Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary emerges in these diary entries as a lively storyteller whose accounts connect an earlier period of imprisonment and experimentation to the New York social world around him. He is presented through conversations rather than a continuous biography: he recalls Diane de Beauvau’s pursuit of him, remembers details about the diarist that had gone unnoticed at the time, and offers a counterpoint to the hurried movement of the dinner party around him.

Stories of Switzerland

At dinner, Leary described Diane de Beauvau chasing him around Switzerland in the early 1970s and sending him notes and letters. He said that her pursuit was what got him locked up. In a later conversation recorded on tape, he returned to the story, linking the love letters and Diane’s taking acid at fourteen to his imprisonment in Switzerland. The diary gives his account rather than an independent explanation of the circumstances, but the repetition makes this episode a recurring part of how he presents his past.

Leary also described Geneva’s jails as places where prisoners who paid could receive pastries on a tray, likening the experience to staying in a good hotel. The wry detail shifts the emphasis from confinement to the peculiar comforts available within it. His story is told with comic ease, even as it concerns imprisonment.

Memory and Recognition

Leary told the diarist that they were one of his favorite people, and showed an unusually precise memory of having seen them in the 1960s and later in St. Moritz. He remembered what the diarist had been wearing, including occasions when they attended his lectures and light shows in the East Village. The diarist had not known at the time that Leary was paying such close attention. That delayed recognition gives their exchange its particular warmth: Leary’s public history is accompanied by a private archive of encounters that the other person had scarcely registered.

Creativity and the Dinner Party

At dinner at Quo Vadis, Leary continued talking about his past for the tape. In the same conversation, he said that, if he could do it over, he wished he had been with the Velvet Underground, whom he regarded as highly creative and unusually productive. The comment places his reflections on his own life beside an admiration for a band’s collective artistic work.

The diary also sets Leary against the restless pace of the evening. When Bob Weiner was described as rushing from one place to the next, Leary responded that years in prison had meant being rushed and told what to do, and that he would no longer hurry. The contrast makes his refusal more than a joke at the dinner table: in the diarist’s account, he turns an imposed schedule into a reason to move at his own pace.

The Diarist’s Speculation

The diarist regarded Leary as intelligent and speculated that he might have worked with the CIA. The speculation drew on his time at Harvard, reports that the government had used LSD, and the diarist’s impression that a person who had mastered the subject might attract official attention. These are the diarist’s conjectures, not facts established by Leary’s own account in the entries. Their presence nevertheless shows how his stories about LSD, imprisonment, and expertise fed a larger aura of mystery around him.