The Rise and Fall of Willie the Weeper: "Respectable" Intoxication in the Late 19th Century.
Found this surprising and questionable passage in Andrew Barr's Drink: A Social History of America (NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.; 1999; first trade paperback edition, 2000; ISBN: 0-7867-0743-7) a few days ago:
"Drugs were also considered by many people to be the height of fashion at a time when alcohol was falling out of it. A Colorado physician suggested in 1880 that drug taking was 'the growing and fashionable vice among the rich -- especially the fashionable women who, in the giddy round of evanescent pleasure, must have a stimulant. Whiskey and champagne are painful in their after-effects rather than pleasant. Beer is vulgar...' It was especially smart to take the drug of one's choice by the up-to-date method of hypodermic medication. As one dealer in medical instruments commented in 1882, 'People have discovered that [syringes] are not only of great service in the alleviation of extreme pain, but that they afford a convenient sort of respectable intoxication.' By 'respectable' he meant 'nonalcoholic.' The hypodermic kit was preferred to the decanter in many respectable homes."
-- p. 137
This passage suggests two rather alarming things: one, that certain features of the lifestyle of the "Decadents" were far more popular than I had previously believed; and two, that well-heeled people took drugs socially rather than in privacy (or, at last resort, in an opium den or the equivalent), and quite probably shared needles as well. (Which also begs the question as to the transmission rates of syphilis and hepatitis, but let's leave that aside for the time being.)
I had been under the impression that hard drug consumption in the United States, particularly via syringes, didn't really come into any kind of noticeable flower until the 1920s and 1930s (viz. Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse), and was primarily limited to a Venn diagrammatic confluence of the rich and morally bankrupt, the criminal underworld, and various outsider groups such as "homosexuals," jazz musicians, certain writers and artists, etc. The fact that it supposedly was de rigueur among the fashionable elites as far back as the early 1880s (if not the late 1870s...) seems more than a little fantastic to me.
Barr cites two sources for this passage (on p. 418): "Rocky Mountain News, March 30, 1880, in Thomas J. Noel, The City and the Saloon: Denver 1858-1916 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1982) pp. 88-89;" and the "Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner, 1882, pp. 668-68," in H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800-1980 (Syracuse, NY, 1981), p. 27.
Oddly enough, I seem to have only two books that say anything useful on the subject, and they're a bit ambiguous as to the prevalence of intravenous (or "skin-popping") drug ingestion in the latter half of the nineteenth century; why the hell the Encyclopaedia Britannica is mum on the subject is beyond me.
First, Luc Sante's -- yes, he was the technical adviser to Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York -- excellent Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (NY: Vintage Books; 1991; first Vintage Departures edition, October 1992; ISBN: 0-679-73876-2; 414 pps.) offers this overview:
"A sort of historical amnesia governs the popular view of the use of drugs, making it seem like a historical phenomenon and obliterating its deep roots in American culture. Drugs came into American life in a substantial way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Boston-based traders broke the monopoly on opium exportation that had formerly been held by the British Levant Company out of Anatolia, Turkey, and the British East India Company out of China. At first the trade was mainly confined to the intra-Asian routes, but amounts of the product had been gradually making their way back to the United States, and its popularity kept growing. By 1840 an estimated 24,000 pounds were coming into the country every year, and a duty imposed by the government that year raised the price to $1.40 per pound. By 1860 the amount had grown to 105,000 pounds and the price had risen to $4.50. In 1870 half a million pounds were coming in, and the duty alone was $2.50 per pound. The period immediately after the Civil War brought drug use and its perfectly legal traffic new avenues of enterprise: cheap, quality-controlled cocaine hydrochloride was available in drugstores [there seems to be some dispute as to when cocaine was first synthesized: various sites give the year as either 1855 or 1860; The People's Almanac, however, declares that cocaine was isolated in pure form in 1844 (p. 1077)], as was cannabis indica extract. Before long, morphine, the chief active ingredient in opium, was extracted [in 1806 by the German chemist F.W.A. Sertürner; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1994), vol. 8, p. 334] and made available for ready sale. In that early period, drugs were a fancy of the middle class: the poor simply didn't know about them, lacking the sorts of fashionable medicos who might prescribe them for ailments often of a neurotic or psychosomatic kind. The pattern usually involved a patient obtaining a prescription, often a temporary one to relieve symptoms, renewing the prescription with little trouble from his local druggist, and soon developing an addiction as the process was repeated long after the initial malady had gone away.
"Something happened in the 1870s, however, to give drugs greater notoriety and correspondingly greater popularity. Some blamed the habit on the use of morphine to relieve pain from wounds in the Civil War. The vice crusader Anthony Comstock, when he received his mandate as a Postal Censor from Congress in 1874, made it his business to go after drug traffickers as well as purveyors of indecent literature, but at that point he seems to have been concerned mostly with contraceptives and abortifacients, and did not begin seriously to pursue opiates and pyschotoxins until the 1890s. The democratization of opium appears to have been rooted in its use by the Chinese, who came to the West Coast in large numbers as laborers on the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The Chinese, of course, owed their addictions largely to the marketing expertise of the British East India Company, and they were discreet and peaceable users. What turned the tide against opium was a wave of prejudice against the Chinese that began in the West and spread eastward, and which fastened onto objects, habits, and peculiarities connected with them."
-- pps. 141-42
Sante also offers some interesting observations from Stephen Crane -- yes, that Stephen Crane -- on opium use in New York City:
"'Opium smoking in this country,' Stephen Crane reported in 1896, 'is believed to be more particularly a pastime of the Chinese, but in truth the greater number of the smokers are white men and white women. Chinatown furnishes the pipe, lamp, and yen-hock, but let a man once possess a "layout" and a common American drugstore furnishes him with the opium, and afterward China is discernible only in the traditions that cling to the habit.'"
-- p. 146
"By the 1890s, opium dens were to be found concentrated not only in Chinatown but also in the Tenderloin, and until Comstock and associates began cracking down later in the decade, there were whole strips of dens where one could go without being introduced. Opium was popular among a certain class that dwelt along the common fringe between the underworld and show business. As Crane wrote: 'Cheap actors, race track touts, gamblers and the different kinds of confidence men took to it generally,' and it was equally in vogue among prostitutes and showgirls. A con artist, say, would make a big score, a hundred dollars or so, and then would repair to his favorite den, where he would hold up for weeks. There was no shortage of wealthy users, either. Some of them came in with their own equipment, pieces made of gold, silver, and ivory. At one point there was a house on Forty-sixth Street near Seventh Avenue that catered exclusively to the hophead gentry....The newspapers generated a steady stream of blind items that alluded to various celebrities seen entering the house, the women disguised by heavy veils. Hop use was simultaneously condemned and glamorized by the press, and its popularity grew steadily. At the time Crane published his report, in 1896, he estimated there were 25,000 regular users in the city; another writer of the same period guessed a far less plausible 500,000."
-- pps. 147-48
As regards narcotics more familiar to us today -- the big C and the big H -- Sante has this to say:
"By the late [1890s], cocaine was also on the ascendant, although it prompted less condemnation, less glamorization, and very little press feature, because it required fewer props and was generally far less colorful. Of course, opium and cocaine tended to attract many of the same people, and to the uninitiated they were indistinguishable. If anything, cocaine, available in drugstores for a pittance and consumable anywhere in secrecy, was a poor man's high at the time."
-- p. 148
"Cocaine was generally injected with needles in the nineteenth century, but around the turn of the century, ingesting it via the nose became a fad; crystallized cocaine was for a while called 'burny' or 'bernice' and snorters were known as 'burny blowers.' According to the reminiscences of the policeman Cornelius Willemse, the Lafayette Hotel, a Tenderloin fixture at Fortieth Street and Seventh Avenue, was so popular with users that it featured in its back room a potted tree called the Burny Tree, its branches garlanded with hundreds of lengths of the black rubber tubing used for snorting. Cocaine was to become ever more popular in the following decades, and increasingly identified with the criminal population....On the horizon was heroin, then merely the brand name for the diacetylmorphine solution synthesized by Bayer, the German inventors and manufacturers of aspirin, in 1896. It was marketed as a cough suppressant around the turn of the century, and caught on quickly, so that by 1916 it was estimated that one-third of the city's habitual drug users were addicted to it."
-- p. 150
David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace's The People's Almanac (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.; 1975; ISBN: 0-385-04060-1 [trade paperback]; 1478 pps.), reprinting material from Thomas Szasz's Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Co.; 1974), offer these tidbits in their "A Synoptic History of the Promotion and Prohibition of Drugs:"
"1883 Dr. Theodor Aschenbrandt, a German army physician, secures a supply of pure cocaine from the pharmaceutical firm of Merck, issues it to Bavarian soldiers during their maneuvers, and reports on the beneficial effects of the drug in increasing the soldiers' ability to endure fatigue.
"1885 The Report of the Royal Commission on Opium concludes that opium is more like the Westerner's liquor than a substance to be feared and abhorred.
"1889 The Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Md., is opened. One of its world-famous founders, Dr. William Stewart Halsted, is a morphine addict. He continues to use morphine in large doses throughout a phenomenally successful surgical career lasting until his death in 1922."
-- p. 1078
"1900 James R.L. Daly, writing in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, declares: 'It [heroin] possesses many advantages over morphine... It is not hypnotic; there is no danger of acquiring the habit...'
-- pps. 1078-79
"1901 In Colorado, a bill is introduced, but is defeated, making not only morphine and cocaine but also 'malt, vinous and spiritous liquors' available only on a physician's prescription.
"1902 George E. Petey, writing in the Alabama Medical Journal, observes: 'Many articles have appeared in the medical literature during the last 2 years lauding this new agent... When we consider the fact that heroin is a morphine derivative...it does not seem reasonable that such a claim could be well founded. It is strange that such a claim should mislead anyone or that there should be found among the members of our profession those who would reiterate and accentuate it without 1st subjecting it to the most critical tests, but such is the fact.'
"1909 The U.S. prohibits the importation of smoking opium.
"1910 Dr. Hamilton Wright, considered by some the father of U.S. antinarcotics laws, reports that American contractors give cocaine to their Negro employees to get more work out of them.
-- p. 1079
"1921 Alfred C. Prentice, MD, a member of the Committee on Narcotic Drugs of the American Medical Association, declares: 'Public opinion regarding the vice of drug addiction has been deliberately and consistently corrupted through propaganda in both the medical and lay press... The shallow pretense that drug addiction is a "disease"...has been asserted and urged in volumes of "literature" by self-styled "specialists."'
"1924 The manufacture of heroin is prohibited in the U.S.
"1925 Robert A. Schless: 'I believe that most drug addiction today is due directly to the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act [enacted in 1914, "controlling the sale of opium and opium derivatives;" p. 1079], which forbids the sale of narcotics without a physician's prescription... Addicts who are broke act as agents provocateurs for the peddlers, being rewarded by gifts of heroin or credit for supplies. The Harrison Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.'
"1928 It is estimated that in Germany one out of every hundred physicians is a morphine addict, consuming 0.1 grain of the alkaloid or more per day.
"1930 The Federal Bureau of Narcotics is formed. Many of its agents, including its 1st commissioner, Harry J. Anslinger, are former prohibition agents."
-- p. 1080
"1938 Since the enactment of the Harrison Act in 1914, 25,000 physicians have been arraigned on narcotics charges, and 3,000 served penitentiary sentences."
-- p. 1081
Nothing there to really confirm Barr's assertion that "The hypodermic kit was preferred to the decanter in many respectable homes" in the U.S. in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, although the item from 1901 about the bill introduced in the Colorado state legislature that would've banned morphine and heroin as well as alcoholic beverages seems to offer partial support for one of Barr's sources, Noel's The City and the Saloon: Denver 1858-1916. I'm kind of surprised that I don't remember William S. Burroughs commenting on this; I don't recall him going much further back than the Harrison Act, and I've read, what, ten of his books and half of two others (man, can you believe that I actually hacked my way through The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded and didn't finish Nova Express or The Wild Boys?! further proof, if any is needed, of my singular perversity...).
Huh. Guess I should keep my eyes open for a book (or books...) on the subject.
"Drugs were also considered by many people to be the height of fashion at a time when alcohol was falling out of it. A Colorado physician suggested in 1880 that drug taking was 'the growing and fashionable vice among the rich -- especially the fashionable women who, in the giddy round of evanescent pleasure, must have a stimulant. Whiskey and champagne are painful in their after-effects rather than pleasant. Beer is vulgar...' It was especially smart to take the drug of one's choice by the up-to-date method of hypodermic medication. As one dealer in medical instruments commented in 1882, 'People have discovered that [syringes] are not only of great service in the alleviation of extreme pain, but that they afford a convenient sort of respectable intoxication.' By 'respectable' he meant 'nonalcoholic.' The hypodermic kit was preferred to the decanter in many respectable homes."
-- p. 137
This passage suggests two rather alarming things: one, that certain features of the lifestyle of the "Decadents" were far more popular than I had previously believed; and two, that well-heeled people took drugs socially rather than in privacy (or, at last resort, in an opium den or the equivalent), and quite probably shared needles as well. (Which also begs the question as to the transmission rates of syphilis and hepatitis, but let's leave that aside for the time being.)
I had been under the impression that hard drug consumption in the United States, particularly via syringes, didn't really come into any kind of noticeable flower until the 1920s and 1930s (viz. Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse), and was primarily limited to a Venn diagrammatic confluence of the rich and morally bankrupt, the criminal underworld, and various outsider groups such as "homosexuals," jazz musicians, certain writers and artists, etc. The fact that it supposedly was de rigueur among the fashionable elites as far back as the early 1880s (if not the late 1870s...) seems more than a little fantastic to me.
Barr cites two sources for this passage (on p. 418): "Rocky Mountain News, March 30, 1880, in Thomas J. Noel, The City and the Saloon: Denver 1858-1916 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1982) pp. 88-89;" and the "Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner, 1882, pp. 668-68," in H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800-1980 (Syracuse, NY, 1981), p. 27.
Oddly enough, I seem to have only two books that say anything useful on the subject, and they're a bit ambiguous as to the prevalence of intravenous (or "skin-popping") drug ingestion in the latter half of the nineteenth century; why the hell the Encyclopaedia Britannica is mum on the subject is beyond me.
First, Luc Sante's -- yes, he was the technical adviser to Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York -- excellent Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (NY: Vintage Books; 1991; first Vintage Departures edition, October 1992; ISBN: 0-679-73876-2; 414 pps.) offers this overview:
"A sort of historical amnesia governs the popular view of the use of drugs, making it seem like a historical phenomenon and obliterating its deep roots in American culture. Drugs came into American life in a substantial way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Boston-based traders broke the monopoly on opium exportation that had formerly been held by the British Levant Company out of Anatolia, Turkey, and the British East India Company out of China. At first the trade was mainly confined to the intra-Asian routes, but amounts of the product had been gradually making their way back to the United States, and its popularity kept growing. By 1840 an estimated 24,000 pounds were coming into the country every year, and a duty imposed by the government that year raised the price to $1.40 per pound. By 1860 the amount had grown to 105,000 pounds and the price had risen to $4.50. In 1870 half a million pounds were coming in, and the duty alone was $2.50 per pound. The period immediately after the Civil War brought drug use and its perfectly legal traffic new avenues of enterprise: cheap, quality-controlled cocaine hydrochloride was available in drugstores [there seems to be some dispute as to when cocaine was first synthesized: various sites give the year as either 1855 or 1860; The People's Almanac, however, declares that cocaine was isolated in pure form in 1844 (p. 1077)], as was cannabis indica extract. Before long, morphine, the chief active ingredient in opium, was extracted [in 1806 by the German chemist F.W.A. Sertürner; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1994), vol. 8, p. 334] and made available for ready sale. In that early period, drugs were a fancy of the middle class: the poor simply didn't know about them, lacking the sorts of fashionable medicos who might prescribe them for ailments often of a neurotic or psychosomatic kind. The pattern usually involved a patient obtaining a prescription, often a temporary one to relieve symptoms, renewing the prescription with little trouble from his local druggist, and soon developing an addiction as the process was repeated long after the initial malady had gone away.
"Something happened in the 1870s, however, to give drugs greater notoriety and correspondingly greater popularity. Some blamed the habit on the use of morphine to relieve pain from wounds in the Civil War. The vice crusader Anthony Comstock, when he received his mandate as a Postal Censor from Congress in 1874, made it his business to go after drug traffickers as well as purveyors of indecent literature, but at that point he seems to have been concerned mostly with contraceptives and abortifacients, and did not begin seriously to pursue opiates and pyschotoxins until the 1890s. The democratization of opium appears to have been rooted in its use by the Chinese, who came to the West Coast in large numbers as laborers on the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The Chinese, of course, owed their addictions largely to the marketing expertise of the British East India Company, and they were discreet and peaceable users. What turned the tide against opium was a wave of prejudice against the Chinese that began in the West and spread eastward, and which fastened onto objects, habits, and peculiarities connected with them."
-- pps. 141-42
Sante also offers some interesting observations from Stephen Crane -- yes, that Stephen Crane -- on opium use in New York City:
"'Opium smoking in this country,' Stephen Crane reported in 1896, 'is believed to be more particularly a pastime of the Chinese, but in truth the greater number of the smokers are white men and white women. Chinatown furnishes the pipe, lamp, and yen-hock, but let a man once possess a "layout" and a common American drugstore furnishes him with the opium, and afterward China is discernible only in the traditions that cling to the habit.'"
-- p. 146
"By the 1890s, opium dens were to be found concentrated not only in Chinatown but also in the Tenderloin, and until Comstock and associates began cracking down later in the decade, there were whole strips of dens where one could go without being introduced. Opium was popular among a certain class that dwelt along the common fringe between the underworld and show business. As Crane wrote: 'Cheap actors, race track touts, gamblers and the different kinds of confidence men took to it generally,' and it was equally in vogue among prostitutes and showgirls. A con artist, say, would make a big score, a hundred dollars or so, and then would repair to his favorite den, where he would hold up for weeks. There was no shortage of wealthy users, either. Some of them came in with their own equipment, pieces made of gold, silver, and ivory. At one point there was a house on Forty-sixth Street near Seventh Avenue that catered exclusively to the hophead gentry....The newspapers generated a steady stream of blind items that alluded to various celebrities seen entering the house, the women disguised by heavy veils. Hop use was simultaneously condemned and glamorized by the press, and its popularity grew steadily. At the time Crane published his report, in 1896, he estimated there were 25,000 regular users in the city; another writer of the same period guessed a far less plausible 500,000."
-- pps. 147-48
As regards narcotics more familiar to us today -- the big C and the big H -- Sante has this to say:
"By the late [1890s], cocaine was also on the ascendant, although it prompted less condemnation, less glamorization, and very little press feature, because it required fewer props and was generally far less colorful. Of course, opium and cocaine tended to attract many of the same people, and to the uninitiated they were indistinguishable. If anything, cocaine, available in drugstores for a pittance and consumable anywhere in secrecy, was a poor man's high at the time."
-- p. 148
"Cocaine was generally injected with needles in the nineteenth century, but around the turn of the century, ingesting it via the nose became a fad; crystallized cocaine was for a while called 'burny' or 'bernice' and snorters were known as 'burny blowers.' According to the reminiscences of the policeman Cornelius Willemse, the Lafayette Hotel, a Tenderloin fixture at Fortieth Street and Seventh Avenue, was so popular with users that it featured in its back room a potted tree called the Burny Tree, its branches garlanded with hundreds of lengths of the black rubber tubing used for snorting. Cocaine was to become ever more popular in the following decades, and increasingly identified with the criminal population....On the horizon was heroin, then merely the brand name for the diacetylmorphine solution synthesized by Bayer, the German inventors and manufacturers of aspirin, in 1896. It was marketed as a cough suppressant around the turn of the century, and caught on quickly, so that by 1916 it was estimated that one-third of the city's habitual drug users were addicted to it."
-- p. 150
David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace's The People's Almanac (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.; 1975; ISBN: 0-385-04060-1 [trade paperback]; 1478 pps.), reprinting material from Thomas Szasz's Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Co.; 1974), offer these tidbits in their "A Synoptic History of the Promotion and Prohibition of Drugs:"
"1883 Dr. Theodor Aschenbrandt, a German army physician, secures a supply of pure cocaine from the pharmaceutical firm of Merck, issues it to Bavarian soldiers during their maneuvers, and reports on the beneficial effects of the drug in increasing the soldiers' ability to endure fatigue.
"1885 The Report of the Royal Commission on Opium concludes that opium is more like the Westerner's liquor than a substance to be feared and abhorred.
"1889 The Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Md., is opened. One of its world-famous founders, Dr. William Stewart Halsted, is a morphine addict. He continues to use morphine in large doses throughout a phenomenally successful surgical career lasting until his death in 1922."
-- p. 1078
"1900 James R.L. Daly, writing in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, declares: 'It [heroin] possesses many advantages over morphine... It is not hypnotic; there is no danger of acquiring the habit...'
-- pps. 1078-79
"1901 In Colorado, a bill is introduced, but is defeated, making not only morphine and cocaine but also 'malt, vinous and spiritous liquors' available only on a physician's prescription.
"1902 George E. Petey, writing in the Alabama Medical Journal, observes: 'Many articles have appeared in the medical literature during the last 2 years lauding this new agent... When we consider the fact that heroin is a morphine derivative...it does not seem reasonable that such a claim could be well founded. It is strange that such a claim should mislead anyone or that there should be found among the members of our profession those who would reiterate and accentuate it without 1st subjecting it to the most critical tests, but such is the fact.'
"1909 The U.S. prohibits the importation of smoking opium.
"1910 Dr. Hamilton Wright, considered by some the father of U.S. antinarcotics laws, reports that American contractors give cocaine to their Negro employees to get more work out of them.
-- p. 1079
"1921 Alfred C. Prentice, MD, a member of the Committee on Narcotic Drugs of the American Medical Association, declares: 'Public opinion regarding the vice of drug addiction has been deliberately and consistently corrupted through propaganda in both the medical and lay press... The shallow pretense that drug addiction is a "disease"...has been asserted and urged in volumes of "literature" by self-styled "specialists."'
"1924 The manufacture of heroin is prohibited in the U.S.
"1925 Robert A. Schless: 'I believe that most drug addiction today is due directly to the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act [enacted in 1914, "controlling the sale of opium and opium derivatives;" p. 1079], which forbids the sale of narcotics without a physician's prescription... Addicts who are broke act as agents provocateurs for the peddlers, being rewarded by gifts of heroin or credit for supplies. The Harrison Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.'
"1928 It is estimated that in Germany one out of every hundred physicians is a morphine addict, consuming 0.1 grain of the alkaloid or more per day.
"1930 The Federal Bureau of Narcotics is formed. Many of its agents, including its 1st commissioner, Harry J. Anslinger, are former prohibition agents."
-- p. 1080
"1938 Since the enactment of the Harrison Act in 1914, 25,000 physicians have been arraigned on narcotics charges, and 3,000 served penitentiary sentences."
-- p. 1081
Nothing there to really confirm Barr's assertion that "The hypodermic kit was preferred to the decanter in many respectable homes" in the U.S. in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, although the item from 1901 about the bill introduced in the Colorado state legislature that would've banned morphine and heroin as well as alcoholic beverages seems to offer partial support for one of Barr's sources, Noel's The City and the Saloon: Denver 1858-1916. I'm kind of surprised that I don't remember William S. Burroughs commenting on this; I don't recall him going much further back than the Harrison Act, and I've read, what, ten of his books and half of two others (man, can you believe that I actually hacked my way through The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded and didn't finish Nova Express or The Wild Boys?! further proof, if any is needed, of my singular perversity...).
Huh. Guess I should keep my eyes open for a book (or books...) on the subject.