembered work. Only one other of his books, The Heart of the Continent, has seen a new edition since the 19th Century.
«Едок хашиша» остается самым известным произведением Ладлоу. Только одна другая его книга, «Сердце континента», была переиздана после XIX века.
After the prohibition of marijuana, the writings of Ludlow were interpreted by two camps. On the one hand, there were the prohibitionists, who pointed out Ludlow’s addiction to “hasheesh” and his horrifying hallucinations; on the other, those who believed that cannabis deserved a second chance and saw Ludlow as a literate chronicler of the mystical heights that could be reached using the drug. In 1938, shortly after the federal government cracked down on marijuana, the prohibitionist warning was carried in the book Marihuana: America’s New Drug Problem. The book included several pages of excerpts from The Hasheesh Eater and noted that
It was Ludlow who contributed the most remarkable description of the hashish effects. He not only described the acute hashish episode with great intensity and fidelity but recorded the development of an addiction and the subsequent struggle which resulted in his breaking the habit. As an autobiography of a drug addict it is, in several respects, superior to De Quincey's “Confessions”
In 1953, Union College selected the alumnus Fitz Hugh Ludlow as a “Union Worthy” and invited three academics to compose speeches for the occasion. Morris Bishop (who would later include his impressions in his book Eccentrics), criticized Ludlow’s later attempts at fiction, writing that his short stories “are today stale and meaningless echoes of all the other magazine stories of his time, originating in literature, not in life, and conducted with no regard for truth and with little for verisimilitude.” In The Hasheesh Eater on the other hand:
is a sincerity, a reality, which he could not recapture when he tried to construct stories solely from his imagination He finds lyric phrasing to convey the unearthly beauty of his visions, and the unearthly horror of the evil fantasia which succeeded his bliss. He is a drugged Dante in reverse, descending from the Paradiso to the Inferno. His descriptions, drawing from his subconscious a strange mingling of the sublime and the grotesque, often suggest the work of Dali and other surrealists. The writer’s passion gives his work an intensity which the reader recognizes and sympathetically feels. This is a very considerable literary achievement. Robert DeRopp, in the 1957 book Drugs and the Mind, was perhaps the first to express skepticism at Ludlow’s “addiction” story, noting that “[n]o one seriously interested in the effects of drugs on the mind should fail to read Ludlow’s book,” but accusing Ludlow of a “hypertrophy of the imagination and an excessive dependence on the works of De Quincey” (although he also found The Hasheesh Eater to be “more lively and more colorful reading than the grossly overrated confessions of that ‘English opium eater.’”). DeRopp suspected that “in many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.”
At this point in time, there occurred a resurgence of interest in marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English speaking world as a whole. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline researcher Heinrich Klüver, looked to Ludlow’s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized. In 1960, The Hasty Papers: A One Shot Review, a beat literature journal, devoted most of its pages to reprinting the first edition of The Hasheesh Eater in its entirety, and David Ebin’s book The Drug Experience included three chapters from The Hasheesh Eater. In 1966, excerpts were published in The Marijuana Papers edited by David Solomon. In 1970, a reprint of the 1857 edition was put out by Gregg Press, and the Berkeley Barb reprinted several chapters. By this time Ludlow had been rediscovered, both by mainstream researchers into drugs and addiction, and by the growing drug savvy counterculture. Oriana J. Kalant, in 1971 in The International Journal of the Addictions found The Hasheesh Eater to be a remarkable description of the effects of cannabis:
it is evident that Ludlow recognized, with remarkable insight, most of the characteristic subjective effects of cannabis. He also noted, and interpreted essentially correctly, such pharmacological points as the relation of dose to effect, inter and intra individual variations in response, and the influence of set and setting. Most importantly, perhaps, he recorded the development of his dependence on cannabis more comprehensively and astutely than anyone to date. The initial motives — including features of his own personality and temperament — the constant rationalization, compulsive use despite obvious untoward effects, the progression to a state of almost continuous intoxication, the inability to reduce his dose gradually, and the intense craving and depression after abrupt withdrawal, all are clearly described. Ludlow recognized also the lack of physical symptoms during withdrawal, and the difference from opium withdrawal in this respect. With the benefit of hindsight, we can also identify in Ludlow’s account a number of other features consistent with present knowledge, but which even scientists of his day could not possibly have known. For example, the initial change in tolerance, the continuum between euphoria and hallucinations, the differentiation between the hallucinatory process and the affective reactions to it, the relation between spontaneous and drug induced perceptual changes, the similarity between the effects of cannabis and those of other hallucinogens, the attempts at drug substitution therapy (opium, tobacco), and the role of psychotherapy and abreactive writing, are all in keeping with contemporary thought. These points permit the modern reader to feel even greater confidence in the extraordinary accuracy and perceptiveness of Ludlow’s record. The mid 1970s saw two new editions of The Hasheesh Eater in print, one by San Francisco’s City Lights Books, and a well annotated and illustrated version edited by Michael Horowitz and released by Level Press. By the late 1970s, you could even find the face of Fitz Hugh Ludlow on a T shirt, thanks to his alma mater Union College, which had thrown a “Fitzhugh Ludlow Day” celebration in 1979. In the 2000s, Ludlow has been introduced to a new generation of psychedelics users through Terence McKenna, who read chapters from The Hasheesh Eater for a set of tapes (“Victorian Tales of Cannabis”) put out by Sound Photosynthesis, and who regularly praised Ludlow in his books, saying Ludlow “began a tradition of pharmo picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P. T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.”
The Hasheesh Eater remains Ludlow's most remembered work. Only one other of his books, The Heart of the Continent, has seen a new edition since the 19th Century.