From High Times, July 1976, letters to the editor. Responding to something psychedelic church founder and former Millbrook resident and author Art Kleps asserted in the March ’76 HT interview: that Timothy Leary wrote Illuminatus!
Illiteratus!
We noted Art Kleps’ plug in your March interview and we appreciate his efforts to promote our book by surrounding it with a little mystery and allure. In the interest of accurate transmission, however, we must state that the Boo Hoo made a boo-booo. Dr. Leary is a good friend and a great scientist, but he did not write Illuminatus!Countless wives, sweethearts, friends, intelligence agencies, secret societies, visiting extra-terrestrials, et cetera, had us under close observation in 1969-71, while the pages of the trilogy emerged from our typewriters and Dr. Leary was imprisoned in the California archipelago, in North Africa and in Switzerland.
A solipsist to whom it makes no difference whether he is smoking Colombian gold or oregano, Kleps is welcome to remain owner and sole proprietor of his own universe, in which Dr. Leary wrote Illuminatus! But in the objective universe of factual validation, the only begetters of that accursed neo-Necronomicon were – and remain – very truly yours.
-Robert Shea, Glencoe, Ill., and
Robert Anton Wilson, Berkeley, Ca.
(submitted to rawilsonfans.org by RMJon23)
